How to Get $15M From Students in Your City

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You don't have to work, study, or live in Pittsburgh to be aware of that city's mayor's proposal to institute a 1 percent fee on college and university tuition paid to institutions with campuses in Pittsburgh. This link should take you to the latest related news stories.

"There isn't an institution in this city in the last five years that hasn't raised tuition, and in each and every case, the tuition hike has been far greater than 1 percent," Mayor Luke Ravenstahl said. The city's proposed addition to the school bill "falls right in line with orientation fees, with transportation and security fees, with lab fees" and more nebulous charges that colleges could reconsider.".

Economic Hits + Stimilus Funds, State by State: How Do They Add Up?

This graphic from The New York Times could hold your attention for hours.

Obama Community College Proposal May Not Be Enough

Will $12B in federal funds work to cause an additional five million students to graduate from community colleges by 2020? Experts say that increased state and local funding is also needed:

''It's great that people are coming back to community colleges to get trained, but a student only brings about a third of the cost of their tuition.''

Ivy Tech Community College President Thomas Snyder says his school can handle more growth in part by finding savings internally and relying on philanthropic and community donations. The school will not expand too much and find itself with empty classrooms if an economic turnaround slows future enrollment.

''We're cautious in making sure that we don't make expenditures on staffing, for example, or other critical areas that we can't sustain,'' Snyder says.

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.”

Sue This School? Should a College Pay When a Grad Can't Find a Job?

This author says, "Yes." We've all seen the headlines about the New York woman who is suing her alma mater for $70,000 because she could not find a job after graduating. Mark Gimein, writing in a Slate blog, examines the actual situation "on the ground: and suggests that . . . "the more you know about Thompson and the school she's suing, the more likely it is that you might start thinking that whatever her chances of winning in court, she's right. The story of Thompson's suit isn't a one-liner about a grad too naive to know that graduating from college doesn't guarantee a job. It's a story about what 'college' means and about marginal, for-profit "colleges" that squeeze four years of fees from their students and leave them with all the debt and little of the education or prospects that they counted on."

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.

Is Greater Financial Independence Ahead for Universities?

"Unpredented pressure" on current financial models for public institutions is expected by Moody's Investors Services: 

The financial effects of recessions are typically not felt immediately by leading global public universities because tough fiscal policy decisions often must funnel through a lengthy government budget process before impacting university funding. The government budgeting process, therefore, often renders university financial performance a lagging indicator of economic activity. This delayed impact is even more pronounced in the current recession due to the prevalence of short-term government stimulus spending, which often may postpone or soften funding reductions for universities. However, when stimulus spending expires and governments seek to achieve better budget balance, many universities are likely to experience substantial funding reductions or, at best, an extended period of limited funding growth. At the same time, universities face demand to enroll additional students as alternatives to education (i.e., employment) are weakened by economic contraction, forcing many people to seek opportunities in higher education to enhance skills and credentials. With policies of limiting enrollment places and tuition fees, market pressure to add capacity, and government funding unlikely to increase, Moody’s expects unprecedented pressure on the current financial model of public universities.

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.

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

(Support) Staffing Up, Productivity Down?

Doug Lederman reports, in Inside Higher Ed, on a new report from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. Click here to read his brief report. Click here (PDF) to read the entire report, which is titled "Trends in the Higher Education Labor Force: Identifying Changes in Worker Composition and Productivity." A longer report from The Chronicle of Higher Education is available here, but is likely password protected.

Colleges' enrollments have risen dramatically in the past 20 years, so it's not surprising -- and arguably is even appropriate -- that the size of their staffs has grown, too. But the rate of growth has come among support staff employees rather than instructors and has outstripped the enrollment growth, resulting in a decline in productivity over that time, a new report asserts.
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The center's report acknowledges what critics are likely to cite as a bias in its report -- the fact that many support stuff employees do play important roles in the educational experience for students, in many student service areas. But the report's overall finding, writes Daniel Bennett, its author and administrative director at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, is that the way that the higher ed work force has grown has "increasingly resulted in unproductive use of labor resources."

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.”

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.

The Last Professors We'll Ever See?

No, it's not an Indiana Jones movie. It's Stanley Fish essaying about the potential end of higher education as we know it and lamenting that a young Stanley Fish today would not be able to have the career that he has had. He's reviewing The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities,” by Frank Donoghue.

Universities under increasing financial pressure, he explains, do not “hire the most experienced teachers, but rather the cheapest teachers.” Tenured and tenure-track teachers now make up only 35 percent of the pedagogical workforce and “this number is steadily falling.” Once adjuncts are hired to deal with an expanding student body (and the student body is always expanding), budgetary planners find it difficult to dispense with the savings they have come to rely on; and “as a result, an adjunct workforce, however imperceptible its origins . . . has now mushroomed into a significant fact of academic life.”

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?

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.

Wobbly Time for College Tuition

"For this academic year, the average sticker price of four-year colleges was up less than 1 percent over inflation, and financial aid was up about 5.5 percent over inflation in 2007-08." So, these two new reports from the College Board are good news! But according to this article there could also be some pretty bad news, too, possibly resulting in a reversal of those trends:

Based on what's happened in past recessions, tough budget periods are now anticipated at both public and private colleges. On the public side, at least 17 states have already handed down budget cuts to their higher-education systems, which "will likely mean tuition increases," says Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, a research and advocacy group in Washington. "Even the places where the governor is trying to protect higher education, they're still going to take a big haircut," she says.