February 13, 2012, 5:14 pm
By Richard Kahlenberg
Today’s announcement by President Obama to create an $8-billion Community College to Career Fund to train 2 million workers is very welcome news. For years, community colleges have been asked to educate with the fewest funds those students with the greatest needs. According to a report of the Delta Cost Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, in 2009, the average community college spent roughly $10,000 per student, compared with almost $19,000 a year at public research universities and $41,000 a year at private research universities. Excluding research funding and other expenses and focusing exclusively on instruction, community colleges spent about $5,000 per pupil compared with $10,000 at public research universities and $20,000 at private research universities.
The president is politically smart to connect community-college funding directly to the nation’s need to boost…
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February 13, 2012, 4:27 pm
By Richard Vedder
Joe Biden admitted at a talk at Florida State University the other day that, yes, federal student-financial-assistance programs probably did contribute to rising college costs. That was newsworthy, and I suspect a statement that was not vetted by the White House (not the first Biden rhetorical faux pas from the Administration’s perspective.)
The Biden statement flies in the face of the generally perceived wisdom among supporters of the federal student-loan and grant programs, namely that these programs really have little impact on college costs. The Biden admission, however, implicitly agrees with those who argue the gains from these programs to college students are significantly dissipated by the fee-raising behavior of the schools enrolling the affected students.
Biden, in effect was embracing an idea first vocally proclaimed by Bill Bennett, then Secretary of Education, in 1987…
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February 12, 2012, 10:15 pm
By Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson
Struck by all the hoopla about the irrelevance of college education to success in our new world of technology, we decided to ask two talented research assistants from the Spencer Foundation, Charles Kurose and Amato Nocera, to look into the matter. Here, in their own words, is what they found.
In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, “Will Dropouts Save America?”, Michael Ellsberg gives an increasingly popular argument against a college education. The argument runs something like this: wildly successful entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs dropped out of college. They didn’t need a college degree or the kind of skills that are learned from textbooks or in the classroom: passion, creativity, and a revolutionary idea fueled their success and gave the world two of its greatest tech companies: Microsoft and Apple.
Although the anecdote about Gates and Jobs is true, the…
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February 12, 2012, 9:57 pm
By Marybeth Gasman
The Obama administration has been bold in its pursuit of higher-education goals. Most of us are familiar with President Obama’s 2020 goals – by 2020 he wants the United States to be first in the world in higher education. He wants every adult American to have at least one year of college or career training.
In order to meet the goal, the Obama administration has issued a Request for Information (RIF) aimed at gathering and disseminating strategies for improving retention and degree attainment. Throughout the country at myriad colleges and universities, there are superb practices for engaging students and ensuring their success. We often know what works but we fail to replicate positive approaches and strategies.
As most of the traction to meet the 2020 goals must take place at community colleges, historically black colleges and universities, Hispanic-serving institutions,…
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February 9, 2012, 6:01 pm
By Richard Kahlenberg
Advocates and opponents of affirmative action have been eagerly waiting to see whether the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a challenge to the use of race in admissions in the case of Fisher v. Texas. Many observers thought the Court would announce whether it would grant or deny a cert petition in the case last month, but the Court deferred a decision, leaving advocates on both sides hanging. A decision is expected some time after the Court returns from its winter recess next week.
In the meantime, major voices are weighing in on the case. Last month, Columbia University president Lee C. Bollinger published an op-ed in the Washington Post urging the Supreme Court not to take the Fisher case. Soon after, the New York Times editorial board defended the status quo on affirmative action in a lead editorial. Both Bollinger and the Times editorial writers championed the importance of diversity …
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February 8, 2012, 12:28 pm
By Peter Wood
The ten miles between Rutgers in New Brunswick and Princeton (in Princeton) cover more than the distance between a large state university and the rarefied atmosphere of one of the nation’s top undergraduate institutions. Route 27 inches south, stoplight by stoplight, through a Mexican-American barrio (El Gallo Loco), a Guatamalan area (Productos Centros Americas), and a neighborhood built by refugees from the aborted Hungarian revolution of 1956 (the Magyar Bank is still in business). Then come long stretches of gray commercial sprawl which offer testimony to the efforts of numerous small-time entrepreneurs: Crandle Custom Car Cleaning, Meat Town, Quietly Kept Bail Bonds, D & J Fashionistas. Eventually Route 27 opens into broken countryside, with housing developments named to evoke Olde England (Whitehall Gardens, Somerset Mews, Carriage Run) but home to lots of upwardly mobile south…
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February 7, 2012, 4:55 pm
By Peter Wood
President Obama’s account of what has happened, is happening, and will happen in higher education; his various policy statements; and his administration’s agency initiatives deserve to be considered as a whole. They add up to a large and energetic attempt to recast the role of American colleges and universities. But while each of his major statements and every one of his administration’s actions has been well publicized, somehow the larger picture gets relatively little attention. I’d like to attempt a synthesis in the next several posts, first going through what I take to be the eight major points, one by one, and then reassembling them as a whole. His eight major points seem to be:
(1) The United States needs a massive expansion of undergraduate enrollments. His benchmark for this was set February 24, 2009 in his address to a joint session of Congress where he enunciated “a new…
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February 7, 2012, 3:54 pm
By Richard Vedder
One of the major rationales for public subsidies of higher education is that colleges are supposed to make students more virtuous–better persons. We are told a college education strengthens awareness of the difference between right and wrong, enhances the impulse to help one’s fellow citizens, and reinforces a respect for the rule of law and the negative consequences of corruption. Some cite statistics showing lower crime rates amongst college graduates as evidence of the effectiveness of colleges as purveyors of virtuous behavior. Early in my odyssey in higher education, say around 1960, these civic virtues were reinforced at liberal-arts colleges by mandatory attendance by students at chapel, even at nonreligiously affiliated institutions. Still earlier, the instilling of civic virtues was the ostensible major purpose of higher education.
Yet today, not only is virtue downplayed,…
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February 7, 2012, 1:54 pm
By Frank Donoghue
I can’t remember if Texas Governor Rick Perry could or couldn’t remember if he would eliminate the Department of Education if elected president, but it doesn’t matter now since, rather than endure one more embarrassing debate performance, he packed his bags and went home. One remaining candidate, Ron Paul would eliminate that department. It’s part of Paul’s plan to drastically reduce the size of the U.S. government as well as its military presence abroad, a platform that has energized a small but fervent base, including a substantial number of young voters. Paul’s not going to win the nomination, but if he does continue all the way to the Republican convention in Tampa, he could influence the party’s platform. So is his plan to eliminate the Department of Education crazy? Not, in my view, as crazy as it might first appear, but I’d far rather see it…
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February 2, 2012, 1:40 pm
By Richard Kahlenberg
President Obama’s recent address at the University of Michigan rightly suggested that if the American Dream is to be open to all, not just some, college must be made more affordable to average Americans. But a new analysis of America’s oldest and richest university suggests that adequate financial aid is necessary, but not sufficient, to ensuring that students of all economic backgrounds have access at selective colleges.
Eight years ago, Harvard’s president Lawrence Summers suggested that “an important purpose of institutions like Harvard is to give everybody a shot at the American Dream.” Strongly backed by William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions at Harvard, the university crafted an innovative and far-reaching financial-aid program to make Harvard virtually free for students from families making less than $40,000 (and today, for families making less than $60,000) in…
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