A Good Deal.

Via the PEN NewsBlast, the Chicago Tribune reports on efforts in Chicago to introduce a residential school in the district. Having recently toured the SEED school in D.C., I’m encouraged to hear that the idea of a residential public school is spreading. Though, as the article points out, the price tag is a big deterrent—the SEED school’s planned Maryland school will apparently have a price tag of $34,000 per student.

But considering that the annual cost of incarcerating a juvenile offender in Illinois tops $70,000—not to mention the economic benefits of having well-educated, productive citizens—that starts to seem like a pretty good deal.

Long Before NCLB...

With so much attention paid to the future of NCLB--when will it be reauthorized and what will it look like--today's event was a great opportunity to look back at what got us to this point. Chris Cross, Sam Halperin, Kati Haycock, and Jack Jennings led us through the history of the law and what it means for today's debates. It's important stuff. If you missed it, listen here.

Smoldering

In the announcement heard 'round the edu-blogosphere today (but on the back page of the Washington Post), Secretary Spellings invited states to apply to be one of 10 which will be granted more flexibility under NCLB. The selected states will be allowed to differentiate consequences for schools that are failing to reach NCLB goals on multiple measures and those that aren't hitting them on just a few. Or, in Secretary Spellings' words, states will be able to distinguish between "on-fire schools and those with a smolder."

Hopefully this change will bring about some good innovation and thinking in the pilot states, and help guide national policy on how to address the needs of the schools in the most trouble, without forgetting that those schools in which one or two groups of students aren't reaching proficiency still need assistance and accountability for improvement.

This article in Monday's Washington Post highlights the continued need for attention on within-school achievement gaps. The article cites the credit many, particularly disabilities rights advocates, give to the law for finally bringing attention to the needs--and perhaps most importantly, the learning potential--of students with disabilities.

Secretary Spellings' added NCLB flexibility should allow a more reasonable, targeted approach to school reform, which is certainly a positive development. But this change should not allow some 'smoldering' schools to get by without any attention to implementing the reforms needed to also put out the smaller fires.

March Madness Round Two

Yesterday, we declared Stanford the winner of the ES graduation rate tournament. Today, we look at who comes out on top looking at the difference between the institution's overall graduation rate and their basketball team's grad rate--the one with the smallest difference wins.


--Thanks again to Abdul Kargbo, Sumner Handy and Kevin Carey.

Potholes

Last month, we published a Chart You Can Trust showing that, when it comes to getting into college, it's still better to be a mediocre student with a high-income family, than it is to be a high scoring, low-income student.

The Consortium on Chicago School Research just released a report looking at why this might be the case. This second report in a series on what determines students' success in getting to college looked at the college search and application process and where students "encounter potholes on the road to college". The results speak to the importance of having a strong college-going culture in schools and having adults that can help students navigate the complex application and financial aid process--results that are relevant far beyond Chicago schools.

The chart below shows the pathway to (or away from) college for the sample of students CCSR followed. Definitely some potholes along the way. To find out more and read through all of the results, click here.

Haters vs. Critics

One of the more difficult things about adopting a left-leaning but essentially reformist stance on K-12 education is that you end up arguing with teachers unions a lot, not because you're anti-union, but because teachers unions are the most influential and vocal representatives of the existing education establishment that you're trying to reform. There's a world of difference between criticizing the policy positions that teachers unions adopt and hating the idea of unions generally. I think The Quick and the Ed can be fairly described as having a healthy amount of the former and absolutely none of the latter.

Even so, I'm regularly challenged to pre- or re-establish my pro-labor credentials as the price of questioning the wisdom of some standard union position or NEA talking point. It's tedious, particularly for someone who spent his whole career before coming to Ed Sector working for Democratic politicians and non-profits that advocate for low-income children. But then people like these idiots come along with their "Ten Worst Union Protected Teachers" contests and other sundry insulting tactics, ensuring that my tedium will continue into the foreseeable future.

Reasonable people understand the distinction (although with too many caveats, c'mon); people who are pretty much just as unhinged as their critics don't. As AFTie John notes, the vlog in question hilariously blames teachers unions for promoting standardized tests and accountability, which is kind of like complaining about the AARP's nefarious plan to privatize Social Security.

The Big Dance with an ES Twist

Following on last year's successful NCAA graduation rates bracket (well, not successful if you used it in your office pool), we've taken a look at how this year's teams would fare at the big dance if winners were based on the team's graduation rate. As usual, expect plenty of upsets (click on the image to see the full bracket).


For another measure of school success, check out Inside Higher Ed's NCAA bracket here. And stay tuned for a bonus round tomorrow.

--Posted with substantial help from Abdul Kargbo, Sumner Handy, & Kevin Carey

Life After Sallie

There have been numerous news reports of the “tightening” credit markets and their potential impact on student loan availability. The majority of federal student loans are made through private banks and if these banks can’t find investors to buy their loans, they don’t have money to make new loans—hence, a problem with student loan availability (to be clear, there is currently no problem with federal student loan availability). This problem isn’t actually new to student lending and the federal government solved it almost forty years ago.

When the federal student loan program first began in 1965, it faced the same “tight” credit market—not because of turmoil in global credit markets, but because banks were having a hard time finding investors who wanted to buy risky student loans. To solve this problem, the federal government created Sallie Mae.

For over 30 years, Sallie Mae provided a needed secondary market for student lending. But then things changed. Growing profits from student loans and a greater willingness among investors to buy student loan debt, combined with pressure from Republican lawmakers, resulted in Sallie Mae separating from the federal government. Sallie Mae fully ended its secondary market operations—and its relationship with the federal government—in 2004. Sallie Mae then proceeded to expand and become the biggest seller of student loan securities—the precise market that is seeing such trouble right now.

Privatizing Sallie Mae left the federal student loan program without any direct access to treasury funds and completely reliant on private credit markets. In the 1998 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, Congress established the ‘lender of last resort’ program to provide assurance that students would have access to loans, even if there were no banks to provide them. The program authorizes guarantee agencies, non-profit entities that help administer the federal loan program, to step in and make the necessary loans, and gives them access to treasury funds. (The legislation also specifically requires Sallie Mae to act as a lender of last resort, as part of its repayment for receiving governmental benefits for the first 30 years of its life.)

This program has never been used. And as Secretary Spelling’s comments at Friday’s hearing before the House Committee made clear, we’re not really sure how effectively the lender of last resort program will operate—the ability of guarantee agencies to administer the program, whether electronic processing of loans is possible, and whether the federal treasury can make the needed funds available. Fortunately, we also have the Federal Direct Loan program, which enables the federal government to loan directly to students and to access treasury funds as needed.

The privatization in federal student lending has certainly led to some improvements, making it easier for students to get loan funds, improved loan servicing, and lower costs for many students. But what the past year has made clear is that the federal student loan program, just as it did back in 1965, needs direct involvement from the federal government. A loan program that receives the benefits of the federal government (a guarantee on defaults, low interest rates to students) but without the necessary oversight from the Department of Education and without readily available treasury funds, is much too vulnerable to the risky and sometimes unscrupulous behavior in the private market.

Noted Without Comment (Okay, Some)

In complaining about the recent firing of 98 employees from the DCPS central office, which will save the taxpayers some $6 million per year and increase the school system's phenomenally low student-to-bureaucrat ratio from a pre-firing level of less than 50-to-1, City Councilman Harry Thomas, who voted against giving Chancellor Rhee the authority to lay off DCPS civil servants, questioned whether the employees who were let go are "the people who really affect educational outcomes."

Right... 

Obama on Education

In the New Republic, Josh Patashnik tries to find meaning in the evolution of Senator Obama's views, positions, and public statements on education policy. It's a smart, well-written piece that does a good job of summing up the politics and reform dynamics currently at play. But in the end I don't think the evidence lends itself to any definitive conclusions about Obama's instincts as a heterodox reformer generally, or what an Obama presidency will mean for education. Nor do I think Senator Clinton is quite as in the tank to anti-reform and labor interests as the article implies.

For example, after losing Iowa, Senator Clinton said "We will end the unfunded mandate known as No Child Left Behind." There two ways to do that: 1) End the mandate, or 2) End the undfundedness. When Obama won Wisconsin a few weeks ago, he said "I don't want our standards measured just by a single high-stakes standardized test, because I don't want our teachers teaching to the tests." Again, this could be accomplished by 1) Not holding schools accountable for the results of a single test, or 2) Holding schools accountable for the results of multiple tests, or a single test plus other measures.

In both cases, the ambiguity is not accidental. Clinton and Obama are using words that appeal to widespread dissatisfaction with NCLB among Democractic primary voters--"unfunded mandate," "single high-stakes standardized" etc.--without actually promising to unequivocally dismantle the law. It's not like such a position isn't available. Bill Richardson simply pledged to "Scrap No Child Left Behind." Dennis Kucinich said "My election will mean the end of No Child Left Behind as a way of achieving the education of our children."

There's simply no way that a Democrat in the middle of the tightest primary fight in decades is going to wade into the swamp of school reform politics at this point. But that doesn't mean they can't, or won't, once elected. Patashnik quotes Fordham's Mike Petrilli saying "The old rule in politics is that, if you want to get something done, you need to campaign on it." Haven't the radical policies of the current adminstration definitively refuted that notion?

Grover Norquist is Right

So I'm sitting at home last night catching up on Tivoed episodes of The Daily Show, and come upon Tuesday night's interview with uber government-hater Grover Norquist, who was flogging his new book. He tried to be funny--a fatal mistake when you're a guest on a comedy show--and then offered a bunch of lame generalities about how government steals our liberty etc. etc. blah blah. His one example of bad government: The DC Public Schools.

And here's the thing: Grover Norquist is wrong, spectacularly so, about a great many things. If there was a modern Mt. Rushmore of wrongness, his bearded, roundish mug would be on it. He's a living example of how, if you push your wrong ideas with sufficient zeal and bad faith, one man can make the world a worse place for all of us. He also knows nothing about education--he thinks we should "simply" voucherize the schools, and in denouncing government monopolies, he says that DC has only one system of public education, when in fact 30 percent of all public school students in DC, where he lives, are enrolled in an alternate system of public charter schools.

BUT--he's entirely correct to say that the DC Public Schools spend a great deal of money, $14,000 per student, and don't spend it well. If you take a close look at the system, you'll find that every Norquistian cliche about incompetence, bureaucracy, and wasted resources is more or less true. He's not exaggerating. Which just goes to show that low-performing schools are not just a waste of money and a profound moral failure given the high stakes for disadvantaged children. They also undermine public education generally, indeed they undermine public everything generally.

This seems like a pretty reliable test: if Norquist is right, something is really, really wrong. All the more reason to hope that Mayor Fenty and Chanchellor Rhee's efforts to finally turn the DC schools around bear fruit.

Learning Communities

Kingsborough Community College is a typical two-year institution of higher education, in the sense that it enrolls a lot of students (nearly 15,000), most of whom are eligible for need-based financial aid, it's mission of helping first-generation and working students is tremendously important, and unless you happen to live nearby (Brooklyn, in this case), you've probably never heard of it before.

According to a new report from MDRC, Kingsborough is also doing some interesting work to improve the quality of education it provides. Researchers randomly assigned 1,500 students to either regular classes or "learning communities," in which students are assembled in small groups (25 in this case) and take a sequence of multiple courses together. The idea is that students greatly benefit from having academic relationships with other students, which often doesn't happen when you commute to school, sit in class, and then leave for your job or family. The study found that the students in the learning communities were more engaged, were more likely to pass developmental English courses, and more likely to earn credits and pass courses in general. The positive effects faded, however, when they went back to the normal regime. Two- and four-year colleges have been experimenting with learning communities for a number of years and the results have generally been positive, but I'm not sure there's been any evidence this definitive and grounded in randomized assignment design.

It's also worth noting that one hardly ever hears news of such education-focused research or results coming from selective four-year institutions, because--unlike community colleges--they have other, apparently more important things on their minds.

Sharia-Compliant Student Loans

Let me start off by saying that I know very little about Sharia (Islamic religious law) and how it applies to lending, except pretty much what I heard on this NPR Marketplace segment. But a concept in Sharia-compliant lending caught my attention, a concept that could be usefully applied to the student loan market: equitable risk.

From the Wikipedia entry on Islamic banking, the idea is described like this:

Mudaraba is venture capital funding of an entrepreneur who provides labor while financing is provided by the bank so that both profit and risk are shared. Such participatory arrangements between capital and labor reflect the Islamic view that the borrower must not bear all the risk/cost of a failure, resulting in a balanced distribution of income and not allowing the lender to monopolize the economy.

Or, as described in the Marketplace segment,

Islamic finance, the essence is not geared towards debt. It is more geared towards equity, partnership…So the future, we could see Sharia student loans that work like venture capital. The lender would get a cut of the student's future earnings. If the student does well, the bank does well. Equitable risk.

Currently, there is no risk to the bank unless a student fails completely in paying back their loan—until the student defaults. And even then, the student cannot discharge his debt in bankruptcy. There is no middle ground; either the student does well enough to pay the loan back, or the student fails and defaults on his loan.

And there is one party that is almost entirely absolved of risk in this situation—the institution. Currently, the price for an education is disconnected from its actual value in the marketplace. A college that does a good job of graduating students and placing them in jobs can easily cost the same or less than a college that fails to graduate a high percentage of students or has a low job placement rate. But those factors are not calculated into how much debt students take on for their education, leaving the student with nearly all the risk for the loan, and the lender and institution with little to no risk.

Say a private college graduates a student with $80,000 in loans and a declared major in journalism. The student will struggle to pay off the loan and pursue a career in journalism, but these struggles are no skin off the institution’s back—the institution has the money, even if the value of the degree wasn’t worth the debt load. But under a system of equitable risk, the debt available for the degree would be more closely pegged to the actual earnings of the student after graduation, potentially leading to a more rational pricing system.

Clearly, a national system like this would have big problems—institutions that did a good job of graduating journalism majors, even if the students were successful, would have less debt available to their students because of the lower salaries in that career path. This could hurt institutions whose primary mission is to graduate students into lower paying, public service careers—some form of government-financed debt and risk-sharing would still be critical to ensuring that students can get loan money to finance their education.

While an entirely Sharia-compliant system is unlikely to work in the U.S. student lending system, some of these concepts could help bring rationality to the current tuition-pricing system, and also ensure that student lending sticks its original purpose of helping students, not making big profits for banks or institutions.

The Wire Finale

In which everything comes full circle, and Baltimore remains the same. 

Summary: Dukie becomes Bubbles, while Bubbles comes up from the depths into--and onto--the Sun. Michael becomes Omar, while Omar passes into myth. Carver becomes Daniels and/or Bunny, while Daniels decides he can't be part of the lie that destroyed the job.  Sydnor becomes Lester, while Lester retires to a happy life making miniature furniture and a family with Shardene, the stripper from Season One. Chris becomes Wee-Bey, and the two of them of hang out at the prison fence reserved for guys who took all the weight. Marlo sells the crown and tries to become Stringer, only to find that he misses the taste of blood. Cheese sums up the nature of the Game and then gets got by Slim Charles, in the most deserved execution of the year. Carcetti becomes governor, and takes Rawls and Lester the jester along for the ride. Prez finally becomes Prez. Some stuff happens with the newspaper too, but that's not important right now. 

Others have noted that the first three seasons of The Wire function like a self-contained whole. In retrospect,  seasons four and five feel a little like the world's longest prequel, set in post-script continuity, telling the stories of how many of the major characters came to be. The finale lacked the emotional punch of episodes eight and nine, mostly because by the end all the major events had occurred and decisions made, leaving the last 90 minutes to square the circle and tie it in a bow. It was more optimistic than I had anticipated, having made his point about all the major forces corrupting Baltimore--the drug suppliers, lawyers, politicians, and media corporations all escape unscathed--David Simon seemed content to give viewers a measure of closure with the characters they'd come to know. For that--and much more--I say thanks. More tomorrow. 

Secretary Spellings and Dungeons and Dragons

Can't get enough bad NCLB puns? Check out Secretary Spellings on NPR's Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me. And apparently, while Karl Rove is a master of political strategy, he's not so good at asking someone out on a date...

Pollitt Sets Things Straight

Last Sunday wasn't a banner day for gender and journalism. The Times gave too much credence to the scientifically-unsupported single-sex theories of Leonard Sax, while the Post did one worse by publishing this monumentally inane opinion piece from professional anti-feminist Charlotte Allen, who argued, in all seriousness, that women are stupid, because their brains are small, and so they should stay home where they belong. Today the Post took a small step toward atonement by publishing a response from Katha Pollit, which you should read. An exerpt:

For Allen, it's definitely the woman: her brain is just too puny. She cannot mentally rotate three-dimensional objects in space -- and that, as we all know, is the very definition of smarts. Funny how that definition keeps changing, as women conquer field after field that was supposed to be beyond them. In the 19th century, physicians insisted women couldn't cope with college: studying would send rushing to their brains the blood that was needed for the womb. Back then, nobody credited women with the superior verbal abilities and memories Allen says scientists now find women to possess.

True to form, she dismisses these as minor talents that only helped her "coast" through school and life. But back when the experts were explaining why women couldn't be lawyers or professors or poets (at least not very good poets), nobody said verbal skills and memory were trivial; they only became trivial when women were found to excel at them. Now the sexists diss women as inferior mental-object-rotators. I have no idea whether this is true, and whether if so it's unchangeable, but you have to admit this is a very narrow scrap of turf on which to plant the flag of manly superiority.

I let my subscription to The Nation lapse a while back, but Pollitt's sharp perspective and clear writing were what I've missed most. Read the whole thing.

A Narrowed Point of View

Since it looks like NCLB isn't going to reauthorized until 2010 or so, we should probably all hunker down and prepare for a steady stream of stories like this one, about a Montgomery County elementary school that spent an entire morning focused on art in protest of the curriculum narrowing effects of the federal law. The story then pivots, as all such stories do, to recent studies from CEP:

Her sentiments echoed a report released last month by the Washington-based Center on Education Policy, which found that many elementary schools across the country have allotted more time to reading and math by cutting time for social studies, science, art and physical education. The issue of "curriculum narrowing" has become a key part of the debate over reauthorizing the 2002 federal law, which is designed to improve reading and math proficiency.

It's worth noting, first of all, that reporters routinely misinterpet the CEP data or present it in ways that aren't really accurate. Sometimes they just botch the numbers entirely; in other instances--like this one--they're vague to the point of being misleading. All we're told here is that "many" districts have cut a range of subjects, including art. But a quick look at the actual CEP report, which was released a few weeks ago, shows that the percent of districts that reduced time on art--the entire subject of this story--was 16%. The number is right there on Table 1, on the second page of an eight-page report. So either the reporter (or her editor) didn't bother to read it, or read it and chose not include the number in the story. Why? I imagine because it calls the story's premise into question; 16% doesn't feel so much like "many." The CEP reports, moreover, suggest that districts most likely to cut time in subjects like art to increase time for reading and math are chronically low-performing districts that are really under the NLCB gun--districts not like Montgomery County.

More broadly, this whole conversation about the impact of NCLB on curricula needs to get beyond the simple formulation of "Curricula narrowed; ergo NCLB bad." There are only so many hours in the school day. Priorities need to be set and choices must be made. The 16% of districts that cut art in favor of reading and math didn't necessarily make a bad choice, unless you think that all districts had, pre-NCLB, miraculously arrived at the precise optimal mix of subjects and time. Reducing time for art in order to ensure that elementary school student can read might be exactly the kind of hard decision those students need.

Update: AFTie John nods approvingly, saying:

If you're an NCLB lover, there's no use trying to contact the reporter She's too far gone. She writes that the morning of art focused attention on "a national reality: that art is often squeezed out of the curriculum by the academic rigors of the No Child Left Behind law."

This is just a matter of definition, then. If you think 16% is "often," then it's a fair piece. If not, it's not. John?

Update 2: John responds:

Well, a little extrapolating and back-of-the-envelope arithmetic suggests that 4 million students (16% of ~ 25 million public K-6 students) are missing more than 30 hours of art instruction per year. So, yes, Kevin, I think that's a lot of lost art instruction. But the art of defending NCLB against all comers is alive and well at Education Sector.

This is the "if you multiply some number times some other number times some other number times the entirety of the American public education system, the result is a non-trivial number" excuse, i.e. the last refuge of scoundrels. Again, those 30 hours of art and music instruction weren't poured down a rat hole somewhere. They weren't "lost," they were replaced by 30 hours of instruction in reading and math. The result, presumably, is students who are better able to read and do math but have less skill in and appreciation of art and music. Is that--as John seems to believe--obviously a bad thing?

Update 3: John juxtaposes the statement above about the last refuge etc. with the following from a paper that Education Sector published last year:

Taken in isolation, some of the provisions described above may seem inconsequential, amounting to 1 percent or less of school spending. But when the costs of these provisions are added together, they amount to a significant percentage of all school resources. As Table 9 shows, the eight provisions described above add up to almost 19 percent of all school spending. This amounts to roughly $77 gazillion* in school spending per year nationwide.

30 hours is about 2.7 percent of the roughly 1,100 hours of instruction schoolchildren get per year. That's for the 16 percent of districts made cuts in art and music (the percent that cut art is presumably less). So, once again, this is a matter of definition. If you think that four tenths of one percent (.027 X .16) is comparable to 19 percent then John's comparison is apt. If not, it's not. 

See also this thread at D-Ed Reckoning, whose commenter says:

As a musician and composer, I can say that trading some time teaching music for time teaching reading, assuming they're actually teaching reading, is a perfectly OK tradeoff. Why? Because one can't perform written sheet music without being able to read. One's decoding skills have to be good enough to recognize words from English, Italian, French, and German.I'm looking at a piece right now that has the following words on it, just on the first line: Trompete, Langsam, Con Sordino, crescendo, Senza Sordino. If I couldn't read those words, I wouldn't be able to play the music, even if I could perfectly execute the instructions encoded on the staff itself. Music and art are valuable for both the heart and mind, but reading and math are necessary for success in anything, including music and art.

Tough Questions about UDC

One of the Washington Post's best columnists doesn't publish on the op-ed page, but in the Business section: Steven Pearlstein. I've become a regular reader over the last few years, not just because he provides a lot of insightful, well-informed commentary on business and economic issues, but because he's written some really good pieces on higher education. A few months ago he wrote a pair of smart columns on the University of Maryland's recent efforts to become more efficient, and yesterday he took on a topic that doesn't get enough attention here in DC: The University of the District of Columbia, which he describes as:

...a poorly run institution that is driven more by political imperatives than economic ones and spends too much money doing the wrong things badly.To put it bluntly, the District doesn't need -- and probably can't support -- a quality land-grant university. Its population is too small and its tax base too narrow. Most of its public school graduates are unprepared to do college-level work. And the most pressing need of its businesses and its unemployed residents is for an effective teaching machine that can make up for the deficiencies of the public school system and train its residents for the tens of thousands of "middle skill" jobs offered by the regional economy. In other words, what the District needs is a community college.

This is true. UDC is a particularly glaring example of problem that, to varying degrees, crops up repeatedly in higher education. There is one established model for organizing a high-prestige institution of higher education. It's been in place since the late 19th century, when Harvard president Charles Eliot led the push to adopt the German research university model, and it involves hiring faculty who have been extensively trained as researchers and then organizing them into semi-autonomous departments defined by the major academic disciplines. As the nation has evolved over the last 120 years from giving only a small percentage of students a higher education to where we are today, with almost 70 percent of high school graduates going to directly to college, we've basically just stamped out copies of that model and built them in every major population center. The problem is that while that model works pretty well for the top students, it becomes progressively less effective as the mission of the university necessarily becomes more and more focused on providing more basic, vocational classes to students who didn't get a great high school education. And of course there are few cities providing a worse high school education than Washington, DC.

So when a city like DC decides, as it did some years ago, to invest in a public university, there's a natural inclination to want to build the "best," most prestigous institution it can, something that can be a source of civic pride, something that represents high aspirations for the community and its students. But what you end up with is a bad mismatch between organizational design and purpose, lots of wasted money, and students not getting the education they need.

Research for Richard Simmons

From USA Today: “Time spent in physical education does not detract from elementary school students' ability to excel in the classroom and may even help improve girls' academic performance, a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.”

Wait, I thought that boys were the ones that had to move around to learn, not girls. I’ll just leave that one for Sara Mead to ponder.

The CDC report does show that children, boys or girls, should move around during the day—no surprise to anyone who has been around a child. And “the study indicates that trimming physical education programs may not be the best way to raise test scores in schools.” In the article, this leads to a lot of bemoaning NCLB and the resulting curriculum narrowing. But I find this encouraging—schools can teach reading and math and keep physical education, it’s not a zero sum game after all. Someone call Richard Simmons and make sure he sees this report.

Generation X Grows Up

I graduated from the State University of New York at Binghamton in May 1992, with a B.A. in political science. Things felt uncertain then. Early in my first semester in 1988, my poli-sci teaching assistant calmy explained why she was a communist and how the revolution was on its way; by the time I graduated the Berlin Wall was a memory. The recent recession was just wrapping up and it seemed likely that the Reagan / Bush administration would continue for at least four more years. The value of a liberal arts degree in the job market was quickly demonstrated by my first four quasi-full time jobs after graduation: camp counselor; sporting goods salesman; waiter in a rib restaurant; camp counselor again.

The class of '92 also fell smack-dab in the middle of the "Generation X" demographic, so people like me were fed a steady of magazine articles and movies describing our alleged apathy, cynicism, and fondness for flannel. It wasn't all b.s.; as a younger member of the generation, Chuck Klosterman, once observed with only slight exaggeration:

Twenty-somethings in the nineties were by and large depressed about the future, mostly because (a) they knew there was very little to look forward to, and (b)they were obsessed with staring into the eyes of their own self-absorbed sadness. There are no myths about Generation X. It's all true.

But this begs a question that is never asked enough: Were we right, in retrospect? Things worked out fine for me, I went to grad school, got a job, got married, got a better job, made more money, stayed married, bought a house, travelled to some places, and so on and so forth. So did almost all of my friends from high school and college.

But of course you can't responsibly generalize from your own experiences or those of people you happen to know. To really answer that question, you'd have to go to the trouble of identifying a large, statistically representative sample--say roughly 10,000 people who earned a bachelor's degree in 1992 or 1993--gather a lot of baseline data about each person, and then diligently keep track of them as the years passed, following up with more detailed surveys every few years or so for the next decade. It would cost a lot money and you wouldn't really know the answer to the question for a good 15 years, which is roughly 14.5 years after the magazines and movies got bored and started talking about something else.

Thankfully, the federal government did just that, and released the latest results today. This is from the National Center for Education Statistics' "Baccalaureate and Beyond" longitudinal study, which began with students who finished college during the 92-93 academic year and followed up in 1994, 1997, and 2003. I'm not sure there are any blockbuster findings, but in a way that's the point: studies like this do mundane but crucial work of providing empirical foundations for our sense of things, clarifying and updating the common wisdom. A few highlights:

• People go to school so they can work. Roughly two-thirds of the original grads majored in what the report calls "career-oriented" fields: business, education, engineering, health, etc., as opposed to "academic" fields like my poli-sci degree, arts and humanities, math, biology, etc. While colleges rightly see themselves as much more than vocational, the plain truth is that most students go to college with pretty straightforward ambitions to get a decent job and thus life.
  
• Things are different for men and women. At the the three follow-up points--94, 97, and 03--the percent of men who were neither employed nor enrolled in grad school was 6, 4, and 5 percent, respectively. For women the numbers were 7% in 1994, 8% in 1997, and 18 percent in 2003. As people get older, marry, and start families, the arcs of their careers and lives continue to diverge by gender.
  
• Things get better as you get older. The average graduates' salary nearly doubled from 1994 to 2003, from $30,800 to $60,600, in constant 2003 dollars. From graduation to 1994, 29% of graduates were unemployed at least once. That percentage fell to 22% in 94 -97, and 13 percent from 97-03, despite the latter time period being twice as long. Among those with a full-time job, the percent in jobs they considered to have definite career potential went from 44% in '94 to 59% in 97 and 90% in '03.
  
• For college grads, the business of America is business--and education. In 2003, 28% of working 92/93 grads were "business workers and managers," while another 19% were "educators."
  
• There's more than one way to get a good job. Career-oriented majors were quicker to get a job and less likely to be unemployed, but by the time 2003 came the academic majors had mostly gotten through grad school and caught up; there was no statistically significant difference in 2003 earnings between career and academic majors, after controlling for other factors.

What I and my fellow Gen-X grads didn't know, of course, was that our pessimism was mostly unwarranted. We knew were post- a lot of things: modern, Cold War, etc. We just didn't know what we were pre-, yet. Luckily, it turned out to be prosperity; the economy was just beginning a historic expansion during which nearly all the new money went to college graduates like us. In general, if you made it through college, things worked out, if not in the short term than probably the mid- and most likely the long. All the more reason to make sure that more students have similar opportunities today.