What If College Is Not For Everyone?

At a time when many in higher education leadership, like the Lumina Foundation, among others, are calling for change to graduate more and more students with degrees, others are focusing for the moment on the question: What if a college education just isn't for everyone? "

It's fine for most kids to go to college, of course, (but) it is not obvious to me that that is the best option for the majority," says Mike Gould, founder of New Futures, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that provides scholarships for low-income students pursuing anything from a four-year degree to a massage-therapy certification. "Some education may be a good thing or it may just be a lot of debt."

The problem, Gould and others say, is that many high schools focus so much on college that low-achieving students fall through the cracks. A Public Agenda report this month raises similar concerns about high school guidance counseling. It follows up on a December survey that concluded most young workers who don't have a college degree "are in their jobs by chance, not by choice," and that guidance toward a career path "is hardly clear and purposeful."

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA - "Strengths and Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats"
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA - "Smart Planning in an Era of Uncertainty"
• April 7, Houston, TX - "Sustaining Higher Education in an Age of Challenge"

Crisis in Florida Community Colleges?'

SCUP–45 offers CPEs for CPAs.

By Robert A. Jones in National Crosstalk: A very close look at Florida community colleges that begins with a rather exciting drama about the overloading of online registration at Miami-Dade College on June 17, 2009, but the bottom line is that when students get pushed out of the community colleges, they are pushed altogether out of higher education.

The college’s registrar, Dulce Beltran, watched the electronic traffic jam with amazement from her home computer. She had never seen such a tide of humanity sweeping toward the college on registration night. Signing into the system as an administrator, she watched as classes filled with startling rapidity. She could also see that thousands of students were being shut out because of the overload, and with each passing minute, their chances of finding classes were diminishing.

But it's worse than that:

“The system has collapsed here,” said Padrón. “We can’t hire faculty to teach students, and our buildings are deteriorating and breaking down. Thousands and thousands of students have been turned away, which has never happened in our history. If we are forced to keep rejecting these students, I fear we are headed for some kind of social breakdown. You simply can’t deprive people of a way upward.”

and:

“I don’t want to exaggerate, but people come to work here every day with the goal of helping those who don’t have much,” said Montoya in his office next to Padrón’s. “To me, even our bureaucratic fights are interesting in that way. People don’t fight for salaries or travel or perquisites. They fight for classroom space or new desks, tools that can help the students. It becomes a passion, and it’s contagious.”

But the fact is, Miami Dade is still going broke. And the prospects for a rescue from Tallahassee appear slim.

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

Today's GI Bill: Connecting America's Veterans to Higher Education

Now SCUPers can connect on Facebook and on LinkedIn.

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Tomorrow, Wednesday, November 11, is Veterans Day. Take a moment to let someone you know who has served that you appreciate their service.

The American Council in Education (ACE) has just launched a new website to assist veterans in navigating their choices and making the most of their opportunities: "Service members and veterans deserve access to high-quality, postsecondary education. It eases the transition into civilian life and ensures lifelong economic and social benefits. Today’s GI Bill is designed to help you make the most of your education benefits by providing clear yet comprehensive guidance."

College for $99 a Month?

Kevin Carey, policy director of Education Sector, writes in the Washington Monthly about some new twists on for-profit higher ed and foresees our industry getting hit like the music industry has. He says we're lucky, in that we have more regulatory protection.

[A]n ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. This was hardly unusual—hundreds of institutions are online hawking degrees. But one thing about StraighterLine stood out: it offered as many courses as she wanted for a flat rate of $99 a month. “It sounds like a scam,” Solvig thought—she’d run into a lot of shady companies and hard-sell tactics on the Internet. But for $99, why not take a risk?

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Smith’s struggle to establish StraighterLine suggests that higher education still has some time before the Internet bomb explodes in its basement. The fuse was only a couple of years long for the music and travel industries; for newspapers it was ten. Colleges may have another decade or two, particularly given their regulatory protections.

Saluting a New Cadre of Students

We've been following the development of the new GI Bill for some time now. This article from Business Officer magazine reports on a summit held by the American Council on Education (ACE) for senior campus officials coping with making the most of this funding for our veterans: 

Summit participants presented innovative programs, promising practices, and creative solutions to educational roadblocks for veterans. And while the specifics of their activities varied, at a minimum, higher education institutions that succeed in attracting and retaining veterans provide greater access to accurate and timely information, a streamlined process for accessing education benefits, academic credit for military training and experience, and veteran-specific transitional support programs on campus. In essence, they have changed their culture to accommodate a new phenomenon.

From statewide systems to a small community college, from an institution with a long association with the military to one with a famous history of war protests, here are some examples of creative ideas for transitioning veteran students.

Most Graduates’ Debt Load Is Manageable

According to a new College Board policy brief,  “People think students are drowning in debt, and there is a small proportion of students that borrow an exorbitant amount, but most students graduate with a manageable debt load,' . . . bachelor’s degree recipients who did borrow, the median loan debt was $19,999, up 5 percent from $18,973 four years earlier."As was the case four years ago, about one-third of all graudating seniors have accumulated no debt at all. This link to a New York Times article; this one to the policy brief itself.

Leading Indicators Provide a Peek at the Fall Admissions Story

A NACAC study shows that students have more interest in public schools, including community colleges, than before the financial crisis. Despite the challenges this presents for admissions staff, they're getting their budgets cuts at public (46 percent of schools) and at privates (30 percent of schools).

Read about it here:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/09/nacac

The top link is to the Inside Higher Ed story, this one is to the full report: "Effects of the Economy on the Admission Process, 2008-09, National Association for College Admission Counseling June 2009":
http://www.nacacnet.org/AboutNACAC/PressRoom/2009/Pages/EffectsoftheEconomy.aspx

Louisiana: Tougher College Admissions Standards Boost Graduation Rates

This Times-Picayune article contains a link to a chart of graduation rates of state institutions and is somewhat focused on the State University of New Orleans' plans to increase graduation rates by having tougher entry standards, following the apparently successful process already undertaken by Louisiana State University Baton Rouge over the last decade. It briefly addresses concerns that state budget cuts will affect student support services. We also provide a link to the Louisiana State Board of Regents Planning, Research and Performance website.

Times-Picayune article:
http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2009/06/tougher_college_admissions_sta.html

Louisiana State Board of Regents Planning, Research and Performance:
http://regents.state.la.us/Planning/prphome.htm

Community Colleges Challenge Hierarchy With 4-Year Degrees

Some think community clleges offering 4-year degrees is the "Cat's Meow," others think it is a "solution looking for a problem." What do you think of this?

“It’s cooking in several states, in many work-force-related fields, but there’s a lot of debate and politics, and differing views on whether they’re still community colleges if they give baccalaureates,” said Beth Hagan, executive director of the Community College Baccalaureate Association, a nonprofit group that promotes the trend.

In Michigan, community colleges are seeking to offer baccalaureates in culinary arts, cement technology and nursing. Their efforts have stalled, said Mike Hansen, president of the Michigan Community College Association.

“We need legislation to do it, and the legislation’s been introduced, but that’s as far as it’s gotten,” Mr. Hansen said. “The four-year universities in the state are very much opposed to the idea.”

Mike Boulus, the executive director of the group that represents the four-year universities, called the plan to expand community colleges “a solution in search of a problem.”

“It’s clearly unnecessary,” Mr. Boulus said. “Community colleges should stick with the important work they do extremely well, offering two-year degrees and preparing students for transfer to four-year schools.”

Access Matters

Related: A concurrent session at SCUP–44: The College Funding Crisis: Five Ways Planning Can Help.

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As we keep reminding ourselves in the SCUP office, "Never waste a crisis."

Colleges and universities must begin to forge a new alliance with government at both the state and federal levels. Higher education can plant the seed for such an alliance by investing in efforts to educate the public and government officials about the nature and breadth of the financial aid problem and its potential impact on America’s fortunes. . . . Equally important, all constituencies in higher education must make a genuine attempt to reduce operating costs without sacrificing educational quality. Reducing costs is an essential good-faith effort to win the support of political officials and the American public.

The Challenge to States: Preserving College Access and Affordability in a Time of Crisis

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This quick-fire SCUP–44 session, The College Funding Crisis: Five Ways Planning Can Help, will present five areas where financial, academic, and physical planning can make a major difference, and will highlight opportunities for leadership, middle management, and faculty to turn the economic downturn to advantage. Be sure to be there in Portland, July 18–22 for Values and Vision Create the Future.

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This statement (PDF) was developed with the guidance of a distinguished group of higher education leaders whose names you will realize. It's a dense, 2-page document that you should definitely read and have available as a reference. Under "Productivity,"the bullet points begin thus:

Develop measurable expectations for productivity increases by all institutions, and strategies for reinvesting the resulting savings in efforts to maintain and expand undergraduate access and affordability, particularly for low- and middle-income students. Institutions can meet productivity expectations by such measures as: Increasing teaching loads for full-time faculty; Freezing or reducing graduate and professional enrollments; Streamlining administrative functions; Incorporating technology into instruction; and Closing low-demand, high-cost programs that are not distinguished and cannot be justified by economic or labor market needs. Require institutions and systems to begin or continue reporting data on the performance of all undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs (costs, enrollments, degree attainment levels, and completion and attrition rates), and develop plans to increase the productivity of or suspend support for low-performing programs that are not strategically required for the future. Reduce student demands on the system by expanding dual enrollment and other accelerated learning options, assuring course availability for on-time completion, and by limiting credit requirements for degree programs and accumulation of excess credits. Review state policies and regulations in areas such as procurement, human resources, and information technology, revamping or eliminating policies and procedures when cost exceeds benefit.

The Doors That Claiborne Pell Opened

Beth Macy writes about the death of Claiborne Pell and the impact of Pell Grants on her own life:

I'm not rich now by any means. But on the night following Pell's death, I stared into my fireplace and wondered where I'd be without him: scrambling to pay my bills, like so many in my family? Stuck in a bad marriage or an addict?

The year I was born, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson wrote: "At the desk where I sit, I have learned one great truth. The answer for all our national problems — the answer for all the problems of the world — comes to a single word. That word is education." Call me corny, but it's a sentiment that still chokes me up.

As our president-elect talks about rebuilding national infrastructures and creating new technologies, I hope that Pell's promise of an established right to postsecondary education isn't forgotten. If new ideas are key to buoying our tanking economy, we need to first build an intellectual infrastructure to spark them.

With college tuition increasing at a rate more than double the rise in need-based aid, I have often wondered what would have happened if I'd tried to go to college 20 years later than I did. Ask my mom to cosign for a loan?

College Affordability: The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

Anthony P. Carnevale explores some of the ways that he suggest are better ways to examine the issue of college costs:

A major flaw in the popular narrative on rising tuitions is the failure to distinguish public from private colleges. Tuition increases affect private and public colleges differently. Public enrollments are less affected by tuition increases because of their lower threshold prices. As tuitions rise, college enrollments shift from private colleges to the lower priced publics creating an increasing public funding burden, especially in recessions when families are looking for bargains. Private tuitions distort the data on rising tuitions as illustrated by this statistic: College tuition rates have risen more than 300 percent since 1987, when overall prices have only risen by a little more than 80 percent. Look closer and you will see that the big tuition increases come at the high-priced private institutions, not the public colleges. Tuition increases in public colleges have been relatively constrained and competitive. According to the College Board Trends in College Pricing survey in 2007, tuitions at four-year public colleges have risen by a little more than 50 percent in the last ten years and by about 20 percent in public two-year colleges – a far cry form 300%.

A deeper confusion stems from the fact that the dominant narrative on affordability fails to distinguish between college tuition and college cost. Tuition is the price that students and families pay for college. Cost is what colleges pay to educate students.

The Iron Triangle: College Presidents Talk about Costs, Access, and Quality

From the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education and Public Agenda, comes this late 2008 report. The structure of the introduction tells you something about the contents of the report: "Higher education in changing times"; "Are we headed for dialogue or for stalemate?"; 'A missing pre-condition for dialogue"; "An investment worth paying for"; "Are you listening to us?"; "A dangling conversation?"; "Expected and unexpected views."

Three key insights emerged from these conversations—one expected, the other two less so. The first is that, as one might have anticipated, our respondents were incredibly thoughtful, informed, and articulate; they drew from a wide range of experience from their own institutions, from other institutions where they had served, and from their participation in national and regional professional associations. The second factor, initially less anticipated, is that none of them was the least surprised by our questions. Indeed, we began each interview by asking the respondents to list his or her issues of greatest concern. For the most part, the presidents began by listing some version of our three main topics: college costs, access, and quality. In some cases, the presidents even conducted parts of the interview for us, following up their own statements by saying, “But you will probably ask me…” The third observation is that there was a great deal of commonality in the way the presidents perceived the issues. Just as it’s possible to put a number of photographs together to create a composite picture, the college presidents’ responses—taken together—can be summarized by a composite view. While few of the presidents would wholeheartedly agree with all of this composite (and some would endorse very little of it), most of the presidents we interviewed resonated with much of it.

Too Few Low-Income College Students?

A thoughtful article by Stacy Teicher Khadaroo in The Christian Science Monitor about recent analyses of statistics indicating even more underrepresentation of poor students on campus, especially at elite institutions:

"Higher education used to be one of the ways to get to the American middle class.... [Now] it's the only way," because of the loss of low-skill, high-wage jobs, says Thomas Mortenson, an Iowa-based senior scholar with the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education in Washington. "That places a very different set of responsibilities on higher education. If in fact they're going to play a socially constructive, economically constructive ... role, they have to diversify their enrollments."

He and other advocates for low-income students take many of the top-ranked public and private universities to task for the small percentages of low-income students they enroll. At the University of Virginia, for instance, about 7 percent of students in 2006 received federal Pell Grants, a common proxy that researchers use for low-income status. At Yale, it was about 8 percent.

College Board Reports

It might be easy to overlook College Board reports, or to take them for granted. This item is here to remind you that you can find plenty of good stuff at the College Board, including resources on: Trends in College Pricing 2007, Trends in Student Aid 2007, Education Pays, Tuition Discounting, and the Higher Education Landscape.

College for All?

From Change magazine by Anthony P. Carnevale: "Postsecondary requirements for workers are increasing in part because jobs that require postsecondary education are concentrated in the growth industries."

How Many College Graduates Does the U.S. Labor Force Really Need?

From Change magazine by Paul E. Barton: "Despite a common assumption that there is great economic demand for more college-educated workers, compelling evidence does not exist that there will be a rapid rise in the general demand for college graduates in the future–or a damaging shortfall in their supply."

Good Policy, Good Practice: Improving Outcomes and Reducing Costs in Higher Education (A Guide for Policymakers)

From the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education and The National Center for Higher Education Management Systems: "Together, Parts I and II of this document present the solid base of experience available to policy leaders as they seek to raise the higher education attainment of state residents, even in the face of fiscal constraints. There is more experience and knowledge about improving educational outcomes and policy strategies than is often recognized. We urge policymakers to draw upon and improve these examples when they, as we believe they must, engage in development of state policies and strategies aimed at enhancing student opportunity and success while keeping college affordable for students and states. Good Policy, Good Practice demonstrates that states have tools–policy strategies and levers–to assure a viable economic and educational future for their citizens."

Lots of Action (or, at least news) About Student Loans

A few links from BuzzFeed:

• Harvard Ends Loans
• State Schools Should End All Loans
• Harvard's Altruism = Less I-Bankers
• Pomona Will Drop Loans, Too
• Yale Jumps On Harvard's Bandwagon
• Duke Joins The Rush
• Swarthmore Swaps Loans for Scholarship
• The Sudden Rush To Ease School Costs
• Williams Latest to Replace Loans
• Amherst College Using Endowments Instead Of Loans