Higher ed as a crummy sorting mechanism: CHE article

[polly_mer]

...while steering the children of the rest — should they go to college at all — into nonselective institutions too poor to ensure that most of their students graduate.  Under pressure from political and market forces, and severe financial strain, the nonselective sector adopted a host of bad habits, such as heavy dependence on tuition, that have compromised some colleges' ability to survive this crisis.

[Wahoo Redux]

Okay, but this is really what the article is about:

We need to set out on a new course that connects higher education to high schools and labor markets and provides transparency and accountability.

In using public money to bail out colleges and help keep them afloat, we should reroute a much larger share of higher-education expenditures toward ensuring that all Americans, regardless of family wealth, stand a good chance of getting the education they need to be financially independent and engaged citizens.

We must stop heavily subsidizing the wealthy's consumption of elite higher education as a luxury good, and redirect tax dollars toward the nonselective two-year and four-year colleges that do the heavy lifting when it comes to preparing a work force and lifting people out of poverty.

We need to ensure that financial aid goes to the low-income students who need it the most.

[marshwiggle]

I have a couple of questions about the article:

A child from a family in the top quartile of family income and parental education who has low test scores has a 71-percent chance of graduating from college and getting a good job anyway by their late 20s. However, a child from a low-income family but with top test scores has only a 31 percent chance of achieving similar success.

Anyone know more about this? Why specifically do low-income smart kids not succeed? Do they not pursue post-secondary education, or do they not complete it, for instance? And whichever it is, why?

Selective colleges use far too much merit-based aid to offer tuition discounts to the well-heeled. Merit aid is affirmative action for the mostly white upper-middle class.

By "merit-based aid", do they mean scholarships? Or does it refer to something else?

[polly_mer]

I have a couple of questions about the article:

A child from a family in the top quartile of family income and parental education who has low test scores has a 71-percent chance of graduating from college and getting a good job anyway by their late 20s. However, a child from a low-income family but with top test scores has only a 31 percent chance of achieving similar success.

Anyone know more about this? Why specifically do low-income smart kids not succeed? Do they not pursue post-secondary education, or do they not complete it, for instance? And whichever it is, why?

Yes, they are less likely to pursue higher ed. 

Yes, they are less likely to complete when they do pursue it.

Why?  I'm one of the success stories, so this is a topic near and dear to my heart as I watched my family and friends not succeed.

The short version includes:

* leaving everything you know for a shot at a different life is hard, especially when you don't know what that different life will look like and would rather have a life like everyone you know, but with more money from a better job.

* the assumptions underlying how a college student's day-to-day life works are drastically wrong for many poor students

* the assumptions of what normal is and what people want out of the college experience varies drastically across socioeconomic groups

* when daily experience is so hard that you're struggling with meeting basic needs this week for your whole kith and kin, things that might pay off in the long run but aren't urgent today will never get done.


A few popular media links that give examples are below:

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/09/the-rural-higher-education-crisis/541188/

https://www.vox.com/2018/8/3/17639142/poor-kids-college-dont-enroll

https://slate.com/business/2015/06/college-graduation-rates-for-low-income-students-why-poor-kids-drop-out.html

https://hechingerreport.org/the-real-reasons-many-low-income-students-dont-go-to-college/

https://www.insidehighered.com/sites/default/server_files/media/HOPE_realcollege_National_report_EMBARGOED%20UNTIL%20APRIL%2030%203%20AM%20EST%20(1).pdf

https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2019/01/16/first-generation-low-income-students-drop-out-000873/

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/magazine/who-gets-to-graduate.html

Selective colleges use far too much merit-based aid to offer tuition discounts to the well-heeled. Merit aid is affirmative action for the mostly white upper-middle class.

By "merit-based aid", do they mean scholarships? Or does it refer to something else?

They mean scholarships and often scholarships funded through simply discounting tuition (i.e., the college just charges less and eats the difference).

Selective institutions are looking for students who will complete in four years and will then get a good job that reflects well on the institution.  In ten years or so from graduation, the institution expects alumni to have good enough jobs to donate real money, sponsor students in internships for good job, and otherwise be a continuing asset in the alumni network.

Selective institutions know that the most probable path to success in those areas is to already be on third base headed for home.

[Hibush]

Selective colleges use far too much merit-based aid to offer tuition discounts to the well-heeled. Merit aid is affirmative action for the mostly white upper-middle class.

By "merit-based aid", do they mean scholarships? Or does it refer to something else?

They mean scholarships and often scholarships funded through simply discounting tuition (i.e., the college just charges less and eats the difference).

Selective institutions are looking for students who will complete in four years and will then get a good job that reflects well on the institution.  In ten years or so from graduation, the institution expects alumni to have good enough jobs to donate real money, sponsor students in internships for good job, and otherwise be a continuing asset in the alumni network.

Selective institutions know that the most probable path to success in those areas is to already be on third base headed for home.

Thanks for this good description of merit at such institutions. Many applicants think merit means good grades and extracurriculars. But those metrics are proxies for the real merit.

It can be difficult or impossible to justify need-based aid for students who are meritorious in that way. Hence the alternative inducement to enroll. Even a small discount can be seen as an appropriate recognition of ... merit.

[spork]

Here tuition discounts are disguised as a tiered system of "merit scholarships." The marketing message from admissions is "we think you're so special that we're going to give you a scholarship of X amount."

This is a good explanation of admissions economics: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/magazine/is-college-tuition-too-high.html.

I too come from a community with a culture of "what looks good in the short term for immediate needs almost invariably trumps a potentially much more comfortable and fulfilling life over the long term." Especially since the long term option means leaving everything one is currently familiar with.

[dismalist]

The technical term for all this garbage is "price discrimination". The idea is to extract as much as possible from those willing and able to pay, like from those flying first class. There's nothing inherently wrong with this -- it increases the number of people who can consume the product!

I just vehemently object to calling this financial aid. :-(

[polly_mer]

Even at Super Dinky, we were better off using discounting to get the business major who would then go back to a small town half an hour away to work in Daddy's car dealership than to get the excellent student who will go be a teacher somewhere at $35k.

That car dealership future owner will send money every year and eventually possibly tens of thousands of dollars from the dealership 'supporting the community' fund. 

The probability is high that we can get a funded internship or two every year for our business students because the alum will remember that valuable part of education and give others the same valuable experience.

It's likely that alum will be a booster for us and display our swag as free advertising.  It's likely we can have a better homecoming parade because they will send an entry every year as advertising for them.

The Chamber of Commerce local circuits go much smoother when a substantial fraction of the representatives are our alumni.

As a society, we need smart people to get an education, but it's a lot easier to take good enough people and push them a little bit to be community leaders who will support the current system in ways that benefit us.

That's why Wahoo is wrong about what the article is really about.  The article itself explicitly states the wrong problem and thus proposes solutions that won't fix either the real problem or the problem that the article's author wants fixed.

[Wahoo Redux]

Nope, I was right.  But all this context is very interesting.

You do make me wonder, however, Polly, that you seem to be so determined to undercut traditional higher education (or perhaps I am being unfair) and yet higher ed apparently gave you a new lease on life.

Just curious.

[polly_mer]

You do make me wonder, however, Polly, that you seem to be so determined to undercut traditional higher education (or perhaps I am being unfair) and yet higher ed apparently gave you a new lease on life.

Define 'traditional higher ed'.

Define 'undercut'.

I got lucky with a very good K-12 system and a stable enough childhood home life that I could take full advantage of education.  The expectation was that a college education in the form of something one cannot learn on the job will lead to a better life. 

However, if I wanted to stay where I grew up, then the major choices were basically k-12 teacher, accountant, medical (doctor, dentist, nurse, vet, pharmacist), business administration, or something to do with agriculture because we were a farming community. 

Many success stories were had via those paths, but it was likely that one would go away to college an hour away and come back to any of the other small towns within an hour's drive, depending on what jobs were open when one graduated.  That's a big deal when most of the people in town have never been farther away than that hour's drive.

We also had many cautionary tales regarding people who went to college in the humanities or more tangentially job-related degrees who then returned home to get exactly the same non-college-degree-required job they could have had right out of high school.  Thus, those folks lost four or more years of experience and seniority and often had adopted new habits and mindsets so they no longer fit into the community.

In contrast, most people who went away for a job-like education do still fit in when they come back, but they get better jobs that they could not have gotten right out of high school.  Even when they decide that the job for which they went to college no longer meets their needs, their next job is not likely to be one that regularly hires new HS graduates.

I am an oddity among my birth community and family because I went away to get a completely different kind of life.  However, my different life is only possible because my college education focused on highly specialized topics that are hard to get any other way than in college.  Because I went to an engineering institution, my take on higher ed focuses on the value of a highly specialized education instead of the broader liberal arts education.

As I've spent time in various places from a rural open enrollment CC to an elite R1 that was a top five program for some graduate work along with keeping up with the higher ed literature, I've learned a lot.  However, that learning means I cannot get behind any of the simplistic ideas of what US higher ed is or should be.

A humanities-heavy liberal arts education is a great choice for a small group of collegegoers.  However, that's far from the only valuable education.

Small privates like Super Dinky can add value to their communities, but seldom is that value in a traditional humanities-heavy liberal arts education or necessarily a direct job-related program like k-12 teacher, social worker, or nurse that is expensive to deliver due to accreditation requirements.  The Super Dinkys' value really is in the experiences of being at college like clubs, internships, and athletics with majors like business, psychology, and biology to help solidify community contributors and build a regional network that thinks beyond direct personal benefit.

However, as population and demographics shift as well as operating costs like technology that don't scale with enrollment increase, the need and ability to have tons of those institutions in a given region also decreases.

Regional comprehensives, CCs, and distance ed are good choices to fill gaps for regional needs like the k-12 teachers, social workers, and nurses.  Fully funding those programs based on demand is a good priority for the state.  The old system of normal schools and agricultural institutions filled a mission space that could be tweaked for the 21st century.

There's a national need for research institutions and the true SLACs.  We absolutely need humanities majors to be available to those who want them and will do the work to become experts in the field.  We need humanities faculty doing research in areas that contribute to human knowledge with a direct application. 

However, much of the general education currently in college is more effective and more efficient as part of k-12 so college is either a highly specialized education as is common in Europe or a very good liberal arts education as a different kind of specialty.

[Wahoo Redux]

Fair enough.  I simply meant that you seem very ready to close or curtail virtually any institution or major that does not meet a certain threshold, whatever that may be at the time.

I never do understand the sorts of comments about "humanities-heavy liberal arts education" being "far from the only valuable education."

Where does this defensiveness come from?  Businesses and STEM rule the university and corporate worlds, as far as I can tell, and garner most of the headlines.  Scientists are cool in entertainment media, even when they are science-fiction villains; humanities professors, artists, writers, and musicians are often foppish and 'professorial' in the movies and TV (anyone remember the concert violinist being righteously humiliated by the high school football coach in Prince of Tides?).

This attitude is something I've been trying to get a handle on, yet it seems elusive, even to the people who seem to have this attitude.

[polly_mer]

As an example of a cautionary tale, https://slate.com/business/2020/07/debt-nation-student-loans-arthur-stallworth.html

The details indicate a conclusion of don't take out loans for a graduate degree in a field with no jobs, capitalize on your real job skills instead of being a contingent worker in academia, and pick a region to live in which your income will cover normal living expenses.

However, the basic message from headlines and skim of intro/end is first-gen guy goes to college, ends up with a ton of loans, and doesn't have the pay-off of a good enough job to do something interesting all day while having a comfortable middle-class life. 

He might have been better off by staying in the town where he could get a bill-paying job and draw on the barter/favor system through moth and kin.

One huge problem for many people who start in low SES classes is losing access to resources by moving away to college, but not immediately being able to make up the difference through paying for goods and services.

Having little money, but a pretty good barter/favor system works out.

Having sufficient money and access to a system while one can purchase goods and services works out.

Being in the purchase system with little money and few skills for which people will pay good money is problematic,

Having the money to participate in the purchase economy and then having a location with few shops or service provider, as my current town does, has resulted in:

* rotating individual members of a high SES class that keeps trying to change things

* a resentful low SES class who take money and fake smile even while complaining amongst themselves about newcomers who want to change the wrong things because the locals have a good enough life due to their barter/favor economy augmenting formal purchases.


* a rotating middle who move here as k-12 teachers or similar jobs, discover they aren't paid enough to participate in the purchase economy nor do they have a mechanism to participate in the barter/favor economy, and eventually move back to their hometowns with nasty things to say about their time here.

[polly_mer]

Fair enough.  I simply meant that you seem very ready to close or curtail virtually any institution or major that does not meet a certain threshold, whatever that may be at the time.

This is a sampling effect.

We don't seriously talk about closing, say, the English department at the state flagship that has 50 professors and hundreds of majors.  The topic never comes up.

We talk about a place like Super Dinky who has had three English majors graduate in the past five years with three full-time faculty members covering courses in general education and those majors.

Often, the threshold for various places is 10 graduates either as a five-year annual average or as a total over a window that might be 3 years.

A lot of physics departments in the past few years have been chopped or been on the chopping block based on those thresholds because:

* it's unfair to the students who will get a better education elsewhere. Peers matter,  being exposed to more professional discussions matter, being part of a larger professional network matters, even when many folks will leave the fold. The American Physical Society runs national and regional programs to help new physics graduates get good jobs that use their skills without the title of physicist or engineer. Being isolated at a tiny program with perhaps one full-time faculty member is not a benefit to those students.

* it's a poor allocation of resources since we're not competitive in the national pool, which is diminishing, and there's no local pool based on a decade of enrollment numbers.  Physics is important in the world and specific physics classes need to be taught for other majors, but maintaining capabilities for a full major is a bad decision.


Likewise, knowing the background and numbers, we never talk about closing the regional comprehensive with 15k students.  We talk about closing the place that dropped from 1500 to 800 in a region that has several other institutions that are the same size with essentially the same mission.  If the region only has 3000 college-going students per year and that's going to drop based on current k-12 enrollment, then the reasonable action is to close the most struggling institutions to prop the others up to sustainable.

I never do understand the sorts of comments about "humanities-heavy liberal arts education" being "far from the only valuable education."

What majors do you picture when someone says 'higher ed should not be jobs training or vocational training'?

During discussions at various institutions, it's pretty clear that many humanities faculty members do not view nursing, k-12 education, engineering, social work, business, and criminal justice as majors with equal standing to their own majors.

The faculty certainly want nurses, teachers, and engineers in the community.  They visit businesses  and benefit from the advances of the engineering and technology from the 20th century.  However, they don't want that education done at college.

However, when we talk about the goals of a college education and the biggest challenges facing achieving those goals, seldom do the humanities faculty state 'the primary goal of a college graduate is to get a job in a relevant field that requires the degree'.  That is exactly the primary goal in engineering, social work, and teaching.

The humanities faculty in fact will insist that the primary goal is acquiring critical thinking skills or something related to personal growth including being a well-founded citizen.  The explicit statement is exactly that getting a job, let alone in the field, is why people go to community college for a certificate in welding or an apprenticeship program in plumbing.

American general education requirements are weird compared to the rest of the first world.  Yes, citizens need to know history, literature, and how what's important changes based on who gets to speak.  However, that's a k-12 thing both because of the amount of material to learn and how few people actually will get more than the one-off course in college when majoring in something like nursing or engineering.

Critical thinking skills are important, but rely on having enough of a background in a specific area to see missing details, the half-truths, and what questions were avoided.  Having the best humanities background in the world doesn't help when the need is a gap that overlaps chemistry, physics, and specialized engineering practice.

Thus, all the assertions that a liberal arts education gives what employers want with critical thinking and other soft skills misses the big problem that employers also need 'specialized' skills like programming and math well beyond algebra II that allows one to interpret data to make business and government decisions out in the world.

If more of our leaders had real science and math backgrounds beyond the couple gen ed classes in a humanities-based education, then we'd be in better shape as a society.

[Hibush]

The technical term for all this garbage is "price discrimination". The idea is to extract as much as possible from those willing and able to pay, like from those flying first class. There's nothing inherently wrong with this -- it increases the number of people who can consume the product!

I just vehemently object to calling this financial aid. :-(

If price discrimination is a good thing for colleges to practice, because it permits them to do more societal good, what should they call it? Obviously "price discrimination" or "maximum extraction" will prevent the practice from working. "Financial aid" or "merit aid" seem to keep the participants happy. Like the hairdresser telling you you look good, it is misrepresentation that all are willing to participate in, and gives a better result than strict accuracy.

But there may be better terminology between these extremes that better opimizes the accuracy-utility tradeoff.

[dismalist]

The technical term for all this garbage is "price discrimination". The idea is to extract as much as possible from those willing and able to pay, like from those flying first class. There's nothing inherently wrong with this -- it increases the number of people who can consume the product!

I just vehemently object to calling this financial aid. :-(

If price discrimination is a good thing for colleges to practice, because it permits them to do more societal good, what should they call it? Obviously "price discrimination" or "maximum extraction" will prevent the practice from working. "Financial aid" or "merit aid" seem to keep the participants happy. Like the hairdresser telling you you look good, it is misrepresentation that all are willing to participate in, and gives a better result than strict accuracy.

But there may be better terminology between these extremes that better opimizes the accuracy-utility tradeoff.

Discount! :-)