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.

Bailouts

A letter from Friday's New York Times:

Dear Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Paulson:

My student loans are too big and it is hurting the economy. Can I have a bailout, please? I need $92,000.

If the trouble in the finance industry means there are fewer high-paying jobs available for recent college grads, there may be a bit of truth to this statement. The least the feds could do is let students discharge their loans in bankruptcy.