Reality Check: Obama is Standing for Students

Since when did an effort to ensure that students receive a high-quality affordable education in exchange for their financial aid become unconstitutional micromanagement of colleges and universities?

This is where the rubber hits the road, folks. Where the needs of a particularly elite form of academia comes into conflict with the average student's right to an affordable public education. And apparently it's about to get ugly. 

Don't believe the hype. President Obama is not attacking faculty, he is not seeking to destroy public colleges and universities which are the workhorses of higher education, and for pete's sake he is not proposing a pseudo-NCLB for higher education.

The President's main goal is simple:  After decades of hoping that students could hold institutions of higher education and states responsible for providing a high-quality, affordable college experience that leads to degrees, he's calling the nation's attention to the fact that the market isn't working on its own and some really serious regulation is needed.  The federal government is a major financial player in higher education, far more so than in k-12, and it has a responsibility to ensure that the schools it funds do right by their students.  

Despite their loud claims to the contrary, many schools are not currently doing right by their students. Some of them are setting prices so as to absorb all available financial aid and providing students with few supports and long-shots at completing degrees. Others are taking advantage of the availability of student loans to charge the middle-class sky high prices while hiding behind "admissions standards" to leave the majority of students from the 99% out in the cold.  In addition, there are a lot of federal dollars spent unnecessarily, supplanting resources from institutional endowments. Finally, there are plenty of childish states, pulling back on their investments when the federal government provides support. 

All of that should be stopped by holding colleges, universities, and states to the standards that we now hold students.  The problems we face in higher education today are largely due to the behaviors of those institutional actors--not students.  The federal government must use the strings associated with Title IV to ensure that college administrators, boards, and state legislatures behave themselves and let the students and faculty get back to the hard work of education.

That's the goal. It's where Obama is headed, if you'll just give him a chance to get there.

And when he does: NO, this will not make student aid more complicated.  Instead of rules for millions of students we can have a much smaller set of rules for the few thousand institutions. Done right, this will not punish students for the acts of their states and institutions. It will not further push education towards earnings and away from learning.  It should do the opposite-- it focuses on the actual problem-- schools that claim to educate students while merely sifting and winnowing out the ones it doesn't want, schools that recruit students only to leave them behind once checks are signed. It helps direct students towards the states and institutions where their aid will be used well.  It helps ensure that students get degrees--which is the very least they deserve (and come on, don't tell me that in your day you really earned your degree...).

Suggesting the opposite-- suggesting that this effort will hurt students-- is a red herring. It's a line tossed about by privileged elites who have claimed to serve America's middle class while restricting enrollment through selective admissions, and promoting rhetoric that allows some elite colleges to stand on high above their peers, endlessly wealthy and exerting strong influence, helping to push millions of Americans into debt. 

Beware of these scare tactics. The President isn't going to cut students' Pell dollars. He's never going to assign letters grades to each colleges and university.  He's not bringing in standardized tests or value-added modeling for professors, or giving colleges incentives to get rid of teacher tenure or privatize.

Unfortunately, he's also not about to make college--or at least community college-- free.  Now there's something worth critiquing him for.

Sure, the President did make some errors in his plans. He should never have likened this effort to the ridiculous College Scorecard or called them "ratings"-- that trivialized the approach.  He should have challenged schools to improve to certain standards before the move to link aid to institutional performance rolls out.  Race to the Top should never have been a part of this at all, since doing this fast has never been a good way to bring about quality change. He should never have mentioned MOOCs or other such untested approaches to cutting costs, and in fact, he needn't have mentioned specific practices for cost-cutting at all.  That can and should be left up to the institutions to deal with-- he simply needs to tell them what goal posts to aim for and what the rules of engagement are.   For example, he should have reiterated the importance of educators to education, and assured the faculty of their very real place in affordable higher education. He should have placed much more emphasis on the importance of public institutions and the role that states must play in adequately funding them if those states want to get any Title IV funds for their private or profit schools.   

Shoulda, woulda, coulda.  The fact is that the current financial aid system has benefitted colleges and universities-- and states-- far more than students for a very long time, and President Obama is finally going to try to do something about it.  Did he get the plan exactly right on this initial roll out?  Nope. Will it be accomplished in the next few years? No way.   But that isn't and wasn't the point.  He is standing up for students and families and telling higher education administrators and states that they must get some skin in the game-- or get out of Title IV.   It's about damn time. 

New Evidence on Need-Based Grant Aid

Ben Castleman and Bridget Long of Harvard University just issued a terrific new paper on the impacts of a Florida need-based grant distributed to students across the state.  Using a rigorous regression-discontinuity design, the authors make several contributions to the study of the impacts of financial aid by tacking a couple of of tough questions:

• Does need-based aid promote college completion?
• Who benefits most from need-based aid? Is it the highest-achievers to whom merit aid is often targeted?

They find that YES, need-based aid (without any performance criteria) produces strong and statistically significant impacts on credits earned and degree completion.  Specifically the authors find that $1,000 more of grant eligibility increased the probability of staying continuously enrolled through the spring semester of students' freshman year by 3.3 percentage points, increased the cumulative number of credits students completed after four years by 2.3 credits, and increased the probability of earning a bachelor’s degree within five, six, and seven years by 2.5, 3.5, and 4.0 percentage points, respectively. This is very similar to what my team is learning from studying a Wisconsin grant program.

They also find that the impacts of need-based aid are strongest for students who did well in high school but are below the cut-off for the Florida Bright Futures grant, again mirroring findings from Wisconsin. 

Critically, the authors also note that most students got this need-based grant just once-- as in Wisconsin, many lost it between the first and second years of college. How much more effective might financial aid be if we made it easier for students to retain it?  

In short, the answers do not surprise me at all and lend important empirical evidence to a debate that has been tilted towards merit & performance aid mainly because of a lack of tests on the need-based aid.

So...implications:

Policymakers:  Please read this carefully before jumping to the conclusion that you must change the structure of need-based aid to promote college completion -- it is already doing so.  Changes could be positive or could undermine effectiveness.  In fact, the authors conclude: "Overall, our results suggest that not only does need-based aid have a positive effect on persistence and degree completion, but also that increasing the award amounts of current aid programs could have beneficial effects." 

States and Colleges and Universities:  Investments in well-prepared students who aren't making your merit cutoffs are good bets for cost-effective investments in need-based aid.  Mark Schneider and I have been saying this for a long time.   Consider making your money really pay off.

UVA: Poster Child for Empty Promises and False Hopes

Just a few years ago, we the people of UW-Madison were hearing quite a bit about the flagship university of another state -- the University of Virginia.  Our Chancellor at the time, Biddy Martin, is from Virginia, and lauded UVA's efforts to gain autonomy from the state while also increasing affordability through its "Access UVA" program.

I vehemently and repeatedly disagreed with Martin's assessment of UVA and its "successes" at the time, but to little avail.  She managed to convince most of the university that a semi-divorce from the state would allow for financial flexibilities that would help to make college more affordable. While some of her plans were thwarted by the rest of Wisconsin, she got the vote of the Faculty Senate and to this day, many students and faculty speak of her efforts as if they made UW-Madison more affordable.

In point of fact, they did not, and today even the poster child she commended-- UVA-- fell to pieces. Access UVA will no longer be a grants program, instead it will be scaled back and shifted to include a sizable amount of loans.  Students from low-income families will graduate with $14,000 in debt (if they escape after just 4 years--unlikely) and other students with up to $28,000.

Access UVA, said President Teresa Sullivan, wasn't "sustainable."  There's an end-stop to her statement that makes you wonder if she and the school recognize that the result was not inevitable but rather stemmed directly from the political and policy choices made over the last decade.  Now UVA must face facts: its costs of attendance are high, its support from the state of Virginia is low, and it is going to ask students from poor families to graduate with debt amounting to a third or more of their families' annual income.  These things don't just happen.

High-tuition high-aid models of financing higher education were formulated and evaluated at a time when college students were on average wealthier, whiter, and smaller in number.  It was perhaps possible to feel proudly progressive about taking tuition from the top 75% and redistributing aid to the bottom 25% (or even 90/10).  No longer.  Today about 80% of students feel college is unaffordable, and yet they have to pay high tuition to make the top 20% happy in their glorified teeny-tiny classes, lush campuses, and elitist environments. Only a fraction of that 80% gets any significant grant aid, while the rest carry debt.  In this model, 80% of the students bear the brunt of the education of the top 20%, who escape from their college party years with debt that Mommy and Daddy pay off on graduation day.

The student leader at UVA who objected to these changes perfectly described the real underlying problem when he said "[but] there are increasingly few places left to streamline or cut back on to make these ends meet without impacting the quality of education or student experience.”   There it is-- we need to spend a lot to have high quality.  Affordability be damned.

Anyone who's taken a stroll across UVA's lawns knows that it would be perfectly possible to have a darned good college education for the students of the state at a fraction of what they are spending now. Sure, it wouldn't be the same-- but times they are changing. And it is far less tenable for colleges and universities to throw up their ivy-covered walls and say "sorry you cost too much" to poor students than to insist that they take action to lower their costs for all students, to make college opportunities for all Americans the realities they should and must be.

What Constitutes "Satisfactory Academic Progress" in the 21st Century?

I often receive email from students who've learned of my interest in the contemporary college experience and want to provide a window into their own.  Recently I heard from a man who initially enrolled at UW-Madison in 2007 and subsequently took an educational pathway that is increasingly normal.  His efforts to find ways to learn new things and make college affordable are notable, and he challenges us to think about the ways in which traditional forms of higher education align with today's students.  With his permission I'm sharing a letter he wrote, and at his request, I am identifying the author.  The following essay is by James Kasombo, who will be re-entering Madison this fall. 

'Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability.'

            Upon graduating from high school in the top five percent of my class, being ushered into the university's honors program, and finding a wholeheartedly welcoming dormitory community off the shores of Lake Mendota, in many respects it felt as though I had made the rightful transition for my life. Granted, no guidance counselors had openly foretold the high costs of a college degree versus the varying returns on investment different majors would create. There was an intense barrier of advanced math and science within the initial semesters of post secondary education if one were to pursue careers in medicine or engineering, stymieing the aspirations of many gifted students having streaked through their K-12 schooling. Convening each night in the communal bathroom to brush our teeth, the floor community would reflect on the day's lectures, discussion groups, and assignments with strikingly different opinions of how this task at hand, that of earning a bachelors degree, was making an impact on our development into adulthood.

            And so it was halfway through the fall semester of 2007, shortly after TED had started an ameliorative experiment of freely posting talks from its conferences on the internet, that I stumbled upon Sir Ken Robinson's now transformative argument for how we look upon education to prepare adults for an unknown future. At that same time, I had successfully tutored a cohort of students through a philosophy midterm, yet failed a calculus exam, and watched as more and more fellow teenagers began the process of withdrawing from their studies altogether.  

            “Students must successfully complete a cumulative 2/3 (67%) of all credits for which they enroll.” Over the course of my three years living in Madison, I would not meet this standard. Instead, I became the youngest person on a team of New Student Leaders for the university's summer orientation program after my freshman year, receiving high marks for engaging with incoming students and relating with the parents who would be sending children their children away. Instead, I produced the Marcia Légère Student Play Festival during my sophomore year. Organizing amateur playwrights, directors, and actors, who would collaborate with drama & literature faculty to create a student driven performance, lead to my reception of the Union Trustee Leadership Award from the Memorial Union Building Association. Instead, I attained an internship with the nation's eleventh largest library system by way of ISIP. Instead, I served as a resident assistant at Highlander House for Steve Brown Apartment's Campus Connect program during my junior year, and also happened to help the UW Model United Nations team win an award at AMUN.

            During those years I would enroll in classes and later withdraw because I did not or could not see a clear connection between my then liberal arts program of study and tangible, substantial opportunities in the labor market. This symptom is seen across the board of postsecondary education as the idea of 'college for all' has collided head first with the reality of costs increasing by sixty percent just over the last decade. Meanwhile, our parents have made zero gains in their income. State institutions of higher learning have watched their funding reduced (such asUW-Madison losing almost ten percent of its budget by way of state taxes, in the space of five years) for the sake of propping up quite arguably the end products of disjointed education,health care and incarceration. Sure, our access to credit was [inappropriately] increased, but in my gut the idea of student debt becoming the new normal was a recipe for disaster: too many college students of today needing to cover growing gaps in their funds by both working and borrowing.

            By the summer of 2010 I had fully withdrawn from the university, personifying yet another data point of those failing to gradate within six years. But as I explained to my parents, it was an opportunity to experience for myself the visceral chasm between my skill set, what I really needed from a college education, and the careers needed to traverse the gap between low skill/low pay work and the upper middle class of the contemporary American economy. Of course, that very summer I would fracture my jaw, requiring surgery covered by my parent's health insurance, and spend several months recovering. This became an all too vital introduction into the treacherous alliance of employment and health we must accept when determining survival, in every sense of the word. Later that year I worked for a luxury hotel in downtown Madison, experiencing significantly higher wages than hotel employees across the capitol square. Being so young and green with employment, it took detailed explanation from the union's representative for me to understand the power of organized labor in service jobs. Yet, I would still fall behind on paying rent, and in lieu of eviction, would move back home to Milwaukee in the spring of 2011.

            Over the following two years I would obtain six different jobs, four of which being full time, with transitions in between being of my own volition. I'd witness the leveling effects the world of retail has on human capabilities. The often direction-less management had detrimental impacts on workers who'd show up day in and day out for the sole task of feeding their kids, and paying interest on loans taken in pursuit of a lifestyle they couldn't afford in the first place. Whether it be a warehouse, bookstore, or banquet hall, I have seen with my own two eyes middle skill laborers becoming prisoners of circumstances, chiefly byway of technology+globalization's effect on productivity. And so, when I was given an opportunity to leap from the role of an hourly worker to that of a manager, I knew my journey into the mindset of real world workplace dynamics was about to become complete. Therefore, in the spring of 2012, I was hired as an assistant manager for a children's museum in downtown Milwaukee, and within a few months was promoted to manager of the visitor services department. This professional experience would finally validate a core reason I stepped out of college and answer the question: Minus the credential of a B.A., did I possess qualifications and life skills necessary to build a fulfilling career?

            At the age of twenty four, I had a job nearly any college graduate of our time would figuratively kill for, management in the non-profit sector. Indeed, I savored every ounce of responsibility placed in my hands, from carrying keys to open the facility, being in a select group of people with safe access, overseeing all front desk operations, handling inventory of the gift shop, to supervising a staff of part time employees and being on the forefront of children's safety & wellbeing. Acting as a hiring manager, looking over the resumes of those jockeying for a job that paid minimum wage yet required significant skills, bringing on those flexible enough to work mornings and weekends, then getting to know the lives of those who would be reporting to me, was an extremely humbling endeavor. Working alongside adults ten, twenty, thirty years my senior with strengths and flaws more seasoned than mine, yet being treated as an equal peer, was wholly invigorating. Yet, after almost a year of sixty hour work weeks, treating injured toddlers, consoling distraught parents, and stressing over six figure budgets, it became apparent that while the answer to the preceding question may have been yes, the real question I had come to answer was how consequential the vehicle of a college degree is in attaining positions of power, influence, and sensible compensation.

            The College Board has made remarkable statements regarding the relaxation of a high school-to-university model many [academically gifted] students assume is the lock step pathway into adulthood. They've advocated creating admission policies for delayed entry after high school, making withdrawal & re-entry policies as clear as possible, and fostering an environment that understands for some students there comes a time when it is appropriate to take a break in their education, when their talents could better flourish in alternative venues. Sadly, these revelations come from a report written over thirty years ago in 1981, and it's safe to say their recommendations have not become mainstream. Ask any Millennial, and we will tell you that when coming of age, preparation for college and preparation for a vocation are indeed mutually exclusive.  In the space of just one generation, the gap between annual wages for a college degree versus a high school degree has increased from fifteen thousand to twenty-five thousand dollars, mainly because the high school graduate has seen negligible gains. Yet, the chance of someone from the top income fifth staying up there without a college degree is higher than someone from the bottom income fifth reaching the top with a college degree. The overarching fact is for those of us in the middle, a bachelor's degree evenly exchanges the probability of winding up in poverty with that of reaching the top, but odds are you stay in the middle depending on your field of study. In other words, placing a magnificent amount of faith in debt which cannot be discharged for the sake of a credential which inherently doesn't acknowledge the wide variance of human capital, has been the harbinger against completion of my degree ever since discovering voices of educational revolution.

            You know that the college degree is not affordable. Two-thirds of college presidents believe a degree is not affordable for those who need it most.  Unfortunately, federal student aid programs have performed poorly, trying desperately to fund accordingly with merit and income, juggling the balance between institutional subsidies and individual aid. Such struggles are why I have wound up appealing for my aid package. Though, it should be made clear, this is a process I support. Public monies should not be loaned nor spent on causes to which there will be no significant return. But I do hope it is inferred from my writings that my time in school was an incredibly formative portion of my life. Lessons learned inside the classroom transferred directly towards my life as an employee. Leadership positions attained at the university were the linchpin towards my success within stressful situations of the workplace, especially in management. And now, I look to return to Madison with aspirations to graduate in the winter of 2015 with degrees in Computer Science and Philosophy. I've spoken with my advisor as how to organize my classes over the coming semesters. I've gained skills in self discipline and persistence to assure academic achievement. Most importantly, I've gained the real world experience necessary to assure my studies not only relate to career goals, but towards my aspirations of leveling the playing field for those residing within the downside of advantage.

            Rising tides of the American economy do not lift all boats. The college degree has become less a sail, more the life jacket in terms of being buoyed by gains of our free market. My time away from the university was an exercise in coming to terms with this well researched conclusion, thanks to tangible successes and mistakes in real life. Once the goals I have set for myself come to fruition, the resulting tributes will acknowledge a proud alumnus, proponent, and advocate of UW-Madison.

 On Wisconsin!

Putting the UW System Tuition Freeze in Context

Today's Journal Sentinel has an excellent chart illustrating how the challenge of paying for college in Wisconsin has changed over time

The only problem is that neither the chart or the accompanying article addresses the likely assumption of many readers: students who can't pay these costs, even by working, are "held harmless" through financial aid.  For that reason, many say, we should simply raise tuition further and invest that additional revenue in financial aid distributed to the neediest students.

To evaluate that claim, let's take a look at the "net price" of attending UW-Madison and UW-comprehensives-- the cost paid by the poorest students after taking into account all grant/scholarship aid provided to offset the sticket price.  

At UW-Madison, for the upcoming year 2013-2014, that amount is $13,635.00 for Pell recipients with no expected family contribution.   As you can see in the chart above, that means students from families typically earning less than $30,000 a year are expected to either work 1,866 hours a year (~35 hours/week) or borrow around $68,000 (5 years is typical time-to-degree for these students at Madison).  Is this a reasonable proposition?

In addition, consider that no more than say 3-4% of UW-Madison undergraduates come from this sort of family.  After all, more than 85% of students do not receive any Pell at all. For those students, the net price is over $21,000 in the coming year (total cost in 2013-14i s $24,000).  Redistribution is helping very, very well-- and many students with substantial need deliberately overlooked by the federal "needs analysis" are being left out in the cold. It's no wonder there's now backlash against our financial aid system-- there's universal need and a narrow means-tested system. Never works. 

Now, let's turn to the UW Comprehensives. As this recent presentation from System showed, financial aid tends to reduce the price paid by students at these schools by about $2,200 or 17%.  So instead of an average sticker price of $13,000 at places like Parkside or Stout, students tend to face around $11,000. This still means taking on up to $40-50K in debt or working long hours.  The only way in which institutions can claim to meet the need of students from families earning less than $60,000 is by assuming their willingness to borrow $20,000 or more in loans-- and frankly, that is a big assumption. When these students graduate, they will have debt amounting to a third of their family's income, and despite a focus on their "future earning power" that fact will matter more to them than anything else because the primary use of those future earnings will be to help keep the family that raised them afloat. These are not students whose families can contribute to paying off their debt upon graduation- -they are far more likely to be helping to pay off the debt their families accrued thanks to the substantial opportunity costs faced by losing their child-worker while they attended college.

Other skeptics point to the availability of the 2-year colleges throughout the state, again assuming that their costs are affordable.  While tuition is indeed lower, the costs of attendance itself are not.  Students do not live at home rent free while in college any longer-- they live at home while paying rent, and while in school lose time in which they would have been working.  In addition, they get far less grant aid because their institutional resources are lower. So once again, this unchecked assumption is wrong-- and the colleges themselves know it.  Madison College has billboards posted around Dane County pointing out that students at that college accrue less debt -- not no debt.  Since when should students have to borrow to attend a 2-year community institution?

I recognize that many in the political Right want the pending UW System tuition freeze for all the wrong reasons, seeking to starve the System into submission and eventual collapse, to force the end of the public sector.  I also recognize that the freeze will do some harm to the colleges and universities throughout the state, and that harm will be disproportionately distributed.  But what exactly happens depends in great part to the behavior of System and UW-Madison. The smart response would be to seize the opportunity to ensure that state spending is focused on instruction and distributed according to the needs of the students.  The money currently flows disproportionately to the least needy students and is budgeted defensively to support many activities aside from institution.  This must stop.

1. Downsize the administrations at most universities and most significantly at UW-Madison.

2. Ensure that UW-Madison does the lion's share of the belt-tightening while requiring that it provide wage increases to faculty and staff.  In other words, compel the institution to sacrifice on behalf of its sister institutions and ensure that instruction does not suffer. Find the units in which faculty are not teaching despite have substantial undergraduate enrollment and forbid any teaching releases not paid for with research dollars.  Increase the research "buyout" rate on all grants larger than $250,000.  Ensure that athletic programs either generate revenue for the campus-- and pass it along-- or close them. Etc.

3. Commission a task force to identify one UW comprehensive university to close and re-assign willing faculty and staff to online endeavors throughout the state.  Do this only after thorough analysis and consider of cost-effectiveness and geographic needs. 

4. Create an indirect cost incentive fund at 3-5 campuses to grow funding from research.

Again, etc.

I doubt any of this will happen because System will not act as the leader it needs to be, and because Madison will be allowed to retain greater power than any other higher education institution in the state, to the great detriment of the vast majority of students.   As a result, the freeze will be followed by a sizable tuition increase.  It shouldn't-- following the freeze, tuition should go up according to something like inflation or labor costs. Nothing more.

Actors on both sides seek to protect interests other than students.  All should be called out for it. A clear and intentional move to a goal of providing universally affordable postsecondary opportunities throughout Wisconsin is long overdue.