Starting Over

Radio station WAMU in Washington, DC, today aired the final installment of journalist Dan Charles's impressive four-part series on a year in the life of an urban school trying to leave its dismal history behind. Listen here.

Gremlins!

The Project on Student Debt has a new video out to help student loan borrowers ditch their "debt gremlin" with the new income-based repayment plan option available for federal loans. It doesn't take much to go from manageable debt to a debt gremlin (losing a job, feeding it after midnight...), but this new federal repayment option promises to provide some relief--and, given the current economic situation, the timing couldn't be better.

FIPSE, Failure, Fraud

The United States of America spends something like $400 billion per year on post-secondary education. That's a lot of money. Yet we don't know as much about the higher education sector as we could, or should. While Clemson has justifiably taken heat for cynically manipulating the class size component of the U.S. News rankings, few people have noted that there's actually very little evidence about the impact of class size on learning in college, one way or another. The class size literature in K-12 education is exponentially richer, despite the fact that class size varies much more in higher ed.

Fixing this problem is a perfect role for the federal government, which sponsors high-level research in health, the sciences and elsewhere. And indeed the U.S. Department of Education has long maintained a Fund for the Improvement of Post-secondary Education (FIPSE), which is gets roughly $130 million per year -- not exactly NIH or DARPA money, but enough to sponsor some solid research. Once upon a time, that's exactly what it did -- applicants were subject to a rigorous review process and the imprimatur of an award often helped raise matching funds from foundations and elsewhere.

But as InsideHigherEd reports, there will be no FIPSE competition this year, because Congress has sucked up nearly all of the money for pork projects. This works about they way you'd expect: Some of the money probably goes for worthwhile purposes. Some of it, like $238,000 for "technology upgrades, including purchase of equipment" at Troy University, is probably better than burying the money in a hole in the ground but wouldn't exactly rise to the top of a rigorous review process.

And then you have people like Robert D. Felner, former dean of education at the University of Louisville, who allegedly($) took $694,000 earmarked for "Support and Continuous Improvement on No Child Left Behind in Kentucky" and promptly funneled it into a shell non-profit think tank run by a buddy who then disbursed the money between them. At least, that's what the federal indictment for mail fraud, money laundering and tax evasion says. Felner--who, incredibly, was about to leave for new gig as chancellor at UW-Parkside before his arrest--appears to have been comfortably operating as a con man within academia for most of his career.

This is what happens with pork. The U.S. Department was exercising minimal oversight because, hey, it's not really their project, is it? They'd rather decide how to disburse FIPSE money but Congress won't let them. There are are hundreds of FIPSE earmarks--how much sense does it make to spend lots of time and effort monitoring the purchase of new laptops at Troy University or what have you? But Congress--in this case, Representative Anne M. Northrup (R-Kentucky), who wangled the money--isn't set up to monitor grants. Nor do they have any incentive to root out corruption and incompetence for their own earmarks--that would just expose the underlying selfishness and disregard for the public interest that pork represents. Colleges, meanwhile, are culpable as they've increasingly decided to play the game along with everyone else by hiring special pork lobbyists etc. etc.

Testing Dropouts

Evidently, there’s a run on GED classes. Some say this is because the economy is so bad that 16-21 year old dropouts are making the rational choice for education over unemployment. Others say it’s b/c getting the GED is easier than finishing high school (and in some cases taking state exit exams). An NCES report on late dropouts shows that this view of the GED as the easier alternative to high school is one reason they leave.

On the other hand, if you talk to recent dropouts and those on the cusp of dropping out you might hear another part of the story: they're jumping in line to finish the GED because they think it's going to get harder. And they are probably right. They don’t necessarily know when the change is happening (American Council on Education, or ACE, updates the test every so often and is scheduled to do so again for 2012) or what the details are (by Dec. 31, 2011 GED-takers need to have completed and passed all five content area assessments or they need to take the whole battery of tests—about 7 hours worth in all--over). But they do seem clear on one message—if you wait another year or two, you may have to start all over with a new version that’s sure to be more difficult. Hey, it might even be faster and cheaper to re-enroll in high school and get the diploma.

Speaking of, there's a proposal called HOPE USA for ~$2 billion for locally designed small-school slash real-world learning programs to get dropouts back in the system. Described here in the same report that illustrates the scope of the dropout crisis: more than 6 million 16-24 year olds are high school dropouts (60% are men and a disproportionate percent are Black and Latino--18% and 30%).

Besides the re-enrollment approach, which is good but circles back to some testing questions, the dropout crisis has brought a lot of attention to “early warning signs” that might help predict who’s likely to drop out. This seems like the better place to start. There are long lists of early indicators, and some debate over which ones are really predictive. Personally, I’ve found that the straight question: “do you know what grade you’re in?” can cast a good early signal—any response resembling my neighbor’s “I’m not sure, I don’t know if I passed English last year” should serve as a bright red flag.

Bankrupt

"We're looking into whether California can renege on its commitment"

--Diana Fuentes-Michel, executive director of the California Student Aid Commission, in regards to a state program to repay the college loans of nurses and teachers who agree to work in-state.

The programs sound like a win-win for all sides. A student gets a portion of his or her student loans written off if he or she agrees to work in a high-need field. A state gets to direct students into fields that otherwise might not be filled, while they simultaneously reduce general fund support for colleges and universities. It's a win-win all around, except when states go broke and decide to backtrack on their promises.

Similar programs exist for other professions, but teachers are the primary targets. Teacher participants in Alabama, Alaska, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Virginia face either partial cuts or worse. Many more states are considering freezing their programs from new applicants.

Success or failure of these types of programs depends largely on their durability. A state is asking a participant to begin a career they might not otherwise pursue and, in turn, the state promises some financial assistance to do so. If states fail to uphold these promises, future students will be far less likely to participate. This is important, because if the programs are designed to attract the marginal students--the ones who need a little extra push into a given field--and not just supplement the salaries of ones who would do so anyway, the programs need prospective applicants to believe the money will actually exist down the road.

That, in fact, is the real problem with these programs: they're not really designed to affect the overall supply of teachers, even for specialty areas. They're just too small. Really they're designed to show the public that state leaders are doing something for certain underpaid and under-supplied professions. State leaders can't force school districts to modify their salary schedules to accommodate the laws of supply and demand. Legislatures have been unwilling to throw more money at colleges and universities and dubious that the postsecondary institutions would use additional money to follow state priorities. What we're left with are boutique programs that made their political point and now can fall by the wayside and only harm a few thousand teachers. That's not just financial bankruptcy; it's of the moral variety as well.

Ranking Secrets Revealed!

College rankings are an interesting business, if for no other reason than the public loves them and the higher education intelligentsia hates them. Take the ongoing scandal at Clemson University. When it came out recently that Clemson has made increasing its US News & World Report ranking from 38 to the top 20 its sole focus, it provoked gasps and outrage in the higher education world, but barely a ripple elsewhere. To be sure, the stunts Clemson has pulled are pretty outrageous and do little to enhance the instituton's quality, but rankings are here to stay; the only question still in doubt is whether those rankings will reflect things that actually matter.

Clemson's actions are all quite rational given the incentive structure colleges currently operate under. The state of South Carolina provides little oversight to its public colleges and universities, and the federal government has few levers to demand quality. That leaves individual institutions to determine their own measures of success, and Clemson found a numeric benchmark on which it could measure itself: college rankings. The ranking magazines sell millions of copies each year, which drive applications, which in turn boosts prestige. If you're Clemson, you'd be a fool not to do everything in your power to increase your ranking.

And that's exactly what they did, in pretty stark ways. US News gives a large preference to class sizes between 1-19 students, so Clemson did everything in its power to reduce classes that were in the 20-25 range down to the magic number of 19. In turn, Clemson let every class over 50 students grow indefinitely. The magazine didn't value average or median class size--it valued the percentage under 20 and the percentage over 50. Nevermind that no good research would suggest that's in the best interests of students.

Next, because the rankings value wealth and exclusivity, Clemson raised tuition sharply and sought to increase the academic credentials of its incoming students. South Carolina is a poor state with low educational attainment; Clemson's policies made it more elite and less accessible to first-generation, minority, and low-income students.

The thing that's so galling about all this is what comes next. Despite constant criticism and constructive suggestions on how to improve, US News continues to give 25 percent weight to a peer assessment survey that's really nothing more than a measure of fame. This is by far the single most important category in the rankings, and Clemson, pursuing its own best interests, deliberately scored its peers lower. InsideHigherEd found Clemson President James F. Barker's survey response, and he rated Clemson as the best university in the country, above the likes of UC-Berkeley, Michigan, UNC-Chapel Hill, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, and Yale.

There are two things that continue to baffle me about all this. One, that the magazine continues to use such a flawed measure when it's in every institution's best interests to rate other ones poorly. The surveys are based purely on reputation and have next to nothing to do with quality. Two, that institutions have not seized the opportunity to create something better. They've focused mainly on attacking rankings themselves rather than seeing that the American public wants some objective system to evaluate colleges and universities, a system that would fairly evaluate how well a college educates the students it starts with. Until we get something better, we're left with glossy, silly, status-based nonsense. Institutions, act accordingly.