If only for their sheer size, measured in numbers 13 digits long, the two massive spending bills now wending their way through Congress are likely, if passed in anything like their present form, to revamp whole areas of our national life. Not the least of these areas is higher education. 

The American Families Plan would invest hundreds of billions of dollars to make community college free, improve graduation rates, increase the size of Pell Grants, and create a new national service program focused on fighting climate change that includes college scholarships for those who complete a year of service. Democrats hope to pass that bill using budget reconciliation to avoid a GOP Senate filibuster. Meanwhile, a bipartisan infrastructure bill budgets tens of billions of new dollars for energy research, much of which will flow into U.S. research universities.

Politics being what it is, either or both bills could bite the dust or be radically scaled back. But if you want to know which specific colleges and universities are likely to benefit most from whatever largess emerges, you could do worse than scan the top rungs of the Washington Monthly’s college rankings.

As it has since 2005, the Monthly ranks colleges and universities on three broad criteria: the degree to which they recruit and graduate students of modest means (with Pell Grants as the main data point), produce the scholarship and scholars that drive economic growth and human flourishing (with federal research dollars a central measure), and encourage students to be active citizens (with national and community service participation a key variable). That these criteria line up almost precisely with the new funding priorities of Congress and the Biden administration has lent of late an air of triumphalism to Washington Monthly staff Zoom calls.

Our measures are quite different from those used by a certain other magazine that dominates the college rankings game. That other publication, which shall not be named (though in Spanish it’s Noticias de Estados Unidos e Informe Mundial), rewards colleges for their wealth, prestige, and exclusivity. In so doing, it both reflects and aggravates the higher education sector’s increasing tendency to shower resources on students from affluent backgrounds while sending a trickle to those from poor, working-class, and minority families. This exacerbates the racial and class inequality that, as Kevin Carey argues in this issue (“The College Class Crisis”), is tearing the country apart.

The Monthly’s rankings, by contrast, are crafted to push institutions of higher learning to be engines of upward mobility, scientific progress, and democratic participation. They are designed, in other words, to reflect what we think most Americans want from the hundreds of billions of tax dollars that flow annually into those schools.

The very different yardsticks of the two magazines lead to quite different results. For instance, 17 of the top 30 schools on our national universities list are public. In the other magazine’s, 25 of the top 30 national universities are elite private ones. The public universities on our list range from prestigious flagships like University of California, Berkeley, to schools that don’t even make the other publication’s top 50—such as University of Minnesota Twin Cities (20 on ours, 66 on theirs) and Iowa State University (27 on ours, 118 on theirs). 

You’ll find similar discrepancies in the liberal arts category. The College of Saint Benedict, a small women’s college outside Saint Cloud, Minnesota, is 18 on our liberal arts ranking and 96 on theirs. Beloit College in Wisconsin, number 27 on our list, is number 80 on theirs.

On the flip side, several brand-name schools that shine on the other rankings suck on ours. Tulane, Pepperdine, and Baylor, which come in at 41, 49, and 76 respectively on that other outlet’s list of national universities, plumb the depths of ours at 274, 290, and 314 respectively. 

A number of highly prestigious private institutions do make it to the top of our national universities list, due in part to the copious financial aid they provide to the low-income students they admit. That record deserves admiration, but also qualification. For one thing, these schools don’t let in very many low-income students. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, number eight on our list, admits more Pell students annually than do Stanford, MIT, Duke, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins combined. For another, these universities’ generosity is made possible by impossibly large endowments that few other schools can even dream of amassing. Harvard and Yale, which together enroll roughly .15 percent of all college freshmen, own more than 10 percent of all the university endowment assets in America. 

If Congress does increase the size of Pell Grants, it will bring welcome financial relief to some of America’s most important but least appreciated colleges, like California State University, Long Beach. Few national publications write about this public institution. It doesn’t have a big endowment, a prominent sports team, or flashy amenities. But it ranks second on our list of master’s universities, in part by enrolling 15 percent more Pell recipients than the student body’s standardized test scores and the state’s demographics would predict. Also, its Pell students last year graduated at a rate only 5 percent below its non-Pell students, a considerably smaller graduation gap than for Pell students nationwide. The federal government would, wisely, be giving more funds to an institution with a track record of helping move low-income students into the middle class.

The money would also help Elizabeth City State University, a historically Black institution in North Carolina that ranks 13 on our list of bachelor’s colleges. This public college enrolls 10 percent more Pell students than predicted, and they graduate at only a 3 percent lower rate than non-Pell students. Elizabeth City is exactly the kind of institution our rankings are designed to highlight, and we are thrilled that the American Families Plan would give it additional support.

Some better-known colleges, meanwhile, will miss out. Hofstra University, famous for hosting presidential debates and catering to the academically undistinguished children of affluent New Yorkers, enrolls 6 percent fewer Pell students than predicted, and graduates those students at an 11 percent lower rate than its non-Pell students. For students from families earning $75,000 a year or less, the school charges $30,000 in annual tuition, even though it has amassed an endowment of more than $600 million. Elizabeth City State, by contrast, charges $1,900 in tuition and has a $12.3 million endowment. Hofstra’s indifference to lower-income students helps place it at 373 on our list of national universities—18 from the bottom and 213 spots lower than it ranks on that other publication’s list. Hofstra will deserve the low share it gets of whatever extra Pell funding Washington appropriates. The same is true of the billions of dollars in new college scholarships that would come from an expansion of national service. Hofstra also ranks abysmally (328) on our overall service ranking. 

While the spending bills could do a tremendous amount of good, policy makers need to get the details right. Absent tough regulation, for instance, state governments will be tempted to cut their higher education budgets by the amount of extra aid Washington is sending, leaving the intended beneficiaries of that aid no better off and the federal government holding the bag. 

On the other hand, if the money comes with the wrong kind of strings, states and university systems won’t have the flexibility they need to experiment with new models. For instance, it might make sense for them to direct some college completion grants not to colleges but to high schools for programs like dual enrollment. As Anne Kim explains in this issue, dual enrollment has a better track record than AP courses of getting low-income and minority students into and through college (“Advanced Misplacement”).

Another concern is that funds for national service will get squeezed out as negotiations over the American Families Plan proceed. This would be a relief for higher education trade groups, which have never been enthusiastic about the idea. But it would be a betrayal of the mission most of the colleges they represent were founded on, of preparing students for both professional careers and democratic participation. College presidents these days don’t want to be held responsible for the latter mission (or even the former, truth be told). But especially at a moment when our democracy is in the red zone, they need to be. As the Gates Foundation’s Postsecondary Value Commission recently concluded (“What Is the Value of a College Degree?”), we should judge institutions of higher learning not just on their students’ economic outcomes but on their “ability to navigate and influence society to promote equity and justice.” 

Expanding national service is also key to making “free college” a reality. As I argue elsewhere in this issue (“Free College if You Serve”), the increased Pell Grants in the bill won’t be enough to allow low- and moderate-income students to earn a bachelor’s degree without taking on debt. Nor will it do much to boost their graduation rates. Add in service scholarships, however, and the full costs of a BA are covered. And research shows that young people who serve in AmeriCorps and then go to college graduate at higher rates than their peers who don’t serve. 

Congress should not just expand national service, but also improve it by removing the senseless federal tax imposed on AmeriCorps scholarships, a burden not placed on GI Bill benefits. It should also write rules that encourage more states to follow the lead of Nebraska, which, as Jamaal Abdul-Alim reports (“Cornhuskers Love AmeriCorps”), offers in-state tuition at its public colleges to any AmeriCorps veteran. 

Washington should consider not just what programs to support, but also what kinds of research to fund. As Elizabeth Austin details (“The Secret Lives of English Majors”), surprising recent data from the University of Texas system shows that Black and white humanities graduates earn roughly the same amount of money both right after graduating and 15 years out. Black and white students in fields like science, technology, engineering, and math, by contrast, have enormous earnings gaps. No one knows for sure why the humanities have relative racial equity. But if the federal government is interested in advancing the economic standing of minorities, it would be wise to invest some money to find out.

Rankings like ours, and those of our competitors, can have a real impact, for good or ill, on how colleges behave. But money from the government is ultimately a way bigger motivator. Here’s hoping that the new spending bills, should they pass, not only reward the colleges that do well on our current rankings, but also persuade the laggards to do better.

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

There was a room in my high school where they kept the chopped-up carcass of an old car. You could take the engine apart and put it back together, or slice pieces off the door with a saw that made orange sparks fly. It was a dirty, greasy place in a building where most of the kids wore tied-dyed Grateful Dead T-shirts or early J.Crew.

I rarely went there. Not because I didn’t like engines and sparks. I grew up watching my father, an electrical engineer by training, work with a soldering iron and a table saw in our garage. No, I stayed away—was, for all intents and purposes, kept away—because that wasn’t where people who were going to college were supposed to be. 

We lived in the prosperous suburbs of a decaying city in the postindustrial Northeast. The giant conglomerate my father worked for had stopped manufacturing things in town and built an R&D park nearby where they invented things that were manufactured somewhere else. The whole apparatus of local government, from municipal boundaries to tax rates to deployment of police, was built to funnel money into the suburban school system, where the children of the R&D park employees prepared to follow their parents into one of the good engineering schools or the Ivy League. Almost everyone was white. The room with the old car was for the few kids from the city who accidentally ended up on the wrong side of the school district line. 

In the decades that followed, America transformed itself into a continent-size version of my hometown. College graduates flourished while everyone else stagnated or fell behind. People were increasingly segregated by class, geography, and ideology. Higher education became a political fault line, particularly during the Trump years, when college-educated white suburbanites surged into the Democratic Party while white people without degrees ran toward the Republicans. 

This realignment, which is far from complete, leaves colleges and universities in a dangerous position. The strong bipartisan commitment to affordable public higher education is at risk if one party sees college as antithetical to its voters and beliefs. Democrats doing electoral math should be mindful that there are 60 million more voting-age white people without bachelor’s degrees than with them, and they are concentrated in states with disproportionate political power.

Most diagnoses of this shift are oddly indifferent to the structure of higher education itself. That’s a mistake. Many of the failures that led to our fractured political climate are rooted in biases set deep in the foundations of higher learning, which systematically discriminates against people who are most vulnerable to falling behind in the modern economy. We can build something better—but only if we’re honest about who benefits now, and what it will take to change. 

In the past five years, the political left has galvanized to make college free and forgive outstanding student loans. These are worthy goals. Twentieth-century middle-class prosperity was created, in part, with public colleges and universities that were once affordable but are no longer. It makes sense to restore that promise and help people who were financially injured by surging college prices. 

But free college and debt forgiveness by themselves leave much of the structural inequality of American higher education firmly intact. Take, for example, California’s widely emulated three-level higher education system. It gives $13,000 in state funding per undergraduate to students in the elite University of California system, which is disproportionately attended by children of the wealthy—kids who have been tracked since birth into prestigious programs. It gives out $8,000 to the less selective California State University campuses. It only gives $2,500 for undergrads at open-access community colleges, where most of the attendees are lower- and working-class students. Free college, then, could ultimately shell out far more money for rich kids than for the poor. (Many low-income community college students already pay no tuition at all.) It is like giving the people eating at Le Bernardin and Burger King the same voucher for a gratis meal. 

Private colleges don’t get direct state subsidies, so they make up for it with high prices. Sticker price tuition at the University of Southern California is more than $60,000. But that doesn’t mean no public money is involved. Endowment earnings are untaxed, and alumni get lucrative tax deductions for donations. Research universities often rake 60 percent or more off the top of federal grants for “overhead.” Add public funding and tuition together and you get a system that devotes vastly more resources to upper-class students pursuing bachelor’s and graduate degrees at selective four-year universities, public or private, than to students anywhere else. 

It’s not because elite four-year university courses inherently cost more. A technical film production course at Los Angeles City College requires expensive audio, video, and lighting equipment. A history class at UCLA requires a classroom and a historian. We give more money to privileged students because we think they deserve it more and the underprivileged deserve it less, and because the people who decide where the money goes are almost always themselves scions of the upper tier and want their children to be the same. We apply a veneer of so-called meritocracy to a system that is designed from the ground up to replicate power. 

Even within the elevated reaches of four-year colleges and universities, there are really two systems operating in parallel. One prepares people for jobs in fields like health care, teaching, accounting, engineering, and computer systems. While many of these students go on to master’s degrees and continue to learn on the job, they share the experience of having majored in subjects that match their careers. We’ll call these “Actual Job Majors.” 

Then there are the other people, the ones who take few if any courses that are designed to prepare them for a job, unless you define the job as “tenured professor in teaching this subject,” which, if you’ve been paying any attention to the state of the academic labor market, is pretty much the same as preparing for no job at all. We’ll call these “Not a Job Majors.” 

There are many examples, but the big four categories of Not a Job Majors are psychology, business, social science, and communications, which collectively grant more than 700,000 bachelor’s degrees per year. The math is pretty straightforward—there are more than three million people in the workforce with BAs in psychology, and only 192,000 psychologists. This category also includes the kinds of esoteric majors that politicians like to claim are wasting taxpayer dollars. But to a first order of approximation, these students don’t exist. They are hallucinations of anti-intellectual resentment. In 2019, more people graduated with a BA in business administration from Cal State Fullerton alone than got a BA in women’s studies, French literature, or linguistics from every college and university in America combined.

While we’re all familiar with the guy carrying $120,000 in loans for a liberal arts degree from NYU who struggles to make rent while freelancing in a Brooklyn co-op—mostly because he tweets a lot—the Not a Job Majors are, on average, doing fine. Often, more than fine! They’re the heart of the suburban upper-middle-class to lower-upper-class workforce, the car-buying single-family homeowners with 401(k)s, the people who rode out the pandemic from their converted home office. 

At American University, a wealthy private institution in Washington, D.C., more than 65 percent of undergraduates enroll in one of the big four Not a Job Majors. Many borrow significant sums to do so. They and their mostly well-off parents aren’t being irrational or self-destructive. They understand that American isn’t a job training place. Rather, it’s a means of class replication, a way station on the path to a certain kind of stability and prosperity. American degrees signify that bearers have been pre-sorted and selected, that they come from certain backgrounds and have been acculturated in certain ways. 

What jobs do they eventually get? The most common occupation of people with degrees in psychology, social science, communications, and business isn’t counselor, economist, writer, or entrepreneur. It is, in each case, “manager.” Part of a cadre of bosses 10 million strong. 

So let’s think about how all this looks to the very large number of people who did not fly on high-speed rails from the enclaves of college-educated wealth to a thriving post-collegiate career. 

Over the past several decades, these Americans have been caught in a deeply unenviable position. First, whole sections of the economy and labor market were hollowed out by a combination of neglect and deliberate policy choices. Private-sector unions disintegrated, wages stagnated, and stable jobs eroded, all in exchange for lower prices on consumer goods they still can’t afford. 

Then the vocational courses at the local high school started to disappear. Sometimes this was done with good intentions, to correct the notorious practice of keeping students of color off the college track and to open the path to higher education for all. But it had an effect: Federal funding for vocational education shrank along with the number of job-focused credits high schoolers took. There are now fewer clear pathways to fewer good jobs. 

They’re told: It’s okay! There’s a solution! I mean, probably not for you, to be honest, you’re just going to have to get by on $12.50 an hour until Social Security kicks in. But definitely for your kids. Just send them to college!

Except the elite colleges only accept one student a year from where you live (the valedictorian), so they can congratulate themselves on “regional diversity.” Even if you manage to be that student, you and your parents both have to borrow a mind-boggling sum of money to pay tuition. And ultimately succeeding in college means taking classes that your local high school doesn’t offer, because K–12 education in this country is chopped up into 13,500 districts that are mostly funded by a combination of state revenue and local property taxes, both of which are in short supply in places that don’t have many of the good white-collar jobs. 

If you can’t get in, you instead enroll in a college that, unlike the underfunded local community college, has a bunch of warm, friendly people on staff who quickly return your texts and phone calls and help you fill out all of the complicated federal financial aid forms. There are no waiting lists for enrollment and nobody hassles you about a missing high school transcript or not-so-great scores on the SAT. The program is starting up in just a few weeks, takes way less than four years to finish, and leads to a good job in a fast-paced, growing field. 

Except it doesn’t, because the “college” is a private equity–backed for-profit corporation that was engineered to harvest billions of federal financial aid dollars by defrauding students while easily evading a set of essentially nonexistent consumer protection regulations. Republican lawmakers don’t want to go after these schools because of generous campaign contributions, and Democrats can’t because new Department of Education rules get tied up in endless litigation. 

And even if you manage to stumble through the for-profit minefield unscathed and get all the way through to a real degree, which likely means navigating the Kafkaesque process of transferring credits from a community college to a four-year university, and enroll in an income-based loan repayment program that keeps debt payments affordable, and you’re lucky to not graduate into the teeth of recession caused by government mismanagement of Wall Street derivatives and/or infectious disease, and you emerge with an honest-to-goodness 40-hour-a-week gig with health benefits and vacation and a 401(k)—who’s really in charge? Where do most of the fruits of your labor go? Who’s your manager? Some guy with a Not a Job Major degree who was essentially promised the job at birth. 

You know what that sounds like? A racket. A cheap, knock-off version of opportunity. No one should be surprised that voters aren’t running into the arms of people who have nothing better to offer.

Here’s what they should offer instead. 

Education and training are a crucial part of most people’s path to stability and prosperity. The American economy needs many highly skilled workers to compete internationally. Colleges have a critical role to play in accomplishing these goals. All of these things are true. 

But education alone isn’t enough—not even close. Workers need power and leverage to demand better pay. In Washington State, for example, home health care workers who collectively bargain with the government make nearly $20 an hour plus health and retirement benefits. In Arkansas, people doing the same work make $9 an hour with no benefits. They don’t need a college-only agenda. They need strong labor laws, affordable child care, health insurance, and a robust minimum wage.

Other parts of the workforce would absolutely benefit from better education and credentials—but only if the job structure were changed to match. When my daughter turned three, she enrolled as a full-time student in the neighborhood public school. Her teacher had a bachelor’s degree, as all public school teachers do, with a specialization in early childhood education. The next year, the children moved to a classroom for four-year-olds, and then kindergarten a year later, always taught by a credentialed teacher. Same building, same profession. 

But that’s because Washington, D.C., chose to extend its public school system to include three- and four-year-olds, a policy President Biden has proposed expanding nationwide. Despite her college degree, my daughter’s pre-K–3 teacher wouldn’t have been able to get the same job in nearby Virginia or Maryland, because in those states, the job “pre-K–3 public school teacher” doesn’t exist. Instead, young children are left to the vagaries of the under-subsidized and under-regulated private child care market, where training, credentials, pay, safety, and learning are often in short supply. In the early childhood sector, and many others, education and jobs strategies only work if they work together. 

Progressives also need to take higher education funding justice seriously. The present distribution of public dollars reflects deep structural racism. As a rule, the more students of color are enrolled in a college, the less money it receives from all sources. Six states are under Department of Justice supervision because of systemic discrimination against historically Black colleges and universities, including chronic underfunding. In addition to generous, targeted tuition affordability and loan forgiveness policies, progressives should make the underlying structural inequality of higher education a major priority. 

Biden says he has a proposal for this. To some extent, he does. The American Families Plan, first introduced in April 2021 and now making its way through Congress, would make community college free as part of the biggest new federal investment in higher education in a generation. Biden’s focus on community colleges makes sense; these are the institutions that have been historically underfunded, and where most of the students in greatest need enroll. Key members of Congress have proposed doubling the Pell Grant, which would direct tens of billions of new dollars to low- and middle-income undergraduates. Biden has called for an additional $62 billion to help students not just enroll in college, but also graduate. Regulators in the Department of Education are working to reverse Betsy DeVos’s permissive treatment of for-profit schools. 

Yet for all its expense and ambition, the Biden plan leaves too much of the existing inequitable and unregulated system in place. For decades, states have had free rein to pull money out of public colleges and universities and replace it with federally guaranteed student loans. State funding schemes that give minority-serving institutions less money are treated as regrettable but immovable historical legacies, not policy choices that can be unmade. There’s a real danger that a wave of new federal money would be diverted from its intended recipients through budgetary shell games and political favoritism. We need much stronger federal laws and regulation of state spending and tuition policy to prevent this. (One alternative is giving a standard federal subsidy to any college, two- or four-year, public or private nonprofit, that agrees to make tuition free.) 

Colleges also need to be accountable for helping students prepare for careers. Democrats have spent the past decade struggling to regulate the for-profit college industry, and with good reason. But most job-focused programs are in public and nonprofit colleges, and nobody is even trying to hold them similarly accountable. A recent Third Way report found more than 500 accredited colleges where low-income students make less money than the average high school graduate 10 years after they initially enrolled. Fifty-seven percent were for-profit colleges, reflecting consistent poor outcomes in that sector. But most of the rest were public colleges and universities. 

The Department of Education now publishes program-level earnings information, so students can, in theory, avoid schools that do little more than take their borrowed money and hand them a worthless diploma or certificate in exchange. But there is no evidence that we can improve higher education quality through a pure consumer-information-based approach. Students and parents believe the promise implicit in being granted government loans to attend a government-approved school—that the government is paying attention to higher education quality. The government should really do that, and only lend students money to attend programs that help them pay their loans back. This policy should also be applied to the lucrative graduate school sector, particularly the wholly unregulated market for master’s degrees, which are intensely financed by loans and heavily marketed as the gateway to high-paying careers. The more new federal money flows into the system, the higher the consumer protection guardrails need to be. 

These policies aren’t a substitute for bringing tuition prices down and ameliorating the student debt crisis. Instead, they’re the second half of the equation—college needs to be both affordable and good. The amount of new money currently being proposed for higher learning is historic. It would be an enormous missed opportunity to spend that much and do little to change the underlying structures that keep too many students down.

Thankfully, there are models that states and communities can adopt. A growing number of programs have proved to be very effective in helping economically and academically at-risk students earn degrees. The City University of New York’s ASAP initiative, for example, offers full-time community college students free tuition, transportation, books, and advisers, among other wraparound supports, Participants have three-year graduation rates that are more than double their non-ASAP peers. 

Yet these models have not been quickly or widely adopted. In part that’s because the colleges that serve those students are strapped for money. But it’s also because the current model of funding and regulating colleges provides no incentives to do so. Colleges are paid for enrolling students, not educating or graduating them. Students who enroll in national service programs are more likely to graduate (see Paul Glastris, “Free College if You Serve,” page 22)—but service, too, is often a minor priority for status-obsessed schools. 

Would an “affordable and good” strategy that combines tuition and debt relief with funding fairness and accountability totally overhaul the prestige dynamics underlying different professions? No, it would not. White-collar managers will continue to have higher status than mechanics. Social class goes deep. What it would do is put different parts of the education and labor markets on more equal footings. It would treat people fairly who help our society prosper in different ways. It would help higher education live up to the promise that it makes more often than it keeps: to be a place that opens up opportunity for everyone, regardless of where they come from or where they decide to go.

The post The College Class Crisis appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Matt Hudson-Flege was a high school senior when the 9/11 terror attacks occurred. Filled with a desire to do something for his country, he considered joining the Army, but decided he was “too much of a hippie,” he recalls. Going straight to college didn’t seem quite right either, though he applied to a few. 

Then someone told him about the National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC), an AmeriCorps program that puts small teams of young people to work on short-term service projects at nonprofits around the country. He signed up, and soon after graduating from high school found himself working at a Salvation Army food pantry in the seedy Tenderloin District of San Francisco. 

The firsthand view of urban homelessness was eye-opening for the 19-year-old from middle-class suburban Cincinnati. So too was learning to live with 10 other NCCC members from a wide range of backgrounds in a cramped halfway-house apartment. When it was his turn to cook for the group, for instance, he decided to make chili the way he had learned to growing up: just ground beef with cinnamon and other spices. The roommate he was sharing cooking duties with, a West Virginian from a single-parent family, had other ideas. Into the pot she threw beans, corn, peppers, and tomatoes. 

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m making chili,” answered the young woman. 

“That’s not chili!” he exclaimed.

“Yeah it is,” she replied.

After asking his other roommates, who also hailed from different parts of the country, Hudson-Flege realized that “99 percent of America doesn’t eat chili like we do in Cincinnati.” It was such a revelation that he still remembers the incident almost 20 years later. “What else about the world do I not understand?” Hudson-Flege, now a research assistant professor at Clemson University, recalls thinking. 

More revelatory experiences followed. At the team’s next assignment, helping out at an elementary school in a low-income neighborhood in Sacramento, Hudson-Flege caught glimpses of dysfunction in the families of some of the school kids that “made me wonder how we can make a difference given how tough their lives are.” From there the crew was sent to build trails in Big Sur, then to plant trees in Salt Lake City—missions where he learned, among other things, how to use a jackhammer. As a final project, the team put on a three-day event for high school seniors in Virginia City, California—an organizational challenge far more complex than any he had ever experienced and, he says, “a huge confidence builder for me.” 

Joining NCCC required Hudson-Flege to defer an admission he’d received from Eckerd College in Florida, which made his parents fear he might never go to college at all. They needn’t have worried. After finishing AmeriCorps in 2003, not only did he enroll at Eckerd, but the college doubled his merit aid in recognition of his service. He also had a Segal AmeriCorps Education Award, a GI Bill–type college scholarship that AmeriCorps veterans are granted after completing a year of service, to further defray costs. He graduated from Eckerd four years later, debt-free.

But he wasn’t done serving. After a stint in the Peace Corps and eight years with a Catholic antipoverty nonprofit in Cincinnati, Hudson-Flege earned a PhD from Clemson with an on-brand thesis topic: the long-term civic engagement of NCCC veterans. Those who entered the program with the least interest in public service, he found, saw their interest grow the most. These days, in addition to his research post at Clemson, he runs a chapter of College Advising Corps, a nonprofit that places college-educated AmeriCorps members from lower-income backgrounds in high schools serving lower-income families to help students navigate the daunting college admissions and financial aid process.

Hudson-Flege is certainly on the far edge of the “National service can change your life” curve. In general, however, his experience is typical. Numerous studies show that AmeriCorps programs have positive impacts not only on a wide range of societal problems, but also on AmeriCorps members themselves, including helping them afford and graduate from college and inspiring them to choose careers in public service. 

National service is also having a moment politically. The American Rescue Plan Joe Biden signed in March included an extra $1 billion for AmeriCorps, an amount that nearly matches the agency’s annual budget. And a key component of the American Families Plan, the massive spending bill Democrats want to pass via reconciliation this fall, is a new “Civilian Climate Corps” that aims to put disadvantaged young people, military veterans, and others to work on environmental projects while building skills that will help them get jobs in the green energy sector. Separately, Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, Biden’s closest friend in the Senate, has been pushing legislation to boost the size of AmeriCorps, from 75,000 today to 225,000. Meanwhile, the New York Times editorial board has endorsed retired General Stanley McCrystal’s plan for Washington to create a million national service slots. 

Curiously, however, in public discussions over how much the American Families Plan should invest to make college free, the subject of national service almost never comes up. That’s a mistake. Massively expanding national service isn’t incidental to the goal of helping students—especially those who need it most—get into and through college. It’s key to achieving it. And encouraging students to give something to help make America better isn’t, or shouldn’t be, incidental to how we judge the value of our public investments in higher education. It should be central to it. 

The fusing of college aid with voluntary national service has been essential to AmeriCorps ever since then Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton conceived of the idea during the 1992 presidential race. His stump speech that year included a promise to create a “domestic GI Bill” in which anyone could do a year of service and receive a college scholarship. It was “the most consistently popular applause line of the ’92 campaign,” writes Steven Waldman in The Bill, his book on the passage of the legislation that created AmeriCorps, which Clinton signed into law in 1993.

From very early on, however, the idea had enemies. In 1995, newly elected Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich called AmeriCorps “coercive voluntarism” and tried to eliminate it. That effort failed thanks to Republican Senate moderates and the program’s design, which was cleverly structured to garner bipartisan support: Most AmeriCorps funds flow through state-based commissions whose members are appointed by governors, a patronage opportunity chief executives of both parties came to appreciate. One of those governors was George W. Bush of Texas, who, when he became president, increased the number of AmeriCorps members from 50,000 to 75,000. Barack Obama signed legislation authorizing the program to grow to 250,000 members, though he could never get Congress to appropriate the funds. Instead, Tea Party Republicans tried to zero out its budget. They, too, failed. So did Donald Trump in his effort to kill AmeriCorps, despite enjoying GOP majorities in both houses of Congress for half his term.

Because it has so frequently been in the cross hairs of conservative budgeteers, AmeriCorps has been under enormous pressure to justify its existence. Its programs have consequently been subject to considerable rigorous evaluations. 

Those evaluations show that when it comes to fulfilling the pledge every new member takes to “get things done,” AmeriCorps has been notably successful. The one-on-one tutoring efforts its members conduct significantly boost reading and math scores and attendance for the poor and minority students they tutor, compared to control groups. The workforce training nonprofit Year Up, staffed by AmeriCorps members, increases the earnings of the young adults from low-income and disadvantaged backgrounds who receive the training by $7,000 to $8,000 per year compared to similar young people who don’t participate. The Big Brothers Big Sisters program, also heavily staffed by AmeriCorps members, cut the rate at which young minority participants initiate drug use by 70 percent compared to similar young adults. Low-income high school students who are counseled by College Advising Corps members (like those in the program Matt Hudson-Flege runs) are 18 percent more likely to apply to a college or university and 19 percent more likely to be accepted than are similar students who aren’t counseled. 

The evaluative literature on the effect of AmeriCorps on members themselves is not as extensive. But a 2018 study by the nonprofit group Service Year Alliance and Burning Glass Technologies, a labor market analytics firm, suggests the impact is substantial. The study compared the resumes of 70,000 veterans of AmeriCorps and other service programs, like the Peace Corps, to 100,000 otherwise similar peer resumes. It found that 24 percent of the program veterans who didn’t have a bachelor’s degree when they served went on, like Hudson-Flege, to earn one, compared to 11 percent of the peer group. It also found that after 10 years, 23 percent of the vets had careers in education, and community and social service occupations—again like Hudson-Flege—compared to 7 percent of their peers. 

Other studies show that serving in AmeriCorps builds members’ skills and personal networks in ways that help them secure future jobs, especially in the nonprofits they embed in. Indeed, the program operates as a kind of “de facto workforce development system” for the nonprofit sector, writes the longtime national service expert Shirley Sagawa of the Center for American Progress. This is no small advantage. According to the Johns Hopkins Nonprofit Employment Project, nonprofits employ the nation’s third-largest private-sector workforce, behind only retail trade and manufacturing.

Despite its record of boosting college and career attainment (for both its members and those they serve), the idea of greatly expanding AmeriCorps has almost never been raised during the past few years of intense discussions among liberals about how to make college free, or at least far more affordable. Instead, that discussion has largely centered on three big policy ideas to achieve that goal.

For a long time, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren dominated the debate with their free college proposals, under which the federal government would give states enough money to allow their public two- and four-year colleges and universities to charge no tuition. But as this magazine has long argued—and as progressive policy wonks have since come to understand—the Sanders/Warren plan leads to a nightmare of unintended consequences. It would unjustly reward those states (mostly red) that cut college funding and let tuition rise, while perversely penalizing states (mostly blue) that did the right thing by spending more to keep tuition low. It would heavily subsidize elite public research universities that cater to affluent white people, while short-changing regional universities and community colleges, which disproportionately educate non-wealthy students of color and have less money to begin with. And by excluding private nonprofit colleges, the Sanders/Warren plan would leave out hundreds of schools that serve racially and economically diverse students, including many historically Black institutions.

In part because of these problems, the Biden White House has emphasized a different idea: free community college. This approach is politically and morally easier to make the case for than free four-year college. While almost every American today needs some kind of quality post-secondary credential to have a decent shot at a middle-class life, we aren’t yet at the point where every American needs a four-year degree. Nor does every American want one. And a lot of those who don’t voted for Donald Trump.

That said, bachelor’s degrees do confer much greater lifetime earnings on average than do sub-baccalaureate credentials, and they are disproportionately earned by middle- and upper-income whites. So there remains a profound need to do something to address the inequities of the four-year college system. 

Fortunately, there is growing consensus among Democrats in Washington, including Biden himself, to support a third big idea that will help on that front: doubling the size of the Pell Grant. In 1975, the Pell covered 80 percent of the cost of a public four-year degree. Now it covers only 30 percent. Doubling the award, from the current maximum of $6,495 to $12,990 per year, would make college more affordable for millions of students. It would also largely avoid the pitfalls of the Sanders/Warren plan because the grants would be targeted at the lower- and lower-middle-income students who need them the most. 

It would not be a panacea, however, for several reasons. First, without tough federal regulation, states will be tempted to cut their education budgets by the amount of the increased Pell funding, leaving federal taxpayers with a hefty tab and Pell recipients no better off. Second, a $12,990 annual Pell award would barely cover in-state tuition at most public four-year colleges and universities. Students would still be on the hook for rent, food, books, and other incidentals—costs many lower-income students can’t afford. 

Finally, while doubling the Pell Grant would help disadvantaged students afford college, it likely wouldn’t do much, on its own, to help them graduate—and without a sheepskin, a college education isn’t worth nearly as much in the market. College dropout rates for low-income and minority students are alarmingly high, and unaffordable tuition costs are only one cause. Living expenses like housing and food are another big factor. So too is the fact that lower-income students enter college with less preparation and social capital than affluent whites. They typically attend high schools with fewer resources, like veteran teachers. They usually lack college-educated parents and networks of friends from similar backgrounds who can help them navigate the college bureaucracy or connect them to summer jobs and internships. With relatively few adults in their lives who have good-paying careers, they have less direct knowledge of what those careers are, much less how a college degree can lead to one. The latter is astonishingly important: Students who grasp that a college degree is essential for a desired career are six times more likely to receive a college degree than those who do not.

A major expansion of national service would address all of these problems. Done in concert with higher Pell awards and free community college, it would create a system where every American can not only afford to seek a bachelor’s degree but has the support they need to get to graduation and into a career. 

To understand how it would work, imagine you are a high school senior from a low-income Pell-eligible family who is interested in earning a four-year degree. Legislation has passed doubling the Pell Grant, making community college tuition free, and expanding AmeriCorps. You enroll in community college and two years later earn an associate’s degree with virtually no out-of-pocket expenses. You then serve two years in AmeriCorps. Now you have two years’ worth of Segal award dollars plus two more of Pell funding you can use to pay for your junior and senior year at a bachelor’s-granting institution. Because Segal awards are pegged by statute to the maximum size of the Pell Grant, you would have a total of $25,980 ($12,990 x 2) to put toward your education per year. That is more than enough to cover in-state tuition plus fees, room, and board at the average public university, which is currently $25,864. And, as the Burning Glass research and other studies suggest, the skills, relationships, and sense of purpose you garnered during your time in service mean your likelihood of graduating is considerably higher than if you had not served. So too your chances of landing a job after college, especially in the nonprofit sector, if that’s what you want.

Washington could take other steps to make national service an even more appealing route to achieving free college. While AmeriCorps is sometimes stereotyped as dominated by elite whites, demographically its membership is diverse—Black people actually make up 22 percent of participants, a higher share than of the U.S. population as a whole. Still, more could be done to recruit lower-income and minority members. Bumping up the size of the Segal award would be a huge help. So would extending the temporary boost in members’ modest stipends that Biden’s American Rescue Plan mandated. Giving members more and better skills training and college credit for what they learn could let them earn degrees and certificates faster after they finish their service. Nebraska recently passed a law offering in-state tuition at its public universities to any AmeriCorps veteran, regardless of where that person served or is originally from. Incentivizing every state to follow Nebraska’s lead would vastly expand the universe of affordable colleges AmeriCorps alumni could apply to. Some colleges and universities match the Segal awards AmeriCorps veterans bring with them, as Eckerd did for Matt Hudson-Flege (colleges that do earn points on the Washington Monthly’s college rankings). Washington could write rules to encourage more colleges to do the same. 

If expanding national service is so crucial to a successful “free college” agenda, why hasn’t it been part of the discussion? One reason is that the advocates who focus on higher education reform and those in the national service space occupy different career silos and don’t talk much to each other. A bigger reason is that making national service a vehicle for college affordability would be expensive. The federal government would have to fund not only the extra Segel awards but also the costs of putting more national service members in the field. The plan sponsored by Coons to increase AmeriCorps to 225,000 members annually would cost $8 billion over three years. With centrist Democrats like Joe Manchin pressing to limit the overall size of the American Families Plan, it’s easy to see why the idea of vastly expanding national service opportunities hasn’t gained more traction.

But this price tag is misleading. Much like with infrastructure spending, national service ultimately more than pays for itself. A 2020 study by the consulting firm ICF found that every dollar the federal government spends on AmeriCorps returns $3.50 in taxes received or saved and more than $17 when benefits to recipients and society are factored in. These cost savings may not be “scoreable” by the Congressional Budget Office, but they are savings nonetheless. 

And then there are the unscorable benefits a massively expanded national service program would bring to the country. Imagine how much headway hundreds of thousands of new national service members—be they recent high school dropouts, aspiring college students, college grads, or retirees—could make against America’s unmet needs, from disadvantaged elementary school students who require tutoring to catch up academically to the frail elderly who need meals delivered in order to be able to stay in their homes. Consider how a more robust pipeline of skilled talent to the nonprofit sector would help in implementing the American Families Plan and its trillions of dollars in social service spending, much of which would be carried out by nonprofit groups. 

In The Bill, Waldman describes AmeriCorps as “the Swiss Army knife of social programs” because it addresses so many of the country’s problems. Its proven ability to “get things done” is the strongest reason to expand it. The U.S. military’s primary purpose is defending the country, but it has also provided a route to the middle class for millions of Black and low-income white Americans who have worn the uniform. So, too, can AmeriCorps offer a path to higher education and remunerative, fulfilling careers for those who serve. And because Segal awards, like GI Bill benefits, are earned and available to anyone willing to serve, regardless of race or class, it is harder for conservative politicians to spin them as giveaways to “those people.”

The universal nature of AmeriCorps is key to another profound advantage that could come from massively expanding the program: strengthening a deeply frayed democracy. What better way to bridge the partisan divides that are tearing this country apart than providing an opportunity for Americans from all walks of life to serve together for a year or two? 

Like the original GI Bill, a massive expansion of AmeriCorps could make institutions of higher education themselves less elite focused and more democratic. Colleges and universities cater to affluent families largely because those families can pay tens of thousands of dollars a year in tuition. If AmeriCorps veterans started showing up en masse with significant sums, colleges would be fools not to start catering to them, too, and in doing so, start admitting more students from modest backgrounds. That in itself might boost the graduation rates of these students, who often drop out, research shows, because they feel they don’t fit in. 

AmeriCorps veterans armed with more money for tuition would create other beneficial dynamics. For instance, regional public universities, which have been struggling to attract students with money in recent years compared to more selective flagships, also tend to offer more public service majors in areas like education, health care, and social work, as this year’s Washington Monthly rankings show. Since those are precisely the kinds of careers AmeriCorps veterans prefer, regional universities would suddenly have a competitive advantage. To keep their Segal award dollars flowing, college presidents would have an incentive, which they currently do not, to use their hefty influence over members of Congress to champion national service. This would create what political scientists call a positive “policy feedback loop”: a new policy leading to more political support for
that policy. 

There is a reason this magazine has long ranked America’s colleges and universities on their record of both recruiting and graduating non-wealthy students and of encouraging all students to spend time serving their country and communities. It is because we believe that equality of opportunity and active citizenship are not separable—a view shared by the Gates Foundation’s Postsecondary Value Commission in its recent report (see “What Is the Value of a College Degree?”). It’s no accident that two of the great democratic expansions of higher education in U.S. history happened during periods of mass mobilization: the creation of the land grant college system during the Civil War and the GI Bill during World War II. The third great expansion, the 1965 Higher Education Act, which for the first time provided federal financial aid to any aspiring student who lacked the means to go to college, passed at the height of the civil rights movement. 

In the decades since, we have allowed our higher education system—indeed, our entire country—to become captured by wealth and privilege. But America may now be on the verge of another great moment of higher education reform, itself the result of years of public activism. By massively expanding national service we can ensure that these reforms succeed and endure.

The post Free College if You Serve appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When Yen Huynh first signed up to serve in AmeriCorps in Nebraska, her goal was to become a resident so she could pay in-state tuition for graduate school.

“My original plan was to move to Nebraska, gain state residency, go to school, and work for a little bit but [then] eventually move back home to Albuquerque,” says Huyhn, a 2016 graduate of the University of New Mexico, where she got a bachelor’s degree in political science and criminology. 

The plan worked. Huyhn became a resident, and she is now getting her master’s degree in political science from the University of Nebraska Omaha, where she is paying the in-state rate. But were Huynh still in New Mexico and planning to join AmeriCorps today, she would qualify for resident tuition a different way. That’s because as of April 2021, Nebraska is granting in-state tuition to anyone who has served in AmeriCorps, even if that service took place in another state. It’s a change that could save program alumni tens of thousands of dollars.

“When I found out that the bill for in-state tuition was passed for those who had finished serving in AmeriCorps, I thought it to be a great benefit,” Huynh says. She supports the change, even though she is already a resident.

The person behind the new law in Nebraska is Democratic State Senator Tony Vargas, himself an AmeriCorps alum. Vargas met his wife a decade ago while both were working as educators for Teach for America, the education nonprofit that recruits “promising leaders” to teach for at least two years in a low-income community. (Teach for America operates under the umbrella of AmeriCorps.) Vargas taught in Brooklyn, and his wife taught in the Bronx. The couple eventually moved to Nebraska so Vargas’s wife could attend law school. But education remained a passion. Vargas served on the Omaha school board from 2013 until 2016, when he successfully ran to become a state senator.

Vargas attributes his interest in service and education to his parents, who immigrated from Peru to New York City, where Vargas was born. He recalls growing up as a “free and [reduced-price] lunch kid” in elementary through high school. He was a Pell Grant recipient, and only the second person in his family to go to college.

“My parents sacrificed a lot for us and always taught us that education was really important, but also that it was important to give back to communities like ours,” Vargas told me.

Service leaders and higher education leaders in Nebraska are excited about the change, which they say is both right on the merits and good for the state’s economy. “AmeriCorps members do so many great things for our country, and in thanks for their service, we hope to help make higher education more affordable in any way we can,” says Cathleen Plager, executive director of ServeNebraska, a commission on volunteer service in charge of coordinating federal grants for AmeriCorps projects in the state. Plager told me that since 1994, when AmeriCorps began operating, Nebraska has had 11,765 members serve in the state, and all of them have received a Segal AmeriCorps Education Award—a Pell Grant–sized cash gift they can use for classes, student loans, and other additional expenses. (For 2021 to 2022, a Segal award is worth $6,495.) Citing information from the AmeriCorps federal agency, she said $37 million of all Segal awards have been paid to Nebraska colleges or loan institutions. Vargas and others hope the law will encourage even more AmeriCorps members to study in the state, bringing in fresh talent and dollars.

Ted Carter, president of the University of Nebraska system, is also excited about the new law. “The University of Nebraska system was proud to support state legislation recognizing the service of AmeriCorps alumni and expanding access for them to attend our university’s campuses,” Carter says. “With this legislation, we have new opportunities to attract talented, service-oriented students to Nebraska—a game changer for our workforce and the economic competitiveness of our state.”

It isn’t the only legislation Vargas has introduced to help AmeriCorps recipients. In August 2020, the governor signed into law a bill crafted by the state senator that excludes Segal awards from state income taxes. In doing so, Nebraska joins Iowa, which already exempts the awards. Many federal lawmakers want the national government to do the same. To that end, in June 2021, a bipartisan group of congressional representatives introduced the Segal AmeriCorps Education Award Tax Relief Act.

Shirley Sagawa, who drafted the legislation that created AmeriCorps during the Clinton administration, supports the change. She says making the Segal awards tax-exempt is a commonsense policy goal that would alleviate an unnecessary hardship for AmeriCorps volunteers. “Imagine that you have spent the year scraping by on [a] poverty-level stipend in order to serve your community and earn money for college,” Sagawa told me. “You use your education award for tuition. Then you get hit with a tax bill of hundreds or even a thousand dollars.” She argued that the resulting financial burden “undermines the ability of individuals to participate in AmeriCorps if they don’t have family money.” 

It’s not just the tax bill that has advocates upset. As Sagawa explained, AmeriCorps volunteers cannot have their taxes deducted from the award itself. “You have to come up with cash,” she said. “How is that fair?”

There’s plenty of precedent for making federal education gifts tax-exempt. The GI Bill, for example, didn’t require recipients to pay any taxes on what they received. But Congress has a long track record of trying and failing to do the same for Segal grants. Sagawa told me that when first drafting the legislation to create the program, the goal was to make the award tax-free. But doing so would have complicated the legislation’s passage by sending it to a knotty array of congressional committees. “It was not included for jurisdictional reasons,” she said.

Representatives didn’t give up. “To my knowledge, the first time federal legislation was introduced to exclude the AmeriCorps Education Award from federal income tax was in 2001,” says Jennifer Ney, the vice president for public policy at City Year and the managing director of Voices for National Service, a coalition that advocates for national service organizations. The Call to Service Act, which would have exempted Segal awards, was repeatedly introduced from 2008 to 2019 by a wide collection of representatives. Over the years, Representative John Lewis and Senators Orrin Hatch, Ted Kennedy, and Chris Dodd have all taken up the cause. Ney says she is at a loss as to why the legislation has continuously failed.

Segal recipients, meanwhile, remain frustrated. “When you’re coming out of AmeriCorps, you typically don’t get a lot of money or income,” explains Rebecca Charles, a former AmeriCorps volunteer at a K–8 school who clocked more than 50 hours a week helping students. “At the end of the year, when you’re filing your taxes, you kind of forget that this is considered income and so you don’t necessarily plan for it when it comes to paying taxes.”

Congressional legislation would have broad ramifications. Experts say that making Segal awards federally exempt would also likely make them exempt at the state level, changing the playing field. It’s part of why advocates are so keen on getting Congress to act.

But until it does, and until other states make their universities more financially accessible to AmeriCorps alums, Nebraskan policy makers appear happy to welcome more service-minded residents. 

“I brought these bills because I want to make it easier for people to serve in AmeriCorps,” Vargas said. “But I also want to make it easier to get these amazing leaders that have served to then come into the state of Nebraska and see this as a potential home.”

An earlier version of this story mistakenly stated that Nebraska offers in-state tuition only to those who serve a full year in AmeriCorps. It offers in-state tuition to anyone who has served any term in AmeriCorps. The Washington Monthly regrets the error.

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For decades, optimistic liberals believed that by sending more students of color to college, the United States could dismantle systemic racial income disparities. But in recent years, research has made it abundantly clear that’s simply not the case. Even when minority students from impoverished backgrounds earn college diplomas, they make substantially less than their white peers. A study by the Economic Policy Institute, for example, found that Black college graduates earned 22.5 percent less than their white counterparts in 2019, up from 19.2 percent in 2007 and 17.2 percent in 2000. Other researchers have found similarly large gaps, even among the graduates of top-tier universities.

Those entry-level inequities can snowball over time. In a groundbreaking study of students’ long-term earnings, the University of Texas system found that white graduates in computers, statistics, and mathematics earned a median entry-level wage of $53,100, compared with a median of $50,000 for Black graduates and $45,000 for Latinos. Fifteen years after graduation, the salary gaps had increased dramatically: White students were making a median of $112,000, compared with $83,500 for Black students and $68,200 for Latinos. Graduates in engineering and business saw similar salary inequities. 

But when officials at UT dug into their data set, which combined university records of almost 550,000 students who attended nine UT system institutions from 2002 through 2018 with 15 years of wage data from the Texas Workforce Commission, they unearthed some unexpected findings. As they sliced the data by student major, gender, race, and family income, they found that Black, brown, and female alums are often massively underpaid compared with their white male peers in many high-wage career paths, such as computer science, engineering, and business. But they also found that students of color who majored in education, health, and the humanities tended to earn roughly the same amount as these disciplines’ white graduates, both right after graduation and 15 years out.

The humanities data is perhaps the most surprising. Unlike education and health majors, who tend to cluster in professions with more transparent pay scales that support wage parity, humanities grads work everywhere. That’s in part because “humanities” encompasses a long list of majors, from American studies, anthropology, Asian cultures and languages, classical studies, and English through geography, history, linguistics, philosophy, rhetoric, and women’s and gender studies. UT’s data set is robust, including 37,266 humanities graduates, of whom 4,231 identify as Black and 28,814 identify as Hispanic. In the first year after graduation, the median incomes of all humanities students regardless of race and gender clustered just below $30,000; that relative wage parity remained durable 15 years after commencement, when white graduates earned a median wage of $60,000 and Black and Latino graduates made a median wage of $58,000.

How is it that UT humanities majors overcome the racial earnings gap? There’s no one clear answer. But there seem to be multiple possible explanations that could help students, instructors, institutions, and employers everywhere—and across all disciplines—reduce pay discrimination. 

To understand what’s going right in the humanities, it makes sense to start at the outset of students’ college careers. One of the key differences between humanities students and their counterparts in science, technology, and math shows up in the first year of college. That’s when many STEM, business, and pre-med students are herded through notorious “dropout” or “weeder” classes—big, required courses with extremely challenging curricula that are purposely designed to cull any students deemed less prepared to withstand the rigors of their chosen majors. “The failure rate, especially for minorities who come into the sciences, is pretty high,” says the physicist Walter Massey, president emeritus of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and of Morehouse College, and the former head of the National Science Foundation. “Within the humanities, there’s not that sort of weeding out.” 

By itself, that doesn’t explain the earnings gap, which measures the incomes of students who do make it through weeder courses and graduate with degrees in high-wage fields. But it turns out that the stresses of these courses can damage the career prospects of students who stick it out, especially if they arrived at college from underperforming high schools (as many students of color do). “In their first year, they need to make this really hard choice—to try to simultaneously catch up in calculus and take Computer Science 101 or take remedial calc, which delays graduation by an entire year,” says April Christina Curley, the engagement and partnerships manager at the Last Mile Education Fund. She says students who struggle with weeder classes may be denied access to high-level courses in specialized topics that are prized by leading employers, or they may self-select into less rigorous elective classes. Their initial difficulties also can undermine their self-esteem and dissuade them from applying for jobs with the most highly selective employers. 

By contrast, humanities students are generally welcomed with 100-level classes that, while not always gentle, have not been intentionally designed to trim the fat from their already lean departmental enrollments. So humanities students get the chance to find their feet academically before they encounter demanding upper-level courses in world literature or rigorous seminars on modern history. These experiences build confidence that comes across later in job interviews and in the workplace. 

Experts say that humanities classes are also usually smaller, especially in upper levels, than in other disciplines. This gives students a chance to get to know their professors, and vice versa. The open-ended nature of humanities assignments also provides students with an opportunity to express their own ideas in ways that are more likely to catch an instructor’s attention than, say, a score of 96 percent on an advanced calculus exam. As a result, humanities students are significantly more likely to cite at least one professor who served as a mentor during their undergraduate years than are students in other disciplines. These types of mentoring relationships can be deeply beneficial for all students, but especially for minority students, who may be struggling academically or who feel out of place. (Black students, for example, are less likely to have college-educated parents who can help them navigate the world of higher education.)

“I can speak to that in my own experience,” says Zainab Okolo, a strategy officer at Lumina Foundation, an Indianapolis-based private foundation focused on expanding post-secondary educational opportunities. “A lot of what made me successful as an undergraduate was finding faculty who took the time to really learn my passion and challenge me with additional research opportunities and writing opportunities,” she says. “As I’ve gone further in the field of higher ed, and higher ed inequity, I’ve realized just how lucky I was to have that.” 

Faculty mentoring relationships don’t just provide emotional and intellectual benefits. An engaged faculty mentor can also provide a meaningful, personalized recommendation for jobs or grad school, along with informal (but crucial) social capital, such as tips on navigating job interviews and writing thank-you notes to recruiters. 

The differing experiences of humanities students and their STEM and business peers become extremely visible during senior year, when giant tech companies and consulting firms hold highly competitive recruiting events. Many of these have baked-in inequities. For example, high-profile employers may refuse to grant interviews to students who don’t meet a minimum GPA cutoff—so it doesn’t matter if your 3.46 GPA reflects your Herculean freshman-year struggle to catch up after coming to college unprepared. This disadvantages anyone who comes from an under-resourced school district, which means it works against students of color.

Ruthe Farmer, founder and CEO of the Last Mile Education Fund, says recruiters also may restrict interviews to students who are active in extracurricular groups limited to specific majors (such as entrepreneurship clubs or private equity clubs for business majors) or who have taken certain highly specialized, highly regarded courses. Students who aren’t part of the departmental “in crowd” may not know that top-paying companies’ recruiters favor a specific professor’s section of computer systems architecture, for example. As a result, Black, brown, and female students in those majors may miss out on the most lucrative entry-level jobs, with financial repercussions for the rest of their careers.

Most humanities grads do not have access to these highly organized, highly stratified recruitment opportunities. Instead, they have to lace up their boots, head off to campus, and hustle to find those first entry-level jobs. While that initial job hunt can be dreary and discouraging, Okolo and other researchers say the skills built through those experiences can help Black and Latino students in these fields keep pace with their white counterparts over the course of their careers. 

Although it’s hard to quantify, humanities grads’ mid-career salaries also may reflect their willingness to look for greener pastures when they hit a career dead end—or a glass ceiling. Humanities classes require students to read broadly, think deeply, and write often—and, frequently, to stand up and tell their classmates what they’ve read and written, and then think on their feet in response to questions and criticisms. These classroom experiences can breed resilience, creativity, and interdisciplinary thinking, which enable graduates to capitalize on new opportunities in the workforce that students trained in narrower disciplines might not recognize or pursue.

It is also possible that humanities grads wind up working for employers that are more diverse or more liberal, and therefore less likely to discriminate. A study published last year by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce found that liberal arts majors are less inclined toward authoritarianism than business or STEM majors. Those students’ antipathy toward strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedoms may translate into a preference for bosses who treat them and their coworkers fairly. It makes intuitive sense: Individuals whose sense of justice has been honored and honed throughout four years of thoughtful education are less likely to sit quiet when they, or their colleagues, are expected to accept lower wages and diminished prospects because of race or gender.

So what are the equity lessons that universities can—and should—learn from their own humanities departments?

Curley and others say one good first step might be to dump “weeder” classes, or at least create some workarounds so students who don’t make it through the gate the first time get a fair chance (including tutoring and other supports) to try again. These reforms should include retraining instructors to focus on finding ways to retain students, instead of just warning entering freshmen, “Look to your left. Look to your right. One of you won’t be here next semester.”

More broadly, departments across campus should look at humanities models to help them create better mentoring and advising programs for minority and first-generation students in STEM and other high-salary disciplines. “Data do show that personally connecting with a caring adult is really important to students’ outcomes,” says Kathryn Peltier Campbell, a senior editor/writer and postsecondary specialist at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. In developing expanded advising programs, those other departments need to make sure that minority students have access to mentors who look like them and understand their needs. This might be another place where the humanities are out ahead. “We still need to make much more progress in diversifying the nation’s faculty, but I would bet we have more diversity among advisers on all levels in the humanities,” says Laura Perna, the vice provost for faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and executive director of Penn’s Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy.

To help minority students in business and tech develop the kinds of soft skills that can help set humanities grads apart, universities should create comprehensive job search preparation programs designed specifically for minority students in high-disparity disciplines. These programs should include intensive, individualized guidance in writing cover (and thank-you) letters and creating, rehearsing, and re-rehearsing their elevator speeches. Programs also should include repeated and realistic mock job interviews, to make sure they’re ready to handle the subtexts of tricky questions. “For a long time, we’ve looked at programs that help people transition into college,” Perna notes. “Now we’re seeing more attention to programs specifically designed for first-generation, low-income students as they transition out of college.” 

On a higher level, universities need to do a thorough review of on-campus recruiting practices to identify the many places where inequality is being baked into the process. That will require tracking the demographics of the students who are invited to participate in highly competitive recruiting events: Are GPA cutoffs and employer requirements for “golden ticket” courses disproportionately favoring white males? It’s also important to take a hard look at the student societies and extracurricular activities that employers like most. There’s nothing “color-blind” about a recruitment process open to all members of the engineering honor society if all the members are either white or Asian. 

Universities can remove another major driver of inequity by requiring on-campus recruiters to disclose starting salary ranges, signing bonuses, and benefit packages. In contrast with the relative wage transparency of many education and health care jobs, STEM and business employers generally keep details of salary packages confidential. Minority students who are excluded from the informal knowledge loop may have an especially difficult time figuring out what would be considered fair pay. When students have access to reality-based salary data, they’re much better equipped to negotiate their starting salaries, putting them on a path to greater wage fairness throughout their careers. 

But what we most need to tackle this problem is more research into the drivers of disparities—and equities—across university disciplines. The University of Texas database, while large, important, and impressive, is only a beginning. Most colleges still do not have this type of information—by race, by gender, by program—according to Jen Engle, director of the Gates Foundation’s Data in the United States Program. (The Washington Monthly receives funding from both the Gates and Lumina Foundations.) More research like UT’s is desperately needed to give a fuller picture, both of persistent inequities and the as-yet-unrecognized solutions that might bring fairness to post-college wages, for everyone.  

The post The Secret Lives of English Majors appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In a year when the coronavirus pandemic threw college admissions into chaos, 18-year-old Chloe Pressley of Prince William County, Virginia, succeeded beyond her wildest expectations. She got into multiple prestigious colleges, including Caltech, the University of Virginia, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The University of Richmond offered her a full ride. This fall, she’s headed to Yale.

One secret to her success, she says, was a class schedule loaded up with the College Board’s Advanced Placement courses. “I feel like AP is the only way to get to a good college,” she told me. “It provides you with a pedestal above other graduates.” As a senior at C. D. Hylton High School in Woodbridge, Virginia, Pressley took five AP classes, including AP Chemistry, AP Calculus BC, AP Psychology, AP Comparative Government, and AP Literature and Composition. 

But she had to fight to get this schedule. 

Pressley, who is Black, attends a predominantly Black and Latino school in suburban Washington, D.C., where more than 40 percent of students receive free or reduced-price lunch (meaning their families’ incomes fall below 185% of the federal poverty line). Although her home high school offers 18 AP classes, according to federal civil rights data, Pressley said she did not have the option to take AP Chemistry or other high-level STEM classes at her school. She petitioned her counselor, her principal, and, eventually, her local school board member in order to attend another high school in her district—Charles J. Colgan Sr. High—that offered the AP classes she wanted. “I’m very persistent,” she said. 

Pressley also discovered that Colgan, where fewer than one in five students receives free or reduced-price lunch and a majority are white or Asian, offers a wealth of AP classes unavailable at her base school. “There are so many classes that I wish I could have taken, like AP Computer Science,” she said. “That was never an option to me. I didn’t even know the class existed until I heard one of my Colgan friends talking about it.” 

Over the past 20 years, state and federal policy makers have heavily subsidized AP’s expansion, both to promote greater college readiness and to catalyze educational equity. “Our hope (is that AP) can serve as an anchor for increasing rigor in our schools and reducing the achievement gap,” then College Board President Gaston Caperton said in 2006. Today, about 70 percent of all U.S. public high schools offer at least one AP class, and the number of students taking AP courses has more than tripled since 2000. AP has benefited hundreds of thousands of students who otherwise would have had no exposure to the rigors of college-level work. 

Yet these benefits have so far flowed disproportionately to white students in affluent school districts. As a broader mechanism for equity, AP has fallen short, unable to overcome the powerful structural forces that disadvantage far too many students. 

The program has left behind Black students in particular. In 2019, Black students made up 15 percent of all public school students, but they took just 6.3 percent of all AP exams. For every Black student who scored a 5 on an AP exam (the highest possible score), 10 students scored a 1 (the lowest possible). Among white students, by contrast, 5s outnumbered 1s. Black students are only about half as likely to pass an AP exam as all students nationwide, and the difference in overall exam pass rates between Black and white students has worsened since 2003 (excluding the statistically strange pandemic year 2020). 

“AP was designed in the 1950s to be a program for precocious high schoolers who were very privileged,” says Kristin Klopfenstein, a nationally recognized expert on Advanced Placement at the University of Denver. “AP is serving exactly who it’s designed to serve, which is mostly upper-middle-class whites.”

As more colleges and universities go “test-optional” with the SAT and ACT, AP could end up playing an outsized role as admissions officers scramble for alternate standards by which to judge applicants. According to a 2019 survey by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, “grades in college prep courses” and “strength of curriculum” are among the top three factors considered by colleges in making admissions decisions. For many students, access and success in AP—or the lack thereof—could become even more determinative. 

If the ultimate goal of K–12 education is to offer equitable access to high-quality curricula leading to greater college access and success, policy makers need to rethink their approach to AP and look beyond it. Some schools, for instance, are experimenting with ways to ensure that more minority AP students are likely to succeed, such as adding Spanish-language instruction and class materials for AP courses at predominantly Latino schools. For some students, models other than AP might be a better way to experience college-level work. Dual or concurrent enrollment at a partnering community college or local four-year college is gaining in popularity and so far seems to have a better track record than AP at enrolling minority and low-income students. In the 2017–18 school year, according to the U.S. Department of Education, more than 80 percent of high schools offered dual enrollment, including 90 percent of schools in rural areas. 

In the meantime, students like Chloe Pressley remain the exception, not the rule. And instead of closing educational divides, AP is widening them. 

Launched in 1955, Advanced Placement was originally intended “as an academic challenge to a small, elite group of able students,” according to a 2001 report commissioned by the College Board. In 1970, just 55,442 students took AP courses. 

Reformers who discovered AP soon embraced it as a potentially pivotal tool for achieving educational equity. Studies from the 1980s and ’90s linked AP course taking to superior college performance. In 1999, the Department of Education released a highly influential report, Answers in the Tool Box, which concluded that “Advanced Placement course taking is . . . strongly correlated with bachelor’s degree completion.” With its standardized curriculum, rigor, and apparent results, AP seemed an obvious way to close gaps between higher- and lower-
performing schools and students.

In 2000, then Secretary of Education Richard Riley paved the way for an explosion in AP enrollment when he called on every American high school to offer AP. “Going backwards to a time when we watered down the curriculum for poor children is not an option,” he said. “We do these children a great injustice if we allow the old tyranny of low expectations to prevail, once again.” In 2002, Congress added funding for AP expansion in its landmark education reform legislation, No Child Left Behind, and has invested billions more since. In fiscal year 2020, the federal government provided $1.2 billion in grants under Title IV, which states and districts can use to expand AP access. Congress also allowed states to use pandemic relief under the CARES Act to fund exam fees for low-income students, and many states provide additional funding to train AP teachers and cover other related costs.

To date, AP has reached more than 46.5 million high school students, including 2.6 million in 2020. Course offerings have likewise expanded, with 38 different classes now available in subjects ranging from music theory to U.S. history to calculus. Chester Finn and Andrew Scanlan of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute report that fees from AP exams and instructional materials now make up nearly half of the College Board’s revenues (an estimated $466 million in 2016). 

But if education reform was indeed the original driving force behind AP expansion, that goal has remained elusive.

To be sure, minority participation in AP has improved over the past 20 years. In 1997, Black students took 3.8 percent of all exams. As of 2019, that figure is 65 percent larger. The raw number of exams taken by Black students has also skyrocketed, from under 35,000 per year to more than 310,000 over the same period.

Nevertheless, more than 20 years after Secretary Riley’s challenge, schools in poorer neighborhoods—which also often have high minority populations—are still much less likely to offer AP classes than schools where students are mostly white and wealthy. In a 2018 report, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that roughly 40 percent of “high poverty” high schools (where more than 75 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch) provided no AP at all. Of the high-poverty schools that did offer AP courses, 70 percent offered fewer than 10. More than half of affluent, “low poverty” schools, on the other hand, offered 16 AP classes or more. 

In Detroit, Michigan, for example, where 83 percent of public school students are Black and 86 percent receive free or reduced-price lunch, 18 of 27 city high schools offered no AP classes in 2017, according to the most recent data available from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Renaissance High School, which has the city’s most expansive AP curriculum, offered 12 AP courses in 2017, while Martin Luther King Jr. High School and Western International High School each offered seven. Despite its name, the Benjamin Carson High School of Science and Medicine offered just three AP classes in 2017, and only one in STEM. 

The picture is vastly different, however, just a short drive out into Detroit’s suburbs. Affluent Northville High School, about 11 miles west of the city, offered 31 different AP classes in 2017 to its 2,400 students, 92 percent of whom are white or Asian. Half an hour north and northwest, Bloomfield Hills High School offered 25 AP courses, while Novi High School offered 20. All three of these high schools were among the top “feeder” schools to the University of Michigan’s 2019 freshman class, according to an analysis by the University of Michigan’s student newspaper, The Michigan Daily. 

Black students are also consistently under-enrolled in AP even where the availability of classes is not an issue. In a December 2020 study, the American Enterprise Institute found significant racial disparities in AP participation in the “vast majority” of school districts nationwide; in some places, differences between Black and white AP enrollment were as high as 50 percentage points. One study by the University of Michigan found that offering more AP classes actually increased Black-white gaps in AP participation by bolstering within-school segregation. 

While some of these decisions could be genuine assessments of students’ capabilities, bias and stereotyping likely come into play. Research by the San Diego State University professor Suneal Kolluri finds that minority students are often “tracked” away from advanced course work, including AP. These tracking patterns then “become mutually reinforcing when African American students who may be capable of AP work shy away from predominantly White AP classes that make them uncomfortable,” Kolluri wrote in 2018. 

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Seventeen-year-old “CT,” a Black student in Prince William County, experienced this kind of steering. (CT is identified by his initials to protect his privacy.) Unlike Chloe Pressley, CT attends a school that is mostly white, Battlefield High School in Haymarket, Virginia. Though Battlefield offers 27 AP classes, CT told me that his high school guidance counselor discouraged him from taking them. In 2017, according to civil rights data, 29 percent of Black students at Battlefield were enrolled in an AP class, compared to 33 percent of white students and 49 percent of Asian ones. While Black students made up 8.9 percent of the student body, they comprised just 4.8 percent of students taking AP math. White and Asian students, by comparison, accounted for 70.6 percent of the student body and 79.6 percent of the students in AP math.

CT thinks that “there’s a stereotype against minority groups” when it comes to higher-level classes. He said he has long demonstrated an interest in such courses, and he’s “had success in all of them.” But his guidance counselor has not been supportive, and he had to enroll in AP classes over her objections. “She didn’t see my work ethic; she didn’t see the attitude behind it . . . Maybe she just saw other African American students weren’t showing too much interest in them, so she made a generalization that all of them weren’t going to be successful.” (The Prince William County associate superintendent for high schools, Michael Mulgrew, did not respond to requests for comment.)

Even Hylton High School superstar Pressley said she wasn’t encouraged to take advanced course work. “They always suggested that you take a regular course,” she said. “They never outlined all the AP courses that
are available.” 

Lack of access to AP classes isn’t the only problem Black and Hispanic students encounter. They also face a dearth of resources and support, resulting in severe disparities in AP exam performance between white students and minorities, and between poor schools and wealthy ones. 

While the majority of AP exams taken by white and Asian students consistently receive passing scores (3 or higher on a scale of 5), the majority of exams taken by Black students do not. In 2019, just 3.9 percent of Black students’ exams scored a 5, compared to 14.4 percent of white students, 23.8 percent of Asian students, and 8.3 percent of Latinos. Overall in 2019, 31.8 percent of Black students’ exams and 44.5 percent of Latino students’ exams received passing scores, compared to 72.4 percent for Asian students and 65.1 percent for white students.
(Nationally, the pass rate was 59.1 percent.)

Racial disparities in pass rates are even starker at the state level, mirroring other inequities in resources and achievement. In Washington, D.C., where the white-Black performance gap is largest, 79.5 percent of white students’ exams received passing scores in 2019 compared to 23.1 percent of Black students’. Four southern states—Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama—had the lowest overall pass rates for Black students’ exams. In Arkansas, for instance, the Black student exam pass rate in 2019 was a dismal 12.4 percent. States with the highest Black student pass rates also had the fewest number of exams. South Dakota’s pass rate for Black students—the nation’s highest in 2019, at 53.6 percent—was based on just 140 exams (compared to 3,942 exams taken
by whites). 

Yawning racial gaps in performance on AP exams have in some cases worsened over time. Among Latino students, pass rates have declined as participation has grown, falling by more than 16 percentage points from 61.1 percent in 1997. White students’ pass rates, in contrast, have stayed constant: 65.5 percent in 1997 versus 65.1 percent in 2019. “The case may be that more AP participation is not necessarily beneficial,” San Diego State’s Kolluri wrote in a 2018 study. 

Pass rates among Black students have oscillated but remained stubbornly low, never hitting 40 percent. The difference in pass rates between white and Black students has also remained high, hovering around 33 percent. The gap between Black and Asian students has increased from 32.9 percent to 40.6 percent. (Though pass rates for all groups rose sharply in 2020, these results are likely an anomaly, given widely reported technical glitches in test administration and a big decline in test-takers due to the pandemic.) 

Many students in low-income schools don’t have the resources and support they need to succeed in AP course work, including qualified teachers and a halfway decent preparatory education in grades K–8. Ideally, says the College Board, AP teachers should have master’s degrees and at least five years of experience. Numerous studies find, however, that teachers in lower-income schools are much less likely to be experienced or have advanced degrees. 

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One study that vividly illustrates these hurdles is a 2019 analysis of 23 low-income schools across the country that added AP Biology or AP Chemistry to their curricula. “Most of the students in AP Bio are co-enrolled in Bio for the first time,” the authors quoted a school principal as saying. “They’re really coming in at a deficit in terms of prior knowledge.”

Challenges like these also likely explain what happened in Philadelphia, where public high schools dramatically expanded AP offerings to its students in 2006. This “surge,” the late William Lichten of Yale University concluded, “was nearly a total failure.” Among 41 schools newly offering 179 AP classes, “many schools did not have a single AP exam score as high as 3,” he wrote in a 2010 analysis, and “only five reported AP exam passing rates of 10 percent or higher.” 

For some students, obstacles to performance are more subtle yet no less insidious. The Prince William County students CT and Pressley say that in the AP courses they did take, there are only a handful of Black students. “I feel out of place,” said CT. “I feel isolated and I’m nervous to ask questions.” This leads to a sense of isolation. “There’s only one other Black person in the entire class,” said Pressley of her AP Chemistry course. “I feel like kind of an outcast in a way, where I have to prove myself before people actually talk to me.”

These feelings of loneliness can sabotage a Black student’s chances of success, says Jennifer Jessie, who runs an AP tutoring and test prep service in northern Virginia. “If you don’t have the support you need or feel excluded going into the classroom every day, it’s not a great learning environment for you and you’re not going to thrive,” she told me. Jessie, who is Black and herself a graduate of Prince William County schools, recalls being one of only two or three Black students in her AP classes. “It was very lonely,” she said.

The answer, however, is not to eliminate Advanced Placement. When students have access to classes and the resources to succeed, the program provides undeniable benefits, as it did for Chloe Pressley. Ending the program also won’t solve the underlying problems that created educational inequities in the first place. The disparities manifested by AP, Fordham’s Chester Finn said, are symptoms of an illness, but not the cause. “The disease is in a K–12 system that is incubating an excellence gap and sustaining an excellence gap,” he said. “This is like a thermometer showing you a result you don’t like. You don’t throw away the thermometer just because it’s demonstrating a fever.” 

Nevertheless, AP’s mixed record over the past 20 years should prompt a reexamination of how to provide high school students with effective and meaningful exposure to college-level course work. Scholars like San Diego State’s Kolluri, for instance, are looking at ways to improve the odds for low-income and minority students taking AP by challenging biases he says are inherent in the curriculum. “A lot of schools give AP European History in communities that have nothing but kids of color,” he said. “It’s ridiculous.” More students would succeed in AP, Kolluri argues, if the content were more relevant to their experiences. 

Kolluri also believes that schools can reduce these disparities by changing the way they teach the AP classes they do have. In the Harvard Educational Review, Kolluri wrote about two predominantly low-income and Latino high schools that improved their AP participation and pass rates by double digits in less than a decade. One successful strategy, he found, was the incorporation of Spanish-language instruction and materials linked to students’ home cultures, even though these modifications were not, strictly speaking, approved by the College Board. Students in an AP Environmental Science class, for instance, watched a documentary about poverty and agriculture in Guatemala, while AP U.S. Government students discussed local issues involving immigration and criminal justice. “The question is how to offer more opportunity to kids by connecting to their worlds,” Kolluri said. The College Board, he told me, needs to allow more flexibility for this kind of teaching. 

Another alternative is to look outside AP altogether. While there’s a mountain of research purporting to validate AP’s value, much of it is sponsored by the College Board, leaving many academics uncertain about the actual utility. “From an outsider’s perspective, it seems convenient that much of the College Board’s research on the AP program indicates that the program is beneficial for high school students,” wrote Russell Warne of Utah Valley University in a 2017 survey of studies about AP’s impact. Some of the independent studies that do exist find that the program’s reported impacts might have more to do with students’ innate abilities than with the classes themselves. “While there is evidence of a correlation between AP experience and college success (because AP students tend to be capable and highly motivated), there is no evidence from methodologically rigorous studies that AP experience causes [emphasis added] students to be successful in college,” the University of Denver’s Klopfenstein wrote with the Mississippi State University professor Kathleen Thomas in 2010. 

After controlling for factors such as household income and parental education, AP course taking “does not reliably predict first-year grades or retention to the second year,” Klopfenstein and Thomas found in a 2009 study. Instead, what predictive power AP does have is “likely the result of signaling: high ability, motivated students take more AP classes to differentiate themselves from other students in the college applica-
tion process.” 

And while the College Board argues that the challenge of AP itself helps prepare students for college by building good study skills and exposing them to rigorous material, other scholars argue that the costs outweigh the benefits for students unprepared to succeed. “The kids who [score] 1 or 2 on their AP . . . exams don’t appear to have gained any benefit from taking that course,” says Philip Sadler, a senior lecturer at Harvard University who studies STEM education. Given the resources needed to implement AP, Sadler says, cash-strapped districts might be better off using their resources to strengthen K–8 instruction or to offer students alternatives. 

One of those alternatives is dual or concurrent enrollment at a partnering community or four-year college. Under some models, classes are taught by high school teachers; in others, students attend classes on a college campus. Like AP, dual enrollment has expanded rapidly, with an estimated 1.4 million students taking at least one dual enrollment class in 2010 (the most recent year for which data is available). 

Proponents say the model has a couple of advantages over AP. First, success is not dependent on a single test at the end of the course administered by the College Board, but on course work throughout the year. Students get more feedback and a potentially better shot at passing. Students who pass also have the certainty of college credit from the partner institution, while colleges vary widely in whether they accept AP (and many colleges only confer credit on top scorers anyway). Another advantage of dual enrollment is that classes aren’t limited to the 38 sanctioned by the College Board, providing students with more choices and flexibility. Career and technical classes account for about 30 percent of dual enrollments, according to the nonprofit National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships (NACEP). 

Dual enrollment can also more closely replicate the actual college experience, NACEP board member Trey Pippin says. Pippin, who works as a high school guidance counselor in Kentucky, says he recommends dual enrollment to his students based on his own experience. “It gave me the chance to sit in a college classroom with college students and engage with college instructors,” he says. “I had a little bit more experience of what college was going to look like when I moved away myself.” 

And so far, dual enrollment also seems to be somewhat better at enrolling a diversity of students than AP. In Texas, for instance, a 2018 study by the University of Texas system found that the share of Hispanic students participating in dual credit outstripped that of whites (45 percent versus 38 percent). “Dual and concurrent enrollment tends to enroll a wider range of students,” says Melinda Karp, founder of the education consultancy Phase Two Advisory and an expert on dual enrollment.

Given these benefits, states are increasingly supporting expansions of dual enrollment. Kentucky, for instance, offers a Dual Credit Scholarship that covers the cost of up to two dual credit courses per student per year for all high schoolers in the state. In 2009, Colorado passed legislation establishing a tuition-free concurrent enrollment program with credits transferable to any Colorado public university. According to a 2020 analysis by the University of Colorado Boulder, students enrolled in the program were 25 percent more likely to attend college than those who did not participate. They were also 10 percent more likely to finish a four-year degree on time. These findings held true “regardless of student income, minority status, gender, or ninth grade reading test scores,” according to the report. 

Other studies have found more modest, though still positive, impacts. A 2012 study by Brian An at the University of Iowa found a 7 percentage point increase in the likelihood of earning a four-year degree for dual credit students, while an evaluation of Texas’s dual credit programs estimated that participation increased college-going by 2.4 percentage points, controlling for student characteristics.

Nonetheless, dual enrollment isn’t perfect. The demographics of dual enrollment students still skew toward white and affluent, even if the gaps aren’t quite as glaring. The Department of Education’s most recent data finds that white and Asian students are more likely to participate in dual enrollment than Black and Hispanic ones (38 percent of both white and Asian students versus 27 percent of Black students and 30 percent of Hispanic ones). Despite its success with Latinos, Texas’s dual credit program under-enrolls Black students, who made up just 7 percent of dual credit students in 2015 even though they comprised 12 percent of Texas students.

Dual credit programs can also be expensive, which might explain part of the disparities in participation. Even though many states and districts cover the tuition cost, the number of classes covered might be limited, and students must still pay for books and fees. At Northern Virginia Community College, for example, dual enrollment costs $185.50 per credit hour, which means a three-credit course would cost $556. And as with AP, the students who do best in dual credit classes tend to be the ones who are already equipped to succeed.

But if achieving greater equity is the goal, dual enrollment has more potential than AP, and more states may want to replicate Kentucky’s scholarships to help defray the costs. The partnerships created between high schools and community colleges through dual enrollment could mean more seamless transitions between high school and college, and more support for students in and out of the classroom. Flexibility in curricula means that students can choose the courses best suited to their interests and career goals. “By design, because it is rooted in community, it is going to be more equitable,” said Phase Two Advisory’s Melinda Karp. 

Nevertheless, the bottom line is that no single program—whether dual enrollment or AP—can substitute for the top-to-bottom reforms that K–12 education needs. “The challenge is that AP is coming in at the very tail of the educational experience,” the University of Denver’s Klopfenstein said. “While it’s certainly desirable to make AP accessible to all, the first and best solution would be to make sure that all kids are having a K-through-10 educational experience that prepares them to be ready for AP.”

The post AP’s Equity Face-Plant appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The 2020 presidential election happened amid extraordinary levels of voter turnout. According to the Census Bureau, 66.8 percent of eligible adults cast ballots in the race, the highest rate since 1992. Other estimates suggest that last year’s turnout rate bested the 1992 level, and may be the highest since 1900.

As usual, rates correlated heavily with age. But for the first time since the U.S. let 18-year-olds vote, more than half of all 18- to 24-year-olds cast ballots. The 51.4 percent of young people who voted blows the 2016 mark—39.4 percent—out of the water. In fact, the increase in youth voting is one of the most striking shifts among any demographic. Turnout among 18- to 24-year-olds grew by more than double the overall increase from 2016: 12 percentage points versus 5.4 points.

The surge in youth voting stemmed, in part, from how charged the election was. Donald Trump is a mobilization machine, and his polarizing presence atop the ticket turned out millions of progressives and conservatives who might have otherwise stayed home. But part of why youth turnout shot up is thanks to the deliberate work of student voting organizers, who mobilized young Americans to register and cast ballots despite the pandemic and restrictive voting laws. This includes national groups like the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, which helps schools develop registration and turnout plans. It also includes smaller, local organizations. Special credit goes to the many on-campus, student-led groups that worked to get their peers to the polls.

But student organizers have the best chance of success when they are actively supported by their administrations. That’s why each year at the Monthly, we release an honor roll listing the colleges doing the most to turn their students into citizens. To make the honor roll, schools must meet multiple criteria. For this year’s iteration, they had to submit action plans to ALL IN for 2018 and 2020. Schools needed to have signed up to receive data from the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE), which calculates college-specific registration and voting rates. (Information for 2020 is not yet available.) And they must have made both their 2016 and 2018 NSLVE data available to the public. In short, schools need to have shown a repeated commitment to increasing student voting—and have been transparent about the results.

Like youth voting rates overall, our honor roll grew. This year, a total of 205 schools made the list, 47 more institutions than in 2020. What didn’t change is the eclectic nature of the honored campuses. There are plenty of elite schools on the list, such as Northwestern University. But, as was true last year, plenty of famous colleges missed out. The majority of honorees are public institutions, including many community colleges.

The list relies on participation in programs such as ALL IN and NSLVE because raw turnout data isn’t available for all institutions. But to reward truly standout colleges, we ordered the honor roll by voter registration rate. The top-performing school—the Maryland Institute College of Art, or MICA—receives its own distinction for having a registration rate above 95 percent. The next 15 schools are also specially demarcated for topping 85 percent.

It is wonderful to see that both our honor roll and youth voting grew. But that doesn’t mean colleges or activists can rest on their laurels. There are more than 1,000 schools that don’t make the cut. Youth turnout rates continue to sit far below the rate for older Americans. It is unclear if Generation Z will turn out in force in 2022 or 2024, especially if Trump doesn’t challenge Biden. And GOP-controlled states are already at work passing new, even more burdensome restrictions to the franchise. Maintaining last year’s youth voting rates will be a battle. Increasing turnout further will be a war.

But it’s one that we’re prepared to wage at the Monthly. We have faith that activists will continue to fight as well. Many of today’s leading political issues—especially the devastation wrought by climate change—are of particular importance to younger generations. It is imperative that colleges do everything they can to get their students to vote.

The post America’s Best Colleges for Student Voting appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The impact of the coronavirus pandemic on students and colleges will be felt for a generation to come. Many colleges lost much of their financial reserves as campuses emptied out for months and students returned under expensive social distancing and sanitizing protocols. Lower-income families were hit harder by the pandemic. Many less wealthy Americans lost their jobs, and many lost their lives, especially if they were blue-collar employees who could not work from home. Finally, enrollment fell sharply over the past year, with the largest declines among racial minorities, lower-income students, and men. 

These factors have made it more important than ever for colleges to demonstrate their value to students and society as a whole. For the 10th year, we produced a ranking of Best Bang for the Buck colleges, which is laser focused on showing which colleges do a good job promoting social mobility—and which don’t. 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 are primarily the unsung heroes of American higher education: colleges with strong regional reputations that serve large numbers of students from low-income families and help them graduate and succeed in the labor market. A few of America’s wealthiest colleges also make appearances near the top of the lists, but many colleges with billion-dollar endowments lag far behind. In the Northeast, the Massachusetts Maritime Academy takes top billing, followed by the City University of New York’s Baruch College, MIT, and Rutgers-Newark. Rutgers-Newark graduates 71 percent of its students and enrolls far more Pell Grant recipients than expected. Its students are able to start quickly repaying their loans.

In the South and Midwest, Berea College and College of the Ozarks maintain their top rankings thanks to their economic diversity, relatively strong graduation rates, and commitment to meeting students’ financial need. The University of Illinois and Texas A&M flagship campuses are second in their respective regions and both graduate more than 1,000 Pell recipients each year. Vanderbilt, Rice, and Northwestern all appear in the top 10 due to strong outcomes for the modest number of lower-income students they serve.  

In the Southeast, the University of South Florida’s Sarasota-Manatee campus edges out the University of Florida and James Madison University for top billing, with Appalachian State University aptly representing regional public universities. Out west, the California State University system tightened its grip on the top of the rankings, grabbing seven of the top 10 spots and 18 of the top 30 positions. When net prices are generally below $10,000 per year, students make strong progress repaying their loans, and students graduate at high rates across the system, it is hard for other universities to compete. 

We only display the top 50 colleges in print. Online, we list the full 200-plus colleges per region. Toward the bottom of those rankings, we find a mix of middling public and private nonprofit colleges along with a number of for-profit college chains. Here at the Monthly, we like to shine the spotlight on colleges with the resources to do better. Take, for example, Tulane University, which ranked 205 among 211 colleges in the South despite an endowment of nearly $1.5 billion. While much of a university’s endowment is restricted to be used for purposes stated by donors, Tulane still has enough money floating around to improve.

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A few years ago, the higher education staff at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation posed a simple-sounding question: What is the value of a postsecondary education, and how do you measure it? To figure that out, the foundation partnered with the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a D.C. think tank, and empaneled a diverse group of academics, think tank scholars, college presidents, students, government officials, and a couple of journalists (including yours truly). Thus was born the Post-secondary Value Commission.

The group’s original intent was to focus on the economic value of a degree or credential from a specific school to individual students. But we quickly realized that there are vast differences between what students of different races, genders, and income groups pay (including via loans) to get a degree, and in what they earn after college. So equity became central to our work. 

We then recognized that the same degree from a given college can produce not only different incomes for different students, but also vastly different amounts of wealth, especially between Black and white students. So we added wealth as a key variable. 

It then became apparent that the focus on students’ economic well-being was too narrow. Governments invest hundreds of billions of dollars annually in our higher education system; what is the return on that investment, and how do you measure it? Overall GDP growth? Additional tax revenues? What about the benefit to the country of colleges preparing students to become active citizens who, through their individual efforts, help solve the equity issues that were our chief concern?

In short, that simple question did not have a simple answer. Still, after two years of meetings, Zoom calls, and hard work from a crack team of researchers—one of whom is the Monthly’s own data editor, Robert Kelchen of the University of Tennessee—the commission released a remarkable report this spring containing a package of conceptual tools that I suspect will define for years to come how higher education experts, policy makers, and average citizens approach that question.

My favorite tool is the “value threshold” chart reprinted on this page. It gives precise shape to an intuitive idea: that the long-term economic value of a college education for any individual student can range from “not worth the investment” to “lets me earn a middle-class income” to “allows me to save for a comfortable retirement.” 

Unfortunately, the federal government does not publish numbers fine-grained enough for outside organizations to use the tool to assess individual colleges. It could tomorrow, however, if Congress would pass the College Transparency Act, as this magazine has long advocated. The bill would lift a ban on data sharing that Congress itself imposed—on mostly bogus privacy grounds—under pressure from trade associations for colleges that might not look so good once the numbers are public. 

Until then, we think the Washington Monthly’s annual college rankings provide the best existing measures of the value individual colleges offer to individual students and to the country as a whole. (So does the Lumina Foundation, which for more than a decade has generously funded this issue of the magazine, and the Gates Foundation, which also kindly supports our higher education coverage.) We use available federal and other data to rank colleges based on their record of recruiting and graduating students of modest means, producing scholarly research, and encouraging students to be active citizens by voting and performing military or civilian service. And when there’s enough data for outside groups to use the Post-secondary Value Commission’s tools, we will be the first in line. 

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Ten years in the Supreme Court press gallery leaves one with a few surreal memories. In 2012, for example, former Solicitor General Seth Waxman, arguing against an FCC fine for showing brief nudity on network TV, pointed at the marble courtroom frieze above the startled justices’ heads: “There’s a bare buttock there,” he said, “and there’s a bare buttock here.” In 2011, the Kansas corrections official Margie Phelps, defending her father’s homophobic Westboro Baptist Church, argued that the First Amendment covers even direct harassment unless it is “approaching an individual up close and in their grill to berate them”—leaving the aged justices visibly puzzled about why anyone would interfere with an outdoor barbecue. In 2016, Justice Clarence Thomas produced gasps in the courtroom when he broke a decade-long silence to defend the Second Amendment “rights” of domestic abusers. 

And in 2012, Justice Stephen Breyer, in his unforgettable vocal mash-up of Edward Everett Horton and Mister Rogers’s King Friday XIII, told the lawyer for an American citizen tortured to death by the Palestinian Authority, “I think I have to say that you are on a weak wicket.” 

Breyer’s legal point was well taken (the victim’s family eventually lost, 9–0). Yet only Stephen Breyer, the Oxford-educated son-in-law of the Viscount Blakenham, would have bowled a cricket metaphor at an unsuspecting American lawyer. 

But fast bowling is all in a day’s work for Breyer, a justice like no other. I must begin this piece by confessing my deep admiration for the man’s intellectual gifts, his good nature, and his idiosyncratic sense of humor. His mind is capacious, lightning fast, and unpredictable. No other justice in history, I daresay, has not only read the more than 4,000 pages of Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu in the original French, but read them twice, back to back. 

While the conservative justices, by and large, won their seats as courtiers to Republican presidents, Breyer was once a congressional staffer. He knows a great deal about how legislation is actually created and implemented and does not share the majority’s contempt for elected legislators. Breyer is perhaps the last major advocate of legal pragmatism—a venerable system of thought that concerns itself first and foremost not with the abstract meaning of words or the “understanding” attributed to long-dead Framers, but to the real-world consequences of a legal outcome. For Breyer, those consequences are to be assessed for their contribution (or detriment) to “active liberty,” the ability of ordinary citizens to participate in democratic self-government. That liberty, he has argued in the past, is the aim of the Constitution, and interpreting its words without understanding that purpose is, well, simply not playing the game. 

This concern with consequences, coupled with a lucid grasp of administrative law and practice, has given rise to some brilliant opinions. My own favorite is his dissent in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission. In McCutcheon, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a plurality, briskly invalidated a federal statute limiting the number of candidates a wealthy donor could back in one federal election season and the total amount such a donor could give across the board. The case did not challenge the upper limit on each individual contribution, but the federal government argued that striking down the other limits would make the remaining one hard to enforce. Roberts waved away such hesitation: If donors overstepped, Roberts said, then the FEC would simply fine them. In his dissent, Breyer outlined in detail the precise ways that the rich would use to circumvent the FEC (as they have)—then added that Roberts’s trust in FEC enforcement reminded him of Oscar Wilde, who said of the death of Little Nell in Charles Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop, “One must have a heart of stone to read [it] without laughing.”

As the above suggests, Breyer lives in a world of his own. Sometimes (as in McCutcheon) it intersects with the world the rest of us inhabit. But other parts of it do not. Breyer lays out the view from those other parts in his new book, The Authority of the Court and the Perils of Politics. And it must be said—even by a Breyer admirer like me—that in this particular inning it is he who is on a weak wicket. 

The book is based on a lecture Breyer delivered on April 7, 2021—after the contentious 2020 election, the murderous Trumpite invasion of the Capitol, the movement to enlarge or revamp the Supreme Court, and the demands from some Democrats that Breyer retire. Breyer’s defense of the Court acknowledges none of this. But it must be read, at least by implication, as a critique of the project of Court reform and an apologia for his own decision to remain on the Court at the age of 82 rather than allow President Biden to appoint a younger liberal justice. The defense of the Court and of judicial review he offers is such an assemblage of bromides—so close to the boilerplate in any old American government text, and so far from the reality of contemporary American public life—that I, too, am reminded of Oscar Wilde. 

The book is, however, not funny. Read it and weep.

In Breyer’s recounting, the Supreme Court’s value derives from its perceived legitimacy: “the public’s willingness to respect its decisions—even those with which they disagree, and even when they believe a decision seriously mistaken.” Current proposals to change the Court’s functions or size risk destroying that willingness, he argues, and thus “the rule of law itself.” 

Public acceptance of the Court has served the nation well, Breyer says. To reach that conclusion he provides a distinctly tarted-up version of the Court’s history. True, that unfortunate Dred Scott business caused a spot of bother. But that seems to be the only blot Breyer is willing to concede. Plessy v. Ferguson, with its endorsement of segregation, does not rate a mention, nor do the Civil Rights Cases, which invalidated the visionary Civil Rights Act of 1875. Giles v. Harris, which rendered the Fifteenth Amendment unenforceable on the grounds that white southerners wouldn’t obey it, has a cameo, but Breyer seems to find it a prudent decision about the limits on Court’s authority rather than a cynical surrender to racism. Lochner v. New York and the Court’s 50-year vendetta against economic and labor reform barely rates a mention. 

Throughout this history, Breyer says repeatedly, we can all take satisfaction in “the general tendency of the public to respect and to follow judicial decisions.” Take that respect away and 

what, then, would have happened to all those Americans who espoused unpopular political beliefs, to those who practiced or advocated minority religions, to those who argued for an end to legal segregation in the South? What would have happened to criminal defendants unable to afford a lawyer, to those whose houses government officials wished to search without probable cause, to those whose property government wished to seize with little or no compensation? 

That’s an excellent question, but an incomplete one—for no history of the Court can have any worth if it does not also ask what did happen to the generations of Black Americans doomed to segregation after the Civil Rights Cases and Plessy, to the generations of children who coughed their lives out in the mines and mills after the Court voided federal child labor laws, to the workers who lost the right to unionize when the Court invalidated restrictions against “yellow dog” contracts, to the 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans confined in concentration camps approved in Korematsu v. United States, to Native people whose religious practices the Court has treated with contempt in Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association and Employment Division v. Smith, to the victims of police violence who to this day can never receive justice because of the Court’s extreme solicitude for law enforcement, to the inmates who die in agony because the Court has lost interest in policing states’ grotesque methods of execution? 

Has the Court really, on the whole, advanced human rights and democracy more than it has retarded them? There is a serious case to be made that American society would be freer and happier without the Court’s periodic invalidation of federal and state statutes—that Congress has been over time a far more dependable steward of individual rights than has the Court (or the executive branch). Congress wrote the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments as a rebuke to the antebellum Court; a century later, the House and Senate passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, the twin pieces of legislation that actually brought down southern apartheid. 

Breyer surely knows of that argument, but he is unwilling to confront it. Though he admits that the Court has had “ups and downs,” we are by and large asked to take its majesty on faith. 

But the Court’s past, even if it were as glorious as Breyer claims, has only limited relevance to the present Supreme Court of the United States. Today’s Court is quite a different kettle of fish from the Court as it existed even as recently as February 2016, when Antonin Scalia died. 

Since then, the public has seen one party relentlessly assault all democratic and legal norms in its stunningly successful—and shamelessly explicit—campaign to make the Court into a guarantor of right-wing policy and one-party rule. The abduction of the seat left empty by Scalia; the banana republic–style installation of the accused rapist Brett Kavanaugh; and finally the brutal hypocrisy of jamming Amy Coney Barrett into Ruth Ginsburg’s former seat, have been too blatant and too recent for millions of Americans to ignore. And lecturing the people—telling us we should pretend we didn’t see these acts—just will not do. 

As lectures on judging go, Breyer’s is surprisingly devoid of evidence. He insists that judges do not make political decisions. But he bolsters this simply by saying it must be true since they don’t think of themselves as making political decisions, a tautological assurance we as good citizens must accept. Nobody required Stephen Breyer to write this book at this time. But having decided to weigh in on these issues, he owes the nation a decent respect for its intelligence. 

He also owes more respect for himself, and specifically his past experience. As a former Senate staffer, Breyer should be far more aware of the institutional realities than this book suggests. As the proponent of active liberty, he should understand that institutions are worthy of our concern only if they actually serve to make a democratic system better. The rest of us do not exist to exalt the Court; justices, no matter how lofty, are our servants, not the other way around. 

The Court’s legitimacy, then, is to be regained, if at all, either by the Court’s willingness to give up its current role as partisan enforcer (witness the recent voting rights, gerrymandering, and campaign finance decisions) or by the intervention of the parts of our political system that still believe courts are a part of, not set above and immune from, democracy. The current Court may have a marble palace, it may swathe itself in deference, it may guard its internal secrecy, but it is of little value to anyone unless it serves to defend the American project of self-government under law. That duty has already been stripped from it by the rawest of politics, and demanding reverence from the rest of us is not only futile but also a bit silly. It is akin to Dickens’s Sir Leicester Dedlock and his noble friends in Bleak House, who deplored the lack of public faith in the peerage, “as though a low fellow should unaccountably lose faith in a bad shilling after finding it out!”

But uncritical reverence is what Breyer demands of us. He criticizes the media, which must stop referring to justices by noting the president who appointed them or even describing them as “liberal” or “conservative.” He also instructs senators to cease describing nominees as “too liberal or too conservative, and thus ‘outside the mainstream.’ ” And he tells schools to teach civics once again, so that students understand the importance of the Court. 

Given the present conditions, these claims are obviously exasperating. But they’re also somewhat sad. There is an elegiac tone about The Authority of the Court, a threnody to what judging used to be, with echoes of Dylan Thomas:

Good men, the last wave by, crying
how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced
in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the
light.

Is Breyer determined to rage, to serve as a justice on the Court until he is bloody well ready to leave it, actuarial charts be damned? This book suggests he might. 

Being myself well beyond the biblical threescore years and ten, I would never tell such a good man that it is time for him to go gentle into that good night (especially since nothing seems more likely to wedge him into place than such demands by a motley crew of activists and law scholars).

But I will say this: Anyone who really believes in the Little Nell vision set out in this book has been looking down from an Empyrean height at the rest of us for far too long.

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