Can you encourage people to recycle? Our attempt to switch behavior

April 27, 2011, 11:53 am

This is a follow-up to my post Assessing Your Greenness: a serendipitous stroll toward sustainability.

Our campus recently conducted a waste stream audit in the library. Download UCSB_Library_Waste_Audit What it boils down to is that our patrons generate a lot of garbage.This gives you a sense of coffee cups alone:

It will be interesting to see what happens when we temporarily close our coffee operations during a long renovation. Obviously students will still bring coffee into the building, but I suspect they’ll consume less when the impulse to purchase is no longer right down the hall.

The biggest takeaway from this experience is that students are not recycling– at least not as much as we expected. UCSB prides itself on sustainability and being eco-minded so I was anticipating higher numbers. What it boils down to is that 66% of our waste is recyclable, yet only 23% of it actually ends up in a recycling bin.

We’re going to see if we can change that. Taking a page from the Heath brothers and SWITCH, we’re going to see if we can modify behavior by making it easier for people to do the right thing.

A big barrier to recycling was the limitation of bins. I’m guilty of this myself. The closest recycling bin to my office is way down the hall. I can’t blame a student for dumping his garbage in the first can he comes across. Hey—at least they are throwing things away right?

Our Solution

We believe that if presented with a choice, most people would choose to recycle… so we got more bins. This is actually easier said than done. It involved facilities, custodial services, campus planning, and several others. But at the end we deployed nearly 100 new bins.

Our strategy is to place a recycling bin beside every trashcan. In the photo above you can see all three options. Office Pack bins are only located near copiers and printers, but everywhere else we have landfill and recycling together. The signs also provide some guidance on what can and can’t be recycled. Signs are posted above every bin for now.

Prior to this we had very few recycling bins in our building and they were administered by library employees (passionate about recycling) not by our campus custodial service. This report has persuaded campus planners to step up and start handling recycling in the library– another small victory.

All this happened last week— on Earth Day. Hopefully be able to conduct another audit later this year to see if there has been any improvement.

Thanks to the UCSB Library’s S.A.N.E. group for their passion and commitment to saving the earth. None of this would have happened without them

This entry was posted in Assessment&Evaluation, Spaces&Places and tagged library, recycling, sustainability, switch, ucsb. Bookmark the permalink.

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hughesbob

Most of the commenters here are addressing the issue of excessive student loan debt for students who have graduated and, supposedly, are able to get a good-paying job as a result of that degree to make the investment worthwhile. The elephant in the room that few wish to address is that of completion rates. Nearly 2/3rds of those who enroll at a community or for-profit college do not earn a degree in *six* years, and about 1/3rd of those at public and private four-year universities do not earn a degree. And these students are racking up tremendous debt with nothing to show for it and no means to pay it back. But our institutions are more than happy to take those funds and invest it in new buildings, new academic programs featuring the ‘trend of the day’ (like iPad initiatives), and pay raises. Those of us in Higher Education should be ashamed of how we’ve taken advantage of students. Calculating completion rates at 6 years out for a community college (which should be a 2 year degree) and calling them ‘success rates’ is laughable.

texasmusic

You had me until you said “pay raises.” Maybe for that top 1%? My colleagues and I haven’t seen a pay raise in many years. Not this year either.

Aside from that, though, this is a point I have made many times. If you don’t finish college, your debt doesn’t just magically disappear. Not only do you still have to pay it back, with no chance of relief in the form of a bankruptcy declaration, you have to pay it back on whatever income you can earn with no degree in hand. Trying paying back a $30,000 loan while trying to eke out an existence of any sort on a $15,000 salary!

Your elephant brought a friend, too, in the form of loan debt for individuals at 5 and 10 years post-graduation. Loans are sold with the intent that you have them paid off in 10 years. I wonder how many people still have significant debt 10 years out? I have several acquaintances whose debt has spiraled to $100,000 or more. Some of these acquaintances work in fields that require a specific master’s degree, and often a second master’s degree in another field, for work that pays about as much as a teacher’s salary. They didn’t borrow that much money, but the cost of school simply isn’t cost effective when compared to any salary advantages.

I also no longer agree that students should have a stake in paying for their education because they benefit from it. On the surface, that is correct, but with the glut of college graduates on the job market, adding a degree to the requirements for certain jobs that did not previously require a degree has become common. Why hire someone with a specialized education to do what they’re trained to do at a higher salary, when you can simply hire a secretary (remember we call them administrative assistants now?) for a slightly higher salary ($18,000 instead of $15,000) who only occasionally needs to draw on that knowledge for the job. It makes the workforce look more educated, which increases earnings for the company. It does nothing for the individuals typing memos and answering telephones with that “required” college education.

Frankly, I can give a long list of names of people who would gladly give back their diplomas and work a $15,000 clerical job, assuming these jobs exist anywhere anymore, for the chance not to have a lifetime of student loan debt hanging over their heads.

Aptitude

Duh U dont need to go to college to know
U only take on debt U can REALISTICALLY pay back.
Stop the over dreaming mates;
everyone cant get a job after USC film school.
EasyReader

They fail to realize that times have changed. No longer can you pop out of college and into a decent job, especially in some parts of the country. Over 20 years ago you could pay-as-you-go if you were seeking a bachelors degree. The costs now are prohibitive for a simple BA, and out of sight for a professional degree such as MD or MBA. No job equals no way to pay debts and still have something to live on.

sloanhoo

Some good points are made in this set of comments, mostly summed up by “there is enough blame to go around” about how we got into this sorry mess. However, I have to respond to the fallacy of tying total student loan debt amount to first year’s salary. That is a false comparison.

If one focuses on getting the value out of his/her educational opportunity, the diploma creates an income-producing asset that has a much longer lifespan–perhaps 30-40 years. Income-based repayment in whichever variety a graduate qualifies for ensures payments are based on income and family size AND they end after a set number of years (10, 20 or 25 currently) with forgiveness of the rest. Yes, there are twists (such as, certain current grads don’t qualify for IBR, the forgiveness amount is taxable, and having a large debt on your personal balance sheet doesn’t leave a lot of room for other debt), but the IBR programs ensure that nobody is in a hardship state just because of student loan payments. I will bet that student loan payments only add to the burden of credit card and other kinds of consumer debt that today’s students seem so eager to take out while in school. Still, the right focus in answering the question of how much is too much, is to do the math with your financial aid advisor–with your whole financial universe factored in. This is the step our students seem to avoid doing until they are almost out the door. When we started “holistic financial aid counseling” our average debt load decreased the first year.

By the way, those pointing fingers may want to add:
-Congress, for not dropping the interest rate and for taking away subsidy for interest for grad students this year, for eroding basic support for education year after year.
-Accrediting agencies, for always ratcheting up the institution’s fixed costs in the name of quality whether it actually works or not, and for pushing the idea that faculty should not teach more than 2 or 3 classes a term.
-Congress, for appending so many non-education-related social reporting and compliance items to our Title IV lending that each add cost. (HECRA only reduced cost for the government, by shifting it to colleges!)
-The Economy, for tanking and making employment prospects poor in the (hopefully) short-term at least.
-Institutions, for grandiose visions that add far too many other things to the education that soak up budget and donor’s dollars: athletics, presidential edifices, proliferation of “me too” programs.

OK, glad to get that out of my system. Thanks for listening!

seejay

One matter I find absent in this discussion is the social value of having a highly educated populace in general. Unlike primary and secondary education, post-secondary education is regarded as principally or exclusively a (potential) benefit to the individual, rather than a benefit to the society at large. That is plainly not the case, as employers are increasingly aware of the general level of education as a factor in deciding to locate their facilities in one or another locale.

Another distressing and tacit assumption in this discussion is that post-secondary education automatically and necessarily exclude persons from entering anything but white collar positions.

I believe it is essential to raise the overall level of education in the populace – more people finishing high school with a solid educational foundation and more people with post-secondary education enabling them to function at a higher level of productivity and inventiveness. This is a social benefit that ultimately benefits all and should therefore be supported by all, as it is in their enlightened self-interest.
glorenzo

“I hate to sound like an alarmist, but the so-called “College Payoff” theme,
whereby we are advising students that going into debt in order to ultimately
earn a degree can be considered a wise pathway in the long term, looks like a
bad idea. Instead, shouldn’t we be advising students who do not have any
financial support to avoid going into deep debt and to work at whatever job(s)
they can find and enroll in only those courses they can pay for out of their
pockets combined with any aid they may qualify for through federal and/or state
grants?”
From: http://edpath.typepad.com/source_scholars/2011/10/are-we-coming-close-to-an-unprecedented-societal-crisis.html

lizziec

Yes, but tell me what a student is supposed to do when their program of study REQUIRES 2 semesters of consecutive FULL TIME enrollment “to prove residency”?

This kind of crap needs to be eliminated as well.

azsundevil

It isn’t good policy for universities to have advisers and faculty
members urge students to continue with school at whatever the cost by
promising that there will be a job waiting for them when they graduate,
but it happens all the time. For the student it can be a disaster. For
the university employees it’s just another day on the job.

barbmcconnell

Research shows that a majority of students entering the doors of higher education do so with the understanding/expectation that their degrees will lead to a lucrative career after graduation. I seriously doubt I would have gone into debt for my 1st Masters degree in 2006 had the department’s leading instructors not told the entire assemblage at the orientation (sales) meeting that there were major corporations (naming specifically John Deere, Motorola, and others as well) biting at the bit waiting for this university’s students to graduate so that they could “scoop us up” for 6 figure jobs. Unfortunately, they failed to tell us that in order to be considered for these lucrative positions, the corporations would require a minimum of 7-10 years previous experience in that field. Now, I’m learning that because of the current economy, persons in that field are usually the first to be out of work. There are now lawsuits pending litigation with several different universities (primarily against for-profits and technical “schools”) seeking damages for the students who were duped through false promises (outright or inferred) about lucrative careers awaiting graduates. My personal feeling on the whole issue of retention is that the feds need to put in place some requirements of accountability to what steps schools have taken to encourage a student who is at risk of dropping out of school to complete their degree program. Those that don’t show accountability to retain students should be forced to return the monies received on behalf of that student, having the monies borrowed through Title IV federal funds credited to the accounts of the student who borrowed the monies. Seems fair to me.

helvetica

When the credit crisis hit, there might have been an opportunity to address the issue of debt more forcefully, particularly as it affected private loan originations for higher education; however, the federal government stepped in quickly and raised the federal (Stafford) loan limits so that a full-time, dependent undergraduate can now incur up to $27,000 of Stafford loan debt in four years (excluding Perkins, PLUS or private loans). While the effort by Washington to respond to the credit criss was helpful in the short-term, particularly because it provided up to $2,000 more per year in loans at more favorable terms than the private loan market, seemingly it has also raised the “standard” for borrowing (and debt) by $8,000 over a four year undergraduate career. Perhaps this overstates the case if students still have access to private loans, but given that the private lenders have now become somewhat more cautious about lending, this change in federal loan limits seems to have removed what could have been an important “speed bump” in the borrowing process.

By the way, as an exercise that might be of interest to some of you, if you ask your financial aid office for the volume of student loans processed in a typical year and contrast that with total student revenue generated by your institution, you might be surprised to find how dependent many of us have become on student loans and the willingness of students and families to incur debt for college.
cragie

Zandi could not possibly be more incorrect. Federal student loan doesn’t take losses the way regular consumer loans do. Default, far from the end of the road for creditor and debtor, is another beginning. Bankruptcy discharge is rare in federal student loan, and tools like admin. wage garnishment and Treasury offset of other federal benefits and IRS refunds practically guarantees that all defaulters end up paying eventually unless they choose to live completely off the grid. Even if gross defaults increase, net defaults over time are much smaller; direct loan is a moneymaker for the taxpayer.

Zandi’s underwriting idea is ridiculous. Who is going to do all that work? It would require an enormous loss rate to justify the equally enormous cost of underwriting for direct and perkins loans. Think of the cost of pulling credit reports and FICO scores alone, across millions of student borrowers. Those companies won’t provide the data for free out of a sense of patriotism and fiscal responsibility. Add human labor effort to the underwriting process and you have significant new admin costs that someone will have to pay for.

Two decades ago there was a brief period of a year or so where federal law allowed GSL lenders to perform underwriting/risk-rating to screen Stafford borrowers. Lenders opted not to do so. There was nothing in it for them, except for added costs. The loans were guaranteed 100% at that point. Why do any research on the borrower?

The biggest thing Zandi misses is that these are social programs. Neither political party is going to be eager to take credit for crushing the American dream for millions by allowing FICO scoring to determine who goes to college. This is even less likely than determining who goes to college by using IQ testing alone.

The way the federal government underwrites is by screening colleges. That has now expanded somewhat to screening actual academic programs within certain colleges, via the gainful employment regulation. Almost every Congressperson has a postsecondary institution in his/her district. They also have close ties to governors and state legislators — jobs which many Congresspeople and Senators filled earlier in their careers. An across-the-board purging of institutions from the loan program as was done in the past is unlikely to happen ever again — but this is the only hope for those like Zandi who hope for underwriting. A student-by-student risk analysis is not in the cards.
goldenteach

What about those of us who are going into teaching? Though I have managed to get through my master’s and Ph.D. coursework with no loan debt, I have undergraduate debt over $30k. I went to a state school and my parents simply wouldn’t pay for college (despite making a combined $200k/year.) Thus ineligible for student loans, I was forced to get high-interest private loans, and I feel like I will be swimming in debt from them for the next 30 years. I already pay over $500/month for the loans (even on a graduated repayment plan), and as I’m currently an adjunct teaching 3 classes and making less than $15k/year in addition to paying for graduate school. I feel like I was somehow tricked into getting the loans– I know they’re my responsibility, but at 18, I was 4 weeks away from the first day of college, was told I had to pay for it myself and that student loans “weren’t a big deal.” I now feel like they were the worst financial decision of my life. Even though I have a full-time teaching position in the fall, the less-than $40k a year will make it nearly impossible to pay off the $30k of loans (which are already up to over $45k with compounded interest). By the time I pay them off, I will have paid nearly 4x the amount that I actually borrowed. Perhaps you may say that it’s my fault for choosing a profession that doesn’t pay better, but the fact remains that attending college for 7-9 years is expensive, and the average college professor salary doesn’t begin to cover the debt incurred by that amount of school, regardless of how “big” the school’s name is.

lizziec

I hear you – after more years of salary freezes than raises, on top of an already sub-par annual wage, I left academia to work in an area that doesn’t care about your degree, but what you know and can then do. The bonus? I’m making double what the university was paying me while holding its nose and telling me I was overpaid.

Don’t be afraid to look outside the academy. The emperor doesn’t know it yet, but he’s been naked for quite some time.

Fat_Man

The correct answer is zero. Don’t borrow money. Then you won’t have a problem paying it back.

If you can’t afford to go to a school without borrowing money, don’t go there. Find something cheaper. Work and save money. Join the Army.

You don’t want to wind up like Goldenteach below. I wonder if he knows that even bankruptcy won’t help him?

lizziec

“If you can’t afford to go to a school without borrowing money, don’t go there”

Interesting, especially in a era when many administrative assistant positions (read: secretaries with titles) require a Bachelor’s Degree.

“Join the Army”

Yes, and risk coming home missing several limbs and the ability to do anything with that VA college benefit due to a head injury from increasingly accurate and ferocious IEDs in Afghanistan. GREAT plan.

http://twitter.com/pomgraphicart Pamela Gallegos

Please help out this cause: http://wh.gov/jgl

An effort to combat financial institutions fiscal heist on American graduates private loans.

The ever increasing, unrealistic demands of loan providers are a
leading outstanding debt. Interest rates of 14% or more – and demanded
payments of 1,000+ dollars per month is simply not possible with a
starting wage. Graduates are penalized for inability to pay outrageous
monthly demands to the point where they become financially corrupt. This
crisis is amassed a generation of individuals who aren’t financially
stable enough to even think about reproduction, economic stimuli, home
ownership, or plans to wed. Financial institutions are draining the
economy and diminishing social classes by providing blind funding which
is impossible to repay. Americans who have put forth efforts toward
self-improvement to keep up with educational expectations of employers
everywhere, are being punished.
http://twitter.com/industrialist00 Ante Williams

I have so many opinions on this I really don’t know where to start. First and foremost, student loan debt is to be avoided at all costs if possible, and I am speaking from experiences with my own current loan debt. I also have a huge problem with the fact that federal grants are being allow to pay for more than just direct costs (tuition, fees, books),where students on many occasions are getting outrageous refunds. I agree more financial literacy is needed and the federal government should have done a better job with thinking about this when they decided to disband the FFELP.

doctorpapa

Part of the issue we are facing in this country is the disparity between college loan debt, potential earnings, and one’s ability to service said debt. Students who take out loans at higher end institutions but major in areas where the starting salary will barely reach 30 thousand a year, will have an almost impossible task ahead if they have, say $100,000 in student debt, and forget about graduate school. Unfortunately, many people majoring in the liberal arts find that they MUST go on to graduate school and that just increases the amount of loan debt they must suffer through. Most student load debt is higher than what I borrowed for my first home I built in 1984.

jselingo

Agreed, we need to look at the root problem. The federal government makes 90% of new student loans. That gives them a lot of control over forcing colleges to control costs, if they want to use it. But as you probably know, the higher-ed establishment has for years fought off most of these efforts as unfunded mandates.
texasmusic

And still…who’s buying the new cars? You’re comparing apples to oranges here. New grads are not generally the ones not blinking at $25K for a new car because they’re buying $10,000 used cars on 6 year financing. There’s no outcry about a $25,000 new car because it actually is discretionary. College is not as discretionary as it used to be.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Antsy-Kuhnwisse/100002159499682 Antsy Kuhnwisse

*Further* confiscation of wealth? No we don’t need any more of the kind of “sharing” we’ve had in the past few decades, all of it going upward to the top.
buffalolibrarian

davi2665 – agreed!
hughesbob

The analogy about buying a car breaks down, though, when you consider that a very significant number of students drop out of college with huge debt and no degree to show for it. At least when you walk out of a car dealership you have an asset that, while depreciating, is still worth something. Imagine if a car dealership said that “students and their families should have some skin in the game”… and took your money without giving anything in return. We should be disbursing financial aid and providing loans at the end of the semester, not at the beginning, tied to successful completion. And calling 12 units “full time” for financial aid purposes is just as wrong, as is disbursing pell grants to students with less than half time enrollment. Our system of paying for higher education is broken.
_perplexed_

The trend line of taxpayer support for public education suggests that only the costs of private institutions should be used in planning scenerios. Ten years from now, there is no reason to believe that the costs to students of “public” and private universities will differ at all.
glorenzo

Right On 11272784.
lizziec

In addition, there is the constant hand-wringing about how long it takes to finish a “4-year” degree. So WHAT if it takes 6, 7 or even 8 years ??!?! This metric is for the colleges, and so they push this as a necessity, which wholly undermines the ability of students to work, and try to pay their way through school.

We need to call that out as what it is – smoke and mirrors.
jselingo

Don — Agreed. The other issue that I think Kevin Carey pointed out in his piece this week is that your student loan debt is amortized over 10 years. The first 10 years of post-graduate life is probably when recent grads make the least amount of money of their careers. Is there a better way to account for that in student loan payments?
tlgriffith18

I don’t discourage students from borrowing what they need. I try to discourage them from borrowing MORE than they need. I have students who have maxed out the $57,500 in student loans without completing their degree but most of that money was in overpayments to them to the tune of $40k with only $17K going towards tuition and fees. They can’t afford the difference between what they get in Pell grant and the cost of tuition now so they stop going to school (for the most part). In this case the fault is the student’s for frittering away funding meant to help them afford college and using it instead to pay for fancy fingernails, fancy cell phones, fancy vacations. I have no idea how these former students will survive with the double whammy of not getting that overpayment check AND having to start paying back those same student loans.

I’m relieved that there are new financial aid rules in place that will cut back on this type of situation. Unfortunately it also penalizes those students who truly need full funding to cover their costs while in school.
11272784

ABSOLUTELY agreed! We are clearly in the path of abandoning public support for universities. As one speaker said at a meeting, “In the 60′s we were state-funded; later we were state-assisted. Now we’re just state-annoyed.” When we reach that point, students can expect to be paying multiples of the current costs for tuition. That means only the haves will be attending – and a few have-nots on scholarships.
socafish

Right on, went to Rally on that very topic about this time last year .
trendisnotdestiny

This is very well put. There is no national standard for financial literacy with very few state mandates for financial literacy in K-12 curriculum across the country. However, we are supposed to be the world’s guide as master capitalists.

Very few people address the idea that we need a permanent underclass to keep our economy, profits and system from imploding. Maybe this is the reason that the field of home economics disappeared about the same time economics departments metastasized in our educational bloodstream.

Bravo to you thececinc!
22086364

Yep. But it’s gotten even worse.
don_heller

Jeff,

There would be nothing preventing the federal government from introducing an amortization scheme that would allow students to have smaller payments in the early years of repayment, and then gradually increase in the later years when their incomes would presumably be higher. You could do this in one of two ways: 1) increase the amount of the subsidy the federal government provides (likely politically infeasible, at least in the current political climate); or 2) increase the total amount students would pay in interest over the ten years.
tardigrade

The current educational system eats over 20% of an average US lifespan. That’s enough skin-in-the-game for me.

Can you encourage people to recycle? Our attempt to switch behavior

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