The Itinerant Professor

Time for a hiatus

2011-07-09T10:20:00.000-04:00

The Itinerant Professor blog is going on a hiatus until after the first of the year. I've recently accepted a position as Dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University, beginning January 1. I'm going to be spending the next six months finishing up work here at Penn State, and working on the transition to MSU.

Look for the blog to return after I begin the new position, possibly with the assistance of my colleagues at MSU. In the meantime, if you have ideas for a new name for the blog (something more creative than "The Itinerant Dean"), please send them my way.

It's not about excessive executive compensation, it's about tax rates

2011-04-15T08:52:00.001-04:00

This past Sunday's New York Times business section had a story about how executive compensation at large corporations has returned to pre-recession levels. Here's the total compensation (salary, bonuses, perquisites, and stock options) of the top 5 CEOs in 2010 (change from 2009 compensation in parentheses):

Philippe Dauman, Viacom: $84.5M (+149%)
Ray Irani, Occidental Petroleum: $76.1M (+142%)
Lawrence Ellison, Oracle: $70.1M (-17%)
Michael White, DirecTV: $32.9M (n/a - new in 2010)
John Lundgren, Stanley Black & Decker: $32.6M (+253%)

Poor Larry Ellison, who had to take a pay cut this year. Don't feel too badly for him, however - the article notes that his holdings of Oracle Stock are worth over $26 billion.

The Times article discusses shareholder concerns over rising compensation, and whether companies are truly getting value for what CEOs and other executives are paid. But as much as the federal government has tried to control compensation through regulation, i.e., Sarbanes-Oxley, passed in 2002, it has had little impact.

The real issue is not how to control executive compensation, but the fact that tax rates on these mega-millionaires are as low as they are. Each one of these CEOs paid the same marginal tax rate last year - 35% - as anyone who made over $373,650. And they paid only 10 percentage points above the rate paid by someone with an income as low as $68,000.

The chart below shows the marginal tax rates for married couples with the mean income in each quintile, the top 5% of all earners, and the top marginal tax rate, from 1969 through today (click the chart to see a larger version of it). The largest reductions have come for the top rate, dropping from 77% to 35%. In contrast, the bottom rate has decreased only five percentage points. For families in the middle, there has been a nine point drop.

The fix to this problem is far simpler than crafting legislation to try to control how much corporations pay their executives. All Congress (and the president) needs to do is to have the fortitude and political courage to increase the top tax rate. I am not arguing to return the top marginal tax rate to the 1960s level of 90% or even the 1970s level of 72%. But can anyone convince me that any of these CEOs would work any less hard if the top marginal tax rate was increased to the pre-Bush tax cuts level of 39.6%? Or even a ten percentage point increase to 45%? I'm ready to listen to your arguments.

What does this have to do with educational policy? The debate about controlling federal government spending - much of which of focuses on discretionary spending, including spending for education at all levels - could be made easier if upper-income Americans paid a fairer share of taxes.

More on bogus rankings - "The Best Colleges"

2011-04-08T13:02:00.000-04:00

Last year, I wrote about what I described as "embarrassingly bad" rankings published by Bloomberg Businessweek. Those rankings were based on the return on investment earned by students attending various colleges, and in the post I described why they were suspect.

Last week, Penn State issued a press release touting its World Campus' selection as the "the No. 1 online institution for 2011." This designation was conferred by the website, TheBestColleges.org, which I had never heard of before - and I've seen lots of different rankings over the years. So I spent a little bit of time going through the website, and after about 30 minutes or so, I sent this message to Penn State's Director of Public Information:

I read your press release, and not having heard of “Best Colleges,” took a look at the website. Unless you have some information establishing the validity and/or reputation of the website, I’d be a little cautious about how much you want to promote the WC and other rankings from this site. While they say “We do not accept paid placements for our school rankings,” it appears to me that this is a site supported entirely by advertising fees from universities. When you do a search for any of the degrees they show there (not the rankings, but a degree search), no matter what the degree, you get a list of for the most part for-profit and online universities, and very few of what most of us would consider more traditional universities whose quality and rankings are more universally recognized.

Here are the “criteria” they say they use to calculate the rankings for the 25 best online universities:

“We’ve relied on the following criteria to generate our online colleges and universities rankings: student satisfaction (as measured by graduation and retention rates), peer and instructional quality (as measured by acceptance rate and student-teacher ratio), affordability (as measured by tuition costs and availability of financial aid), and credibility (as measured by years of accreditation, reputation and awards).”

To be blunt, this is garbage. Graduation and retention rates are not measures of student satisfaction, any more than acceptance rates and student-teacher ratios are measures of peer and instructional quality.

We can all agree there are problems with the U.S. News & World Report rankings, but they are at least considered reputable by most parties. I would be cautious about trumpeting rankings from “Best Colleges” externally unless you know more about this organization (which I’d be interested in hearing).

Don Heller

There may be more substance to this website and their purported "rankings," but I certainly couldn't see it. If you click on the "About" page for the website, this is all it says:

The Best Colleges reviews publicly available data and then produces independent ranking assessments of colleges in various disciplines. Our goal is to produce resources that are useful to prospective students. We recognize that no ranking system is perfect, and for this reason we recommend that our ratings be used only as a general guide when choosing a quality school.

We do not accept paid placements for our school rankings as this would defeat our primary goal of creating resources that students find useful.

They may not "accept paid placements" for their school rankings, but it appears that they do have quite a bit of advertising from many of the schools that do end up being ranked. And I'm guessing that they get click-through fees for students who go from their website to these schools.

I'd be happy to hear from anyone who has more information about this website.

Is it possible to make Georgia HOPE even worse?

2011-04-05T17:34:00.000-04:00

The answer evidently is, "Yes." The state of Georgia has managed to find a way to make the HOPE Scholarship Program even more inequitable than it already was (see two Civil Rights Project reports I co-edited with Patricia Marin in 2002 and 2004 for more on this). NPR had a story this afternoon about the changes to HOPE, with a sound bite from me. The state has upped the GPA requirement - to 3.7 - to receive a full tuition scholarship, and added the requirement of achieving at least a 1,200 on the SAT (or 26 on the ACT). These changes are likely to mean that lower-income and minority students will receive less money, and upper-income and white students will be more likely to retain the full scholarship. Not exactly a step in the right direction for a state that still has large gaps in college access and attainment between white and minority students.

When Tennessee was considering implementing its lottery-funded scholarship program back in 2004 - which, not coincidentally, was modeled on Georgia HOPE - it ran some simulations based on high school GPA and ACT scores. The data showed that white students were approximately 10 times more likely than black students to have a GPA of 3.76 or greater and an ACT score of 26 or more. Similarly, students from families with incomes of $100,000 and above were about 5 times more likely to have this level of achievement than were students from families with incomes below $36,000 (which was about the median income in the state at the time). It is likely that the results in Georgia would be very similar.

Governor Corbett's spring break surprise

2011-03-11T15:47:00.002-05:00

It's spring break at PSU, so things have been pretty quiet here in Happy Valley. At least they were until Tuesday, when Tom Corbett released his first budget as governor of Pennsylvania. Governor Corbett ran on a "no tax increase" pledge, and since the Commonwealth was facing a roughly $4 billion budget deficit, and Corbett was not seen as a friend of public higher education, everyone expected that this first budget would likely not be very favorable to Penn State. Discussions I had had with senior leaders of the university pointed to an absolute worst-case scenario of perhaps a 25 percent cut in Penn State's appropriation.

So nobody was prepared for the 52 percent, or $182 million, cut in Penn State's appropriation contained in the governor's FY 2012 budget. Penn State was not singled out; overall, appropriations to Pennsylvania's state-related (Penn State, Pitt, Temple, and Lincoln) and state-owned (Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education) institutions were cut by 50 percent, or $660 million. This is most likely the largest proportional cut in appropriations to higher education in the history of any single state, though the $660 million is dwarfed by Governor Jerry Brown's budget for next year, which cut $1.4 billion in total from the appropriations to the U. of California, California State U. system, and the California Community Colleges.

Penn State's response was swift and critical. Al Horvath, Penn State's chief financial officer, said, "A reduction of this magnitude would necessitate massive budget cuts, layoffs and tuition increases, with a devastating effect on many students, employees and their families." If the governor convinces the legislature to go along with such a large cut, Penn State will likely face some of the draconian responses other public systems have implemented during the current recession, including larger-than-normal tuition increases, layoffs, and furloughs. President Graham Spanier, in a press conference the next day, even admitted that the possibility of closing one or more of the university's 24 campuses may be on the table, a measure that had not been considered in recent memory.

In the press conference, Spanier made the point that Penn State and the other public universities in the state were not responsible for the budget deficit the Commonwealth faced. He showed the chart at the top of this post (you can click it for a larger version), which shows that the appropriations to the university have been largely flat over the last decade. He also showed the chart on the right, which shows that while overall spending in the Commonwealth grew approximately 40 percent over the last decade, appropriations to the four state-related universities increased by only 5 percent (through the current year).

It is still unknown whether the legislature will go along with cuts of this magnitude. Even though Republicans (who control both houses of the legislature) will want to support the new governor, they will face intense lobbying to restore some of the cuts. State Senator Jake Corman, who represents the local district and is chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said, “It will be important for all institutions ... to come in and tell us what the ramifications of such cuts would be," a position that may be signalling an open door to restoring some funding for the universities.

I've been serving for the last year on a university-wide committee, chaired by Provost Rod Erickson, that has been charged with identifying ways of cutting the university's budget by $10 million per year over the next few years. I can attest to the challenge of the effort, as this committee has been reviewing data on every single academic program and administrative unit in the university. A number of programs and departments have already been slated for closure or merger, including some in the College of Education. Even with these moves, however, finding $10 million of savings has been difficult. As I said in an article this week in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the $10 million now "looks like a rounding error after the governor's announcement."

Are college costs a major problem?

2011-03-06T18:40:00.002-05:00

David Leonhardt, economic columnist of The New York Times, published a post in his Economix blog last month stating that "College Costs Aren't the Main Problem" facing higher education. While we could all have a nice debate about what the major problem facing American higher education is, I took issue with one thing Leonhardt said. His post implied that there was plenty of financial aid out there, the problem was just that poor students didn't know how to apply for it.

I wrote to him, taking issue with that statement, and pointing to some research I have done with my Penn State colleague John Cheslock and our graduate assistants Rodney Hughes and Rachel Frick Cardelle. That research demonstrates that students from low- and moderate-income families face large amounts of unmet need, i.e., the gap between their resources and grants they receive, and what it costs them to attend college. You can read a summary of what I wrote to Leonhardt, along with his response.

Making progress on more hockey bucks

2011-02-18T09:04:00.000-05:00

Right on the heels of my post about hockey money at Penn State, the university announced that it has received a donation of $1 million toward the $10 million still needed to be raised to bring hockey to Penn State. Bring on the puck!

More blockbuster gifts - but not for hockey

2011-02-16T14:14:00.001-05:00

Back in September I wrote about the $88 million donation Penn State received - the largest in its history - from alumnus Terry Pegula and his wife, with the total amount dedicated to hockey. Well, truthfully it's not all for hockey; some of the money is going to build a 6,000 seat arena directly across the street from the Bryce Jordan Center, Penn State's 15-year old, 15,000 seat multipurpose arena. Interestingly enough, nobody has clearly articulated why the BJC could not have been adapted for hockey use; I have been in there for the circus, and it appears to have more than enough space for an NCAA Division I-caliber hockey rink. One explanation given for building the new arena is that it will provide two rinks. But this ignores the fact that Penn State already has one rink in the Greenberg Ice Pavillion where its current club-level hockey team plays.

One sad aspect of this story is that the $88 million is not even enough to build the rink and support the creation of Division I men's and women's teams. In the latest issue of Town and Gown magazine, Joe Battista - long-time head coach of the men's club team, and now in charge of development of the new rink and programs - was quoted as saying that he has to raise an additional $10 million, bringing the overall cost to almost $100 million.

An unnamed source (yes, The Itinerant Professor has unnamed sources) informed me that before announcement of the Pegula's gift, the Penn State fund raising apparatus worked hard with them to try to earmark some of the money, or an additional amount, for academic purposes. The Penn State leadership was most assuredly aware of what kind of impact the announcement of the Pegula's gift would make, with the sum total dedicated to athletics. These efforts were apparently for naught, and while I'm sure there is still ongoing cultivation of the Pegulas for more money, we have yet to hear anything.

This largesse for athletics is in sharp contrast to two other recently-announced gifts of similar scale to public, flagship universities. Last month, UCLA announced a $100 million donation from an alumnus, with the money earmarked for

"...academic programs and capital improvements that bolster UCLA's efforts to harness intellectual capital, engage the public and serve as a resource in addressing leading civic and societal challenges, particularly in the Los Angeles region. It will be equally divided between the UCLA School of Public Affairs — the campus home for scholarship and teaching in public policy, urban planning and social welfare — and a planned residential conference center that promises to expand dialogue between scholars, government and business leaders, and the public at large."

"Addressing leading civic and societal challenges" - quite a contrast with the similar sum of money to be spent by Penn State, unless you consider the leading challenge in our region to be the lack of Division I hockey and a dedicated rink in which to play it.

Our Big 10 competitor Ohio State just announced its own $100 million donation from alumnus Lesley Wexner (founder of The Limited chain of women's clothing stores) and his foundation. The press release states

"The gift will primarily benefit The Ohio State University Medical Center and The Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute. It will also benefit Ohio State’s Wexner Center for the Arts and select other university initiatives."

Again, quite a contrast with Penn State's big-ticket donation.

In all fairness, Penn State hasn't been without large donations for other than athletics. Almost fifteen years ago, alumnus Bill Schreyer (who recently passed away) and his wife donated $30 million to endow an honors college at the University Park campus, later giving an additional $25 million to the college that now bears their name. But there have been few blockbuster gifts of this type in contrast to our competitors, even those in the public sector. And with very few exceptions - including Phil Knight (founder of Nike) at the University of Oregon, and oil magnate T. Boone Pickens at Oklahoma State - gifts in the range of $100 million rarely are purely for athletics. Even Pickens followed up his large donation to OSU athletics with a $100 million donation for endowed chairs and professorships.

Last April, Penn State announced the kickoff of its $2 billion "For the Future: The Campaign for Penn State Students." The campaign priorities are listed as:

Scholarships: Ensuring Student Opportunity
Enhancing Honors Education
Student Life: Enriching the Student Experience
Building Faculty Strength and Capacity
Research: Fostering Discovery and Creativity
Colleges, Campuses, & Programs: Sustaining a Tradition of Quality

If Penn State is going to achieve its goals of supporting these areas, it is going to have to work hard to find large-capacity donors who are willing to support something other than athletics.

Perish or publish?

2011-01-14T12:35:00.000-05:00

Well folks, The Itinerant Professor has not disappeared from the face of the earth. He's just been swamped with work and other responsibilities that have kept him away from his blogging. But I promise you'll be hearing from him very soon, with a post about the college admissions frenzy.

Update: English tuition hikes

2010-12-09T21:30:00.000-05:00

Students surrounded a Rolls Royce carrying Prince Charles and Camilla tonight, and attacked it in protest against the tuition hikes. Here's a story about it.

More on tuition increases in England

2010-12-09T16:57:00.000-05:00

It's been a busy autumn in England for the higher education sector. Lord Browne finally released his review committee's recommendations for reforming the student fee system (the full report can be found on the Browne Review website). The Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government quickly follow-up with its plan, which adopted many of the Browne recommendations but added some of its own, including a proposal to cut funding to universities (the rough analog of state appropriations in the U.S.) by roughly 40% over the next four years. The £3 billion pound cut is part of a larger, £83 billion cut in all government spending designed to help restore the British budget deficit to a more reasonable position.

Today, the Parliament passed a key component of the Government's plan: an increase in the fee cap from the current level of £3,290 to as much as £9,000, or about $14,000, in the fall of 2012. This is designed to offset the government funding cuts by shifting the burden of financing to students. From the release of the Browne Review committee, through to the Government's proposal, and on to Parliament's vote today, students have been protesting the funding cuts and fee increases. The picture above shows a protest organized by the National Union of Students in response to today's vote (see my blog post on fee protests that occurred while I was on sabbatical in London).

Once I get out from under the end-of-semester crush, I'll be writing more about how student financing is changing in England, and the implications these changes are likely to have on students and universities there.

$42 million for the CEO of Strayer Education Inc.

2010-11-11T11:03:00.000-05:00

Bloomberg reported yesterday that the chairman and CEO of Strayer Education, Robert Silberman, was paid $41.9 million in compensation last year. Or, as Bloomberg put it, "That’s 26 times the compensation of the highest-paid president of a traditional university." Bloomberg went on to note that Strayer receives three-fourths of its revenue through federal student loans and grants. And Silberman is not the only executive in the proprietary sector receiving this kind of compensation; the Bloomberg article indicates that Charles Edelstein, co-CEO of the Apollo Group (corporate parent of the U. of Phoenix, the country's largest postsecondary institution) received $6.5 million in compensation last year.

Compensation of executives of for-profit education companies has been in the news of late, with all of the focus on this sector and its dependency on revenues through federal Title IV funds. Much of Silberman's compensation was in the form of stock options granted last year, so it's not as if he was paid the $42 million in salary. Nevertheless it is tempting to compare Silberman's compensation - and his responsibilities - with the heads of other postsecondary institutions.

Here's a comparison of Strayer, Penn State, and the State University of New York system (all figures are for FY2009):

System	Total Revenues	Number of students	Campuses	CEO compensation
Strayer	$512 million	54,300	87	$41.9 million
Penn State	$4.042 billion	92,613	24	$642,760
SUNY	$8.456 billion	218,528	64	$654,996

You can draw your own conclusions.

The problem of comparing student loan repayment ratios across colleges

2010-10-17T12:18:00.000-04:00

Earlier this year I published a post about Businessweek's ridiculous attempt at ranking colleges based on the return on investment students earn from attending the institution. I listed the problems with Businessweek's methodology, many of which were based on its decision to use data on salaries from a firm called PayScale, which invites people to complete an on-line survey and post information about what college they attended, their major, what they earn, etc. Beyond the obvious problems with data like these being collected non-randomly, using data like this to come up with a single measure for the return on investment of a college education makes absolutely no sense at all. If you don't want to read my entire post, here's the key part of my conclusion:

Most of the evidence from labor economists (see the work of Card and Krueger, or Ehrenberg) points to the fact that differences in returns to college are driven more by within college variation (i.e., differences in the choice of majors or academic experiences once enrolled in a particular college) rather than differences between colleges. What this means is that the decisions students make about what to major in, what courses to take, and what other experiences they have in college have much more influence on their post-college earnings than does the choice of which college to attend.

And now another website, called CollegeMeasures.org (sponsored by the American Institutes for Research), is using the same PayScale data to come up with ratios of student loan payments to earnings for individual colleges. CollegeMeasures has a very good intent - to try to provide institutional officials and policymakers with more information about the outcomes related to higher education. The website's stated purpose is:

. . . to provide measures of performance for four-year colleges to the trustees and state government officials who are responsible for their success. Our goal is to present measures that are informative and thought-provoking, using the best data available. The data are collected from widely-respected sources and represent the best of what is available at the current time.

It repeats information available from many other on-line sources on things like first-year retention rates and graduation rates. It also calculates some other measures from publicly-available data, including a cost to produce each undergraduate degree and an annual cost per student. And it then ranks each institution compared to all institutions, as well as all institutions in its own sector (public, private not-for-profit, or for-profit).

I want to reiterate that the CollegeMeasures website has good intentions. But its attempt at calculating ratios of student loan payments to earnings is, I am afraid, likely to be of little if any value to policymakers, institutional leaders, or even consumers. There are plenty of caveats about the data used in the fine print of the website, but I doubt most readers will get that far. The basic issue is that coming up with just one measure for this ratio requires the use of average (or median) student loan and earnings data. And the problem is that both of these measures are likely to have very broad distributions on any one campus, thus making a single measure - used to compare across all institutions in the country - of little or no value at best, and entirely misleading, at worst.

Let me use my own institution, Penn State's University Park campus as an example. You can see PayScale's salary data for the campus on its website. Here's an excerpt (you can click on an image to enlarge it):

It's unclear from the PayScale website whether these are the only salary data they have on Penn State graduates, or whether this is just a sample. And similarly, you can't tell from the CollegeMeasures website which PayScale data they use in calculating their loan repayment ratios, other than they say they are using median salary for people with five or less years of experience. But look at the salary ranges shown in the graphic above -- they are huge. In some cases, the student loan repayment ratios for students at the top end of the salary range would be less than half that of students whose salaries are in the bottom end of the distribution. So which one is the "best" repayment ratio on which to base a decision to attend Penn State or on which to judge Penn State's performance? We have no way of knowing.

There are obviously large problems with the non-random sample nature of the PayScale salary data. For example, you cannot tell who's completed their survey, and how representative they are of all Penn State's graduates. Another problem can be clearly seen in the graphic above, which shows that 65 percent of the PayScale data come from men, and 35 percent from women. But according to data from the U.S. Department of Education's IPEDS Data Center, 46 percent of bachelor's degree recipients at Penn State's University Park campus in the 2008-09 year were women. Given that men and women are non-randomly distributed across different majors, and that the earnings of men and women are quite different, the PayScale data for Penn State are clearly biased toward men.

Clearly, coming up with good measures of the return-on-investment of attending college is a difficult task. There are too many individual variables that affect the calculation, and attempts to simplify the process by coming up with a single measure - and then using that to compare across institutions - do not help us understand anything about institutional performance.

Rising health care costs hit home

2010-09-25T21:27:00.000-04:00

The rising cost of health care is one of the public policy topics that probably receives more attention in the press than the rising cost of college, the latter of which I know a lot more about. For almost 30 years I've worked at universities almost without interruption, and the five years I wasn't working at a university I was covered by my wife's health insurance under her union contract as a teacher, which was similar to what I received as a university employee. Having worked in universities and benefited from the very generous benefits many universities offer, I've been largely protected from the challenges that many families face in gaining access to and paying for health care. I recognize that not all higher education institutions offer such generous benefits, but the ones at which I've worked have had very good coverage.

For example, the current coverage at Penn State (which self-insures its employees) costs me $247.62/month for coverage for our family. As a benchmark, I have a close friend who is my age and self-employed, and has to buy insurance for himself. He pays over $500/month just for individual coverage that is nowhere near as comprehensive as I enjoy as a Penn State employee. And for my monthly premium, the coverage my family receives is close to universal; we pay small ($10-$20) co-pays for office visits, and beyond that, most office visits for primary care physicians, specialists, hospital stays, procedures, etc. are covered in full. There are of course exceptions; you do pay more if you go outside the approved network of providers (20% of the cost), but the network is fairly inclusive of health care providers, at least in our area around State College. We also have relatively good prescription drug coverage. Many preventive procedures are free.

As an example, a couple of years ago, our youngest daughter was in the local hospital for four days. She had no surgeries or unusual procedures, other than a X-ray or two. The bill came to over $15,000, and we paid nothing other than a $50 co-pay for our emergency room visit before she was admitted to the hospital. This comprehensiveness of the coverage is similar to, and priced in roughly the same ballpark (adjusting for health care inflation) to what I enjoyed when I worked at MIT and at the University of Michigan.

Well, the other shoe has dropped here at Penn State. Earlier this month the university announced the details of changes to the health care coverage effective next January 1.* The monthly premium for family coverage is going up 12% (the individual premium is increasing at the same rate), not an unusually large rise given recent history. However, the coverage that Penn State employees receive is changing radically. The university is instituting two types of charges that didn't exist in the past. The first is an annual deductible, something that is common in many other health insurance plans. Families will pay a $500 deductible, which means that the subscriber has to pay the first $500 of health care costs in a year, before the insurance coverage kicks in.

In addition, the university is instituting a co-insurance charge of 10%, meaning that the subscriber is now responsible for paying 10% of all charges, with the health plan paying the remaining 90%, up to a maximum of $2,000 per year (including the deductible) for a family, or $1,000 for an individual. While 10% doesn't sound like much, you have to remember that under our current coverage the plan pays 100% of the costs. Here's a link to the details of the new plan.

Thus, the impact of the deductible and co-insurance charges is that many families will end up paying $2,000 (in addition to their monthly premiums) above and beyond what they're paying this year. The combination of the increase in the premium along with the out-of-pocket additions means that my cost for health care next year is likely to go up by about $2,400. This represents an increase of about 80% in the out-of-pocket costs, not including co-pays. But the co-pays are going up also, so 80% is probably a reasonable estimate of the increase.

Before you run off and blame the federal government's health care overhaul passed earlier this year, for causing these increases, I can comfortably say that that's not the reason. Rather, the university - like many employers - has been struggling with rising health care costs and how to control them over the last couple of decades. This has been a topic discussed in two university-wide panels on which I have served in the last few years, the University Strategic Planning Council, and the current Academic Program and Administrative Services Review Core Council.

The university has taken some steps, such as instituting wellness programs, to try to help control the demand for health care services among its employees. It also waives the co-pay for visits to two local clinics staffed by employees of Penn State's Hershey Medical Center, in order to encourage employees and their families to use these services (at presumably lower cost) than opting to go to other providers or an emergency room for care.

But eventually Penn State must have realized that more of the costs had to be shifted from being borne by the university to being paid by employees. The changes being implemented effectively accomplish this. There are obviously large equity issues at play here. The additional out-of-pocket costs represent a little over 2% of the gross income of a professor or administrator making $100,000, but it's 8% of the income of a secretary making $36,000.

Now that it has instituted deductibles and co-insurance for the first time (at least in the eight years I have been here), it is unlikely that these will ever go away. Penn State employees covered by this plan should realize that they still benefit from health insurance coverage that is probably better and relatively less expensive than what most people in the country have access to. But they should also realize that these costs will continue to rise in the future.

* Last January 1st, the university drastically changed the health care coverage for retirees, with new employees hired after that date receiving a defined contribution health care plan in retirement, while existing employees enjoy a defined benefit health plan. But that's a topic for another day.

A delay on gainful employment, but a commitment to move forward

2010-09-25T07:13:00.001-04:00

The Education Department announced yesterday that it was going to delay issuance of some of its gainful employment rules in order to examine more closely some of the 83,000 comments submitted. At the same time it announced that it was still planning on releasing the rest of the rules on November 1, as it had originally planned.

As I wrote in my last post, the for-profit sector had kept the pressure on even after the comment period on the rules was over. In an apparent attempt to improve its image and perhaps sound more like the other sectors of the higher education industry, the Career College Association has just changed its name to the Association of Private-Sector Colleges and Universities, or APSCU, an acronym uncomfortably close to that of AASCU, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. Or, as APSCU states on its website, ""CCA is changing because there comes a time when only change can get you where you need to be." I have no idea what that means. The new tagline for the organization is prominently displayed on its homepage:

The notion of providing options to students has been at the crux of the organization's argument against the Department of Education tightening regulations.on the industry. "Committed to putting students first" seems rather facetious given that these are all for-profit companies, and their primary responsibility is to their shareholders, not their customers.

One of the interesting tidbits in the Chronicle of Higher Education's article about the delay was the revelation that Corinthian Colleges, Inc., the company that started the "My Career Counts" public relations campaign I wrote about in my last post, is spending in the "high seven figures" on the campaign. Probably money well spent if Corinthian and APSCU is successful in getting the gainful employment rules delayed, or better yet for them, significantly weakened.

The for-profits keep the pressure on gainful employment rules

2010-09-19T17:40:00.002-04:00

Even though the comment period on the Department of Education's gainful employment rules is over, the for-profit sector is clearly keeping up the fight. This morning's New York Times (Washington edition) has a big, full-page ad (split across two pages) in the front news section (click on the picture to see a larger version of it). Navigating to the URL shown in the ad, www.mycareercounts.org, takes you to a website with all the reasons why the proposed gainful employment rules should be tossed out.

It's a little difficult to figure out who created the website, until you look at the very small print at the bottom of the page:

The website is sponsored by Corinthian Colleges, Inc., one of the nation's largest for-profit higher education providers. A recent report by Education Sector on the impact of the proposed gainful employment rules found that 15 percent of the Corinthian Colleges programs would face restrictions under the rules. The report also noted that the firm had recently reported to analysts that "89 percent of its revenue comes from federal aid programs and only about 1 to 2 percent comes from cash payments from students." Yes, you read that correctly: student payments represented only 1 to 2 percent of the firm's total revenues. Clearly, the loss of eligibility for Title IV federal student aid funds poses a major threat to the firm's continued growth and viability.

Don't be surprised to see continued pressure and lobbying from the for-profit sector, at least until the Department's rules are finalized (due by November 1). The Chronicle of Higher Education reported this week that the industry had given almost $100,000 in campaign contributions in the first seven months of the year to members of Congress who had sent letters to Secretary Duncan asking him to reconsider the rules. Many of these letters are prominently featured on the "My Career Colleges" website. The Chronicle also tallied the hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbying costs incurred by for-profits this year, an amount that represented a large increase over last year. For example, the article noted that Corinthian Colleges spent $310,000 in lobbying costs in the second quarter of this year, an almost 200 percent increase over last year's $110,000.

[Update] When I finally got around to reading the rest of the Sunday Times, I discovered this full-page ad on the front of the second news section (again, you click to see a larger image):

Newsflash! Penn state receives an $88 million gift for. . . . .

2010-09-17T20:16:00.009-04:00

Penn State announced today the receipt of the largest single gift in its history, $88 million, from alumnus Terrence Pegula and his wife Kim. As one could imagine, a gift of this magnitude coming at a time when the university is facing such constrained resources is a huge boost for the institution.

Pegula made his money in the natural gas business, and evidently had invested much money in the Marcellus Shale, the huge gas field that spreads across parts of Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, and West Virginia. Earlier this year, East Resources Inc., the privately-held firm of which he was founder, CEO, and a principal shareholder (according to the Penn State press release), was sold for $4.7 billion to Royal Dutch Shell.

The campus is buzzing and the excitement is impalpable as people think about the potential for such a large gift. Well, at least until you read past the headline and discover that the $88 million is going to be used for. . . . hockey. Yes, you read correctly: $88 million for hockey. To be a bit more precise, the money is going to help build a "state-of-the-art, multi-purpose arena," as well as provide operating funds for the men's and women's hockey clubs to move to Division 1 status, according to the press release issued by Penn State today.

Penn State is fortunate in that it has not faced the same kind of funding constraints faced by other public universities, especially those in states such as California, Arizona, Florida, and Nevada. Nevertheless, the last couple of years have forced the university to make some difficult choices, including raising tuition at rates well in excess of inflation, withholding raises and keeping salaries flat last year, and instituting additional cost sharing for health insurance for employees (to be implemented next January 1).

Penn State is not a poor university by any means; according to the Chronicle of Higher Education's endowment database, Penn State had the nation's 45th largest endowment as of June 30, 2009, at $1.23 billion (since increased to $1.4 billion as of last June 30, according to a report provided to the trustees yesterday). A key difference between Penn State and our peers with billiion dollar plus endowments, however, is the size of the university. Penn State's endowment has to support 24 campuses and approximately 90,000 students. Contrast this with Wellesley College, two spots above PSU at number 43, whose endowment of $1.27 billion supports its one campus and 2,324 students. For those who don't want to do the math, this means that Wellesley's endowment per student is 40 times greater than Penn State's.

It is difficult for any university to look the proverbial gift horse (or alumnus, in this case) in the mouth and say, "No thanks" to any gift, particularly one as sizable as this. Those of us who work in universities and study their operation know that when donors get an idea in their heads of what they want to fund, it can often be difficult to get them to consider more pressing needs. I don't know how much the university tried to convince the Pegulas that Penn State had higher priorities than a new ice rink and Division 1 hockey teams. But clearly this was a priority for them, and in a couple of years we'll be able to gaze upon our new "state-of-the-art" hockey rink, right next door to the nation's second largest football stadium, our four year-old baseball stadium (capacity 5,406 and 20 luxury suites), and the now somewhat aged in comparison Bryce Jordan Center.

One can't wonder about what else $88 million could have bought for the university, if the Pegulas had been convinced to invest in the core of the university's business, i.e., teaching and research, rather than intercollegiate athletics. But here are just a few ideas of what $88 million could purchase:

The university could announce attainment of its goal of raising $100 million in its Trustee Matching Scholarship Program. Announced in 2002, the university had achieved 63% of the original goal (as of last November). This is a wonderful program, with the scholarships all going to undergraduates eligible for Pell Grants, meaning they come largely from families with incomes below $50,000. Yet raising the money has been a bit of a struggle for the university. The Pegulas could have allowed the university to reach its $100 million goal and still had plenty left over.
Roughly 1,500 full-tuition, 4-year scholarships for enternig freshmen this year.
Roughly 2,500 half-time graduate assistantships this year (stipend and tuition waiver), or tuition waivers for approximately 5,300 graduate assistants
88 endowed professorships throughout the university (such as in the Department of Education Policy Studies in the College of Education, to provide just one suggestion)
An endowment that could fund annually into perpetuity:
-- 300 undergraduate full-tuition scholarships, or
-- 270 graduate tuition waivers

I'm sure many on campus and off will be rejoicing over this gift, and as I stated earlier, nobody wants to look a gift donor in the mouth. You may even find me in a few years sitting at the new Pegula Arena cheering on the Penn State hockey team when Michigan comes to town. But it is hard not to speculate about some of the missed opportunities of such a sizable gift.

One more time on gainful employment

2010-09-15T16:08:00.000-04:00

After taking a summer hiatus, The Itinerant Professor is back in full swing. Yes, just like network television shows, this blog takes a summer hiatus. And just like major league baseball stars, it also refers to itself in the third person.

Enough posturing. The big news this fall is the overwhelming response to the proposed gainful employment rules published by the Department of Education in the Federal Register in July. "Overwhelming" as in over 83,000 comments on the rules submitted to the Department, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, far in excess - by scores of thousands - of any other proposed rules by the Department in recent memory .

As Inside Higher Ed pointed out in a recent article, the vast majority of these came in from students, employees, and supporters of for-profit institutions, often coordinated by the Career College Association (CCA), the lobbying arm for the for-profit sector. These were not the result of grass roots efforts, but more akin to the "astroturf" campaigns where companies or other organizations try to make contacts with Congress or federal agencies appear to come from individuals alone, rather than as part of an orchestrated campaign. The IHE article described how Education Management Corp. hired a "Republican-affiliated strategy firm" to encourage and assist employees of its many for-profit institutions to write letters in response to the gainful employment rules. The article noted that the CCA "also coordinated bulk submissions of hundreds of comments."

The story about Education Management Corp. was first published by Stephen Burd of the New American Foundation's Higher Ed Watch blog:

“This week, employees throughout EDMC and our schools will be receiving phone calls during business hours from our partners, the DCI Group, to assist you in crafting personalized letters to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan detailing for him your own views on Gainful Employment,” Todd Nelson, EDMC’s chief executive officer, wrote last Tuesday to the company’s approximately 20,000 employees in an e-mail, which was obtained by Higher Ed Watch.

“You will be asked a series of short questions that will help DCI Group create a unique letter. These personalized letters will then be delivered to you for a signature, along with a pre-addressed stamp envelope,” wrote Nelson. “We encourage you to mail the letters as quickly as possible so that your comments are received before September 9. The entire process should take no more than 10 minutes of your time, but its impact on EDMC would be immeasurable.”

One of the major criticisms of the rules raised by the CCA campaign is that they would likely force many for-profit institutions, or at least some of the programs in those institutions, to close, as students in them would no longer be eligible for federal Title IV student aid funds. The campaign has emphasized how this would severely affect access to higher education by poor and minority students, since they are disproportionately enrolled in this sector. A recent press release by the CCA stated that:

By closing programs and placing others in a tenuous “restricted” category, the ED gainful employment proposal has the potential to push 2.3 million students out of higher education, according to a CCA commissioned economic analysis prepared by Charles River Associates. This number includes 790,000 fewer females, 210,000 fewer African-Americans, and 190,000 fewer Hispanics.

[In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that the CCA had approached me earlier this year about hiring me to conduct this study for it, but I declined.]

The question now is how the Department is going to react to all these comments. It clearly knows that a good portion of these are the result of the astroturf campaign, and thus, are likely to be discounted in importance. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been fairly strident in his criticism of the for-profit sector and the need for the gainful employment rules, and has shown little inclination to back down on the preliminary rules published in July.

My guess is that the Department will stand its ground, and attempt to implement the rules largely as published. An early indication of this was the press release issued by the ED earlier this week when it announced the most recent student loan default rates for FY2008, which rose from the previous year - not a great surprise, given the recession. But in releasing the data, Secretary Duncan noted that:

"The data also tells us that students attending for-profit schools are the most likely to default," Duncan continued. "While for-profit schools have profited and prospered thanks to federal dollars, some of their students have not. Far too many for-profit schools are saddling students with debt they cannot afford in exchange for degrees and certificates they cannot use. This is a disservice to students and taxpayers, and undermines the valuable work being done by the for-profit education industry as a whole," Duncan continued.

So stay tuned. The Department is scheduled to issue the final rules on November 1, with the rules scheduled to take effect next July 1.

A more detailed analysis of ED's proposed gainful employment rules

2010-07-26T16:14:00.003-04:00

Now that I've had a chance to actually peruse (note I didn't say "read," since they are 93 pages long) the Education Department's proposed "gainful employment rules" for proprietary colleges, which were just published in the Federal Register today, I feel a little more qualified to comment on them. Pay attention, folks: comments are due to ED by September 9.

A few interesting observations about the proposed rules:

Rather than basing eligibility for participation in the federal Title IV (student financial aid) programs solely on loan default rates, as do the current regs, the new rules use a two-part test: loan repayment rates and earnings-to-student loan repayment ratios. Thus, institutions with programs that prepare students for gainful employment (i.e., vocationally-oriented programs) would have to demonstrate that students were both making enough money to pay back their loans, and were actually paying them back at acceptable rates. No jokes please about programs that do not prepare people for gainful employment, i.e., most bachelor's degree programs.
The application of the default and earnings-to-repayment ratios would result in institutions falling into three categories:
-- Fully eligible to participate in Title IV
-- Ineligible to participate in Title IV
-- Partially eligible, but would have to curtail their growth and provide certain information to consumers about the risks of excessive borrowing
The ED estimates that 5 percent of proprietary institutions would fall into the ineligible category, and 55 percent would become partially eligible.
The new rules apply not just to proprietary (for-profit) colleges, as much of the press has focused on. They apply to any higher education institution that offers gainful employment programs. The ED estimates that the new regulations will affect the following number of institutions:
-- For-profit: 22.7%, or 474 institutions
-- Private, not-for-profit: 15%, 36 institutions
-- Public: 11.8%, 252 institutions
Note that the percentages are based only on the number of institutions in each sector that offer gainful employment programs. Harvard, for example, would not be included in the denominator of the private, not-for-profit category.
The Dept. of Education obviously has good data on default rates on federal student loans, from the National Student Loan Data System. But the mystery was where it was going to get the data to calculate the earnings-to-repayment ratios. Would it rely on the institutions to survey their graduates? Would it survey graduates? Or perhaps rely on a third party? Well, the answer is found on page 43623 of the Federal Register:

"The Department would calculate the average annual earnings by using most currently available actual, average annual earnings, obtained from the Social Security Administration (SSA) or another Federal agency,. . ."
So the Department will most likely use Social Security Numbers to match student loan repayment amounts with individual's earnings, as recorded in the Social Security system.

Not surprisingly, the proprietary sector has come out guns ablazing against the regs, issuing a press release on the night they were announced titled, "Career College Association Rejects Metrics-Based Approach to Gainful Employment," calling the new rules "unwise, unnecessary, unproven and is likely to harm students, employers, institutions and taxpayers." They're clearly not going to go down without a huge fight on this one. We'll have to wait to see if they'll have any assistance from the other sectors, who obviously will not be as threatened by the regs as will the for-profit schools. Bloomberg reported today that its index of 12 stocks of publicly-traded universities is down 2.1 percent, with DeVry leading the pack down 5.7 percent as of 3:00pm today.

It is too early to tell whether the regulations will survive largely in the form ED has proposed them. One sign that they likely will is that Congress has grabbed onto this issue and doesn't appear ready to let go. So some form of tighter rules will likely occur, and how much teeth they have will be determined in large part by the lobbying (and political donation) strength of the for-profit sector.

Stay tuned.

Department of Education finally issues the gainful employment rules for proprietary colleges

2010-07-23T10:52:00.002-04:00

The ED finally issued the rules for measuring gainful employment in proprietary colleges. The rules will impose a two-part test for gradutes of vocational programs, involving both earnings-to-loan repayment ratios, as well as default rates. ED estimates that under the rules, 5 percent of proprietaries will be forced out of the Title IV federal student aid programs entirely, and another 55 percent will see their growth restricted by the regs.

Marketplace covered it this morning, including a short quote from me (here's a link to the audio of the story), as did the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed.

Businessweek publishes an embarrassingly bad article on the college wage premium

2010-07-16T10:45:00.000-04:00

Bloomberg Businessweek published a "special report" on the return on investment to individual colleges that can charitably be described as misleading at best, irresponsible at the worst. Titled "College: Big Investment, Paltry Return," the article purports to demonstrate how students attending some colleges earn a higher return on their investment than students attending other colleges. Businessweek used a consulting firm that collected self-reported salary information on its website, and used that salary information to calculate the median earnings for graduates of each college, and compares this to what people who only have high school diplomas earn.

The consulting firm then subtracted the current cost of attendance for each institution, adjusts for the school's six-year graduation rate, and used the result to calculate an expected annual ROI over 30 years. And as is ever so popular these days, it creates a ranking of 554 4-year colleges and universities across the country, from highest to lowest ROI (the methodology is described here). The results? MIT has the highest ROI in the country at 12.6%, and Black Hills State University (in South Dakota) the lowest, 4.3%. The article also publishes a shame list, or those schools with high tuition but a low ROI.

So what's wrong with this "special report"? Here are just a few examples:

Probably the most egregious error is that the article makes the same mistake so many articles in the popular press make: it confuses correlation with causality. The article implies that any random student out there attending a higher-ranked institution will have a higher ROI than attending a lower-ranked one. But of course students are not randomly distributed across those 852 institutions. If you took all the MIT students, and sent them to Black Hills State University, the Black Hills ROI would skyrocket. Why? Because the typical MIT student has a higher level of human capital (intelligence, skills, aptitude, motivation - whatever you want to call it) than does the average student attending Black Hills State.

So MIT may very well impart some added value on its attendees, as I'm sure it does, but it can't claim the full credit for their post-college earnings. Another way to think of it is to consider an experiment. Take all those students who were admitted to MIT and Black Hills, and randomly assign some of the students to attend their chosen institution, and others to not be allowed to enroll and instead go into the labor markets without the benefit of a college degree. Under Businessweek's methodology, one would expect all of those non-college attendees to have the same earnings. But of course this wouldn't be true; the students admitted to MIT but not allowed to attend would likely have much higher earnings in labor markets even without attending college than would the students accepted to Black Hills but not attending. This is because many of the same traits that got those students admitted to MIT are also valued in labor markets and thus rewarded through higher wages.

In statistical terms, the Businessweek methodology suffers from strong selectivity bias effects.
The earnings data used in the study are entirely self-reported on the consulting firm's website, and is by no means guaranteed to be representative of the population of graduates of each institution. Thus, the earnings data used in the calculations could very well be biased upward or downward - there is no way to tell.
The cost-of-attendance data used in the study are based on sticker prices, and don't account for financial aid students receive. Given the important role that institutional financial aid plays in subsidizing the cost of college today (see for example this study I did a few years ago, or more recently a study with my Penn State colleagues John Cheslock, Rodney Hughes, and Rachel Frick-Cardelle), the lack of accounting for institutional aid leads to downwardly biased ROI figures for many institutions.
The ROI figures are going to be highly dependent upon the mix of majors in each college. Thus, Businessweek's list of "best bargains" is skewed toward public institutions that enroll a large number of students in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields, i.e., Colorado School of Mines, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, Cal Poly, Purdue, and Missouri University of Science & Technology.
It has been well documented that jobs that require college degrees generally have much better benefits, particularly pension and health care benefits, than those held by people with only a high school diploma. Thus, by focusing on earnings only, and not accounting for benefits differences, the returns to college are again biased downward.

Most of the evidence from labor economists (see the work of Card and Krueger, or Ehrenberg) points to the fact that differences in returns to college are driven more by within college variation (i.e., differences in the choice of majors or academic experiences once enrolled in a particular college) rather than differences between colleges. What this means is that the decisions students make about what to major in, what courses to take, and what other experiences they have in college have much more influence on their post-college earnings than does the choice of which college to attend.

The article concludes with this ridiculous comment:

Over the past 30 years, the S&P 500 Index averaged about 11 percent a year. Only 88 schools out of the 554 in the study had a better return than the S&;P. Everywhere else, students would have been better off—financially, at least—if they invested the money they spent on their college educations and never set foot in a classroom.

"For almost every school on the list," writes Lee [the director of quantitative analysis at the consulting firm used by Businessweek] in an e-mail, "prospective students paying full price would probably have been better off investing in the stock market 30 years ago rather than spending their money on a college education."

So the message here is that unless you attend one of those 88 schools, you are better off skipping college and instead investing the money in the stock market.

There have been many egregious examples over the years of the misuse of quantitative data to create rankings of colleges and universities. But this is perhaps the worst I have ever seen.

Glenn Beck University

2010-07-07T11:14:00.000-04:00

I was (briefly) interviewed on Marketplace Morning Report this morning about Glenn Beck's new "university."

A spitting contest on HuffPost

2010-05-28T10:16:00.003-04:00

Okay, I really wanted to title this, "A pissing contest," or worst case, "A urinating contest," but decided that was not decorous and dignified enough for The Itinerant Professor. So I toned it down a notch.

Michele Hernandez, admissions consultant extraordinaire of whom I previously wrote, published a piece in HuffPost yesterday blaming Harvard for hyping the admissions market for selective institutions. Far be it from me to defend Harvard; I've been plenty critical of the institution in this blog (just do a search for "Harvard" in the search box). I wrote a comment to her post stating that she was playing loose with the facts, and that she and her industry were as much to blame for the frenzy and anxiety students and parents face when dealing with trying to get in to these institutions. She then responded, and. . . .well, you can guess where this is going. She accused me of directing "anger" toward her, which was (I thought) not my tone at all. Guess some people believe anytime you disagree with them you're showing anger.

For some reason, HuffPost deleted parts of my response, I think because I posted too many times. So I'm reprinting the entire thing here:

Michele,

There is no "anger" whatsoever in my original comment; I didn't intend it as a wild rant, and if it came across that way, I apologize [I usually keep my angry rants anonymous :) ]. I'm merely questioning some of the facts you provided in your post, along with your assumption about where the admissions frenzy comes from. I questioned in your original post when you said that students were applying to 15-30 schools a year. You said in your comment that "My data is not based on anecdotes but rather on the actual data provided by colleges." I think you need to provide some citation for these numbers. I recognize HuffPost is not a scholarly journal, but there is still an obligation to inform your readers where these numbers come from.

My suspicion is that your "15-30 schools a year" is a wild exaggeration that is not based on reality, but based on the frenzy created at least in part by the admissions industry, as well as by the media. How many students are really applying to this many schools?

The U.S. Department of Education conducted a nationally-representative survey of students graduating from high schools in the U.S. in 2004; this survey found that only one-half of one percent of graduating seniors applied to 11 or more schools. Even allowing for the changes in college admissions that have occurred since 2004, due to Harvard's dropping of ED and other changes you describe, you would still be a long way from a norm of students today applying to 15-30 schools. Yes, there may be a very small number who do this, but to put this out there as the norm for those applying to the most selective schools I would describe as fear-mongering.

You are right that the colleges are to blame in part for this frenzy, as well as the media as I said earlier, but I believe the admissions consultant industry (of which you are certainly a very prominent member) is at least equally to blame. You try to convince parents that the only way to get their children into one of these institutions is by using the insider knowledge that you and others have, and that without that information (and the often five-figure fee that obtains it), their child has a snowball's chance in Miami of getting into one of those colleges. The fact that you state that “I turn away almost as many students as I work with” is no defense of what your industry helped to create.

In last year’s article in The New York Times (July 18 2009) on the admissions consultant industry, you were quoted as saying: "‘It’s annoying when people complain about the money,’ the Vermont-based counselor, Michele Hernandez, said. ‘I’m at the top of my field. Do people economize when they have a brain tumor and are looking for a neurosurgeon? If you want to go with someone cheaper, or chance it, don’t hire me.’" Is this really the impression we want to send to parents and prospective students, that getting into college is as complicated – and dangerous – as brain surgery?

Another way you add to the frenzy is through the impression you and some in your industry help to promulgate that the Ivy League institutions (and the small handful of others with similarly low acceptance rates) are the only reasonable destination for bright, motivated students. This does a terrible disservice to many students who could and would receive an excellent undergraduate education, often better than they would receive at one of these low-admittance schools, at many of dozens of other schools around the country that have much more reasonable acceptance rates and sometimes lower costs (see the work of The Education Conservancy – http://educationconservancy.org – for helping to combat this). I imagine you’ll respond by saying that that’s part of your service, to help students find the right schools for them. But it’s hard to deny that your website and publicity emphasizes the Ivies, and by featuring so prominently their low acceptance rates, you help add to the anxiety and insecurity these families face.

We'll have to wait and see if she responds.

The Itinerant Professor curse

2010-05-28T09:33:00.001-04:00

Well, just as I was writing something nice about the proprietary sector, word comes out that an influential analyst has trashed it. Steve Eisman of FrontPoint Financial Services Fund, an analyst featured in Michael Lewis's book The Big Short, spoke at the Ira Sohn Investment Research Conference on Wednesday. He was quoted as saying (by Inside HigherEd):

"Until recently, I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive and morally bankrupt as the subprime mortgage industry," said Eisman. "I was wrong. The For-Profit Education Industry has proven equal to the task."

Pretty strong words from someone who supposedly has a good track record for reading markets and industries.

Mother Jones has a good recap of Eisman's perspective on the sector, and why he thinks it's ready for a tumble. He blames the Obama administration's push for gainful employment regulations, which would force the sector to demonstrate that graduates of their institutions make enough money to shoulder the higher debt burdens students there have, on average (see the recent College Board report, Who Borrows Most? for more on this issue).

Criticism of this sector is not new; as far back as almost two decades ago, in the 1992 reauthorization of the Higher Education of 1965, the regulations on student loan defaults were changed and hundreds of proprietary institutions were thrown out of the Title IV programs. But the sector has demonstrated an incredible resilience - and profitability - over the years. The Chronicle of Higher Education had been doing a good job tracking the share prices and market cap of the key players in the sector, but it seemed to have stopped this in recent years (here's the most recent article on it I could find, from 2008 - you need to be a Chronicle subscriber to read it). Its reporting has shown how stock prices of many of the large companies, such as Apollo Group (parent company of the University of Phoenix, the 640 pound gorilla in the industry), ITT Tech, Capella, and others, have risen far in advance of most market indices over the last decade (and fell less rapidly in the decline of the last couple of years).

Many in the proprietary sector broke out the champagne, I'm sure, when Bob Shireman announced last week that he was leaving the Department of Education. He was seen as the leader of the efforts to rein in the sector, which has seen its share of Pell Grant dollars increase to 21 percent, even though they represent 9 percent of undergraduate enrollment (data from the College Board Trends in Student Aid website). Their glee may be shortlived, however. It is likely that others in the Department, as well as Congress, will continue the scrutiny of which Shireman was the figurehead. Steve Eisman obviously agrees.

Building linkages with the proprietary sector?

2010-05-26T17:00:00.002-04:00

A couple of weeks ago I attended a meeting at the American Enterprise Institute titled "AEI Forum on Higher Education." From the invitation, it was a little unclear what the focus of the meeting was going to be. But given that it was being sponsored by AEI, my assumption was that it was going to revolve around something to do with markets and market forces in higher education, given AEI's fairly conservative orientation. My first thought was, "Are you sure you want me there?", but I figured it could make for an interesting event so I agreed to attend.

The meeting did, in fact, focus on markets in the sense that there was a heavy does of proprietary sector institutions and other companies represented. It was a small group of people, only about 25 or so, including (I believe) just five of us "traditional" academics. We've been asked not to divulge the details of what was discussed at the meeting, as it was designed to create an open dialogue between the participants, and make some connections between those of us on the traditional (i.e., public or not-for-profit institutions) and for-profit sides.

What I can say was that it was interesting hearing people from the proprietaries talking in detail about some of what goes on in their institutions. I've read quite a bit about this sector, and have heard bits and pieces at conferences, but not to this level of detail before. I've also written some about my interactions with this sector.before. The meeting also included representatives from companies that were not direct postsecondary providers, like some of the institutions whose logos I included at the top of this post. These other companies provide a variety of services to both for-profit and not-for-profit institutions alike.

Part of AEI's agenda for the meeting was tto spur more research on the new providers in higher education. It's unclear yet where this will go, but there is at least one lead I am following up on with one company. Stay tuned for more details.

The 21st Century Student: Can American Colleges Deliver?

2010-04-29T11:33:00.000-04:00

Here's a link to the summary (and streaming audio) of a talk I gave last week in Penn State's Research Unplugged lecture series.

It's not easy making up $11B in endowment value

2010-04-27T17:45:00.001-04:00

Yes, it's come down to this -- Harvard now begging its alumni to send their spare change to Cambridge to help it recover the $11B (or 27%) in endowment value it lost last year. Okay, that's just a little bit of an exaggeration - they're asking for more than just spare change. But the impact of the downturn in Harvard's endowment is being felt across the university. It's easy to take potshots at what Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam used to lovingly refer to as World's Greatest University, or WGU for short (not to be confused, of course, with the Western Governors University, a somewhat less-prestigious on-line university). But maybe some of those potshots are deserved.

Harvard flew high in the 1990s and in the early part of the current century, when it often earned annual returns in the high teens, with an endowment heavily-invested in private equity and other alternative investments. It is easy to simply write off last year's plunge as the inevitable result of the crows coming home to roost - that in return for earning double-digit returns all those years, the university exposed itself to such high betas that it ran the risk of a large downturn at some point. And in fact, Harvard Management Company has trumpeted this perspective, arguing that if it had invested its endowment more conservatively all those years, and had earned returns much closer to market benchmarks, then it would never have grown as spectacularly as it did: "Harvard's long-term performance remains strong, even after the severe market correction experienced in fiscal year 2009. The 10-year annualized return is 8.9% versus 1.4% for a typical 60/40 stock/bond portfolio." That 8.9% still sounds good, but keep in mind that just two years earlier the 10-year annualized return had been 15%.

But this just may be a bit of Monday morning quarterbacking on Harvard's part. Yes, by investing in risky instruments with higher betas, Harvard did earn larger returns. And it turned around and took those earnings and plowed them into the operating budget (Harvard subsidizes about 40% of its operating budget through endowment earnings). But it took this action with likely little forethought to what would happen to the operating budget if those endowment earnings plummeted, as they did last year. The result is that Harvard now has a mess on its hands, as signified by large holes in the ground across the Charles River in Boston where it has halted construction on the Allston campus (see these articles from Harvard Magazine, "Allston Development on Ice" and "Arrested Development"). Harvard also had to borrow $2.5 billion in December 2008 in order to meet cash needs and to meet calls on private equity investments.

It will take Harvard a long time to return the endowment (and its subsidy of the operating budget) to levels it enjoyed just a couple of years ago. And hopefully Harvard's endowment managers (and those of other universities who made similar investing decisions) will have learned a valuable lesson about the downside of risky investment instruments.

The latest from the chutzpah department

2010-04-21T16:02:00.003-04:00

Sometimes you just have to be amazed at the emails you get from strangers. Here's the latest:

Don,

I have been perusing educational blogs of late and really enjoy your perspectives on education. I was particularly interested in your post on college campus violence, as there will be a Board of Regents meeting on the University of Colorado Denver campus that is expected to deal with whether or not individuals will be able to bear arms on campus this upcoming week.

Anyway, I work in affiliation with _______ College (www._______.edu) and was wondering if it would be possible for us to place an in-text link to the website in one of your posts? We would not be asking that ________ appear in the text, but rather a link from an anchor text statement would link to ________.

Please email me back and let me know if that is a possibility!

Thanks
Genevieve

Yeah, right -- some stranger from a for-profit college (which is what it was) wants me to advertise and promote her college for her in my blog, all just because I'm a nice guy. You'd think she'd at least offer me some monetary compensation for the free advertising. But noooooooo. . . .

Let me know if any of you other bloggers have heard from Genevieve.

Signs of the apocalypse, part 2

2010-03-21T20:35:00.003-04:00

In a long overdue post, I'll describe another sign of the pending apocalypse in higher education. In my earlier post, I described how the State of California is letting its once-vaunted public higher education system die a slow death. This time I turn to Florida, another state that has been battered by the recession and whose higher education system has also taken a beating.

Florida cut its funding for higher education by almost 10 percent this year compared to fiscal year 2009, about three times the size of the average reduction across the nation. The public colleges and universities in the state responded in different ways to the cuts, including gaining the authority from the legislature to raise tuition at a higher rate than they had in the past.

Florida State University announced last month that it was laying off 36 tenure-line faculty, 21 of whom already hold tenure. Traditionally, universities have not laid off tenured faculty without declaring a state of financial exigency, defined by the American Association of University Professors as, "an imminent financial crisis that threatens the survival of the institution as a whole and that cannot be alleviated by less drastic means." While the cuts endured by Florida State are unarguably large, it is hard to make the argument that they threaten the "survival of the institution as a whole."

In discussing the procedures for laying off tenured faculty, the AAUP says, "As a first step, there should be a faculty body that participates in the decision that a condition of financial exigency exists or is imminent, and that all feasible alternatives to termination of appointments have been pursued." The decisions at FSU evidently came from the top down, with very little (if any) faculty input.

Florida State is not the first major university to layoff tenured faculty. Following Hurricane Katrina, Tulane laid off 230 faculty members, 65 of whom were tenured, when it eliminated four of its six engineering departments. But in the wake of the hurricane, which shut the campus for an entire semester, Tulane did declare a financial exigency. The leadership of the university consulted an advisory panel of faculty members in making the decision to eliminate the positions. Even under these circumstances, however, Tulane was criticized by the AAUP and others for going too far.

Florida State, like any other university, is not obligated to adhere to AAUP principles. But AAUP documents such as the 1940 Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure have long been considered "common law" in American higher education. It is likely that other universities will use the current financial situation as an excuse to abandon these principles. Yet it is even more important in times like these that faculty involvement in critical decisions be reaffirmed and valued.

Signs of the apocalypse, part 1

2010-02-20T13:29:00.001-05:00

This week I had the opportunity to testify at a heaing of the Joint Committee on the Master Plan for Higher Education of the California Legislature. This hearing, on Affordability and Student Aid, was the third held by the committee, which is conducting its work as the Master Plan celebrates its 50th anniversary.

In a post on the blog 21st Century Scholar, written before this hearing, I questioned whether the Master Plan -- widely recognized as having created the best public higher education system in the country -- was in fact dead. The State of California has managed to get itself in such a fiscal mess that it is unlikely that it can ever pull itself out. It's not fair to just blame the current recession, which admittedly has battered California as much as any state. The fiscal problems, however, are symptomatic of a three-decade long antitax movement in California that has made it difficult for the legislature and governors to come up with enough funds to adequately fund the University of California, California State University, and the state's community colleges.

I'm sorry to report that, after sitting through part of the hearing this week, it is unlikely that this Joint Committee is going to be able to resolve the problems facing higher education in California. It is clear that the fiscal constraints facing the state are unlikely to be removed without large-scale changes to the political structures there. This would include changing laws and initiative petitions that have restricted the ability of the legislature and governors to raise the tax revenues necessary to support a world-class higher education system. It would likely also require changing the earmarking of parts of the state budget to purposes such as K-12 education and corrections, both of which leave little flexibility for funding higher education when federal mandates such as Medicaid spending are taken into account.

I'm afraid that the reality is that the future will bring two things. First, public higher education in California will be more expensive for this and future generations of Californians than those who had benefited from the first four decades or so of the Master Plan. While UC and CSU have taken steps to make institutional grants available to financially-needy students (to supplement those funds available through Cal Grants and federal aid), it will likely be a challenge for them to maintain these commitments down the road. Like many other public institutions, they will face immense pressure to address issues of middle-income (and even upper-income) affordability, at the expense of maintaining a commitment to access for poorer students. In a piece I wrote for The Century Foundation in 2003, I demonstrated how the most selective campuses of the UC system did a better job enrolling Pell Grant recipients than their peers around the country. It is unlikely they will be able to continue this commitment in the future.

Second, the three sectors are likely to face a Hobson's choice of either allowing the quality of their institutions to degrade, or to restrict access. I point out in my testimony that six of the UC campuses are ranked in the top 50 national universities, public and private, by U.S. News & World Report, and in the top 200 internationally by the Times Higher Education in London. Starved of the necessary resources to maintain this level of quality, it will have to decrease. Alternatively, the institutions could maintain quality, but at the expense of enrolling fewer students. In the worst case scenario, quality would erode and access would be constricted.

I don't envy the task in front of the Joint Committee, or that of the administrators and faculty in the three sectors in California. There are no easy solutions, other than going back to the public and voters in California and presenting them with the likely outcome if the existing antitax mentality continues. And I am afraid of how the public will react to that proposition.

Another insult to the Canadians

2010-02-18T19:01:00.005-05:00

This is not exactly about higher education, but file it under the "Itinerant" part of this blog. Returning from testifying in front of the California legislature (which will be the subject of another post in the not-too-distant future), I picked up the Hemispheres magazine on the United flight. There I found a nice article about what to do in Montreal. At the end of the article, there was this map (click on the map to see a larger version):

Notice the small inset map, showing the position of Montreal in Canada and relative to the U.S.

Unfortunately, the map is not even close to where Montreal truly is, as shown in Google maps:

Where the Hemispheres map shows Montreal is actually Kingston, ON. Once again, we Americans demonstrate our ignorance of our neighbor to the north. You can download a PDF version of the magazine article on the Hemispheres website.

Another shooting on campus

2010-02-13T20:21:00.002-05:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education

There have been too many instances of gun violence on college campuses in recent years. This is obviously a reflection of our larger society, as I have previously written about. But this particular incident hits very close to home, as University of Alabama Huntsville biology professor Any Bishop has been charged with shooting five of her colleagues and a staff member in the biology department at UAH. Three people were killed and three others were injured and hospitalized. The shooting, which occurred Friday afternoon at a meeting of the biology faculty, allegedly involved a dispute over Professor Bishop's tenure. According to news reports, she was denied tenure last year, and apparently an appeal to the department was about to be or had recently been denied. Here are links to stories in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Ed.

Anyone who has been in academe for any period of time can tell stories about disputes between colleagues. I'm certainly aware of examples of these from my own career. The tenure denial cases. The academic couple in the same department who split when one of the pair had an affair with a graduate student. The senior colleague who alleges discriminatory and inequitable treatment.

No one ever expects disputes like these to escalate to the level of violence exhibited in Huntsville yesterday. But as more and more of these instances occur, one can't help but think about the potential for it to happen at your own campus. As conflicts between colleagues arise, it's all but impossible not to have in the back of your mind concern over the potential for violence to occur.

My thoughts are with the faculty, staff, and students at UAH in this difficult time.

The National Merit Scholarship Corporation plays the heavy

2010-02-08T13:27:00.000-05:00

This morning's Chronicle of Higher Education had an article about the National Merit Scholarship Corporation's attack on a blogger, Nancy Griesemer, for her publication of the state cutoff scores used by NMSC for its awarding of National Merit Scholarships. Her point was that these cutoff scores vary widely from state to state, so that a student scoring at a certain level on the PSAT (used as the cutoff for the awarding of the scholarships) would qualify for a scholarship in one state, while a student scoring at exactly the same level in another state may not qualify.

As was criticized by the National Association for College Admissions Counseling in a report last year, the use of a single test for the awarding of the scholarships is an inappropriate use of a high-stakes test. Nevertheless, the NMSC persists in this practice, and has refused to release data on the distribution of its scholarship recipients by race or socioeconomic status.

Seems that the NMSC accused Ms. Griesemer of publishing "proprietary information," yet these cutoff scores are fairly widely-distributed, such as to pretty much every high school guidance office in the nation. Nevertheless, NMSC demanded that she take the information off of her blog, which she did. As legal experts in the Chronicle article pointed out, you can't sue someone for publishing facts. FairTest, an organization dedicated to the appropriate use of educational testing, and presumably more able to stand up to the NMSC, jumped to Ms. Griesemer's defense and assistance by publishing the list of state cutoff scores. You can find FairTest's list here, where for example you can see that a PSAT score of 208 would be high enough to qualify you for a scholarship in Alabama, but a score of 221 would be required in Massachusetts or Maryland.

More on Sallie Mae's lobbying

2010-02-08T08:57:00.001-05:00

In a post last December, I described how Sallie Mae has been one of the leaders in spending money to lobby Congress and the administration on student loan issues. A report in last Friday's New York Times describes how Sallie Mae's lobbying expenses increased even further in 2009, to $8 million, more than double the amount it spent in 2008. Seems like Sallie Mae isn't yet ready to give up the fight against the Obama administration's attempt to eliminate the FFEL program.

What was missing in the State of the Union

2010-02-06T20:43:00.001-05:00

Over at Education This Week, hosted by the Educational Policy Institute, I blogged about what President Obama left out of his State of the Union speech regarding higher education.

Rodney and me (with apologies to Michael Moore)

2010-02-02T20:02:00.002-05:00

It's always interesting to see how people react to things I've published on the web or when I'm quoted in the media. I've learned that's the risk you take when you put yourself out there. In December, I published an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle about the fee increases at the U. of California. It generated only a handful of comments in the Chronicle's on-line edition, including one amazingly intelligent and articulate reader who said, "An incredibly insightful article from a professor from Pennsylvania who has no reason to be biased for or against California" (and I swear it wasn't me using an alias, and I highly doubt my mother reads the Chronicle). But my favorite comment was from the reader who said, "Back to Pennsylvania, Bozo." While first tempted to respond in kind with, "That's Professor Bozo to you," I somehow managed to resist the urge. These are just a couple of examples of what I've seen from the general public.

But today I came across a blog post that was a little different, and from a source that should know better. The blog, "The Third Leg: Career Higher Education," is published by my friends at the Career College Association (CCA), the lobbying organization for for-profit higher education institutions. Today's post in the blog critiques an article in the Houston Chronicle by Jeanine Kever: "Kever quotes a Donald Heller, a traditional higher education stalwart, who suggests employers will not equate degrees from proprietary colleges with the University of Houston, Penn State or Rice."

I'm not quite sure what it means to be "a Donald Heller" -- is that supposed to be a slap in the face, as opposed to being called just plain ol' "Donald Heller"? I also enjoyed being referred to as a "traditional higher education stalwart." Again, I'm not sure if this means I'm traditional, and I'm a stalwart of higher education? It's not too often that anyone who knows me calls me "traditional," but I certainly wouldn't take offense at being called a stalwart of higher education. Or maybe it's implying that I'm a stalwart of traditional higher education, whatever that is (Mark Hopkins and a log? Charles Elliot at Harvard? The Yale Report of 1828?).

In any event, I find the whole thing rather amusing. The blog post does not identify the author, but featured prominently next to the post is a picture of Harris Miller, President and CEO of the CCA. Now Harris is actually a really nice guy; we both spoke at a hearing of the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance a couple of years ago in Nashville, and in chatting during the breaks, found that we have quite a bit in common. For example, we both share a passion for promoting access to postsecondary education for historically underserved populations of students. If you're really interested in what Harris and I had to say at the hearing, you can watch a video of it.

So I'm going to assume it wasn't Harris himself who was dissing me, but probably some lackey of his who doesn't know that I am not just "a Donald Heller," but am actually the Donald Heller. To paraphrase that great higher education stalwart Rodney Dangerfield, I don't get no respect. To add insult to injury, the CCA blog lists 14 "Education Blogs of Note," and they have the audacity to exclude The Itinerant Professor from the list!

Oh, and by the way Harris -- I've got almost twice as many Facebook friends as the Career College Association does.* So put that in your proprietary pipe and chew on it.

===================

* at least today, that is

The death of the Master Plan for Higher Education in California?

2010-02-01T14:37:00.004-05:00

My friends at the blog "21st Century Scholar" provided me with the opportunity to be a guest blogger there this week. Here's my post on the Master Plan.

Happy New Year!

2010-01-05T11:46:00.001-05:00

Returned to the office today after the holiday break to find this on the CSHE refrigerator, from the higher education poetry magnets. Couldn't have said it better myself.

As soon as I get my new course for the spring semester up, I'll be posting about what the new year is likely to bring us in higher education.

Another take on the U. of California fee increases

2009-12-20T11:22:00.001-05:00

I published an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle today, outlining why the fee increases imposed by the UC regents was the right decision. The op-ed was based on my earlier blog post on the topic. There was an opposing piece written by the former admissions director at UC Berkeley, as well as two other op-eds. You can see all of them in the Chronicle's Sunday Insight section.

I weigh in on the Pittsburgh tuition tax proposal

2009-12-16T19:34:00.002-05:00

Story on the local CBS affiliate this evening: "Tuition Tax in State College?". If you have trouble with the video player, you can read a transcript here.

Sallie Mae's hypocrisy

2009-12-07T20:46:00.001-05:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education a couple of weeks ago had an article (sorry, but you have to be a Chronicle subscriber to access the full article on-line) about a grass roots campaign being conducted by our friends at Sallie Mae. Turns out that they had a little problem with part of SAFRA, the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act passed by the House earlier this fall and waiting now to be taken up by the Senate. Which part of the legislation did they not like? The part that, in the words of the House Education and Labor Committee:

Converts all new federal student lending to the stable, effective and cost-efficient Direct Loan program. Beginning July 1, 2010, all new federal student loans will be originated through the Direct Loan program, instead of through lenders subsidized by taxpayers in the federally-guaranteed student loan program.

Not surprising that Sallie Mae didn't agree with this provision, since a good portion of its business comes from originating federally-guaranteed student loans.

So according to the Chronicle article, the leadership of Sallie Mae went out and exhorted their workers to collect signatures on petitions to be sent to Congress, asking them not to shut down the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program. Now we could all have a long and engaging debate about FFEL versus Direct Loans, but that's a discussion to be had another day. The point here is to discuss Al Lord, Sallie Mae's CEO, and yes, the same Al Lord who earned $225 million from 1999 through 2004. That's an average of $45 million per year for those of you who are too lazy or unable to do the math. I should note here that Al Lord is an alumnus of Penn State, has received numerous awards from the university, and has also been a generous donor with some of the money he's earned from Sallie Mae.

The article describes how Lord attended a rally held in Fishers, Indiana, home of a Sallie Mae facility with 1,600 employees, including 100 loan originators whose jobs are on the line if the Senate passes its version of SAFRA. At the rally, Lord was quoted as saying, "There's Washington, and then there's the rest of the country. This is the rest of the country."

The implication here is that the big, bad Congress represents Washington, and scrappy, fighting Sallie Mae represents the "rest of the country." But Sallie Mae is as ingrained in Washington as almost any entity in America. It started out as a federally-chartered enterprise with the mission of originating and servicing student loans. In the 1990s, it began conversion to a private corporation, and has since grown to be one of the country's largest financial services companies, listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Sallie Mae is also one of the biggest lobbyists and contributors to Congressional campaigns in the financial aid industry in Washington. A few quotes about its lobbying activities:

"Sallie Mae spent $3.4 million lobbying last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. It also showered campaign contributions on individual members of Congress, including $26,150 for Rep. Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania, chairman of the House Financial Services Commitee and a key Democratic ally, and $10,000 on moderate 'Blue Dog' Democrats" (Chronicle, 7/30/09).

"Sallie Mae has always been generous to the lawmakers it supports. In the current election cycle, from January 1999 through the end of July, Sallie Mae's PAC has contributed $145,100 to Republican Congressional candidates and $98,093 to Democrats. In contributing to Congressional leaders, Sallie Mae is bipartisan. For example, while Sallie Mae provided $6,500 to the G.O.P. House leadership, it has given $11,000 to the chamber's Democratic leaders" (Chronicle, 8/11/00).

"Sallie Mae, the nation's largest student-loan company, spent $2-million on lobbying in the first half of this year" (Chronicle, 7/30/09).

"Sallie Mae spent $2.3 million in the first half of 2007 to lobby Congress, the White House, the Education Department, and the Government Accountability Office, according to a disclosure form filed with the Senates public records office" (New America Foundation, Higher Ed Watch, 11/30/07)

"Banks and other entities in the student-loan industry reported spending about $5.7 million [in 2005], led by Sallie Mae’s $1.46 million" (Inside Higher Ed, 12/21/06).

So for Al Lord to imply that Sallie Mae is "the rest of the country" is just a bit facetious. Sallie Mae is as intertwined with Washington as is the United States Congress. It has every right to lobby to protect its interests, but it shouldn't be hypocritical in doing so.

Radio show on paying for higher education

2009-12-03T11:30:00.002-05:00

I was a guest this morning, along with the president of Shippensburg University, on "Radio Smart Talk" on WITF, the public radio station in Harrisburg. Here's a description of the show from the WITF website:

Pennsylvania's four state-related universities -- Penn State, Pitt, Temple, and Lincoln -- are still awaiting almost $700 million in funding from the state. That money is being held up by the legislature who has yet to put the final touches on the state budget...The broader conversation is how Pennsylvania state-related and state owned universities are funded to begin with. Tuitions are higher at Pennsylvania's public colleges than in most states and the universities say that's because the state provides a smaller level of funding. In fact, the College Board said last month that Pennsylvania's four-year public universities are the fourth most expensive for tuition and fees in the country. Should the state be providing more funding or do the universities have to find ways to more drastically cut costs?

Here's a link to a stream of the show.

University of California Regents raise tuition 32 percent - great idea!

2009-11-20T15:07:00.002-05:00

Note: See this later blog post for more on this issue, including an op-ed I published in the San Francisco Chronicle: http://donheller.blogspot.com/2009/12/another-take-on-u-of-california-fee.html

The media are alive with coverage of the Cal Regents' decision yesterday to raise fees (what the rest of us call tuition) 32 percent for next fall (including a 15 percent mid-year increase for the spring semester). The Chronicle of Higher Education had some good video of the protests at the Regents meeting, though regrettably the video doesn't show any actually Tasering taking place even though the narration makes reference to it.

If my calculations are right, this means that fees next year will be in the ballpart of $12,560 for resident undergraduate students, certainly a large dollar and percentage increase over what students are paying this year. But where does this place UC compared to other public universities? Each year, the Washington Higher Education Coordinating Board produces an excellent report summarizing tuition and fee rates at public universities in every state. The most recent report is for last year, and shows that Berkeley's rate of $8,932 was 12th highest in the nation for public flagship universities - but still $4,774 or 34 percent below the most expensive public university in the nation, a distinction held by my own institution, Penn State - University Park. Other flagships have not yet announced their increases for next year, but Berkeley will by no means be the most expensive - tuition prices at Penn State and the University of Vermont this year, for example, are already over Berkeley's announced rate for next year. But there is no doubt that Berkeley's announced increase will move it up in these dubious rankings. Tuition at the other UC campuses is generally lower than at Berkeley, but still high compared to peer institutions. (If you are interested in reading more, here is a link to the UC news office information about the fee increases.)

Undoubtedly the protests and outrage at the Regents' decision is due not just to the large increase imposed for this spring and next year, but also because of the fact that UC historically had been one of the cheaper public universities in the country, especially considering the perceived quality of the education that students at most campuses enjoy. Data from the Washington Higher Ed Board show that twenty years ago, Berkeley was the18th least expensive flagship in the nation. By 1999, it had jumped to 19th most expensive in the nation, and next year's rate will undoubtedly put it in the top five. So in two decades, the comparable price of Berkeley has changed quite radically.

But many of the articles included little about what the Regents had decided about financial aid for next year. The university is expanding its "Blue and Gold Opportunity Plan," which next year will guarantee that students with financial need and family incomes below $70,000 will not have to pay any tuition or fees (but may still have to pay for room, board, books, etc.). So these students will be held harmless by the fee increase. In fact, the press release issued by the UC President's Office states the combination of state, federal, and institutional grant aid and tax credits will ensure that the three-fourths of students who come from families with incomes below $180,000 will see no increase in their fees over this year.

In comparison to most other flagship universities, Berkeley has done an excellent job enrolling low- and moderate-income students, as measured by the proportion of undergraduates receiving Pell Grants. In an issue brief I wrote for The Century Foundation, I examined the proportion of Pell Grant recipients enrolling at almost 150 of the nation's most selective colleges and universities (both public and private) in the 2001-02 academic year. At that time, 32.4 percent of Berkeley undergraduates received Pell Grants, a rate higher than all but two other institutions (one of which was UCLA).

The most recent data (2007-08) available from The Institute for College Access and Success (TICAS) show that 28 percent of Berkeley undergrads still receive Pell Grants. Many of Berkeley's flagship peers come nowhere near this level of achievement in enrolling low- and moderate-income students:

U. of Michigan - 8%
U. of Virginia - 8%
U. of Illinois - 16%
U. of Georgia - 12%

to name just a few.

It's important to note that there is research that shows that students, particularly those from poorer families, react to the sticker price of college (the posted price before subtracting grant aid) more than they do the net price when making decisions on enrolling in postsecondary education. One can understand why when the majority of the news coverage of the Regents' decision yesterday focused on the fee increase, with little information about the financial aid initiatives. So there is, and should be, some concern about whether these increases will dissuade some poorer students from attending UC who otherwise would qualify for admission.

But just as there are a good proportion of poor students at UC, its more selective campuses such as Berkeley and UCLA also have a good percentage of more well-off students. The TICAS data show that in 2007-08, 42 percent of Berkeley undergrads and 47 percent at UCLA did not even bother applying for financial aid. While it is possible that some of these students may have financial need even though they did not bother applying for aid, the chances are much greater that most of these students came from families who had income and assets large enough that they knew they would not qualify for state, federal, or institutional aid.

One advantage of higher fees is that they allow the university to capture the consumer surplus of these wealthier students, an issue I wrote about in an earlier post this month. Remember, even at a fee level of approximately $12,560 next year, a Berkeley education is still going to be much cheaper than the alternative at almost all private universities, or out-of-state public universities. Clearly many of these families would be willing to pay even more, so it makes economic sense for the university to capture these higher fees from these families and turn them around into need-based grants for students from poorer families.

The UC Regents are in a tough position. The university is facing a budget shortfall of over $1 billion (before the fee increase), due largely to the cut in its state appropriation. There are certainly steps that the institution needs to take to make sure it is operating as efficiently and effectively as possible, but it is unrealistic to expect that it can reduce its budget $1 billion on the cost side. Employees at UC are already facing 11 to 26 days of furlough this year as a cost-cutting measure. Without generating more revenue - and the university has also committed itself to raising $1 billion for student support over the next four years - it would have little choice other than to let the quality of the education degrade even further. And this would be an absolute travesty for an institution that has long been a jewel of American public higher education.

Revoking tenure for a minor error? Or a case of intellectual dishonesty?

2009-11-19T20:06:00.000-05:00

An article yesterday in In Denver Times detailed the firing of tenured professor Angelina De La Torre of Metro State College in Denver. Her transgression? According to the article - and this post is based on what is reported in that article - this was the reason:

"During a post-tenure review process, which every tenured professor is subject to every five years, De La Torre submitted her updated curriculum vitae, or dossier. On the dossier, she listed a paper as having been published in 2005 in a specialized academic journal.

A review of the dossier showed that the journal did not contain the article De La Torre claimed to have published in 2005.

The college’s investigation report said she 'intentionally' lied on a review of her performance. According to the Handbook for Professional Personnel, the code of conduct for professors, such dishonesty is grounds for dismissal."

De La Torre's defense was that it was an honest error; she had presented the paper at a conference and had submitted it with a check for $25 with the understanding that it would be published in one of the organization's journals. She had assumed it was, but evidently hadn't seen it in print. She said she had spoken to the organization's executive director who gave her the information about the issue of the journal in which her article appeared. Her article did not appear in the journal she had claimed on her CV, and the Board of Metro State this month upheld her firing.

This case raises interesting questions. Is this a case of an honest error by a professor who had, according to the article, an otherwise illustrious career at Metro State? Or does her mistake cut to the core of the concept of academic honesty: not taking credit for something you did not write? One could argue that punishing someone so severely, to the extent of revoking their tenure, seems to be overly draconian for what many could see as an honest mistake. After all, De La Torre was already tenured, and was undergoing a post-tenure review; the argument goes that she likely had little to gain by adding one publication to her CV that she hadn't written. But as faculty members, our worth and reputations are very tightly entwined with our academic honesty and integrity. Anything that calls that integrity into question could be perceived to be enough to warrant dismissal, particularly if called for in the faculty handbook.

De La Torre has said that she will sue the university to get her job back, so we will have wait to see (assuming her suit goes forward) if and how the court will rule. One lesson we should all learn from this case, however, is to be very cautious with our curriculum vitae and similar materials that we use to describe our scholarly and other accomplishments. Even if she does prevail, and gets her job back, I am sure that the experience both she and Metro State have been through has damaged both parties.

Stop financial aid for wealthy students - responses to comments

2009-11-08T20:36:00.009-05:00

I recently published an op-ed in Inside Higher Ed titled “Stop Financial Aid for Wealthy Students.” It generated a number of comments; in fact, it was the second most-commented article on the site for the week (second only to a news article titled “The Power of Race”) [Note: Currently the most commented in the past week on 11/10.]

Many posters were supportive of my views, but others were quite critical. Here are my responses to some of the criticisms people raised, along with a few other interesting posts. I have cut and pasted all or some of the comment, typos and all (you can go to the article to read the full comment), and then respond.

1. “Let's just remember that 120K doesn't get you the same lifestyle in New Jersey as it might in Texas before we call people at that level wealthy. Having lived in both places, and not being the extravagant type, I can tell you that $150K is the equivalent of a lot less elsewhere.”

“I realize that many family have a lot less, but with three paid jobs in the family (2 for me, 1 for my wife), we make about 150K. After mortgage, living expenses in NYS, state income taxes, medical bills, a private school tuition of 20K-30K or more would be the straw that breaks the camels back.”

“I disagree completely with Dr. Heller. I would like to know how a family with an income between $120,000 and $180,000 can pay to educate multiple children at $52K per year. Are we supposed to live on nothing? My family falls in this income range and I can assure you that we are certainly neither wealthy nor price insensitive; in fact, this group is the hardest hit by the exorbitant college tuition in this country. We don't qualify for need-based financial aid and cannot afford the pricetags of most private institutions.”

All three are correct that $150,000 or even $200,000 in income does not put you in the class of Bill Gates, i.e., someone who can purchase whatever they want without even thinking about it. Nevertheless, as I point out in the article, $200,000 does put you in the top 5% of all families across the country. Being among the top 5% or 10% of families in the country should not necessarily entitle you to the right to or privilege of having your child’s education at one of these elite institutions subsidized to the extent that that it is under current policies.

I’d love to be able to afford a Ferrari, but cannot given my income and other choices I have made. I have other good options that fulfill my transportation needs. Similarly, there are plenty of other postsecondary options for these families: lower cost institutions, borrowing to pay for a more expensive college, or as one poster noted, attending other institutions that offer merit scholarships. One commenter included the cost of private school tuition; this is clearly a choice that family made, and if it leaves them with less money for college, then they have to live with that decision.

One person summarized these arguments very cogently: “I do agree that $150K in Austin is not the same as $150 in New York City, but for those of you complaining that parents with a $120K+ income deserve to have this children qualify for financial aid because of the $52K/yr price tag, remember just one thing: one can get a good college education without going to Harvard, Yale, or Stanford. Why not go the University of Virginia or the University of Michigan at approximately half the cost? Or, if the network and cache of the Ivies are that important to you, take out student loans. Subsidies for the middle class and/or wealthy are unconscionable in this economy. Harvard is going to fire librarians, but give $34K in aid per year to a kid with a family income of $150K?”

And yes, the cost of living differs in different parts of the country. Living in a rural area, I am fully aware that the cost of living here differs from that of the metropolitan New York area. But if some of these posters want to complain about the difficulty of living on $150K in New York, I would like to see them try to live in the Boston area on the $30,000 a year a janitor at Harvard may make. Or as one person said, “So private institutions are giving grants to the wealthy, but laying off staff. One wonders what the salaries of the layed off staff were? Can you look a janitor who makes $24 K in the face and say that I have to terminate you because I need your salary to give a wealthy kid a grant?”

2. “As a parent of a Yale freshman, and a single parent with an income in the 60-12K range, I am very grateful for the aid afforded to us. Had Yale not had such a generous aid policy, my son would not have been able to attend. It's high time that these students' achievements be rewarded, no matter what the family income. I work in a college where most of the students are from low income backgrounds, and, unlike the atmosphere at Yale, the attitude most of the time is that of entitlement, not hard work and earning your keep.” [emphasis added]

I would love to know at what college this parent works – or more appropriately, on which planet he or she lives? Based on my experience, and that of many of my other faculty colleagues around the country with whom I speak, it is the students from wealthier families at the elite institutions who are the ones who arrive with and maintain a much greater sense of entitlement, not the low-income students.

3. “My step-daughter attends a small, respected regional liberal arts college and has reached the maximum amount of loans and grants permissible by the federal and state government. She received a large college scholarship and received an outside scholarship because her father survives on worker's compensation. And yet, despite a family income below $30,000, there is an outstanding bill of $3,000 per semester.”

This commenter is absolutely correct – the data on financial aid show very clearly that students from lower-income families generally face much higher levels of unmet need than those from middle- and upper-income families.

4. “I have known undergrads whose parents continued to claim them as tax deductions while providing no actual support, which kept the student from being able to receive financial aid. There should be a way around this.”

This comment was in response to an early person who said her parents did not provide any support when she went to college. There is in fact a “way around this” – it is called professional judgment, which financial aid officers can apply based on an individuals’ circumstances. If the person can in fact document that this has occurred, they can be treated differently.

5. “The ‘financial aid’ provided by these wealthy institutions is NOT financial aid. It is tuition discounting and it's all about marketing and retention. . . Raise the institutional profile etc.”

This may be true for some institutions, but certainly not Harvard, Yale, and the like. How much higher can their profiles be raised?

6. “These schools are privately run enterprises and how they see fit to run their college is their business. If they were public, the article and discussion would be appropriate. However, they are private so they only have to report to their benefactors and boards, not the public, students, faculty, researchers, staff, etc.”

I respectfully disagree (as does Senator Charles Grassley, I am sure). These private institutions benefit from huge public subsidies in the form of 100% income tax deductions for charitable gifts made to them, exemptions from almost all federal, state, and local taxes, and federal (and in most cases, state) support for research and student aid. Thus, I argue that they do have an accountability to the public good.

7. “If a child of a multi-billionaire applies and is admitted to Penn State, Dr. Heller's institution, doesn't that child receive a large discount off the cost of tuition based on something as silly as his state residence? What if Bill Gate's daughters apply to the University of Washington?”

In the ideal world, I would agree with this comment. In that world, we would increase tuition at public universities in order to capture the large consumer surplus that wealthy students enjoy through the subsidized tuition, and then use the increased tuition revenue to provide more need-based aid to poorer students. Unfortunately, much research shows that these poorer students tend to respond to the sticker price of college, rather than the net price, because of imperfect access to information about financial aid. Thus, if you moved toward what economists refer to as a “high tuition, high aid” student financing model, you run the risk of pricing out many needier students.

8. “Nice to know that as I look at my bank account, which has $30 in it with payday 10 days away, that our combined income of $150K makes us ‘wealthy’. Taxes (state, federal, local, and Medicare/Medicaid) eat up almost 40% of our gross income. We *always* have to pay on April 15th, despite having the maximum withholding.”

This person may not feel wealthy, but I return to what I said earlier: An income of $150,000 per year puts you in the top one-tenth of all families in the country, an income higher than 90% of all others in the nation. I recognize that each family’s circumstances differ, but I still find it difficult to accept a policy that automatically gives a huge subsidy to every student at this income level, without any means-testing at all. [Note: the author of this post commented here on my blog (as "DrMom") and I replied]

9. “So students' parents should be expected to pay half of their family income? After taxes, expenses, it just isn't possible!”

Once again, it should be up to families to decide whether or not to make the sacrifices necessary to pay for one of these elite institutions. Current income is not the only source available to pay for college; families and students can also choose to use savings, other assets, or borrowing. And most of these wealthy families have much higher levels of assets and access to credit than do poorer families.

Well, that’s it for now. Once again, I hope you will go back and read the entire article, along with all the comments. And please feel free to comment here also.

Another university caving in to business interests

2009-10-16T12:01:00.001-04:00

Food industry critic Michael Pollan was slated to give a talk about the agribusiness at Cal State-San Luis Obispo. Under the threat of rescinding a $150,000 donation from the chairman of a large agricultural firm, the university cancelled Pollan's lecture and instead put him on a panel discussion with a "meat-science expert," according to the Los Angeles Times.

This pattern of universities caving in to political or donor pressure to cancel controversial speakers is seen all over the country. Last year, it was William Ayers, education professor at the U. of Illinois at Chicago who saw his speeches cancelled or postponed by the U. of Nebraska, Georgia Southern, and Boston College. The argument used against Ayers is based on his time in the Weather Underground. But it was interesting that each of these institutions had first invited him, knowing his background, and then rescinded the invitation after receiving pressure from donors, politicians, the media, or others.

Universities often cite "safety concerns" as the rationale for cancelling speeches by Ayers or other controversial academics such as Ward Churchill, formerly of the U. of Colorado. I find it interesting that universities somehow manage to handle the security preparations when presidents or other high-profile domestic and foreign politicians come to campus, but are unable (or unwilling) to deal with security when a lowly college professor arrives.

I would have more respect for these institutions if they would admit that they were bowing to political or donor pressures in cancelling speeches by controversial figures, rather than falling back on the safety issue. But isn't this what academe is supposed to be - a marketplace of ideas, including those that challenge the status quo from all sides of the political spectrum?

These invitation rescissions aren't restricted to left-wing speakers. A Harvard student group just rescinded an invitation to speak that had been offered to the head of the Minuteman Project, an anti-immigration group.

Saturday Night Live satirizes on-line learning

2009-10-12T13:59:00.001-04:00

Inside Higher Ed this morning described how Saturday Night Live had a nice satire of advertisements for on-line colleges. One commenter on the IHE story noticed the similarity between the SNL clip (you can click on these images for larger versions):

and an actual page from the University of Phoenix site:

Just a coincidence? Who knows, but I'm sure the folks at the U. of Phoenix don't appreciate the humor.

Two higher ed stories on NPR

2009-09-24T10:48:00.002-04:00

On my drive home from work yesterday, I caught two higher ed stories on All Things Considered. That's quite a feat, considering that my commute is only 7-8 minutes (I had to have a "driveway moment" to catch the end of the second story). The first story was about the resignation of Joseph White, the soon-to-be former president of the University of Illinois system. You may have heard that UI has been wracked by a scandal over the admission of politically-connected students, whose names were forwarded by legislators and other government officials to a special UI admissions list. While the university's press release didn't explicitly mention the scandal, it's quite clear that it played a role in White's resignation.

We all know that Illinois is a hotbed of political corruption (witness former Governor Rod Blagojevich's attempt to sell President Obama's senate seat), but is what went on at U. Illinois unique or standard practice at more public universities than we'd expect? I suspect that politically-connected admissions occur at many of these institutions, though probably not as blatantly as with a special list as existed at UI. More likely it occurs in a quiet phone call from a legislative or executive office to the government relations office in a university. Undoubtedly, many of these young men and women would have qualified for admission on their own, but the phone call is placed just to ensure that everything goes smoothly.

This reminds me of a situation I encountered in my own career; the circumstances are somewhat different, but it still speaks to the role of political influence over institutions. I won't say at which institution this occurred, but you can check my CV to get the list of four public universities at which I've taught. I will provide the caveat that some of this information came to me second hand, but from a reliable source. I had a state representative as a non-degree student in one of my classes, and after that semester he applied to the doctoral program in which I was teaching. But the program had a certain set of requirements that this individual did not fulfill, so he was turned down for admission. A short time after the notification was sent out, a phone call came from the campus chief executive's office indicating that the state representative should be admitted, which he subsequently was.

The second story was the one that kept me in the driveway to hear the ending. The story described the faculty walkout scheduled for today at the ten campuses of the U. of California to protest the furloughs, budget cuts, and tuition increases imposed by the UC system. UC employees are being furloughed for 11-26 days (which equates to a 4% to 10% pay cut) [corrected after original posting], and faculty have been told they can't take their furlough on days they are teaching. The faculty want the right to be able to distribute the furlough days over their three main areas of service: teaching, research, and service. The argument is that by allowing some classes to be missed, the impact will be more obvious to students and administrators.

I believe that the organizers of the walkout honestly do have the interests of students and the quality of education they receive at heart, and in the NPR story one of the organizers did a good job articulating this. But I suspect that their perspective will engender little sympathy from the general public, most of whom likely have an image of faculty - especially those at UC, who are on average the most highly-paid among the three public sectors in California - as being well compensated for the work they do. Given what others outside of the academy are facing in the economic downturn, I doubt that few of them will be marching behind the UC faculty.

While the term "professor" is very broad-ranging in this country, including everything from very well-compensated, tenured professors at elite research universities, to "beltway bandit" adjuncts who struggle to make a living teaching five or more courses a semester across multiple institutions, it is likely the former image that most of the general public have in their minds when they think about "professors." We probably have to do a better job of public relations if we hope to garner additional support for higher education among the general public, and an even better job if we want more support for faculty working conditions in general.

A questionable strategy for increasing university revenues

2009-09-22T16:54:00.000-04:00

This week's Sunday Times of London had an interesting article about a movement on the part of some British universities to increase revenues by accepting more overseas students. "Overseas" in the British universities means non-European Union students, as EU students get treated the same as British students for tuition and tuition loan purposes. Thus, increasing the proportion of overseas students at the expense of British students is a way to increase revenues. The suggestion came from the incoming chairman of the Russell Group, roughly equivalent to the Association of American Universities here in the U.S.

This strategy is akin to those U.S. public universities which increase the proportion of out-of-state students, who generally pay much higher tuition rates than resident students. For example, out-of-state freshmen students entering Penn State's flagship campus at University Park this year pay 85% higher tuition than Pennsylvania residents ($25,134 vs. $13,604, and this doesn't include mandatory fees, which are the same for resident and non-resident students). Many U.S. universities try to keep it quiet if they increase the proportion of out-of-state students, as they don't want to send a signal that they're favoring these students at the expense of residents (whose families subsidize the tuition rate through the state appropriation received by public universities). Some states cap the proportion of students who can come from out-of-state, but many provide leeway to the public universities to decide for themselves.

What is particularly interesting about the British situation is that the universities are apparently being very upfront about their decision, and appear to be unafraid of any backlash from either the government or the public. They've used the rationale that they will likely be facing large cuts (up to 25%) in the general support they receive from the government. That leaves them with few options other than to admit more overseas students, who at most universities pay at least three times the current tuition of £3,225 paid by British students. It will be interesting to see whether the Russell Group universities will move forward with this plan.

The high cost of higher education

2009-09-15T13:54:00.000-04:00

I was a guest today on WHYY's (Philadelphia) Radio Times talk show with Marty Moss-Coane. You can stream an MP3 or download it from the show website; my segment starts at 34:45 into the show.

President Obama and socialist indoctrination

2009-09-06T11:14:00.009-04:00

As you likely have heard, President Obama will be giving a video address directly to schools on Tuesday. The focus of his remarks will be on "on the importance of taking responsibility for their [students] success in school." Last Thursday, the first day of schools in the State College Area School District, I learned from some friends in the district that the superintendent had decided to leave it up to individual teachers whether to show the broadcast or not in their classes. If so, I was told, teachers had to allow students to opt out if they or their parents did not want them to participate.

Curious about why this decision had been made, I sent an email Thursday evening to the superintendent, Richard Mextorf, with copies to the school board members. Dr. Mextorf is new to the district, having been in the job for about six months. I've pasted below the full record, recognizing that this gets a bit lengthy, but in the interest of not censoring or selectively editing what he had to say. I should go on record as saying that I would have written him exactly the same email if it had been President Bush rather than Obama.

My email to him, Thursday evening:

Dr. Mextorf:

I have heard from other parents that the district will be requiring written parental permission for students to hear President Obama’s speech on education to the nation’s children next Tuesday. I understand that sometimes rumors about misinformation get started, but if the parental permission requirement is in fact true, I want to let you know how disappointed I am in this decision. I have read the advance information about the president’s speech, and I simply cannot understand how listening to the president exhort children to work harder in school can be considered controversial enough to require parental permission for students’ participation. Given the timing, with the Labor Day holiday on Monday, I think it will be difficult for many parents to provide the required consent. As a parent of two children in the district, as well as a researcher and teacher of educational policy, I find this decision potentially very disturbing.

If this is in fact the district’s decision regarding this activity, I hope you will provide me with an explanation of why the decision was made, and how parents and other community members were included in the decision making process. Thank you in advance for your assistance.

Dr. Donald E. Heller
College Township

His reply Friday morning:

Dear Dr. Heller:

Thank you for the opportunity to address your concern:
1. Viewing the address will be at the discretion of the teacher, depending on relevance to the curriculum.
2. Students must be allowed to opt out of the address, with an alternative activity being provided during that time.
3. A link to the address will be provided on our website for those who did not have the opportunity to view the address
4. Permission slips are not required for this activity.

Sincerely,

Richard J. Mextorf
Superintendent of Schools
State College Area School District

Since he didn't address the "why" aspect of my question, I sent this reply:

Dr. Mextor: Thanks for your quick reply and clarification of the opt out procedure. I still would like to know why the president’s speech has been identified as an “opt out” activity, however. For example, we don’t normally provide an opportunity for students to opt out of a discussion of the Pythagorean theorem in geometry class, or a discussion of the framing of the U.S. Constitution in U.S. History class, so I wonder why the president’s speech seems to have been singled out in this fashion.

One high school student has reported to me that his teacher told the class that they would be able to watch the speech only if everyone in the class agreed to do so; if one student decided to opt out, then this would remove the opportunity for the class to watch the speech together (and I fully recognize that teenagers are on occasion somewhat erroneous in what they report back on what happens in school). I know that your office cannot control what each teacher does in the classroom, but this example is also troublesome. While providing the students the opportunity to watch the speech at a later time on the district website is an alternative, this will not allow for class discussion between teachers and students of the president’s speech. The opportunity to have a guided discussion about the president’s speech and the issues he raises about American education can be a valuable civics lesson for all students.

My concern is that providing students with the opt out option identifies this as a “controversial” activity along the lines of others, such as health education, that students (and parents) are normally provided with an opportunity to opt out of. I do not understand why this speech by the president is seen as controversial enough to be flagged as an opt out activity. So if you could explain why it has been, and the procedure behind the decision, I would appreciate it.

Thanks again.

Don Heller

His response, within an hour:

Dr. Heller:

We have had stakeholders weigh-in on both sides of the issue; some have suggested that, if we mandate that students must view the address, we are forcing children to be subjected to socialism reminiscent of the former Soviet Union. Others suggest we are shirking our civic responsibility if we do not see to it that all children view the address.

I made the decision to let individual teachers decide, based on their judgment about relevance to the curriculum on that day and at that time. I trust our teachers as professionals to make responsible decisions regarding viewing the address. The opt out is to allow parents to decide for their child. The link to the website is to make it easier for parents to view the message with their child, should they not have an opportunity to do so in school.

Thank you for your sensitivity regarding the information from the high school student. In situations such as this, I find it beneficial to give the teacher the benefit of the doubt that I do not have all the information, the proper context, or that the information is part of a bigger picture.

The guidelines I established were to give teachers the opportunity to make an informed, professional judgment, to allow parents the right to remove their child if desired, and for parents and students to have access to the address if they did not have opportunity to do so at school.

Sincerely,

Richard J. Mextorf
Superintendent of Schools
State College Area School District

At that point I decided to bring the dialogue to a close:

I appreciate your sharing the explanation of the process. As one who teaches the politics of education, I’m very sensitive to the pressures you face on issues like this, and the difficulty of trying to please everyone.

Don Heller

As one friend wrote to me after I posted the correspondence on Facebook, "He's punting, and I am *completely* unimpressed by him." I'm sure the superintendent received complaints from some parents, and he probably decided that the path of least resistance was to allow an opt out. So this can be interpreted as a punt, for sure. As I wrote to him, I am sympathetic to the situation he is put in. With the caveat that I have never met the man, and know little about him (the search and his appointment occurred while we were in London earlier this year, so I didn't follow it at all), I doubt that he believes that Obama's speech is an attempt at "forcing children to be subjected to socialism reminiscent of the former Soviet Union." I'm sure he was relating what he had been hearing from some parents. I would imagine and hope that if he had been around a while longer, and had developed more political capital (both with the community as well as his board), he may have been willing to stand up to these parents. The district's website has nothing about this decision, so for the great majority of parents, all they may know about it (if anything at all) is any materials the teachers may have sent home with the children.

In theory, I imagine the district will allow a parent to opt their child out of pretty much any part of their education. But as I wrote to him, singling out this activity - and giving it that attention - sends the wrong message to teachers, students, and parents. There has been nothing that I have seen in the advance publicity about this speech, either from the White House itself, or in the news reports about it, that Obama will be talking about anything controversial. Nevertheless, conservative talk radio and the ever-vigilant Fox News have been raising the "indoctrination" flag and urging parents to boycott the speech. Here's one good editorial in the LA Times about it, and here's the chairman of the Florida Republican Party ranting about Obama's speech (just proving once again that sage statement by Mark Twain, "Better to keep one's mouth shut and be thought a fool, then to open it and remove all doubt").

I frequently have both school administrators and teachers in my classes, and we talk a lot about the difficulty of navigating political controversies in the schools. This is one example, however, where I would like to see the district leadership show more guts and be proactive in standing up to the political right.

Podcast on the economic crisis and financial aid

2009-09-02T13:31:00.002-04:00

I recorded a podcast recently with USC's Center for Enrollment Research, Policy, and Practice on the impact of the economic crisis on financial aid. You can listen to it here.

A refreshing endowment story

2009-09-01T15:00:00.003-04:00

There has been much coverage in the press about the decline in endowment values at many of the country's wealthy universities, and the impact it has had on their operations (here's just one example). But here's a nice story about Cooper Union, which saw its endowment decline by less than 3% in the first half of the year that ended June 30, and expects the value to be flat by the end of that year.

Cooper Union is unusual in that it charges no tuition to its students (similar to Berea College, in Kentucky), so it is dependent upon its endowment to subsidize more than two-third of its operating budget. Granted, Cooper Union benefits from owning the land on which the Chrysler Building in New York sits, but it also exercised prudent endowment management that shunned some of the exotic investments that got other institutions into trouble.

Funding of higher education in the U.S.

2009-08-31T13:04:00.004-04:00

As a placeholder until I can get my head above the beginning-of-the-semester water and catch my breath, here's a link to an interesting video of a lecture on the funding of higher education given by my friend Michael McLendon, Associate Dean and Chief of Staff and Associate Professor of Public Policy and Higher Education at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University. I couldn't have said it any better. Well, maybe just a tad.

And by the way, for those of you who were wondering -- still no budget in Pennsylvania, now two full months into the fiscal year.

Pennsylvania Held Hostage - Day 42

2009-08-11T18:20:00.002-04:00

We're now 11 days into August, and still no budget for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. That means that Penn State and the other public universities still have no clue what their appropriation for the year will be -- and in our case, at Penn State, this is with only 13 days until classes start.

It's becoming almost comical, what Philly Inquirer columnist Karen Heller (no relation) calls a "tour-de-farce." The state has passed a stopgap bill to ensure that state workers in critical departments (obviously a definition subject to much discussion) are at least now receiving a paycheck, yet 255 other state employees are receiving layoff notices. Hard to tell whether Governor Rendell and the legislature are any closer to agreeing on how to bail the Commonwealth out of its budget mess. Latest figurs show the two parties still about $2 billion apart. Stay tuned for further updates.

Whatever happened to fiduciary responsibility?

2009-07-27T21:01:00.005-04:00

Seems like every day there's another story about a college or university that is in some form of financial distress. If it's not Harvard University dropping 11 digits worth of endowment value (check out the Vanity Fair article for interesting coverage), then it's the University of California and California State University systems furloughing their employees.

But the smaller, less prestigious schools generally don't receive the same kind of media coverage that the big boys do. One interesting story, though, is about Greensboro College, a small liberal arts school in the city of the same name in North Carolina. Like many of its peers, it has run into financial problems over the last year. It has had to layoff employees and cut the pay of most of the remaining staff by 20 percent. In fact, Greensboro got itself into such trouble that it was forced to turn to Bank of America for a loan to meet payroll and continue operations. And to get that loan, it had to put up as collateral all of its real estate and its entire endowment. Greenboro's long-time (16 years) president, Craven Williams, stepped down abruptly earlier this month.

Williams had embarked on an ambitious building and acquisition plan, using borrowed funds to do so. This had evidently exacerbated Greensboro's problems, causing the extreme measures it was forced to take this spring. What is striking, though, are some comments made by former trustees in an article in the local Greensboro newspaper, the News and Record. Here's what a couple of them had to say:

“There wasn’t a whole lot up for discussion,” recalled former trustee Tom Wright. “There would be a plenary session, but anything presented, it was as if the financial committee had already reviewed it.”

Said another former trustee, Richard Levy: “If you’re told, 'Everything’s running OK,’ and you’re not told about problems, you don’t go looking for them. You’re there to help.”

If they were accurately quoted, these are stunning admissions by the former trustees. Either they were purposely misled by the university's administration, or they were asleep at the switch in not being aware of the financial situation in which the college found itself.

Trustees play an important role in overseeing the fiduciary health of the institution, particularly in private institutions for which there is little or no government oversight and control. To let an institution get into such financial straits - caused not just by external economic and financial circumstances, but also by active decisions made by the institution's leadership and board - without the board being aware is an admission that at least some trustees were not paying attention. While it is easy to sit back and not go looking for problems, trustees have to be more proactive about asking the difficult questions.

Not to single out Greensboro; probably some of the same issues can be raised about the Harvard Corporation. Much has been written that Harvard is now reaping the downside of the aggressive endowment investment strategies that it has pursued for many years now (and for which it has very generously compensated the staff of Harvard Management Company). But perhaps there will be some hard questions asked about whether the university and others like it were too aggressive in pursuing increases in endowment value.

Making a silk purse from a sow's ear?

2009-07-21T15:53:00.012-04:00

[Warning: severe sarcasm alert in this post]

Sunday's New York Times had an article about the independent college admissions consultant industry. The article had me from the intro:

The free fashion show at a Greenwich, Conn., boutique in June was billed as a crash course in dressing for a college admissions interview. Yet the proposed “looks” — a young man in seersucker shorts, a young woman in a blue blazer over a low-cut blouse and short madras skirt — appeared better suited for a nearby yacht club. After Jennifer Delahunty, dean of admissions at Kenyon College, was shown photos of those outfits, she rendered her review.

“I burst out laughing,” she said.

Seersucker shorts? Madras skirt? You have got to be kidding me, or to use one of my daughter's and her teenage friends' favorite colloquialisms, "WTF????" (I'll never admit to using it myself, of course). Any kid stupid enough to be seen wearing one of those outfits to a college interview should be denied admission on the spot on the basis of demonstrating exceedingly poor taste. The fashion show was of course organized by a college consultant, who I am sure has no shortage of clients in tony Greenwich. It is almost as if you can hear the consultant thinking to herself, "How outlandish an outfit can I get these guillible kids to wear as a way to demonstrate their desperation to get into college?" The article doesn't say if she is a member of the Independent Educational Consultants Association, but if so, she should have her membership revoked.

Another quote from Bruce Poch, admissions dean at Pomona:

[There are some] genuinely rational and knowledgeable folks out there doing this work. Some of the independents leave me looking for the nearest emergency shower.

Both Jennifer and Bruce are well-respected and knowledgeable in the admissions industry, particularly among those in selective institutions. Both also have a great sense of humor, and I know have had plenty of experience dealing with these consultants. And on top of it, Bruce is a dead ringer for Ted Allen of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." If you don't believe me check out this picture and this one (picture him with glasses on in this latter picture).

The Times article describes how some of the consultants charge families up to $40,000 to help prepare their child for competitive college admissions and help them get into their first choice college. It describes how the industry has flourished in recent years, growing from an estimated 2,000 consultants to 5,000 in just the last three years, no doubt preying on the anxiety families have about getting their best and brightest children into the most well-known and priciest colleges.

In some respects, this article would normally be a yawner, outlining some of the less-than-honest tactics (and in other cases, outright lies) of some of these consultants. After all, other media have covered this industry and its tactics in the past. But being on the front page of the Sunday Times does merit some recognition, and as my late mother-in-law was fond of saying, "If it's in the Times, it must be true."

There's always the possibility that these consultants will prey on poor families who know little about the college admissions process, and who have no or little access to high school counselors.
And in fact, some of them are starting to develop much lower-priced "products," such as DVDs, to try to expand their markets down the income ladder. I'll admit that I have yet to purchase any of them myself, but most of these sound like they are little more helpful (and honest) than the DVDs advertised on television that teach you how to buy houses with no money down. Don't hold your breath waiting for me to review any of them here.

The reality, however, is that the people spending $15,000 for a "junior/senior" package for their child or even better, $14,000 for a four-day college admissions "boot camp," likely have more than enough money to spend on making little Johnny or Janey look on paper as if they are something they are not, and on getting them into a college they probably would have stumbled into on their own even without the assistance of these consultants. So if they want to spend that money to make them feel better that they're doing all they can to help their children, all the power to them.

The boot camp is run by one of the admissions consultant industry's leading lights, Michelle Hernandez, who according to the article, offers a top-shelf package to families that costs $40,000. Hernandez is not shy with the press, and on her firm's website she proudly displays all the media which she has graced.

Her website displays her stellar credentials for the job:

As an Assistant Director of Admissions at Dartmouth College for four years and the academic dean of a private high school in South Florida, Hernández has crafted a unique angle for assisting students gain admissions to the most selective colleges, incorporating her “inside perspective” on the admissions adventure. She is one of a small handful of college consultants with years of hands on admissions experience and a ten year history of helping students through her work.

Dr. Hernández graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College in 1989 and went on to earn a Master’s degree in English and comparative literature from Columbia University and a doctorate in education from Nova Southeastern. She is married to Bruce Bayliss, former headmaster of the International School in Portland, Oregon. They have two children, ages 11 and 5, two golden retrievers and a Gordon setter. In her non-existent spare time, Hernández enjoys stargazing with her 16 ½ inch Dobsonian telescope, working out and reading obsessively. The family lives in Weybridge, Vermont.

16 ½ inches - wow, that's impressive!

She also displays "Michelle's Statistics," which trumpets the number of her clients who applied to specific universities and the number who were admitted ("1/1 to Carleton College, 4/5 to Colgate. . ." - and in case you were wondering, no, she does not provide "Michelle's Statistics" for Roxbury Community College, but she did have a 100%, 1 out of 1, success rate for Penn State this year). She of course does not tell you, because she does not want you to know and in fact, cannot tell you, how many of those applicants would have been admitted to those institutions without her help. But hey, why take the chance that little Janey won't get into the one and only college out of the 4,000 out there that will make her happy. So best to spend the $40,000 just to be sure.

When questioned about the high fees she charges, Hernandez responded to the Times with what can only be described as one of the most ridiculous and pompous quotes ever recorded on the pages of the New York Times:

“It’s annoying when people complain about the money,” the Vermont-based counselor, Michele Hernandez, said. “I’m at the top of my field. Do people economize when they have a brain tumor and are looking for a neurosurgeon? If you want to go with someone cheaper, or chance it, don’t hire me.”

Okay now, so um, college admissions is like brain surgery? I don't think so, but heck, if it helps her sell herself more, good for her.

As with anything else out there in the marketplace, caveat emptor.

Update on Penn State's tuition

2009-07-17T13:19:00.002-04:00

Given the U.S. Department of Education's decision to return Governor Rendell's application for stimulus funding because of the exclusion of the four state-related universities, Penn State has decided to go with the lower set of tuition increases (3.7% to 4.5%) the Board of Trustees had authorized. This will certainly be a relief to students and their families, but is a risk on the part of the university. While the ED returned Rendell's application, there's still no guarantee Penn State will see any of the stimulus money. Here is Penn State's news release.

So the university is opening itself up to the possibility it will have to implement either large mid-year expenditure cuts and/or a mid-year tuition increase if the stimulus money does not come through. In addition, since Pennsylvania still does not have a budget (17 days into the fiscal year and counting), there's still the risk that the university's appropriation could require it to implement some of these mid-year measures. Stay tuned.

Update on the Keystone Cops

2009-07-15T18:37:00.004-04:00

The Philly Inquirer reported today that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told Governor Rendell that he cannot exclude the four state-related universities from his request for stimulus funding (see my post of last Monday for the full story). He instructed the governor to resubmit the application, including Penn State and the other state-related universities.

A spokesman for Governor Rendell said that the battle isn't over yet, according to the Inquirer article.

"Given the governor's unparalleled support for higher education, the department's decision reinforces the state's ability to decide how to allocate these federal funds among our colleges, and we remain committed to using those funds where they can have the most impact," Ardo said.

Guess we'll just have to wait and see who is going to win this battle.

The Not-So-Golden State and the Keystone Cops

2009-07-13T11:03:00.006-04:00

Just when we thought the economy had bottomed out and things were starting to turn around, the news on the higher education financial front continues to be pretty dismal. As in past recessions, it's very likely that there will be a lag behind the general upswing in the economy and when higher education starts to benefit from it. And given the depth of this recession, the lag will likely be longer and more painful to endure.

Last Saturday's New York Times reported on the dire situation at the University of California, often considered to be the shining jewel among public higher education systems (I know the California papers have covered this story more thoroughly, but I can't get home delivery of the LA Times or San Fran Chronicle here on the East Coast). The UC system is trying to figure out a way to make up for a $640 million reduction in its state appropriation for this year (a combined $813 million reduction combining last year's and this year's cuts), and according to the article (and an announcement by President Mark Yudof), is implementing "furloughs, deferred hiring and cuts in academic programs" to close the gap.

While personnel cuts are never easy, UC should be applauded for the way they are undertaking it. Rather than across the board furloughs, as so many institutions have done, UC is doing it in a very progressive manner, with higher-paid employees being forced to take much longer furloughs (and therefore larger pay cuts). Faculty hiring is being reduced, and admissions to some academic programs - including the doctoral program in education at Irvine (which hits uncomfortably close to home for those of us in education schools) - are being halted. Also to Yudof's credit, the budget for the president's office in Oakland has been cut by a third. This is not just a symbolic move, as the president's office at UC is substantial and has long been accused by the ten campuses as suffering from administrative bloat.

The magnitude of the $813 million reduction in state funding over the two years can best be understood when examined on a per-student basis. Spread across the system's approximately 227,000 students, this means a reduction of over $3,500 per student, a substantial amount even if one considers that some of the reductions will (hopefully) be made in areas that do not directly impact students.

One can hold out hope that California will resolve its budget crisis in a way that does not penalize UC and the other two systems in the state in a fashion that will harm the quality of the systems in the long run. But it is hard to be optimistic given the challenges the state is facing.
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Meanwhile, back at the ranch - aka, the wild and wacky Commonwealth of Pennsylvania - as I write we are now entering out third week of the fiscal year without having a state budget. The "budget held hostage" headlines throughout the media are getting just a bit tiresome. Governor Rendell and the state legislature are locked in a budget battle that can only politely be described as a high-stakes urinating contest in trading off cuts in expenditures versus increased taxes. If it weren't so serious it would be reminiscent of the old Keystone Cops movies.

The latest budget proposed by the Governor called for a cut of $60 million in Penn State's appropriation as compared to the initial appropriation the university received last year. This includes the $20 million rescission the Governor imposed in FY 2009, combined with an additional $40 million cut for FY 2010. The $60 million represents a reduction of 18 percent of last year's intitial appropriation. To compare to the appropriation cut being absorbed by the University of California, $60 million represents a reduction of approximately $650 per student over Penn State's 93,000 students.

Evidently Governor Rendell has a penchant for starting urinating contests of late. Earlier in the year, in introducing a new state-funded financial aid initiative (interesting move, considering the dire fiscal picture the Commonwealth is facing), he excluded from participation students attending the four state-related universities (Penn State, Temple, Lincoln, and Pitt) and private colleges, all of which participate in the existing state financial aid programs. The exclusion, according to an official in the Rendell administration was "because the state doesn't have as much control or influence over their tuition increases."

This was followed up by Rendell's request to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to exclude the state-related universities from Pennsylvania's share of the federal stimulus funds. Rendell's initial plan to ED included the four universities, but the revised plan submitted late last month cut the $40 million that had been earmarked for them (approximately half of which would have gone to Penn State to offset the appropriation cuts) and shifted it to other public institutions. Echoing the administration's earlier statement regarding the financial aid program, this time it said that the governor "had to make very difficult decisions about funding and has very little control over Penn State expenditures."

Penn State's response to the governor's decision was predictable. In a letter to Secretary Duncan, Spanier wrote:

"By arbitrarily re-defining The Pennsylvania State University as non-public … the governor is setting a dangerous precedent that the Department of Education should address. If the department approves this application as it is written, it gives governors in every other state the ability to pick and choose which public institutions they may support with federal dollars."

We have yet to hear if Duncan has responded, but you can sure this is not the end of the battles over Penn State's (and the other three institutions') status as a state-related university.

Penn State's response to the Governor's proposed appropriation cut was quite pointed. President Graham Spanier threw down the gauntlet in a letter to the Penn State "family" (which includes the Governor, as an ex officio member of the Board) released in conjunction with last week's Board of Trustees meeting, threatening to pile the cut onto the backs of students by implementing large tuition increases. These increases would be on top of rates that place Penn State's University Park flagship campus as the most expensive (for in-state students) in the country.

At its meeitng last week, the university's board adopted two different tuition schedule. The first was based on a state budget that restored Penn State's appropriation to the initial level received last year, i.e., the level in place before the $20 million rescission by the governor. If the legislature passes and the governor signs a budget at this level (an event that most observers put as having a chance somewhere being slim and none), then the university's tuition increases will range from 3.7 to 4.5 percent (the amounts differing for resident and non-resident students at University Park, and students at other Penn State campuses). If a budget passes that includes the currently-proposed $60 million reduction from last year's appropriation, then the tuition increases will be:

Campuses other than University Park: 4.9%
Non-resident students at University Park: 7.9%
Pennsylvania residents at University Park: 9.8%

The university has been clear that it will not be expecting students to pay for all of the cuts, no matter which tuition schedule is ultimately implemented. It has documented a series of expenditure cuts it has already implemented, including the decision to not give any salary increases for the 2009-2010 year. Nevertheless, the university's announcement of these potential increases says to the governor and legislature, "If you cut our budget as you are talking about, it is your constitutents - the students and their parents - who will pay the price." The need for large tuition increases may have been somewhat undermined by another Penn State news release from the trustees meeting: "Philanthropy to Penn State sets records, despite recession."

Stay tuned for further updates.

The potential equity risks in online education

2009-07-01T11:15:00.007-04:00

A friend posted a link in her Facebook profile to an article this week in Inside Higher Ed that described the Education Department's funding for free, online college courses. I responded that I had mixed feelings about the program and in the push toward more online education in general, raising concerns about the potential for more stratification in what is already a highly bifurcated postsecondary system in the country. My friend works on online education, and asked me to elaborate on my remarks. So I decided this would be the appropriate place to do so.

It's helpful to understand first how the current postsecondary system is stratified. This stratification is on a number of dimensions, including racial/ethnic, family income, as well as other measures of socioeconomic status and academic capital, but I'll focus here just on income. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the data branch of the U.S. Department of Education, has very good, nationally-representative surveys that allow us to examine whether different types of students attend postsecondary education, and if so, where they attend.

The current NCES longitudinal survey, the Educational Longitudnal Survey of 2002 (ELS:2002), is of students who were sophomores in high school in 2002. After the initial survey in 2002, students were surveyed again in 2004 (when most were high school seniors), and in 2006 (two years after expected high school graduation). The 2006 data were analyzed in an NCES report to examine the high school graduation and postsecondary behavior of students. The following chart summarizes the findings for students based on their familiy's income in 2002 (you can click on the image to get a full-size view):

As a benchmark, the median family income in 2002 was $51,680, so the first two income categories roughly represent the bottom half of the income distribution, and the latter two the top half.

As is clear, the high school graduation and postsecondry enrollment patterns are highly stratified by income. Seventeen percent of students in the bottom income group (<=$20,000) either did not graduate from high school and/or received a GED credential, while only three percent of the highest income group (>=$100,000) did. While only 52 and 63 percent of students in the bottom two income groups, respectively, had some postsecondary enrollment by 2006, 78 and 90 percent of students in the highest income groups did. What is even more stark is where students attended college. Students in the upper income category were more than three times more likely to enroll in a 4-year institution than were those in the bottom group.

When you dig into the data, other patterns emerge. The following chart is from a presentation I gave last year at the annual conference of the Council for Opportunity in Education. It shows the college attendance patterns of dependent undergraduates who were enrolled in college in the 2003-2004 school year, using data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (I need to update these with the most recent NPSAS data, but haven't gotten around to it yet).

These data divide all postsecondary students into family income quartiles. Over half of the students from the bottom quartile who were enrolled in college were attending either a community college or some other institution, the latter of which were primarily proprietary (for-profit) institutions. The higher income students were more likely to be attending a 4-year institution, and more likely to be attending full-time as well.

Okay, so having established the current stratified nature of the higher education system in the country, let me get back to my concerns regarding online education. When I speak to many policymakers, particularly those at the state level, there is a strong belief among many that online education will be the silver bullet that will help resolve the college cost crisis, as well as improving the state of college access. In other words, they believe that if we can only expand online education, we'll be able to get more students into and through postsecondary education for less money.

At some point, this may be true, but I don't believe there's compelling data yet to demonstrate that online education - in a true apples-to-apples comparison - is necessarily lower cost than traditional bricks-and-mortar postsecondary education (NB - I'm going to ignore the question for now of whether fully online education is "as good as" traditional education in terms of educational outcomes, writ large. I think my points are made even if one concedes this point). And more importantly, from my standpoint, I am concerned that if online education is perceived to be less expensive, that we will end up with a system that channels poor and underrepresented minority students into this option, reserving for more well-off students the option of attaining a postsecondary credential, and in particular a bachelor's degree, by attending a residential institution where the students benefits from all of the amenities and outcomes that are associated with that experience.

It is easy to envision of a set of student financing policies that would have this further stratification as an unintended consequence. Many states are examining policies that encourage students to start their postsecondary careers at community colleges, which are a lower cost (from the perspective of state funding) and price (from the perspective of the student) option as compared to many 4-year institutions, both public and private alike. In the same vein, they are looking into policies that help reduce both the opportunity cost of attending college (primarily that of being out of the labor markets, at least as a full-time worker) as well as the subsistence costs of attending college by finding options to the residential college experience. While these are certainly worthwhile exercises, I generally advise them to undertake these while ensuring that postsecondary opportunity and access to all the options that are available - community college, online education, and the more traditional, residential 4-year experience - are provided to students on as equal a basis as possible, regardless of their family's financial circumstances.

I am not arguing here that we should get rid of online education; I believe that there is certainly a place for it in our system. I think we do need much more and better research, however, that compares the full range of outcomes - academic, psychosocial, and developmental - of all the options before we start investing a lot more money in online education. But we need to be cautious that we do not create a system that is even more bifurcated than the one we already have in place.

We have splashdown

2009-06-15T16:19:00.004-04:00

I thought I was prepared for reentry into the physical environment of my life and job after returning from our five months in London, but I guess you can never adequately prepare for it. This was my first sabbatical, so the first time I was away from (some) of my job responsibilities and office for an extended period of time.

Being back in the physical environment of our Center starkly confronts me with all the issues the Director has to deal with. I'll somehow manage them all, while dealing with the major and mini catastrophes that awaited us in our house upon our return.

After I manage to put out some of the smoldering fires on the work and home fronts, I'm going to get back to talking about higher education policy again.

Cheers, Mate

2009-05-30T06:16:00.003-04:00

Our last day in London is finally upon us. We leave bustling London tomorrow morning to return to bucolic Happy Valley. We're in the midst of packing up, which we've discovered is much easier on this end -- it just means finding everything we own scattered around the house and shoving it into one of our seven suitcases, one picture frame box (for Rosie's art work she's bringing home), and assorted carry-ons.

I think we all have mixed feelings, sad about leaving behind a wonderful experience here in London, but also looking forward to returning home to see friends (and family elsewhere around the States). We've been reflecting both upon all we managed to do while we were here, as well as those things to which we never made it. Luckily, the former far outnumber the latter. Anne's been religious about filling up her London Moleskin (thanks, Eric) with everything she's done in various categories: theatre, museums, outings, tourist sites, etc. I've been a little less compulsive, but for those of you who have friended me on Facebook, I have posted there a list of the shows I've seen, along with things I'll miss about London and those things I won't be missing quite as much.

As I look back on my blog over the last five months, I realized I've probably posted more about my life here in London than I have about higher education issues. Probably natural, given the difference in life here compared to back home. But I'm going to do my best to get back to some of the topics I promised to write about, such as the college admissions process here. I will be continuing to work with my friend and colleague Claire Callender, who has been absolutely a wonderful host, so I know I'll be learning (and hopefully writing) more about British higher education policy.

I'm also going to try to provide semi-regular posts on higher education issues in the States, but know I'll never be as religious at posting as my friends Sara and Liam over at The Education Optimists, another good blog on higher education -- but hell, they have two people writing! There is a lot going on, between the programs proposed by the Obama Administration, and the changes forced on the sector by the economic situation, so I'll do my best to provide commentary and additional information.

So back to packing, saying some last good-byes, taking one last stroll on the Regent's Canal (it's finally beautiful here, of course, now that we're leaving), and watching the finals of Britain's Got Talent tonight. Cheers, Mate!

My take on the British student financing system

2009-05-21T05:46:00.004-04:00

This op-ed is in this week's Times Higher Education, the Chronicle of Higher Education of Britain. And in case you were wondering -- no, I did not choose the headline.

Dumbing down the college choice process

2009-05-15T06:38:00.004-04:00

I've had plenty of experiences -- good and bad -- dealing with the media, but the most recent was really fun. I received a request through our news office to do an interview with a local TV station which was planning a story on whether college was still a good investment, and whether different types of colleges were better investments than others. I told them I was on sabbatical and in London, so they would have to work around that. Couple of days later I get an email from the reporter stating that he had been able to book a 15 minute block of satellite time at the London bureau of CBS news. He subsequently sent the location of the CBS bureau, and I was a bit peeved to see that it was about a 50 minute schlep by Tube from our house, but I was a good sport and said I would still do it.

The block of time was at 7:30 at night London time, so I squeezed myself into a sardine-tin Piccadilly line carriage for the bulk of the trip. I got set up for the interview, and the reporter came on from State College and asked me a series of questions about Penn State compared to other schools.

Well, you can guess what's coming. The story ran last night, and to say it dumbed down the college choice process was putting it mildly (yes, I should have expected this, knowing it was local TV in central PA). I should note that I blame the producer of the story more than the reporter. The story compared the "value" of a degree for three schools: South Hills Business School, a local for-profit 2-year institution; the University of Phoenix On-line; and Penn State. First, the reporter identified Penn State as a "liberal arts college." Second, the interview with me got edited in a way that made me look like a spokesperson for Penn State, rather than a professor. I was identified on the graphic just as "Don Heller, Penn State" -- at least, because it was television, people knew it wasn't the other Don Heller at Penn State. The piece was done in a way that it made me look and sound like a PR shill for Penn State.

Okay, enough whining. What this piece really made me think about was what happens if a piece like this was your main introduction to the college choice process. Approximately 3 1/2 minutes of glossed-over video comparing three higher education institutions that couldn't be more different from each other. A much better thought-out piece would have perhaps compared Penn State to Lock Haven to Juniata (and the relative costs of each, along with the expected returns) for a student considering a bachelor's degree. But something like that probably would have taken more research to pull off.

My favorite question, which unfortunately didn't make it to air, was this one: "Do you think students should be concerned about Penn State closing any time in the future, because of the economic crisis? Should they be worried that their Penn State diploma will be worthless if the institution closes?" After laughing in response to the question (which could be why they edited it out), I assured the reporter that while a handful of small, poorly-resourced, private colleges around the country had closed recently, that wasn't likely to happen to Penn State.

And the Bonehead University Move of the semester goes to. . . . .

2009-05-14T06:03:00.010-04:00

Arizona State University -- Congratulations!

Undoubtedly many of you have read about the controversy over Notre Dame's decision to have President Obama speak at its commencement. If you somehow missed the firestorm, conservative and Catholic commentators took issue with the university's decision because of Obama's support for abortion rights. The president and board of Notre Dame should be lauded for standing up to the critics and not rescinding the offer.

At the other end of the spectrum is Arizona State University, which invited Obama to speak at its commencement yesterday but declined to give him an honorary degree, normally an honor it bestows on its commencement speaker. ASU defended its decision by stating that,

“Because President Obama’s body of work is yet to come, it’s inappropriate to recognize him at this time,” Keeler said.

Previous recipients of honorary degrees from ASU had long-established careers in their fields of work, Keeler said, and they aren’t necessarily affiliated with ASU.

Last spring, the University awarded an honorary degree to James Duderstadt, a professor emeritus of the University of Michigan and an international leader in higher education.

In 2006, degrees went to Wu Qidi, vice minister of education of the People’s Republic of China, and Frank H. T. Rhodes, former president of Cornell University.

Keeler said there are typically only one or two people each year who receive an honorary degree from ASU, though the University will not award one this spring.

“It’s someone who’s really outstanding, who has made outstanding contributions in their field,” she said.

Guess the president of the United States just isn't "outstanding" enough, including the time he spent in the U.S. Senate, in contrast to the accomplishments of Jim Duderstadt, Frank Rhodes, or Wu Qidi.

You have to feel just a little sorry for the poor university spokeswoman, Sharon Keeler, who got shtupped with the responsibility of putting her name on this statement. Would have been nice if Mike "Let Them Be Furloughed" Crow (he's the guy on Obama's right in the photo above) had been the more public face of this decision.

ASU's decision would almost be understandable, if it didn't stand in direct contrast to the honorary degree it awarded a little over three years ago to former Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell, who served in office for less than five months. So according to ASU, five months as Canadian PM is more deserving of an honorary degree than 113 days as President of the US? Hmmmmm, may want to rethink that decision.

It wasn't easy for ASU to win the Bonehead University Move award for this decision. You may remember this as the same university that told some employees that they had to take up to 15 days of furlough leave after they had been told they were being laid off in a few months.

For a nice take on ASU's decision, check out the Daily Show's story.

"College Suspends Student for Working in Gay Pornography"

2009-05-07T15:52:00.004-04:00

The student was suspended by Grove City College, a self-described "Authentically Christian" institution north of Pittsburgh. According to the article in the Chronicle, a statement from Grove City said that, "Throughout this process, his sexual orientation was not a factor in the decision." The suspended student told a local newspaper that he had been working in the porn industry for two years, "to pay his tuition." He was quoted as saying, "When I first came to Grove City, I was pressed for money, and I worked four jobs trying to make ends meet."

Here's a link to the full article in the Chronicle.

The incident raises at least a couple of questions:

Would the student have been suspended if he had been working in straight pornography? Notice that the GCC statement says that his sexual orientation was not a factor, but could it be that the type of porn he made was a factor?
Grove City is one of a handful of colleges in the country that has chosen not to participate in the federal Title IV financial aid programs. It has chosen to do this so that it does not have to comply with Title IX of the 1972 Amendments to the Higher Education Act of 1965, which outlaws discrimination based on gender. If federal grants and loans were available at Grove City, would this student have had to resort to making porn videos - gay or otherwise - to pay for college?

Given that this is a very family-friendly blog, I passed up the opportunity to post many of the other images of the student available on the web.

Another review of really, really bad theatre

2009-05-07T09:36:00.005-04:00

I really enjoy reading these kinds of reviews. This one is of the musical "Shout," about 60s music (pop, not the good stuff), playing in the West End. Read it and weep.

Been-a long, been-a long, been-a long time. . . .

2009-05-05T05:36:00.006-04:00

In fact, almost a month since my last post. I have some good excuses, of course -- visitors, Passover, term break for the girls, holidays in Barcelona and Paris, a speaking gig in Liverpool. Nevertheless, I recognize I have failed my blogging responsibilities. I'd like to say I'll make up for it over the next month, but given that this is our last 26 days in London, that is a promise I'm very unlikely to fulfill.

Since this is admissions season back in the U.S. - at least if you are a traditional student, graduating from high school and transitioning on to college in the fall - I'm going to post about admissions here in the U.K. But before I get to that, I wanted to highlight a protest we came across when we were in Paris last weekend. One of the joys of living here in London is the easy access you have to other European cities. You can hop on a plane (or train, in the case of Paris), and in a little over two hours be in an entirely different country and culture. And the differences are of a magnitude much greater than when you take the train from New York to Washington, for example, or fly from Seattle to San Francisco.

So last week we took the Eurostar train from St. Pancras (a 5 minute bus ride from us) to Paris for a four day visit during the May Day weekend. We played tourist, doing everything from the Eiffel Tower to a daytrip to Giverny. On our last day there, before catching the Eurostar back to St. Pancras, we were walking from Notre Dame to the Pompidou Centre, and came across a concert behing held on the plaza next to the Hôtel de Ville (city hall, for those of you who are French-impaired as am I). We were listening for a few minutes, and then started to notice signs posted around the band. I believe this translates roughly to "The school (university) is not a business, knowledge is not merchandise" (those of you who are more French-literate please feel free to comment and correct my translation). We then noticed small groups of people marching around in circles, holding up more signs.

Many of the other signs were similar to those that showed up at the protest over tuition fees at British universities that I observed in February. The general theme was, commercial interests are taking over the universities, threatening academic freedom and the purity of the education received. Given the language barriers, I didn't have much opportunity to speak with the protesters. But it was an interesting parallel to the situation here in Britain.

A brief foray into the Second Amendment

2009-04-06T10:58:00.005-04:00

Being out of the country, I tend to lose track of what's going on back in the States. I get occasional news headlines when I surf across various websites, but unless I make the effort to look at The New York Times or Washington Post websites, I haven't been too informed of news at home other than that covered by the British press.

However, the last week, here are the headlines from home that have grabbed my attention on the web, and unfortunately, they have nothing to do with higher education policy:

"Pain, grief, questions in NY shootings aftermath" - 13 killed by a gunman in Binghamton, NY before taking his own life

"Gunman Kills 3 Police Officers in Pittsburgh"

"Father Kills Five Children in Third US Multiple Shooting" - Washington State

"Gunman Kills 8 at a N. Carolina Nursing Home"

"3 adults, 3 children die in apparent murder-suicide" - all killed by a gunman in Santa Clara, CA

How many more deaths will it take before this country is willing to implement real, effective gun control laws?

For those of you worried about Larry Summers. . . .

2009-04-06T05:44:00.003-04:00

I know there was great concern over Larry Summers' future after he was ousted as president of Harvard a couple of years ago. Not to worry -- according to the Washington Post, he's certainly landed on his feet financially, earning almost $8 million last year. That's on top of his $587,000 salary as a Harvard economics professor.

Presentations from across the pond

2009-04-04T11:47:00.003-04:00

I'm giving a few presentations while I'm here in London, so I'll try to remember to post links to them here. Here are the first two:

Birkbeck Institute for Lifelong Learning Seminar Programme, Birkbeck, University of London, London England, 02/24/09, "Financing of higher education in a turbulent economy: Challenges for the United States and the United Kingdom"
Institute for Education Policy Research, Staffordshire University, Stoke-on-Trent England, 03/25/09, "Access to higher education in the United States: Issues and challenges"

My 2.75 minutes of radio fame

2009-04-01T17:57:00.007-04:00

I was interviewed on this evening's Marketplace (American Public Media) broadcast about college costs. You can listen to the story, or if you're more of a visual rather than aural kind of person, you can read a transcript.

How not to do enrollment management

2009-04-01T15:47:00.006-04:00

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

U. of California at San Diego Accidentally Congratulates 28,000 Rejected Students

The admissions office of the University of California at San Diego accidentally e-mailed letters of congratulation and welcome to its entire undergraduate applicant pool, including 28,000 students who had been rejected earlier this month, the Los Angeles Times reported. Campus officials blamed the mistake on an “administrative error” that involved selecting the wrong database of recipients.

To be fair to UCSD, at the bottom of the article there's a correction stating that the students weren't actually mailed acceptance letters, but they were instead invited to a reception for admitted students. Here's a link to the full article. And this is not an April Fool's joke.

A "desperately unfunny play"

2009-03-31T02:56:00.003-04:00

We all enjoy a really bad theatre review every now and then. This one, from Timeout London, of the new comedy "The Murder Game," (coincidentally playing right up the street from us) includes the following phrases in the short, 167-word review:

"desperately unfunny play"
"A farce for all the wrong reasons"
"stunted by a clunky script"
"outdated cultural stereotypes"
and my all-time favorite: "some of the worst use of video projection in theatrical history"

Here's a link to the rest of the words.

The case of the environmentally-friendly campus police officer censors

2009-03-30T06:34:00.003-04:00

From the Boston Globe, 3/28/09:

Two MIT police officers, apparently unhappy with the student newspaper's coverage of a fellow officer's recent arrest for drug trafficking, did the only thing they could think of to block the bad news: They trashed it.

The officers were nice enough to put the newspapers in the recycling bins, not the trash, however -- a fact that the lead is somewhat ambiguous about. Here's a link to the full story in the Globe, along with a link to the original story in The Tech, MIT's student newspaper.

How NOT to conduct an election

2009-03-27T06:44:00.005-04:00

I'm no longer an AERA (American Educational Research Association, for the uninitiated) member, so a friend passed this along to me. This went out to the AERA-J listserv (names removed to minimize further embarrassment ):

Dear Division J Members,

A week or so ago I wrote to you announcing XXX XXXX as the winner of the Division J Council Member-at-Large election. This week I have both the awkward task of telling you that there was an error in one stage of the ballot counting and the pleasant task of announcing that the ensuing recount revealed ZZZ ZZZZ as the winner of the election.

We congratulate ZZZ and look forward to her joining the Division J Council.

In the interest of transparency, let me explain what happened. AERA and Division J bylaws require that a form of the Hare system be used for counting ballots when there are more than two candidates for a position--even if there is only one position. We had four candidates. As implemented by AERA, the Hare system works like this: Voters rank candidates and the candidate with the fewest votes (fewest #1 rankings) in round 1 is eliminated. The votes of those who ranked the eliminated candidate number 1 are then given to the candidate they ranked number 2 and so on. The assumption is that if a voter's first ranked candidate is no longer available, he or she would want their vote to go to the person they ranked second.

For our election, this meant that we couldn't simply declare the person who got the most first place votes the winner. We had to go through the rounds, eliminating candidates and assigning votes, until all but two candidates remained.

The system is fairly simple once you see an example of how it is actually done. The description AERA uses is very confusing and appears to be for a situation that did not fit an election like our; if one is not familiar with the process, it can make your head spin. The members of our election committee (AAA AAAA, BBB BBBB and CCC CCCC), none of whom had previous experience with this system, were not entirely clear how to figure out who won and were unsure of their calculations. So we asked the AERA Central Office for assistance. They analyzed the data and declared XXX the winner. They sent us their calculations, but we weren't looking for errors. They told us they had done the analysis a couple of times and had a couple of people verify the results. We had no reason to question their numbers; they're the experts with this system. We also declared XXX the winner.

Then one of the candidates asked for the election results, which according to AERA policy a candidate has the right to do as long he or she agrees to keep the results confidential. In the process of preparing a report for the candidate, I noticed that an error had been made in allocating the votes of the first candidate eliminated. In a close election, correcting that error made a difference in the final outcome. The new results were obtained independently by me, two members of the election committee and by a staff member at AERA.

We are happy for ZZZ but feel very badly for making an error that casts doubts on the division's election process and puts Scott in a very awkward situation. It is hard enough to lose an election, let alone find out you lost after 1800 division members have been told you won. I accept full responsibility for the error. I should have checked and double checked the figures we got from AERA and I should have insisted that members of the election committee do so as well.

In the future, all Division J elections will be conducted by the independent firm that runs all AERA elections. As an organization of well-meaning volunteers, we are just not equipped to set up and run secure elections much less bear the responsibility of determining the outcome in situations like this one.

If you have any questions, I will be happy to try and answer them.

Signed,

_____________________

Australian drag queens come to the West End

2009-03-21T16:40:00.010-04:00

For Rosie's birthday, we went with our friends Joe and Dana to see Priscilla Queen of the Desert - The Musical, which is still in previews here in London. Our family is a huge fan of the movie, which was a cult classic, and we listen to the soundtrack frequently. So we were very excited when we found out they had turned it into a musical and it was coming to London (it's been playing in Sydney for the last two years).

For those of you who haven't seen the movie, the story is about three lip-syncing drag queens who go on a road trip from Syndey to Alice Springs. As one would imagine, they run into all kinds of adventures in small towns on the way, all accompanied by their lip-syncing performances to such songs as I Will Survive (Gloria Gaynor), Go West (The Village People), and Shake Your Groove Thing (Peaches and Herb).

The musical was written by Stephan Elliott, who wrote and directed the movie, and it has the same costume designers as the movie -- and the costumes are as much a part of the show as anything. It's fair to say that the musical is very similar to the movie; the characters and plot are very much the same. So while we were looking forward to seeing it, we also were a bit wary of being disappointed by the lack of innovation.

Suffice it to say we were not disappointed one bit. The show uses many of the same songs from the movie, and adds some new ones, such as Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. It manages to out-camp the original, both in the sets, costumes, and the performances. It really was fun seeing the movie come to life. There were some nice additions to the story and the performances were all solid.

We suspect that when the show opens (next Monday), that it will likely get lukewarm reviews from the critics. Most don't seem to go for musicals adapted from movies, and I doubt this will be much different. But I believe it will also do very well with audiences, similar to how Mamma Mia was received when it opened.

My recommendation is to definitely see this show, whether you've seen (and liked) the movie or not. Assuming it is at least moderately successful here, I imagine it will be brought to Broadway within a couple of years.

There's a short clip from the Australian production on YouTube.

A potential plan to raise student fees in the UK

2009-03-18T08:13:00.002-04:00

Daily Mail, 3/18/09: New threat to the middle classes: Universities' plan to double student fees could leave millions in debt into their 50s

A Universities UK report released yesterday suggested a number of alternatives for increasing revenues available to universities.

Article

Stratford-upon-Avon, home of . . . . John Harvard's mother?

2009-03-10T08:36:00.002-04:00

Desperately Seeking Joe

2009-03-10T07:16:00.006-04:00

A friend of ours attended a performance of Joe Orton's "Entertaining Mr. Sloane," which is playing in the West End. When we saw her the next day, she came over to us all excited, and had brought the programme with her. She whipped it out of her handbag, and quickly started flipping through the pages. She stopped when she came upon an article about Joe Orton, and stabbed her finger at the accompanying picture, saying, "Look!"

There on the page was a picture of Joe Orton taken in 1964, with the caption saying he was photographed outside his flat on our road. There was no house number visible in the picture, so we weren't sure where on our road he lived. But that sent us off on a quest to find out. As the author of the article noted,

As a young girl growing up in Islington his death at the hands of his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, was the stuff of legend. The infamous flat on XXXX Street was a five-minute walk from my primary school and I would often make a detour on the way home in the hope I might catch a glimpse of the 'ghosts of the queer fellas looking through the window'!

Anne and I hadn't noticed any heritage plaques anywhere on the street, so we asked around a little, and sure enough we found out where he had lived.

We had just spent the weekend in Stratford-Upon-Avon, home of one of England's other famous playwrights. So we thought it fitting that after seeing that 16th/17th century house, we ought to look for the home of one of the country's most famous 20th century playwrights.

As we got closer, we could see a very small plaque under the bell. We were pleased to see his presence there had been noted, and stepped up to read the plaque. Much to our disappointment, all it said was "Managed by XXXX Realty Associates." We found it hard to believe that Joe Orton had lived there yet nobody had bothered to memorialize his presence.

Disappointed, we trudged on to Upper Street to do our errands (shopping at Sainsbury's for Anne, a badly-overdue haircut for me). On my way back home, I was walking across the street, and as I passed Joe's house, I looked over at it again. And that's when I noticed it -- there, high up on the outside wall of the top floor, was a round plaque. I was too far away to read it, so I crossed the street and looked up, craning my neck. Sure enough, it memorialized Joe Orton's presence there from 1960 to 1967, when he died "at the hands of his lover."

(You can click the picture to see a larger image and read the plaque)

I'm off to see "Entertaining Mr. Sloane" on Thursday, feeling much better knowing that Joe's life - and death - was properly memorialized on our street. It's also prompted me to rent "Prick up your Ears," the film biography of his life, which was released over 20 years ago.

A discussion of higher education access (part 2)

2009-03-03T08:35:00.011-05:00

In my earlier post, I described the setting of the seminar on access, along with who the presenters were. Here I'll summarize what they had to say (each was given 15 minutes), and reactions from the audience.

Before getting into the discussion, one of the interesting things to note about these seminars is that Members of Parliament actually participate in them. This is in contrast to the United States, where it would be quite unusual to see a member of the House, or even more so, a Senator, attending a policy seminar of this type. I described earlier another of the HEPI seminars, where I had a chance to chat with Baronness Margaret Sharp of Guildford, a member of the House of Lords. One of the members of the House of Commons acts as the host for the seminar, but this is not just in name only. In this seminar, the host MP, Evan Harris, actively participated in the Q&A session with the panel, as did Phil Willis, the Liberal Democrat MP from Harrogate and Knaresborough (and chair of the House of Commons Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee, of which Harris is also a member).

The seminar was opened by Sir Martin Harris, director of the Office for Fair Access (more information about and links to each of these organizations can be found in the previous post). He gave a brief overview of the re-introduction of tuition fees in the UK as mandated in the Higher Education Act of 2004, along with the scheme of government-funded, means-tested grants and bursaries (aka institutionally-funded grants) introduced in consort. In his view, there is no evidence that students are being priced out of attending college, because the combination of government grants, institutional bursaries, and government loans guarantee that the neediest students will have the resources necessary to attend university.

Harris addressed the question that has been raised regarding why there are so few working class students in the most selective British universities. He reiterated that finances have little or nothing to do with it, but that the decisions students make are related academic and social issues, including the schooling they receive in primary and secondary school.

The second speaker was, Malcolm Grant, president of University College London, and chairman of the Russell Group. He too addressed the problem of the participation gap in British higher education, stating that "the primary barrier to widening participation is the failure of 360,000 16 year-olds annually to achieve satisfactory grades on their GCSEs, particularly in maths and English."* Grant explained that the achievement gap at university entry (between working and upper class students) was a legacy of gaps as far back as pre-school, citing research by Feinstein.**

Grant echoed Harris's earlier words, indicating that the issue of "fair access" is more one of preparation and the admissions process, than an isue of financial barriers. He noted that the selective universities (including UCL) rely on more than just performance on the A level exams, indicating that "we're interested in assessing merit, potential, and the ability to thrive in a highly competitive environment." This sounds very much like the language used to describe holistic admissions processes in the U.S.

He recognized that it is not enough for the universities to sit back and blame the primary and secondary schooling systems for poor preparation of working class students. He provided examples of university programs at King's College London and the University of Leeds that provide outreach to underserved populations of students, including building more bridges to the further education colleges and secondary schools. These are similar to the outrach programs many U.S. colleges have implemented.

The third speaker was Michael Driscoll, vice chancellor (equivalent of president) of Middlesex University, an institution much down the prestige pecking order in England. He opened by providing some parameters on the participation gap in the country, noting that of the 3,500 secondary schools in England, 200 of them provide half of the entrants to Cambridge and Oxford, and 100 of them provide one-third of the entrants. Having stated this, however, he said that the country should not bother to focus on these two institutions (and by implication, other elite universities as well), as there simply are not enough admissions slots in these institutions to have any substantive impact on closing the participation gap. His comment sounded very much like comments I and others have made in the States, that we're not going to close the participation gap between rich and poor there by focusing on getting more poor students into the top 30 institutions in the country - there simply are not enough seats to address the scope of the problem as it exists today.

Driscoll also described a HEPI research report documenting that the teaching and other instruction in the less-prestigious universities in England is superior to that of the more research-intensive and elite institutions. He also described how the more elite universities have higher bursaries, indicating that the institutions that enroll most of the working class students have insufficient resources to support them financially:

Cambridge and Oxford: £3,000
Russell Group: £1,700
Million+ (an organization of the less prestigious universities): £700

Following the presentations by the three speakers, the audience was invited to ask questions. The format they use for the Q&A session is interesting; they take three questions from the audience, and then ask the speakers to briefly respond. This tends to speed things up a bit, and discourages the audience members from making long-winded statements disguised as questions. It also encourages brevity of responses from the speakers.

Many of the questions, including one from our MP host, Evan Harris, questioned the assumption of Harris and Grant that there were no financial barriers to a university education in England. Harris questioned whether students and parents really understand the bursary scheme, and have enough information to be able to make accurate decisions about what a university education will cost. Students don't know for sure what their bursary will be from the university they attend until after they are accepted and decide to enroll there. While some universities have good information on their websites that would allow a student to estimate the bursary they would receive, in not all cases is this possible.

One key difference from the U.S. is in the national grants, which are for maintenance, or living costs (income contingent loans are available for tuition fees). Eligibility here in England is based on the income of the parents, in contrast to the 100+ question FAFSA form that is required in the U.S. So as long as you know your parents income, you'll know if you'll be eligible for a full (£2,835) or partial maintenance grant. In addition, universities that charge the maximum tuition fee allowed, £3,145 this year, must provide a bursary of at least £310 to students eligible for the full maintenance grant - thus ensuring that the combination of maintenance grant and bursary equals the tuition fees. Next year's maximum grant will be £2,906, with an income cutoff of £18,360 (average income in the country is about £25,000). I'll be describing the financial aid system in more detail in a future post.

Another important issue brought up by members of the audience was part-time and adult students, many of whom are not eligible for financial aid, or at least as much financial aid, as full-time, traditional-aged dependent students.

In the end, it was a spirited give-and-take both between the speakers, as well as the members of the audience. And as I mentioned above, I was impressed with the participation of the MPs that were there.

*GCSEs are the national subject area tests English students taken during year 11 (the equivalent of the sophomore year of high school in the U.S.) of schooling. Students take them in the subjects that they are thinking of studying at university, or in further education, or related to those subjects (which can include a vocational area). For example, a student who is planning on studying engineering would likely take the maths and physics GCSEs. And by the way, "maths" is what they call it here, with the "s". The GCSEs are the precursor to the A levels, examinations taken by students in further (post-age 16) education that are used in the university admissions process. I'll be writing more about GCSEs and A levels in a later post.

** Feinstein, L., Robertson, D., & Symons, J. (1999). Pre-school education and attainment in the National Child Development Study and British Cohort Study. Education Economics, 7(3), 209-34.

Orange County comes to North London

2009-02-28T14:26:00.006-05:00

Life on sabbatical can't all be about student protests, seminars at Parliament, and lizard dung. There has to be a little fun in there also. So last night I dragged Rosie (the beneficiary of a 14-and-older show) along to see my favorite band, Reel Big Fish, at the HMV Forum in Kentish Town, a hop, skip, and a jump from here on the Northern Line. Above is a crappy image of Scott Klopfenstein, trumpeter, taken by Rosie's phone.

I saw RBF a couple of years ago at the House of Blues in Anaheim, a much smaller venue. The HMV Forum looks to be a former legitimate theatre converted to a club setting. The downstairs looks like a theatre with the orchestra seats removed, and a large balcony above the rear third. The orchestra is divided roughly in half, with the front portion a large dance floor, and the rear portion raised up about 5 steps divided by a railing (with a series of bars in the rear). We had tickets for the downstairs, and as we entered (after queueing up for about 20 minutes), one of the security people took one look at Rosie and asked her how old she was. After she replied "14," he turned to me and said, "I recommend that you stay away from the front part of the floor area. It's not very safe for little people." Rosie was very good, and resisted the temptation to jump all over the guy for calling her a "little person." We simply nodded and said, "Thank you."

We got in around the middle of the set by the first band, Random Hand, who were utterly forgettable. After a short break, the second warm-up band, Suburban Legends, came on. They had also been one of the opening acts when I saw RBF in Anaheim (also hailing from Orange County, California), and they put on a great show. They're primarily a pop group, though when opening for RBF they tend to up their ska quotient. They're backed by some great horns, and do a great take-off on boy band dance moves. They played a 30-minute set that got the audience, which by this time had filled the dance floor to the point that it was hard to move, dancing around. Rosie and I had a great location, standing right on the railing separating the dance floor from the raised section, about where row K would be if there were still seats in the orchestra.

After another short break, RBF came on to the cheers of the crowd. They opened, as they have been on many of their live shows, with "Trendy," to the cheers of the crowd. Frontman Aaron Barrett was his usual self, mugging to the audience and dancing around the stage with and without his guitar. As usual with RBF, the horns (Scott Klopfenstein and John Christianson on trumpet, and Dan Regan on trombone) carried their weight through the entire concert. These four musicians have formed the core of the group since it was founded in the mid-1990s, and they've kept the energy and spirit of ska going all these years. Bassist Matt Wong wasn't on stage, however; I don't know if he's out of the band or just not on this tour of Europe.

They played mostly many of their old favorites, from "She's Famous Now" through "Your Guts (I Hate 'em)" to "Beer." On one of the all-time crowd-pleasers, "She's Got a Girlfriend Now," Barrett stopped at one point and good-naturedly ripped Katy Perry (of "I Kissed a Girl and I Liked It" fame) for singing about girls kissing a decade after RBF first did, and the crowd ate it up. One wonders if there wasn't just a little professional jealousy of Perry's commercial success from a band that's been toiling away since little Katy was probably in middle school.

The crowd, which I would guess numbered somewhere between 1,000 and 1,200 downstairs, with an untold number up in the balcony, was made up primarily of those in the 18-to-mid 20s group. There were a handful of oldsters like I, and yes, even a smaller handful who looked older. And I'd say a small group of under 18s (who were supposed to be accompanied by someone over 18). The crowd was relatively well behaved, though every now and then a plastic cup full of some liquid was thrown across the dance floor, dousing those in its flight path. There was a lot of dancing, as there should be at a rousing ska concert, along with a bunch of kids crowd surfing. The security personnel were pretty aggressive about wading out into the crowd and grabbing the surfers and dragging them back to the ground. After watching the crowd I understood better why the security guard who greeted us at the entry suggested I keep the "little person" with me off the dance floor.

RBF finished up their 90-minute set with an encore that included their biggest hit from the 90s, "Sell Out" (with the audience singing along to every word) as well as their cover of "Take on Me," by 80s legends Ah-Ha. I think that Rosie was suitably impressed, having listened along to RBF with me in the car back in State College many times. If you ever get a chance to catch one of their shows, I highly recommend it. Even if you're not a huge fan of ska punk, it's a fun evening out. Their music is very accessible and they're an entertaining act who knows how to play to their audience.

UK students protest over tuiton fees

2009-02-26T12:48:00.023-05:00

Yesterday a coalition of student groups from campuses across Britain, including the Socialist Students Organisation and the Communist Students Organisation, held a protest over rising tuition fees in British universities. The protest was held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, like Birkbeck part of the University of London and located right next to Birkbeck.

In the UK, the government has placed a cap of £3,145 on tuition fees that universities can charge. Nearly all the universities charge very close to this maximum. In the words of one of the protest's sponsors, "Education Not for Sale was founded in September 2005 as a network of anti-capitalist students fighting for free education." Here's a preview article from yesterday's Guardian.

Like many protests, this one appeared to have more onlookers than active protestors. I would estimate that there were maybe 75 or 100 students actively chanting and carrying signs, and many others taking pictures and just watching. There was also a strong contingent of security personnel, including both the London Met police and private security forces. The protest was mostly a bunch of chanting, primarily calling for the removal of tuition fees and returning to free education. It apparently didn't receive much media attention, as I didn't find any articles in the London papers today.

While student protests over tuition are not unknown in the U.S., what was different about this is how the students from across a number of universities came together to organize.

I've posted below some of the signs held by students at the protest. You can find more pictures on my Facebook page.

And here's the story of Camilla's visit

2009-02-25T11:48:00.004-05:00

Camilla on Royal Visit at Hampstead School

You can see Lena at the left in this picture, gazing at the Duchess of Cornwall. She got to have a short conversation with her, Camilla asking her if there were many Americans in the school (she pegged Lena's accent immediately, evidently). Later in the day, when she saw Lena again, she said "Here's my American friend."

They royal is coming, the royal is coming

2009-02-25T04:45:00.003-05:00

Today is a big day at The Royal School Hampstead. The school's Royal Patron, the Duchess of Cornwall, is coming to visit the school. For those of you not up on your royal family history, the Duchess is also known as Camilla, wife of Prince Charles. The Duchess is coming to the school to help promote The Big Bone Walk, a fund raiser for the National Osteoporosis Society, which is her favorite charity. The girls at The Royal School have been raising funds for the walk, which takes place today in Hampstead Heath. So everyone at the school is all atwitter about Camilla's visit, and we promise to provide a full report from the girls.

A visit to Parliament, and a discussion of higher education access (part 1)

2009-02-24T15:46:00.024-05:00

As I described last month, I've been attending a monthly seminar series sponsored by the Higher Education Policy Institute. The seminars are held in Parliament, and each one is hosted by an MP. This month's seminar was on "Fair Access Revisited" and was hosted by Evan Harris, a Liberal Democrat representing Oxford.

One of the best parts about the seminar series is that they start at 8:20 in the morning (with tea, of course), so that we're allowed into Parliament before the general public. After going through security, including metal detectors, you can actually wander around the vast building fairly unfettered, as long as you wear your visitor ID.

After going through security, you enter Westminster Hall, originally built by King William II between 1097 and 1099 and the oldest surviving part of Parliament. This is also where visitors queue up to sit in the gallery of the House of Commons and House of Lords during debates.
There's obviously quite a bit of history to take in as you walk around, with plaques noting historical events that had taken place at certain points. Early in the morning the building is almost eerily quiet; when you walk in Westminster Hall by yourself, your footsteps seem to echo all the way up to the ceiling.

The seminar itself takes place in a room on the river side of Parliament, almost across from the London Eye, aka "The Gigundous Ferris Wheel." The seminar room is just to the left in this shot, and it is admittedly easy to get distracted by the vista. I was reminded of London's history of terror attacks, as on a regular basis a member of the London Met (the police force) walked up and down this patio, just outside the windows of our room, with a machine gun in hand. I had thoughts of taking his picture, but decided that would probably not be to his liking so opted to pass on that idea.

The seminar itself was very interesting. England has been putting a lot of emphasis in recent years on broadening participation in higher education (which historically has been below that of the U.S., and other European countries), and in promoting educational equity to students from all social classes.* There were three speakers:

Sir Martin Harris, Director of the Office for Fair Access, which "is an independent, non departmental public body which aims to promote and safeguard fair access to higher education for under-represented groups in light of the introduction of variable tuition fees in 2006-07."
Malcolm Grant, President of University College London, and Chairman of the Russell Group, a collection of 20 research-intensive and largely elite universities in the UK, including the likes of Oxbridge, LSE, and the University of Edinburgh
Michael Driscoll, Vice Chancellor (head) of Middlesex University, a former polytechnic institution that is far down the pecking order from the Russell Group institutions (it is ranked 105 out of 113 institutions in the Times of London League Tables, the British equivalent of the U.S. News & World Report college rankings)

Next: What they had to say

* The Chronicle of Higher Education covered a speech today by John Denham, Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities, and Skills (the government department responsible for higher education), in which he talked about the government's goal of increasing participation among traditional-aged students to 50%. The equivalent rate in the U.S. is approximately 65%. Here's a link to an article in The Guardian about Denham's speech.

Attention students and professors: The importance of backing up your work

2009-02-11T06:07:00.006-05:00

To anyone engaged in research, here's a reminder from the Times Higher Education of why it's critical to back up all your work:

Oh crap - there goes my work

05 February 2009

By Zoë Corbyn
A PhD candidate is threatening to take his university to court after it destroyed 35kg* of lizard excrement - the material for his research project.
Working in the faculty of biological sciences at the University of Leeds, Daniel Bennett's PhD was based on analysing samples from the rare butaan lizard, collected through painstaking fieldwork in the Philippines.
But he said that at the beginning of his third year he returned from fieldwork to find his desk occupied by another student. His samples had been removed and incinerated.
"The department's reaction to my plight was, to say the least, muted. In fact, it took 16 months before I received an official response to my complaint, which offered me £500 compensation and announced that new protocols had been established," he writes in this issue of Times Higher Education.
He has submitted his thesis, but has refused to accept the money. He says the incident has contributed to his "deep depression", and he now plans to take the university to court.
Leeds called the loss an "unfortunate mistake" and said "lessons had been learnt". It said it was unaware of Mr Bennett's plans to take legal action. "The issue is being dealt with under the university's student complaints procedure, though the completion of Mr Bennett's PhD thesis has been unaffected."

*To those in the States, that's about 77 pounds of lizard dung.

Boy, do I love that guy's books

2009-02-09T16:35:00.008-05:00

One of the downsides of being abroad is that unless you make the effort, it's easy to lose track of what's going on in the States. For example, it's snuck up on me that spring training starts in less than two weeks; if I had been back home, I would have been much more aware of this. It was only today that I discovered with great sadness that John Updike died a couple of weeks ago. I felt the same way I did upon hearing of Paul Newman's death last year, like a blow to the chest.

I've been reading John Updike's books since I was a teenager. I think the first one I read was Couples, which I would sneak out of my parents bookshelf when I was probably about 13. I snuck the book because it was considered quite risqué in its time, a novel that The New York Times said "was for its time remarkably frank about sex and became well known for its lengthy detail and often lyrical descriptions of sexual acts."

I read the four volumes in the Rabbit series in sequence over about a 25 year span, living roughly a generation or so behind Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. I read a number of his other novels -- not all of them, of course, as he was a prodigious writer -- as well as having enjoyed his essays and short stories in The New Yorker.

When I finished my doctorate in 1997, I bought myself a two-part present. The first part of the gift was a recently-published collection of all four Rabbit books in one volume, Rabbit Angstrom, The Four Novels. The second part of the gift was to take the summer between finishing grad school and starting work at Michigan to reread the four novels in sequence again, all 1,568 pages and 2.4 pounds of it.

My friend Michael Olivas, who wrote a book about Updike and is the former editor of the Updike Newsletter, penned a wonderful remembrance about him on the New Yorker website. I've taken the liberties of reprinting it here, as I was unable to link directly to it.

Rabbit Fan Bids Updike Adieu: John Updike (1932-2009), RIP

Early this morning, I learned of John Updike's passing, and those who know this side of me have been calling and emailing me all day, as if I lost a family member. In a way, I did. When I was a boy, I loved mythology, and carried around a copy of Edith Hamilton's Mythology. In those days, I could tell you Hank Aaron's batting average, and how well he and the Milwaukee Braves had done the night before, and how he had beaten Rocky Calavito in the tv show, Home Run Derby. And I could tell you all the Greek and Roman gods and other mythological figures, courtesy of Edith Hamilton.

My Cousin Margaret Valdez took note, and as an eighth grade graduation present to me in 1964, she bought me John Updike's novel The Centaur, a book I have read regularly since then and have always loved. It is about a boy with psoraisis (a skin disease I have had since I was a boy) and his schoolteacher father. When she discovered further how much I loved Updike and the gift, she got me a subscription to The New Yorker, where Updike was a staff writer. This exposure to such a wonderful writer and magazine encouraged me in a way that no other gift has ever done since then. Today, I give magazine subscriptions and books as gifts, in memory of the profound effect these two gifts had on me.

In graduate school at Ohio State, I wrote my American Literature MA thesis on Updike, published my first book on him (NY: Garland, 1974), and became the Editor of the Updike Newsletter for almost a decade. When I became a law professor, I gave it up and passed it to another scholar. But I never lost my love for Updike's work or the New Yorker, where he regularly published fiction and book reviews.

My late father once made fun of my reading habits, saying that my reading Updike was "nothing like my real life," a point that was accurate enough but that missed the point. I always have loved good writing, and Updike's suburban New England world was no less a part of my imagination than were Neruda's or Garcia Marquez' or Shakespeare's worlds. In fact, that was the point, at least to a young boy growing up in a large family in New Mexico.

When I was editor of the Newsletter, I corresponded with him and with his Knopf editor, Judith Jones, about editorial matters--foreign editions of his work, limited editions, that kind of thing. He spoke twice at the University of Houston, but we never actually met. Once, I was scheduled to introduce him to the Honors College, but a baby niece died and I had to be away, and about two years ago, he returned, and I simply lurked and did not stand in line to meet him, either at UH or at the Alley Theater, where he spoke that night.

In his wonderful essay, On Meeting Authors, he wrote about having once met his idol and New Yorker fellow writer/cartoonist James Thurber (an Ohio State grad--his papers and cartoon originals are in OSU's Thurber Rare Book Room) and E. B. White, also a New Yorker alum. In the essay, he notes that neither of the great literary men were very nice, in contrast to his high expectations formed by having read their work. Characteristically, he wrote: "Meeting authors is like seeing light from a star that has moved on." Now that his star and light have moved on, we still have his work. Through our writing we are all so well met, even if we have never met.

That was what I have been thinking about all day, so I pass it to you. If you want to read a splendid US writer, pick up The Centaur or drink deeply in his Rabbit quartet. I hope that he and my Cousin Margaret, who passed about 8 years ago in her native Santa Fe, meet each other and know the combined effect they both had on this young boy.

Michael A. Olivas
January 27, 2009, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Talk about adding insult to injury

2009-02-06T16:20:00.004-05:00

This brief article was on The Chronicle of Higher Education website today:

Arizona State Furloughs Some Laid-Off Workers

Some Arizona State University employees who are being laid off will also be subjected to a 15-day furloug, reports The Arizona Republic.

The university, which is eliminating up to 550 positions through attrition and layoffs in response to a state budget crisis, has ordered all of its 12,000 employees to take up to 15 days of unpaid leave by June 30.

“Anyone still getting a paycheck between February 2 and June 30 is affected,” Terri Shafer, an Arizona State spokeswoman, told the newspaper. “It’s across the board because the cuts at the Legislature are so deep.”

State lawmakers recently cut $141.5-million from the appropriations for the three state universities, which also include the University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University. —Eric Kelderman

That's really, really nasty. You get a notice telling you you're laid off as of some future date, and then subsequently told you'll be furloughed between now and then. I liked the suggestion of one commenter who said, "I think everyone should take off the last two weeks of the semester, including final exam week."

Presumably President Michael Crow will be furloughed from his $728,750 job also.

An organic pub and Rudolf Steiner

2009-02-06T05:50:00.007-05:00

No, it's not some kind of strange British oxymoron and juxtapositioning. Yesterday Anne and I had lunch at the Duke of Cambridge, just a block from our house (note that the picture above was clearly taken in much nicer weather than we've been experiencing lately - anybody bicycling there would be taking their lives in their hands this week). The Duke is Britain's "first and only certified organic pub," and trust me when I say that you can't get bangers and mash there.

From the outside and in, it looks like any other British pub (ignore the quote from Zagat on the pub's website that calls it "homely but spacious" - that seems an unfair criticism, it was quite cozy inside). [Edited 2/11/09: See the fourth comment after this post about the word "homely"] But everything - and I mean everything (more about this later) - served and used is certified organic or adheres to established standards for sustainability and the like. Tent cards on the tables list all of their efforts and certifications and the year they were established (the Duke just celebrated its tenth anniversary). This includes things like certified organic meats and produce, all procured as locally as possible. All fish served are from sustainable stocks. The Duke serves no foods or uses other goods that have to be air freighted in, in order to reduce its carbon footprint, and they recycle far more than the typical restaurant or household. We did our part by walking there, of course.

The menu changes daily depending upon what foods they are able to obtain from their suppliers and at local markets. The wine list also changes regularly, and yesterday's introduction said that many of their wines come from vineyards "operated under the philosophy of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner." There was more about this but Anne and I were laughing so hard that I don't remember exactly what a Steineresque vineyard was claimed to be. Who knew that his principles were being applied in more than just progressive education schools? The clincher for us was when we noticed that the Duke had supplied "organic tampons" in its loo (presumably just the women's) since 1999.

And the food? Quite nice; I had a lamb, chili, and carmelized onion sandwich, and Anne had salmon with spicy beet root vegetables (which, great surprise, I ate for her) and Bombay potatoes. My sandwich, like many of the dishes served on the board was served with "leaves," which is their term for a salad made up of foofy greens. I commented that the salad should perhaps have been more accurately titled "weeds."

I'm not sure we could appreciate or taste the true organic nature of everything we were served. But we sure did feel good about what we were eating. And in a bit of a note of irony, we kept seeing the kitchen staff pop outdoors for a few minutes. Yup -- they were out there for a quick smoke of what we were sure was organic cigarettes.

Parallel universes

2009-02-03T06:34:00.003-05:00

An article in The Guardian today, "White, middle-class families dominate top university places," demonstrates that the U.K. is dealing with some of the same issues involving gaps in college participation that we're dealing with in the U.S. For a similar analysis in the U.S., see this piece from a few years ago by Tony Carnevale and Stephen Rose, "Socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, and selective college admissions."

Snow Daze

2009-02-02T08:04:00.007-05:00

Well, we certainly didn't expect to have a snow day here in London. But sure enough, it started snowing last night, flurries at first, and we said, "Oh look, it's starting to stick." Anne and I stayed up to watch the Super Bowl, which started at 11:20p or so here. She made it until the middle of the second quarter, I lasted to the bitter end at 3:30a. By the end of The Boss's great set, there was probably about 2" or so on the ground.

We awoke this morning (everyone else in the house much earlier than I, of course) to find it still snowing. Lena checked The Royal School's website to find much to no one's surprise that school was canceled. (Update 5:00p: school has already been canceled for tomorrow, also). There was perhaps 4" on the ground, a fairly unusual occurrence in London from what we understand. What was most striking, however, was the eerie quiet -- unlike every other day here, we rarely heard a car go by, no sound of buses or horns, no planes flying overhead (the airports were closed). Only the occasional sound of kids out playing in the snow. Evidently, the city is pretty much shutdown; the headline on today's Evening Standard was "Snow shuts down London - and there's more to come," saying the 6" by this afternoon was the most snow in London in 18 years. Some of the Tube lines weren't operating at all, and the rest with "severe delays." Many universities were closed. Here's the view this morning out our patio.

The girls will most likely not have school again tomorrow, so we headed out for a walk in the snow and to see if there's anything left at Sainsbury's. We walked along the canal for a block. There were few cars on the side streets, and apparently not an abundance of (any?) snow shovels for the sidewalks. On the main roads in Islington by the Tube, though, the cars and buses were out. One can only wonder if we visitors from the snow belt brought this to the Londoners?

The Anglo Files

2009-02-01T10:50:00.003-05:00

Sorry, I can't take credit for this pun. It's the title of a book by Sarah Lyall, a reporter for The New York Times who was posted to London in the early 90s (she was interviewed on NPR about the book last fall). Lyall approaches her subject, the British, from what I would describe as a faux-anthropological approach. Anne picked the book up after hearing the NPR interview, deciding it would be good background reading for our stay here.

I read the book after we had been here for a few weeks already. Parts of the book are very humorous, and I found myself laughing out loud. But the more I read, the more I discovered that what she had written was not an accurate portrayal of the British people and life here, but really a caricature of those subjects. The chapters exaggerate all the stereotypes of Brits - the fascination with hedgehogs (a chapter that Lena particularly liked), the propensity for bad teeth, the "stiff upper lip." She apparently bases the book on much of the reporting she's done for the Times while based in London (she married an upper-class British writer, which is in part why she had moved here), along with her own general observations.

My problem with the book is that she presents everything monolithically. Our experience is that the British people and society - at least as represented here in London, and we recognize London is not representative of the whole country - are incredibly diverse. The caricatures she paints do a disservice. I recognize I'm basing this on only one month here, but I can see already that her brush is very broad.

If you're looking for some good laughs, then read the book. If you're looking, however, for a book that is just as funny and I think a more accurate portrayal of a foreigner's perspective on a different land, then get one of Sean Condon's books. My 'Dam Life is a hilarious portrayal of the time Condon - who is Australian - spent living in Amsterdam with his girlfriend. And his book Drive Thru America describes a road trip he and an Aussie buddy took across the States. Think Borat, only more realistic.

"Milk," starring Sean Penn: rated C, for Catch-22

2009-01-26T08:52:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, Rosie and I decided we wanted to go see Milk at the local Vue cinema right here in Islington (Anne was interested in seeing it also, but she was a good mother and took Lena to the Natural History Museum instead). We looked on-line and saw that it was rated "15," which according to the British Board of Film Classification (the Brit's version of the MPAA), means that it is:
"Suitable only for 15 years and over. No-one younger than 15 may see a ‘15’ film in a cinema. No-one younger than 15 may rent or buy a ‘15’ rated video or DVD."

This is in comparison to the R rating in the States, which means no on under 17 can be admitted without a parent or guardian. Evidently the British Board decides it needs to usurp parental responsibility in deciding which movies teenagers can see (it appears that most R-rated movies in the U.S. are rated 15 here). Rose assured me, however, that all of her friends at school go to 15 movies all the time.

Being the dutiful parent that I am, I went on-line to see what the parental advisories were for the movie. I found out that the main concerns were things like:

multiple uses of the F-word and S-word -- nothing that Rosie hasn't heard in Avenue Q, [title of show], Rent, or any other of a number of musicals she's attended
sexual situations among men -- as best as I could find out ahead of time, which was confirmed in the film, was largely dark, shaded scenes of men kissing. Well, we (and she, for that matter) have enough gay friends that she's used to seeing men kiss before. Hell, she's seen me kiss a man before. But you know, just in that European kiss-on-both-cheeks kind of way.
partial male nudity -- she's seen me getting in and out of the hot tub enough times that this doesn't bother me
frequent depiction of alcohol and drugs -- hellooooooo, she watches TV
violence, shootings and rioting -- hellooooooo, she watches TV

So given this homework, I decided it was fine for her to see it. So we walk to the cinema, which was very crowded on the Sunday afternoon. I ask for one adult and one student ticket. The clerk doesn't ask Rosie's age, but she does ask to see her student ID. I truthfully say she doesn't have it with her, which means she doesn't qualify for a student price. But if she did have it, she wouldn't have been admitted because it would say she's only 14. So I have to buy two adult tickets (£17.70, after a £1.50 off coupon), and we see the movie.

Which, by the way, was very good. It was interesting listening to the British audience (the cinema was almost full, it had just opened on Friday) reacting or not to many of the American cultural references. But they seemed to enjoy the film also.
==================================================================
One thing I noticed walking around the streets of London is you see very few people in baseball caps in comparison to the states. If you do, about 90% of the time they are New York Yankees caps, and judging from the accents of the wearers, they're not Americans. So going into the Angel Tube station with Anne this morning, we were heading down the extemely long escalator (think something like Dupont Circle in Washington), when she spots a guy coming up the other escalator in a Red Sox hat and wearing a Tufts sweatshirt. Certainly both are an unusual sight, at least based on our experience so far. As he gets up about parallel to us, I say, "Go Jumbos." He looks a bit shocked and at a loss for words, and just replies, "Yeah."

Haute cuisine

2009-01-23T13:39:00.008-05:00

Up until the last couple of days, I had somehow managed to avoid traditional British food. We'd been out to a number of restaurants, but none of them served British food, and we had yet to make a foray to a pub. Yesterday, however, I stopped for lunch in one of the cafes of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, which is just around the corner from Birkbeck and has a reputation as being one of the better college cafes around. One nice feature about Birkbeck's location is that many of the other constituent campuses of the University of London - including the Institute of Education, School of Oriental and African Studies, University College, and Royal Academy - are right nearby.

One of the featured items on the menu at the RADA cafe was higgidy pie, which I of course had never heard of. My colleague Claire assured me it was a traditional British cuisine, so I ordered it, figuring it was time to jump in and eat like a native. They can best be described as round mounds of meat loaf, about the size of a large scoop of ice cream. They served two of them with mashed potatoes, gravy, and smashed peas. If you like meat loaf, then you would like the higgidy pie; if you're the kind of person who doesn't like lots of things mixed together into a dark brownish mass, without knowing the ingredients, then you should probably pass. I fall into the former category, and quite enjoyed them.

Today at lunch, Anne and I decided that it was time for our first trip to a pub. We opted for the Island Queen, which as Anne earlier posted about, is a mere 100 steps from our house. I approached it with a bit of trepidation, because pub fare doesn't have the best reputation for fine dining. I ordered the bangers and mash (sausage and mashed potatoes over gravy, with sauteed cabbage on the side), and Anne ordered a beef bourguignon pie. This was a beef bourguignon served in a pastry casserole, also served with mash and sauteed cabbage (you see a pattern here?). Both were delicious, and certainly put to rest for us the bad reputation that pub food has. Just another block away is a gastropub, the Duke of Cambridge, which we're also going to try.*

After lunch, we made our daily (or sometimes every other day) food shopping trip. As some of you know, pretzels are one of Anne's favorite snack foods, though we had been warned that they are nearly impossible to find in England. Yet right there in the crisps aisle of Sainsbury's, we found not just pretzels, but Penn State pretzels!

* Contrary to what Anne posted, I don't think the Island Queen really qualifies as a gastropub

A good summary of the state of higher education research in the UK

2009-01-22T09:19:00.001-05:00

The Times Higher Education a couple of weeks ago had an interesting piece summarizing the state of research in higher education in the UK.

The not-so-tourist syndrome

2009-01-21T14:15:00.008-05:00

Going on 16 days that we've been here now, and I've realized that I've moved beyond the tourist phase. The trips on the Tube, at least for regular trips, are become much more routine - I automatically know which direction I'm going on the Northern Line without thinking about it, and know on which side the doors on the train open at stations I'm at regularly. I've also learned not to take the stairs at Russell Square, but to wait for the lift; they're not kidding when they say there are 172 steps. I did take them once, just to see what it was like, and trust me - you don't want to do it twice. I'm automatically looking right when crossing a street (warning: watch out for one way streets), and am no longer always increasing the price of everything by 50% to figure its price in dollars.

We're also getting to know the differences between shopping for food at Sainsbury's, Marks & Sparks, and Tesco Express. And also which restaurants in our neighborhood are the best values, though we're trying not to eat out very often. Even the best values are fairly expensive, so we're dinung in as much as possible, especially for dinner. Fortunately, our kitchen is very well stocked, and even though much smaller than our kitchen at home, very usable.

At dinner tonight while discussing how school was for the girls today, I was struck by the fact that Lena automatically talked about her "maths" class, rather than first calling it "math" and then correcting herself. And I'm not even surprised anymore to see she and Rosie in their uniforms as they commute to school - which, by the way, they now navigate on their own on the Tube without parental supervision.

We took in the inaugural festivities from home yesterday. BBC News had coverage from 2:00p to 10:00p GMT. I also streamed some of the CNN coverage over the Internet, which was an interesting comparison. During the ceremonies at the Capitol, both were showing the same video, so either it was pool or the BBC was broadcasting CNN's video. But of course the commentary was quite different. Much of the BBC commentary, not surprisingly, focused on what Obama would likely do in foreign affairs. They also spent time explaining things that Americans know and take for granted, such as who Dan Quayle is (well, at least most of us know who he is). In the end, I turned off CNN and concentrated on the BBC.

I broke down and purchased an Evening Standard (subtitled, "London's Quality Newspaper") for the first time coming back from work today. Normally I just grab one of the free papers they give out as you walk in the Tube stations in the morning (The Metro) and evening (The London Paper). But the same Evening Standard signboards that a couple of weeks ago were advertising record cold temperatures ("London Freeze as Temps Plummet Below Zero" - that's zero celsius, of course) were advertising a special pull out section for the inauguration. So I plunked down my 50p and bought one. The coverage included the activites here in London, including an "inaugural ball." It was interesting that Brits who didn't know me well enough to know my politics assumed that we were celebrating the inauguration, a sentiment that seems pervasive here. It's hard to find anybody who has a good word for the departing President Bush or a negative word for President Obama.

Today Anne came with me to Russell Square, as she was meeting a new friend there for a stroll and tea. So she decided she should pay a visit to my office, memorializing the visit with a picture of, as we've come to call it, my location in the Bowels of Birkbeck. Notice the safety feature of the fire extinguisher directly behind me.