It’s safe to say that the current generation of college students is getting an education unlike any other in American history. They spent the spring and summer in pandemic-induced disruption, isolation, and stress, with vanished jobs and internships, taking hastily arranged online classes, and, in most cases, paying the same tuition that they would have if they had been on campus.

Now, as students are beginning their fall semester, the virus is still not under control. Most have been offered the option of continuing to take online classes while being urged, and in some cases all but forced, to move back on campus and attend in-person classes by colleges that need the dorm revenue—a vast socio-epidemiological experiment that will likely be abandoned amid sickness and unnecessary death. Those attending poorly resourced state schools—disproportionately minority and low-income students—probably aren’t even getting the benefit of the weekly or daily virus testing that elite private schools are providing.

Current college students have also gotten a real-world education in the power of political activism. This summer, in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, large numbers of them took to the streets in support of Black Lives Matter. In November, these same students will have a chance to vote in a national election, many for the first time. It will, to say the least, be no ordinary election—especially for young people, who, by definition, will have to live with the consequences longer than older Americans.

These searing generational experiences are likely to have long-term consequences none of us can predict. But it is a good bet that in the short term they will lead today’s college students to demand fundamental change from the institutions they experience most directly: the colleges and universities they attend.

What might they demand? Well, for starters, they are going to want to see schools make a greater effort to do right by students who are Black, Latino, and Native American, or who come from low-income backgrounds. They are going to want to see colleges double down on their efforts to produce the research and technologies that will create the new high-paying jobs they will need to sustain themselves, as well as the solutions to climate change and other existential threats. And they are going to want their institutions not just to tolerate their civic activism but to sincerely encourage it.

What today’s students could use is a reliable tool to gauge how well their colleges measure up on these demands. As it happens, there is one. The Washington Monthly’s annual college guide ranks individual schools based on how well they promote upward mobility, research, and civic engagement. These criteria are quite different from those employed by U.S. News & World Report, which ranks schools based on their wealth, exclusivity, and prestige. The resulting lists of best colleges are, naturally, quite different too, and those differences reveal a great deal about what is right and wrong with the American higher education system. 

The first thing to note about our top 20 national universities is that 11 of them are state schools. By contrast, in the U.S. News rankings, 19 of the top 20 national universities are elite private ones. The public universities on our list range from prestigious flagships like UCLA—the only public university in U.S. News’s top 20—to institutions that don’t even crack U.S. News’s top 50—including the University of Washington, Texas A&M, and Utah State University. In fact, Utah State, number 10 on our list, ranks number 254 on U.S. News’s.  

You might also notice that a number of the elite private national universities that score in U.S. News’s top 20 do less well on ours—including Northwestern (number 30 on our list), Brown (37), and Johns Hopkins (54). There are differences, too, in the liberal arts category. Berea College, ranked third on our list, is 46th on U.S. News’s. St. Mary’s College of Maryland, number 29 on our list, is number 92 on theirs.

There’s a simple explanation for these divergences: The two magazines are, in many ways, not measuring the same things. U.S. News relies on such metrics as student SAT/ACT scores, alumni donations, and the results of a survey it conducts of academics and administrators, asking them to gauge the reputations of their peer institutions. These aren’t bad measures if you’re an upper-income family trying to get your kid into a fancy school. None of this data, however, factors into the Washington Monthly’s rankings, because we don’t think it’s relevant to the question we’re asking, which is this: Which colleges deliver the best results for taxpayers—who invest more than $150 billion annually in student financial aid—and for typical students, especially those who are minorities, the first in their family to attend college, or of modest means?

Instead, the Washington Monthly’s rankings are based on data U.S. News incorporates barely or not at all. These include the net price a school charges lower-income families (part of our social mobility category), how many of its students go on to get PhDs (part of our research category), and the degree to which it encourages its students to vote (part of our service category). 

The most noteworthy overlap between our lists and U.S. News’s is at the tippy top—the Stanfords, Harvards, and Yales of the country. These universities are not only prestigious and selective. They also provide generous financial aid to the lower-income students they admit. The operative phrase, however, is “lower-income students they admit”—because they don’t admit many. For purposes of comparison, consider the University of Florida, ranked 15th on the Monthly’s rankings. Last year UF graduated more low-income students receiving Pell Grants than did Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Yale, Princeton, and Duke combined. (It is also the seventh-biggest producer of science and engineering PhDs in the country and gets a near-perfect score for its support of student voting.) And it manages this extraordinary feat without the kind of huge endowments that the Ivy League schools use to fund their student aid packages—endowments larger than the GDP of many countries. So while the elite schools deserve kudos for generosity toward their lower-income students, their model of financing—graduate students who go on to insanely lucrative careers in investment banking and then kick back a portion of their outsized gains to the university—isn’t exactly admirable, or remotely replicable. 

This gets at a larger point: The system in which colleges are forced to operate—and that the U.S. News rankings both reflect and enable—is rigged in favor of the wealthy and well connected, and that system has to change, for the good of the country. 

You can see this most clearly in the fate of many small, private nonprofit schools that aren’t havens for wealthy students. Hiram College of Ohio, for instance, has a proud history—President James Garfield was an alum—and performs well on our rankings. It ranks third on our bachelor’s colleges list, in part for enrolling large numbers of first-generation college students and sending them off to PhD programs and the Peace Corps. But Hiram has also struggled financially. In 2014, deep in debt, it dropped several majors, including art history, and added more in-demand ones, like sports medicine. It also recently cut its tuition in an effort to attract more students. While these tough but necessary moves helped, the pandemic again throws its future into question. 

Another worthy but financially stressed institution is Canisius College, a private Jesuit school in Buffalo, New York. Canisius ranks in the top fifth of our list of master’s universities because its graduation rate is far higher than student demographics would predict, and its students go on to get PhDs at high rates. But COVID-19 has forced the college, which was already struggling, to announce layoffs and eliminate several majors. 

The pandemic may be hastening what some have long predicted: the eventual demise of many private nonprofit colleges. The vulnerable ones are those that serve ordinary rather than elite students. Open-access public colleges and universities are also at risk, not of extinction so much as of being further hollowed out by cuts to their funding from state governments whose tax revenues are plummeting. 

An influx of federal money may stave off immediate disaster. But it won’t slow the overall trend of a higher education system in which schools that attract the well-off grow richer while those that serve everyone else grow poorer—forcing non-affluent students to pay ever-higher tuition, take on ever-growing amounts of debt, and mortgage their futures.

What America needs is a New Deal for higher education—one that will reverse this trend while maintaining the institutional diversity and autonomy that has long made this country’s higher education system the envy of the world. In this issue, the longtime Washington Monthly writer and guest editor Kevin Carey proposes such a plan . We think it’s brilliant and pragmatic, and we hope you will, too. 

Change can’t come quickly enough, especially for students of color, who are hurt the most by the inequities baked into the current system. We know, for instance, that Black students disproportionately attend under-resourced community and four-year colleges; have to take on higher levels of debt than white students to pay for it, on average; graduate at far lower rates; and, even when they do graduate, earn less in the workforce. 

What we don’t know is how individual colleges contribute, for better or worse, to these outcomes. That’s because little of the federal data that researchers—and this magazine—use to assess college performance is broken down by race. Until that changes, imperfect workarounds are the best we can do. We gave it a shot in this issue by tapping a new data set from the U.S. Department of Education to create a first-ever list of colleges where majors popular with Black students lead to decent-paying jobs. 

Elsewhere in this issue, Daniel Block examines some new thinking among Black academics about how to help more students of color enter and succeed in STEM fields. Jamaal Abdul-Alim looks at a program that was wildly successful at boosting completion rates at two-year schools, and why policymakers let it wither away. And Anne Kim reports on a technical training program that employers are actually willing to pay for—one that focuses on soft skills. 

Since we began publishing our annual college rankings in 2005, we’ve been warning that America’s higher education system is an inequitable, unsustainable mess that rips off too many of the students it is meant to help. Now, with that system teetering on the brink, we may be at an opportune moment to fundamentally change it. And the current generation of students, the most screwed yet, may be the ones to push us to finally act.

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

Millard McElwee was 12 years old when Hurricane Katrina slammed into Louisiana. Having evacuated to the relative safety of Shreveport before the storm hit, McElwee at first didn’t realize the enormity of the catastrophe. But as his family drove back to their suburban New Orleans home, the carnage was unmistakable. Trees were down. Towns all along Interstate 55 were in blackouts. Even Baton Rouge appeared to have no power. “It’s still something I vividly remember,” McElwee said of the outages. “You could tell the difference, even in the cities during the day.”

While McElwee’s own home was without electricity for a month, he was still lucky: Located north of the city, his house hadn’t flooded. Many of his relatives, who lived in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward and Metairie, weren’t so fortunate. Some moved in with McElwee temporarily. At one point, his family’s two-bedroom house and office trailer hosted 13 people. They depended on canned water and National Guard–issued ready-to-eat meals, or MREs.

“It was nasty,” McElwee said of the meals, which are used by the Department of Defense to sustain troops in combat. He chuckled. “It was nasty back then when they gave it to us. It was nasty years later when we tried it again to see if it would get any better.”

Eating the foul-tasting MREs is one of McElwee’s most striking Katrina memories. But it’s hardly the only facet of the storm that left a lasting impression. McElwee remembers engineering experts from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of California, Berkeley, coming to the city to assess what had gone wrong. He recalls talking with his father about why the levees and the Army Corps of Engineers had failed so badly. It gave him a new goal: to become an engineer himself so he could better protect people from catastrophes. 

After the storm, McElwee dedicated himself to his classes, becoming a straight-A student. He began looking at the engineering programs of various universities. He visited MIT’s website daily. Doing so helped him find the school’s Minority Introduction to Engineering and Science program—a renowned and selective academic camp for teenagers from underrepresented communities. McElwee, who is Black, attended, and then went on to study civil engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Now he is a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, where he works on quantifying how natural disasters impact communities of color. 

“Natural disasters don’t discriminate,” McElwee, now 27, explained. “But we do know there are disparities in the responses and reaction times.” His job is to figure out how large the disparities are and why they exist. To that end, in 2019, McElwee built a mathematical model that predicts how floods impact travel times in New Orleans. It’s the first to explore the reasons these times go up more for minorities. One explanation for the discrepancy, he found, is that marginalized groups typically have to travel farther for work. But another is that the infrastructure in their neighborhoods is more vulnerable, and once it’s damaged, authorities are slower to fix it. Minorities “typically live in communities that haven’t had as much investment in terms of recovery of the network,” McElwee told me. “Previous natural disasters have shown that these areas are usually not serviced as quickly.”

McElwee’s work fits into a broader trend among Black people in STEM fields. According to experts, scientists of color are more likely than their white peers to work on problems with a clear relationship to issues of equity. “There have been several studies that have shown that Black students in particular, and students of color more broadly, tend to pursue careers that are going to allow them to have some sort of social justice orientation,” said Tia Madkins, an education professor at the University of Texas at Austin. In a 2015 study of 2,697 undergraduate STEM students, more than 50 percent of under-represented students of color said working for social change was either “essential” or “very important” to their career goals. For others, the figure was just 37 percent.

But, unfortunately, there aren’t many Black students in the STEM fields. Black people are 12 percent of the U.S. population and 13.3 percent of its undergraduates. Yet in recent years, they have received just 4.9 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded in math, 4.5 percent of those awarded in computer science, 4 percent of those awarded in civil engineering, 3.7 percent of those awarded in chemical engineering, and 3.1 percent of those awarded in mechanical engineering—percentages that have barely changed over time. Among graduate students, the disparities are similarly dramatic. Black Americans, for example, make up just 4 percent of all doctorates awarded in engineering fields.

STEM majors earn more than most other majors, and the dearth of Black students in these disciplines is part of why Black college graduates on the whole make so much less than their white counterparts. (Though it’s certainly not the only reason; Black STEM graduates earn less than white ones in the same industries.) It has led many academics to explore why so few Black students study technical subjects. The answer is complex, with structural causes that can date back to elementary school. But according to interviews with multiple Black academics, it’s about far more than just K–12 education. Black students’ disproportionate interest in social justice and the absence of Black STEM majors are causally related. In their courses and jobs, most STEM faculty and employers do not make social change a focus. And for many Black students, that’s a serious problem.

“There is strong professional and personal dissonance that makes it difficult for them to stay in STEM fields,” said Ebony McGee, a professor at Vanderbilt University who researches Black students’ professional motivations. These students are leaving the sciences, she told me, “not because they cannot do the work but because they cannot see themselves in traditional STEM fields.” McElwee, in other words, is an outlier in engineering not just because of his skin color. He’s an outlier in engineering because of his research.

That’s unfortunate for many reasons, not the least of which is that some of the greatest injustices in American society need technical solutions. Building offices and apartments that are greener will require clever engineering. To make online education more effective, especially for communities that lack reliable internet access, the U.S. will need socially minded computer scientists. Fixing health care inequities demands better medical expertise and technology.

But distressing as it may be, the current tendency for STEM academics to ignore social justice presents a major opportunity. If Black STEM students are disproportionately interested in using their degrees to make the world more equitable and fair, then STEM departments can attract and retain more Black students by making these themes central to their curriculums. Doing so will have two sets of benefits: It will help Black people enter well-paying professions, and it will help create a corps of scientists and engineers focused on making a more just planet.

If you look at a list of the most popular majors for Black students, disciplines associated with public service are on top. More than 26 percent of recent health and medical administration graduates are Black, nearly double the national average. In social work and sociology, the numbers are 22 percent and 18.6 percent, respectively. In criminal justice, 20 percent of recent graduates are Black. 

These are all extraordinarily important fields of study. At some colleges, they can even pay well right after graduating (see “Colleges Where Majors Popular with Black Students Pay Well”). But these are the exceptions. Overwhelmingly, majors with explicit social justice upsides pay considerably less than STEM. It’s a fact that reflects poorly on the United States, which chronically undervalues professions dedicated to helping others. 

But it’s a fact nonetheless, and one that makes researchers concerned about the future earnings of young Black Americans. “[College] might be the only opportunity there is for them to enter the middle class,” Nicole Smith, the chief economist at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, told me. While students should be free to pick their own areas of study, Smith said, it’s especially important for people of color to consider their career prospects when deciding. “Your very first job is a platform from which all of your other wages will be determined,” she said.

In explaining why so few Black students study STEM, Smith—like many other education experts—honed in on America’s segregated K–12 education system. It’s easy to see why. Institutionalized racism has shut Black Americans out of neighborhoods with high-performing schools and funneled them into districts with fewer monetary and academic resources. As a result, many Black students arrive at college without the math and science skills needed to pursue advanced STEM classes. “It’s a done deal,” Smith told me.

But while the pipeline problem, as it’s often called in policy circles, is real, it cannot by itself explain the disparity. In a 2019 study of racial gaps in STEM, three researchers followed the academic trajectories of more than 5,000 Black, Latino, and white American college students. They compared Black students, Latino students, and white students who had similar levels of academic preparation, had similar financial backgrounds, and were alike in all manner of other ways—from their parents’ education levels to their SAT scores. They found that Black STEM students were 14 percentage points more likely to switch out of STEM than white students from similar circumstances, and 15 percentage points more likely to drop out of school altogether. Latino STEM students were 14 percentage points more likely to drop out of college than similarly positioned white ones. (Notably, this pattern wasn’t present in non-STEM fields.)

“This was not a transfer and dropping-out pattern that we found among students who were underprepared,” said Yasmiyn Irizarry, a quantitative sociologist at UT Austin and one of the paper’s authors. “This was among students that were equally prepared.”

So what else is at play? Many academics cite the chronically low number of Black faculty in technical fields. It’s a compelling explanation. Research suggests that the lack of Black STEM academics means that many Black STEM students struggle to envision themselves progressing in their disciplines. One 2019 study by a collection of psychology professors and STEM researchers found that Black female STEM students were far more likely to experience feelings of belonging with Black professors than with white ones. Indeed, many Black female STEM students at largely white institutions told the surveyors they had no mentors. This has very tangible consequences. Research shows that students of color perform better on tests when faculty of color are present, and there’s a positive correlation between the number of minority faculty at a school and the likelihood that its students of color persist. 

When I spoke to Black STEM graduates who attended predominantly white schools, several said they might have left had it not been for the support of Black faculty. Raheem Beyah, for example, Georgia Institute of Technology’s vice president for interdisciplinary research and an electrical engineering professor, partially credited his success to the mentorship of Gary May, a Black engineer famous both for his work on computer-aided manufacturing and for his efforts to bring minority students into STEM fields. Beyah tries to pay it forward. “When students come into my office, I know what their concerns are, because I had the same concerns,” he said.

Indeed, simply seeing other, more advanced Black students can make an impact. Tahira Reid-Smith, an engineering professor at Purdue University, decided to study mechanical engineering on the recommendation of an older Black classmate. She opted to become an academic after watching several other Black students in her Bible study group do so. “It was implicitly inspiring,” she said.

It’s therefore not surprising that historically Black colleges and universities are the biggest producers of Black engineers and scientists. A full 27 percent of Black students with bachelor’s degrees in STEM fields went to HBCUs. Several of these schools have particularly excellent track records of graduating students into high-paying jobs. According to a Washington Monthly analysis of new program-level data offered by the Department of Education, for example, Tuskegee University’s mechanical engineering graduates have a median income of $65,300 in their first year after graduating, which exceeds the median first-year income for all mechanical engineering graduates by roughly $3,000. Its chemical engineering graduates have a median income of $67,200—also well above average.

But while it’s critical that schools hire more Black STEM faculty and build communities of Black students, it still won’t be enough. Even with an aggressive push, reaching racial parity in STEM departments will take time—particularly for tenured positions, where turnover is especially slow. And while many Black faculty and older students enjoy mentoring, the process places a large, unpaid service burden on people who are already overstretched.

“I don’t think this is about patching Black students to Black faculty,” said Irizarry. Instead, she told me, STEM departments in general—and their white professors in particular—need to think hard about why so many students of color are leaving. “A commitment to self-reflection is what is lacking.”

When it comes to race, STEM professors have much to reflect on. Departments can stereotype some Black students as underprepared despite evidence to the contrary. They can make others feel that they owe any success to affirmative action. There are plenty of reasons why highly qualified students of color feel unwelcome in technical fields. 

But one of the most overlooked is the focus of the STEM community itself—and its disconnect from the lived experiences of Black students. Surveys suggest that STEM professors and professionals tend to be interested in having students acquire technical expertise for its own sake, or in order to make money and promote America’s geopolitical advantage. Black students, disproportionately familiar with the many injustices in American society, tend to be more interested in acquiring technical expertise to effect social change. 

“The people who are in most STEM programs and run most STEM organizations are not from those same backgrounds and do not have those same kinds of concerns,” Irizarry told me. Their teaching, she said, can lead many Black students to feel lost or unwelcome. 

That can be true for everyone from freshmen to nearly complete PhDs. McElwee, for example, told me that both he and other Black, socially minded engineering students encounter pushback against their work. “I’ve had some Caucasian advisers or have heard of other Caucasian advisers saying, ‘Is this really important? How is this technical?’ Which is sometimes a little bit discouraging, because in addition to championing our own research, we have to defend these things being worth studying.”

But the worthiness should be evident, because the applications are everywhere. The city of Flint used a machine-learning algorithm to find lead-tainted water pipes. After Michael Brown’s shooting in 2014, three Black teenagers built an app that lets people rate their individual interactions with the police. Academic engineers are at the forefront of figuring out how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, perhaps the most technically challenging and politically urgent problem on the planet. This work helps the underserved in particular, but it also helps people in general. Everyone will in some way have to contend with the consequences of a dangerously changing environment.

Indeed, the upsides of socially conscious, diverse STEM grads should be apparent to even aggressive for-profits. Electric car sales are rising, and with better technology, consultancy firms believe that such vehicles will become extremely lucrative for auto manufacturers—while also helping fight climate change. Skin care companies could tap into a bigger market if they hired Black chemists who have thought at length about how cosmetics impact darker tones. Reid-Smith of Purdue got funding from Procter & Gamble to investigate how women can more effectively style curly hair. 

“A lot of women have gone natural, which means [they’ve] stopped putting chemical relaxers in their hair to permanently straighten their hair,” she explained. Instead, many have turned to blow dryers and flat irons to adjust patterning. But using too much heat can also permanently change hair patterns in unwanted ways. “There’s thousands and thousands of women trying to do tutorials on how to prevent heat damage, and I’m like, ‘You know, mechanical engineers study heat transfer. This would be an interesting, fun project to work on at a research level.’ ” 

Much of Reid-Smith’s career is an example of how the hard sciences can be used to make the world a better place. She works, for example, to examine how engineers and scientists can be more compassionate in the design of products and machines, including in the health care field.

“One need not be in a nonprofit to motivate social justice concerns,” Irizarry said. “An engineering firm that has a diverse group of engineers will be a lot more creative in how they think about the infrastructure of a particular community, which can improve social justice concerns while getting contracts and getting paid.”

It is, of course, unfair to make Black academics and professionals responsible for getting the STEM community to care about justice. Their white counterparts need to also see why these topics are important for the world—and why bringing more people of color into STEM fields is itself critical to making the U.S. more equitable. And one upside of having more socially conscious STEM curriculums is that all incoming students, not just Black ones, will be more exposed to the progressive applications of their subjects. The U.S. needs more engineers, mathematicians, and scientists of all backgrounds to focus on tackling problems like gun violence and environmental disasters. If STEM teachers and colleagues emphasize such issues, that’s more likely to happen.

But for now, many Black researchers are leading the charge. McElwee’s ultimate career goal, becoming a professor himself, is motivated by a desire to serve his community and bring more people like him into engineering. “I’ve yet to have an African American science, technology, or math professor at Carnegie Mellon or Berkeley,” he said. “I want to be part of the solution.” To that end, he’s taught for the last several years at Carnegie Mellon’s free summer STEM program for underrepresented high school students—the Summer Academy for Math and Science (SAMS)—an analog of the one he attended at MIT. He described it as the “excitement of his year.”

Much of his teaching is focused on showing students that STEM is fun. His pupils build popsicle stick bridges that can support hundreds of pounds and design pinball machines. But he also brings up themes of social justice. In one class, McElwee had students look at the effects of natural disasters, much as he does. That included talking about how they impact people of color. “The overall course was looking at various types of disasters, but also making them aware that there’s a ton of literature out here about communities that are disproportionately affected,” he said. “Even in the SAMS program, I try to distill those nuggets.”

The post Why STEM Needs to Focus on Social Justice appeared first on Washington Monthly.

There has never been a crisis in American higher education like the one we are facing today. While fall enrollment numbers are still in flux as colleges scramble to deal with an out-of-control pandemic, there is no question that all but the wealthiest institutions are facing deep financial pain and potential catastrophe. Even relatively conservative estimates like those published by the college financial planning firm Edmit suggest that, thanks to declining revenue and investment returns, one-third of all private colleges are now on track to run out of money within six years—a nearly 50 percent increase in estimates from 2019—and many are vulnerable to bankruptcy much sooner. Public universities, meanwhile, are about to be hammered by steep cuts in government funding, forcing them to raise prices, cut services, and turn away students, including millions of newly unemployed workers. 

The higher education system was weak before the coronavirus hit. Thanks to long-term enrollment declines, recent years have already seen a spate of small-college bankruptcies, each a minor tragedy of shocked students, heartsick alumni, and another town or city suddenly without a vital institution whose generational roots were somehow not deep enough. Many regional public universities had been steadily drained of vitality as state budget cuts accumulated, year after year. 

But COVID-19 has turbocharged all of these trends, with serious consequences for America’s most vulnerable. Low-income and first-generation students, immigrants, and people of color will be more likely to delay going to college or to drop out. Because colleges will charge more and families will have less, many more students will take out loans and, with diplomas or without, end up in default, widening economic inequality and the racial wealth gap. For many poorer communities, colleges have been like stubborn plants, protecting them from the erosion of globalization and economic disruption. When their schools close, it will further social decay. 

The need for college won’t go away, however, particularly with widespread unemployment. For-profit colleges backed by private equity will surge into the gap, using aggressive and deceptive marketing tactics to sign up naive students who will pay outsized tuition with no-questions-asked loans from the U.S. Department of Education. Much of that debt will never be repaid, ruining credit, wasting lives, and costing taxpayers billions. 

Many of these calamities can and should be mitigated in the short run by a sufficiently large federal rescue package. But even that will leave the system significantly worse than it was pre-pandemic: diminished, sclerotic, and vulnerable to the next unforeseen disaster. A fundamentally different policy architecture is needed for American higher education, and the best time to build it is now. This essay describes how that plan would work. 

The plan would change how the federal government supports colleges and universities, staving off immediate disaster, boosting resources for historically underfunded schools, and fundamentally realigning the financial incentives that drive many colleges to put money and status ahead of students. At the same time, the plan would usher in a new era of intercollegiate cooperation, transforming an archipelago of endangered, isolated institutions into a network of technology-enabled learning communities. 

Not all colleges would choose to participate in such a network, preserving the American tradition of diversity and independence in higher learning. But those outside the system would mostly be rich colleges that mostly serve rich students, and we would tax them in a way that helps pay for everyone else. 

The result would be a new higher education ecosystem that works for everyone, not just the chosen few. 

For a long time, the federal government did very little to fund higher learning. Until the mid-20th century, states paid the overwhelming majority of the costs for public colleges, students paid for private ones, and nobody paid that much. But after World War II, higher learning opened up to the masses as matriculation became a path to upward mobility for the burgeoning middle class, women entered the labor market, and the economy shifted toward white-collar work. The GI Bill set the precedent for the federal government’s market-oriented, voucher-based method for supporting higher education institutions: Give or lend students money, and let them decide where to spend it. 

This system, which persists to this day, has had its virtues. Collegiate learning and scholarship are complicated, sometimes esoteric, and not especially amenable to the kind of direct government regulation that often follows direct government subsidies. The market approach helped make American higher education uniquely large and diverse, encompassing thousands of institutions with different missions, philosophies, and student bodies. Nearly every existing college found a place in the new order. Elite research universities expanded spectacularly,
attracting money and talent from around the world. 

But the system rested on the strength of a few key assumptions that have steadily weakened over time. It presupposed that state governments would continue to sustain and expand public colleges and universities, as they had while building out regional public universities and community colleges in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. That turned out to be deeply mistaken. Some states, like California, New York, and North Carolina, invested in their public universities and kept tuition low. But others, like Pennsylvania, Colorado, and New Hampshire, were stingy, letting students and parents foot the bill. And in every economic downturn since the 1980s, states have disproportionately cut college and university budgets. 

The logic was always the same—unlike K–12 schools, prisons, and health care for the poor, higher education could raise prices to make up for lost revenue. So tuition increased during recessions to fill the budget gaps, backed by a federal loan program with bottomless reserves and no credit standards for borrowers. The process worked like a ratchet: When funding was restored during boom times, tuition never went back down. Adjusted for inflation, tuition prices at public four-year universities have almost tripled over the past 30 years. The post-2008 period has been especially harsh. Some states, mostly governed by Republicans, never restored lost funding. If Great Recession–era funding cuts are repeated over the next few years, 23 states will end up with systems that receive two dollars in tuition for every one dollar in state funding, a threshold beyond which the whole idea of being a “public university” is seriously in question. 

The system also assumed that an unregulated, consumer-driven free market for higher education would successfully match students with the institutions best prepared to serve them while imposing market discipline on quality and prices. But the higher education market does not work like the simple models freshmen are taught in Econ 101. Choosing an institution with which to have an intense multiyear relationship involving hundreds of people and countless unforeseeable future decisions is a lot more complicated than shopping for toothpaste at CVS. Undergraduates are inexperienced consumers by definition—few people return to college for another bachelor’s degree. Students and parents are highly susceptible to marketing and pressure tactics, rumor and innuendo, peer pressure, and vaguely defined reputation. The fact that colleges disclose little hard data about the quality of their courses doesn’t help. 

Colleges also do their best to make prices hard to understand. Car dealers are a cultural stereotype of caveat emptor sleaziness. Yet when you shop for a car, at least dealers are required to list various key features along with the price in a standard window sticker that is the same at every dealer. Colleges are subject to no such regulation. Instead, each adopts a different financial aid “award letter” format that is often a nightmare of deliberate obfuscation. A New America study of more than 500 award letters found that a third of colleges don’t even disclose how much they actually cost. Seventy percent combine grants and loans into a single measure of college “aid.” Many then tell students that their “net price”—tuition minus “aid”—is $0, even when it’s financed by tens of thousands of dollars in loans. All of this translates into congenital market failure, measured by the millions of Americans who drop out of college and default on their student loans. 

This system has obviously disadvantaged customers. Yet for decades, it worked just fine for schools. The economy continued to shift away from blue-collar labor toward jobs that require college degrees, stoking demand and expanding the pool of students to include more diverse consumers. Beginning in the late 1990s, the gigantic Millennial generation ensured that there were enough customers for everyone, and colleges were able to keep labor costs down by creating a constant oversupply of newly minted PhDs and then using the resulting power imbalance in the labor market to hire them as adjunct professors for wages low enough to qualify for food stamps. As a result, many colleges prospered. If you’re old enough to revisit a familiar college campus after a decade or two away, you will almost certainly be struck by how much bigger and nicer everything has become—even if the school isn’t famously wealthy. 

But in the long run, consumerization and privatization were a trap for most colleges. Like countless other dimensions of American society, the higher education sector became increasingly financialized and winner-takes-all. While upper-upper-tier institutions accumulated almost unimaginable amounts of new financial wealth and global brand prestige, many schools were swept into a race for status and students. After the Millennials finished school and the overall size of the college-going population declined, that race became less-than-zero sum. 

To make the numbers add up every year, some colleges, especially in the private nonprofit sector, spent millions on “enrollment management” consultants whose marketing tactics generated thousands of applications that were fed into the kind of sophisticated mathematical models that airlines use to generate ticket prices, with the goal of maximizing tuition revenue from each seat in the lecture hall. Can you imagine if you had to disgorge every detail of your earnings and assets before haggling with a seller who was legally allowed to lie to you about how much their product actually costs? If you’ve ever sent kids to college, you don’t have to imagine.

This complex price discrimination helped sustain creaky college finances for a while. But like all systems that rely on statistical analysis of the past, it was vulnerable to a future black swan event like a once-a-century pandemic. As the virus tanked the economy, it blew up state budgets and turned every classroom and frat house into a potential public health disaster. It also prompted our anti-immigrant president to move even more aggressively to keep out international students, who often prop up university budgets by paying full tuition. With less money from states, fewer Americans who are willing to attend school for fear of getting sick, and a smaller pool of international applicants, many colleges stand on the precipice. 

Many people already believe that the time has come to upend the old system. Outrage over the $1.6 trillion mountain of outstanding student debt helped fuel the Bernie Sanders “free college” movement that upended American electoral politics. The Sanders plan, and a similar proposal from Elizabeth Warren, would give states enough money to reduce undergraduate tuition at public colleges and universities to $0. The cost would be split between new federal grants and state matching funds. As part of the post-primary rapprochement between rival campaigns, Joe Biden has broadly endorsed the program. 

“Free college” is a well-motivated but poorly designed idea. Understanding why shows what to do instead. By giving each state enough money to bring public university tuition down to $0, “free college” would unjustly reward states that previously cut college funding and let tuition rise, while perversely penalizing states that did the right thing by spending more to keep tuition low. The stingy states, especially over the last decade, have largely been governed by Republicans. “Free college” is essentially a bailout for tax-cutting, government-hating right-wingers. And by requiring states to opt in and spend additional matching funds if they want to make college free, it would all but guarantee that some states opt out, as they did with the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare. 

“Free college” would give far more money per student to wealthy elite public research universities that charge higher tuition and enroll many well-off students than to regional universities and open-access community colleges where tuition is already low. By excluding private nonprofits, it would leave out hundreds of schools that serve racially and economically diverse students, including many historically Black institutions. 

Finally, some people can and should pay for college. Higher education is both an essential public service that should be accessible to all and an expensive private good that is bought and sold for large amounts of money in the free market. Other things work this way, which is why many people believe affordable housing is a basic human right but few, if any, believe that all houses should be free. 

There’s a better way, one that would bring private nonprofit colleges into the fold, make higher learning affordable for everyone, and greatly improve the quality of education that students, especially the most vulnerable, receive. Here’s how it would work.

To start, the federal government should create a new program that provides a direct annual subsidy of $10,000 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student to any college, public or private nonprofit, that agrees to certain terms. It’s important, here, to distinguish tuition prices from tuition revenue. Colleges often provide scholarships and discounts that bring prices substantially below listed rates, and most students attend public institutions that charge much less than the eye-popping rates at some private colleges. As a result, the majority of undergraduates today attend a college where tuition revenue is less than $10,000 per FTE student. 

The first condition would be to adopt a uniform pricing system. (“Free college” is an exceptionally simple form of uniform prices, in that there aren’t any.) Anyone with a household income below $75,000 would pay nothing. From there, tuition would increase on a sliding scale and cap out at $10,000—roughly the average tuition price at public four-year universities—for households earning more than $250,000 per year. At public universities, prices would be the same for in- and out-of-state-students, eliminating the financial incentive for colleges to recruit wealthy students from far away at the expense of local taxpayers. The existing Pell Grant program would be maintained, providing lower-income students with additional funding to pay for books, housing, and living expenses. 

“Free college” would keep school funding levels roughly the same. In this plan, by contrast, the combination of tuition from the uniform price schedule and the annual federal subsidy would be more money than most public and nonprofit colleges receive in tuition today. For some, it would be much more. That’s a good thing. Colleges that currently charge low tuition—mostly low-cost community colleges and regional public universities—also tend to get less state financial support. These institutions have been shortchanged for decades by political neglect. They serve large numbers of working adults, students of color, first-generation collegians, and students with academic challenges. 

This plan would provide those colleges with a huge boost in new resources that could be used to improve facilities and laboratories, increase the number of course sections, reduce class sizes, improve faculty pay, and increase the number of full-time tenured professors. We know that less-selective colleges can make impressive gains in helping students learn and graduate—if they have the resources to do the job (see Jamaal Abdul-Alim, “Higher Ed’s Most Successful Failure,” for one example of a successful program). “Free college” would make college cheaper, but not better. For many students, better is what they most need.

For colleges closer to the break-even point between existing revenues and what they would receive under the new plan, there would still be many good reasons to participate. Transparent lower prices would make them more attractive in the market. Competition with neighboring states would give local legislatures incentives to provide their colleges and universities with enough money to participate. But because the plan allows individual colleges to opt in, no institution would be forced into a financial and regulatory arrangement not to its liking, preserving the long and worthwhile tradition of college autonomy. This plan would also avoid the Obamacare problem of putting governors in the position of saying yes or no to funding for the entire state. 

In a stroke, the plan would eliminate uncertainty, anxiety, and confusion for millions of students and parents struggling to pay for college. College would be cheaper or free for many, and it would be far easier to compare prices, since colleges would use the same tuition fee schedule and be required to use an identical format when describing other expenses like room and board. 

Including private nonprofit colleges in the plan would broaden the political coalition for reform and help preserve the distinct character and economic diversity of cities and towns that rely on local colleges, many with long faith traditions and expertise in serving Black, Hispanic, and other groups. For-profit colleges would not be eligible.

The plan would be expensive, in the tens of billions of dollars annually, depending on how many colleges opted in. But because students would have less need to borrow, the cost would be partly offset by less money spent on subsidized loan interest rates, fewer defaulted loans, and fewer loans forgiven at taxpayer expense. 

Colleges receiving the subsidy would be held accountable for baseline measures of quality and success. While the federal government can’t and shouldn’t judge how well a university teaches particular subjects like linguistics, anthropology, or chemical engineering, it can prevent abject failure. There’s no such thing as a good college where the vast majority of students drop out, can’t find jobs, or default on their loans. Colleges that consistently fail by these measures would be ineligible for government grants. 

The second major pillar of the plan would be a set of research investments and policy changes designed to connect all of the participating colleges into a network of learning- and student-focused institutions. It would begin with a simple but profound change in the way colleges relate to one another: credit transfer. Every college in the network would be required to accept credits from every other college in the network.

The existing college credit system is a disastrous remnant of the time when most students could only take classes from the single college they were admitted to. Today, assembling a degree from credits earned at multiple colleges is a nightmare of bureaucratic uncertainty. Millions of hours and dollars are lost every year when colleges routinely refuse to accept grades earned by students who earn credits from multiple institutions, a common occurrence for adult, part-time, and other “non-traditional” students who now make up the majority of undergraduates. Countless students end up borrowing and paying to take the same classes twice. Under this system, that wouldn’t be a problem. 

Individual institutions would retain the discretion to set standards for what courses count for academic majors, including, if they chose, a mandate that all courses that count to the student’s major be taken at the college granting the degree. Colleges and academic departments have different approaches to disciplinary learning, and that autonomy and diversity should be respected. The same would be true for colleges that maintain an authentic core curriculum—not a vague set of “Pick two from Column C” distribution requirements, but actual courses that all students are required to take. That said, most undergraduate credits are not earned in pursuit of majors or core curricula. For all other degree requirements, students in the network would enjoy complete credit reciprocity. 

Because nearly all colleges now offer online courses, this would give students the best of traditional in-person and online learning—the kind of intense socialization, peer and faculty relationships, and mentoring that in-person education provides, with the freedom to choose from among the best online courses offered by thousands of course catalogs nationwide. It would inspire colleges to improve their online technological tools and pedagogical skills. Since everyone in the network would use the uniform fee schedule, the cost would be the same. 

Over time, this would give colleges powerful incentives to cooperate and specialize. In the current cut-throat, status-driven market system, every college is an island. Even in the face of an existential threat in the form of global pandemic disaster, colleges are not working together. (If you won’t do something even though not doing it might literally kill you, you’re never going to do it.) This culture of extreme educational individuality is replicated at the course and instructor levels. A typical full-time professor may have dozens of colleagues at institutions around the world with whom she is in constant, ongoing communication and collaboration on scholarship and research. These powerful networks are stable even as scholars move among institutions. Yet when it comes to teaching, there is nothing similar. Every lecturer stands alone.

The combination of scaled-up credit reciprocity across a huge network serving millions of students would create strong incentives for colleges to pool their resources and offer outstanding versions of the high-volume courses commonly taken by many students. The price tag for a single luxury campus fitness center that has become table stakes for competing in the market for upper-middle-class students is far more than colleges currently spend on developing, say, a world-class sequence of undergraduate courses that could be used and adapted by many different colleges, in person and online.

The new system would also fundamentally change the terms of college competition. Instead of being trapped in a price-discounting and high-end-amenities arms race, colleges would have good reasons to create great courses that attract some of the millions of potential students within the network. College accreditors would serve as watchdogs to prevent unscrupulous schools from lowering standards to sell easy credits. 

Cooperation across the network would be bolstered by a large new investment in research and development. The federal government gives higher education $30 billion annually to conduct research in nearly every field of inquiry one can imagine, but very little on higher education itself. Every year, millions of students take hundreds of thousands of courses, almost none of which are subject to the kind of careful scientific inquiry that universities themselves specialize in conducting. This new research effort would take advantage of the size of the new college network to conduct ongoing research on best educational practices and promising innovations. 

The system would create its own kinds of competitive pressures—more centered on academic quality than the current market, but still intense enough that colleges would need to work hard to sustain enrollment. Some might choose to specialize in the academic disciplines where they have the most strength and depth. They would also build reputations for expertise in particular approaches to pedagogy. Students would choose to live in communities that fit their needs, faiths, backgrounds, and ideological affinities, while enjoying access to courses and peers nationwide. 

The end result would be a new network of affordable, well-resourced, deeply interconnected colleges and universities that combine the virtues of traditional higher education diversity and autonomy with consumer protection, information technology, and cutting-edge education practice. Instead of letting some colleges collapse into bankruptcy while the rest struggle and claw in a failed system of free market chaos and declining public support, some of the most vital and distinctly American institutions in our nation’s history would be repositioned for even greater success. 

Not all colleges would join the network. Some might prefer autonomy, as is their right. For others, the numbers simply wouldn’t add up. The annual subsidy and uniform price schedule would yield much less revenue than they receive in tuition today. For the most part, these are extremely wealthy universities that enroll mostly wealthy students—the Ivy-plus universities, fancy liberal arts colleges, and a relatively small number of elite public research universities. The winners who took all over the past 50 years. 

This plan would not, in other words, tear down the system of elite colleges and universities that currently serves to acculturate and accelerate the children of the ruling class. As long as people are allowed to be very rich, there will be places like this, just like there will always be mansions and expensive cars. And in fairness to Stanford, Yale, Duke, and other universities that sell status to the highest bidder through a thinly veiled system of bribes and legacy admissions preferences, these universities truly are some of the greatest centers of research and scholarship on the planet. They should keep being excellent at that, which helps all people, not just the privileged. 

This does not mean, however, that the public should continue subsidizing them in the same way. 

The “nonprofit” institutions most likely to opt out of the new network are the same universities that hold the lion’s share of all university endowment assets, totaling hundreds of billions of dollars. In 2017, Congress passed a small 1.4 percent excise tax on endowments larger than $500,000 per student. The higher education lobby, incensed, has been fighting to repeal it ever since.

But the real money isn’t in the taxes colleges don’t pay on their endowment earnings. It’s in the income taxes individuals don’t pay on their donations to colleges, which are effectively subsidized at nearly 40 percent for the wealthiest donors, and thus provide an incentive to donate much more. 

The cost of the new plan would be partly offset by eliminating the tax deductibility of any donations to colleges with an endowment greater than $200,000 per student. If colleges want to avoid the penalty, they can spend down their assets by making tuition cheaper for more students. There is no reason taxpayers should heavily subsidize millionaires who give money to billion-dollar institutions. 

The U.S. Department of Education should also impose much stricter borrowing standards on colleges for loans used for education outside of the network, including at for-profit colleges. The current loan system runs on autopilot—anyone can borrow to enroll in any program at any accredited college. The new system would put the burden of proof on colleges, and require them to share in the risk. Eligibility for federal loans would be restricted to individual college programs that consistently graduate students who are able to get good jobs and pay their loans back. If students default, the college would have to reimburse taxpayers for 50 percent of the loss. 

The existing higher education policy architecture has been in place for so long, it can be hard to imagine something fundamentally different. But while the ideals of learning and scholarship are eternal, the means by which we organize and pay for higher education have changed many times in the past. It’s time to change them again. 

Relying on state governments to ensure that colleges have enough money and on the free market to ensure that colleges are well run, while the federal government stands in the background passively lending students enormous sums of money that many will never pay back, has failed. That approach would have kept failing in the best of times and will be an unmitigated catastrophe in these, the worst of times. 

The moment has come to finally give all students, not just the elite few, a great, affordable college education, without life-shattering financial stress and anxiety. And it’s time for colleges to work together, rather than standing and dying alone.

The post How to Save Higher Education appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Four years ago, Christine Abate was driving the car she had just bought with $4,000 in cash to get to and from classes at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, Ohio, when another driver T-boned her, sending her car careening front end first into a set of boulders. Her vehicle was badly banged up, but fortunately she wasn’t. “The doctors were surprised I walked away from the accident,” Abate recalled.

She was lucky in another way: She had a strong support system at her college. Unexpected life events, like suddenly being without a car, are a major reason students drop out of college. At Cuyahoga Community College, known locally as Tri-C, Abate was part of an experimental program called Degree in Three that was designed to help students like her stay on track. In return for agreeing to attend school full-time—going part-time is another factor linked to increased dropout rates—students in the program received tuition assistance for any costs not covered by their other financial aid, essentially making college free. They were also given $50 monthly gift cards to defray the cost of gas and groceries, and received more individual attention from academic advisers—a resource most students at financially strained community colleges sorely lack.

For Abate, the program made a huge difference. She stayed in school, finagling various ways to get to campus, at one point renting a car. She paid for the rental and other living expenses by juggling several part-time jobs—at a nursing home, a hospital, and in people’s homes as a health aid. Most of all, she credits her advisers for helping her stay in school. “Not only were they emotionally supportive and understanding of how stressful it is to be a college student, they were also there for personal life and personal struggles,” Abate told me. Other than her advisers, she said, “I didn’t have anyone tell me, ‘You’re doing a great job. We’re here for you. Good job getting an A on that test. You’re smart.’ I didn’t have that.” Her advisers became her personal boosters. When she applied for jobs, she listed one of her advisers as her reference. 

In December 2019, she graduated with an associate’s degree in nursing. That same month, she took her state nursing certification exam, and in February of this year started working in a Cleveland-area hospital, just as the COVID-19 crisis was about to heat up and her skills were most needed. She has since been accepted at Ohio University, where she hopes to earn a Bachelor’s of Science in Nursing. 

Abate’s experience with Degree in Three was no outlier. A carefully controlled evaluation of the program and similar ones at two other Ohio community colleges found that participating students were nearly twice as likely to graduate within three years as other students at those colleges who were also attempting to attend full-time but were not part of the program. Participating students were also more likely to transfer to a four-year college. Though the program costs more per student up front, it helped so many more students graduate that the overall cost per degree in the program was lower than it was for students attending the community colleges normally. 

In other industries, a new strategy that creates more products at a lower per-unit cost would be seen as a wild success. The company that developed it would quickly become a magnet for investors and a leader in the field—until their competitors all started copying the strategy. Not so, apparently, when it comes to American higher education. Despite rigorous evaluation, widespread acclaim from researchers, praise from Ohio Governor John Kasich, glowing write-ups in major newspapers, and powerful boosters in the philanthropic world, Degree in Three isn’t being rolled out at community colleges across the country, or even in Ohio. In fact, Tri-C itself discontinued the program in 2018 when its external funding ran out. A sister program at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College experienced the same fate. With the collapse of state revenues brought on by the pandemic, the status of the program at a third Ohio school, Lorain County Community College, remains uncertain, and a version in New York City, where the program originated, barely avoided having its budget slashed earlier this summer. 

The failure of America’s community colleges to replicate, or even maintain, successful programs like Degree in Three illustrates a profound but underappreciated flaw in the way this country allocates funds for higher education: Students who need resources the most get the least. Community college students generally have significantly less of the social capital—parents who attended college, for instance—that can help them navigate the college setting. They tend to have less developed study skills than affluent students who attended well-funded high schools. They also carry greater personal burdens, such as having to work multiple jobs. Since some adults enroll in community college classes without intending to get a degree, and students often transfer to different institutions, graduation rates for community college can be difficult to pin down. But reports suggest that just a third of students who enter these schools receive a degree or certificate within six years—a rate that would be considered scandalous if it were happening at elite institutions that more affluent students attend.

Yet community colleges generally have far smaller budgets to spend on students than four-year schools. Public four-year schools, whose student bodies tend to be wealthier and whiter, spend on average three times more per student each year than community colleges. Private four-year schools generally spend five times as much. As long as these basic inequities continue, even the most astonishingly successful innovations to boost community college success rates are likely to languish. 

Over the course of the 2000s, various community colleges and research groups experimented with interventions designed to help more students graduate. One effort, with the goal of providing the students a sense of community, grouped them into cohorts with whom they took all of their first-year classes. Another attempt involved giving students increased access to advisers. Yet another effort gave students scholarships, in addition to whatever financial aid they were receiving, and conditioned the funds on passing grades and consistent enrollment. But all of these efforts, and many others, saw relatively modest effects.

Prompted by a report from a New York City mayoral commission on alleviating poverty, the City University of New York system began thinking ambitiously about how to increase graduation rates. CUNY devised a program that would wrap together all of the interventions that had shown a modest positive effect on graduation rates. To alleviate cost stressors, the program would provide free Metro passes, free books for classes, and waivers for any tuition that remained after financial aid. It would also assign additional academic advisers, with lower caseloads, to meet with the students, twice a month in their first semester and then once a month after that. From focus groups, researchers had learned that students also drop out when they can’t reconcile their work schedule and class schedule, so students in the program got priority enrollment. Lastly, because of the drawbacks of part-time attendance, students would be required to attend full-time, with the goal of graduating in three years. The resulting program was named CUNY Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, or ASAP. 

It worked. Students in the program graduated in three years at nearly double the rate of other CUNY students attempting to attend full-time—40 percent compared to 22 percent. Students in the program also transferred to four-year colleges at a higher rate than students not in the program. And the program was evaluated with an uncommon degree of rigor. MDRC, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research group, ran the randomized control trial, with 896 students participating, and produced a 155-page report of the results. 

The study made a splash. The New York Times wrote up the findings, and its editorial board highlighted them, too. The Obama administration cited the CUNY program’s success, calling on all community colleges to take similar steps as part of their broader proposal to increase the number of Americans getting degrees. “I’ve not seen any other interventions with as large effects as CUNY ASAP,” Thomas Brock, director of the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, told me. “It really stands alone.” Funds to continue the program were added to the New York City mayor’s budget. 

The question remained, though, could this work elsewhere? Community colleges across the country, most of whom operate on fine margins, weren’t rushing to implement it. A bevy of funders, such as Ascendium Education Group, the ECMC Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, Arnold Ventures, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Lumina Foundation (the latter four of which have given grants to this nonprofit magazine), chipped in funds to replicate the program elsewhere, for a trial period of three years. Again, it would be rigorously evaluated by MDRC. In 2014, three Ohio community colleges signed up to host the program: Lorain County Community College, Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, and Cuyahoga Community College.

Christine Abate was at Tri-C during this evaluation period, as was Kevin Jones. Jones had begun taking courses at the Tri-C Eastern Campus in 2016 after deciding that his roofing job was taking too much of a toll on his body. The program connected him with advisers who he says felt like family. “They were my aunties,” said Jones, now 25 and a transfer student at Case Western Reserve University, where he is studying artificial intelligence and cultural history with an eye toward going to law school to become an attorney in intellectual property. “When you come from that Black cultural experience, it’s really nice to have someone you can latch onto and have that familial type of connection with,” he said. “And [Degree in Three] was the way they were able to interact with me. I’m appreciative [of] the program for allowing me to meet them.”

Abate and Jones weren’t the only students who benefited. MDRC released early data from 2015 and 2016 showing that students in the program were twice as likely to stay in school. After the three-year period was up in 2018, researchers crunched the numbers fully. Ohio’s version of ASAP had been just as effective as CUNY’s: Graduation rates had nearly doubled for students in the program, and students were 50 percent more likely to transfer to a four-year college. If CUNY ASAP was strong proof of concept, this new study of Ohio’s version showed that the concept could be successfully applied elsewhere—it was, in the argot of social science, replicable. And while the cost per student enrolled in the program per year was estimated by researchers to be $3,303, that amount was partially offset by extra revenue (mostly from Pell Grants) the colleges received because students in the program stayed in school longer. With all factors taken into account, MDRC calculated that the cost per graduate of the Ohio version of ASAP was $49,000 less than for similar students not in the program.

Few other community colleges, however, seem interested in even trying to replicate the ASAP model—not because they think it won’t work, but because the realities of the budgeting process in most states and municipalities make funding something like this extremely difficult. One problem, Brock pointed out, is that states budget on a year-to-year basis—a system that doesn’t take into account longer-term savings. If you’re a state legislator or college president who pushes for programs with a longer time frame, you may not get credit for positive outcomes that happen three or six years down the line, he said. On top of that, lawmakers are unlikely to take money away from four-year colleges in order to pay for innovations at community colleges, Robert Kelchen, a professor at Seton Hall University who studies higher education, said. (Kelchen is also the data manager of the Monthly’s College Guide.) To fund a program like this would “take a significant investment of new money from states to implement this program on a widespread basis. That looks to be very unlikely in the next several years,” Kelchen said.

Ohio community colleges were only able to run the program with ample grant funding from large foundations. (Another recent attempt to replicate the program in West Virginia is also being funded by Arnold Ventures.) Once the outside money for Ohio ran out, the state legislature didn’t allocate funds to continue the program. Without additional funding, said Miria Batig, who oversaw the program at Tri-C’s Western Campus, “trying to get that kind of ratio [of advisers to students] would be near to impossible.” Stephanie Davidson, vice chancellor of academic affairs at the Ohio Department of Higher Education, said as attractive and beneficial as the program may be, the state would be hard pressed to find a way to sustain it. As it stands, Ohio has no plans to expand the program at the state level, and two of the three colleges that participated have discontinued their programs. 

Tiffany Jones, the senior director of higher education policy at the Education Trust, a nonprofit that focuses on equity in education, told me that it’s not hard to figure out “how to help students from low-income families complete college—that work has been done.” What is difficult, she said, is finding college leaders and state policymakers who make student success a top priority not only in their rhetoric but also in their budgets. “This is really a question of political will.”

The struggle of the Ohio programs to survive, much less spark similar efforts across the country, tells a larger story about ambitions to make community college better. No past effort had been tested so rigorously and seen such success. Community colleges generally operate on such thin margins that, on their own, it is nearly impossible for them to come up with the additional cash to pilot new programs. But without some money to try out new strategies, it’s hard to see how these schools will ever solve the stubborn problem of low graduation rates—or really any of the problems they face. State and local lawmakers could have theoretically provided the funds to bring CUNY ASAP to their states, but as a practical matter, we now know they won’t. 

There’s another large investor, however, that could step in: the federal government. Jones argued that there should be a federal fund, either for states or for individual colleges, to scale up strategies proven to boost student success. Grants should be tiered by institution type to ensure that under-resourced schools are able to compete for the funds, and investments should target schools that enroll high proportions of historically disadvantaged students, Jones said. There are any number of ways Washington could direct more federal funds to these schools, which would allow them to adopt programs like ASAP. (Kevin Carey lays out one such proposal in this issue.) Until then, the single most promising way to help minority students and students from low-income families succeed in higher education will remain a promise unfulfilled.

Correction: This story has been updated to correctly reflect Christine Abate’s degree program at Ohio University, and the status of her car after the accident. 

Update: This story was updated on Aug. 31 to include Ascendium Education Group and ECMC Foundation as funders of the ASAP implementation in Ohio.

The post Higher Ed’s Most Successful Failure appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For more than a decade, economists, business leaders, and progressive writers and thinkers have waged a wonky war over the so-called skills gap—specifically, whether such a gap exists at all.

Employers, for their part, argue that the skills gap is real, and complain that it makes it tough to find qualified workers. Many progressives, however, say these gaps are a myth, the product of businesses’ own failings. They charge employers with inflating the credentials required of applicants and skimping on worker training.

Research shows that the progressives have a point: Many companies are indeed guilty of “degree inflation,” demanding college degrees for jobs that don’t need them. Companies have also reduced investment in worker training over the past 20 years, forcing employees to seek more training themselves at community and for-profit colleges, often going into debt to pay for it. According to a recent report from the Aspen Institute, less than one-fifth of workers have access to employer-sponsored or on-the-job training, and they tend to be the highest paid and already the best educated. 

But employers are right, too. Many entry-level workers today are missing a crucial set of skills that most high schools and colleges don’t teach: the so-called soft skills that are increasingly important for success in the modern workplace. These include basic workplace-survival behaviors like showing up every day and on time, and knowing how to talk to your boss and colleagues. They also include higher-order skills like critical thinking, problem solving, and collaboration. While more K–12 schools have begun teaching critical thinking and analytical skills under the rubric of “social-emotional learning,” it’s hardly part of the standard curriculum, nor is the pedagogy established about how to teach it well. As a consequence, most students don’t learn in their classrooms what life is like on the job—and it shows.

Employers, says a U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation report, are “coping with new hires who are unsure of how to write a professional email, struggle to organize and prioritize tasks, or have a difficult time collaborating with coworkers.” A survey of more than 1,000 hiring managers by the Society for Human Resource Management yielded a similar finding: About one-third cited a lack of soft skills among candidates as the reason they had trouble filling positions. 

One promising program has the potential to end the deadlock over the skills gap, satisfying employers while addressing the skeptics’ critique that companies skimp on training. Developed by the Federation for Advanced Manufacturing Education (FAME), this small-but-growing two-year apprenticeship-style program trains students to maintain and repair the machinery that now does most of the rote work of manufacturing. It has a unique curricular focus: As much as two-thirds of students’ time is spent on soft-skills development, while just one-third is devoted to technical training. The result is that graduates have excellent professional and collaborative skills, fulfilling employers’ needs. But it’s also successful enough to draw the kind of financial investment from companies that workers deserve. First launched at a single Toyota factory in 2010, it has already grown to involve more than 350 manufacturers in 13 states, from large refrigerator makers to smaller plastics plants. Of the roughly 850 students who have graduated so far, 85 percent have been hired by their sponsoring employers with starting salaries at $50,000 or more. And because the students don’t pay for their training, they can graduate debt free. 

While few issues these days draw bipartisan consensus, politicians as diverse as Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and even Donald Trump agree on the need for more high-quality career and technical education opportunities in general, and apprenticeships in particular. FAME could be the kind of program to drive that consensus into action, for the benefit of both employers and workers. 

Dennis Dio Parker, the founder of FAME, has grappled for decades with skills shortages, ever since his employer, Toyota, launched a factory in Georgetown, Kentucky, in 1987. Now employing 10,000 workers, it’s the largest Toyota plant in the world, but when it first opened, the factory had trouble finding enough qualified workers. “We needed workers qualified in skilled maintenance—maintaining the conveyor lines, the power to the buildings, the robots, the table lifters,” said Parker, whose job was to develop in-house training programs for Toyota. These workers also needed the problem-solving skills to figure out why a machine might be broken and how to fix it. In addition, they needed to be able to communicate and work closely with the engineering department and with each other. Unfortunately, Parker said, “not many people were passing the assessment tests.” 

As Parker tinkered with new training curricula over the years, he interviewed dozens of supervisors about the skills their exceptional workers possessed and saw some common themes. “Technically, they’re highly competent, but they’re also great attenders,” Parker said. “We never worry about them missing. They have great initiative.” These workers also had great communications and people skills. Parker set out to train workers to perform like those exceptional employees. The program he ultimately developed was effective enough to draw the interest of other companies, whom he organized into a collaborative to disseminate the model. That collaborative became the Federation for Advanced Manufacturing Education, launched in 2010, and its signature program for technicians has since come to be known as FAME.

From week one, FAME makes clear that it’s not a traditional college program where students can get away with playing hooky or sit slouched in the back of class. At orientation, students receive a collared uniform shirt, which they’re expected to wear to class every day. This insistence on a uniform is actually part of the program’s soft-skills curriculum. “If you look professional, you’ll start to feel professional,” Parker said. Students also learn the program’s expectations about attendance—which is not to be on time, but to be early. Outside each classroom are attendance sheets with students’ names and a daily log of arrival times. Students are marked in green if they are 20 to 30 minutes early to class, while on-time arrivals are marked in yellow and tardies of even one minute past the start time are in pink or red. A single red mark is enough to warrant a warning; three tardies means dismissal from the program. The emphasis on attendance underscores how the world of work contrasts with that of school, Parker said. “Colleges do a terrible job of preparing their students for the rigor and discipline of being a good attender at work. You can have a student with a 4.0 [GPA] who misses classes from time to time, and from the college’s perspective, their attendance is perfect. But they’re still going to get fired in a heartbeat on the job.” 

At the start of the program, students are introduced to the FAME’s signature pedagogical prop: laminated “pocket cards,” sized to fit in the pocket of a work shirt, that serve as crib sheets for core concepts. The first week of class, students receive two cards focused on “safety culture” and three cards on “professional behaviors.” As the program continues, they accumulate more cards, on communication skills, problem solving, “visual workplace organization,” and other skills specific to their future jobs as advanced manufacturing technicians (AMTs). They’re expected to memorize and be able to recite each card on command, and, ultimately, to apply the content in a real-life situation. 

Each card includes a checklist of required behaviors or core concepts, in simple, direct language. The “AMT professional greeting” card, for example, lays out seven steps for how students are expected to greet each other. Step 1 is the “professional posture” (described on a separate card), followed by Step 2: “Greet the other person with a strong voice. Look in the eye.” The sequence ends with Step 7: “Tell them you are pleased to meet them and/or offer to help.” 

While these instructions might seem basic, they are often eye-openers for the 18- to 20-year-olds who make up the target demographic of the program, Parker said. “They have no context or life experience,” he told me. The program also drills students in public speaking. In FAME instructor Chris Lagemann’s classroom, for instance, at the State Technical College of Missouri, each class begins with a student delivering a presentation on shop floor safety, which the class critiques based on the checklists of do’s and don’ts spelled out on the pocket cards that define expectations for presentations. “They get evaluated on their posture and appearance,” Lagemann said. “Did they stand up straight, and were their hands in front? Were they fidgeting or standing still? Did they introduce themselves?” Lagemann keeps track of how many “um”s, “you know”s, and “like”s the presenter uses. Students run through this exercise twice a day, every day. “It’s a lot of repetition,” Lagemann said, but its purpose is to inculcate the skills laid out on the cards to a point of automaticity.

Unlike many other training programs, where students spend several weeks or even months in the classroom before an internship, FAME students spend three days each week on the shop floor immediately applying what they learned. Lagemann says he sends a weekly report to the employers sponsoring his students alerting them to that week’s lessons. “If there’s something in the plant that coincides or matches that discussion, they’ll try to have a job or assignment to practice those skills,” he said. “Likewise, if there’s something going on at the plant—if there’s a new installation or a shutdown of a particular piece of equipment—the manufacturers let us know that so we can cover that topic or have a 20-minute discussion of what’s going on.”

This close partnership between employers and FAME is a big reason why the program’s placement rates are so high. The sponsoring employers “match” with students at the start of the program and pay them a minimum of $14 an hour—enough to pay for tuition and living expenses. Instructors like Lagemann do their best to tailor the curriculum to employers’ specific needs, while a liaison at the company often serves as the student’s mentor, assigning work and communicating with instructors. “They’re taking on quite a bit of responsibility from an employer standpoint,” Lagemann said. “They’ve agreed to pay this kid 14-plus dollars an hour for two years; they’re going to train them, keep an eye on them, and assess them and hold them to the standards we expect.” But, he continued, employers “do get a two-year look to decide whether to give them a full-time job.” So far, the employers partnering with the program have decided that this level of investment is worth it—as have the students.

Before entering FAME, Glenn Dodge had attended one semester of college, with the goal of getting a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. “I learned very quickly that it wasn’t the right fit,” he said. “I overburdened myself.” At age 19, he dropped out, bringing home thousands of dollars in school debt—but not the degree he’d been after. His stepmother, a guidance counselor at a local high school, pointed him toward FAME. In 2017, he enrolled in the program’s Missouri chapter. 

Among other things, Dodge credits the program with transforming him from a “slightly shy” person into a confident public speaker serious about his work. “I stuttered a lot,” said Dodge, now 21. “I would throw in ‘uh’s and ‘um’s. I wouldn’t give a professional greeting. I would just start talking.” The program drastically improved his public speaking. “I learned to make eye contact rather than just read off a slide. I made sure people could hear me,” he said. Dodge’s sponsoring employer was a plastics manufacturer, where he had a mentor named Jason Cartwright. “He would bring me up into his office every now and then and just draw with Expo marker on his window to explain something,” Dodge said. “He made sure I understood what I was learning and could apply it.”

By the end of the program, Dodge was an excellent prospect for employers. After graduating in May 2019, he fielded four interview requests in one week, two of which turned into offers on the spot. He accepted a job working the third shift as a maintenance technician at Toyota Bodine, where his starting salary was $50,000 a year. He says he’ll have the loans from his aborted college career paid off in under five years. “I don’t understand why people still believe that they need a four-year degree to be a success,” he said. “AMT and the manufacturing field is where the lucrative money is at.” 

One testament to FAME’s success is its ability to propel the careers of workers who, in other circumstances, might have far more trouble climbing the ranks. Camryn Vrbka, who enrolled in Missouri FAME’s inaugural cohort in 2015, is the rare woman in a relatively male-dominated field. “I liked engineering, and I liked solving problems, but I also found out I don’t do calculus for fun,” she said, by way of explaining why she didn’t enroll in a traditional college. She credits the FAME program with not only opening the door to a well-paid career but also boosting her up the ladder more quickly than she otherwise could have gone. She, like Dodge, has a job at Toyota Bodine, where she maintains and repairs machines that inject thousands of pounds of molten aluminum at high pressures into molds for engine parts. These machines, Vrbka said, are about two stories high and take about nine months to master. Yet Vrbka has already been promoted twice and, at just 21 years old, now holds the position of group leader, a job that typically requires 10 years of experience. “The next-youngest person at my level is at least five years older than me,” she says. Vrbka is also getting that four-year degree after all. She’s building on the associate’s degree she earned through FAME to get a bachelor’s in business administration, with tuition assistance from Toyota and FAME, in a recently added perk to the program. “She can go as far as she wants,” Nane Lawson, Toyota Bodine’s hiring manager and the advisory chair of Missouri FAME, told me. 

While FAME’s target demographic is recent high school graduates, it has shown that it also can benefit older workers who want to “upskill” or “reskill” from different careers, such as ShuJuanna Johnson, a FAME trainee in Arkansas. Johnson, now 45, dropped out of high school when she became pregnant with her daughter. Although she eventually earned her GED, she found herself trapped in relatively unskilled work, including 15 years at a cleaning company pressing and folding shirts. “My primary job was to make sure the shirts were starched, make sure there were no spots or wrinkles,” she said. “It wasn’t taking me to the place in life where I wanted to be. It wasn’t a career. It was just a job, and I didn’t want to be living paycheck to paycheck.”

Johnson heard about FAME from counselors at a local community college, decided to apply, and was accepted. “I never had any experience with professional behaviors. I never even really thought about it,” she said. She credits the program with preparing her for a new work environment, as well as improving her time management and communication skills. Today, she is apprenticing at a Georgia-Pacific facility in Crossett, Arkansas, where she is learning to maintain and repair the machinery that manufactures tissues, paper towels, and other products. “It has really inspired me to do things that I never thought I could do,” she said. 

So if FAME’s approach is so effective, why aren’t there already many more programs just like it? 

One reason is that demand for soft skills from employers is relatively new. Another is that, although more schools are beginning to realize the importance of non-cognitive skills, teaching them isn’t yet a core part of most students’ formal education. K–12 and higher education still focus on academic achievement and technical knowledge, to the particular disadvantage of workers without four-year college degrees or lower-income backgrounds. 

But even as more educators recognize the importance of soft skills, there’s still a final problem: how to define it and teach it. Definitional and pedagogical challenges abound. What exactly, for instance, is “leadership,” and how is it measured, let alone taught? While teaching and testing technical skills is relatively straightforward—a welding student, for example, either performs a sound weld or doesn’t—judging that same welder’s work habits and ability to get along with colleagues and superiors is much more nebulous and subjective. What FAME has managed to do is transform the squishy concept of soft skills into clear, practicable expectations for behavior and offer students plenty of opportunities for practice, assessment, and feedback.

While there has not yet been a formal evaluation of FAME, one indicator of its potential is the eagerness of employers to invest in the program. In the spring of 2020, more than 350 manufacturers were sponsoring trainees across a variety of sectors. In Missouri, the home of Glenn Dodge and Camryn Vrbka, participating employers include, in addition to Toyota Bodine, the leading commercial refrigerator maker True Manufacturing (“If you’ve ever gone to Walmart and gotten a soda out of the coolers, that’s a True refrigerator,” Lagemann, the FAME instructor, said); plastic-bottle manufacturer Alpha Packaging; and local concerns such as Component Bar Products, which creates custom machined parts for automotive and other industries; and C.A.P.S. Inc., a company that specializes in making plastic bottle caps for mustard and ketchup bottles and other food products. While the coronavirus pandemic has caused delays in some states for the 2020–21 FAME cohort, founder Dennis Dio Parker said employer interest has remained surprisingly stable, even despite the recession, and the program is working to adapt its format for the new realities of the post-pandemic world. If anything, Parker said, the pandemic could potentially prompt a renaissance of manufacturing in the United States as a result of supply-chain disruptions around the world. Such “in-shoring,” he said, could even prompt more interest from employers wanting workers trained to fill their needs. 

Programs like FAME hold important lessons for the future of workforce training. First, training programs need to make the teaching of soft skills a priority, and FAME shows one way that can be done. Second, the success of the program’s apprenticeship-style format also reinforces the value of work-based learning, which deserves far greater attention and investment. Research has found that the career-focused programs producing the best results (as measured by higher wages, for example, and more consistent employment) are those that include work-based learning opportunities. FAME is a potentially powerful addition to that repertoire of programs, particularly for its ability to draw investment from employers and for its formalized soft-skills training. Its model is replicable in sectors beyond manufacturing, too. In fact, the Manufacturing Institute, which now runs the program, is already looking for other high-demand fields where a FAME-like program can be developed and launched. As the demand for soft skills continues to grow, innovative efforts like FAME will be increasingly important for ensuring that American industries and workers have what they need to compete in a global economy.

The post Why Apprenticeships Should Go Soft appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On November 3, Americans will vote in an election unlike any other in U.S. history. As COVID-19 rages across the country, many will find themselves voting by mail for the first time. Others will wait in long lines at the fewer polling places that are open because their state government has made voting by mail difficult or impossible. If localities are imprudent about in-person voting—by having people line up indoors, for example—some will doubtlessly get sick as a result, leading to a terrible trade-off between political participation and physical health.

For even the most seasoned voters, this will likely be a fraught and challenging process. But for America’s college students, it will be especially perplexing. Young people are, by definition, the age group least experienced with the act of voting. Not coincidentally, they are also the ones least likely to cast ballots. In 2018—a hard-fought, high-water mark for youth midterm voting—turnout among 18- to 29-year-olds was still only 35 percent, more than 10 points below the rate for 30- to 44-year-olds, 20 points below the rate for 45- to 64-year-olds, and less than half the rate of the over-65 crowd. Among college students, the rate was 40 percent—not much better.

The good news is that despite the pandemic, young people are unusually fired up about the 2020 contest. A recent poll by Harvard’s Institute of Politics shows that more 18- to 29-year-olds say they plan to vote in 2020 than said they planned to vote when asked in surveys conducted at similar times in 2016 and 2018. It’s clear that recent events, such as the mass activism against police brutality and institutionalized racism, have inspired many young people’s passions. According to a poll by Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, 27 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds have attended a march or a demonstration in their lifetimes, a more than fivefold increase from 2016. A quarter of all 18- to 24-year-olds say they have registered someone else to vote, far more than in the past. And while many people are worried that young Americans will be less likely to vote by mail than their elders, preliminary evidence suggests that’s not the case. Compared to 2016, the number of 18- to 24-year-olds who voted by mail in Florida’s 2020 presidential primary increased by 338 percent. For all other age groups, the increase was just 11 percent.

The bad news is that many young Americans are still unsure about how to vote. In the same Tufts survey, just 51 percent of respondents correctly knew whether they could register online. Seven-and-a-half percent, which translates to 3.5 million people, said they have poor access to the internet, which inhibits their ability to both register and learn about the voting process. And it is unclear if colleges will be able to keep large numbers of students on campus until November 3, meaning that even the most well-informed students may wind up registering in places they ultimately can’t cast ballots.

At the Monthly, we believe that colleges have a special obligation to help young Americans become active political citizens. It will help if they make sure students can be confident about where they will be on Election Day. But to ensure that young people capitalize on their growing enthusiasm, schools will need to do much more. They’ll need to explain how to register and what’s needed to actually cast a ballot, given both the pandemic-related election chaos and the growing maze of franchise restrictions in GOP-controlled states. In other words, they will need to help make voting as easy as possible.

There are multiple resources universities can use to pursue this end. The ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, for example, works with all kinds of colleges to develop school-specific student voting action plans. It has developed a virtual tool kit full of suggestions for how schools can use the internet to bolster registration and turnout during the pandemic, and it has created a Google group where colleges can share digital resources and ask questions. The National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE) at Tufts University calculates registration numbers and turnout rates for participating campuses, allowing schools to track their progress.

To encourage schools to work at bettering turnout, the Monthly has used ALL IN and NSLVE information to compile its fifth student voting honor roll. The listed schools have met multiple criteria. They have submitted an ALL IN action plan in 2018 and 2020. They’ve signed up to receive NSLVE data about their own campus registration and turnout rates. And they’ve made both their 2016 and 2018 NSLVE data available to the public. They have, in short, shown a repeated commitment to increasing student voting and have been transparent about the results.

This year, a total of 157 schools made the list. This is 18 more schools than made the previous honor roll, released in February, and nearly twice the number that made the honor roll released last year. Much as in the past, it’s an eclectic group. Many prestigious, private four-year colleges perform well, but they are easily outnumbered by public two- and four-year institutions. Some of America’s most famous schools didn’t make the cut.

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, this year we’re ordering 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 eight schools are also specially demarcated for topping 85 percent. Not all of these institutions performed so remarkably well in the past. MICA, for example, increased its registration rate by more than 25 points between 2014 and 2018. It’s possible for schools to quickly up their game if they work at it.

This means that administrators must incorporate registration and voting into their orientations (digital or otherwise), and faculty must make a point of discussing it in their classes. For schools struggling to figure out the best way to increase rates, the new Ask Every Student program by the National Resource Consortium on Full Student Voter Participation helps colleges devise plans to, quite literally, ask each of their students to register. 

But for school employees, much of the work really just involves empowering students. In everything from protests to registration drives, young Americans have proved that they are committed to making their voices heard in 2020. Some have already found ways to work through the voting challenges created by the pandemic. Students in California’s Students Vote Project have discussed hopping onto Zoom lectures to encourage their peers to cast ballots.

It’s not difficult to see why they’re so enthusiastic. The stakes of the upcoming election are monumental, and young people will have to live for longer than anyone else with the consequences. They want to participate. It’s imperative that colleges do everything they can to help.

The post America’s Best Colleges for Student Voting 2020 appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In the United States, there’s a direct correlation between the average earnings of a college major and what percentage of the major’s students are Black. In the highest-paying disciplines—subjects such as computer science, chemical engineering, and finance—Black students are a significantly smaller share of recent graduates than they are nationwide (in the case of those three, the share is below 5 percent, compared to a national share of roughly 10 percent). For the lowest-paying majors, the opposite is true. The subject with the highest share of Black graduates—health and medical administration—leads to first-year average incomes that are tens of thousands of dollars less than finance, and roughly half of what computer science and chemical engineering students go on to earn.

There are many reasons for this correlation, ranging from high school segregation to the relative emphasis these subjects place on bringing about positive social change (see Daniel Block, “Why STEM Needs Social Justice“). It has spurred intense efforts by both policymakers and many universities to graduate more people of color from high-paying fields.

These endeavors are important for the financial well-being of these communities and for the social well-being of the United States. But it’s also important that institutions respect the choices Black students make for themselves, and high-paying fields are far from the only ones worth studying. Indeed, the fields that Black students disproportionately graduate from are essential to both day-to-day life and academic inquiry. Without social workers, the U.S. safety net system would collapse. Sociology leads to a plethora of worthy careers, from political advocacy to urban planning to sociological research itself. This means it’s critical that we work not just to graduate more Black students from STEM majors. It means we need to figure out how to make sure the subjects more Black people already study lead to better-paying jobs.

To that end, the Washington Monthly has gathered newly available data from the Department of Education to examine at which specific colleges the majors (or “programs”) known for high Black enrollment, like social work, lead to above-average earnings. We started by looking at the 38 most popular majors in America and identifying the four with the largest share of recent Black graduates: health and medical administration (26.1 percent of recent graduates); social work (22 percent); criminal justice (20 percent); and sociology (18.6 percent). Next, to make sure we were working with a large enough sample size, we eliminated every school whose program graduated fewer than 50 students in the past two years and then, among these schools, calculated the median first-year earnings for each of the four programs. Then, we cut out all institutions where the first-time, full-time undergraduate Black graduation rate is below 50 percent (the graduation rate for these Black students nationwide is 40 percent) to eliminate institutions that saddle most of their Black students with debt without providing any credentials. To ensure that the graduation rate came from a large enough sample size to be meaningful, we took out every school that graduated fewer than 25 first-time, full-time Black students.

After that, we isolated the colleges where program graduates had above-average earnings relative to program graduates nationwide and where the program graduated an above-average share of Black students relative to its peers nationwide. The result is a list of the schools where the majors in which Black students are most represented lead to well-paying jobs, and where we feel as confident as we can that they are sharing in the returns.

The outcome is somewhat depressing: There are not many programs that meet these thresholds. You may notice, for example, that there’s no health and medical administration list. That’s because every health and medical administration program with above-average earnings and an above-average percentage of Black graduates has a Black graduation rate below 50 percent. For social work and criminal justice, it is only slightly better: Of the 417 criminal justice programs that graduated at least 50 students, only eight make the list. Only four of the 250 social work programs do. Sociology is the sole major of the four that has more than 10 programs that meet the above criteria (we have elected to list only the top 10), a relative abundance powered by the fact that the major is offered and popular at elite four-year schools.

For these top-performing programs, earnings on the whole are still significantly below what they are for high-paying fields. Columbia University’s sociology program, the highest-earning one on this list, has a median earning well below that of most engineering programs. None of the social work programs listed have first-year salaries that exceed $34,500—the median salary for recent college graduates nationwide. Research shows that students who graduate with degrees in more traditional liberal arts fields, like sociology, do eventually catch up to their STEM peers in incomes. But initial salaries are important, especially for students dealing with debt, so it’s distressing that none of these very worthwhile majors yields notably high immediate returns. It is further evidence that there are structural problems with American politics, economics, and society that need to be addressed. We seriously undervalue professions that prioritize helping others and the people of color who are overrepresented in their workforce. (The two are likely related: The high percentages of people of color in these industries could well be part of why, on average, they pay less.)

Even in a far fairer economy, of course, these kinds of fields likely won’t pay as much right out of college as the hard sciences do, which typically demand more taxing, technical knowledge. And to the extent that Black students are drawn to lower-paying fields to help fight structural oppression—for example, criminal justice majors are needed to help address mass incarceration—then the ultimate solution to this imbalance is eliminating systematic discrimination. Doing so might lead some Black students to choose other fields, while also reducing barriers to graduating from those fields. 

But, needless to say, dismantling racism is a lengthy task. Until it happens, it’s especially critical that majors with high Black enrollment be more lucrative. 

The good news is that they can be. There are schools that graduate these students into well-paying jobs. While none of the listed social work programs had earnings that exceeded $34,500, all of the sociology and criminal justice programs did. And it’s not just elite schools that made the cut. Almost half of the institutions are open-access public schools. Every social work program that appears is offered by a state school, and the only two nonselective institutions on the sociology list are public universities. One of them, the University of Houston, has the highest share of Black graduates of any of the sociology programs, and its median earnings outpace several far more famous colleges. It’s a positive sign that even less-selective institutions can help students in these majors get decent-paying jobs right out of college.

We were able to produce this list only because the Department of Education, after years of promises, finally released earnings data by specific school programs. There’s no doubt that this is useful. But it also has limits. First, thus far, the department only provides information for two years of graduates—2015 and 2016. (To make sure we matched earnings with graduates, we measured the shares of Black graduates using the same years.) Second, it only gives us such data for graduates who are one year out of college. It would be much more helpful if the department provided program-level earnings for classes that are multiple years, and ideally decades, out of school.

The relative paucity of information presents other constraints. The Department of Education does not break down earnings data by race. As a result, it is impossible for us to know if Black students are sharing equally in the above-median earnings. Given that Black people make less than other Americans in the same fields and with the same levels of education, it’s likely that they are not. (Our belief is that the relatively high share of Black graduates in these particular programs means that they are likely still enjoying some of the higher-than-average returns.)

In addition, the department does not provide program-level debt estimates that include family debt, meaning that researchers, including ourselves, cannot accurately measure how much graduates of these programs owe lenders. Given that people of color take on more debt on average than others, the government must determine and then release this information so we can better understand which programs are most financially helpful for minority communities. Similarly, the proxy we used to determine Black graduation rates—first-time, full-time students—is imperfect because it does not capture returning or part-time students, of which Black people also make up a disproportionate percentage. We used it anyway, because the Department of Education provides no part-time or returning student graduation data that is broken down by race. It also doesn’t provide graduation rates broken down by each school’s particular programs.

To fully explore which schools do the best job of helping Black students go into well-paying jobs, researchers need as much granular program-level data as possible that includes outcomes by race. In theory, getting it should be straightforward: Congress must simply repeal a 2008 law that bans the government from being able to track by racial category students’ outcomes after college. There’s already a bipartisan collection of senators who support eliminating this prohibition. In the meantime, the Department of Education can keep publishing data on program-level outcomes so we can see how graduates fare several years after college.

But for now, we hope that our findings more fully illustrate the unfortunate state of majors, race, and earnings—as well as provide some glimmers of hope.  

The post Colleges Where Majors Popular with Black Students Pay Well appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic crisis have made colleges’ role in enhancing social mobility more important than ever. Typically, during recessions, more Americans enroll in colleges and universities in an effort to boost their job prospects. We may not see enrollments increase until after the public health crisis passes—which could take a year or two—but millions of Americans are doubtlessly thinking ahead to what colleges can do for them. 

For the ninth 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, beginning on page 52. (We used the same data and methodology to create the social mobility portion of the main rankings, which begin on page 62; the methodology is explained on page 106.) We had to use the same data for median earnings and student loan repayment rates as last year, as the U.S. Department of Education did not update college-level data in the College Scorecard this year. Hopefully the federal government will continue to share this important information with the public going forward.

The Best Bang for the Buck colleges across each of the five regions are a mix of some of America’s most elite institutions and hidden gems with strong student outcomes and a commitment to upward mobility. In the Northeast, four Ivy League universities and MIT are joined in the top 10 by Goddard College, the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, Bentley University, the City University of New York’s Baruch College, and Rutgers University–Newark. At Baruch College, low-income students with Pell Grants graduate at essentially the same rate as their wealthier peers. And the cost of attending is reasonable; for a student from a household earning less than $75,000, Baruch has a net price of $2,789 per year. This is what an engine of social mobility looks like. 

In the South and Midwest, Berea College and College of the Ozarks maintain their consistently high rankings thanks to their economic diversity, relatively strong graduation rates, and commitment to meeting students’ financial need. Public universities do well in both regions, with the University of Illinois campuses in Chicago and Urbana-Champaign landing within the top five in the Midwest and Texas A&M’s College Station and Texarkana campuses joining the University ofTexas–Rio Grande Valley in the top five. More than half of UT–Rio Grande Valley students are the first in their families to attend college, and the average net price is just $3,298 per year.

In the Southeast, Georgetown University and Washington and Lee take the top two spots again this year, reflecting the fact that they serve their lower-income students exceptionally well. But combined, they only graduated 262 Pell recipients last year—about a fifth of the number that graduated from seventh-ranked Florida International University, where nearly half of the students are first generation. Finally, in the West, the California State University system continues to dominate the region. Fourteen of the top 23 colleges in the West are Cal State campuses, with Stanislaus taking the top spot this year. The University of Washington’s Tacoma campus and Utah State University also maintained their traditional spots in the top 10.

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. In a time when students and their families are balking at paying high tuition prices for mediocre student outcomes, many of these colleges will struggle and may be forced to change their behavior or risk going out of business. But not all of them. Liberty University, for example, is in no danger of closing, thanks to its billion-dollar endowment and around 100,000 students attending online, but their net price of $25,272 and 44 percent eight-year graduation rate result in them being ranked 262nd of 278 colleges in the Southeast. They can—and must—do better.

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Joe Biden enters the final two months of the 2020 campaign about as well positioned ideologically as any Democratic presidential nominee in decades. Over the summer he and Bernie Sanders negotiated a set of policy positions in which the former vice president moved to the left on everything from climate change to immigration. But he conspicuously stopped short of signing on to the most controversial “big ideas” of his socialist rival, such as Medicare for All and decriminalizing illegal border crossings. 

This new agenda, because it’s been blessed by Sanders and other progressives, gives left-leaning Democrats reason to hold their noses and vote for Biden. It also makes it harder for Donald Trump to persuade wavering Republicans and Independents that Biden is a tool of the extreme left. That—plus the smoldering ruin Trump has made of the country—should, with luck, be enough to secure the White House and a Senate majority for the Democrats.

But even Biden’s Pretty Darned Progressive agenda will be no match for the catastrophic situation he and the Democrats will inherit should they win back power. The young voters who rallied around Sanders during the primaries weren’t wrong that America needs root-to-branch change, not marginal reform. And that was before the killing of George Floyd focused the nation’s attention on its deep and abiding racial injustices in ways not seen since the civil rights era. It was also before Trump’s bungled management of the pandemic created 1930s-level mass unemployment. 

These huge, intertwined crises will present Biden, if he wins, with the responsibility, and possibly the opportunity, to enact much bolder changes than he has dared contemplate. The question is, what are the big ideas he should pursue? 

Certainly not the ones Sanders himself couldn’t sell. Remember how, during the debates, the more Sanders argued for Medicare for All, the more its political flaws became obvious—that it would require huge new taxes on the middle class and take away private health insurance for 150 million Americans, all on the promise that most people would come out ahead? 

Instead, on health care, Biden should champion a smarter big idea, one this magazine has dubbed “Medicare Prices for All”: In a nutshell, the federal government would set uniform (and generally lower) prices for all medical procedures. Doing so is the single best way to discipline our increasingly costly, monopolized, predatory, and discriminatory health care system. It could also deliver lower out-of-pocket health care costs to voters, with no tax increases, before the 2024 elections. 

On higher education, Biden needs a similarly smarter big idea than the one Sanders has been peddling, universal free public college. The Sanders plan would essentially pump enough federal money into states to allow their public universities to charge zero tuition, regardless of the different amounts those states currently spend on higher education. But that would unjustly reward states (mostly red ones) that currently underinvest in their public college systems, while penalizing other states (mostly blue ones) that provide more generous subsidies to keep tuition low. It would also direct comparatively more funds to elite flagship universities that disproportionately serve upper-middle-class whites, while shortchanging under-resourced open-access colleges that cater to lower-income and minority students. 

In this issue, Kevin Carey lays out a better big idea to transform higher education while avoiding these flaws (“How to Save Higher Education,” page 30). Under Carey’s plan, individual colleges (not states) would be offered a direct annual federal subsidy of $10,000 per full-time student. In exchange, they’d have to offer free college tuition to students with an annual household income below $75,000, meet minimum standards for graduation rates and post-graduation earning, and accept credits from every other college that takes this deal, including from online classes. 

While not every college would take the deal, hundreds around the country probably would, since most Americans attend colleges where the revenue per full-time student is less than $10,000.  Participating schools would have plenty of extra money to invest in better outcomes. (As Jamaal Abdul-Alim reports in “Higher Ed’s Most Successful Failure,” page 36, there are already proven ways of achieving those outcomes.) And the requirement to share credits would create strong incentives for colleges to cooperate with each other to improve student success rates. 

The end result, Carey writes,

would be a new network of affordable, well-resourced, deeply interconnected colleges and universities that combine the virtues of traditional higher education diversity and autonomy with consumer protection, information technology, and cutting-edge education practice. Instead of letting some colleges collapse into bankruptcy while the rest struggle and claw in a failed system of free market chaos and declining public support, some of the most vital and distinctly American institutions in our nation’s history would be repositioned for even greater success.

If he is going to meet the demands of this moment in history, Biden will (like FDR) have to govern more ambitiously as president than he is running as a candidate. This magazine will continue to try to fashion the big-but-smart ideas he’ll need. 

But first, of course, he has to win.

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In Washington, D.C., debates around higher education tend to focus on the Harvards and Yales of the world, forgetting that the vast majority of students don’t attend elite schools. Too often absent from these conversations are higher education’s true workhorses: so-called regional public universities.

While the Department of Education offers no official definition of these institutions, they basically occupy the middle space between community colleges and flagship research universities. One analysis by Inside Higher Education tallies more than 500 schools nationwide that fit this category. Generally, they are less selective in their admissions policies and lack prestige, but they fulfill an essential role in helping millions of Americans advance their lives and careers.

These schools—think Eastern Michigan University instead of the University of Michigan—confer nearly 40 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in the country each year and as many as one-fifth of degrees overall. They are particularly important in providing students of color access to higher education—and they play an enormous role in supporting their local economies. 

The problem is, they are also struggling to survive. 

Even before the pandemic, many regional public universities were facing stark financial challenges. Enrollment numbers and state funding had been in decline for years. Now, their revenue may shrink further, as some students shift to cheaper community colleges for online classes and others are unable to afford college altogether. 

But if the schools pull through this period, they could be pivotal to a robust and equitable post-pandemic recovery, as a recent Brookings Institution report found. A case study of regional public colleges in the Great Lakes region, it highlights three significant ways in which these schools could bolster a post-COVID-19 recovery.

First, regional public universities are typically the economic anchor of the towns or cities where they’re located, and are often the town’s biggest employer. They also often spur economic development through research and development activities and partner with local employers to help commercialize new technologies or share best practices. In past downturns, according to Brookings, this support has cushioned localities from the most severe impacts of the crisis. In the Great Lakes region, for instance, communities with a public four-year school lost fewer jobs during the Great Recession and recovered more quickly, the study’s authors, Rob Maxim and Mark Muro, found.

Second, these universities’ close ties with their communities mean they can be responsive to local employers’ needs for skilled workers. One of the biggest challenges currently facing the higher ed community is the frequent mismatch between the skills employers want and the ones newly minted graduates have cultivated. But Brookings found that in the Great Lakes region, the most common majors at regional schools were business, health, and education, indicating that graduates are likely filling high-demand local jobs, such as in nursing.

Dan Hurley, CEO of the Michigan Association of State Universities, said this function of filling local workforce gaps is bound to become more important as the economy shifts after the pandemic subsides. “Michigan already has an exceptionally high proportion of adults that have some college and no degree, and now we have pandemic-induced unemployment and underemployment,” he told me. “These populations are poised to reenter higher education either for upskilling or to earn longer-term credentials. There’s huge pent-up demand there.”

Third, regional public institutions offer broad access to higher education, which can make them engines of equity and economic inclusion. Of course, no school is perfect, but these universities have a significantly better track record than elite schools in enrolling and graduating minority and low-income students in terms of sheer numbers. In the Great Lakes region, as many as 71 percent of Black students enrolled in a public university attend a regional public institution, as do nearly three-quarters of Native American students, 59 percent of Hispanic students, and 61 percent of students who identify as two or more races, Maxim and Muro found.

These schools also award a greater share of bachelor’s degrees to Black students than flagships and major research universities. In terms of absolute numbers, they grant more than twice as many bachelor’s degrees to Black students as their elite counterparts. “Regional public universities help close racial attendance gaps,” Maxim and Muro concluded.

Research by Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist who focuses on social mobility, and his colleagues at Opportunity Insights likewise finds that regional public colleges are among the most successful in recruiting and graduating low-income students. Among the schools Chetty cites as best facilitating economic mobility are institutions like the State University of New York at Stony Brook and many campuses of the City University of New York. (This dedication to equity is also one reason why so many regional schools populate the top slots of the Washington Monthly’s college rankings, see page 62.)

By comparison, Chetty finds that state flagship schools and elite colleges are still largely preserves of the rich, with essentially no gains in the share of low-income students enrolled (despite much-ballyhooed initiatives to increase economic diversity). Nor have these top-tier schools become more racially inclusive. A 2017 New York Times analysis found that Black and Hispanic students are actually more underrepresented at top colleges today than they were 35 years ago. Black students make up just 6 percent of the freshman class at elite schools—a share that hasn’t changed since 1980, though their share of the college-age population has grown to 15 percent.

While regional public universities have been doing great work for decades, they may not be doing any work if the pandemic wreaks havoc on their budgets.

The vast majority of these schools do not have the cushion of fat endowments. Instead, they rely on student tuitions and state appropriations to keep their doors open. While state funding was declining even before the coronavirus outbreak, higher education spending now faces much deeper cuts. “It’s a pretty tough period right now,” Rob Maxim told me in an interview. “States are seeing double-digit revenue declines, and unfortunately higher education tends to be a balance wheel for state budgets.” State legislators, in other words, know that they have more flexibility when it comes to funding public universities in comparison to other priorities, such as K–12 education or prisons, where funding levels are fixed or mandated by statute. “A lot of these schools had just gotten to 2007 pre-crisis funding levels,” Maxim continued, “and we’re looking at potentially slashing appropriations again.”

Moreover, many schools will face steep drops in enrollment numbers as students rethink their fall plans—meaning more revenue losses on top of state budget cuts. While analysis from McKinsey finds that more college-going students are now opting for in-state schools closer to home, it’s flagships and major research universities that are benefiting from the shift. Hurley said that Michigan State University, for instance, is likely to see its largest freshman class ever, while enrollment is likewise reportedly increasing at the University of Michigan. “State flagships have global brand pull,” Hurley said. At the same time, students more likely to head off to regional schools are now less able to afford it, even despite tuition freezes and other changes schools have made to stave off enrollment declines.

As of this writing, it’s still too soon to tell what impacts the pandemic will have on attendance this fall, but it’s clear that regional public universities could suffer enormous economic fallout. The consequences could be dire for the students and communities that rely on them—especially low-income and minority students, for whom regional schools may be the only lifeline to greater opportunity.

“If there’s anything that’s been laid bare by the past few weeks, it’s systemic racism and the continuing inequality of access that people of color have in the U.S.,” Maxim said. “If these schools are defunded, it’s only going to deepen those inequalities.” Given the vital role that regional public universities play, the nation can’t afford to let these institutions become yet another casualty of the pandemic.

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