Tag: graduate school

Examining Trends in Graduate Student Debt by Race and Ethnicity

For many of us in the higher education world, the release of the newest wave of the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS) is something akin to a national holiday. The NPSAS is a nationally-representative dataset of both undergraduate and graduate students that has provided a snapshot every four years of the state of how students pay for higher education. (Going forward, there will be a new dataset produced every two years, which is great news!) The 2015-16 NPSAS dropped on Tuesday morning, which sent nerds everywhere running to their computers to run numbers via PowerStats.

In this post, I look at graduate student borrowing, which is of increasing interest to policymakers given the average size of graduate student loan burdens and the potential implications for taxpayers thanks to income-driven repayment and Public Service Loan Forgiveness. I used the TrendStats tool to look at graduate student loan debt by race/ethnicity every four years from 2000 to 2016, based on concerns raised by Judith Scott-Clayton about the growth in student debt among African-American students.

The first figure looks at overall trends in graduate student borrowing across each of the five cohorts. The percentage with no debt fell from 51% in 2000 to 39% in 2008 before remaining steady throughout the rest of the period. Meanwhile, the percentage with at least $50,000 in debt (for both undergraduate and graduate school) went up from 9% in 2000 to 32% in 2016, with a steady upward trend across every cohort. The increases were even larger among those with more than $100,000 in debt, with that share going from 1.5% to 14.2% during this period. (The introduction of Grad PLUS loans in 2006 probably didn’t hurt that trend, although the jump between 2008 and 2012 was larger than the jump between 2004 and 2008.)

I broke down the borrowing data by race/ethnicity to look at the percentage of graduate students with no debt at all across each cohort. Across each cohort, at least 60% of Asian students had no debt, while the percentage of white students with no debt was 51% in 2000 before meandering around 40% in more recent cohorts. Forty-five percent of Hispanic students had no debt in 2000, which steadily fell to 27% in 2016. Among African-American students, however, the percentage with no debt fell from 37% in 2000 to 17% in both 2012 and 2016. Part of this may be due to the higher likelihood of black students to study in fields with fewer graduate assistantships (such as education), but family resources likely play a crucial role here.

Finally, I examined the percentage of students with at least $100,000 in educational debt by race and ethnicity. All groups of students started out at between one and two percent with six-figure debts in 2000, but those rates quickly diverged. By 2012, 7% of Asian students, 11% of white students, 14% of Hispanic students, and 21% of black students had at least $100,000 in educational debt. In the newest NPSAS wave, all racial/ethnic groups except black students stayed within one percentage point of their 2012 level. But in 2016, an astonishing 30% of African-American graduate students had at least $100,000 in debt—nearly three times the rate of white students.

In future posts, I will look at some other interesting tidbits from the new NPSAS data. But for right now, these graphics are so depressing that I need to step away and work on something else. Student loan debt isn’t a crisis for all students, but it’s an increasingly urgent matter for African-American students in particular as well as for taxpayers who will be expected to pay for at least partial loan forgiveness.

[Check out my next post for some regressions that explore the extent to which the black/white gap in the percentage of grad students with $100,000 in debt can be explained by other factors.]

Improving Data on PhD Placements

Graduate students love to complain about the lack of accurate placement data for students who graduated from their programs. Programs are occasionally accused of only reporting data for students who successfully received tenure-track jobs, and other programs apparently do not have any information on what happened to their graduates. Not surprisingly, this can frustrate students as they try to make a more informed decision about where to pursue graduate studies.

An article in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education highlights the work of Dean Savage, a sociologist who has tracked the outcomes of CUNY sociology PhD recipients for decades. His work shows a wide range of paths for CUNY PhDs, many of whom have been successful outside tenure-track jobs. Tracking these students over their lifetimes is certainly a time-consuming job, but it should be much easier to determine the initial placements of doctoral degree recipients.

All students who complete doctoral degrees are required to complete the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED), which is supported by the National Science Foundation and administered by the National Opinion Research Center. The SED contains questions designed to elicit a whole host of useful information, such as where doctoral degree recipients earned their undergraduate degrees (something which I use in the Washington Monthly college rankings as a measure of research productivity) and information about the broad sector in which the degree recipient will be employed.

The utility of the SED could be improved by clearly asking degree recipients where their next job is located, as well as their job title and academic department. The current survey asks about the broad sector of employment, but the most relevant response for postgraduate plans is “have signed contract or made definite commitment to a “postdoc” or other work. Later questions do ask about the organization where the degree recipient will work, but there is no clear distinction between postdoctoral positions, temporary faculty positions, and tenure-track faculty positions. Additionally, there is no information requested about the department in which the recipient will work.

My proposed changes to the SED are little more than tweaks in the grand scheme of things, but have the potential to provide much better data about where newly minted PhDs take academic or administrative positions. This still wouldn’t fix the lack of data on the substantial numbers of students who do not complete their PhDs, but it’s a start to providing better data at a reasonable cost using an already-existing survey instrument.

Is there anything else we should be asking about the placements of new doctoral recipients? Please let me know in the comments section.

The Joys of Teaching

It’s been a busy couple of weeks since my last post. Much of my time has been spent completing revisions to my dissertation after my defense last month. I deposited the final version of the dissertation with the University of Wisconsin late last week, which means that I have completed my doctoral degree (although I won’t get a paper diploma until October or November). I am now done with graduate school and rapidly making the transition to my next stage in life.

I accepted a position this spring with Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, as an assistant professor of higher education in the Department of Education Leadership, Management, and Policy. When visiting the university on my flyout, I was impressed with both the focus on teaching and the quality of the graduate students and faculty. Although I certainly enjoy doing research, I could have had the freedom to research many topics of interest in non-university positions—or even worked for one of the university research centers around the country. My insistence on the academic path was driven by my desire to teach, as well as to do research.

While I know that not all university faculty members truly enjoy teaching, it is rare that someone will actually state their dislike in public. This is why I found a piece in last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education to be extremely interesting. In that piece, an associate professor in the humanities (writing under a pseudonym) detailed why he/she has disliked teaching in the past. The article did not state the type of institution (teaching or research intensive) that the professor teaches at, but is still disconcerting nonetheless. I am concerned about what happens to students in classes that faculty don’t like to teach—particularly large, introductory courses at research institutions.

I’m looking forward to spending part of my summer preparing materials for my courses in the next academic year. And if I ever say that I dislike teaching in general, please remove me from the profession.

All Quiet on the Blogging Front

This blog has been fairly quiet through the month of April, a notable difference from my goal of writing about two posts per week. While I greatly enjoy being able to write my thoughts on timely issues in the higher education world, there are times when my day job doesn’t readily allow for time necessary to think through and write a post—let alone keep up with the news. But I do want to take a few minutes to share the reasons why I’ve been so busy, as well as why May will likely be a fairly slow month on this blog.

First of all, I’m preparing to defend my dissertation (three essays on higher education policy) toward the end of next week. The last few weeks have been fairly frantic as I’ve made substantial changes to two chapters before I sent them to my committee last week. Although there will certainly be a lot of changes required after my defense, it feels great to be ready to defend. I will be happy to share the dissertation chapters with anyone who is interested after final revisions have been made.

At the end of this week, I am flying to California to give a presentation at the annual Education Writers’ Association seminar at Stanford University. I was asked to give a talk on my research in the area of input-adjusted metrics in measuring institutional effectiveness, and particularly how adjusting for cost changes the ordering of institutions. This talk will be in front of a large group of journalists who cover education on a regular basis, which is a neat opportunity.

Finally, on the teaching front, I am giving my final lecture of the semester tomorrow on accountability and performance measures to a mixed undergraduate/grad student class on debates in higher education policy. I’ve really enjoyed giving several previous lectures, and this one has particular meaning to me as it is something that is both very policy-relevant and fun to teach.

I hope to get a post or two up sometime in the next two weeks, so please send along any ideas that you would like for me to explore in future posts. Until then, it’s back to the fun world of cleaning and coding administrative datasets!

Back in the Classroom Again

A lot of things have happened since the spring of 2008—I’ve earned a master’s degree in economics and nearly completed a PhD in education policy, have spent thousands of hours staring at the black and then white backgrounds of Stata, and have been fortunate enough to work with many brilliant scholars and researchers on important policy issues. But I haven’t been in front of a classroom of students since May of 2008, when I completed a year of being a teaching assistant for principles of microeconomics classes. (In the meantime, I have continued to work with undergraduate and graduate students on a one-on-one or small group basis.)

This spring, I have the opportunity to be a teaching assistant for Sara Goldrick-Rab’s class on issues and debates in higher education policy. In this class, I will be giving at least one of the weekly lectures in addition to meeting with individual students while gaining just a small amount of familiarity with the departmental copy machine. This class also gives me the opportunity to think more about possible course preparations for my (hopefully) impending career as a faculty member and how I would advise undergraduate and graduate students with an interest in education.

My teaching philosophy is fairly straightforward, with a goal of helping students get the “so what” of the course material. For the majority of students who will not go on to careers in my fields of interest (higher education policy and challenges in conducting quantitative research in this area), the primary goal of my teaching should be to emphasize why it is important to understand the topics at hand rather than becoming experts in all of the literature and related terminology. Students can become experts in repeating the key points of the day’s readings (I’ve been guilty of that in the past as well), but this doesn’t help them in the long run.

Hopefully, I will be teaching a class or two of my own this fall as I set off on my own academic career. But as I start my twelfth and final semester of graduate school, the opportunity to get back in the teaching mindset among a group of stellar students is quite welcome.

The Top of the Ninth

This time of year, my thoughts turn fairly often to baseball. This is especially true this year with my beloved St. Louis Cardinals in the playoffs. The familiar sounds of the game’s great announcers are the background of my summer, and are particularly well-suited for listening while working. Today’s lengthy playoff games (three and a half hours for a regular nine-inning game) made me think of George Carlin’s famous dialogue on why he preferred baseball over football. The best part of the dialogue is the following:

“Baseball has no time limit: we don’t know when it’s gonna end – might have extra innings.
Football is rigidly timed, and it will end even if we’ve got to go to sudden death.”

As I work well into an October evening filled with tightly played postseason games, this quote makes me think about graduate school. Enrolling in a PhD program is a lot like playing baseball—there is no rigidly enforced time limit (at least since the end of curfews about three decades ago) and extra innings are unlimited in theory. Few other sports, with the exception of playoff hockey and cricket, have such indeterminate endings.

My journey through graduate school has often felt like an exciting playoff baseball game. Through my five-plus years in graduate school, both in economics and education policy, I have experienced the highest of highs (incredible research opportunities and working with amazing people) and the lowest of lows (scoring below the posted minimum score on an exam). But days like today make me feel like I’m entering the top of the ninth inning of graduate school with a comfortable lead.

Today marked a very exciting day in my time in graduate school. I have spent at least three years working with a research team on a paper examining the effects of a randomly assigned need-based grant program here in Wisconsin. We finally finished the umpteenth rewrite of the paper and sent it off to a very good journal. The paper should be posted on our study’s website in the next few days, but the main punchline is that financial aid does have modest positive effects on students’ persistence through college. To come up with this estimate, we used a pretty nifty econometric strategy of instrumental variables with treatment-by-site interactions; for baseball fans, think of it as advanced sabermetrics.

Additionally, I have been making good progress in applying for assistant professor positions in both education and public policy schools. In working on my application materials, I realize how much I have learned and grown in my time in graduate school. Five years ago, I couldn’t have imagined what I would be doing today, which is pretty amazing. I won’t know where I will be next year for several months as I approach free agency this spring, but I am looking forward to getting called up to the academic big leagues.