This attitude is why it takes so long to do even the most simple thing in a college or university.

Why does this keep getting overlooked?  Another paper today came out today ( Not Just Kid Stuff Anymore: The Economic Imperative for More Adults to Complete College) that argues for the need for more people to go to and complete college.  It includes the following quote:

By 2018 the demand for college-educated workers will rise 16 percent, while demand for other workers will stay flat.  At the same time, nearly two-thirds of jobs in 2018 will require some postsecondary education or training.

Here’s the thing.  That may well be true, but I guarantee that those increases are in specific fields, few of which are in the social sciences or humanities.  Those jobs are in areas of science, engineering and mathematics.  You know, the scary majors.  We import millions of Indian and Chinese technology workers every year because we don’t have enough trained people in this country to do that work, all while graduating more history and philosophy majors that our economy could ever absorb.  (Don’t believe me?  Take a look at the top 50 job titles for H1B Visas in 2011.  Of the top 10, 6 are IT, 2 are math/science, 1 is accounting and 1 is medical.)

Now, I appreciate the humanities topics.  My undergrad included liberal amounts of history, philosophy and literature.  But it also included a bunch of IT, and that’s what I made my living at.  I have a PhD in Education Policy, but I am using what I learned during that process to make a living as a statistician/analyst.  The fact is that we need college graduates in the fields we are importing, not just in general.

In some ways this is something the for-profits do better than traditional higher education.  Most degree programs are tied directly to an in-demand career field.  You don’t see University of Phoenix offering Bachelors degree’s in Women’s Studies or Poetry.  But even they fall short in providing the truly technical types of education that the country truly needs.

Part of the issue here is that we allow students to choose their major at a point in their life when they are 1) more interested in partying with their friends 2) think $30k is a lot of money and 2) have no idea how hard it can be to support one’s self.  But we also still haven’t entirely solved the problem of how to allow adults (who realize later that they made a mistake) to go back and retrain for a more technical field.  I could get a Masters in Engineering if I wanted, but would be hard pressed to go back and get a Bachelors without quitting my job.

As long as we continue to argue for more college graduates with specifying what types of fields, we will continue to produce large numbers of college graduates while still needing to import large amounts of talent.  Yes, calculus is hard.  So is organic chemistry and electrical engineering.  Programming is work, especially if your program is providing life support to ICU patients and therefore cannot fail.  But we need students learning how to do those types of things, not just getting degrees for the sake of the piece of paper.

Side note:  We still hear about health care jobs being where the demand is, which is sending more and more students to community college nursing programs and medical assistant training.  However evidence is starting to come in that there is an oversupply, at least at the associates level.  Employment is harder to find, and there are still challenges getting into bachelors level programs.  (Nursing bachelors programs are extremely tight because most nurses can make more actually nursing than as a professor teaching students; that short supply of teachers makes slots limited.)  Just as the late 80s/early 90s saw a ramp up then dive in IT people with minimal credentials being able to find jobs, the lucrative medical fields appear to be ramping up the level of education needed for the best jobs.

Via: OnlineEducation.net

Let me say that again.  They broke down the door to investigate a case of student aid fraud.  Because, you know, those types of criminals are renowned for flushing the paperwork down the toilet.

They did all this at 6am at the home where the accused no longer lived and hadn’t for some time.  They felt it necessary to handcuff the one adult (the estranged husband of the accused) and put him (in his boxers), along with three pre-teen children, into the back of a police car for hours while they searched the house.

I can not think of a single good reason for this behavior.  Even if she still lived there, these types of crimes NEVER call for breaking down doors, frightening small children, or handcuffing people in their underwear.  Apparently the DoE can’t either, since they issued a very generic statement saying that they assessed the risk to the officers, public and occupants, but say nothing about why the risk in this case justified the same behavior usually used with meth labs and chop shops.  The homeowner had no criminal record and wasn’t the person under investigation, so how this type of approach could have been protecting anyone is beyond me.

As a general matter of civil liberties I have a real problem with the way this warrant was handled.  I don’t expect law enforcement to be perfect – sometimes they will execute warrants against properties where the person no longer lives.  And assuming they can show probable cause, they have every right under the warrant to search for any documents the accused left behind.  BUT, what they don’t have the right to do is to break down doors, traumatize children, handcuff and lock people into a car for hours, or otherwise detain a person who is not under investigation,  just because they live at the address being searched.

Additionally, I am deeply uncomfortable with the idea that the Department of Education has a law enforcement branch, particularly an armed one and one large enough to execute this search warrant with only minimal presence (and no involvement) of local law enforcement.  Obviously someone needs to investigate crimes involving aid fraud and such, but they need be neither armed nor leading raids themselves.  They should be partnered with the FBI or local law enforcement who have a better sense of appropriate levels of force.

If local law enforcement had executed a warrant this way they would have been tarred and feathered for excessive use of force and unlawful detainment.  The fact that these were DoE agents executing the warrant leads me to two conclusions:  First, that they are inexperienced or watch too much TV if they think the level of force used was appropriate.  Second, that law enforcement authority has been granted far beyond the scope appropriate.  When the department of education has guns, we are one step too close to a totalitarian society for my comfort.

Friday the US Department of Education released the repayment rates for student loans by institution.  This was anxiously awaited because the gainful employment regulations are going to require that for-profit colleges and universities have 35% repayment rates to be eligible at all and 45% to be unconditionally eligible.  University of Phoenix‘s stock went up because of a 44% rate, while most of the rest of the for-profit sector went down because of low repayment rates.

However those with low rates are in good company.  Other schools that don’t meet the 35% cutoff:

• Medical schools
  • Harvard
  • Loyola
  • Georgetown
  • Temple
  • Penn State
  • Tulane
  • Columbia
  • University of Massachusetts
• Law Schools
  • Seton Hall 29%
  • John Marshall 28%
• Public Schools
  • Tennessee State 22%
  • South Carolina State 17%
  • Delaware State 21%
  • Alabama State 14%
  • Virginia State 25%

(Rates are based on number of students paid in full or with a declining balance as well as how far the balance had dropped in 4 years.  To be fair to the medical & law schools, I also calculated the % of people making payments regardless of how much so far; those listed also had fewer than 35% of students making payments.)

So what’s my point?  The ability to pay back a student loan appears unrelated to where you went to school or even what you studied.  If someone who went to Harvard Med School can’t make a payment on their loans then the fact that many people who go to “lesser” schools can is nearly miraculous.  More specifically, these numbers make it clear that quality of degree and field are not as tightly related to repayment rates as one might previously have expected.

Second, University of Phoenix is achieving that repayment rate with 5.5 time more students than the next highest school.  (That also happens to be a for-profit; American Intercontinental University who is sitting at 39%).  In fact, to 50% repayment you have to go to the 5th school, Penn State (excluding the med and law schools) which has 12% of the students University of Phoenix does.

I really think that before this particular beating continues people need to take a better look at the numbers.  With an overall average of only 56% repayment, no one is doing particularly well, and many highly respected schools are doing worse than some of the for-profits.  Tarring and feathering an entire sector without looking at the bigger picture is unjust and makes it clear that this is a vendetta, not a fair and balanced discussion of the issues.

<crickets chirping>

A year later we heard that the journal had gone through a couple of “changes” and wanted to know if we wanted our paper back or were willing to wait*.  We said we’d wait.

<more crickets>

Friday we FINALLY got the paper back – revise and resubmit.

The number one comment by both reviewers?  The literature review was out of date.

^&(*^%$%$#^&^&()()%$&*)*&&^%#@&*(

Well, DUH!  Of course it’s out of date.  YOU PEOPLE SAT ON IT FOR YEARS!!!

*sigh*

So now, instead of working on my literature review, I’m working on the lit review for this paper instead.

It is always better to have published papers in the field, so I know that this is worth the effort in the long run, but if this takes too long I may never graduate.  Again.

* A while back I did a paper with someone in the law school and discovered that they basically shop their papers around to everywhere, all at once, and take “the best” [read: prestigious] offer.  I am so jealous of that system.

All too many people are looking at this from a one-dimensional perspective; for-profit = bad.  To this group there is some kind of ethical issue with making money on education; these are the same people who have been tarring and feathering charter schools for the past decade. The corollary is that making money principally from money provided by the government is worse.  (Why this doesn’t apply to defense contracts and such is beyond me.)  The picture is much more complex.

We are caught in an explosion of credential-ism, whereby the administrative assistant who used to need a High School diploma now needs an Associates in Business and a promotion to manager needs an MBA.  Do these jobs really require what is taught in these programs?  Probably not.  But the degree is a short-cut; it indicates purpose on the part of the person, discipline to complete something and some assumed level of knowledge.  (Note that at the same time employers routinely complain that students don’t learn what they need them to learn in school, but that’s another post entirely.)  Regardless, most people can’t stop working long enough to get the credential, making the “traditional” college experience an unachievable goal.

At the same time we live in a society where the message for the past few decades has been that degree = success = money = middle class.  My father died in 1993, when I was in my late 20s.  I had dropped out of college after the first semester of my sophomore year and not yet gone back.  On his death-bed he informed me that I was going to be a bag lady because I hadn’t finished school.  At the time I was making $50k working as a tech support manager in silicon valley.  To him that didn’t matter, and we continue to deliver that message today.  We tell kids and adults that they HAVE to go to college, and we talk about increasing the number of graduates, all the while watching the benefits of that degree shrink.

These competing pressures are driving more and more non-traditional students back to school.  (Traditional students are full-time, 18-21 year olds usually living on campus and working maybe 10 hours per week.)

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, about half of today’s students are financially independent; 49% are enrolled part-time; 38% work full-time; 27% have dependents of their own. Almost half — 12 million — attend two-year community colleges rather than four-year schools.

And most students who start college don’t finish. Only 56% of students at four-year colleges complete a degree within six years, and just 20% of first-time students at public community colleges get a degree or certificate within three years. — USA today citing NCES

We have a system in place that is made to support a small fraction of what today’s college student is actually like at a time when public funding for education is being drastically cut, limiting innovation in the public sector.  Is it any wonder why for-profit firms have stepped in to fill the gap?

For-profit colleges work with a disproportionate number of

1. working adults
2. minorities
3. first time college students
4. first college student in the family

This is not a chosen strategy; every school would rather have the easy students who all complete their programs, know how to deal with the system and make the school look great by going on to great accomplishments.  For-profits work with this audience because that is the one that exists and is being drastically underserved by other higher education organizations.

On the one hand, many people see these groups as disadvantaged and therefore in need of protection from the “big bad corporate wolf”.  But on the other, most non-profit colleges aren’t interested in supporting these students or don’t have the resources to help them navigate the process.  For example, only 58 percent of community college students eligible for Pell Grants applied.

The study, conducted in collaboration with the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), identified several reasons that community college students are reluctant apply for aid. These reasons include:

a lack sufficient human and technology resources at financial aid offices to provide students with information and one-on-one assistance

financial aid needs of students may not receive adequate priority or attention because public funding is scarce for many community colleges.

students not having a basic understanding of financial planning for a college education

Say what you want about for-profits, but they provide students the information and resources to apply.

Are there crooked for-profits out there seeking only to game the system?  Of course.  There are also crooked churches, crooked social service organizations and crooked businesses.  This doesn’t make them ALL crooked.  Are there bad apples at every school doing the wrong things?  Yup; if I could take the enrollment counselors who were recruiting from homeless shelters out and paddle their bottoms I would.

But just as there are bad for-profits, there are bad non-profits as well.  Segregating the system based on incorporation status doesn’t provide any benefit to the discussion.  Bad apples in both barrels need to be dealt with, students need to be educated on smart college borrowing, and schools that provide sub-standard education need to be weeded out regardless of whether they put their money into shareholder dividends or new buildings and endowments.

The higher education system has some really big issues right now, and picking on the new kid isn’t going to solve them.  The most sensible voices in the current discussion realize that.  The rest need to come down off their high horses, stop throwing the baby (innovation and superior service) out with the bath water (predatory recruiting practices and uninformed lending) and focus on supporting the students we HAVE, not the ones we wish we had.

Is a for-profit always the best alternative for a given student?  No.  Neither is Harvard, or StateU or Local Community College.  However singling out the for-profit sector isn’t reasonable; there are lots of people flipping burgers with degrees from third-rate universities who struggle just as much with their loans, and many with non-vocationally oriented degrees from top universities who are drowning in debt.  The problem is systemic and needs to be addressed as such.  Access, funding, and the desired outcomes are all in need of some serious re-imagining, and removing the most imaginative group from the discussion (even if you don’t like what motivates their imagination) isn’t going to help anyone.

Another article came out today about how for-profit colleges and trade schools (lumped into one big indistinguishable mass) are using deceptive practices to convince students to sign up for expensive degree programs, then encouraging the students to take out massive student loans that they won’t be able to pay off when they graduate due to low starting salaries or no jobs.  It would be foolish not to acknowledge that some for-profit organizations do this, but it would be just as foolish to suggest that no not-for-profit ones do.

Tuitions are going up everywhere.  State support of public institutions is going the way of the dodo, with the most recent announcement being double digit tuition increases for the universities in Arizona.  In some cases, the for-profits may become the only place with the capacity to take students as budgets such as California’s cause even community colleges to turn students away.  The for-profits may still be more expensive the those public institutions with space, but the gap is closing quickly.

For instance, a full (no transfer credit) Bachelors in Education from the University of Phoenix runs about $43,000 (either online or in a regular albeit evening classroom format).  That sounds huge; how will a teacher ever repay that?  Of course, they could also go to ASU for around $33,000.  Assuming they lived in Phoenix already and that they could take the time off from their current job to get to the scheduled classes and that they could arrange transportation and child care (if necessary).  (The for-profits have few traditional students; most are working adults going back for a career change or enhanced qualifications.)

An Arizona teacher has a starting salary on average $31,000, which comes with the threat of layoff due to the state or a district being short on funds.  A back of the envelope payment calculation comes up with $497 per month for University of Phoenix vs. $382 per month for ASU.  With a take home of under $1955 per month averaged out over 12 months (assuming 18% of gross for taxes and benefits, which is probably low), student loan payments would eat up 25 and 20% of take home respectively. (I’m not even going to talk about private not-for-profits; even the middle-of-the-road ones often charge upwards of $18,000 per year AFTER financial aid.  For example, here is the small liberal arts school I went to for undergrad.  $25k per year for tuition alone is not uncommon.)  Even with the new Income Based Repayment (which would limit the amount to 15% of 1.5*povery rate, or $184 per month) this is still a heavy burden with really slow progress.

A new proposal takes this a step further, calling for schools to be required to keep debt (average debt per student) at or below 8% of the Bureau of Labor Statistics 25th percentile salary.  But there’s a catch; this only applies to proprietary (read: for-profit) schools and trade programs.  That’s where the hypocrisy comes in.

A new teacher from ASU is nearly as finacially underwater as a new teacher from University of Phoenix, yet the proposal is essentially a price cap on the latter but not the former.  I can’t think of a single justification for that beyond the irrational hatred many in education feel for for-profit firms trying to make it in their industry.

Obviously these firms fill some niche that the standard public colleges don’t.  It might be convenience, timing, far superior customer service (as long as you are enrolling for more classes, the for-profits will bend over backwards to help you get what you need), a lack of requirements for classes that appear unrelated to your career, or any number of other possible things.  From a purely dollar-based comparison they may look like a bad deal, but students don’t choose a school based strictly on dollars.  These other factors weigh in, and sometimes the convenience alone can be worth the price.

My point is that if we as a society believe these kinds of limits are valuable then they should apply across the board.  Firms who are deceptive in their recruitment techniques should be sued over it, regardless of their tax status.  The public education system is slow and resistant to learning from the for-profit sector despite seeing how successful that sector is, and that’s too bad.  As state funding drys up, public institutions are going to find even more pressure to drive up enrollment for additional tuition dollars and cut costs (including financial aid) to make ends meet.

At first, this is a massively tempting idea.  I have certainly spent the summer bringing myself up to speed for a new course I’m teaching by listening to podcasts of classes from Berkeley and MIT, and consider these types of resources invaluable for an adult who wants to fill out their knowledge on a topic or learn something new.  Yet we get a great deal more from college than just topic knowledge. 

I see a few problems with this model that the article fails to address:

•  We produce an awful lot of ill-prepared high school graduates in this country.  Almost 42 percent of  freshmen enrolled in public 2-year colleges and 20 percent of those enrolled in public 4 year colleges were enrolled in at least one developmental course (U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2004).  These students will be unable to read and learn from this type of material without a person to go to, and may not be able to complete the work at all without being pushed to complete the developmental coursework.
• Many of these same struggling students are first generation college students who lack the cultural capital to understand the process.  For better or worse, the structure of a traditional school helps ensure that those students find their way through the process.  Even though there are holes in how the system works now, leaving students to find their own way will only make that worse.
• Students get a lot more from college than just topic knowledge.  Even if we treat it as some form of white-collar trade school, students learn teamwork and presentation skills, make contacts within their field, and build valuable social skills in the college process.  I have serious doubts about how well an online school can teach those things.    
• Colleges serve many purposes outside of teaching undergraduates.  Some are extraneous, while others are irreplaceable.  Where will basic research be done?  The kind of stuff for which there isn’t a market yet, but which the engineers and scientists will need to know to build the next generation of technology?  How and where will we train future PhD’s, either to do research or to teach?  Why would someone WANT to go down that path when their work has been devalued.  (Note: I have a real problem with the ancient apprentice / indentured servant model of doctoral education we have now, but I don’t see an improvement here; more like extinction.)
• One of the things that colleges do is force students to think about other perspectives.  This in part comes from the fact that many academics have perspectives that bare little resemblance to those held by the general public, and can be abused the way some push ideology, but is none the less an important part of school.  The same goes for taking subjects that may not appear immediately interesting.  No one would take my statistics class if they weren’t required to, yet many tell me later that it is one of the most broadly useful classes they have taken. 
• The past 50 years has seen credential creep; where you used to be able to support a family with a high school diploma, you now need a bachelor’s degree to get in the door and a master’s to get promoted.  Will this be the antidote, showing that knowledge and credentials are only loosely correlated?  Or will this make it worse by further devaluing degrees until the checker at Walmart needs a degree in Finance to get the job?
• Moreover how do we differentiate the person who listened to the Berkeley podcasts from the person who went to class, wrote the papers and took the tests?  I suppose one could ask if we need to, but few employers are willing to “take your word for it” rather than call your references.  A degree serves a similar function; it is an external stamp that you stuck it out, did the work adequately (although adequate changes from school to school), have at least some knowledge of the topic, can follow rules and can deal with the culture of a bureaucratic organization.

I agree with the article that something needs to change about how we do higher education, but this model seems primarily suited to turn it into a white-collar trade school, focused at the (albeit much larger) undergraduate level and suited principally to self-motivated students with sufficient cultural capital to navigate the process in a meaningful way.  That may be good for some students, but is unlikely to work for all, and genuinely harmful to some.

• Working full time at day job, who has laid off half the company in the last 3 months so I need to perform adequately
• Teaching 1 section on Intro to Statistics and the associated Lab
• AERA presentation to write, to be uploaded by March 23rd
• Reading prep toward comps this summer and dissertation after that.  I know 1 comp question so far (local and national environment of high stakes testing with regard to its relationship to college performance)
• Data may start coming in that will be used for dissertation, in which case I will have to start turning disjointed files into a longitudinal database; that’s going to be a blast.

All of which means I need to get back to being reasonably organized.

• WORK: Luckily my day job is relatively self-contained.  I organize myself within that bucket and it rarely crosses over outside the occasional blackberry message. 
• TEACHING:  For the teaching, I have finished lecture notes for 7 out of 15
  chapters and 2 of the 4 exams.  I’m not quite up through spring break,
  but getting there.  
• Today I need to go through the piles of papers on my desk and organize what goes to class and what doesn’t.
• Tonight I need to go through my ancillary materials and add to my notes pages for the 4 chapters I just finished, then print the notes pages for myself.
• Tomorrow I need to call the Blackboard Administrator and get my class turned on so that I can use it for distributing copies of the Presentations to the students, as well as ancillary materials.
• Tomorrow night is the first class; I need to be well rested, fed, and my most sparkling self (ugh)
• Next weekend, in addition to grading the first homework, I would like to go through and complete the two chapters to get me through spring break.
• AERA: Dang that thing sneaks up on me every single year.  I need to review my proposal and the comments made by the reviewers and my adviser, then start writing.  I have most of the materials, but this is a slightly different way of organizing the material and I need to not underestimate how long that can take.
• Next weekend I need to re-read the proposal, my advisers comments and those of the reviewers, then begin free-writing around the topic. 
• COMPS: This is the one I have the most fudge on, so I will probably let this slide until after the AERA paper is done.  The exception is if adviser decides to have any kind of regular meeting (doubtful) between now and when the data is all here.
• DATA: Waiting game – the good news is that its not here yet, so I have nothing to do.  The bad news is that I don’t know when it WILL be here…..

Last time I taught I found my entire weekends being occupied with things related to teaching.  That can’t happen again.  More importantly, I need to align how I use the weekends for the entire semester to meet my broader goals.  So here are a few goals:

1. Weeknights are mine.  Either I am teaching until 8pm or I am trying to get to the gym, but one way or the other I need the downtime to relax and am too often braindead anyway from a day of work.  The most I will ever ask of myself on a weeknight is grading homework in front of the TV.
2. One day out of every weekend is devoted to AERA writing and Comps;  At first it should be mostly AERA, later in the term it will refocus to mostly comps, but the goal is not to let the class take up both days and to do both from the very beginning.
3. I need to get the remaining lecture notes between now and spring break (2 chapters) completed next weekend.  I can then complete the remainder of these notes after the AERA paper is done.

Unlike so much of life, most of the non-class related tasks are not things that can easily be broken down and put on a list.  I’ve tried to turn the project “Write AERA paper” into a series of next actions and failed.  They are either too vague, or specific but rapidly become irrelevant or incorrect.  Therefore I need to focus on those types of lists for what I CAN create lists for (grade homework, review lecture notes, answer emails from class) and allot time in chunks for those that I cannot.

Here is to the internal hope that arises every semester that somehow, this one can be different.