Tag: New York Times

Should Students Get Admission Preferences for Community Service?

A January report called “Making Caring Common” sponsored by the Harvard Graduate School of Education and endorsed by dozens of researchers and enrollment management professionals made headlines for calling on students seeking to attend elite colleges to focus less on college preparatory tests and more on community service while in high school. (The report also called on expanding the definition of what a “good” college is, but that’s a topic for another day.)

Last weekend’s New York Times included an interesting proposal from attorney Steve Cohen in response to this report. He wrote the following:

“The best way for colleges to tell kids they truly value a concern about others and a real commitment to community service is to announce that they’ll give an admissions bump of one standard deviation to anyone who spends two years after high school doing full-time AmeriCorps-type community or military service.”

Essentially, Cohen is calling for an expansion of the ‘gap year’ between high school and college. While this sort of plan has some benefits (such as giving students a chance to mature before beginning their studies and providing potential opportunities to learn more about the world), I am skeptical that a two-year community service program would actually benefit students from lower-income families:

(1) Voluntary gap years are basically just for students from wealthy families. Although research from Sara Goldrick-Rab and Seong Wan Han shows that gap years are far more common for financially-needy students, these gap years are typically so students can transition to adulthood and pay for their education. Community service jobs are unlikely to pay the bills; AmeriCorps, for example, pays their full-time employees about $1,070 per month—far less than a full-time job flipping burgers or making biscuits. Students from wealthier families can rely on their parents to subsidize them while waiting to get into an elite college, while lower-income families may expect their college-age students to help pay the bills.

(2) Delaying enrollment for two years can hurt students when they get to college. A majority of first-time students who enroll in community college already take at least one remedial course while they are in college (remediation data at four-year colleges are tricky because some states and colleges technically do not offer remedial courses). Even among students who took college preparatory coursework, delaying enrollment by two years provides ample opportunity for many of the key math and writing skills to become rusty. This can result either in higher rates of remediation (and delaying the path to a degree) or struggling in the first year of courses (which can result in the loss of financial aid). For example, research by Robert Bozick and Stefanie DeLuca finds that delayed enrollees are less likely to earn a college degree than on-time enrollees, even after controlling for academic preparation and family income.

For these reasons, I highly doubt that giving admissions preferences to students who delay college to do community service will help non-wealthy students. However, I am intrigued by the preference for students with military experience, particularly as most elite colleges enroll few veterans. Research by Amy Lutz shows that young adults from the wealthiest family income quartile are less likely to serve in the military than those from lower-income or middle-income families. Military service also offers a better compensation package than community service, although at greater risk to the individual. These people who are willing to put their lives on the line certainly deserve special consideration in admissions, while young adults who can afford to do community service for two years likely do not.

Rankings, Rankings, and More Rankings!

We’re finally reaching the end of the college rankings season for 2014. Money magazine started off the season with its rankings of 665 four-year colleges based on “educational quality, affordability, and alumni earnings.” (I generally like these rankings, in spite of the inherent limitations of using Rate My Professor scores and Payscale data in lieu of more complete information.) I jumped in the fray late in August with my friends at Washington Monthly for our annual college guide and rankings. This was closely followed by a truly bizarre list from the Daily Caller of “The 52 Best Colleges In America PERIOD When You Consider Absolutely Everything That Matters.”

But like any good infomercial, there’s more! Last night, the New York Times released its set of rankings focusing on how elite colleges are serving students from lower-income families. They examined the roughly 100 colleges with a four-year graduation rate of 75% or higher, only three of which (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, University of Virginia, and the College of William and Mary) are public. By examining the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants in the past three years and the net price of attendance (the total sticker price less all grant aid) for 2012-13, they created a “College Access Index” looking at how many standard deviations from the mean each college was.

My first reaction upon reading the list is that it seems a lot like what we introduced in Washington Monthly’s College Guide this year—a list of “Affordable Elite” colleges. We looked at the 224 most selective colleges (including many public universities) and ranked them using graduation rate, graduation rate performance (are they performing as well as we would expect given the students they enroll?), and student loan default rates in addition to percent Pell and net price. Four University of California colleges were in our top ten, with the NYT’s top college (Vassar) coming in fifth on our list.

I’m glad to see the New York Times focusing on economic diversity in their list, but it would be nice to look at a slightly broader swath of colleges that serve more than a handful of lower-income students. As The Chronicle of Higher Education notes, the Big Ten Conference enrolls more Pell recipients than all of the colleges ranked by the NYT. Focusing on the net price for families making between $30,000 and $48,000 per year is also a concern at these institutions due to small sample sizes. In 2011-12 (the most recent year of publicly available data), Vassar enrolled 669 first-year students, of whom 67 were in the $30,000-$48,000 income bracket.

The U.S. News & World Report college rankings also came out this morning, and not much changed from last year. Princeton, which is currently fighting a lawsuit challenging whether the entire university should be considered a nonprofit enterprise, is the top national university on the list, while Williams College in Massachusetts is the top liberal arts college. Nick Anderson at the Washington Post has put together a nice table showing changes in rankings over five years; most changes wouldn’t register as being statistically significant. Northeastern University, which has risen into the top 50 in recent years, is an exception. However, as this great piece in Boston Magazine explains, Northeastern’s only focus is to rise in the U.S. News rankings. (They’re near the bottom of the Washington Monthly rankings, in part because they’re really expensive.)

Going forward, the biggest set of rankings for the rest of the fall will be the new college football rankings—as the Bowl Championship Series rankings have been replaced by a 13-person committee. (And no, Bob Morse from U.S. News is not a member, although Condoleezza Rice is.) I like Gregg Easterbrook’s idea at ESPN about including academic performance as a component in college football rankings. That might be worth considering as a tiebreaker if the playoff committee gets deadlocked solely using on-field performance. They could also use the Washington Monthly rankings, but Minnesota has a better chance of winning a Rose Bowl before that happens.

[ADDENDUM: Let’s also not forget about the federal government’s effort to rate (not rank) colleges through the Postsecondary Institution Ratings System (PIRS). That is supposed to come out this fall, as well.]

Are Academics Public Intellectuals? (And What Can We Do?)

The Sunday New York Times included an editorial piece by Nicholas Kristof with the title, “Professors, We Need You!” In this piece, Kristof argued that the vast majority of faculty do not do a good job connecting with media and policymakers and thus do not get the importance of their work communicated beyond the proverbial ivory tower. Perhaps the most damning statement in the piece is Kristof’s assertion that “there are, I think, fewer public intellectuals on American university campuses today than a generation ago.”

Some of Kristof’s statements about the disincentives toward public engagements are certainly true, at least for some faculty at some institutions. Tenure-track faculty are often judged by the number of peer-reviewed publications in top journals, at the expense of public service and publishing in open-access journals. The increased specialization of many faculty members also makes communicating with the public more difficult due to the often technical nature of our work. Faculty who are not on the tenure track face an additional set of concerns in engaging with the public due to their often unstable employment situations.

With those concerns being noted, I think that Kristof is providing a somewhat misguided view of faculty engagement. Some (but not enough) academics, regardless of their employment situation, do make the extra effort to be public as well as private intellectuals. (If you’re reading this blog post, I’ve succeeded to at least some extent.) The Internet lit up with complaints from academics about Kristof’s take, which are well-summarized in a blog post by Chuck Pearson, an associate professor at Virginia Intermont College. He also created the #engagedacademics hashtag on Twitter, which is worth a look.

While I would love to see elite media outlets like the New York Times reach out beyond their usual list of sources at the most prestigious institutions, I don’t see that as tremendously likely to happen. So what can academics do in order to get their work out to policymakers and the media? Here are a few suggestions based on my experiences, which have included a decent amount of media coverage for a first-year assistant professor:

1. Work on cultivating a public presence. Academics who are serious about being public intellectuals should work to develop a strong public presence. If your institution supports a professional website under the faculty directory, be sure to do that. Otherwise, use Twitter, Facebook, or blogging to help create connections with other academics and the general public. One word of caution: if you have strong opinions on other topics, consider a personal and a professional account.

2. Try to reach out to journalists. Most journalists are available via social media, and some of them are more than willing to engage with academics doing work of interest to their readers. Providing useful information to journalists and responding to their tweets can result in being their source for articles. Help a Reporter Out (HARO), which sends out regular e-mails about journalists seeking sources on certain topics, is a good resources for academics in some disciplines. I have used HARO to get several interviews in various media outlets regarding financial aid questions.

3. Work through professional associations and groups. Academics who belong to professional associations can potentially use the association’s connections to advance their work. I am encouraged by associations like the American Educational Research Association, which highlights particularly relevant papers through its media outreach efforts. Another option is to connect with other academics with similar goals. An example of this is the Scholars Strategy Network, a network of “progressive-minded citizens” working to get their research out to the public.

4. Don’t forget your campus resources. If your college or university has a media relations person or staff, make sure to reach out to them as soon as possible. This may not be appropriate for all research topics, but colleges tend to like to highlight faculty members’ research—particularly at smaller institutions. The media relations staff can potentially help with messaging and making connections.

While Kristof’s piece overstates the problem that faculty face in being viewed as public intellectuals, it is a worthwhile wakeup call for us to step up for efforts for public engagement. Perhaps Kristof will turn his op-ed column over to some academics who are engaged with the public to highlight some successful examples?

[UPDATE: Thanks to The Chronicle of Higher Education for linking to this piece. Readers, I would love to get your comments on my post and your suggestions on how to engage the media and public!]

The Value of “Best Value” Lists

I can always tell when a piece about college rankings makes an appearance in the general media. College administrators see the piece and tend to panic while reaching out to their institutional research and/or enrollment management staffs. The question asked is typically the same: why don’t we look better in this set of college rankings? As the methodologist for Washington Monthly magazine’s rankings, I get a flurry of e-mails from these panicked analysts trying to get answers for their leaders—as well as from local journalists asking questions about their hometown institution.

The most recent article to generate a burst of questions to me was on the front page of Monday’s New York Times.  It noted the rise in lists that look at colleges’ value to students instead of the overall performance on a broader set of criteria. (A list of the top ten value colleges across numerous criteria can be found here.) While Washington Monthly’s bang-for-the-buck article from 2012 was not the first effort at looking at a value list (Princeton Review has that honor, to the best of my knowledge), we were the first to incorporate a cost-adjusted performance measure that accounts for student characteristics and the net price of attendance.

When I talk with institutional researchers or journalists, my answer is straightforward. To look better on a bang-for-the-buck list, colleges have to either increase their bang (higher graduation rates and lower default rates, for example) or lower their buck (with a lower net price of attendance). Prioritizing these measures does come with concerns (see Daniel Luzer’s Washington Monthly piece), but the good most likely outweighs the bad.

Moving forward, it will be interesting to see how these lists continue to develop, and whether they are influenced by the Obama Administration’s proposed college ratings. It’s an interesting time in the world of college rankings, ratings, and guides.

Financial Aid as a Paycheck?

President Obama is set to make a series of speeches this week addressing college affordability—a hot topic on college campuses as new students move into their dorm rooms. An article in this morning’s New York Times provides some highlights of the plan. While there are other interesting proposals, most notably tying funding to some measure of college success, I’m focusing this brief post on the idea to disburse Pell Grants throughout the semester—“aid like a paycheck.”

The goal of “aid like a paycheck” is to spread grant aid disbursals out through the semester so students take ownership of their education. Sounds great, right? The problem is that it’s only been tested at a small number of community colleges in low-tuition states, such as California. If a student has more financial aid than the cost of attendance, then there is “extra” aid to disburse. But this doesn’t apply to the vast majority of students, particularly those at four-year schools. Spreading out aid awards for students with unmet need creates an even bigger financial gap at the beginning of the semester.

In order for “aid like a paycheck” to work for the vast majority of students, we have to make other costs look like a monthly bill. If students still have to pay for tuition, books, and housing upfront (or face a hefty interest rate), this program will create a yawning financial gap. If colleges want to be accountable to students, perhaps they should bill students per month for their courses—that way, dropped courses hurt the institution’s bottom line more than the student’s. This would delay funds coming in to a college, which can result in a loss of interest given the large amounts of tuition revenue.

Before we try “aid like a paycheck” on a large scale, Mr. President, let’s try making colleges get their funds from students in that same way. And let’s also get some research on how it works for students whose financial need isn’t fully met by the Pell Grant. The feds have the power to try demonstration programs, and this would be worth a shot.

Another Acceptance Angst Article

Having spent three years in a college admissions office, I know this is the time of year in which some students find out whether they were accepted to the college(s) of their dreams. I am particularly annoyed by the New York Times’s “The Choice” blog, which is clearly aimed toward students with academic credentials suitable for Ivy League institutions. My annoyance rises because this blog focuses its attention on such a small number of institutions which are academically out of reach of nearly all students and perceived to be financially out of reach of almost everyone (although this is not the case).

The Choice annually follows a small group of students who apply to many of these highly selective institutions, and are shocked when they receive a rejection letter. While I am glad that the blog now includes more students from geographically and economically varied backgrounds, most of the bloggers’ stories are still sufficient to cause angst to many well-prepared students. Take for example Leobardo Espinoza, Jr., from Topeka, Kansas. His most recent post was full of angst about getting rejected by Washington University in St. Louis, one of the most selective colleges in the Midwest. Thankfully, he eventually realized that he was already accepted by American, Amherst, and Bowdoin, as well as Kansas and Wichita State. But I am concerned that many readers will get the wrong impression about his post.

I am glad that the blog is finally featuring students who apply to at least a few local options. If students have a choice, I strongly recommend avoiding as much debt as possible along the road to a bachelor’s degree by staying in-state or attending private colleges with generous financial aid options. Yes, getting rejected by one prestigious college stings and it makes for great reading among the NYT’s elite readership. But it’s not the end of the world, and I think that Mr. Espinoza has realized that in spite of the title of the article.

An Elite Take on College Rankings

As a conservative, small-town Midwesterner, I get a great deal of amusement out of the education coverage in the New York Times. I have never quite understood the newspaper’s consistent focus on the most elite portions of America’s educational systems, from kindergartens which cost more than most colleges (is the neighborhood school really that bad) to the special section of the website regarding the Ivy League. In that light, I was interested when several friends sent me the NYT’s take on college rankings and surprised to find a discussion that didn’t focus solely on the Ivy League.

In Saturday’s edition of the paper, columnist Joe Nocera noted some of the limitations of the U.S. News and World Report college rankings, such as rewarding selectivity and spending more money regardless of outcomes. (I’ve written plenty on this topic.) He notes that the Washington Monthly rankings do seek to reward colleges which effectively educate their students, and also states that a reduced focus on institutional prestige might help reduce student stress.

I am hardly a fan of Nocera (who is best known for comparing Tea Party supporters to terrorists), but the piece is worth a read. I highly recommend reading through the comments on the article, as they show a sharp divide between commenters who believe that attending solid—but not elite—colleges is a good investment and those who believe strongly in attending an elite institution. For those of us who are not regular readers of the Gray Lady, the comments also give us an idea of what some of America’s elite think about the value of certain types of higher education.