Whispered Policies

Friday's Chronicle reports on a new study that points out how difficult it can be to identify which colleges and universities have no-loans policies designed to enhance affordability. Author Laura Perna and her colleagues find that the majority of elite institutions with these policies fail to advertise them in ways that are accessible to low-income students and families-- effectively maintaining their status as "bastions of privilege." The researchers then go on to make several helpful suggestions about how colleges could change their tactics to increase awareness and uptake of their progressive efforts.

But they could've gone one step further and discussed the incentives colleges have to maintain the status quo-- that is, to continue making their current and former students and staff feel good with liberal actions, garnering attention in elite venues such as the New York Times, without fundamentally changing their overall enrollment demographics or costing too much money. Call me cynical, but as a sociologist it strikes me that this is exactly how power is effectively maintained in the face of pressure for socially responsible actions from powerful institutions.

According to another recent study by economists Waddell and Singell, of the just-over 384,000 Pell Grant recipients attending 4-year institutions in 2000, only 0.3% were enrolled at Ivy League institutions (which disproportionately possess these no-loan policies). Across elite private institutions, Pell recipients rarely amount to more than 1% of the entering class. In 2000, there were only 108 Pell recipients in the freshman class at Harvard, and just 50 at Princeton. These are tiny, tiny numbers. So if no-loans policies actually resulted in massive increases in applications from low-income students, we could see many consequences for those schools. For one, their institutional aid budgets would have to grow-- if low-income students managed to get past the admissions hurdle. Second, depending on how exactly admissions dealt with the increased applicant pool (e.g. whether a 'thumb' was placed on the scale so as to ensure a reasonable proportion were admitted-- an action recommended by Bill Bowen), graduation rates might be affected. Third, you'd see a larger, more visible contingent of people on campuses from different family backgrounds, affecting social dynamics. Many of these outcomes could be interpreted as both positive and negative, depending on your perspective.

Simply put, right now colleges with small numbers of low-income undergraduates can afford to adopt no-loans policies. Based on the two studies discussed here, this is likely because their policies are only weakly communicated to the groups who'd be affected (I hestitate to call these the "targeted audiences" however) and the effects on enrollment are small and subtle. For example, Waddell and Singell conclude that such policies do not increase the overall number of needy institutions at institutions but do have some effect in skewing the composition of that group toward somewhat lower-income students who've traveled longer distances to attend college. Since positive publicity generated by laudatory articles in the elite press may well generate enough new alumni donations to offset current costs, the whole thing may be close to a "wash" --under current circumstances. More effective publicity and outreach to families who do not read the mainstream liberal elite newspapers or visit websites like finaid.org to get their information about college, might change the game. Under those new conditions, I have to wonder-- would no-loans policies continue to be so popular in elite higher education?

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Overhauling Teacher Prep

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's call for an overhaul of teacher preparation programs is certainly warranted. Reports such as Arthur Levine's in 2006 have highlighted weaknesses in the training received by many graduates of traditional, university-based teacher preparation programs.

I'm one however who believes that there is role both for university-based as well as alternative providers of teacher preparation, such as Teach For America and The New Teacher Project. In a policy brief for the New Teacher Center (and related blog post), I discuss some promising partnerships between institutions of higher education and school districts -- teacher training pipelines that by and large provide the hands-on experience and training called for by Secretary Duncan and contained within many other diagnoses of what ails traditional teacher prep.

Likewise, the Carnegie Corporation's Teachers for a New Era initiative provides evidence of what effective university-based programs can and should look like.

To answer the Secretary's call, we needn't start from scratch.


UPDATE: Alexander Russo has the text of the Secretary's speech here. Secretary Duncan singles out Wisconsin-based Alverno College (among other institutions) and the state of Louisiana for praise. I also discuss both Alverno College and Louisiana's teacher preparation accountability system in my policy brief.

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The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Once upon a time, college students could pay their tuition with a mix of family support, financial aid, and perhaps a little work. Today, family support and aid are woefully inadequate for a broad swath of undergraduates, and full-time work is common.

Is working while in college truly necessary? Are the earnings used for academic expenses related to postsecondary education, or are they frittered away on life's pleasures? Since a handful of studies indicate a negative association between working long hours and rates of degree completion, these questions have taken on broader significance.

Unfortunately, few studies track students' income and expenditures in systematic ways. To better understand spending patterns, and attempt to tease out the reasons for those patterns, one would ideally have longitudinal data collected for a large sample of students, and complemented by in-depth interviews with a sub-sample of students to delve more deeply into the reasons underlying decisions, and validate the measures employed. Now true confession: Together with Doug Harris, I am conducting just such a study right now, the Wisconsin Scholars Longitudinal Study. But that's not why I'm writing this-- we don't yet have data to report on.

But apparently someone else does. A few weeks ago, a news outlet reported the headline "Will Work for Beer," covering the release of a new study from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, published in the Journal of Population Economics. In that study the authors used national cross-sectional data and determined that the earnings students make from work are not enough to replace contributions from their parents, or cover tuition costs. According to the report, "We test several hypotheses regarding the financial motives for and academic effects of college student employment and find empirical support for the hypothesis that a decrease in parental transfers increases the work hours of four-year college students. We also find that an increase in the net price of schooling increases the number of hours worked by both four-year and two-year college students."

Ok. So the decision to work may have something (but not everything) to do with how much support parents provides and how expensive college is. Unsurprising. Not particularly newsworthy.

But the lead author didn't stop there. Instead, she waded into popular stereotypes about college students, telling the reporter that the results mean that the drive to work isn't coming from a need to really make ends meet-- instead, "students...work to have ‘beer money,' money for entertainment, money to pay other expenses, just not their tuition."

Huh?

Her conclusion took a gigantic interpretive leap from her data. Notably, it's not a conclusion found anywhere in the actual research paper. All her evidence suggests is that students' work isn't generating income equivalent to parental contributions or in line with college costs. This could mean many things, including that students have a hard time finding enough work to generate sufficient earnings. Of course it suggests they likely need to find other ways to make ends meet-- including loans. But it says nothing about what they use their work earnings for, how they prioritize expenses, what they go without, etc. With her statement to the press, the author did little more than simply impute meaning to meaningless results.

Why mention "beer money"? It's not uncommon for an academic paper to simply say what it shows-- and conclude that while we need to know more about explanations for patterns in the data, we just don't have the information in the dataset to tell us what we need to know. Why step outside those bounds, and lend fodder to the fire? In what way is this helpful-- to policymakers, to students, or frankly, to anyone?

Working students are often struggling students. There's good qualitative evidence on this, even if the quantitative evidence isn't yet available. Professors dislike them because they tend to fall asleep in class, having been up serving on the graveyard shift instead of studying. Their classmates often don't know them well, since student-employees have little time left for socializing. Their grades are lower than average, their stress levels high, and their chances of degree completion relatively low. So why do we feel the need to minimize their need to work, to mock them for it, to enforce a stereotype that their earnings are spent at bars? It seems nothing less than classist-- in the absence of providing students with sufficient financial supports to make working during college truly optional, we try and make ourselves feel better by telling stories that students work not out of true financial need, but rather a desire to imbibe.

Maybe that helps some fraction of folks sleep at night, but I seriously doubt it's grounded in any kind of truth.

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Teachers' Voice

An important survey was released this week that captures teachers' perceptions of their professional working environment. The national study of 900 teachers by Public Agenda describes educators as falling into one of three groups: "Disheartened," "Contented," and "Idealists." It also raises some serious policy implications for the placement, retention and longevity of teachers based on teachers' perceptions about working conditions, why they entered the profession, and their opinions about proposed policy reforms.

But as useful as this survey may be in defining these issues at a 30,000-foot level, it does not approach the power and utility of teacher surveys that offer entire populations of educators in individual states and districts the opportunity to share their voice about working conditions, leadership support, resources, opportunities for professional learning, etc. In turn, these anonymous surveys also provide contextualized, customized summary data at the state-, district- and school-level based on the perceptions and opinions of local educators.

Teaching and Learning Conditions surveys have been led by the New Teacher Center in states such as Alabama, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, North Carolina and West Virginia, and in school districts such as Fairfax County, Virginia. They provide state and district policymakers and educational leaders with powerful data to define issues that need to be addressed in school and districts that have major implications for the quality and effectiveness of teachers and principals.

Read the Public Agenda report, but also think about conducting a Teaching and Learning Conditions survey in your state or school district. What do the teachers where you live and work think?

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California Knocks Down Data Firewall

California is adept at building firebreaks to stop advancing wildfires throughout the state. The inferno that is the student-teacher firewall issue was apparently doused yesterday when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill that eliminates a statutory ban on using student achievement data to evaluate teachers. The existence of such a restriction would have deemed California ineligible for a federal Race to the Top competitive grant award.

Here is the Governor's press release.

Here, here and here are background posts on the student-teacher data firewall issue in California.

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