He Saved the TV World. A Lot.

Let me just take this opportunity to heartily endorse the comments of Christopher Orr and every right-thinking citizen in this great land of ours by saying that remaking Buffy the Vampire without Joss Whedon is an idea so terrible that it might very well rip a Large Hadron Collider-style hole in the space-time continuum and kill us all, that's how bad it is. If there was a way to stand on line the night such a movie premiered and pay $11.00 that would be subtracted from the opening weekend box office gross, to punish the producers for their sins, I would do that. I'd buy negative tickets for my friends and relatives, too. (Come to think of it, shouldn't there be a Web site or something for this?)

I admit to no objectivity regarding Whedon, a pop culture genius of the highest order. It's not that he can do no wrong--indeed, his shows are infamous slow starters, generally taking a half-dozen episodes or so for the themes, characters, and plotting to cohere. Dollhouse was much the same this year--the pilot was boring, the next few episodes mediocre, but then came "Man on the Street" and whoosh, everything came together in the alchemy of pathos, humor, twisted genre convention and deep intellectual engagement that Whedon manages to achieve like few before him. 

Dollhouse is by most accounts the lowest-rated network television show ever to be renewed, and in that respect it will probably be remembered as something of milestone: the first post-broadcast network program, still alive because it was popular on iTunes, Hulu, Tivo, DVD pre-order and pretty much every platform other than being sent out through airwaves and along coaxial cable at an appointed hour. 

3-Year Degrees Are The Future, and Always Will Be

The Post ran a story recently titled "Colleges Consider 3-Year Degrees to Save Undergrads Time, Money." This is one of those ideas that gets rolled out every now and then and never goes anywhere. And I think it's pretty clear why. There are actually two distinct proposals mentioned in the article, which confusingly oscillates between them. The first is giving students a way to earn a traditional four-year bachelor's degree in three years. The second is awarding a degree for only three years of learning. Both ideas ultimately suffer from higher education's opaque and limiting convention of measuring academic progress in terms of time. 

The problem with the earn-a-four-year-degree-in-three-years idea is that there's nothing really new about it. Students can already take AP classes, dual high school / college enroll, go to summer school, sign up for an extra class each semester, or otherwise try to get through more material sooner. But the financial incentives aren't always great -- summer school isn't free, so you're stilling paying for the same number of credits. Plus, many students are on the five- and six-year tracks for their 4-year degree (or longer), so three years is unlikely. 

And just because a relatively small subset of students could finish early doesn't mean they will. I myself was lucky enough to go to a high school that jumped on the AP program early, back in the mid-80s, so I walked into college with 24 credits under my belt. It would have been pretty easy to finish a semester or even a year early. But why do that--college is fun! Instead, I strategically took it easy, throwing some three-course semesters into the mix and generally avoiding classes that met before noon. That still left me with only eight credits left to earn going into my last semester. So I took two classes: the last prerequisite for my major (an introductory course, incredibly) and a women's studies class, on the premise that it would be a good place to meet women. 

The problem with the other proposal--awarding a degree for only three years of learning--is that three is 25 percent less than four, and so three -year degrees will be worth 25 percent less than four-year degrees in the job market, and so people won't want them. The question of transition to graduate and professional school also goes on the table. 

Some might say, "No--it will be a three-year bachelor's degree." But what does that even mean?What's a bachelor's degree other than a credential certifying that you were enrolled as a full-time student at an accredited college or university for the equivalent of four years? It's true that Europe is rapidly transitioning to a standard three-plus-two bachelor's and master's system, but the last year of college prep high school there is roughly equivalent to the first year of college here.  

All of this flows from the inherent vagueness and inflexibility of defining higher education credentials exclusively in terms of time--credit hours, two and four-year degrees. The basic unit is still the number of hours you spent in a room having someone teach you, not any reliable, consistent measure of what you actually learned. 

And that, really, is what we need. People study a lot of different things in college. It's exceedingly unlikely that the body of knowledge, skills, experience, and attributes necessary to begin a career or graduate-level studies or some other agreed-upon milestone is exactly the same in all of them. But with a few exceptions, e.g. five-year engineering and pre-med programs, that's what we pretend. Instead of trying to stuff four years into a three-year basket, we need to start defining and differentiating courses of study while making assessment results much more transparent, so people can take their credentials into the job market with confidence, regardless of how long those credentials took to earn. This is a good start. 

The Condition of School Choice

Dana Goldstein at The American Prospect wrote last week about the importance of opening up school district boundaries to allow parents in urban areas to send their kids to suburban schools, and vice-versa. Making district boundaries more porous is one step toward reducing the growing resegregation of our communities and schools, and it may be beneficial to those students who do transfer. But it doesn't address what most families fundamentally want - a good, safe school in their community.

As I wrote in this report, inter-district choice just isn't going to impact large numbers of students in many large, urban areas - there simply aren't enough good schools nearby to take transferring students. And that's assuming that suburban schools will open up a substantial number of seats - something which will require financial incentives or politically unpopular mandates. This isn't to say that inter-district choice policies aren't worth pursuing, it's just that they will take increased resources and careful attention to be done right. And for school choice to impact a large number of students in many urban areas, policymakers need to combine increased choice across district boundaries with building better schools, whether it's charter schools or traditional public schools of choice.

As a sidenote, and an addendum to Chad's great Condition of Education series, the recent report also includes some relevant information on public school choice. As one might expect, white, non-poor, and suburban parents are more likely to report moving to their current neighborhood for a school:
But among parents who reported having choice among public schools (46 percent), the patterns look different in who takes advantage of school choice, with students of minority and lower-income parents attending public schools of choice at a higher rate:

One disturbing result in the new report is that parents with less than a high school diploma reported the lowest rates of choice. And this was a drop from the 2003 survey results. It's hard to say what, exactly, the reason is for lower choice among parents with lower education levels, but it may indicate that policymakers at all levels - state, district and school - need to step up outreach efforts to ensure choice is accessible to all families.

The Condition of Education: College Wage Premium

We often talk about the college wage premium as if it's some sort of bonus you get once you've earned higher educational credentials. The chart showing average median wage by educational attainment is pretty common--each attainment level is given its own bar, they're arranged left to right in increasing education levels, and the median wage rises on the page left to right. It's a simple and effective way to say that college pays off.

What is less commonly understood is that college isn't just a bonus: it has, for a long time, been a safety net against wage decline. The chart below illustrates what this means. Since 1980, real wages for Americans with bachelor's degrees or higher have risen $3,000, or 6.7 percent. Over the same period, wages for Americans with less than a high school diploma and for those with a diploma or its equivalent have fallen 23 and 17 percent respectively. In other words, it's not so much that earnings for those with bachelor's degrees have accelerated rapidly; it's that they've held onto their market position while others have fallen precipitously.
This makes a difference in the way we think about educational attainment. If college was just a way to get a bonus, you might be content with what you have now. If, on the other hand, you understood that you would likely suffer large penalties over time if you opted not to go, you might think about college differently. You might see it as more essential.

The Condition of Education: Economic and Racial Segregation

The National Center for Education Statistics holds an annual Condition of Education event that's sort of like a State of the Union speech, only without politics, fanfare, or clapping, and with graphs and a sole focus on education. Other than the annual "special analysis" section (this year's is on International Assessments and will come out in the summer), all the information is culled from other surveys and products that are available elsewhere. This might sound boring, but it's a nice time to think about larger trends in education nationwide and get a physical copy of the compendium of data.

Over the next few days I'll highlight some of the charts and tables I found most interesting. The one at left looks at the percentage of students, by race, who attend a high-poverty school, defined as a school where 75 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Nationwide, about a third of black and Hispanic children attend a high-poverty school, while only four percent of white children and 13 percent of Asian/ Pacific Islanders do. By contrast, only four percent of black and six percent of Hispanic children attend low-poverty schools, defined as schools with ten percent or less of students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch.

These numbers are in part a reflection of growing segregation in our nation's schools. Since 1990, the percentage of students attending a school with a minority population comprising at least 75 percent of the student body has risen from 16 to 24. A third of all black and Hispanic students attend such schools. 62 percent of whites attend a school where the student body is more than 75 percent white.

These conditions will not likely be addressed through school assignment policies. The Supreme Court has ruled that even non-binding race windows are unconstitutional in school assignment plans. Efforts to integrate by economic factors face their own complications, not least of which is the flight of effective teachers out of low-income, high-minority schools.

Solutions must do one of two things. Either they must attempt to address large-scale housing and location decisions that are the basis for school segregation in the first place, or they must ignore the problem entirely and address the symptoms, rather than the problem itself, head on. The former would require localities to emphasize mixed-use neighborhoods and other zoning tools to address de facto segregation. The latter would suggest focusing more resources and attention on these schools, such as providing incentives for effective teachers to work in them. Without such efforts, schools will be powerless to counter prevailing societal living patterns.

Aligning Financial Incentives With College Success

Postsecondary institutions have few financial incentives for results. Their funding streams are either divorced from students entirely (through federal research grants or block state funding) or based only on the number of students they enroll (through per-student funding and tuition). This is true at the K-12 level as well, but K-12 schools at least have a regulatory system (like it or not) attempting to drive results. Higher education has neither the funding nor the accountability systems to hold institutions to high standards. While it's not true that institutions have no incentives to graduate students--upper-level students consume far more campus resources than their lower-division peers--they continue to operate as business-as-usual despite roll-the-die odds on college graduation. Institutions are more or less left to their own devices, with all the good and the bad that implies.

States are beginning to experiment with new ways to fund their colleges and universities that hinge funding on student success. This experimentation is a good sign, but it gets tricky really quickly.

Ohio, for instance, is about to adopt a plan to fund its public postsecondary institutions entirely on their ability to retain and graduate students. It's innovative in that the money is not based on pure raw numbers--the state will instead compute "expected" course completion and graduation rates, based on student socioeconomic factors, and reward institutions that meet or exceed these predicted rates. This is much more sophisticated than Ohio's current system of basing funding only on the number of students enrolled on the 14th day of the semester. And, it gives institutions incentives to be accountable for student success.

Yet, Ohio's plan is lacking one significant element: there's nothing to incentivize quality. The opposite is true really, because institutions would have financial motives to make their academic programs easier. More students + lower standards = more graduates = more money. That's not a formula for success.

Ohio is in a position, unlike most other states, to enhance the equation with outcomes data. Its institutions collaborate with the state’s Department of Jobs and Family Services to collect employment data on recent graduates of all postsecondary institutions in the state. The resulting data show the percentage of students who graduated between 2001 and 2006 who were employed or enrolled in more postsecondary education six months after completing their degree, as well as the number of 2002 graduates employed at the end of 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006. Six-month, in-state employment numbers of graduates from public universities ranged from 67 percent (Miami University) to 83 percent (Wright State and the University of Akron). Community colleges had some of the highest numbers. Graduates of the Cincinnati College of Mortuary Science were found to be employed and in-state 89 percent of the time and graduates of the MedCentral College of Nursing were at 92 percent.

These data aren't perfect--they discount students who leave the state and give salary numbers for academic discipline but not by institution--but they would nonetheless be powerful in the hands of students and their parents. If such information were aggressively marketed to students and parents, the quality portion of the equation would be driven by student demand rather than institutional prerogative. That isn't possible right now, but it would make the higher education market a whole lot more focused on quality.

In the end, experiments like Ohio's are a real risk for accountability advocates. A bad or misaligned accountability system is worse than nothing at all, and as Ohio policymakers push forward they must be careful to balance quantity and quality concerns together.

The Case Against Helping Low-Income Families Save for College

A couple of weeks ago I published a column in the Chronicle of Higher Education more or less denouncing 529 college savings plans on the grounds that policymakers have used them to avoid the hard choices inherent to actually keeping college affordable while simultaneously inducing families to gamble away their hard-earned money in a casino run by a particularly mendacious house. 

Not long afterward I received an appreciative email, signed, simply, "Mom who lost the college funds for her daughter."  

I thought of that while reading about the recently announced initiative spearheaded by the New America Foundation and the Center for Social Development (CSD) at Washington University in St. Louis to increasing 529 college savings plan participation among low-income families. 

As a liberal circa 2009, I know I'm supposed to be all about asset building for the poor. It's one of those clever policy ideas that lets you be in favor of improving the economic lives of low-income households without associating yourself with retrograde, dependency-generating social programs. A hand up, teach a man to fish, etc., etc. Welfare for a post-welfare world. And of course I'm not really opposed to giving every newborn a savings bond or something along those lines. There are worse ways to spend public money. (Mass incarceration and ruinous foreign wars come to mind.) 

And yet...I have qualms.

First, I don't think 529 accounts are really assets at all. Most non-rich people accumulate assets in two forms: housing and retirement savings. There's a permanency to both of these things. You become a homeowner and (recent catastrophic events notwithstanding) build up equity over time. Eventually you own the house (or the next one, or the one after that) free and clear and it provides a roof over your head for the rest of your life. Similarly, the point of saving for retirement isn't just to spread your income out over your whole life. It's to save enough money so that income from the assets is enough to sustain you. In both cases the idea is to build something that holds core value while providing additional ongoing benefits, something than can be passed on from one generation to the next.

529 plans are just a way to extend the cost of college over time. "Pre-paid tuition plans," for example, are actually another form of 529s, and there's really no difference--you pay over 22 years (or less) instead of four, and when you're done, there's nothing left. Your kid has something of value, of course, something asset-like, but you're back to square one. 

Obviously, part of the appeal of 529s is the tax savings on investment income. But that means you have to take on risk of investment losses--a risk exacerbated by the (relative to houses and retirement) shorter time horizon and the total inflexibility of when you need to spend the money. Retirement can be delayed or spending adjusted in a downturn, and a house that's lost value is just as good at keeping you warm and dry. But if you lose the college funds for your daughter, her whole life is turned on end.

New America's chief assets person, Ray Boshara, says that "Structured and invested properly, 529s hold enormous, un-tapped potential to get more students, especially those least likely headed to college, on a path to attend and complete college." Putting aside for the moment whether "enormous" is empirically justified, I assume the phrase "invested properly" is a nod toward the practice of reducing investment risk as college approaches. Which is a good idea--but it also diminishes expected returns and further reduces 529s to simply stretching the college payment timeline and little else. If you assume some families are going to make money in the market, then you have to assume that others are going to suffer terrible losses for no other reason than they unluckily had children at the wrong time. That's a steep price to pay. 

Plus, more broadly, doesn't the best way to help low-income families save involve helping them earn more money than they need to spend, so there's some left over to save? In other words: helping them not be low-income anymore? And if they're poor, presumably any money they save comes at an unusually high opportunity cost in terms of foregone consumption.  A lawyer making half a million dollars a year who saves $1,000 for college presumably feels nary a pinprick of pain. What is that--a 60-inch flatscreen instead of a 64-inch? 40 fewer minutes playing blackjack in AC? For a poor family, by contrast, $1,000 means less housing, food, basic amenities--important stuff. And keep in mind, the lawyer is the one getting a better tax benefit out of 529s, because he's paying at a higher rate. 

New America, to its credit, wants progressive 529s that subsidize accounts for low-income families. But this still seems a lot like pre-funded Pell grants. Why not just use the same money to increase Pell grants? The argument then turns toward behavioral effects. The director of the CSD says "There is evidence that savings for college may focus attention of parents and children on post-secondary education, affecting their outlook, orientation, course selection, discipline, and academic achievement." That's an interesting contention--what evidence and how does it get to "may" focus attention? This would be useful to know, given the shocking lack of good research linking student financial aid to college-going. I'm sure New America is fully in favor of increasing income equality and lowering college costs and investing in Pell grants, too. But there's only so much money to go around. 

In other words, it's less that I think all of this is a bad idea per se and more that it seems like one more in a ever-growing list of small-bore college access programs that ignore the two overwhelmingly important issues: out-of-control price increases and inadequate public support. By creating the appearance of a solution, it's easier to leave the actual solutions undone. Instead of inventing complicated new ways to help low-income families save scarce dollars so they can pay for colleges that get less affordable by the year, let's just make college affordable in the first place.  

Informed Demand

Ed is Watching responded to my recent report about school choice and pointed me to this website from the Education Policy Center - a website designed to inform Colorado parents about available school options. I took a quick look and the website looks helpful, providing a step-by-step guide for parents on enrolling in schools out of their district and finding charter schools. What I'm really interested in, though, is how they market this website to parents - how do they ensure that lower-income parents, who may not have time to surf the web during work, get access to this information? And are they talking to schools about how to reach out to those parents?

There is no doubt--as I found looking at other markets in low-income communities--that having well-informed consumers is critical to creating and maintaining high-quality options in a marketplace. But it takes more than publishing school report cards to create the kind of well-informed parents that will really drive quality in an education market.

Parents (and consumers in general) tend to rely on their social networks for information about schools, and parents without informed social networks are at a serious disadvantage in learning which schools are the good schools. Overcoming this disadvantage requires more than just making information available to parents, it requires an active, coordinated information campaign using multiple outlets--the internet, radio and television, and going door-to-door. And schools need to be a prominent part of the information campaign, by reaching out to parents and encouraging them to participate in school choice.

In my report, I look at the banking industry and efforts to increase the number of low-income households with checking or savings accounts. Mainstream banks face several hurdles when reaching out to low-income customers, including mistrust of banks, a misunderstanding of the costs of checking and savings accounts, and a lack of awareness of the account options available. To overcome these hurdles requires a lot of outreach and aggressive information campaigns. When the City of San Francisco, for example, decided to promote an initiative to make low-cost bank accounts available to low-income residents, it ran ads throughout the city about the high cost of using check cashing outlets and promoted the city's new program with the slogan, "Everyone is Welcome". The city also provided banks with information to help them reach out to low-income customers and better meet their needs.

Banks in other cities have reached low-income customers by being flexible in how they provide their services - instead of only operating in stand alone branches, banks meet customers in the places they already go, like grocery stores and pharmacies. And some have also partnered with check cashing and payday loan outlets to offer traditional checking and savings accounts along with the check cashing services customers already use.

A 'build it and they will come' attitude does not work in banking, or in education. If we truly want a dynamic marketplace in which all parents are well-informed and actively choosing, it will take a lot more outreach and a lot more flexibility than we typically see today.