FYI- two articles summarizing the NAICU meeting this week in
Washington. In short, expect more Federal Government intrusion, wanting to know
the return on investment for government support (for us that means Pell Grants,
Title IIIB), as well as how much graduates make once they finish. Incidentally,
I know of 2 studies that have tried to do this for HBCU grads, one saying they
perform worse than Black grads of PWIs (Frierson at Harvard), and one saying
HBCU grads outperform Black PWI grads (Price at Morehouse).
The earnings piece is a concern because it devalues liberal
arts (which is already happening with foundations pushing STEM- and I am a STEM
guy but value liberal arts). STEM folks make more money so having more of them
helps address that issue.
One more piece to consider. I am in conversation with the
Kresge Foundation about a grant to help us boost recruitment efforts. We are up
6.5% from spring 2012 to this spring (which again is good compared to most
schools), but we really need a couple of years with 10% growth to get to 1,600
and stabilize fully. I think they will help BUT they want us to talk about how
will we grow in a way that will be cheaper than what it cost for us to run a
school with 1,600 students in the late 1990s? So they want to know how will
we reinvent ourselves by decreasing our operating budget and increasing
enrollment? This can be a sub question for the next strategic plan under
resources- not just how do we acquire more but how do we maximize resources and
in fact use fewer resources.
Tough big picture questions I’ll be asking so start thinking
about them now.
College Administrators Discuss Dealing With Increased
Government Involvement
February 4, 2013
by Jamaal Abdul-Alim
Maureen Budetti, NAICU director of student aid policy, says
that schools are being asked to provide prospective students and their families
with information that might be overwhelming.
WASHINGTON — As the federal government seeks to expand its
reach within the realm of higher education, administrators should expect their
institutions to face more scrutiny, more accountability and more unfunded
reporting requirements.
That was a the advice delivered during a half-day “academy”
that kicked off the annual meeting of the National Association of Independent
Colleges and Universities, or NAICU, this week on Capitol Hill.
Some of the more spirited discussions concerned federal
efforts to require colleges and universities to collect and disseminate data on
how much their graduates earn upon graduation.
“If you want to look into the crystal ball to the new
regulations of higher education, you need to be prepared to collect more
systematically and report more information related to the employment of
graduates,” said Susan Hattan, NAICU senior consultant.
Hattan made her remarks during a session titled “Assessing
Institutional Quality through Graduates’ Earnings.”
Hattan said efforts to tie wage data for graduates back to
institutions and programs emanates from larger conversation about whether a
college degree is worth it in light of the nation’s ongoing employment woes,
the rising cost of tuition and growing amount of student debt. She noted how
two bills known as the “Student Right to Know Before You Go” act — one
sponsored by U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and another
one by U.S. Reps. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif. ) and Robert Andrews (D-N.J.) — would
have required the posting earnings data on graduates by institution, degree and
program. She also recalled the Obama Administration’s court-blocked bid to
require for-profit colleges to post “gainful employment” data on their
graduates.
“This is something that Congress very much wanted during the
last go-round,” Hattan said of tying earnings data for graduates to
institutions and programs. “This is something that the administration wants,
and all signs are this is something they will demand at a greater level of
detail than has been included … in the past.”
Tying wage data for graduates to institutions and programs
is already being done, said Mark Schneider, vice president of the American
Institutes for Research, who spoke of research he has done in half a dozen or
so states to link wage records to student transcripts in order to determine how
much graduates from a given program within a school earn upon graduation.
While the records enable him to determine short-term
earnings for graduates, he said the data does not enable him to figure out how
much they earn later in life.
The longer-term data is important because it will confirm or
refute the notion held by proponents of liberal arts education that liberal
arts degree holders may not earn much after graduation but fare much better in
the long run.
But in the short-term, Schneider’s research in Virginia has
found that graduates of occupational or technical associate degree programs
out-earned bachelor’s degree graduates by almost $2,500 statewide.
Graduates of not-for-profit colleges — where he said
graduates mostly earned liberal arts degrees — fared the worst in Virginia in
terms of earnings upon graduation, according to Schneider’s research.
“This is a serious issue in terms of measuring what students
earn,” Schneider said during a forum titled “The Changing Role of the Federal
Government in Higher Education.”
“We need you to say [to policymakers]: ‘One-year data is not
sufficient,’” Schneider said. “We have to know what happens to students 10 or
15 years out.”
Others noted that Schneider’s data on Virginia graduates
only captures students who continue to work in Virginia — about a third or so
of the graduates — whereas many graduates from Virginia colleges and
universities may go on to work for the federal government in D.C., on Wall
Street in New York or on the West Coast.
Schneider conceded that there is a need to capture data of
graduates nationally.
“This is a serious data issue that the nation has to
address,” Scheider said.
In a session titled “Shopping for College: What the Feds
Think Students Should Know,” Maureen Budetti, NAICU director of student aid
policy, said that colleges and universities are being asked to provide
prospective students and their families with information that may overwhelm or
confuse prospective students.
“We’re not against disclosures. We believe that [with]
consumer information, transparency is a good thing,” Budetti said. “The problem
we’re having is that it’s just too much information,” she said, raising
concerns that prospective students and their families may ignore the
information altogether if they don’t deem it useful.
She also said it was burdensome for institutions to produce
much of the data.
“It’s overwhelming, redundant, unclear, costly and of
questionable usefulness,” Budetti said. “Other than that, they’re pretty good.”
Among the things that Budetti took aim at was the new
Shopping Sheet created by the U.S. Department of Education.
Though no NAICU institutions were among the 500 colleges and
universities that have volunteered to use the shopping sheet, Budetti said it
“has a lot of problems in it.”
The problems, she said, included checkboxes that don’t work
well if an institution has graduate students, and other checkboxes that are
“confusing and inadequate.”
“We tried to tell [the Department of Education] you can’t
put everything on the first page or the way that you think is best,” Budetti
said. “We need to have some flexibility.”
Higher Education Leaders Wary of Increased Federal Oversight
February 5, 2013 |
by Jamaal Abdul-Alim
WASHINGTON — Despite the largeness of the audience they
addressed this week at the NAICU annual meeting, all of the fresh-faced
Congressional staffers and Obama Administration officials who spoke about
federal efforts to hold colleges accountable declared their remarks
“off-the-record.”
But to the extent that you can trust that a room full of
college presidents and other senior administrators were listening intently, you
can still get a good sense of where these young politicos were coming from — or
at least where their “bosses” were coming from — based on the responses from
the attendees, including some who indicated they were former Congressional
staffers themselves.
“As I listen to you and listen to your agenda, I’m beginning
to hear a centralizing, top down force out of the concern that we all share for
affordability, for student success, for graduation rates, for giving students
the ability to thrive in their lives after they arrive (on campus),” Marlboro
College President Ellen McCulloch-Lovell told the speakers during the Q-and-A
session of the panel talk, titled, “Holding Colleges Accountable: A View from
Key Capitol Hill and Administration Staff.”
McCulloch-Lovell said the Congressional staffers spoke as if
“we have to solve a problem” in higher education.
She was joined in her criticism by C. Todd Jones, president
of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Ohio, who noted
how most of the student loan defaults and lackluster completion rates the
staffers lamented were “primarily and disproportionately” concentrated among
for-profit colleges, not the private nonprofits that were represented at the
annual meeting of NAICU, an acronym for the National Association of Independent
Colleges and Universities.
Statistics support that view.
According to “The Condition of Education,” an online
resource maintained by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for
Education Statistics, the six-year graduation rate at private nonprofit
institutions was 65 percent, compared with 56 percent at public institutions
and 28 percent at private for-profit institutions.
As for default rates, for the fiscal year 2008 cohort, the
default rates were highest at private for-profit two-year institutions at 12
percent, and private for-profit four-year institutions at 11 percent, but
lowest at private not-for-profit and public four-year institutions, each with 4
percent.
McCulloch-Lovell and Jones addressed their comments
collectively to the panelists:
•Ajita Talwalker, special assistant to Under Secretary of Education
Martha Kanter;
•Libby Masiuk, education policy advisor for the majority
staff at the Senate HELP Committee, which is chaired by retiring U.S. Sen. Tom
Harkin (D-Iowa);
•Brian Melnyk, professional staff member for the majority at
the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which is chaired by U.S.
Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.); and
•Rich Williams, education policy advisor for U.S. Rep.
George Miller (D-Calif.), senior democratic leader for the House Committee on
Education and the Workforce.
McCulloch-Lovell prefaced her remarks by saying she
understands the position the young staffers are in because she once worked as
chief of staff for U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) from 1983 to 1994.
But that did not stop her from critiquing the staffers’
“bosses,” whom she suggested are “experiencing kind of a lag time.”
“I think we’ve got the message, and I think collectively, we
are doing everything we can to cut costs, be efficient, keep our quality high
and come up with the lowest possible increases in tuition and to increase
student aid,” McCulloch-Lovell said. “And I’m wondering if part of what needs
to go on with the administration and Congress is catching up on all of our
actions and our innovations, because I hear this federal government’s urge to
regulate more, and one of the reasons we’re having trouble with our costs is
regulations and the cost of regulation.”
Her comment about the cost of regulation drew a hearty
applause.
McCulloch-Lovell also took exception with the staffers’
repeated references to “return on investment” when they spoke of federal tax
dollars being used to support higher education.
“I’m also hearing a kind of consumerist ‘return on
investment’ kind of language that makes me a little afraid, because the return
on investment for higher education is not only jobs that help people advance
their lives and have families and become good participants in society,”
McCulloch-Lovell said. “It’s also the perspective and knowledge that helps us
reanimate our democracy.
“I want to know what you mean by ‘return on investment.’”
All of the speakers gave various answers, but — as per their
request — their comments were off the record.
In summary, however, the staffers collectively stated that
the issue of “return on investment” emanates from fact that as providers of
what they said was some $170 billion in federal aid to higher education,
federal policymakers bear special responsibility for ensuring quality in the
academic “enterprise.”
They also said that as students take on high-stakes risk
when they invest in a college education, that it’s a matter of concern when
students are unable to get jobs that justify the investment and enable them to
pay off their student loans.
The staffers also said they welcome input on how to reduce
the regulatory burden to colleges and universities.
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