Over the past year, a steady flow of institutions of higher education have withdrawn from U.S. News & World Report’s increasingly troubled college rankings. First, in November 2022, several prestigious law and medical schools departed, including Stanford, Yale, Penn, and Harvard. Then, this past winter and spring, four well-regarded colleges—Bard, Stillman, Colorado College, and Rhode Island School of Design—announced that they would no longer cooperate with the magazine’s rankings. And finally, in June, Columbia became the first top university to stop participating in the undergraduate rankings, expressing concern about their “outsize influence.” The latter wasn’t the brave stand that it might have seemed—Columbia had fallen 16 places in the prior year’s list after one of its professors revealed that administrators had been juking the stats—but no matter: After years of criticism over U.S. News’s unreliable, prestige-obsessed reign over American higher ed, an exodus has begun. 

What are these schools rebelling against? In their announcements, similar phrases pop up again and again: “outsize influence,” “the tyranny of rankings.” College administrators clearly resent the power that U.S. News has over how they run their institutions. But there was another current within the flood of “Dear John” letters, a sense that the rankings’ priorities are hindering, not helping, schools’ professed commitment to public service. Take Harvard, which objected that U.S. News’s methodology makes it harder to “enhance the socioeconomic diversity of our classes” and “allocate financial aid to students based on need.” Or take RISD, which complained that the metrics are “unambiguously biased in favor of wealth, privilege and opportunities that are inequitably distributed.” To be sure, Harvard and, to some degree, RISD also embrace policies that are “unambiguously biased” toward the rich and powerful. (Legacy admissions, anyone?) But their paeans to the cause of inclusion speak to a broader shift in public opinion, a disgust with the self-serving institutions of the elite that can no longer be ignored.

The clamor for these changes is so loud that even U.S. News is listening. In May, the publication announced that it would begin tracking colleges’ success in graduating students from diverse backgrounds and remove alumni donations and class sizes as factors in its rankings, among other measures. Small changes, but a recognition, at last, that something is fundamentally off.

Now more than ever, we need a better set of benchmarks for what “excellence” is in higher education, ones that measure what colleges do for their country, instead of for themselves. The Washington Monthly’s college rankings try to do just that, by rating institutions on their commitment to three goals: social mobility, public service, and research. Rather than laud the universities that mostly cater to the sons and daughters of the wealthy, we reward those that welcome students from everyday and low-income backgrounds and help them to graduate on time, with good jobs and low debt. Rather than rely on vague surveys of institutions’ “reputation” for academic prowess, we measure hard data on research spending, faculty awards, and rates of PhD attainment among graduates. And instead of boosting universities for how generous their alumni are in giving to their endowments, we rank the generosity of alumni toward their community: How many join the Peace Corps and the military, or pursue careers as social workers or teachers?

This year, the top performers in the Monthly’s rankings once again highlight this difference in priorities. Some traditionally prestigious names appear on our list of 442 national universities—at first place, followed by Stanford and MIT, is Harvard, with its exceptionally high graduation rate, its cheap net cost for students from middle-to-low-income families (fourth best in the nation, at an annual $1,758), its prize-laden faculty, and a comparatively high rate of graduates sent into AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, and ROTC programs. But we also recognize public universities that, without cracking that “elite” echelon, elevate students of humble backgrounds into community-minded graduates with strong economic prospects—like 19th-ranked Florida International University, a perennial leader in our list that goes underrecognized in the other one (where it was tied for 151st last year). FIU rose 13 places in our 2023 rankings, fueled by its continued commitment to enrolling Pell Grant students, shepherding them through at a low cost that’s comparable to what much richer universities can afford, and graduating them into jobs with respectable incomes. Another such school is California State University, Fresno, tied for 250th on the other list but ranked 26th on ours, ahead of Dartmouth and the University of Chicago. Located in the continental U.S.’s third-largest majority-Hispanic city (Miami, home of FIU, is fourth), Cal State Fresno costs about the same, net, as Princeton, which has $35.8 billion to splash on its undergraduates. At the same time, the NorCal state school graduates more Pell recipients than the New Jersey Ivy, both in absolute terms and compared to predicted numbers.

Brown University, as wealthy and selective as they come, rises only as far as number 43. Despite being fairly affordable for those who make it through its iconic wrought-iron gates, the Providence school makes very little effort to enroll students who actually need the help. Its graduates enter national and military service at abysmally low rates for an institution of its reputation (128th and 205th), and comparatively few pursue service-oriented majors. Meanwhile, Brown spends much less on research compared to its peers. 

Harvey Mudd tops our list of liberal arts schools this year, whereas under the prevailing orthodoxy it typically trails the leading pack. We rank the Claremont science and engineering college so highly because it leads in two key categories—the actual versus predicted earnings of its recent graduates, and the number who go on to earn PhDs. Right behind it is a perennial Monthly favorite, Berea College, which is the best in the nation at enrolling low-income students, and among the best at getting them to the podium on Commencement Day—at exceptionally low cost. Sought-after Carleton College ranks only 36th out of 199; it costs a pretty penny, is far worse at getting its students to complete their degrees than you might expect, and sends them on to surprisingly low-paying jobs in the decade after graduation. (Although they do pursue advanced degrees at a high rate, which could partially explain the lagging post-college income.)

Each year we rank roughly 850 bachelor’s and master’s institutions, as well. Many, like Elizabeth City State University, a historically Black college in North Carolina that ranks second among bachelor’s-granting schools, go unheralded by the prestige measurers even as they quietly graduate thousands of underprivileged students into well-paying jobs. Since 2021, ECSU has climbed 11 places thanks to its incredibly low cost to students and its efforts to enroll Pell recipients and keep them in school, which it does at a rate only 5 percent below the mean. SUNY Geneseo tops our master’s list, ahead of no fewer than seven Cal State campuses in the top 11. The Finger Lakes–area school excels in our research and service metrics, sending an extraordinary number of students on to doctoral degrees and the Peace Corps. Meanwhile, Cal State Northridge, the third-ranked master’s school, graduates more Pell recipients each year—3,779—than the entire Ivy League combined, and charges them about what Cornell and Dartmouth do, while splitting its $203.5 million endowment among 36,000 students and somehow also managing to rank eighth in research spending among its peers. Near the bottom is DeVry University in Ontario. This California campus of the for-profit chain charges an arm and a leg to low-income students—$28,207 a year—who go on to underperform their peers’ incomes by nearly 25 percent, a significant problem with all that tuition to pay off.

The other big news this year has been the growing conservative attack on higher education. Several GOP governors, most prominently Florida’s Ron DeSantis, have been cracking down on academic freedom in their state universities in the name of fighting “woke” values. Such tactics might bring short-term political gains, James Fallows argues in this issue, but are self-defeating in the long run (“What’s the Matter With Florida?”). They appeal to a shrinking number of noncollege-educated voters, while alienating a growing mass of voters with college degrees. They also sap the vitality of institutions that are major drivers of a state’s economic growth—Florida, for instance, is experiencing record-high numbers of faculty resignations and departures from its universities. DeSantis’s relentless campaign against higher education might well be weakening institutions like FIU that serve the working-class people he claims to champion.

Meanwhile, this summer, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority struck down affirmative action, leaving in place legacy admission for wealthy whites while reversing precedent that had allowed schools to prioritize spots for minorities. But as several writers note in this issue, the dream of diversity isn’t dead. As Monthly editor Will Norris reports, the military has long run preparatory schools that help underprepared minorities boost their academic scores so they can gain admission to elite officer training academies like West Point without lowering standards—a strategy selective civilian colleges and universities should adopt (“How the Military Can Save Affirmative Action”). Meanwhile, Jamaal Abdul-Alim tracks the growth of “direct admission” programs, which reduce barriers for low-income and first-generation students, many of them people of color, by encouraging colleges to proactively notify qualified candidates of their acceptance—before they’ve even applied (“When Colleges Apply to Students”). Anne Kim casts a jaundiced eye on certificate programs offered by tech giants like Google that allegedly can land high-paying jobs for workers without a full degree (“Google’s Participation Trophies”). And finally, Raquel Rall, Demetri Morgan, and Richard Chait pull back the curtain on university boards, which claim to care about the diversity of their students but keep their own diversity numbers secret—until now (“Does Your Board of Trustees Reflect Your Student Body?”). 

The day after the affirmative action decision, the Court also blocked President Joe Biden’s effort to forgive $430 billion in student loans. “The fight is not over,” Biden said that day. He has since launched another debt forgiveness measure under different legal authority and a new income-based repayment plan that would greatly lower monthly payments and eventually forgive some principal for lower- and middle-income borrowers. Both plans face likely court battles. As the historian Jonathan Zimmerman chronicles in “Higher Ed’s Founding Promise,” the struggle to enshrine college as an affordable public good is as old as the republic. Another president, George Washington, willed a portion of his estate to create a national university for the benefit of all (his wishes were thwarted by political chicanery), and later, Justin Morrill, the architect of the 19th-century land grant universities, desired that they should be “accessible to all, but especially the sons of toil.” 

Here at the Monthly, we’re proud to contribute to that struggle with our annual college guide, which aims to hold institutions—and the governments that fund them—to their promises of affordability and public service. Let’s say the exodus from U.S. News continues. What happens if, instead of competing to rise in its rankings, colleges vie to do well in ours? With the reader’s indulgence, we might imagine this utopia. Here, colleges strive to let in more low- and middle-income students, instead of courting the privileged offspring of wealthy donors. Administrators encourage their undergraduates to spend at least part of their careers serving others as teachers or soldiers, instead of plunging directly into investment banking and private equity. They fall over one another to fund research into climate solutions. They make it as easy as possible for their students to vote. They fight to reverse the reigning system of inequality, rather than perpetuate it through the relentless pursuit of wealth and prestige.

A pretty picture. For now, the sons and daughters of toil can only dream of it.

The post A Different Kind of College Ranking appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The Republican Party’s current campaign against higher education came more or less out of the blue. When Ron DeSantis ran for reelection as governor of Florida barely 10 months ago, his website listed “Education/Banning Critical Race Theory in Classrooms” as only number seven among his priorities, three places behind “Preserving Florida’s Environment.” 

DeSantis is now well known for legislative and administrative efforts to control the state’s educators—for instance, his push to ban AP courses in African American history, to prohibit state colleges from using public or even private funds on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs, to dismantle tenure protections, and to appoint a right-wing governing board for New College, a public liberal arts school. These and other measures built on DeSantis’s yearslong background of anti-“wokeness” but were officially kicked off only during 2023, as he launched his ill-starred presidential campaign.

Similar measures in other Republican-run states—North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Ohio, Iowa, and most of all Texas—have sprung up in just the past two years. All continue a long historic pattern of conservative political suspicion about “elite” or “liberal” institutions. But compared with other big themes in the modern GOP platform—tax cuts, redistricting and voting controls, court appointments, abortion—they are sudden new objects of attention, without decades’ worth of legislative or lobbying push behind them. Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society have been laying the groundwork for a politicized right-wing judiciary for decades. DeSantis et al. are just getting started.

A sign of how recent the switch has been: An authoritative New America survey called “Varying Degrees” found that only three years ago, in 2020, some 69 percent of Americans felt that colleges “have a positive effect on the way things are going in the country.” This included majorities from both political parties. Two years later, that overall-approval number had fallen to 55 percent, with almost all of the change coming from Republicans. According to New America, some 60 percent of Republicans now view colleges as actually damaging the country, rather than helping it. Among Democrats, more than 70 percent still view colleges as a net plus. 

“For many conservative lawmakers, higher education isn’t simply in the crosshairs,” Karin Fischer, of The Chronicle of Higher Education, writes in an extensive new report called College as a Public Good. “It’s Enemy No. 1 in a new culture war.” 

How did this happen? And what can colleges and their supporters, leaders, and constituencies do about it? Time is our enemy on many fronts. But in this case colleges should be heartened in the knowledge that time is on their side—if they use it correctly.

What is old: “The past is not even past.”

America’s achievements are always new; its tensions and tragedies are always old. Look at the headlines in 2023. With allowances for technology and demographic and legal change, you could be reading about 1923, or 1823. Racial inequity and strife. The right balance between the secular and the sacred, between the urban and the rural, between big cities and smaller towns. Between idealistic involvement in the world and self-protective isolation. Between … you get the idea.

One of those constant tensions is America’s view of advanced education. Choose nearly any decade in our national history, and you will find an instance of political action, rhetoric, or censure—almost always from conservatives—directed against what are seen as privileged, dissolute, and disloyal ivory-tower types. Nearly 60 years ago, Richard Hofstadter won the Pulitzer Prize for his book on the topic, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Watch the recent movie Oppenheimer and note the role that UC Berkeley played in national politics from the 1930s onward. In the 1950s, Dwight Eisenhower—who in addition to commanding Allied troops had served as president of Columbia University before becoming commander in chief—led the Republican Party against Adlai Stevenson and the “eggheads” he would bring into public life. And this was even after the vast democratization of higher education through the GI Bill. 

“While Eisenhower may not have been the first president to hold anti-intellectual sentiments, he demarcated a shift in the political rhetoric of America’s ideological right,” the scholars Edric Huang, Jenny Dorsey, Claire Mosteller, and Emily Chen wrote recently. “Anti-intellectualism became a common fixture in the subsequent campaigns of Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Trump to convey a stance of strong leadership and instinct not reliant on established experts while decision making.”

When I was a teenager in California, Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown hugely expanded the University of California system. Three entire campuses—UC San Diego, Irvine, and Santa Cruz—opened in just a five-year span, or as long as it might take to build one college dorm these days. Soon afterward Brown was turned out of office by Ronald Reagan, who criticized the pinkos and hippies who lazed and pot-smoked their way through those universities.

In the half century since then we’ve had crises over “political correctness” (yesterday’s “cancel culture”), the “Western canon,” Ebonics, and much more. We’ve worried about “safe spaces” and “snowflakes.” We’ve had scandals over for-pay college admission, and court battles over affirmative action. We’ve had more or less a continuation of the trench warfare over higher education that had prevailed for nearly a century but that ramped up with the sudden shift in GOP sentiment over these past two years.

What did change? It was not the cost of higher education, or calculations of its financial return. Those costs keep going up, but not significantly between 2020 and 2022. Nor was it the prevalence or absence of “progressive” courses or teachers. People involved in university life are to the left of public opinion in general—and always have been. (People more interested in money or even entrepreneurship have typically gone into other lines of work.) It’s inconceivable that either the professor corps or the student body could have changed so dramatically between 2020 and 2022 that Republican support for colleges would have a reason for the dramatic fall-off.

So what happened? 

Evidence suggests that this was another manufactured right-wing crisis, like the nonstop Fox and Newsmax stories about the menace of trans athletes in college sports. The NCAA reports that there are more than half a million “student athletes” at U.S. colleges. The current Fox and Newsmax roster of “unfair” trans competitors in swimming, track, basketball, rowing, amounts to a few dozen people, and this after the NCAA cleared the way for transgender competition back in 2010. Of such hyped “threats” a right-wing panic is born. The crisis is “real”—but it’s false, and will be overtaken by time. 

So too with the current right-wing “war” on higher ed. Higher ed will win. If it stays the course.

What is new: A base that is shrinking …

What does staying the course look like? It involves reckoning with two trends—both long term, but one more visible to the political world than the other.

The visible trend is the emergence of education as another of the great axes of political alignment. Race is of course a major divider; and gender; and age; and urban-versus-rural location. But education has joined that list. 

A half century ago, in the Republican era that stretched from Dwight Eisenhower and his vice president Richard Nixon, through Ronald Reagan and his vice president George H. W. Bush, the GOP base had a substantial “country club” component. Most of those GOP leaders were well educated, and not ashamed of it. Richard Nixon had gotten his law degree from Duke. His vice president Gerald Ford had been not only a star athlete at Michigan but also a graduate of Yale Law. Even Reagan, of Eureka College, surrounded himself with advisers from Princeton (James Baker, George Shultz), Yale (Ed Meese), Harvard (Caspar Weinberger), and other pedigreed venues. There was a brake on how pitchfork-like you could sound in blasting these places and their values. Meanwhile the Democratic Party, with many Ivy-educated leaders of its own from FDR onward, had its national electoral base among minority groups and working-class whites.

That balance had shifted by the time of the second President George Bush, who narrowly carried the votes of noncollege whites over Al Gore in 2000. From that point on, a small gap in political alignment has become a chasm. As Donald Trump was preparing to run for reelection, Gallup reported that “the 25-percentage-point edge in non-college whites’ preferences for the Republican Party (59%) over the Democratic Party (34%) thus far in 2019 is the largest in the past two decades, and is up from a 20-point gap in 2014.” 

At the same time, the college-educated vote was shifting in the opposite direction. As recently as 2016, the white college graduate vote was evenly split between Trump and Hillary Clinton. Four years later, white college graduates went for Joe Biden by more than a dozen points. 

It sounds too simple to put it this way, but the shift means that Republicans may see little political risk in attacking out-of-touch “woke” academics. Thus we have the spectacle of Ron DeSantis (Yale and Harvard Law) and senators like Josh Hawley (Stanford and Yale Law), J. D. Vance (Ohio State and Yale Law), and John Kennedy (Vanderbilt, University of Virginia Law, and the Magdalen College at Oxford) doing just that. Inflammatory GOP rhetoric may explain how a gradual, long-term shift in partisan attitudes toward higher education became the seismic disruption that New America found between 2020 and 2022, with a large majority of Republicans now seeing colleges as harmful to America. 

This polarization is obviously a problem for the country and its colleges at the moment. The longer-term problem for the Republican Party is that with each passing election, a larger and larger share of Americans have college degrees, and a smaller and smaller share do not.

… and one that is expanding: Colleges as the new economic drivers

The less discussed but equally important trend is the ever-growing importance of colleges and college towns as linchpins of economic opportunity and advancement. In her new report for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Karin Fischer assembles many academic studies and journalistic accounts documenting the central role of higher education institutions in community, regional, and statewide economic progress.

In times of economic turmoil, colleges are relatively stable anchor institutions. Factories come and go; most colleges stay put. As Fischer puts it, “Around every college campus, there is a network of businesses to meet its needs: to feed and entertain students, to house professors and care for their children, to make sure the internet works and the trash gets collected.”

Community colleges are an exception to the partisan divide over higher ed. According to the New America survey, some 85 percent of Americans, a majority in both parties, believe that community colleges are succeeding in their main role, which is to match people who need opportunities with the opportunities a continually changing economy can open up. As for research universities, their role in spinning off innovations and businesses has been evident from the time of the land grant universities onward. “Researchers estimate that for each new patent awarded to a college, 15 jobs are created in the local economy,” Fischer writes. If you want to boost your region’s economy, the best step would be to establish a research university there 100 years ago. The second-best step would be not to drive that university’s students and faculty away now. 

“What’s the matter with Florida?”

Why do these findings matter? Because they highlight the modern college version of what Thomas Frank called the What’s the Matter With Kansas? paradox. In his book with that title nearly 20 years ago, Frank examined why mainly lower-income white voters—Kansans, for his purposes—supported candidates and policies that “objectively” harmed their economic interests. Poorer rural people voted to cut taxes for the rich; families who depended on public education voted to cut funding for their schools.

If he were writing the book today, he might examine the aftermath of COVID-19. This summer researchers at Yale reported on evidence that the “excess death rate” during the pandemic had a strong partisan skew. Among registered Republicans—in Ohio and Florida, for the Yale study—the excess death rate was far higher than among registered Democrats.

Or Frank might write about the new Republican campaign against higher ed. It might not be killing their voters literally. But it is darkening their future prospects. In the biggest sense, colleges and universities are increasingly the key to community and regional success. But, as Charlie Mahtesian recently pointed out in Politico, they’re also an electoral threat to a Republican Party seen as anti-knowledge.

Again Florida is the test case and poster child. “DeSantis War On ‘Woke’ Leads to Faculty Brain Drain at Florida Public Universities” read a headline from the investigative site Florida Bulldog this spring. The Tampa Bay Times also used “brain drain” in a recent headline. The Times story cited record-high levels of faculty resignations and departures from Florida universities, and quoted a report from the American Association of University Professors saying that “some candidates were turning down Florida offers with nothing else lined up.” Similar accounts abound. Meanwhile DeSantis’s nemesis Gavin Newsom of California keeps directing resources and expanding access to the nation’s leading public university system, and California, for all its travails, keeps attracting students and professors, and leading innovations for the nation’s economy.

Great universities depend on their appeal to teachers—and students—from locations far beyond their home base. Here too a Know-Nothing Florida is paying the price. According to a recent study by Intelligent.com, one of eight Florida graduating high school students say they won’t consider college within the state because of DeSantis-era policies. Meanwhile the central problem of the University of California system is too many applicants from too many places around the world. Another Oppenheimer reference: Think of the constellation of talent gathered at Caltech and UC Berkeley as portrayed in the film. Imagine how hard it would be to assemble them—or their counterparts who were curing diseases, inventing microchips, founding new companies, exploring the universe—in a state whose motto is not “Eureka” but “Where woke goes to die.”

Be not afraid

What’s the matter with Florida at the moment might boil down to Ron DeSantis, and his crass willingness to sacrifice his state’s future to his own culture war campaign. What’s the matter with the GOP’s larger anti-education campaign is that it can do a lot of damage before it ultimately fails.

It will fail because it’s based on a losing bet—that a party can permanently ride the grievances of a shrinking minority—and because it’s at odds with the long-term sources of economic, cultural, and civic development. Someday historians will see the anti-college campaign as the death throes of a doomed movement, like the last stages of the Know-Nothing Party in the 1850s. 

But someday could take a long time. What can the college community—leaders, teachers, neighbors, students—do in the meanwhile? 

They can be confident and calm, knowing that they’re in a high-stakes tactical struggle but that the strategic prospects are bright. Time is indeed on their side. And they can remember three guiding principles for the many elements of their response. I mention them in summary and shorthand.

1. Disagreement is mainly theoretical. Progress is overwhelmingly practical. This pattern occurs everywhere, and is a centerpiece of modern resentment-based politics: Things “out there” are really terrible! Even though the things you see around you are mainly doing okay. This has been the dark guiding genius behind Fox News for decades. Rile people up about threats and mayhem somewhere, so they think the calm outside their doors is a fortunate anomaly. 

It applies to the economy, and to education. The extensive New America survey showed people feeling much better about the colleges they knew firsthand, from their own communities, than they did about the distant “woke” hellscapes they kept reading about. What does this mean for college leaders? It almost never pays off to tell people, “You’re wrong.” Instead it’s a matter of a new emphasis on the practical, the sane, the community-minded, the inclusive realities of the best modern colleges. 

2. Never pull up the ladders. Keep talking about a bigger tent. Yes, these are two different images, and clichés. But they embrace one crucial reality: Even people who “don’t like” colleges mostly dream that their children and grandchildren will go to one. I don’t have New America polling data to back this up. But I do have nearly a decade of traveling smaller-town America with my wife, Deb, talking mostly with people who themselves lacked college degrees. And this is the story the Monthly’s improved college rankings have told.

Ask people what they don’t like about the weirdos and lefties who now run colleges and they’ll tell you—as their grandparents might have complained about the weirdo hippies at Berkeley in the 1960s, and their grandparents might have grumbled about the privileged, prissy “college boys” in the era of Stover at Yale. But ask them what they hope for their own grandchildren, and the doors opened by higher education are almost always high on the list. 

Colleges need to present themselves as holding the doors open, expanding the tent, making sure the ladders are available to people who couldn’t reach them before. Making college sustainably affordable is obviously number one on this list. Number two is making people aware that 99 percent of American colleges are not Darwinian struggles-for-survival in the admissions process but in fact have room for nearly all. Colleges have often portrayed themselves as citadels, and with reason. For now they should emphasize their nearness and accessibility, not their distance from normal life.

3. Town and gown: We’re in this together, for the long run. The third imperative for the turbulent years ahead is to make sure that colleges emphasize their commitment to the surrounding community—and, more importantly, that they make that commitment real. In previous reports in this magazine—from Indiana, Pennsylvania, Maine—we’ve given examples of what this means. In her Chronicle report, Karin Fischer offers many more: for example, local purchase plans, which direct the vast purchasing power of colleges to aspiring business in their local areas. More and more college leaders are making this a trend.

The Republican war on colleges boils down to the idea that colleges are them—one more object of suspicion, resentment, riling-up, and punishment.

America’s higher ed establishment should show day by day why the colleges view America, and the larger public should view America’s colleges, as crucial parts of us.

The post “What’s the Matter With Florida?”  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

American colleges and universities care deeply—or at least claim to care—about the diversity of their student bodies. When the U.S. Supreme Court last fall agreed to hear cases on affirmative action at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, many higher education institutions and trade associations signed amicus briefs in support of race-conscious admissions policies, and then disagreed vigorously when the justices invalidated those practices in a 6–3 decision in June.

But does concern about diversity extend to the boards of trustees that govern colleges and universities? Do governing boards, whether for a single institution, multiple campuses, or an entire state system, practice what they preach? It’s an important question, because boards of trustees (sometimes called regents or visitors) appoint the school’s president and together with that leader shape institutional strategy, budgetary priorities, and organizational values. These decisions affect students on multiple fronts, from admissions policies to academic programs, tuition and fees, and campus climate.

It stands to reason that the more the demography of a board mirrors the demography of the student body, the more likely it is that the college will solicit and appreciate the perspectives of all its students and endeavor to create equitable opportunities and outcomes for them.

Surprisingly, however, data on the diversity of college boards of trustees is not publicly posted or otherwise readily available. As a first step to determine the race and gender of trustees, we examined the websites and public records of a representative sample of 100 institutions drawn from the top, middle, and bottom of the Washington Monthly’s 2022 college rankings. We then compared these numbers with the gender and racial composition of each school’s undergraduate student enrollment as collected annually by the U.S. Department of Education database and publicly available through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). As a final step, we ranked the schools based on the degree to which the demographics of the boards and the students were aligned.

To be considered well aligned (19 institutions), the match between the demographics of the board and the students had to be within 10 percent of one another on both gender and race; somewhat aligned boards (58 institutions) had a match between 50 and 90 percent; and poorly aligned boards (23 institutions) had a match of less than 50 percent.

(You can view the rankings at the bottom of this page or at this link.) 

Here’s what the numbers reveal:

Politics matters. Perhaps the most noteworthy, but predictable, finding is that colleges in reliably Democratic (blue) states have boards that are more demographically aligned with their student bodies than colleges in reliably Republican (red) states. Of the 19 well-aligned institutions, 14 are in blue states and five are in purple states—Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin, which fluctuate between Republican and Democratic electoral victories. By contrast, 12 of the 23 poorly aligned schools are in red states, four in purple states, and seven in blue states.

It is not hard to guess why this might be the case, at least for public institutions. At almost all public four-year colleges and universities, governors appoint the trustees. Unsurprisingly, governors tend to choose trustees who share their views and support their policies and priorities, which, in turn, represent the views of the voters who elected them. In general, Democrats have a more racially diverse, more liberal constituency, and, therefore, governors in blue states are more apt to appoint women and people of color to college and university boards. In contrast, Republicans depend heavily on conservative white voters, a political reality reflected in fewer diverse appointments. 

One might not expect to see such differences at private institutions, where electoral politics does not play a role in trustee selection. At most private colleges and universities, trustees are selected and approved by the incumbent board, with the rest elected or nominated by alumni or appointed by denominational authorities. Yet our data shows that there was not great variation in board alignment between private and public institutions. Nine private and 10 public institutions were well aligned; 19 public and 39 private schools were somewhat aligned; and 8 public and 15 private institutions were poorly aligned. The geographic pattern among public and private colleges was very similar: College and university boards in blue states are more aligned with their student bodies than boards in red states. The bottom line is that the degree of alignment at both public and private colleges generally reflects the state’s political leanings. As Tip O’Neill, former speaker of the house, famously observed, “All politics is local.”

Quality matters. Sixteen of the 19 well-aligned institutions have a six-year graduation rate above the national average of 62 percent. By comparison, nine of the 23 poorly aligned institutions have graduation rates below the national average. Moreover, of the 19 well-aligned schools, 17 are highly ranked (in the top 50) by the Washington Monthly. By contrast, none of the schools sampled from the Washington Monthly’s lowest ranks has a well-aligned board, although a few highly ranked institutions (e.g., Brigham Young University and the University of Florida) have poorly aligned boards.

Many factors influence quality, such as selectivity in admissions, available resources, and faculty competence. The role boards play cannot be easily untangled, but the overall patterns on these two indices of quality suggest, at the very least, that well-aligned boards, more often than poorly aligned boards, are associated with institutions that have favorable outcomes and ratings.

Gender, race, and power matter. Among the 100 sampled institutions, there is greater disparity on gender than race between board composition and undergraduate enrollment. Only 20 schools are well aligned on gender, versus 31 on race; 29 schools are poorly aligned on gender, versus 22 on race. 

That the gender diversity numbers are worse does not mean that the numbers on race are satisfactory. Still, it’s worth asking: Why are the gender numbers worse?

One possibility: In 2022, only 24 percent of U.S. governors were women and 33 percent of college presidents were women. These numbers mean that the appointing authority (the governor) at public institutions and an influential voice in trustee selection at private colleges (the president) are overwhelmingly male. 

A second potential explanation is that there is a lag between the increase in women going to college—their enrollment started outpacing men’s around 1980 and now stands at 57 percent—and their appointment to college boards. In 2020, women made up 37 percent of public college trustees, up from 29 percent in 2000, and 36 percent of private ones, up from 29 percent in 2000. The gap has closed, but nowhere near the point of representation equal to female enrollments. To compound the situation, about half of all public and one-quarter of all private colleges do not set a maximum number of years or terms a trustee may serve, which limits turnover and opportunities to diversify the board.

We have a hunch that there’s a third factor at work. If the proportion of women on boards equaled the percentage of enrolled women, female trustees would be in the majority. Currently, men on average make up about two-thirds of the members of both public and private boards. A majority-female board would produce a profound transfer of power and a notably different atmosphere in the boardroom. Most people do not voluntarily cede power or embrace change, so incumbent trustees may well seek, consciously or not, to perpetuate the status quo regarding the board’s demographic composition. 

Unlike the case with women, if the percentage of Black and Hispanic trustees were proportional to student enrollment, trustees of color would still constitute a comparatively small fraction of the board. There would be two African Americans, for instance, on an average-size public board of 12 members,  and  four Black members out of 28 on the average-size private board. To be blunt, these numbers will not materially alter the demography of the dominant players or the norms of the dominant culture, whereas a majority-female board would. This might further explain why the numbers on gender are worse than the numbers on race—the stakes are higher for the current power structure. 

Board diversity should not and probably cannot be mandated by law, especially in light of the Supreme Court’s recent decision on affirmative action. Rather, boards should diversify as a matter of institutional self-interest. Other kinds of boards are exploring what intentionally diversifying might look like. In the years ahead, women will remain a substantial majority, and students of color will make up a greater fraction of the “customer base.” Projections from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) indicate that between 2017 and 2028 there will be a 14 percent increase in Hispanic students, an 8 percent increase in Black students, and a 6 percent decrease in white students. As a result, trustees will need to be more attentive and responsive to the experiences and concerns of students of color. A board demographically similar to the student population will probably be more inclined and better positioned to do so. 

While mandates that college boards be more diverse are probably unlawful as well as unwise, the U.S. Department of Education, in the interest of greater transparency and accountability, should require that every college submit data on the demographic composition of their board and the degree of alignment with their undergraduate population as part of the annual, publicly accessible IPEDS survey. This requirement would be a minimal burden on colleges but would unveil important information about each school’s governing body. Ironically, demographic data on the boards of publicly traded companies is much more accessible. For example, Nasdaq now requires that listed companies disclose composite data on the gender, race, and LGBTQ status of the company’s board. Additionally, boards of Nasdaq-listed companies must, with certain exceptions, have at least two diverse board members or explain why that’s not the case. 

There are other benefits to disclosure of demographic data. First, the information would enable researchers to study the interplay between the composition of boards of trustees and the schools’ policies, priorities, practices, and outcomes. Second, the data would interest and benefit journalists and the media more generally. Publications like the Washington Monthly might even add board and student diversity alignment as a factor in calculating rankings. Third, the data could inform public debate and elections and, by extension, precipitate new criteria and procedures for trustee appointments to state colleges and universities. And, finally, published numbers would highlight leaders and laggards on alignment among all institutions and, just maybe, nudge (or shame) the laggards to become better aligned.

Boards that espouse the virtues of diversity should themselves exemplify diversity. Inescapably, the composition of a board of trustees signals the intensity of an institution’s commitment to diversity at the top of the organizational pyramid. Reality needs to match rhetoric for boards to have the credibility and moral authority to govern effectively. 

At this early stage of research on board diversity, we do not know exactly how or if a well-aligned board enhances the overall quality of an institution or the students’ education and experience. Additional research and time will be required to see whether—and, if so, how—board and student alignment impacts institutional performance and culture. But so far, the upside seems significant without any obvious downside.

Likewise, we do not yet know precisely and definitively how and why some boards are well aligned with student demographics while other boards are not. However, we do know that roughly one-fifth of the schools we examined have achieved that objective. So, we have proof of concept. The goal is attainable; excuses are suspect.

The post Does Your Board of Trustees Reflect Your Student Body? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Each fall, I teach a freshman history seminar called “Why College?” 

Fifteen new students crowd around a table on the first day, exuding a mix of excitement and caution. They are watching me—and, of course, each other—as we all wonder what lies ahead.

I begin the class by sharing the founding mottoes of several dozen American universities. What, I ask, do these phrases tell us about the institutions that proclaimed them?

Slowly, as the veils of shyness come off, a few answers emerge. Students point out that some well-known secular schools of today had religious roots: Consider Princeton (1746: “Under God’s power she flourishes”), Brown (1764: “In God we hope”), or Colgate (1819: “For God and for truth”). Most of all, though, the students are surprised by the mottoes’ explicit emphasis on personal qualities—especially virtue, morality, and character—in the service of others. Howard University (1867) declared allegiance to “Truth and service. Elizabethtown College (1899) said it would “Educate for service”; three years later, the University of Indianapolis opened its doors under the same motto. The students also notice that state universities emphasized their own duties to serve the citizenry. The University of Missouri (1839) proclaimed its commitment to “The welfare of the people”; North Dakota State University (1890) was founded “For the land and its people.”

That’s still the story we tell ourselves about American higher education: It serves all of us. Over the past two and half centuries, the United States has developed the most extensive and diverse system of college and universities in human history. The public goods generated by that system—technical innovation, social mobility, and informed citizenship—are beyond dispute. But we never agreed to pay for it as a public good. Its costs have been borne heavily—and unevenly—by private citizens. We praise it as the basis of shared national prosperity and progress, then we turn around and present students—and their families—with the bill.

To be sure, America has also developed elaborate forms of government assistance to help people attend college. Every state created public universities; most of these schools remained free (or close to it) into the 20th century, reflecting their charge to serve all their citizens. The University of Kentucky’s president declared that his school should be “accessible to the poor youth of the land”; in the 1880s, he invited state lawmakers to visit the campus and count the number of young men “with bronzed features and hard hands.” The federal government passed important measures extending higher education to workers and farmers (the Morrill Act of 1862), military veterans (the GI Bill, 1944), and middle-class borrowers (the Higher Education Act, 1965). The language of these laws spoke to the perpetual dream of American higher education: that we could create a system “accessible to all, but especially the sons of toil,” to quote the Morrill Act.

We never did. Federal and state intervention opened the college door to millions of Americans, but it failed to inscribe higher education as a truly public good—that is, something anyone can receive, regardless of circumstance or background, precisely because it benefits the nation as a whole. That doesn’t necessarily mean it should be free of cost to students; instead, it means the costs shouldn’t keep some people out and saddle untenable debt on others. The problem was far less urgent in earlier eras—when only a small fraction of mostly well-heeled white men went to college—than it is in our present moment, when almost all of us will need some kind of postsecondary education. But by examining how Americans debated college in the past, we can learn lessons that help us imagine a different future. College isn’t—or shouldn’t be—a consumer good, purchased by people who can afford it so they can improve their own opportunities. If it’s good for everyone, we need to make it accessible to everyone as well.

At the time of the American Revolution, the new nation had nine colleges. That number tripled over the next 30 years, and then tripled again in the three decades after that. The United States boasted 811 institutions of higher education by 1880, which dwarfed the rest of the world. The United Kingdom had 10 universities, up from six in 1800; during the same period, the number in France rose from 12 to 22. In all of Europe, there were just 160 places to receive a post-secondary degree. “Colleges rise like mushrooms in our luxuriant soil,” one American college president enthused in 1827.

Part of the reason, of course, was the widespread availability of that soil: As the United States moved westward, appropriating ever more territory, institutions could readily acquire cheap land on which to build. The other reason was the lack of a central regulatory authority, in religion or education. Any group of people could hang up a shingle and call themselves a church, or a college; sometimes they were one and the same. And just as churches tried to enlist the most souls, so did colleges compete for students. That created enormous opportunity as well as huge flux: Some schools thrived, while others fell by the wayside.

But it also meant that the public good—the high-minded civic purposes in college mottoes—often got buried in the hurly-burly quest for customers. That’s the main takeaway of the historian Adam Nelson’s new book, Exchange of Ideas, on the economics of higher education in early America. (Full disclosure: Nelson is a friend, and I supplied a blurb for his book.) Consider the University of Pennsylvania—where I teach—and Dickinson College, which were both started by national founding fathers named Benjamin (Franklin and Rush, respectively). Penn tried to block the creation of Dickinson, in nearby Carlisle, lest it lure young men who might otherwise head to Philadelphia. Once Dickinson was up and running, meanwhile, Rush worked to prevent the chartering of other new schools in Pennsylvania. Dickinson advertised itself as a “healthful” rural alternative to Penn, and Rush wanted to make sure it remained the only one.

There were two other ways to increase market share: cut prices or cut corners. The first one required new sources of income, to defray tuition costs. Penn and Princeton both sent emissaries to the West Indies to solicit donations from the owners of slave plantations; to a degree they have only begun to acknowledge, the early American colleges relied on profits as well as labor from slavery. (Princeton’s first nine presidents owned Black slaves, who helped build and maintain the campus.) The colleges also got periodic infusions of cash from their respective statehouses, reflecting the widespread belief that these institutions served the broader public. In its first 150 years, Harvard accepted more than 100 appropriations from Massachusetts’s colonial and state legislature; Williams and Bowdoin (the latter was located in Massachusetts until 1820, when Maine became its own state) dipped into the same till; and Penn received $287,000 from lawmakers in Harrisburg, about $8 million in today’s dollars. As Bowdoin’s first president declared, these colleges had been “founded and endowed for the common good, not for the private advantage of those who resort to them for education.”

Another tactic for besting the competition, paradoxically, was to lower your standards. The first president of Dickinson, whom Rush recruited from Edinburgh, complained that the school admitted every applicant and conferred a degree upon him regardless of academic performance; some people received bachelor’s degrees after just one year of study. Put simply, colleges sold credentials to anyone who could pay for them. Indeed, Princeton’s president glumly observed, credentials—and their imagined cash value—were the only thing that seemed to motivate the young men in his charge. Students “consider education as nothing more than a subordinate art to getting money, and they aim at no other scholarship than what will soonest put them in way of turning a penny,” Samuel Stanhope Smith complained. “Such are the reproaches of foreigners verified; that we are a nation of little-dealers, & shifty-sharpers, without any dignity, without taste, without a sense of national honor, & intent only on profit.” To shore up the country’s dubious reputation on the other side of the Atlantic—and to discourage young men from patronizing schools there—several eminent politicians proposed establishing a national university in America’s new capital; most remarkably, George Washington willed a portion of his estate to it. But that project likewise foundered on the shoals of institutional self-interest. The established colleges lobbied against the national university, fearing that they would lose students—and tuition dollars—to it.

They also worried that any new institution would be captured by whatever national party or faction held sway. Especially after the French Revolution, the Federalists—led by John Adams and Alexander Hamilton—warned that colleges and universities were being overcome with “seditious” ideas from the Continent; meanwhile, students who backed Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Republicans claimed that Federalist educators were imposing their own conservative dogmas. Ultimately, these dynamics made it next to impossible to persuade wary state legislators to provide consistent support for higher education. You can’t make a strong case for colleges as a public good if they seem to serve one segment of the public at the expense of the rest. So even as new states in the Midwest created universities, they struggled to generate public appropriations. A territorial governor appointed by Jefferson proposed a “University of Michigania” in 1805, but the Ann Arbor campus didn’t open until 1841. Indiana’s 1816 constitution called for a state university, “wherein tuition shall be gratis, and equally open to all,” but it took more than 30 years for the state legislature to start implementing that promise.

At the federal level, meanwhile, the Civil War unleashed the first large spigots of cash for American universities. Southern lawmakers had blocked assistance to higher education on states’ rights grounds; a Virginia senator called it an “unconstitutional robbing of the Treasury.” But secession cleared these dissenters from Congress, which distributed 17 million acres of land for states to sell or rent to “promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life,” as the 1862 measure sponsored by Vermont Representative (later U.S. Senator) Justin Morrill proclaimed. Some states decided to use their land grant money to support existing colleges, such as Rutgers and MIT; others created entirely new institutions like Michigan State and Oregon State, which entered into feisty competition with the already-established universities in Ann Arbor and Eugene. Long celebrated as a hallmark of democratic education, the Morrill Act has come under fire in recent years from scholars who note—accurately—that at least a quarter of the federal land grants sold to support universities were seized from Native peoples or appropriated via treaties that were never approved by the federal government. But even these critics often assume that a broad swath of white people benefited from the act, as its hopeful language (“accessible to … the sons of toil”) suggested. 

That turns out to be a myth. Only four states—Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and California—passed permanent property taxes to fund their universities in the 19th century. So land grant schools had to rely on tuition and fees for room and board, which priced out many Americans. Tuition in the mid-century was modest, ranging from $10 at the University of Wisconsin to $75 at Harvard; the big-ticket item was living expenses, which were often double or even triple the tuition charges. Nor were these fees enough to keep schools afloat. Some cash-poor land grant universities sold parts of their campuses or spent down their endowments; others tried to cut costs by requiring faculty and students to maintain and clean their buildings, while still others temporarily shut their doors. At a time when only a tiny fraction of Americans went to college, state lawmakers continued to regard it as something that advantaged select individuals. So they balked at appropriating tax dollars for the universities, which seemed to subsidize some people at the expense of others.

Meanwhile, supporters of the Morrill Act were divided about whether it would provide practical training for workers and farmers—as the act proclaimed—or catapult them into the burgeoning middle class of teachers, lawyers, and other white-collar professionals. Although he was the son of a blacksmith, Justin Morrill became a wealthy entrepreneur who invested in railroads and supported tariffs on foreign goods; his main goal was to prepare a new generation of engineers and managers who could advance American capitalism against its global competitors. Similarly, the head of Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School—Connecticut’s first land grant institution—insisted that it would fit graduates for industrial and scientific leadership rather than for “labor with the hoe or anvil.” These claims angered farming organizations like the Grange, which feared that the land grant schools would lure graduates away from the soil; they also complained about entrance exams, which required Latin and other academic subjects that rural boys rarely studied. In Connecticut, where a Sheffield professor scoffed that “Yale College does not propose to run a machine shop,” pressure from the Grange persuaded legislators to move the state’s land grant school from stuffy New Haven to a new “agricultural school” in Storrs. But the students who went there aspired to middle-class careers, just as Morrill wished. The school soon morphed from an open-admissions manual-training institution to a more selective state college centered on the liberal arts. Tuition rose in tandem with admission standards, dampening opportunities for poor and working-class candidates. 

Elsewhere, land grant universities hewed more closely to their founding mission. At North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts—which became North Carolina State University—the state’s burgeoning Populist movement skewered the land grant school for providing “theoretical, literary, and ultra-scientific education” instead of teaching more “practical” arts. The university squared the difference by mandating three hours of classroom recitation—the standard mode of academic instruction—and three hours of manual training; it also required all students to take agriculture, horticulture, shop work, and mechanical drawing. Most of all, Populists ensured that state universities remained either free or very close to it, so that—at least in theory—anyone could attend. “Fie upon the people’s higher schools, if they are to be but rich men’s schools!” thundered the president of Kansas State Agricultural College (later Kansas State); indeed, he added, “democracy should tolerate no tollgates on the educational highway.” In 1887, Arkansas barred its state university from charging tuition to students taking vocational courses. “The son of a rich man can go to Harvard, Yale, Columbia or Princeton, and pay the $150 or $200 per year demanded by these institutions for tuition,” the Nebraska Farmers’ Alliance declared in 1891, “but the boy from the poor man’s home cannot do this … The free state university is his only hope.”

Thanks to its Populist defenders, the University of Nebraska didn’t charge tuition during these years. But fees for room, board, and books could run as high as $175, which placed the school beyond the means of many poor and working-class families. And despite the proliferation of new colleges in the 19th century, a relatively small number of Americans patronized them. In 1880, only 26 of 811 higher education institutions had more than 200 students. Lacking the donors and endowments of the more established private colleges, state universities were especially slow to get off the ground. In the 1880s, the University of Wisconsin and Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia were smaller than Amherst; Indiana University had fewer students than Williams, and the University of Minnesota was about the same size as Bowdoin. Students came overwhelmingly from the upper classes or from the burgeoning new middle class of managers, lawyers, and other professions. And insofar as poorer students went to college, they too aimed to join the white-collar labor force. Despite Populist paeans to agriculture, a Colorado educator explained, country boys came to college to avoid a “slave life of labor”; indeed, a Tennessee Populist politician admitted, they were “sick and disgusted with farming.” They sought jobs in business and the professions, even though most of these positions did not yet require a bachelor’s degree for entry. A college credential might help pave the way for success, but it was hardly a prerequisite for it.

All of that would change over the next century, when postsecondary education became the sine qua non of security and sustainability. In 1900, only 2 percent of high school graduates in the United States went to college; in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, 66 percent did. An institution that formerly served just a sliver of white males now enlists a majority of Americans. And there are roughly 4,000 two- and four-year degree-granting institutions in the United States, including public, private nonprofit, and for-profit schools.

But even as we created an economy that required postsecondary education to get ahead—or even to get by—our polity made higher education a consumer good that only some citizens could reasonably afford. That’s the key theme of a bracing new book by the historian Elizabeth Tandy Shermer called, yes, Indentured Students. As Shermer acknowledges, government assistance has helped millions of Americans attend college. But postsecondary education remained beyond the reach of many other people, while still others have gone into crushing debt to obtain it. Colleges continue to attract as many customers as they can, just as they did during the early years of the republic. And the rest of us seek the best deal we can find, balancing the cost of a credential against its market value.

The first sharp rise in student attendance occurred in the boom years of the 1920s, when roughly one new college opened every 10 days. High schools multiplied as well, allowing the elite private schools and big state universities to raise their admission standards—and their tuition—without reducing enrollment. “The best brains in the state should have the best training available, but mediocre and stupid persons should be positively discouraged from entering college,” a UVA professor surmised, celebrating his school’s newfound selectivity. The University of Kansas hiked its fees by 25 percent in the 1920s; in Nebraska, legislators authorized the state university to charge students for the first time. In a 1927 address at Brown, John D. Rockefeller Jr. argued that the era’s famously rowdy students (think speakeasies and flappers) should party on their own dime. “Today … the majority of the students go to college for a good time, for social considerations or to fit themselves to earn money,” Rockefeller, son of the famous industrialist, argued. “The idea of service to the community is no longer the chief consideration. It would seem, therefore, that under these changed conditions the student might properly be expected to pay for the benefits he receives.” The private colleges, especially, jacked up prices to meet their skyrocketing expenses. Despite increased donations from philanthropists and alumni, student tuition covered 63 percent of Columbia’s operating costs; at MIT and Penn, it was close to 90 percent.

The Great Depression brought that system to a crash, generating the first forms of federal student aid. Between 1929 and 1934, New York University lost 10,000 of its 13,000 students in its engineering, commerce, and education programs. More than 10 percent of private colleges took IOUs in lieu of tuition; Carthage College in Wisconsin accepted coal as payment, while students at the University of North Dakota covered their fees with farm produce. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s answer to the problem was the National Youth Administration, which funneled federal money to colleges so they could give students part-time jobs. The NYA reflected FDR’s penchant for decentralized public-private solutions as well as his antipathy to “the dole”—that is, direct government payments to needy Americans. While it surely kept some students in college, the NYA also sparked yet another spike in tuition: Since students had more money in their pockets, schools could charge them more as well. The NYA also reflected the ubiquitous racism of its time. Funds were distributed via local authorities, who rarely assisted the small number of African Americans attending college. Nominally, the NYA prohibited racial discrimination. Especially in the Jim Crow South, however, white officials made sure that most work- study jobs went to whites, as well. 

A similar pattern marked the GI Bill of 1944, which is justly celebrated for opening the college door to millions of American military veterans. By 1947, veterans made up almost half of American students; a decade later, when the original GI Bill expired, more than 2 million of 14 million eligible veterans had received educational benefits under the measure. Given how much we venerate the GI Bill today, it’s easy to forget the skepticism that greeted it at its birth. University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins—himself a military veteran—warned that the bill would turn college campuses into “educational hobo jungles”; at Harvard, meanwhile, President James B. Conant feared that the GI Bill failed to distinguish between “those who can profit most from advanced education and those who cannot.” They shouldn’t have worried. Eschewing the rah-rah high jinks of campus life, veterans outpaced other students by every academic metric. “All they care about is their schoolwork,” one undergraduate complained. “They’re grinds, every one of them. It’s books, books all the time.” 

But GI benefits—like the New Deal ones—flowed almost entirely to white men. Just as African Americans were often blocked from receiving home mortgages under the GI Bill, so were they frequently barred from accessing higher education. Most Black people still lived in the South, where they were limited to the roughly 100 institutions that would accept them; and most of these schools were historically Black colleges and universities, which lacked the resources to accommodate a new influx of students. Meanwhile, racist officials in local Veterans Administration offices—which administered funds for the GI Bill—barred African Americans from attending universities in the North, which were facing huge challenges of their own. The tidal wave of veterans overwhelmed state universities, which built Quonset huts and other makeshift structures to house the new students and their growing families. (The GIs made lots of babies.) And the universities addressed the new challenges in the manner in which they always do: by raising tuition. That was the only way to meet the enormous new demands on them. 

The next great wave of higher education growth occurred in the 1960s and early 1970s, fueled in part by a new form of student aid: federally backed grants and loans. The GI Bill had provided educational opportunities to a specific category of students; the Higher Education Act of 1965 offered aid to everyone, prompting The New York Times to call it a “natural extension of the G.I. Bill.” Some members of Congress pressed for federal scholarships that would have made at least the first two years of college free for everyone. But a loan system sounded more “American,” insofar as it placed responsibility on individuals rather than on their government. Only 22 members of the House and three in the Senate voted against the HEA, which was hailed as a model of bipartisan consensus. It was signed into law by Lyndon Johnson, who had taken out loans to attend college during the Depression—when few Americans could afford it—and wanted others to enjoy the same opportunity. Meanwhile, states increased their subsidies to higher education as well. Bolstered by generous funding from Tallahassee, the University of Florida didn’t charge tuition until 1969. Most remarkably, California’s 1960 “Master Plan” guaranteed tuition-free admission to its University of California campuses (for students graduating in the top eighth of their high school classes) and to California State institutions (for those in the top third). Anyone with a high school degree could attend one of the state’s burgeoning community colleges, which likewise didn’t charge tuition.

We all know what happened after that. Since Congress had agreed to cover defaults on loans, banks handed them out like candy; it wasn’t until the Obama administration that the federal government cut out the middleman and became America’s student lender. And when state legislatures started slashing their higher education budgets in the 1980s, the colleges had little choice but to raise their fees yet again. Whereas prior tuition hikes had been relatively modest, the new increases were draconian. Between 1987 and 2010, the average per-student state appropriation at four-year public colleges declined 31 percent; during the same span, tuition costs doubled. Adjusted for inflation, state appropriations have picked up since then. But college costs keep soaring, vastly exceeding what many Americans can afford.

Now the bill has come due—to our students, of course. More than 60 percent of students have borrowed to make ends meet. The total student debt burden has topped $1.5 trillion, which is more than our collective debt on credit cards. And nearly a quarter of student borrowers are in default, which exceeds the rate among homeowners. College has become yet another consumer good, like a house or a car. But the consumers can’t afford it without taking on enormous debt, which will hound them for the rest of their lives. Even with President Joe Biden’s recently announced income-driven repayment program, which promises to reduce borrowers’ monthly payments by more than half, millions of Americans will struggle to free themselves from the indenture of student debt. The costs of that to the country—in rates of homeownership, entrepreneurship, childbearing, and much else—are incalculable.

Lyndon Johnson was right: Postsecondary education is a necessity for most people in the United States. In a 2014 Gallup poll, 96 percent of respondents agreed that “it is important to have a degree or credential beyond high school.” But 79 percent added that they did not think postsecondary education was affordable for everyone who needed it. College has become a practical imperative but not a true public good, which we agree to subsidize so that every American can take advantage of it. It certainly benefits the broad American polity: People with university and community college degrees are healthier, more civically active, and more likely to start businesses than people without them. But we haven’t framed a good enough argument for college to be funded as a public good instead of by the frazzled citizens who take out second mortgages, piece together multiple loans, and sometimes even forsake meals to pay for college. Prior to the pandemic, nearly a third of undergraduates reported that they had experienced food insecurity during their college careers. That is—or should be—unacceptable, in a nation that claims to value education as the key to personal and collective progress.

How could we make the case for college as something every American should be able to experience without placing their personal and fiscal health in peril? Somewhat paradoxically, it would start with a frank acknowledgment that not everyone will or should go to college. If people without post-secondary degrees sense that the rest of us are condescending to them, they won’t support any new form of government aid to higher education. Remember the liberal snickering when Donald Trump declared, “I love the poorly educated,” after polls in 2016 showed he won a huge fraction of voters who have a high school degree or less? The tsunami of mockery among Democrats made it even more likely that people without postsecondary degrees would cast ballots for Trump—and oppose public assistance to colleges and universities.

Second, if we want more public dollars, we need to show the public that we care about whether—and how much—our students learn. I’m looking at you, my fellow professors. We are incentivized to produce research, which wins promotions and salary increases; teaching doesn’t. At every level of higher education, from community colleges to elite private universities, the best predictor of a professor’s salary is the fraction of their time they devote to research; meanwhile, time spent teaching is inversely proportional to pay. Is it any wonder that so many students—and their parents—look at us as selfish pedants who are feathering our own nests? True, there is a budding “student success movement” of faculty members who are trying to improve undergraduate learning, especially among minority and first-generation students. But the very need for such a campaign demonstrates the lack of overall institutional commitment to it.

Third, we need to stop the arms race that inflates the cost of college—and inhibits public support for it—across the country. In the early years of the republic, schools battled for students by reducing tuition and amenities. Now they try to outpace each other in the opposite fashion, providing ever-nicer dorms and gyms that might catch the eye (and open the wallet) of young customers. They also vie for the most high-profile leaders, which has spawned yet another form of competitive excess. My own employer recently gave departing President Amy Gutmann a cool $23 million, $20 million of it in deferred compensation accrued during her 18 years at the helm. Like fancy facilities, extravagant salaries make it harder to imagine higher education as a public good that merits public support. They recall John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s comment in the 1920s: If all of this is just a playground, designed to make rich kids happy and college presidents rich, students should pick up the tab. You can’t make an argument for more taxpayer dollars when you’re squandering the ones you have now.

A century ago, Americans resolved to make public high schools free and open to all. Our goal should be to make college free, too, or at least accessible enough that nobody needs to go into penury to pay for it. But if Washington simply gave states enough money to allow their public colleges to charge no tuition, as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have urged, it would reward the states that starved their universities and penalize the ones that spent more to keep tuition low. A much better solution, as Kevin Carey has argued in these pages (“How to Save Higher Education, September/October 2020), would be for the federal government to pay a flat per-student subsidy to any college that agrees to reduce class sizes, enhance instruction, and take the other steps that help people succeed. Or, as Paul Glastris has proposed (“Free College if You Serve,” September/October 2021), we might allow students to defray tuition by performing national service. (And there’s a nice historical precedent for that, too: Back in the 1880s, students could attend William & Mary for free if they pledged to teach in Virginia public schools for two years after they graduated.) But no new large-scale measure to assist students will stand a chance unless we can persuade a wary public that colleges are a public good, not something that simply helps some people at the expense of others. And that begins with doing a better job with what we already have.

It also will require us to look back to moments when the nation expanded access to higher education. Speaking in 1850, two years after his institution’s founding, the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin spelled out his vision for it. “The American mind has grasped the idea and will not let it go, that the whole property of the state, is holden subject to the sacred trust of providing for the education of every child in the state,” he declared. “Without the adoption of this system, as the most potent compensation of the aristocratic tendencies of hereditary wealth, the boasted political equality of which we dream, is but a pleasing illusion. Knowledge is the great leveler. It is the true democracy.” That’s the dream that inspired the Morrill Act, the GI Bill, and the Higher Education Act. It’s what led agrarian radicals to demand tuition-free public colleges in the 1890s, and it’s what sparks the call for the same today. We shouldn’t romanticize the campaigns of the past, which so often fell short of their mark. Yet we also need to revive the spirit of those efforts, if we are to meet the even greater challenges that lie ahead.

At the end of every semester, I ask my students to name their favorite university motto. Last year the most popular ones came from Dickinson—“Freedom is made safe through character and learning”—and from Davidson—“Let learning be cherished where liberty has arisen.” Intuitively, the students understand that our democracy depends on an informed populace. For most of our history, primary and secondary schools shouldered the burden of preparing citizens; that’s why we funded these institutions from the public purse and required everyone to attend them. In recent years, postsecondary education has become a near-universal expectation for American citizens as well. The question is whether our democracy can generate the will to help all of them obtain it.

The post Higher Ed’s Founding Promise  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Earlier this year, I enrolled in a Google-sponsored online course to earn a “professional certificate” in data analytics. The course was one of a series of new, video-based classes that the company has suggested might someday replace traditional college. 

“College degrees are out of reach for many Americans, and you shouldn’t need a college diploma to have economic security,” wrote Google’s president of global affairs, Kent Walker, in a 2020 blog post announcing the new curriculum. Walker later added, on Twitter, that in its own hiring, Google “will now treat these new career certificates as the equivalent of a four-year degree for related roles.” 

Under the umbrella “Grow with Google,” the company offers three online professional certificate courses in project management and user experience (UX) design, as well as data analytics, IT, and other specialties. All are available through the online learning platform Coursera, and cost $39 or $49 a month. On its website for prospective students, Google describes its courses as an educational shortcut to a lucrative gig and lists the average median salaries that certificate earners might receive: entry-level data analytics jobs pay $92,000; entry-level project managers, $77,000.^. 

Unfortunately, my experience earning—and then attempting to peddle—a Google-sponsored certificate was less triumphant. My certificate took me just two and a half weeks to get, mainly because I learned to game the system. (I watched videos at double speed and passed quizzes by trial and error.) And when I presented my shiny new credential to prospective employers in the Washington, D.C., area and scoured job postings in Silicon Valley, my credential was less a foot in the door than a plaintive knock at firmly barred gates. Almost every “entry-level” data analytics job I found required either extensive experience or, alas, a supposedly outmoded college degree. The real lesson of my ersatz professional certificate was to illuminate the pitfalls of the burgeoning certificates industry—a rapidly expanding marketplace defined primarily by a lack of data, regulation, and oversight. 

That’s not to discredit the idea behind short-term credentials like certificates. In theory, they’re great. In our rapidly changing labor market, workers need fast and affordable options to acquire additional skills and retrain without going back to college. But in reality, too many of the short-term programs available today, Google’s included, might not meet that need—largely because neither students nor employers have any way of distinguishing credible programs from scammy dreck. The value of a certificate, even when backed by a behemoth like Google, remains iffy, if not downright suspect.

That lack of accountability is bad for everyone. It’s bad for companies in need of skilled workers, and it’s bad for students hoping to keep pace with technological advancements. If professional certificates are to become a meaningful currency in the educational marketplace and act as a pathway to economic security—which they should—there’s much more work to be done. 

Professional certificates have exploded in popularity in recent years. The nonprofit Credential Engine now counts at least 112,000 certificate programs nationwide, offered by trade schools, community colleges, four-year colleges and universities, and companies like Microsoft, IBM, Facebook parent Meta, and, of course, Google. Students hoping to switch careers or boost their earning potential have been driving the trend. Coursera, for instance, reported 8.3 million enrollees worldwide in 79 different professional certificate programs as of March—an increase of 157 percent over the past year. According to a 2023 survey by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation, roughly 40 percent of adults who are considering returning to school now say they would pursue a certificate, versus just 27 percent who’d go for a bachelor’s degree. 

Low-income and minority students, who are less likely to have access to traditional higher education, enroll in these programs at disproportionately high rates. Of the roughly 150,000 U.S.-based learners who’ve earned a Google professional certificate, for example, more than half identified as Asian, Black, or Latino, and 38 percent of those who reported earned less than $30,000 a year at the time of their enrollment, according to data provided by Coursera. 

When Google entered the online certification world a few years ago, headlines echoed the tech giant’s own puffed-up promises anticipating the demise of traditional higher education. “Google’s Plan to Disrupt the College Degree Is Absolute Genius,” gushed a headline in Inc. “Is This the End of College as We Know It?” asked The Wall Street Journal. It’s easy to see why. Compared to bachelor’s degrees, professional certificates and other short-term credentials are fast and cheap. Students can continue to work or care for their families, and they don’t have to take on loads of debt. Anyone with access to a computer can usually earn a certificate in a few months for a few hundred bucks. 

But is a certificate even worth it? The answer’s unsatisfying: We really don’t know. In most cases, no rules require Google, or any other company or institution, to disclose whether certificate earners subsequently succeed in the workforce, or whether they end up making more than they did prior to completing the course. “We know next to nothing about the composition of students who participate in these programs; the rates at which students complete programs and earn workforce-relevant credentials; and whether … program participation leads to subsequent education and training or improved workforce outcomes,” according to a Brookings Institution report published in May. 

The federal higher education database, the College Scorecard, only tracks courses that receive federal financial aid. For the most part, that’s limited to programs that provide 300 “clock hours” or more of instruction over at least 10 weeks (or 600 hours over 15 weeks, depending on the provider). Many certificate programs, including all of Google’s offerings, don’t meet that threshold. 

Of course, some certificates and short-term credentials do translate to lucrative jobs. In its analysis of the minority of programs for which Scorecard data is available, Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce finds that workers with professional certificates in engineering technologies, for example, can expect to earn a median of between $75,001 and $150,000, while certificate holders in occupations like manufacturing and construction can expect to earn between $40,001 and $50,000. (Like any educational certification, including traditional college degrees, students’ chosen field of study broadly dictates the scope of their earning power.) 

But Michael Itzkowitz, the founder and president of the HEA Group, a higher education consultancy, says the lack of good data on which programs produce real results—and which, crucially, do not—makes certificates the “riskiest” educational investment a learner can make. In May, the HEA Group published an analysis of the roughly 5,600 certificate programs for which College Scorecard data is available, and found that nearly half (46 percent) of graduates make less than $30,000 per year four years after earning their credential. “Certificates, when done well, can offer one of the fastest paths to economic mobility,” Itzkowitz says. “But they’re also disproportionately likely to lead to the majority of their students earning a very low salary after they complete.”

We should expect students who earn certificates in, say, cosmetology to earn relatively little—such is the market for hairdressers and manicurists. But the HEA Group’s analysis also found worrisome variation in salary outcomes even among students who earned certificates in nearly identical subject matter. Recipients of certificates in “computer/information technology administration and management” from the for-profit Asher College in Sacramento earned a median income of $49,525 four years later, the report found; those who earned certificates in “computer and information science” from the public South Texas College earned less than half that—a median of $18,250. 

Free market die-hards might argue that these disparities will self-correct as students flock to programs with the best reputations, leaving the poor performers to wither. But making those comparisons is tricky. Is the 10-week, full-time data analytics “boot camp” taught by Fullstack Academy through Virginia Tech for $13,495 markedly better than the nine-week online class on the same subject from Cornell University for $3,750? Is the online certificate course sponsored by IBM better than the one offered by Meta? It’s impossible to decide without knowing how graduates fare in the job market. 

I ended up choosing Google’s data analytics course in part because it was the most popular certificate program in 2022, according to Coursera. As of late July, more than 1.7 million students had enrolled. According to Bronagh Friel, the head of Grow with Google, 75 percent of the company’s certificate graduates “report a positive career impact, such as a new job, higher pay or a promotion, within six months of completion.” Those are great results, but they’re self-reported, and there’s no way to verify them. 

Public and private colleges and universities that confer four-year degrees in a variety of fields are not, of course, uniform in quality either. Graduates with diplomas in business management tend, on average, to have substantially higher salaries than graduates in fine arts. Graduates of Harvard make more money, on average, than graduates of the for-profit DeVry. But if the goal is to provide students with an educational path to a reliable salary, a bachelor’s degree—from anywhere, in any subject matter—remains the better bet. The HEA study found that 80 percent of bachelor’s graduates earn at least $40,000 per year four years after graduation (in contrast to the relatively poor performance of certificate holders noted above). In some STEM fields, like computer science, bachelor’s degree graduates earn a median of $104,799.

Part of the reason might be the substantive advantages conferred by a four-year educational experience, says Sean Gallagher, the founder and executive director of Northeastern University’s Center for the Future of Higher Education and Talent Strategy. An employer hiring a college graduate with a degree in computer science is relatively confident that the candidate can perform basic data analytics tasks. But what a company really values, Gallagher says, is that the candidate, by making it to graduation, is likely to have “the soft skills, the experiences, the perseverance, and the ability to attain a goal.” An asynchronous online course, or even a “very deep, well-designed, very expensive, few months’ training experience,” Gallagher adds, is far less likely to convey those types of skills.  

This preference for college degrees extends to the tech world, too, despite Silicon Valley’s love affair with college dropouts like Apple’s Steve Jobs and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and commitments from companies like IBM to dramatically reduce the job postings that require a four-year degree. A 2022 report from the labor market research firm Lightcast found that tech companies still disproportionately require college degrees. At Oracle, more than 90 percent of job postings required a four-year degree or above, according to Lightcast. At Apple, it was 72 percent. At Google, 77 percent. 

This trend certainly held true in my admittedly superficial job hunt this summer. Armed with my new Google professional certificate, I surveyed Indeed.com for entry-level data analyst jobs in both D.C. and Silicon Valley, and found that almost every job required either a four-year degree, significant prior experience, or a nuanced set of skills that would be impossible to obtain through short-term certification programs. A June posting for “Big Data Software Engineer” at IBM, for example, did not require a college degree, but it did ask that applicants have Top Secret security clearance; could demonstrate “hands-on experience configuring and operating container-based systems such as Kubernetes, Docker and/or OpenShift”; and be able to program in Python and Java. When I asked Victoria Suarez, the manager of talent strategy and operations at Alpha Omega Integration, an IT firm based in Vienna, Virginia, if she thought my Google certificate could get me in the door, she hesitated. “Oftentimes, you can just sit there, push play on the video, and get a certificate,” she said. “We all kind of know that too.”

At best, my certificate was a signal to potential employers of my interest in the field. “It could demonstrate to an employer that, hey, this person would be worth training because they’re already investing in themselves to take the certificate and to acquaint themselves with the field,” says Matt Deneroff, the D.C. branch director for the global professional placement firm Robert Half.

My job search at Google was perhaps the most deflating. Despite Google’s promise to treat its own career certificates as “equivalent of a four-year degree,” Google’s hiring platform, which allows applicants to sort job openings by the degree required, does not list “certificate” among the filter options. In a forthcoming book, the author and higher education expert Ben Wildavsky quotes a Google executive admitting that the company-sponsored certificates “aren’t intended to prepare people to work at Google itself.” Google employees, the executive explained, “need deeper learning abilities than short-term programs typically provide.” 

The idea, trumpeted by Google and echoed by overwrought pundits, that professional certificates ought to replace traditional degrees is maddening to many champions of professional certificates. Professional certificates and college degrees are not the same, and they’re not supposed to be the same—and that’s a good thing. Professional certificates are narrowly focused courses designed to teach students a specific set of measurable skills, like how to clean up data in an Excel worksheet. A four-year bachelor’s degree in, say, computer science, is designed to confer a much broader, historical, and even philosophical understanding of information technology, along with higher-order skills like problem-solving, analysis, critical thinking, and research. 

Claiming the equivalence of these credentials is misleading, and possibly even damaging. Low-income and minority students, for instance, might get “tracked” into lesser certificate programs in lieu of college, or they might themselves opt out of college under misguided beliefs about a certificate’s value compared to traditional degrees. The right way to think about degrees and credentials, experts like Wildavsky argue, is a “both/and” approach. “We should not think of [them] as completely disconnected separate pathways,” he says, but as complementary mechanisms for producing students with both a broad education and targeted skills.

Improving the certificate marketplace is a prerequisite step toward achieving that vision. First, Congress can help buttress credible certificate programs by allowing students to access Pell Grants to pay for them. In the Senate, Virginia Democrat Tim Kaine and Indiana Republican Mike Braun have cosponsored legislation to allow federal funding for “high quality” programs resulting in “industry-recognized” credentials; in the House, North Carolina Republican Virginia Foxx and Virginia Democrat Bobby Scott have introduced similar plans. Legislation that sets rigorous quality metrics for Pell eligibility and requires comprehensive data reporting could help raise the bar for providers, standardize offerings, and, importantly, provide students with outcomes data to inform their choices.

Second, states could do much more to steer students toward high-quality short-term training programs. Virginia’s “Fast Forward” initiative, for example, funds state-approved programs in high-demand fields, like IT or commercial trucking, where the state has identified worker shortages. Under a unique pay-for-success model, the commonwealth pays two-thirds of a student’s tuition only if they graduate and earn an industry-recognized credential within six months of program completion. According to the Brookings Institution, 95 percent of Fast Forward students complete their programs, and 70 percent earn an industry credential within six months.

Third, employers and providers can help legitimize professional certificates by building certification programs designed to educate students in specific, measurable skills that businesses want—and then ensuring that companies hire those graduates. They can also partner with traditional institutions of higher education to lend pedagogical heft to coursework and underscore a certificate holder’s credibility. 

To its credit, Google is working on both of these fronts. The company is currently building “partnerships” with hundreds of community colleges offering access to Google certificates, and late last year, it announced that it would fund up to 10,000 certificates for students of the University of Texas system, its largest collaboration to date. Google has also assembled a consortium of more than 150 employers, including heavyweights like American Express, Walmart, and T-Mobile, that “recognize the certificates in their hiring processes and are eager to hire talent in these fields,” according to Google’s Friel. (The company does not have data on the number of hires that occur through this consortium.) 

In a similar vein, the University of Virginia’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies now guarantees job interviews with a half-dozen employers to students pursuing certificates in fields that are in demand, including cloud computing, cybersecurity, IT, and project management.

Ross McPherson, a student who lives in Blacksburg, Virginia, enrolled in UVA’s certificate program in project management to switch careers after years of working first on commercial diesel engines and then in operations for US Foods. “I needed to have some kind of competitive advantage to be able [to make] a living with my brain instead of my hands,” he says. He had already earned a bachelor’s degree and an MBA from the University of Northwestern Ohio, but he credits the certificate program for giving him a boost. Thanks to UVA’s “guaranteed-interview program,” he got an interview with Definitive Logic, a UVA partner employer, in October and was offered a job in November. “It was probably the fastest process I’ve ever been a part of,” he says. 

McPherson is, by all counts, a certificate success story, but his trajectory was both less revolutionary than the one initially spun up by Google and more promising. If the rapidly growing professional certificate industry succeeds, it will not be because it disrupted traditional institutions of higher education, but because it worked with them to build the pathways students and businesses both need. 

The post Google’s Participation Trophies  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

After writing for years about the benefits of certificates and short-term credential programs, especially for working learners, I had begun to feel inauthentic, like a self-help guru who doesn’t take her own advice. So I finally enrolled in one this spring: Google’s “career certificate” program in data analytics, available online through Coursera for $39 a month. 

With more than 6.5 million learners enrolled worldwide, Google is one of Coursera’s “top instructors,” offering a multitude of certificates in a panoply of languages from Arabic to Spanish. I thought I was gunning for a certificate. What I actually got was a lesson in humility. 

Google’s data analytics program is its most popular offering. The program consists of eight separate courses with titles like “Prepare Data for Exploration” and “Process Data from Dirty to Clean.” Course materials consist of short videos, quizzes, readings, and optional practice activities. Students can also post on message boards to engage with other enrollees. 

Production values are slick, with soft lighting and catchy music, and the content is high quality—this is Google, after all. Modules are succinct and logical; the instructors, all of whom are Google employees, are lucid and charismatic. The course does an exceptionally strong job of explaining what data analysts do, with mini monologues by upbeat Google workers describing their backgrounds and jobs. Also laudable is the focus on soft skills, like collaboration and teamwork. One module, for example, talks about the importance of finding mentors and building networks, while another segment tackles how to handle conflicts with colleagues. Instructors are also refreshingly diverse. In an industry infamously dominated by white men, only one instructor appeared to meet that description.

But the program’s central conceit—to “equip participants with the essential skills they need to get a job” with no degree or prior experience required—is also its central weakness. Google’s aim to make the program accessible to all learners means the material is basic, and the pacing frustratingly slow. It’s not until the final module of Course 4, more than 100 hours into the program, according to the syllabus, that students begin to work with formulas for data analysis, like calculating averages. It’s not until the very end, Course 7, that students finally get to work with the programming language R, and even then, we were only introduced to a handful of commands. 

Though I started out diligently enough, watching every video, clicking every link, and trying to channel the enthusiasm of my Google teachers, the format quickly turned monotonous. What should have been a progression toward mastery became an exercise in sheer endurance—which is about when I started to cheat. 

I began watching videos at double speed, skipping optional exercises, skimming through readings, and passing quizzes through trial and error. You only need 80 percent to pass a quiz, and you can take them as many times as you’d like. I also discovered that the written responses required in some quizzes didn’t have to make much sense. I once typed in, “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs performing data analysis,” and earned 100 percent. 

According to the American Council on Education, which evaluates academic programs, my Google data analytics certificate program should have taken 175 hours and more than six months to complete. My shortcuts got me mine in about two and a half weeks. My certificate—a digital document that I can share with employers—declares my competence in “tools and platforms including spreadsheets, SQL, Tableau and R.” In truth, my knowledge of the programming languages SQL and R goes about as far as knowing they’re not just letters of the alphabet.

One thing I did learn is the difficulty of completing a self-directed program with static content. Humiliatingly, I learned that I personally lack the discipline and dedication to upskill myself. As I clicked through video after video, I could feel the press of chores and other assignments, while my aspirations for learning withered. My dog suddenly needed a walk; I remembered emails I had to return and errands I needed to run. 

I can only imagine how much more challenging this must be for students in different circumstances than my own—workers with physically demanding jobs, small children at home (my kids are big), or stark financial pressures, or those who are perhaps counting on this course as a gateway to a better life. Coursera and Google do not disclose completion rates, and there are many reasons students don’t finish, but I noticed that while Course 1 in my data analytics program listed 1.9 million enrollees in July, just 328,000 had enrolled in Course 8. That suggests an 83 percent attrition rate.

Policy makers and pundits often talk blithely about re-skilling and upskilling American workers, as if access to a training program is all it takes to transform 20th-century-trained workers into a 21st-century labor force. But my experience underscored that people also need a support network—access to other humans, who can provide mentorship, guidance, motivation, and community. Almost anybody, including those who have been out of school for a long time, is theoretically capable of learning a complex set of new skills. But they can’t be expected to do it on their own. 

A second lesson I learned is that there’s no free lunch when it comes to education and training. Data analyst jobs pay as much as they do because it’s impossible to learn everything you need from a single online course. Google acknowledges as much in the final modules of its program, where it encourages students to build a portfolio and provides extensive links to additional tutorials in coding, data visualization, and other skills. Providers need to make clear that a certificate is only the first step toward a career, not a substitute for the deep knowledge, professional networks, and work experience someone needs to truly succeed in a field. (See main article.) 

I still believe that quality certificate programs can help jump-start, restart, or advance careers. But they’re neither a stand-alone solution nor a silver bullet. My experience in the educational trenches provided another useful reminder: that the champions of policy prescriptions sometimes need to take their own medicine.

The post How I Earned (Hacked) a Google Career Certificate appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Growing up in a single-parent household in Rochester, New York, Olivia Galloway dreamed of being the first in her family to attend college. She worked hard at her high school, a charter school called Young Women’s College Prep, taking no fewer than seven AP classes. But her mother, a home health aide, didn’t have the resources to splash on expensive extracurricular college prep, nor the college experience to guide her daughter. Olivia had set her sights on a nearby college with a well-regarded nursing program—she hopes to become an obstetrics nurse—but, not knowing the process, she missed the deadline to apply.

This past fall, however, a college counselor at Olivia’s school introduced her and fellow seniors to a new program that reversed the admissions process, making it easier for underprivileged students like her. Instead of filling out piles of forms and sending them to each school, Olivia simply created a profile on an online platform, which colleges pay to access. She added information about her academics and her personal interests—she enjoys reading, writing, baking, and cooking—and then waited for the acceptance letters to start rolling in. Hardly 24 hours passed before she started hearing from schools. “It was so surprising and truly amazing to see all my options open overnight,” she told me this summer. “I was contacted by 12 different colleges and all of them gave me amazing scholarships.”

Olivia ultimately accepted an offer from Daemen University, the Buffalo-area school whose regular admissions deadline she had missed. Thanks to Daemen’s offer, Olivia says, she most likely won’t have to take out student loans. “My reaction to Daemen was excitement,” she told me. “I was grateful for all of the universities that reached out to me, but Daemen was like a breath of fresh air—it was close to home, had the program I wanted, and had a beautiful dreamy campus!”

Olivia’s experience illustrates an emerging national trend known as “direct admission”—a low-cost alternative that could revolutionize the way students of lesser means apply to college. Programs like the one Olivia used, which is called Greenlight Match, have expanded dramatically in recent years, growing from one program in Idaho in 2015 to multiple states and hundreds of colleges today. Some states, such as Idaho, Hawaii, Illinois, and Connecticut, are running or developing direct admission programs themselves, while other programs are operated by private companies.

For most high school students, applying to college is an anxiety-filled game of wait-and-see that starts after they send off applications and may well end in rejection. But it’s also a game of resources, one that rich, well-connected families are primed to win. Parents with lower incomes don’t have the means for SAT tutors, application coaches, and visits to multiple schools in far-flung states. If they didn’t go to college, they may not know how to pick “reach” and “safety” schools, or fill out a financial aid application. As a result, these parents and students may apply to too few schools, or maybe, out of discouragement, none at all. In other words, not only is the college application process stressful for all students, but it is also especially ill-suited to students from lower-income, less educated families—that is, to people like Olivia.

This new approach is already producing results for students, as well as filling critical needs for colleges and the workforce more broadly. Idaho, which in 2015 became the first state to adopt direct admission, saw an 11 percent boost in undergraduate enrollment over the next four years, according to a 2019 study. That’s welcome news for universities, which are fighting even harder to attract students now amid sagging enrollment numbers that haven’t recovered since the pandemic. Meanwhile, the national job market is producing far more roles for college graduates than it has workers with degrees to fill them (although the demand for college grads has cooled somewhat as people return to the workforce post-pandemic). And college-educated workers earn a median 84 percent more than those without a postsecondary degree. Ultimately, by getting more students into college—and especially ones from low-income backgrounds—direct admission promises to help grow the economy, fight inequality, and keep higher education afloat. 

In 2010, only 45 percent of Idaho’s high school seniors enrolled in an institution of higher education—the least in the country. The Potato State also boasted lower-than-average incomes and was having trouble keeping its young people from moving away. In response, the Idaho Board of Education set an ambitious goal: It would increase the state’s overall college completion rate among 25-to-34-year-olds, which was 34.7 percent that year, to 60 percent by 2020. In 2015, in support of that goal, legislators adopted a direct admission program that notified all graduating seniors who met a preset academic threshold that they were accepted to state universities. Two years into Idaho’s new program, 48 percent of the class of 2017 immediately enrolled in college after high school graduation.

Proactively letting students know where they’re admitted reduces friction compared to traditional admission, says Jennifer Delaney, an associate professor of education policy, organization, and leadership at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Delaney has coauthored a handful of studies that found, among other things, that direct admission “is a low-cost and effective mechanism to increase institutional and statewide enrollment in postsecondary education.” In addition to the 11 percent rise in college enrollment that Delaney reported between 2015 and 2019, she also credits the program with helping to reverse out-of-state migration. 

Within a few years, other states began catching on. In 2017, South Dakota launched its “Proactive Admissions” program, offering high school seniors with sufficient test scores admission to the state’s public universities and technical colleges. In 2019, the Illinois legislature authorized funding to develop a pilot program for the class of 2021. (The pilot was never launched, according to Delaney, and Illinois lawmakers are still debating a proposal to fund the program.) Hawaii and Minnesota have adopted similar programs, and Connecticut is designing its own system as well. This year, the University of Michigan–Flint announced a direct admission partnership with six nearby high schools, and the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay became the first in its state to embrace direct admission from area schools.

Meanwhile, for-profit companies like Concourse, which created Greenlight Match, have gotten into the game. The program that Olivia Galloway used is a little different from “direct” admission, where students are automatically admitted to certain institutions based on their GPA and other factors. Greenlight Match is an example of “reverse admission,” where students aren’t accepted by default but they still avoid the traditional process of sending out applications in favor of creating one universal profile that schools can peruse. Colleges contract with Concourse and pay a fee to access its admissions program, which on the other side coordinates with high schools and community organizations to reach the students those universities want.

Importantly, rejection letters are never part of the process. That prevents students from getting discouraged and keeps their eyes on their goal: a better education. Michael Dannenberg, a senior fellow at College Promise, a national nonprofit that advocates for higher education access, told me this was a “game changer” for first-generation and low-income students. By proactively sending out acceptance letters, these programs preempt the danger that students won’t apply to college because they think they’re going to get rejected. “It stops students from in effect saying to themselves, ‘I reject applying to you because I think you’re going to reject accepting me,’ ” Dannenberg says. “It cuts that phenomenon off at the pass.”

Concourse was founded in 2017 by Joe Morrison, a tech entrepreneur who had previously consulted for university marketing teams and built trading platforms for banks. His ambition, according to the company’s website, was to “provide students around the world with universal access to higher education.” In 2021, the company launched its first reverse admission platform, Global Match, which helped institutions enroll international students through a similar process where colleges “apply” to students. Forty-seven international students participated in the first Global Match pilot. “They received 180 admission offers within the first week, a tremendous start,” Morrison told me.

In fall 2021, Concourse joined with EAB, a company that specializes in education research, marketing, and enrollment, to launch Greenlight Match, which essentially applied the Global Match model domestically in the U.S. “The goal was to create more college access for first-generation, low-income, and other historically underserved U.S. students,” Morrison said. The first step in that process was the launch of a pilot program in the Chicago area in which 658 students participated. Concourse coordinated with community-based organizations to find students across nearly 50 high schools who fit the underserved demographic they wanted to reach: low-income families and first-generation college applicants (about half the pool, according to a survey of the participants). That test case generated nearly 2,000 admission offers and more than $135 million in scholarship and financial aid offers, Morrison said.

In the fall of 2022, Concourse became a subsidiary of EAB and expanded to several other U.S. regions, including Rochester, New York, where Olivia Galloway grew up. Now in its second year, Greenlight Match has grown fourfold to serve some 2,600 students and has secured more than 18,000 admission offers—or about seven per student—and a total of $1.1 billion in scholarship offers, according to Morrison. This fall, Concourse is planning a full national rollout of Greenlight Match.

Delaney, the direct admission researcher, told me programs like Greenlight Match are an improvement over traditional admissions in two ways. First, by pushing information to students instead of relying on students to search for colleges, she said, it “reduces the need for social and cultural capital to navigate the college search process and likely makes the process more equitable for students of different backgrounds within the Concourse system.”

Indeed, in researching this story, I found that students like the fact that through the system, colleges search for them instead of the other way around. One student told me she likes it more than the Common Application, which enables students to apply to multiple colleges at once. “In the Common App you apply for the colleges you want, you look for the college,” Lydia, an undocumented student and aspiring dental surgeon from Chicago who used Concourse to get into Knox College, where she got a $59,000 annual scholarship to cover the $63,000 annual tuition in 2022, told me. “And in Concourse the college looks for you.”

The other advantage of direct and reverse admission, Delaney says, is that the process offers a guarantee of acceptance, which takes away uncertainty and allows students to plan ahead. “Students no longer need to guess which institutions will admit them, but instead already know where they have been admitted,” Delaney told me. “There is also value in the guarantee since it gives students ‘a bird in the hand’ and a clearly defined pathway through which they can enter a postsecondary institution.”

For all those advantages, direct admission can’t replace every aspect of the traditional college search process. For one thing, Morrison noted, most direct admission programs generate acceptance letters automatically, based on minimum GPA thresholds. But the programs don’t necessarily give students personalized guidance on the colleges that have proactively accepted them, including what major to pursue or whether the campus culture is likely to be a good fit. After the acceptance letters arrive, some students must still submit a more traditional application in order to complete the enrollment process and, often, to learn what kinds of scholarships will be available to them. 

Because of those limitations, Morrison believes that the “student-first” reverse admission strategy pioneered by his company has some advantages. Students fill out simple profiles—the process usually takes about 30 minutes, he said—with their grades, academic interests, financial details, hobbies, and personal aspirations. This allows universities to personalize offers to students, letting them know which majors might best fit their interests and abilities, which scholarships they are guaranteed to receive, and when they can start school. After that, students complete a brief form for each offer they would like to pursue, receive official admission materials, and may then chat online with the institution’s representatives before making a final decision. 

“As the ‘demographic cliff’ approaches and higher education becomes increasingly competitive, it is widely agreed that higher education institutions need to innovate and find better ways to reach and attract students in order to build their incoming classes,” Morrison told me. “Direct admission is a step in the right direction, taking some of the guesswork out of the process for students. Reverse admission takes this concept much further, enabling universities to reach out to students proactively and make personalized, informative, compelling admission offers and provide a more student-centric, welcoming admission process.”

As direct admission has grown in popularity, other players have jumped into the market. In 2019, the nonprofit-run Common Application joined the bandwagon, allowing colleges to offer “non-binding guaranteed admission” to graduating students in their states who have filled out the Common App and who meet a minimum GPA set by those schools. Last year, Sage Scholars, a student financial aid company since 1995, signed up 23 private universities for a direct admission program, including Loyola University and Washington & Jefferson College. Also in 2022, Niche, another private admission platform, launched a direct admission partnership with 15 more universities.

Experts who study direct admission praise its potential to simplify the college application process and help students who traditionally have been at a disadvantage. “We know from decades of research that the current college search and application process is too complex,” Taylor Odle, an assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, told me, “and that this complexity disadvantages already underserved students, especially first-generation students, students of color, those from low-income families, and those in rural areas.”

In a post–affirmative action world—where colleges can no longer consider the race of applicants—direct or reverse admission platforms may offer an additional advantage. Concourse already kept the race of applicants hidden—as well as their names and surnames, which also could introduce bias. As long as the programs operate in communities that serve students from historically underrepresented groups, colleges will have another way to draw applicants from diverse backgrounds. This year, Augsburg University, in Minneapolis, experimented with admitting all students through direct admission, a rousing success in terms of both increasing enrollment and attracting underprivileged students. Inside Higher Ed reported that students of color made up 73 percent of this year’s accepted class at Augsburg, up from 62 percent the prior year, and Pell Grant recipients rose from 48 to 61 percent.

Still, Odle, Delaney, and others caution that direct admission programs, and especially reverse admission platforms like Concourse, are not a panacea and do have drawbacks. These new admission systems haven’t replaced the traditional process, so if a student also wants to apply to colleges that don’t use direct admission, that’s more work, not less. The same holds true for counselors and college advisers, who must learn to navigate Concourse and the other private systems that have entered the burgeoning market. Although Concourse is constantly streamlining its system to require less and less time and effort from applicants, the emergence of competitors means that this problem won’t be going away anytime soon.

Beyond that, Odle raised questions about which colleges are participating in programs like Concourse. Among other things, he wonders: Do they offer robust financial aid? Do they have strong graduation rates? Do they serve low-income, first-generation, and students of color well? Do they offer programs that are closely aligned with the local labor market? “Connecting students to any college is generally a positive outcome if that student’s alternative was no college,” Odle said. “But connecting students to colleges that may not be prepared to serve them well or provide them with upward economic mobility could be a worse-off outcome for students.” 

At least some of Greenlight Match’s partner colleges do a creditable job of serving low-income students. The graduation rate for Pell Grant recipients at Knox College, where Lydia enrolled in 2022, is 73 percent—just one percentage point below the school’s overall graduation rate of 74 percent, and well above the national median of 58 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard. Median earnings for Knox graduates are an annual $51,471, slightly above the national figure of $50,391. 

Finally, on reverse admission platforms like Concourse, what populates a student’s profile—and what assumptions will colleges make about what they see? Information that may look like an objective measure of a student’s abilities, like standardized test scores (optional on Concourse) and GPA (not optional), doesn’t include the context of a student’s background, and thus may end up reinforcing existing inequalities. “If the portfolios that colleges use to admit students mainly feature GPA and standardized test scores, we already know these pieces of information fall sharply along racial and socioeconomic lines and have led to much of the inequality we see today,” Odle said. So do extracurriculars; after all, only a certain kind of family can afford lessons in sailing or polo. 

Despite those potential snags, the school that accepted Olivia Galloway considers the experiment a success. Daemen University’s senior vice president for strategic initiatives, Greg Nayor, told me Daemen adopted direct admission in hopes of finding “high-achieving, underrepresented students.” The 2022–23 school year was Daemen’s first time using Greenlight Match, so it started off slow, only admitting and enrolling a handful of students through the program. But Nayor said Daemen officials were convinced that getting access to those students, who might not otherwise hear of the school, is well worth what they pay to participate in the program. After this test run, the university has entered a long-term partnership with Concourse. “We feel the investment in increasing college access for underrepresented students is worthwhile and part of our mission,” Nayor told me. “We are pleased with our return on our investment for this first trial year and think we will be even more pleased in years to come.”

Meanwhile, at Olivia’s high school, many other students have rave reviews for the program, as does LaQuanna Sparkman, the counselor who introduced Olivia to Greenlight Match. Sparkman told me that when her students got an offer overnight, often they would stake out a spot outside her office the next morning, eager to share the good news. “It has been a joyous experience,” she said. 

The post When Colleges Apply to Students  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In high school, Brieon Fonoti knew what attending a high-quality four-year college could mean for his life. “School was always the goal,” he says. But growing up in a poor neighborhood in Long Beach, California, where he attended “a lot of inner-city schools,” even the state’s well-funded public colleges felt unattainable. His mother, who raised him and his three siblings by herself, cycled between jobs—call centers, the post office—and struggled to make ends meet. Looking for a better life, Fonoti heard that the military often pays for higher education after a period of service. “I was trying to do something to make it easier on myself financially,” he told me. “And so, I joined the Army.”

After graduating from high school in 2017, Fonoti, whose mother is Black and father is Samoan, left Long Beach for a paralegal position with the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps, or JAG Corps, at Fort Riley in Kansas. “I was looking for a job that would transfer over to the civilian side,” he explained, and paralegal work held such promise. There, a senior officer recognized his talent. “You work hard,” he recalled the officer saying. “You’re really smart. Why don’t you go to school and become an officer?” The way to become an officer was through the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, so he applied.

Because of Fonoti’s middling high school grades, West Point didn’t accept him outright, but instead offered him a spot at the U.S. Military Academy Preparatory School (USMAPS), located at a nearby satellite campus. USMAPS allows promising applicants who need to catch up to their peers academically to spend a full school year taking small-group academic courses and preparing to reapply for West Point. The JAG Corps officer who recognized Fonoti’s talent had also gone through USMAPS, and encouraged him to accept the invitation. About 40 percent of the 240 or so would-be cadets who attend USMAPS every year are Black, and many, like Fonoti, come from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds.

Though he was at first hesitant to say yes because it meant investing a year of his time, once Fonoti started at USMAPS in the fall of 2020, he felt supported academically in a way he never had before. “I was touching subjects I had never taken in high school,” he said. “Like, I never took calculus, I never took physics.” He served as battalion commander, a leadership role similar to class president, for one semester, and finished 30th in his class out of more than 200. When he reapplied to West Point in the spring, he was accepted.

Fonoti completed his sophomore year at West Point this past spring. He’s majoring in law and is ranked about 800th out of 1,200 in his class—an impressive feat for a student of his background at West Point, a college that’s as selective as Georgetown. To have finally realized his dream can feel surreal, he told me. “Even now sometimes I’m walking around, like, damn, I kind of—kind of go here,” he said, incredulous, on a sunlit day this spring. We sat outside the campus’s formidable gray-brick dining hall, the Hudson River rushing below. A statue of Douglas MacArthur loomed nearby.

Fonoti’s remarkable story is far from unique at West Point: In recent decades, the school has used its long-running preparatory program, which about 42 percent of Black cadets go through, to build a more racially and economically diverse student body than most other selective schools. Black cadets make up about 15 percent of the West Point student body, double the percentage of most Ivy League colleges, and graduate at a similar rate as white cadets. Black West Point graduates also achieve the rank of major early in their career nearly as often as white graduates.

Like other race-conscious admissions programs, USMAPS is designed to help promising recruits who may be lagging academically because of their socioeconomic background. But it does so in a way that civilian colleges seldom do—by building up those students’ academic abilities to match those of their more privileged peers. In other words, students who excel at USMAPS prove through their performance that they are worthy of admission.

For colleges looking to find ways to achieve racial diversity after the Supreme Court’s June decision eliminating affirmative action in college admissions, USMAPS may provide an answer. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and a sister case involving the University of North Carolina, the Court ruled it illegal for colleges to give minority students an advantage based on their race. USMAPS shows that a rigorous preparatory education can help students reach the regular admissions threshold on grades, test scores, and other entry criteria, potentially making such an advantage unnecessary.

In the ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, noted that the decision “does not address” the use of race-conscious admissions policies by service academies like West Point. He justified the exemption by referencing “the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.” But the move was widely seen as a political expedient—a way to outlaw affirmative action in civilian settings without antagonizing the military, an institution voters revere. In an amicus brief to the Court last fall, 35 former leaders of the armed services warned that prohibiting the use of “modest, race-conscious admissions policies” would “impair the military’s ability to maintain diverse leadership, and thereby seriously undermine its institutional legitimacy and operational effectiveness.”

The service academy loophole also allowed Roberts to sidestep an inconvenient fact: USMAPS proves that it is possible to craft race-conscious college admissions policies with rigorous and fair standards. For the most committed opponents of affirmative action to acknowledge that would undermine their whole strategy.

But by the same reasoning, the success of USMAPS poses a challenge to liberal supporters of affirmative action as well. If military academies can use the preparatory school model to achieve diversity while upholding admissions standards, why can’t elite civilian colleges and universities do the same? In USMAPS, West Point is making the investment necessary to help highly capable but underprepared Black and Hispanic students succeed. Ivy League schools, by contrast, have taken the easier path. Rather than tap their immense endowments and powerful fund-raising capacities to train up large numbers of talented lower-income students of color, they hit their race targets by lowering the bar for admissions or enrolling better-prepared minority students from affluent families. Just 3 percent of all students at Harvard come from the bottom 20 percent by income, as Richard Kahlenberg noted in the Washington Monthly, and almost three-quarters of Black students are from the top socioeconomic fifth of the Black population.

The prep school model of race-based admissions is not the easy target for conservative activists that Harvard’s more conventional version proved to be. If affirmative action has a future after SFFA v. Harvard, introducing programs like USMAPS at civilian colleges could be what saves it.

The origins of military prep school can be traced to 1916, when an act of Congress authorized enlisted men to apply to West Point, spawning informal academic programs for soldiers stationed at home and abroad to prepare for the academy. USMAPS was born when West Point consolidated these programs into a formal preparatory school for enlisted soldiers in 1946.

After 1948, when President Harry Truman banned segregation in the military and integration began, Black service members received few opportunities for promotion to the officer corps. By the late 1960s, frustration over this pattern of discrimination, made worse by large numbers of Black draftees serving under white officers in the brutal combat of Vietnam, led to racial tension and violence. Recruiting more Black officers became imperative for maintaining order, and in the 1970s and ’80s, military leaders responded with aggressive affirmative action plans. That included establishing Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs at historically Black colleges and universities and requiring minority representation on officer promotion boards. The military also leaned heavily on USMAPS and similar prep schools in the Navy and Air Force to bring more Black candidates up to the academic level of the service academies. As a result, the Black student populations grew substantially. By the time of the 1991 Gulf War, a Black four-star general, Colin Powell, was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the military was widely lauded as the most successfully integrated institution in the country.

That success presented a major problem for conservatives in their long war to outlaw affirmative action. In 2003, the Supreme Court took up a case, Grutter v. Bollinger, involving the University of Michigan Law School, that most experts predicted would spell the end to race-conscious admissions policies. Instead, a group of retired senior military leaders delivered an amicus brief testifying to the vital role affirmative action had played in the rebuilding of the nation’s armed forces after Vietnam and warning of dire consequences to military readiness should those tools be taken away. Legal experts called the brief a “showstopper,” and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the majority, drew heavily from it in an opinion that would protect affirmative action for another two decades.

Meanwhile, in 2011, USMAPS relocated from Eatontown, New Jersey, to a single enormous glass building just a few miles up the road from the academy’s main campus on the Hudson River. There, promising West Point applicants whose grades and test scores fall short of the academy live and study for 10 months without distractions. “USMAPS is a very close facsimile of what they’ll experience at West Point,” Colonel Carl Wojtaszek, the chair of the West Point economics department and coauthor of a major recent study of USMAPS, told me. In addition to underrepresented racial groups, USMAPS serves prior-enlisted service members, who make up 20 to 30 percent of the USMAPS student body, and student athletes recruited to West Point, who make up about 40 percent. “Prepsters” are put through a gauntlet of military drills and physical training, but the school’s main emphasis is academics. The curriculum focuses on three core subjects—math, science, and English—and features a full-year study skills course that emphasizes time management and information literacy. “Learning how to just prioritize and time-manage—that was the biggest key at Prep that they would stress to us,” says Jemel Jones, who attended USMAPS in 2018 and graduated from West Point this spring after playing quarterback all four seasons at the academy. Jones says those study skills helped him keep pace with students who were admitted directly to West Point when he arrived at the academy.

Civilian colleges across the country have also long struggled with the fact that first-year students from disadvantaged backgrounds often lack the academic preparation they need to succeed. Their efforts to correct the problem, however, have been much less effective. Most colleges funnel underprepared new students into remedial education courses that rehash material the students failed to learn in high school. Students who are put in remedial classes at four-year colleges are often overburdened by the extra class time and schoolwork, and are more likely to drop out, according to the organization Education Reform Now. More than half of Black students at four-year colleges are in such programs.

Many colleges, including highly selective ones, have taken a more promising approach: placing incoming freshmen with lower grades and test scores in two- to six-week summer preparatory programs. The few studies of these programs’ effect on student attainment suggest that they are modestly more successful than regular remedial classes. For instance, a 2010 study of 2,222 incoming freshmen at a selective technical college found that students who attended the college’s summer bridge program were 3 percent more likely to graduate than a control group of students with similar high school GPAs and household income.

But for students who grew up in the most adverse circumstances and attended low-performing high schools, only so much can be accomplished in just a few weeks. No civilian colleges have expanded on the success of the summer school preparatory model and developed a full-year program like USMAPS.

That’s because ordinary colleges don’t have the same incentives as the military to invest in their students’ success. “A normal college, when they bring somebody in, they’re thinking at best it’s a graduate that leaves and they don’t have to worry about again, but we are obligated to have our graduates go into the Army and lead,” Wojtaszek said. “We can’t have failure on the human capital side, because that person is going into our ranks and will lead 39 sons and daughters. Just getting him across the stage isn’t enough.”

Another crucial difference is that, unlike summer school students at civilian colleges, USMAPS students haven’t already gotten into West Point. At the end of the year, they reapply for the academy. About 83 percent get in. This gives would-be cadets a clear goal: gaining entry. “This aligns the incentives,” Wojtaszek and his collaborators pointed out in their study, which was published this spring.

That incentive structure helped Marisa Reyes, a 2018 West Point graduate and former prepster, find motivation to succeed. Growing up in Brownsville, Texas, Reyes lacked a sense of purpose and struggled to keep up with her high-achieving sisters in high school. “There was an honors breakfast where both my sisters were getting recognized for being A-plus students,” she says. Her dad turned to her. “He asked me, ‘Don’t you want to be up there someday?’” After her older sister was accepted to the Naval Academy, Reyes applied to all three service academies and was rejected. But West Point offered her a spot in the preparatory program. There, for the first time, she found purpose: getting in. “The saying was, ‘Getting you ready to go down the hill,’” Reyes told me. “That was constantly referenced.” Now that she was surrounding herself “with people that were always motivated,” she said, she thrived.

It’s a winning formula. USMAPS students who are admitted to West Point increase their SAT scores, on average, from 1099 to 1164 over the course of the preparatory year. That figure is within the normal range for directly admitted West Point first-year students and only 122 points shy of the 1286 mean score for direct-admits. West Point assesses applicants with its College Entrance Examination Rank (CEER), an academic ability metric based on a student’s high school class rank (adjusted for school quality) and SAT scores. According to Wojtaszek’s study, Black prepsters who were accepted to West Point after completing USMAPS saw a 29-point gain on CEER’s 800-point scale, and Hispanic prepsters saw a 36-point gain. These improvements mean that Black and Hispanic prepsters accepted to West Point upon reapplying have academic credentials equivalent to those of lower-performing applicants who are admitted directly to the academy.

But academics are only one measure used at West Point. Admission is determined by the Whole Candidate Score (WCS), a comprehensive measure of abilities, 60 percent of which is based on CEER. A candidate’s leadership potential, which is calculated based on high school faculty recommendations and extracurricular achievements, is another 30 percent, and the final 10 percent is a physical fitness test. Over the course of USMAPS, Black prepsters who were accepted to West Point improved their leadership score by 24 points and physical score by 6 points on an 800-point scale.

Just as impressively, since 1951, USMAPS graduates have made up 11 percent of the student body, yet they have held a quarter of the student leadership positions at West Point. Since West Point’s goal is to prepare future leaders, not future academics, this figure is an especially encouraging indicator of USMAPS’s effectiveness and of the wisdom of allowing its graduates into West Point ahead of some other students with higher SAT scores.

USMAPS also helps students with the cultural acclimation necessary to succeed at a rigorous college. Reyes, the 2018 West Point graduate, described the proactive academic mind-set she learned at the prep school. “USMAPS did a good job of teaching you [to] always ask for help,” she said. That confidence and sense of belonging is critical at a prestigious college like West Point. Despite the academy’s strides on diversity, the school is still culturally dominated by white legacy students. “This place is way outside the norm of what I’m used to in California,” Fonoti told me this spring while we walked across the vast central quad, a group of mostly white cadets playing volleyball nearby. “There are a lot of kids here with, like, really oddly important parents,” he added. “They all went to private schools.” That’s not true for many former prepsters. As Fonoti put it, he can’t call his parents and say, “‘Super-important mom and dad, shit hit the fan. I need help.’ They’re the ones asking me!”

In civilian higher education, this cultural dislocation can be insurmountable. Often, low-income students of color struggle with the adjustment to their new surroundings, failing to find a support network and toiling at their schoolwork in isolation. They drop out at higher rates than their peers. It’s a different story at West Point. Former prepsters I spoke with described a culture of mutual support rooted in their prep year together. “We do have a really deep sense of camaraderie,” Fonoti said. “A lot of us are first-generation college students.” Jones, the quarterback who graduated this spring, said this affinity among former prepsters was a source of strength at West Point. “We take pride throwing up the ‘U’ for ‘USMAPS,’” he said, beaming, and made a “U” with his thumbs and index fingers. Jones, who will fulfill his five-year active-duty service as a tank platoon leader at Fort Bliss in Texas, said that as an upperclassman he made a habit of mentoring younger former prepsters.

Prepsters have a lower-than-average academic class rank at the academy, but 58 percent of students who entered USMAPS between 2005 and 2008, the last time the figure was made publicly available, eventually graduated from West Point. The rate was even slightly higher for Black students than white—60 percent compared to 58 percent—and is especially impressive considering that West Point is tougher to get through than most elite colleges. The overall West Point graduation rate is 84 percent; Harvard’s is 98 percent.

Almost 25 years ago, the journalist and Air Force veteran Debra Dickerson made the case in U.S. News & World Report that elite civilian colleges should follow the military’s example and create their own preparatory feeder schools. This spring, Wojtaszek came to the same conclusion. “Selective colleges and universities can potentially benefit from the experiences of West Point since they face similar challenges in attracting low-income and minority students who are often not sufficiently well prepared for the academic rigors of advanced undergraduate education,” he and his collaborators argued in their study of USMAPS.

One lesson elite institutions of higher education can take from the military’s experience is that viable prep schools can’t be run on the cheap. The Army doesn’t disclose the cost per student at USMAPS, which is free for attendees. But it is a fair bet that it’s close to the cost of West Point itself, which is about $62,500 per cadet per year. The government picks up 100 percent of that, too. Every Ivy League college has an endowment north of $6 billion; Harvard’s is $53 billion. Prestigious colleges and universities certainly can come up with the money to run high-quality preparatory academies. They haven’t because they haven’t needed to: Until now, they could meet their diversity goals simply by lowering admission standards and recruiting better-prepared minority students from affluent families.

That’s not going to be so easy in the wake of the Supreme Court’s June decision banning race-conscious admissions policies. Elite schools will still have some inexpensive workarounds, like making standardized tests optional, an already-spreading practice that has been shown to advantage Black and Hispanic students, and giving credit to students who write in their admissions essays about how race has affected their lives (another carve-out Roberts wrote into his opinion). Still, racial diversity on elite college campuses is expected to go down unless those colleges are willing to try new strategies.

USMAPS-style prep schools should be high on the list, especially because they have a strong chance of passing muster with the Court. Or, at least, they will for a while. In SFFA v. Harvard, Roberts, a patient longtime foe of affirmative action, left open the possibility that the Court might someday revisit the military academies exemption. Conservatives elsewhere are already gunning for it. In July, soon after the ruling, House Republicans added a provision in the annual defense authorization bill that would do away with all affirmative action programs in the military. That language is likely to be stripped out of the legislation during negotiations, with Democrats controlling the Senate and the White House. But that situation won’t last forever, either.

Even if the civilian prep school strategy might someday be vulnerable to challenge by politicians or the courts, liberals should still encourage elite colleges to pursue it. Not only would it benefit lower-income minority students, more of whom would be admitted into prestigious schools; it could also prove to be the innovation that saves the very concept of race-based admissions.

The hard truth is that traditional affirmative action has long been unpopular with most voters. But those voters might be more sympathetic to a prep school version if they came to understand that minority participants invest a year’s worth of sweat equity to earn their place by rising to the academic standards of elite colleges. And if the American public comes to support this model of affirmative action, conservatives will attack it at their peril.

The post How the Military Can Save Affirmative Action appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Higher education in America is facing its most severe challenges in decades. Enrollment is down, inflation is up,  and Americans are more skeptical than ever that a college degree is worth the time and money needed to earn it. And there are plenty of colleges that do little to counter this narrative, thanks to being bastions of elitism or producing lousy outcomes using hard-earned tuition and tax dollars.

The good news is that there are quite a few colleges that provide a quality education at an affordable price for students with modest economic means. We have been highlighting these colleges for more than a decade in our annual list of Best Bang for the Buck colleges, and we are pleased to share the 2023 version of the rankings. The rankings are broken down by region. (We used the same data and methodology to create the social mobility portion of the main rankings; the methodology is explained here.) 

The Best Bang for the Buck colleges across each of the five regions include a few incredibly wealthy and highly rejective colleges, but they are matched and surpassed by regionally focused public and private colleges that focus on providing value to their students. For example, Vanderbilt University—a national top performer in U.S. News & World Report’s exclusivity-focused college guide—ranked only 10th in the South for graduating and financially supporting the modest number of Pell Grant recipients that it admits. Vanderbilt trails institutions such as Texas A&M International University (57th in U.S. News’s ranking of universities in the West), Sam Houston State University (263rd among national universities in U.S. News), and Grambling State University (99th among U.S. News’s southern universities) that graduate far more Pell recipients and propel them into the middle class.

In the Northeast, the Massachusetts Maritime Academy edged out the University of Pennsylvania and MIT for first place. Two City University of New York campuses made the top 10, sandwiching super-wealthy Princeton. Wade College in Texas was tops in the South (but unranked by U.S. News), closely followed by the longtime Monthly favorite Berea College. In the Southeast, Florida International University topped Washington and Lee University in our rankings while producing nearly 100 times as many Pell graduates each year. (FIU is tied for 151st nationally in U.S. News,which ranks Washington and Lee highly by comparison.) Four public universities in Florida made the top 10, but that might change in the future as Governor Ron DeSantis’s battle against a top-notch higher education system plays out.

In the Midwest, Governors State University takes top honors for far outperforming expectations on graduation rates and earnings of former students. In the West, the list is dominated by California State University campuses yet again, with seven Cal State campuses outperforming ultra-rejective Stanford. 

We only display our top 50 colleges in print. Online, we list the full 200-plus colleges per region. The bottom of the rankings mainly consists of expensive private nonprofit and for-profit colleges with middling student outcomes. Tulane University has been on our shame list for years, and it checks in at last place in the South this year due to relatively poor graduation rates, low post-college earnings, and a high net price. Compare that to its position in U.S. News, which rewarded Tulane with the 44th national spot last year for its research power, low acceptance rate, and hefty endowment. Other low-ranked universities in the Monthly’s college guide with substantial financial resources include the University of Miami, High Point University, Creighton University, and the University of Tulsa.

The post America’s Best Bang for the Buck Colleges appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Anyone who is a fan of Tom Hanks—which is to say, pretty much everyone—can probably recall some of his most famous lines: “There’s no crying in baseball.” “My mama always said, ‘Life was like a box of chocolates.’ ” “Wilson!”

My new favorite is not from one of his movies. It’s from the opening of his commencement address at Harvard University earlier this year:

On behalf of all of us who studied for two years at Chabot Community College in Hayward, California, two semesters at California State University, Sacramento, and for 45 years at the School of Hard Knocks, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in one damn thing after another, thank you.

With that line, Hanks summed up something essential about America: Its true greatness is not defined by its elite. The newly minted Harvard graduates sitting in that audience, most of them from wealthy families, are destined for successful careers, some of them spectacular ones. Few, if any, are likely to achieve as much as the veteran actor with humble roots. 

One of four children of divorced, financially strapped parents—his father was an itinerant cook, his mother a hospital worker—Hanks learned enough from his modest post-secondary theater studies to earn parts in regional Shakespeare productions before moving on to television and then cinema—first as a comic actor, then in more serious roles. Over his career, his pictures have grossed nearly $10 billion—an astonishing feat for someone who has never played a superhero. Instead, in carefully chosen films like Saving Private Ryan, Sully, Captain Phillips, and Apollo 13, Hanks has portrayed a specific type of American hero: the quietly competent man next door who, under extreme pressure, acts with kindness, good humor, and professionalism. Those characteristics have also defined Hanks’s offscreen presence, helping to make him the most admired actor of his generation—on both sides of the political aisle.

American colleges and universities once enjoyed wide admiration, too. In recent years, however, public approval of colleges and universities has plummeted for two main reasons. First, tuition and fees have skyrocketed, and government has done too little to rein them in or help students cope. When Hanks went to college in the 1970s, the federal Pell Grant for low-to-moderate-income students covered 80 percent of the cost of a public four-year degree. Now it covers only 30 percent. 

Tuition increases have not been a problem for students from the most affluent families, nor for the elite private and public universities they disproportionately attend. Indeed, those prestigious schools are thriving financially precisely because of the burgeoning ranks of upper-middle-class and wealthy parents—encouraged by the helpful editors at U.S. News & World Report—who believe they must go to absurd lengths to get their kids into them. Meanwhile, the nonselective two- and four-year institutions that educate the other 90 percent of America struggle to get by on per-student funding levels that are half or a quarter of what the elite schools enjoy.

The second reason for declining public approval of college is politics. Over the past decade, college-educated Americans, who used to split their votes between the two major parties, have swung decisively toward the Democrats, while voters without college degrees have shifted dramatically in the other direction. This bifurcation of the electorate along educational lines has incentivized conservative politicians and media to attack colleges as bastions of dangerous leftism, as James Fallows reports in this issue (“What’s the Matter With Florida?”), and they have done so with abandon. Not surprisingly, confidence in higher education has dropped far more among Republican than Democratic voters. 

It is hard to exaggerate the threat that this brutal combination of partisan wrath and elite cluelessness poses to higher education. At the same time, we shouldn’t overstate the difficulty of turning things around. For all its faults, postsecondary education in the U.S. remains the envy of the world and retains a measure of domestic goodwill—few parents in America don’t want their children to go to college. The system can reverse its slide in public opinion by behaving in ways that better reflect the interests and values of the American majority. 

The Washington Monthly’s college rankings are our attempt to help show the way. Instead of rewarding schools for their prestige, wealth, and exclusivity, as U.S. News does, we give points to those that help non-wealthy students earn remunerative degrees, encourage students to vote and serve their country, and produce the scholars and scholarship that drive economic growth and human betterment. 

The good news is that plenty of colleges measure up. Some are elite, like Harvard. Most are ordinary institutions that serve everyday students and are largely unknown outside their communities—like California State University, Sacramento, the four-year school Hanks attended, which comes in fifth on our ranking of best master’s universities. To us, the most outstanding colleges are like the characters Tom Hanks plays: unassuming and quietly competent at a difficult, important job. 

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