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Wednesday, August 3, 2011

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Should Pell Grants Be Better Targeted?

July 12, 2011 By Richard Kahlenberg

As policymakers debate options about how to deal with a likely shortfall in funding for Pell grants—the federal government’s primary vehicle for aid to low-income and working-class students—a new research paper from the University of Wisconsin suggests that scarce Pell dollars should be targeted to the neediest Pell students.

The research was released at a conference at the University of Wisconsin at Madison late last week. I spoke to the gathering about the need to create more socioeconomic diversity in higher education, and while I was in Madison, I had a chance to talk with both of the lead authors of the paper, Wisconsin professors Sara Goldrick-Rab and Douglas Harris. (The other authors are James Benson and Robert Kelchen.)

Broadly speaking, in the debate about why so many low-income students fail to graduate from college, conservatives emphasize the idea that such students lack adequate academic preparation, while liberals tend to emphasize inadequate financial aid. The new Wisconsin research is fascinating in part because it confounds some of the thinking of both liberals and conservatives.

The study examines a three-year old experiment in which 600 randomly selected Wisconsin Pell-grant-receiving, public-college students were given a separate, privately financed grant of $3,500 per year, while a control group of 900 Pell students did not receive the extra cash. The program, the Fund for Wisconsin Scholars, ended up netting students about $2,500 after other aid programs were reduced in response to the new cash.

The researchers found that on average, the students who received the supplemental grants were no more likely to persist in college than those not receiving extra financial support. Moreover, they found that more advantaged Pell students (those with higher ACT scores and parents with college educations) appeared to be less likely to persist when they received the private grant, perhaps because they had more money with which to socialize. (Win one for the conservatives.)

At the same time, those Pell students who were more disadvantaged (had lower ACT scores and parents lacking a college education) benefited a great deal from the supplemental grants. Their persistence rates after three years climbed dramatically, by 17 percentage points (or 31 percent), from 55 percent for the control group to 72 percent for the treatment group. These students, many of whom regularly send money home to their families, appear to have felt somewhat less pressure to work long hours for employers during college, and thus were able to spend more time studying for classes. (Win one for the liberals.)

This is just one study, but it’s a rare controlled experiment addressing higher-education-grant aid, so it’s worth considering the public-policy implications. In the larger scheme of things, I’d rather not see the Pell program cut at all. (The $5,550 maximum award, as Tom Mortenson has noted, would need to be $12,000 to have the same purchasing power that Pell had in the 1970s.) But if the Pell program must be trimmed, wouldn’t it be better to award its scarce dollars to those who would benefit the most?

It seems unlikely that policymakers will want to give Pell grants to those with low test scores and grades, given the perverse signals that would send to students and the conflict with deeply ingrained notions of meritocracy such a policy would present. But if Pell grants must be cut, shouldn’t special efforts be made to shield Pell-eligible students who seem to benefit the most from aid—those whose parents do not have a college education?

The new Wisconsin research suggests that targeting aid to the most vulnerable yields the greatest bang for the buck. At a time when budgets are tight, and when we’re trying desperately to boost graduation rates, holding low-income, first-generation college students harmless when cutting Pell would seem to be a win for common sense.
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'Fields of Learning' - Inside Higher Ed

'Fields of Learning' - Inside Higher Ed
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Campus Technology: Rethinking the LMS


What's the future of the learning management system? What's its place in higher education environments of the 21st century? Will it even have a place in the coming years?
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Campus Technology: E-Textbooks: 4 Keys to Going All-Digital


When Florida's Daytona State College set out to implement an all-electronic textbook program two years ago, its goal was to drive down the cost of textbooks by 80 percent. The school is well on its way to achieving that goal, and along the way it made some discoveries about what it takes to make a successful transition to e-texts. MORE
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Diverse Issues in Higher Education: Making the Work of Black Scientists Accessible to the Public




July 28, 2011 by Lois Elfman


Since 2000, The HistoryMakers (www.thehistorymakers.com) web campaign has been conducting interviews with prominent African-Americans in fields such as business, education, entertainment, law, music and religion. So far, 2,000 people in more than 80 U.S. cities and towns have been interviewed.


Two years ago, HistoryMakers founder and executive director Julieanna L. Richardson put a focus on the field of science with the mission of using the life stories of individuals in the sciences as a way to encourage people to enter professions in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields. A $2.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation has made the ScienceMakers project a reality.


“The reference to a Black scientist is George Washington Carver,” Richardson says. “There is a huge lack of knowledge that our project is really committed to changing.”


The grant provides for partnerships with 10 science centers around the country, and there is an ongoing series of public events at which some of the ScienceMakers speak to enraptured audiences. In the coming months, the video interviews will become available for viewing on the web.


“Our project has the capacity to change the whole paradigm by introducing the world to the lives of these scientists,” says Richardson. “Up until now, the focus has been on subject matter, but not on the people.”


Each video recorded interview lasts about three hours, and the subjects are asked about everything from their childhood to their mentors. The goal is to interview 180 ScienceMakers. Thirty have been interviewed, and through collaboration with the Carnegie Mellon University Informedia Project those interviews are now edited and about to be placed online.


Starting next month, another round of video interviews will take place. The public programs and outreach efforts will increase.


Dr. James H. Stith, a physicist and retired physics professor and vice president emeritus of the American Institute of Physics, conducted four interviews and was also the subject of an interview. Growing up, Stith says he did not know any African-American physicists. In college, he studied under Dr. John Hunter, but it wasn’t until later he learned that Hunter was only the third African-American to earn a Ph.D. in physics.


In his video interview, Stith said his greatest regret was that early in his career there was no one he could bounce ideas off before making big decisions.


“Rightly or wrongly, at that stage of my life you always felt you were on display,” he says. “When you had doubts about what you should do or trying to decide which trajectory to take, you felt you couldn’t talk about these choices with people from the majority group.


“What I do now is I spend a lot of time talking to folks about diversity,” he adds. “It is one of the most difficult conversations people can have, but it’s also the most needed conversation.”


As a member of the advisory board for ScienceMakers, Stith has helped identify some of the interview subjects. Many of the early interviews featured “mature” people who had achieved historic accomplishments, including physicist Dr. Julius Taylor, who was 96 when Stith interviewed him last year. As the interview process has progressed, Stith has tried to broaden the list to include younger people who are mid-career.


“As we go into school systems and start talking to young people, they want to see people a little closer to their age than I am,” Stith, 70, says.


Stith says when he speaks to young people with a passion for science and their parents, they often do not understand what a career in a STEM field would entail. Some may pursue careers in medicine by default because it is clearer what a doctor does. What he tries to enlighten people about is that a vast number of science career possibilities exist.


“We hope through ScienceMakers and through the Web we can put this information in front of a larger subset of people who are trying to make decisions,” Stith says.


In addition to the Web, Richardson and Stith say public events will provide inspiration and motivation to spread the word.


“The key thing is once we build it, we need to have collaborations to get the information out,” says Richardson.


Stith says ScienceMakers will show the human side behind scientists as well as inform young people and their families how interest in the sciences translates into careers.


“It is a great framework in which to think about emerging issues,” he says.
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The Crisis Digital Magazine Summer 2011


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TLT Group Session 1 Symposium 2011 You Are Not Alone!


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University Business July-August 2011 Digital Edition




New Articles

Models of Efficiency Summer 2011 Honorees
Preventing embezzelment schemes on campus
Funding lecture capture
What colleges can do to avoid identity theft and fraud




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Campus Technology Free Webcast: Lecture Capture Deployment Models: Comparing Total Costs of Ownership


http://event.on24.com/event/33/61/27/rt/1/documents/slidepdf/tegrity_802_lecture_capture_deployment_models_comparing_total_costs_of_ownership_final.pdf
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Campus Technology: Teaching with the Cloud



All educators today, but especially those in post-secondary roles, need to learn how to make the most of cloud-based resources in their teaching practices, according to education consultant John Kuglin.

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