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

Why Aren't There More Poor Students at Rich Colleges?

US News & World Report has new data out on the numbers of poor students at rich colleges. The numbers are remarkably low. At least one analysis finds that well-qualified poor students have "sticker shock" and are unlikely to know how much financial aid they would qualify for at a rich school.

She found that low-income students who are qualified to attend selective schools
(based on their board scores and other measures) have a probability of applying
to such schools of just 8 percent. Once they apply, though, they’re likely to
get in and receive a generous financial aid package — and once they receive
their financial aid packages, they are very likely to enroll. But many such
students may be put off by sticker shock.
“A low-income student who applies
to Yale, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton is not going to pay a dime,” she said,
“but it’s not clear whether that message gets out to them.”

Free: The University of the People

Have you been hearing about a "free" university? Perhaps the reference is to Shai Reshef's University of the People. Here's a link to a brief Q&A with Reshef in Campus Technology magazine. Here's a link to the school's website. 

When a student signs up, he or she is grouped with 20 other individuals whom they interact with and learn from via homework assignments, discussion questions, and lectures. Students discuss the questions among themselves and participate in a peer-to-peer learning environment. If at any point a peer can't help--or if a student needs more elaboration on a particular topic--then they can visit the course forum. There they will find all university students who are taking the same course, along with volunteers, professors and graduate students who can help with those issues. At the end of each week, students take a quiz on the material they've learned, turn in their homework and receive a grade. The same system is used for all 40 courses that comprise the program.

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.

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.

Private College Tuition Increases for 09-10 Lowest in 37 Years

According to the annual tuition increase study done by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, the average 4.3 percent increase in tuition for next year among private, nonprofit colleges and universities matches the lowest increase ever measured, in 1972-73, the first year the report was tabulated.

Read about it here:
http://www.naicu.edu/news_room/private-college-tuition-rises-at-lowest-rate-in-37-years


Related: NAICU has a reporting page on "Enhancing Affordability" which includes a "New Affordability Initiatives for the 1009-10 Academic Year" listing with links to campus examples of such things as tuition reductions, tuition freezes, partnerships with community colleges, one-year commuter options and others.

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

What Do You Mean by 'What Does a College Degree Cost?'

If you want to know how much needs to be spent by "someone" to get a degree, $40,000 may be the answer. A recent Delta Study report says that answer also depends on how you perceive the role of colleges.

This link is to an Inside Higher Ed report by Doug Lederman:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/05/19/degree

"The paper shows that it is distinctly possible to come up with such a figure, but the wide variation in the numbers -- based on institution type, program, degree level, and other factors -- suggests that the answer will depend in large part on how the question is framed. And that decision is a surprisingly value-laden one, says Johnson. "You frame the question one way if you are only interested in students who graduate, and another way if you want to know the cost for people who go to college and don't complete," he says. "The point is, this is not just a data question. It's a question of what it is that we want from our colleges and universities."

This link is to the Delta Study report on degree costs (PDF):
http://www.deltacostproject.org/resources/pdf/johnson3-09_WP.pdf

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.

Well-Regarded Public Colleges Get a Surge of Bargain Hunters

As things get tough, our student body realigns itself to the realities:

“The country is in the process of reconsidering the easy accumulation of debt for consumer things, and it may well be that that will be a factor that tilts people toward public institutions because of the cheaper sticker price,” said Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization.

A poll by the center in December showed that “people’s anxiety about paying for college is almost at an unprecedented high,” Mr. Callan said.

“We’re not sure how they will respond, but we’re pretty sure they won’t respond by deciding not to go,” he added. “Middle class families understand that you’re going to be consigned to the minimum-wage economy if you don’t get some higher education or training.”

Struggling College Students are Having an Even More Difficult Time

Are they "doing more with less" or "doing less with less"? This USA Today article examines the longer walks (free, the bus costs money), the changes in diet (less soda, more canned tuna), and other ways students are changing behaviors - and briefly mentioned programs at a number of schools to allow students with unpaid tuition to stay enrolled, and to freeze or limit increases to tuition:

The Community College of Denver has offered a food bank to students for more than 10 years, but in the past year there been a significant increase in its use, says Jerry Mason, director of student life: "We are actually having trouble keeping up." The student government has doubled its annual funding from $3,000 to $6,000 to help with the increased demand, he says.

Federal financial aid applications filed nationwide for this fiscal year increased by 9% compared with last year, a projected 1.2 million more applicants, according to Department of Education data.

Obama's Higher-Education Goal Is Ambitious but Achievable, Leaders Say

By Sara Hebel and Jefrey J. Selingo in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Before President Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, the White House compared the purpose of the event to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats during the Great Depression. But for higher education, Mr. Obama was more like John F. Kennedy when he issued the challenge in 1961 to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

This president’s goal was equally daunting: for the nation to have the world’s highest proportion of college graduates by 2020. “That is a goal we can meet,” he said to applause in the chamber.

But is it?

College and university leaders were clearly delighted that Mr. Obama dedicated so much time in his speech to higher-education issues, which had for years taken a back seat to elementary and secondary education in presidential addresses. But, by Wednesday, the enormity of the task that has long been on college administrators' wish list became evident again.

“It’s absolutely achievable, but it’s ambitious,” Hilary Pennington, director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s postsecondary program, said in an interview. “It’s a stretch goal.”

In November, the Gates foundation announced that it would spend several hundred million dollars over the next five years to double the number of low-income young people who complete a college degree or certificate program by age 26 (The Chronicle, November 21). Recognizing the difficulty of the task, the Gates foundation set a slightly longer time frame for its goal than the president did for his—2025 instead of 2020.

Ms. Pennington said President Obama’s speech might have helped in one of the biggest hurdles to achieving the foundation's goal of doubling college-completion rates: first, recognizing that a problem exists.

“The American public thinks that if you go to college, you finish,” she said. “The president has the unique ability to make sure we break through the noise and make people realize that many more countries are taking this more seriously than we are.”

Need a College Loan? Ask Your Friends Online.

Somehow, we expect that to some people, using your social networks to get money for college might sound like, well, socialism. Hmm. This article specifically examines GreenNote's business model and use by students, as well as CollegeDegreeFund, CharityforDebt, and GradeFund. We've been using Kiva.org to make microloans in developing countries and this sort of feels the same.

As higher-education costs rise and families feel the squeeze on traditional sources for college funding, students are on the hunt for innovative ways to pay their bills. In addition to loan websites like GreenNote, other sites are cropping up where students can raise donations for college.

Easy money? What's the catch? Some of the gifts come in exchange for earning good grades or for performing nonprofit volunteer work. And so far, the aura of potential on these sites is much greater than the actual money flow. In the near-term, at least, it appears unlikely that enough donors or lenders will come forward to meet even a fraction of the clamor for cash.

In fact, traffic to peer-lending sites may be driven, in part, by a lack of information about resources available to students and parents, financial-aid experts say.

Cut-Rate Campus in New Hampshire

Wow. It seems like a bargain for students in New Hampshire. They can go to the Southern New Hampshire University's main campus for tuition of $25k or they can attend at the satellite campus in Salem for only $10k a year. No Olympic-sized pool, no rotating climbing wall, no 46,800-square foot food court. SNHU plans another satellite, and the State of Pennsylvania is considering some similar plans. Some say that it looks like "reinventing community college."

So what does $10,000 - comparable to tuition and required fees at a state school - buy? A full load of prescribed introductory courses in English, math, psychology, and history, intimate classes of fewer than 10 students, and built-in office hours with professors, so students don't drop out.

The only amenities at the Salem satellite: computer labs, vending machines, and a lounge with a stack of magazines and a chess board.

"It's not the mainstream college experience, but it helps keep your sights focused on your work," said Matthew Gambardella, an 18-year-old business major who commutes 40 minutes from his parents' home in Peabody.

More Work-Study Student Jobs!

Here in the SCUP office, we find that the 8-12 work-study students we employ each semester are a very useful productivity tool which help to maximize what we can get done with your membership dues. For example, the students are solely responsible for populating and keeping up to date our list of college and university plans, which currently has 734 hyperlinks to strategic and campus plans, and provides Carnegie Classification and other data about each institution for which we have found plans. The last time Congress approved more than a billion dollars in work-study money was 2001. A pot of $200M that is funded by the stimulus package law signed this week could push that total back over $1B in 2009. If it does get spent that way, that creates enough dollars for an additional 130,000 to be funded. More here.

The additional $200-million is intended to help colleges provide more Work-Study jobs for students, but the situation is not quite that simple. Colleges match the Federal Work-Study money on a 25-percent-to-75-percent ratio, so they can take the government funds only if they have the institutional aid dollars to supplement them. Colleges have to pay Work-Study students at least the federal minimum wage, and more if required by state law. The federal minimum wage is scheduled to increase from $6.55 to $7.25 in July. Some of the new money will be absorbed by this increased cost at affected campuses.

And even if a college does offer more Work-Study jobs, it might do so by converting regular on-campus student jobs into Work-Study ones. That would help students with financial need, but it wouldn't mean a net gain in the number of jobs. Even so, that is the route some colleges will take, said Mark L. Lindenmeyer, assistant vice president and director of financial aid at Loyola College in Maryland. After all, many financial-aid offices want to give priority to needy students.

Will the Financial Crisis Derail the New GI Bill?

We've been following the new GI Bill with great interest, as it was made into law and as it now gets implemented. Megan Eckstein shares what she has learned about some provisions of the law that make some administrators uneasy about their ability to fully implement it:

Under the program, created through the GI Bill that was signed into law last summer (The Chronicle, September 24, 2008), the federal government will match, dollar for dollar, any financial aid that colleges provide to veterans above the cost of the most-expensive public institution in that college's state. The general provisions of the GI Bill provide military personnel and recent veterans with enough aid to attend the most-expensive public college in the veterans' home states.

Advocates of the new program, known as the "yellow-ribbon program," worry that veterans' ability to afford the colleges of their choice would be limited if many colleges decide they cannot find the money to chip in to cover veterans' education costs.

Before they can decide to what extent they might be able to participate in the program, college administrators are waiting to see details of final regulations, which are expected sometime next month. The institutions are particularly interested in finding out how the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs will determine what the most expensive public institution is in each state and what fees would be counted toward that total.

Colleges Scramble to Help Cash-Strapped Students

We guess that even a "cash-strapped" college has more liquidity than a cash-strapped student?

Facing job losses, dwindling college-investment accounts, and a tight credit market, students and parents have been streaming into financial-aid offices, asking for adjustments to their aid packages. Colleges are trying to help, but as the second semester starts up, some students have had no choice but to drop out or scale back the number of classes they're taking.

To expand financial aid, many colleges are cutting back on hiring, and construction projects are going on hold. Some institutions are getting creative on the fundraising front – think special appeals to alumni. Another tactic: Some colleges are offering leniency to students with unpaid balances.

School officials thought the trouble would hit this past fall. Instead, overall enrollments were "perfectly normal," says Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO) in Washington. But now, he says, "people are apparently running out of steam."

Midyear departures are particularly disruptive. Schools create budgets based on enrollments for the year. And for students, "it's very hard, having done one semester, to then [temporarily stop or transfer] and not end up losing a lot of credits and a lot of time," Mr. Nassirian says.

Nearly a quarter of private colleges and universities and 13 percent of publics expect second-semester retention to be worse than last year's, according to a survey of 214 chief financial officers by The Chronicle of Higher Education and Moody's Investors Service.

Data Brings Sunshine: Research Publics Not Spending Money on Classroom Instruction

Even more interesting than the latest findings are some implications for the future:

The greatest value of the Delta Project’s report may yet to be realized. Leaders of the project, which is funded by the Lumina Foundation for Education, plan to create a Web-based function that will allow users to look at the spending and revenue data of individual institutions. While the raw data is already public through the federal data clearinghouse for higher education, known as the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), the Delta Project hopes to create a function that adds context and meaning to the often dizzying IPEDS numbers.

Charles Miller, who chaired the U.S. Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, said he welcomes the greater sunshine that the Delta Project is bringing to postsecondary education.

“Unless you have data that’s in this kind of form, it’s very hard to make decisions and policy judgments that are objective,” he said.

After reviewing the report, Miller said the Delta Project had made a data-driven case for reform, without having to use the sometimes tough language that’s found in many such reports, including the one Miller’s own commission presented.

“It doesn’t say ‘Here are the failings of the system,’ and a lot of the report is going to avoid doing that, but [Wellman] implies it,” he said.

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?