Tag: research

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!

Is Money from Parents Bad for Students?

Most people would generally consider a student getting money from his or her parents while in college to be a good thing—after all, most traditional-age college students tend to have few resources of their own and additional money from Mom and Dad might help students work fewer hours (generally considered a good thing). But a new paper in the American Sociological Review by Laura Hamilton, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California-Merced, challenges this assumption. In a paper titled “More Is More or More Is Less? Parental Financial Investments During College” (abstract here), she finds that parental financial assistance increases the likelihood of graduation, but is associated with lower student GPAs.

As a sociologist, Hamilton came to the project with the perspective that more financial resources are a good thing for a student due to the mere availability of resources and social capital. I don’t start from that perspective—and instead look at what students can do with the available funds. But I am also concerned that no-strings-attached gifts from parents might not be a good thing, since they may lack the performance requirements of merit-based financial aid. Additionally, the need for additional funds might reflect the inability of a student from a middle- to upper-income family to secure merit-based aid.

Hamilton uses two old, workhorse datasets in her analysis—the Baccalaureate and Beyond Study (B&B) of students who graduated in 1993 and the Beginning Postsecondary Students Study (BPS) of students who began college in 1990. She uses the B&B to focus on cumulative GPA at graduation as an outcome, which has two main limitations: we don’t know the relationship between parental assistance on dropout or changes in college major which may be associated with GPA. Because of that, she uses the BPS to look at graduation rates. Neither dataset is perfect or free of issues of causality, but it’s not a bad starting point (the datasets have to be appropriate to get into a top-tier journal like ASR).

The positive relationship between parental assistance and graduation rates won’t raise many eyebrows, but her claim that among students who get to graduation, those with higher levels of parental assistance have lower GPAs is more controversial. My biggest concern with the article is that appears that more help from the parents allows some marginal students to stay in school who otherwise would not have appeared in the dataset. If some of the 2.0 GPA students with parental assistance would have dropped out, there may not be differences in the GPAs of students who successfully completed college. Because of this, I have to take the finding on GPAs with a grain of salt.

 

On another note, this article also can teach scholars quite a bit about how to interact with the media. The mixed conclusion gives the education press and the general public an opportunity to run with a provocative conclusion—parents shouldn’t give their kids money (if they can) because they might just slack off. The headline in today’s Inside Higher Ed piece on the article (“Spoiled Children”) is an example of how research findings can be spun to get more eyeballs. While the media should run more reasonable headlines, it is the responsibility of academics to call out the education press when they play these sorts of games.

The Wisconsin Idea in Action

One of the factors which attracted me to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for graduate school was the Wisconsin Idea—the belief that the boundaries of the university should be the boundaries of the state. (Yes, that is much more important than being able to see my beloved Packers on television each week—and I’m a shareholder in the team.) As the University of Wisconsin System was formed in the early 1970s, the Wisconsin Idea has been adopted by the rest of the state’s public colleges and universities. While some people say that the Wisconsin Idea has passed its prime due to the focus on arcane research topics, I still think the idea is alive in well.

I saw a great example of the Wisconsin Idea in action at UW-Parkside that made the state newspapers this morning. Two Parkside students did research for a class project and discovered that moving prisoners’ medical records from paper to electronic formats could save millions of dollars and likely improve patient outcomes. This is a win-win for the students (who gain valuable research experience and analytic skills), the university (which gets great publicity), and the state (which should be able to save money).

I have been privileged to study the Wisconsin public higher education system for the past four-plus years through the Wisconsin Scholars Longitudinal Study. It is not uncommon for someone at UW-Madison to look down their noses at the rest of the UW System, but it is critical to recognize the contributions of the entire system toward making Wisconsin a better place to live.

Public Research at its Finest: The 2012 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

It is no secret that academics research some obscure topics—and are known to write about these topics in ways that obfuscate the importance of such research. This is one reason why former Senator William Proxmire (D-WI) started the Golden Fleece Awards to highlight research that he did not consider cost-effective. Here are some examples, courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society. (Academia has started to push back through the Golden Goose Awards, conceived by Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN).)

Some of these potentially strange topics either have potentially useful applications or are just plain thought-provoking. To recognize some of the most unusual research in a given year, some good chaps at Harvard organized the first Ig Nobel Prize ceremony in 1991. This wonderful tradition continues to this day, with the 2012 ceremony being held yesterday. Real Nobel Prize winners are even known to hand out the awards!

Ten awards are handed out each year, so it is difficult to pick the best award. My initial thought was to highlight the Government Accountability Office’s report titled, “Actions Needed to Evaluate the Impact of Efforts to Estimate Costs of Reports and Studies,” but this sort of report is not unusual in the federal government. So I’ll single out a nice little article on whether multiple comparisons bias can result in brain wave activities for a dead Atlantic salmon (no word on whether the study participant was consumed after completion of the study) as my favorite award. Multiple comparisons bias is certainly real and the authors provide a nice example of how to lie with statistics, but the subject tested sure is unusual. I encourage people to take a look at the other awards and try to figure out how these research projects got started. Some seem more useful than others, but that is the nature of academic research.

The Annals of Improbable Research, the folks who put on the Ig Nobel ceremony, also have three hair clubs for scientists: The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists, the Luxuriant Former Hair Club for Scientists, and the Luxuriant Facial Hair Club for Scientists.

Here is the full video of the ceremony.