David Brooks on College Aid

Someday, David Brooks will write a tight, well-reasoned column on education policy, and we will praise it here on the Quick and the Ed.

Today is not that day.

In today's NYTimes piece($), Brooks critiques a recent proposal to increase college financial aid from Hillary Clinton and the DLC, making the familiar Brooksian argument that it's all about culture, stupid. He says:

Over the past three decades there has been a gigantic effort to increase the share of Americans who graduate from college. The federal government has spent roughly $750 billion on financial aid. Yet the percentage of Americans who graduate has barely budged. The number of Americans who drop out of college leaps from year to year.

There are two basic challenges to increasing the percentage of people who earn college degrees: getting more students to go to college, and getting more students to graduate once they get there. Brooks mixes and muddles these issues throughout the column, but as it happens he's got his facts wrong no matter how you look at it.

According to the U.S. Department of Education and the Census Bureau, the percent of high school graduates who immediately enrolled in college the fall after graduation increased from 49% in 1972 to 67% in 2004.

The percent of 25- to 29-year olds who completed at least some college increased from 36% to 57%.

The percent of 25- to 29-year olds who earned a bachelor's degree increased from 19% to 29%.

All of those numbers can and should be better. But it's foolish to say that the federal student aid money spent during that time did no good.

Brooks criticizes the DLC proposal for new tuition tax credits by citing Harvard Professor (and Education Sector research advisory board member) Bridget Terry Long's research questioning the effectiveness of the Clinton administration's HOPE and lifetime learning tax credis. But the whole point of the DLC proposal is to reform those credits by making them more generous, streamlined, and targeted.

Brooks notes, correctly, that the college completion problem isn't all about money, that we need to do a better job of preparing students for college and engaging them once they get there. But that's why the DLC ties funding for its program to state success in getting students into and through college, to create incentives to fix those problems.

There's one area where both Brooks and the DLC miss the mark: asserting that college dropouts are a growing problem. Way too many students drop out of college, hundreds of thousands every year. It's a terrible problem and a huge waste of opportunity and talent. But the percentage of students who enter college and don't finish isn't going up; the best research suggests it's actually gone down slightly in recent years. College dropouts are a bigger percentage of the population than they once were, but only because more people go to college in the first place.

In the end there are a lot problems to tackle when it comes to getting more students through college. Preparation, attitude, engagement, culture--these things matter. But money matters too. An extra $5,000 for college might not seem like a lot of money if you're a rich guy from suburban Maryland. For a lot of students, that kind of money makes all the difference in the world.

Kirp on Preschool

Education Sector senior non-resident fellow David Kirp published two articles of note recently. One uses new research to suggest that early-childhood education is even more important than you might have thought, while the other uses Illinois as a case study of the many political obstacles to achieving it.

In "After the Bell Curve," published in last weekend's New York Times Magazine, Kirp brings new research about heredity and environment to bear on the long-running debate about nature and nurture. Several studies of low-income twins and adopted children have complicated the conventional wisdom that I.Q. is almost solely a function of genetic—it appears that for poor children, the detrimental developmental impact of poverty can overwhelm heredity and prevent those children from reaching their genetically-determined intelligence potential. In other words, "how genes are expressed depends on the social context" and "if heredity defines the limits of intelligence, experience largely determines whether those limits will be reached."

Kirp notes, for example, that the average 4-year-old growing up poor has heard a total of 32 million fewer spoken words than the child of professionals. Such a language-poor environment is a serious setback to realization of intellectual potential. Kirp argues that early-childhood education, namely universal preschool, is the way to create a stimulating environment for all children to help them "max out" their I.Q.

In "Sandbox Cum Laude," published in the Chicago Tribune Magazine, Kirp and Donna Leff examine the state of preschool education in Illinois in light of Governor Rod Blagojevich's new "Preschool for All" initiative. The article spotlights several successful state- and district-funded pre-K programs for at-risk tots and reviews the research that supports high-quality preschool as a sound investment, such as estimates that the economic return to society of preschool programs is between $7.14 and $17.07 for every dollar invested. But implementation of the Illinois initiative hasn't always been smooth, and several issues remain unresolved, including whether this expensive project will continue to be supported by a governor accused by an opponent of having "policy attention deficit disorder," how it will incorporate existing federally and locally funded preschool programs, and how it will function in an era of high-stakes testing and accountability.

-Laura Boyce

Private College Campaign Against Accountability, Contd.

The Washington Post ran an Op-ed yesterday by the Katherine Haley Will, President of Gettysburg College, criticizing the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education for supporting a new, improved system of collecting information about the nation's colleges and universities.

I won't bore you with the whole back-story about how this is part of an orchestrated campaign led by private colleges to avoid being held accountable for whether or not they're doing a good job, having done so recently here and also a few months ago here. So just some additional comments:

If you feel like you've read this all before, you have: the same person ran essentially the same Op-ed on the same topic in the same place (the WaPo) last year, read it here if once just wasn't enough. She even managed to get the phrase "Big Brother" into both titles. Shouldn't there be some kind of policy against that, some sort of editorial statute of limitations?

The big misrepresenations in this piece remain the same as always: failing to mention that (A) Data about individual students would never be released in any form, protected by strict federal privacy laws established over 30 years ago, (B) The system is not designed to monitor students, it's designed to monitor institutions, and (C) Many higher education folks, including the major organizations of public universities, support the plan.

There are also some more specific misrepresentations of note. For example, the first graf says:

Does the federal government need to know whether you aced Aristotelian ethics but had to repeat introductory biology? Does it need to know your family's financial profile, how much aid you received and whether you took off a semester to help out at home?

The system wouldn't actually collect data about the grades you received in specific courses. It's never a good sign when you have to exaggerate and dissemble in the lead sentence of your piece to make your point.

Moreover, think about the question: "Does the federal government...need to know your family's financial profile" for a second. Of course, the federal government already does know that, because your family fills out a detailed series of forms every year with all kinds of information about income and spending and submits it to the IRS.

That data remains confidential and doesn't get used for any "Orwellian schemes" (her words) because to do so would be a federal crime punishable by time in prison--as would releasing data submitted under the system in question here. The Op-ed also says:

This proposal is a violation of the right to privacy that Americans hold dear. It is against the law. Moreover, there is a mountain of data already out there that can help us understand higher education and its efficacy.

What law does this proposal violate? Surely President Will can't mean the recent bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives banning the system, a bill that hasn't been passed by the Senate nor signed by the President. I hope this debate hasn't sunk to the point that it misses distinctions I learned when I was six years old watching "Schoolhouse Rock."

And to the claim that there is a "mountain of data" out there about higher education efficacy, here's an open challenge: Someone, anyone send me information that shows the following about Gettysburg College:

How much do students there learn between the time they arrive as freshmen and the time they leave as seniors? How does that compare to other colleges?

If you do, I'll publish it here along with an apology to President Will.