More from The Chronicle

The Chronicle of Higher Education starts a new series today, “Sticker Shock”, focused on the rising cost of higher education—it’s not a new topic, but as the author, Goldie Blumenstyk, says, it’s “damnably complex,” and there are no clear solutions. With The Chronicle’s deep knowledge of higher education issues, this should be an enlightening series.

In the first installment, Blumenstyk presents an overview of the rising cost of higher education - the growing burden tuition places on family incomes and the increasing debt loads of college graduates. While discussions of college costs often focus on tuition in terms of family income or total student loan debt, they often don’t consider how salaries for college graduates figure into the cost equation.

In 2005, NCES took a look at the debt burden—the percent of monthly income dedicated to loan payments—for students who graduated college in 1993 and 2000. Debt burden is a useful measure because it takes into account total debt levels, terms of repayment (e.g., interest rates, flexible repayment plans), and graduates’ salaries. Based on the NCES report, the debt burden for graduating students didn’t actually increase much, despite a jump in the average total debt at graduation.

From 1993 to 2000, the average amount borrowed among graduating students who took out loans rose from $12,100 to $19,400, but the debt burden only rose from 6.7% to 6.9%. This is partly due to more favorable interest rates for the later cohort, but also because salaries one-year after graduation rose from $28,300 to $34,100.*

Unfortunately, these numbers are old and we don’t know if salaries are continuing to keep up with the rising debt loads of students—recent media accounts would suggest they aren’t. As we face an uncertain economic future in which salaries for recent college grads might not rise as quickly as their loan debt, debt burden should be another regularly cited indicator of the impact on students of rising college costs.


*Loan amounts are in 1999 constant dollars and salaries are in 2001 constant dollars.

Let's All Hold Hands

Back in the summer I grumbled about the lack of open-access academic journal articles in education research. Today, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on efforts among scholarly publishers to both allow open access to articles, and make money.

Frances Pinter, the publisher of Bloomsbury Academic, which is pioneering this new approach, says, “"I'm tired of the divide between open-access people who have nothing but disdain for publishers, and publishers who don't really know how to take a few risks and try some new models." I’ll admit that I often fall into the first half of that quote, but she makes a good point that this is an area where a little cooperation could go a long way.

In the Air and on the Ground

No Child Left Behind has become a non-issue on the campaign trail, in part because the politics are too complicated for both candidates, and in part because there are, frankly, more important things to worry about these days. Overall, there's a fairly solid elite consensus that the law is at best founded on smart principles but seriously flawed, and at worst a horrendous corporate conspiracy and/or prime example of Bush Administration malfeasance. Meanwhile, the Washinton Post looks at the data for local school districts in a front-pager this morning and finds that NCLB is...working exactly as intended. In nearly every local district, in both reading and math, the percent of non-poor students passing tests is going up while the percent of poor students who are passing is going up even faster, narrowing socio-economic achievement gaps. Schools identified as low-performing reacted to the so-called "label and punish" AYP system by...redoubling their efforts to not be low-performing. For example:

The onus of failure also sparked a shakeup at Shady Grove Middle School in Montgomery County. Three years ago, the school missed a test-score target. If just one more student from a low-income family had passed in reading, the school would have made adequate yearly progress, the label of success.

"We were stopped dead in our tracks," Principal Lance Dempsey said. "It was very crushing. And it was by one kid."

Dempsey launched a schoolwide literacy plan. She pushed teachers to learn techniques to integrate reading into every subject and gave them weekly training in reading instruction. Teachers started meeting regularly to identify students who were falling behind and to make plans to help them. Educators across the region are taking similar steps. Physical education and art teachers often weave math and literacy lessons into games and projects.

The result, Dempsey said, is a better school. "I think it gave us an opportunity to say, 'Whoa, we are leaving a few kids behind.' " In 2005, only two-fifths of students in poverty passed in reading. This year, almost three-fourths passed.

What am I missing?

Dispatch from Austin City Limits

Within seconds of setting foot on Texas soil, a horde of fire ants swarm up my shoe and begin sinking their fangs into my ankle, leaving angry sores that last for days. Combined with the total airport power failure and the crazy drunk woman in the airplane seat in front of us, I begin to wonder if my third annual summer music trip with Maureen (after Lollapalooza in 2006 and VirginFest in 2007) might be ill-fated. But luckily the ants are the last bad thing to happen, and Austin City Limits is a blast.

We arrive a day early and spend Thursday touring around town, starting with barbecue at the Salt Lick, browsing through vintage records at Antone's, and then on to the University of Texas campus. The undefeated Longhorns are hosting Arkansas on Saturday and burnt-orange T-shirts are everywhere. (Various local publications allege that the UT starting quarterback is named "Colt McCoy" but I'm pretty sure this is just an elaborate joke devised to mock gullible out-of-towners.) We stop by the world-famous Ransom archive (Gutenberg Bible, check; fascinating early drafts of Underworld, check) before heading on to the museum (which recently acquired a great Anselm Kiefer) and then the Texas statehouse.

Except apparently you're not supposed to call the statehouse the "Statehouse" but rather the "Capitol" because, as our tour guide mentions on at least eight separate occasions, Texas was its own country for ten whole years before joining (and then dropping out of, and then re-joining) the Union. In any case, it's a beautiful building. If you speak while standing directly on the lone star in the center of the rotunda, it produces acoustic effects that are, while not quite Wren's whispering gallery, still kind of neat. We're staying with friends, whom we meet for Tex-Mex near their place in the very pleasant surrounding hills.

Day One

There's a line at the brunch place full of fellow concert-goers--capacity at Zilker Park is 65,000 and it's full all weekend--but the half-hour wait for my guacamole omelet is so, so worth it. We park and ride the shuttle to the main gate, emerging into a hot-but-not-oppressive afternoon sun. Wandering over to the "AT&T Blue Room" stage, we catch the end of an energetic set from What Made Milwaukee Famous. Then we navigate through a sea of folding chairs (more on this later) to catch the insta-buzz NYC sensation, Vampire Weekend. They're okay; I have no particular objections to the music but find their preppy smugness to be off-putting. Maureen agrees. "That one," she says, pointing to lead singer Ezra Koenig on the Jumbotron, "is going on my list of guys who need to have their [butts] kicked."

"John Mayer is still first on the list, though."

We've got an hour before the next act, on the other side of the park (there are seven stages in all, so the whole enterprise requires careful planning). The food is much better and cheaper than at our previous festivals and the drinks are plentiful. (Overall the concert organization was terrific with the lone, notable exception of running out of Lone Star tallboys by mid-Saturday afternoon.) Marketers are handing out sweatbands festooned with the logo of the recently deceased Washington Mutual; I grab a handful to sell as collector's items on Ebay. We make our way near the front of the AT&T stage and settle in for the most multi-cultural band in all of creation, Gogol Bordello. 

It's hard to describe how preposterously entertaining they are, in a bordering-on-and-often-crashing-into-absurd kind of way. The video clip below only hints at their awesome gypsy-rock assault (warning: the sound is terrible because the microphone on my little camera can't handle the rock music). You half expect to be handed a release form explaining that images of you may appear in the next Sacha Baron Cohen movie, what with frontman Eugene Hutz's manic testosterone-addled raving, the roller derby outfits, and all the rest. It's like they're daring you not to get the joke. 

We decide to skip Jenny Lewis' performance in the [Dead Bank] tent since she'll be here in DC on Thursday. We catch a little Hot Chip and then idle near David Byrne, looking sharp in white hair and an outfit to match, doing the Peter Gabriel world music thing. That leads to local favorite Alejandro Escovedo's tight, expert sound. He's on one of the smaller stages and the median age of the crowd suddenly jumps up about 20 years. The band is super-professional as the evening turns to night and they lay down old favorites along with much from Alejandro's justly lauded new album, Real Animal. It's wise, hopeful, and good way to finish the day. As we wait in line for the shuttle bus, The Mars Volta plays on the big AMD stage, sounding like what you'd get if you shot Led Zeppelin full of amphetamines and locked them in steel cage for a musical battle to the death. 

But that wasn't the end of the day. As the self-proclaimed "Live Music Capital of the World," Austin is stuffed with great venues into which many ACL bands book late-night gigs. We walk up 6th Street (which is a lot like Bourbon Street in New Orleans, and I mean that in the worst possible way) to Emo's Outdoors and the Drive-By Truckers. They arrive after midnight, start a little slow, and my mind begins to wander as I reflect on how age makes it harder to stand all day and stay up all night. But then, at the stroke of 1AM, the Truckers reach beneath the dashboard, flip a switch that shoots reserves of moonshine directly into the engine, and rip through an incendiary set of southern rock anthems that are damn close to the Platonic ideal. Later, we walk back to the car, senses heightened, knowing it will be hard to sleep. 

 

Day Two

The idea was to get there early but we end up needing more time to recover than originally planned. As we walk to the buses, Maureen dashes into the historic Driskill Hotel for a drink of water only to emerge minutes later with a sly grin. "Robert Plant is in the lobby," she says. "We had a moment." I pale, flashing back to Hammer of the Gods. What kind of moment!?! "There was eye contact," she explains. "We bonded because we both have long curly hair."  

Brushes with greatness take time and so we grab lunch and the next band to see is...the Drive-By Truckers. Redundant? No, sir. Shonna Tucker grabs swigs of Jack Daniel's mid-song, Mike Cooley makes me want to take up smoking, and Patterson Hood regales the audience with a lengthy story of how his momma recovered from a six-year vodka bender by marrying a 350-pound long-haul trucker named Chester who killed eight men escaping a P.O.W. camp in Vietnam. Highlight (see clip): a rousing version of "Hell No I Ain't Happy" -- truly, a song for our times. 

We buy some concerts T-shirts and CDs from the temporary Waterloo Records outlets before heading over to see MGMT.  This involves a lot of navigation through the afore-mentioned lawn chairs, which are proof that profound technological change doesn't always involve fancy computers. We all remember folding lawn chairs, but the key innovation was making them collapsible to the point where you can sling them over your back with relative ease. The lawn chair profusion at ACL has become so great that they've had to designate special areas in which chairs can and cannot go. As with other sectors of the economy, advances in lawn chair technology have expanded the boundaries of possibility, resulting in new incentive structures and the need for new policies to match

Unfortunately, when the crowds get big enough, those boundaries start to erode and movement slows to a crawl, like rush hour gridlock in a big city. Personally, I think deploying new chair tech is fine if you're physically unable to walk or stand for long periods of time, but otherwise sitting in front of one stage all day betrays a fatal lack of seriousness and arguably moral weakness in matters of or relating to rock and roll. 

Anyway, MGMT draws a huge crowd as the Brooklyn duo wisely augments their synth-driven sound with a solid three-piece band. They play most of their excellent debut, Oracular Spectacular, with the highlight being a mass-jump-inducing rendition of "Kids." (see clip).

From there we walk back to the AT&T Stage end of the park--and here let me pause to suggest that if you're going to spend what I presume was a lot of money to have "delivered by AT&T" plastered on everything and you're marketing to a generally youthful, affluent audience who as such are likely to own AT&T-exclusive iPhones, you might want to give some thought to what will inevitably happens when tens of thousands of people in close proximity try to use said phones all at once: they'll be repeatedly reminded that your network kind of sucks. 

But I digress. We listen to Conor Oberst doing a reputable job in the distance before Iron & Wine begins on the Dell Stage. There's a cute couple with an even cuter three-year old daughter sitting behind us, which gives me hope that my future children won't cramp my music-loving style. (Readers with evidence to the contrary are kindly asked to keep it to themselves; we all need our illusions. Although Blues Traveller and Band of Horses are playing the same stage tomorrow, Sam Beam pretty much wraps up the crazy beard championship while playing a lot of good tunes from the Woman King EP and The Shepherd's Dog. It gets dark and our Austin friend joins us for Beck, who kicks off with "Loser" before playing some pretty good stuff from his new record as well as his ultra-depressing break-up album, Sea Change. We pause on our way out to hear Plant and Allison Kraus sing "The Battle of Evermore"--not bad--and decide to follow the crowds and walk all the way back to town. 

At this point we're pretty tired so obviously the smart thing is to get some rest drink several margaritas before heading back to Emo's for another post-midnight show. As we arrive Man Man is finishing up an act that seems to consist of wearing denim cut-offs and white face paint while jumping up and down in unison and beating on things. So we grab a few Shiner Bocks and wait for Okkervil River to begin. They do not disappoint. We saw them open for The New Pornographers at the 9:30 Club a few months ago and they were good then, but now the Austin natives are truly in their element, playing in front of an adoring crowd that knows all the lyrics by heart. The space fits about thousand people total but only a few hundred beneath a makeshift overhang in front of the cramped stage, and it's hard to imagine anything to improve. Highlights: "Unless It's Kicks" and "A Girl in Port," among many (see clip). 

We get home even later and more wired than the night before. 

Day Three

Of all the bands in all the world, there may be none more ill-suited to play on a huge festival stage at 1:30 in the afternoon under the hot Texas sun than a two-person post-punk act that looks, sounds, and feels like a smoke- and fashion model-filled downscale London nightclub at 4AM, i.e. The Kills.  But that's exactly where they were, and they were not happy. You could practically see last night's alcohol steaming off of Alison Mosshart's vampire skin, while Jamie Hince repeatedly cursed his manager and made comments like "This is suicide" and "We've never played in daylight before." (One suspects that getting dumped by Kate Moss last week didn't help.) But credit where due: they didn't mail it in. It was actually a good set, helped by the fact The Kills have released some stellar albums in recent years. Mosshart would venture to the front of the stage for a few seconds, recoil from the light, retreat back to her microphone, retch, cover her head with a towel full of ice cubes, and then try it all over again. It was actually kind of charming. 

We rehydrate and then return for Stars, day to The Kills' night in term of sound and disposition. Torquil Campbell repeatedly thanks the crowd and organizers for the honor of performing as the veteran Montreal pop rockers play mostly highlights from Set Yourself on Fire and In Our Bedroom After the War. Next up is Neko Case, playing what she says is the final date on what must have been a very long tour supporting Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. At first I'm worried that the spare arrangements will be insufficient for the space and crowd, but the music grows in confidence throughout the hour. We then turn quickly back for a repeat from Okkervil River, the crowd again super-appreciative and the music again strong and driven, although the band starts to get ragged toward the end. 

Originally the plan was to pivot back to the Raconteurs, but I grow weary and the beverage stands call. So we grab some dinner and I'm pleasantly surprised by the nearby White Denim show on a smaller stage. Then we shimmy through the chairs and crowd to get near the Band of Horses, whom I'd never seen live before. Turns out I didn't know how much I was missing. They wisely play nearly all of Cease to Begin, which is tailor-made for a festival setting, all hooks and soaring choruses.  At one point lead singer Ben Bridwell looks out into the crowd with a beatific smile and says "Wow, look at all these people. Y'all are beautiful. I love you!"

Maureen says, "He just put the bong down and walked right on stage." And let's just say that, based on the olfactory evidence, Bridwell had a lot of company.

Foo Fighters close things out but frankly these are always the least fun parts of a festival; due to the lack of other shows you end up standing in the dark with a zillion people about half a mile from the stage watching tiny figures on a big screen. Plus we have tickets to The Black Keys at Stubb's downtown. So we leave to the strains of "Learn to Fly" and make it to our concluding show of the weekend just as the Akron blues-rock duo begins to play. "Growing up in Akron would make anyone sing the blues," notes Maureen, an Ohioan herself. I can't argue with that, so we order one last Lone Star and relax in the evening air, enjoying the final cymbal crashes and heavy chords of a terrific Austin weekend.

Scalpel

Mike Petrilli mischaracterizes what it means for a program to be labeled "ineffective" by the Office of Management and Budget's Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART). His argument starts with the presidential debate last week with this exchange:

LEHRER: What I'm trying to get at this is this. Excuse me if I may, senator. Trying to get at that you all -- one of you is going to be the president of the United States come January. At the -- in the middle of a huge financial crisis that is yet to be resolved. And what I'm trying to get at is how this is going to affect you not in very specific -- small ways but in major ways and the approach to take as to the presidency.

MCCAIN: How about a spending freeze on everything but defense, veteran affairs and entitlement programs.

LEHRER: Spending freeze?

MCCAIN: I think we ought to seriously consider with the exceptions the caring of veterans national defense and several other vital issues.

LEHRER: Would you go for that?

OBAMA: The problem with a spending freeze is you're using a hatchet where you need a scalpel.

When Obama went on Face the Nation and elaborated that there are government programs that do not work, Mike decided to give Obama some scalpel help and used OMB PART scores to determine which Education programs should be cut. Besides PART itself possibly not making it into the next administration, here's why the scores should not be used in the way Mike suggests:

1. PART treats every program equally, so the entire Bureau of Labor Statistics is one program with a budget of $500 million. Education is split into many tiny programs, so the BLS is graded on the same curve as the $1 million B.J. Stupak Olympic Scholarship Program. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is not one program, but seven. No other agency is hit as hard as Education in this way.
2. Government programs, as Mike well knows, are often shackled with poor designs. A compromise here or there makes the original intent of the program nearly impossible to achieve. PART assesses how well the program accomplishes its goals, but if its goals are conflicting or unclear, let alone flat-out impossible, the program earns a bad score. See this review of the federal Perkins loan program, designed for needy college students:

   The program's institutional allocation formula (i.e., how much program funding is given to each school to offer Perkins aid) is designed to heavily benefit postsecondary institutions that have participated in Campus-Based programs for a long time, at the expense of more recent entrants or new applicants. Since these longstanding institutions do not have a higher proportion of needy students, this allocation formula tends to limit the program's ability to target resources the neediest beneficiaries.
   

3. Education programs are not the only ones receiving "ineffective" ratings from PART. Using this "scalpel," we would also cut Amtrak, the Earned Income Tax Credit, Americorps, Veterans Disability Compensation and Veterans Home Loans, and the Air Force Base Operations & Support. This last one alone is funded at twice the level of all the programs Mike lists. It fails because, "The overall program does not have long-term, outcome-based performance measures. Program elements do have performance measures, though they are often input or output oriented rather than focused on outcomes that directly and meaningfully support the program's purpose."
   
4. PART scores are binary, meaning OMB managers must answer either "yes" or "no" to questions about program efficacy. There's no room for flexibility whatsoever. Imagine an agency that juuuust fails on every measure. It would receive a score of 0. An agency that gets even one yes, no matter how many horrendous other failings it has, would have a higher score.
   

If you want to know more about PART scores, see here.

Candor

In a discussion about the use of standardized college admissions test, William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions at Harvard university, says:

"At Harvard we get terrific students, and we turn out terrific students later on. Is that due to Harvard or is that due to the students to begin with? Who knows?" 

I appreciate honesty and candor as much as the next guy but shouldn't you know? Students pay a lot of money to go to Harvard, the government kicks in a bunch as well, and here a high-ranking official admits that the university really has no idea whether it adds any value or simply provides a pure sorting-and-networking service. Of course the phenomenon of human learning is extremely complicated and subject to all kinds of endogenous and exogenous factors, so this is not a simple question to answer. To really make some headway you'd need at minimum a group of very smart, highly-skilled people with access to large amounts of resources along with specific training in various complex research and analytic methods, plus proximity to thousands of potential subjects to study. In other words, a place just like Harvard University. I mean, they've got research centers devoted to figuring out everything from astrophysics, genomics, and nanotechnology to cancer, AIDS, and peace in the Middle East. Is it crazy to think they could figure out how much they contribute to their own students' learning? 

Due Diligence

Clearly whoever's running the "Firesales, Mergers and Acquisitions" department at J.P Morgan isn't aware that there's a WaMu Tent here at ACL or else they'd be here tearing down signs, hanging out backstage with Jenny Lewis, etc.

What $700 Billion Could Also Buy

Matthew Yglesias makes a quick point that deserves elaboration, particularly in the current financial climate. His basic argument (and I'm adding some of my own as well) is that if we think of the "economy" consisting only of the stock market, then sure, the bailout seems like on OK idea. But there's also measures of job security, unemployment, equality, health care, quality of life, etc. And if we consider other options on which we could be spending that money, the bailout makes a lot less sense.

The first thing we have to acknowledge is that $700 billion is a ton of money. As in it would automatically be the largest line item in the 2008-9 budget. It's more than we spent last year on Social Security ($608 billion), Medicare ($386 billion), or Defense ($481 billion). The bailout would cost about 65% of our total discretionary budget last year.

$700 billion will increase our national debt by 7 percent at the drop of a hat.

It's amazing how quickly consensus arrives when a financial crisis emerges. What could we do with $700 billion instead? Simple arithmetic tells us that every man, woman, and child could get a tax cut of $2,300 (if we limited it to taxpayers only it would rise to almost $4,000). If we wanted to be a little more selective, we could pick and choose from any number of good ideas that pump a ton of money into needed areas. We could try to actually solve some root problems too, either by addressing the housing issue head-on or using incentive programs to increase the savings rate. Anything progressive instead of reactive. I can't quickly retrieve the figures for repairing all our bridges and roads, cleaning up our waterways, or investing in alternative fuels, but here in the ed world, a $700 billion investment in the nation's human capital would go a long way. Heck, implement all the proposals of this week's College Board Rethinking Student Aid report for the bargain basement price of $60 billion. Or start with Education Sector's Eight Education Ideas for 2008 for a total cost of about $18 billion.

The point is there are a lot of good ways to invest $700 billion in the United States. Spending it all to rescue bad mortgages seems like one of the worst.

Students on a Balance Sheet

Inside Higher Ed reports today about Spelman College's new financial aid initiative intended to ensure students make it to graduation. Says Spelman's Vice President for Development:

The worst thing from our perspective would be to have a student who’s a senior, who may have upwards of $60,000 in loans, not be able to graduate.

Indeed. Students don't get partial credit for completing half of a college degree. It's all or nothing, and it's much more difficult to find a job that will allow you to repay tens of thousands of dollars in student loans if you don't have a diploma in hand. But you don't hear much about the relationship between student loan defaults and the United States' low college graduation rates - less than two-thirds of students overall graduate in six-years, and less than half of minority students graduate on time. The ten-year default rate for students with high debt loads who received a four year college degree is 20 percent. For students who don't get a degree, that number is certainly much higher.

Spelman provides a great example to other colleges interested in raising graduation rates and reducing student loan defaults. And colleges can start by reallocating some of the financial aid that is currently going to recruit wealthy students and use it to ensure that students don't just have access to a four-year degree, but actually attain it.

Over at Higher Ed Watch, Stephen Burd writes another good post on why we shouldn't be bailing out student loan companies, and says "These defaults are not just numbers on a balance sheet, they're students." So true.

Music Woo

Heading out of town to Austin City Limits, back with full report next week, policy team will be providing expert commentary and/or bitter sarcasm in the meantime.

Why Didn't I Think of That

Once upon a time, all the way back in the early 1980s, Congress passed a law that guaranteed lenders a minimum return of 9.5% on student loans. The financial world was very different back then--the prime rate was almost 19% in 1981--and the student loan industry wasn't as robust. But as time went on interest rates dropped into the mid-single digits, more and more students borrowed, and the guarantee wasn't needed anymore. By 1993 the prime rate was down to 6% and the 9.5% program had become a big hole in the public treasury that lenders could stand beneath and lap up leaking money at the taxpayer's expense. So Congress passed another law to shut the loophole down.

Lenders responded by making money honestly devising a series of dodges and gambits to keep the pipeline open, such as taking money made from old loans made under the 9.5% program, sprinkling magic fairy dust on it, and then "recycling" it back into the same old accounts, where it was then re-lent as a new loan but claimed as an old loan that received the 9.5% guarantee. This went on for more than a decade, at what was until recently assumed to be a cost to taxpayers ranging in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Finally, under political pressure, the Bush Administration shut the program down, making the lenders pay back all the money they took allowing the lenders to keep all the money they took as long as they promised not to take any more. For more on this, see the always-valuable Stephen Burd at Higher Ed Watch.

Now comes word that the taxpayers weren't actually ripped off to the tune of over $500 million. No, the real price tag will be closer to $1.2 billion, and while such numbers might seem quaint given today's headlines, call me old-fashioned but that still seems like a lot of money. But apparently I just don't understand the right way to think about this. Contacted by Paul Basken, a reporter from the Chronicle of Higher Education, one lender explained($):

Loan agencies "across the nation have moved forward beyond the 9.5 loan issue," said Patricia Beard, chief executive of the South Texas Higher Education Authority. Anyone concerned about the welfare of student borrowers should instead devote "attention to something that matters to the nation," such as the overall downturn in capital markets, she said.

According to the Chronicle, the South Texas Higher Education Authority "was found to have claimed 93 times the amount of loans now considered eligible for the 9.5 percent program." But never mind, because they have "moved forward beyond" all of that messy business. Why be stuck in the past? I'm going to remember this when prosecutors coming knocking on my door after discovering my scheme to defraud taxpayers out of huge sums of money. Come on, fellas--I've moved forward! Or maybe I'll try this out at home with my wife. Yes, it's technically true that I failed to put the garbage out for three consecutive weeks, resulting in a huge colony of rats establishing permanent legal residence in our back yard. But why dwell on past mistakes? I've moved forward, sweetheart--why can't you?

And where, exactly, would the lenders like to move forward to? To finding new ways to grab loads of taxpayer money, naturally--as Basken reports today, lenders are angling for a piece of the $700 billion bailout pie. Perhaps the plan is to make the cost of the 9.5% scam pale in comparison.

Unigo

The U.S. News & World Report college rankings will be irrelevant in three years and dead in ten. They will not be killed by outright competitors like the Princeton Review, the Fiske Guide to Colleges, or even the recent Forbes magazine rankings utilizing Ratemyprofessor.com. They'll be slayed by a 20-something named Jordan Goldman.

Goldman is not bringing us another set of rankings using mathematical formulas, no matter how related they are to student outcomes. Goldman's site is based solely on real student impressions. They're not politically correct, and colleges will not be happy with what they say.

Goldman's design is essentially a Facebook/ MySpace Website devoted solely to students picking colleges. There are no rankings, only reactions, essays, photos, and videos taken by alumni and current students, all unpaid interns so far, collected and put online by Goldman's staff. Goldman's site, Unigo, is free and will run off advertising revenue. It's no coincidence that some of the most successful start-up companies in the last five years have followed this model (see Google, Facebook, MySpace, etc.). People don't like to pay for content they can get for free, and in a world where Internet users can find anything in a moment, they are not going to pay for college reviews published in magazines or books anymore when they can get better, more relevant, content online.

Unigo asks real students their perspective on their school in open-ended essay formats. Unlike other mediums, where space is at a premium, Unigo publishes everything. They offer their own condensed version too, but links allow readers to find the full piece. They're often breathtakingly honest in a way that will surely both draw in readers and give heart attacks to university administrators. Consider snippets culled from reviews of Louisiana State University ("We can drink any college under the table and do it with some class and hospitality."), Cornell ("I tend not to blame the suicides on the school. As for blaming suicides on the weather: if you're that cold, then buy a jacket, for God's sake. It's much less messy, and you don't even have to write a note first."), or Quinnipiac University (approvingly called "a white school").

While college administrators attempt to fight off magazine rankings on one hand and state and federal government officials with the other, they've launched voluntary systems of accountability. Those efforts have yet to offer much in the way of new information, and they'll be blindsided by the power of student-driven content organized on the Web. Unigo offered 267 colleges and universities a two-week preview of the site, but most denied. At Davidson College in North Carolina, vice president of admissions Christopher Gruber summarily dismissed Goldman's creation, saying,

I've got to be honest with you, I'm not spending a ton of my time navigating those student-driven sites. It's too much to manage. My sense is that the traditional big players, like Princeton Review, are the major sources for online information too, in part because those are the names that parents still recognize. Those are the names that are going to have greater panache, and so those are probably the ones that will be turned to. The ones that we supply information to are the ones that we spend the most time on, filling out surveys for them to make sure that that information is accurate.

Gruber, of course, doesn't realize that students drive higher education decisions. And as Sunday's Times notes, he is clearly oblivious to the fact that 230 current Davidson students—one eighth of its student body—have already posted reviews, photos, and videos to a site that has barely even launched.

Besides those participation numbers, what will really drive this site is the thirst for more relevant information. Students see hundreds of college-produced guidebooks of diverse students sitting on a lawn, presumably solving the AIDS epidemic, or sterile photos of students in a lab, with a professor over their shoulder that just screams, "Come to our school! Our faculty are great!" In reality, every college has some sort of lawn, some sort of diversity, and some claim to faculty greatness. But there are no numbers to support those claims, nothing to show somehow that their lawn is greener, their diversity is more relevant, or their faculty are actually better teachers. Real student observations will trump these Potemkin catalogs with ease.

The paper version of the Times piece drives the point home best. On the page opposite the article was an advertisement for the University of Richmond. We see a large image of a woman looking resolutely into the distance and three smaller pictures of, respectively, a woman in a science lab with a test tube, a professor looking over a student's shoulder, and their main campus quad. It's paired with the following text:

A curious mind thrives at Richmond. Faculty who inspire. Students who challenge. Incredible facilities. The latest technology. More opportunities than you can imagine. And generous financial aid resources to help make it affordable. Recognized as one of America's premier liberal arts universities, we offer an intimate environment where students explore a wide variety of academic possibilities. Our small classes encourage intellectual debate, close interaction with professors and hands-on research. Satisfy your curiosity at Richmond.

What does that even mean? What college would not say those things about itself? Unigo already has 89 reviews, 40 photos, and six videos, all written, taken, or produced by students currently at the University of Richmond. Some of the students are happy with their choice of school; others are not. One describes the student body as, "shallow, self-centered, competitive, rich preppy students whose main concerns are themselves, their money, the way others perceive them, and oh yea.. themselves." while another says the worst thing about the school is the "racial problems."

Unigo still has some bugs to be worked out. I've been checking it every day this week, and some of the links have failed and the videos refused to load. But it's gotten better each day, and a site with such unfiltered information, from real, current students, is certainly worth watching.

Ugh

In a Reykjavik-level summit of "people who irritate me," Deborah Solomon interviewed Charles Murray in the New York Times Magazine college issue over the weekend, producing this priceless exchange:

What do you propose that 18-year-olds do instead of trying to learn the difference between macro- and microeconomics? Oh, the world of work out there!

I’m sure you’re aware that unemployment is very high right now. There are very few unemployed first-rate electricians. I can get a good doctor in a minute and a half. Getting a really good electrician — that’s hard. If you want jobs that are in high demand, go to any kind of skilled labor. And by labor, I mean things that pay $30 or $40 an hour.

So here in a few sentences we have Solomon's typical haughty know-nothingness--unemployment is "very high?" True, except when compared to most of our industrialized competitors, most of the last four decades, and any objective definition of the words "very high"--combined with Murray's remarkably cloistered elitism. To heck with college--just join the wonderful world of work (I believe this is a ride at Epcot Center) and you too will be able to "get a good doctor in a minute and a half..." 

Avoiding the Elephant

Doug Lederman reports on a recent conclave of higher education leaders opposed to new government oversight:

Even as other speakers agreed that the temptation to increase direct federal oversight of accreditation and higher education was ill-conceived, they were more accepting of the notion that colleges have brought much of the criticism behind that temptation on themselves, and that much of the scrutiny was deserved.

In other words: While our critics are right that we're underperforming, we reject their proposed solutions, even though we have no credible solutions of our own, and our objections are rooted in a general aversion to oversight as opposed to a specific analysis of the problem and how it might be solved. 

Good luck with that. 

The College Debt Delusion

Per Chad's post from last week about the way the U.S. Department of Education seems to be going out of its way to explain away the recent rise in student loan default rates as a hurricane-driven, one-time-only, move-along-nothing-to-see-here phenomenon, and Erin's earlier analysis showing that the most commonly-used default measures badly understate the true extent of the problem, it's worth wondering what exactly, motivates this tendency to talk down the reality of loan default. And I think the answer is pretty obvious: college prices have been increasing steeply for a long time, nobody knows what the heck to do about it, and so people want to believe that default rates are low because that's the only way to sleep at night. 

To review: From 1988 to 2008, average tuition and fees at public universities more than doubled in real dollars. Median family income and spending on student financial aid did not rise as fast--not even close. And so a greater percentage of students had to borrow greater amounts of money to make up the difference. According to the College Board, 26% of student attending public four-year universities borrowed in 1993. By 2004, that number was up to 47%, at the same time that the average real-dollar amount borrowed grew by 36%. When the latest numbers are released soon, I expect they'll be even larger. In just the last eight years, total annual combined public and private student loan volume increased from $42.5 billion to $78 billion in constant dollars. 

These numbers are troubling for all kinds of reasons and there's no end in sight. Colleges and universities have a tremendous amount of leverage in setting prices; they're heavily subsidized by the public, protected from traditional competitors by high costs of entry and from non-traditional competitors by high regulatory hurdles, and in the business of selling a must-have, globally coveted product whose value continues to grow. There are ways to break the pattern of constant price escalation, which I'll explore at greater length in a magazine article next month, but in the short-to-mid-term it's a safe bet that the student debt problem will be with us for some time and will only become more acute.

But as long as students pay that debt back, universities and lawmakers can tell themselves that it all worked out in the end. Sure, it was expensive, and sure it was burden to repay. But it was all worth it, right? The students got a valuable degree, everyone got paid--what's the problem, really? 

Never mind for a moment the interests of efficiency and equity for low- and middle-income families. Never mind that it's perfectly possible to borrow way too much money and still pay it back. The illusion of minimal student loan default rates is just that, a mirage and a veil, one behind which the reality of financially overwhelmed students is becoming more obvious by the year. But people don't want to know that, because then their failure to solve the higher education cost spiral--and in some cases their complicity in sustaining it--would itself become a much heavier burden to bear. 

Hollywood vs. Higher Ed

While I'm happy that the entertainment industry is producing fine shows like Mad Men, it's also engaged in some really scary and reprehensible lobbying with respect to higher education, basically trying to force colleges to create an infrastructure for electronic spying and eavesdropping in a futile attempt to shore up an archaic business model for a few more years. To read more about why this is such a terrible idea, and how academic freedom is being sacrificed in the name of a larger battle between those who sell intellectual property and those who sell the means of its transmission, read my new column in today's Inside Higher Ed. 

Mad Men

While of course it's an outrage that The Wire was once again snubbed by the Emmy awards, it's worth noting that the winner for best dramatic series, Mad Men, is a very good show. I watched season one on demand in August, catching up before the beginning of season two, an activity that was probably so typical for someone of my age, race, class, occupation, marital status, etc., that there is doubtless a Web site or two out there cackling with glee over its ability to predict the television watching habits and other cultural predispositions of people like me with near-total accuracy. Whatever; Mad Men is really great, for several reasons. There are the things you'd except: writing, direction, acting. It also has the really interesting milieu of Madison Avenue in the early 1960s, with the nation on the verge of becoming something different and all the men drinking Scotch in the middle of the day while wearing exceptionally nice suits. I read somewhere that the setting in a movie is a lead character unto itself, and that's especially true here.

But the thing that really elevates Mad Men is the way the plot dynamics and character development synchronize in such interesting ways. The twin themes of the show are the particular nature of American self-definition and the politics of gender. And in both cases those things drive the narrative and the characters simultaneously. Don Draper, the protagonist, is the creative director of a mid-sized but quite successful advertising agency. His particular talent is understanding the hidden hopes, urges and anxieties of the American buying public, and how to tap into that collective psyche in ways that sell things. Draper knows that in the prosperous consumer society American had become, people don't buy things for what those things are. People buy things for how things for how those things make them feel--and in America, more so perhaps than anywhere else, you are what you feel you are, what you decide you are. At the same time (spoiler alert) we learn throughout the course of the season that Draper himself is an extreme example of self-creation. "My life goes in only one direction: forward," he tells someone who wants to drag him back to the past he left behind. Draper understands that future-facing urge for the new so acutely because he lives it every day. It's his great talent, but it also threatens to pull him apart. 

Similarly, Mad Men positively wallows in the unreconstructed sexism of the time, when all the women were "girls" and wives were expected to fool themselves while their husbands wander. On the surface the plot-lines are standard issue: romance, infidelity, etc. But that's just an excuse to explore more interesting territory, as the characters seem to sense, nervously, that the ground of gender relations is starting to shift beneath them. And again this is personified in the characters: Don's wife Betty, who has the perfect life she always wanted and can't figure out what's missing, office manager Joan, who revels in the power of her attractiveness but also senses the tragedy of its limitations, and most of all Peggy, the aspiring copywriter, Don Draper's doppleganger in her desire to will her way to a different destiny but with all the massive differences that being young, single, working class and female bring. 

It all comes together beautifully in the final episode of the first season, where Draper is pitching an advertising campaign to Kodak, which wants to sell a funny looking plastic wheel in which people store and display photo slides. Using slides of his own family, thinking of the ways he both loves and betrays them, Draper talks about the enduring power of nostalgia, of a longing for an earlier, simpler time. "It's not called the wheel," he says. "It's called the carousel." It's an absolutely devastating scene, all the more so when Draper rushes home to his perfect home and family only to find it...empty. Mad Men is an emotionally brutal program, as pitch-dark in its own way as The Wire or Battlestar Galactica in its honesty about the human condition. Not the greatest show in television history, of course, but that's over now, and Mad Men is certainly worth your time. 

Peace, I Hope

It's been a little hard to stay focused on education for the last week, what with the sense that outside our small office overlooking Connecticut Avenue, history is unfolding by the minute, hour and day. And because I've been somewhat obsessively reading the many moving tributes to and reflections on David Foster Wallace, who died last week, far too young. Over the past year I've consumed virtually every piece of non-fiction he wrote, and in doing so I was awestruck at his insight and mastery of prose. There was also, regardless of topic, a humility and essential human decency in the personality behind the writing that was chastening in a way; he challenged you with the example of his generosity of spirit and discipline of mind. He was also ruthlessly honest and self-critical, so with that in mind I'll simply note that there are times when I meet someone smarter than I or read someone who is a more talented and skilled writer, and I can't avoid pangs of jealousy and self-doubt, yet Wallace was one of those people who was so much smarter and so much more talented and accomplished that such small feelings seemed foolish, and I was just grateful that he chose to share his ideas and work, too briefly, with the world.

Plus, he was all about the greatness of The Wire. Peace, DFW.

Choices

There was a time, lasting about two months, between when I finished grad school and when I landed my first real job. The logistics got to be a little dicey toward the end; my lease was expiring at the end of the summer, the potential new job was in a different city, my girlfriend had just moved to a different different city, and the uncertainty and stress of it all started to get me down. I complained about this to my thesis advisor, a smart, tough woman who had held a variety of important jobs in and out of Ohio government. She told me--in a nice enough way but with the clear implication that I had a lot yet to learn--that I was being stupid. "Stress isn't not knowing what you're going to do with your life," she said. "Stress is knowing exactly what you're going to do, and that you can't do anything else." 

I thought of her while reading Roger Cohen's column last week (see also Ezra Klein here), in which he noted that one of the beneficial effects of the current vast financial meltdown is that perhaps fewer Ivy League graduates will be going directly into the lucrative investment banking industry. (Indeed this is now pretty much assured given that as of today there are no more investment banks to speak of. Times change, don't they?) But it still begs the question as to why so many students, given the rare and phenomenally valuable opportunity to do whatever they want with their life, tend to do not only the same narrow thing, but a thing that involves sacrificing vast amounts of their youth to a very difficult, not particularly enjoyable, and socially worthless job, all in the pursuit of money that they won't have time to enjoy?

I suspect the answer has a lot do with what some people call the paradox of choice. If you're on the Ivy League track, then up until the day you graduate you know exactly what you're supposed to do: work hard and grab a medallion from the small number of colleges and universities that are universally regarded as the very best. You can do this with no fear that you're making the wrong decision. No one will say "Harvard? Why?" 

But once you finish, your path is much less clear. Indeed, the whole point of getting the medallion, in theory, is to have as many choices--and thus as un-clear a path--as possible. If you've never been in that situation before, and you don't have the wisdom of hindsight, this is a new and stressful circumstance. And so I suspect many students choose a path based less on what they actually want to do with their lives and more as a way of finding something that's the equivalent of the path they've already taken: safe, reliable, accepted and validated among peers and society at large. My undergraduate institution didn't have a direct line into Goldman Sachs, so for us the default was "law school." I'm pretty sure at least half the people taking the LSAT that year did so not out of any particular interest in the law but because it was a good answer to the constant question of "What are you going to do when you graduate?" As a result, a lot of time and money was wasted amassing legal knowledge that ulimately went unused--or didn't, but confined people's lives and careers in ways they would later come to regret. 

Which makes me think that the best career advice colleges could give their students is not how to start a career but how to think about a career. (That's what a liberal education is for, isn't it? Not what to think, but how?) I, for example, didn't set out to become a policy analyst / manager / columnist / blogger / occasional journalist. Instead, I learned enough in grad school to get a job, where I had some success and learned some new things. Those new things led to another job, where I had some more success and learned some more new things, and so on, and so forth. That's how a lot of careers work these days. You can't map out that path ahead of time. All you can do is put yourself in a position to have success, learn new things, and hopefully make smart choices along the way. 

And while that kind of uncertainty can be daunting at the beginning, there are no students more well-equipped to be successful, and no nation or time in which more opportunities for success are available, than those Ivy League students finishing college in this day and this place. If the present Wall Street Chernobyl causes a few more such students to wander in different directions for a while, we'll all be better for it in the end. 

Pay Up

One of the headlines from last week's Aspen-sponsored, Gates-funded education summit in Washington was the widespread assumption among the several hundred reform movers and shakers gathered at the Mayflower Hotel that it would be a good thing to move from the patchwork of 50 different state standards that we have under NCLB to more common standards, such as voluntary national standards.

But moving in that direction raises the question of whether there's any guarantee that the forces that have produced mostly low state standards under NCLB wouldn't exert the same downward pressure on national standards.

I put the question to two people who have a lot of experience with accountability: Sandy Kress, who was the Bush administration’s point person on NCLB during the law's drafting, and Michael Barber, who build a new accountability system in the UK for the Blair government. Both believe that the solution involves paying states to do the right thing. Establish rigorous standards, they suggest, and then offer states significant financial incentives to adopt them and reward schools for reaching them.

In contrast, NCLB requires states to set their own standards and take action against schools that don’t meet the standards—a system that incentives states to set the bar low.

The consensus seems to be that imposing rigorous standards on states won't fly politically, that states will have to come to the party of their own volution. That's fine. Then the McCain or Obama administrations need to work on getting the incentives right. We need higher standards than NCLB has produced.