The carnival of corruption and deceit that is the Operation Varsity Blues college admissions scandal has created many windows onto the sorry state of American higher education, and of American society at large. How the rich and powerful, unsatisfied with the enormous and growing advantages of our winner-take-all society, bribed and cheated to take even more. How athletic coaches simply diverted graft money normally claimed by college “development” officials into their own pockets. How the market price of an elite admissions slot can reach upward of $6 million, based on what one wealthy Chinese family was willing to pay. 

But the core truth exposed by the FBI is even more disturbing. The sheer venality of the scandal is the inevitable consequence of a higher education system unmoored from any honest appraisal of how well colleges help students learn.

Finding and publicizing such information is one of the Washington Monthly College Guide’s prime directives. Over the last fifteen years, we’ve steadily added new data to our rankings of what colleges do for their country by promoting social mobility, research, and public service. That perspective, unlike the wealth- and status-obsessed rankings published by U.S. News & World Report, creates a very different definition of excellence. 

It’s not surprising, for example, that no B-list celebrities were arrested for bribing their children into Utah State University, our fourteenth-ranked national university: it already admits 89 percent of students who apply. We rank Utah State so high because it’s very good at helping low-income students graduate and get good jobs. It was not designed to exclude people, which is why it doesn’t even crack the top 200 at U.S. News. 

Nor did any venture capitalist financiers pay off a test proctor to wangle their progeny into Cedar Crest College of Pennsylvania, our fifth-ranked master’s-granting university, which does a great job of promoting civic engagement and sending its graduates into the Peace Corps and PhD programs. Few of its students appear to be partying on yachts during spring break or getting paid to promote branded products on Instagram. And we can be sure that nobody Photoshopped the head of their weakling spawn onto the body of a champion water polo player in order to fake their way into Berea College, which ranks fourth on our list of liberal arts colleges. Berea, which has a historical mission of serving first-generation students from Appalachia, doesn’t have a water polo team—or crew, or sailing, or fencing, or any of the other rich-people sports that upper-crust families have long used as the so-called “side door” into coveted schools. 

Instead, those families set their sights on the University of Southern California, which saw the greatest number of employees implicated by the cheating scandal and—perhaps not coincidentally!—has produced a remarkably diverse collection of lurid improprieties in recent years. There’s the former dean of the USC medical school, a then-practicing eye surgeon, who spent many of his hours holed up in hotel rooms smoking meth with a prostitute. And the dean of the social work school, who pioneered the creation of a debt-financed $110,000 online social work degree by splitting the profits with a for-profit tech company; raked in millions; and somehow managed to bankrupt the department anyway before being implicated in a shady financial transaction involving the son of a prominent local politician. And the $50 million settlement with a rival school for lies and misconduct in poaching a star Alzheimer’s researcher. And the campus gynecologist who stands accused of sexually abusing hundreds of students—crimes the university allegedly tried to cover up. 

These are the kinds of things that happen at an institution disconnected from authentic purpose, a place where the pursuit of money and celebrity becomes both means and ends. Because it’s hard to know how good the education is at a given university, college, or program, institutions with branding savvy and proximity to wealth, fame, and power can ride a self-reinforcing spiral of price and reputation all the way up near the top of the U.S. News list, where USC currently sits at number twenty-two, blocked from further ascension only by universities that figured out how to play the game first. It’s no wonder that people selling glitzy fantasies in Hollywood and Silicon Valley were attracted to USC. They saw themselves. 

We, however, see a university that, despite a $5.5 billion endowment, has a substandard commitment to public service. That’s the difference between selling a world-class university and being one.

All of the schools caught up in the cheating scandal participate, to varying degrees, in the corruption of the academic ideal. Just as you can’t cheat an honest man, you can’t bribe your way past the doorman of a side entrance that doesn’t exist. Elite universities in this day and age are trying to have everything: money and influence and power but also respect and deference and public support. Some very good books have been written about these kinds of temptations. They can be found on the shelves of university libraries and the syllabi of the better humanities courses, should administrators and board members care to look. 

Reorienting higher learning around an ethical and student-centered set of values won’t come quick or easy. It will start with some outside accountability for where students, especially undergraduates, truly rank on the list of institutional priorities. We’ll continue to play that role by shining a light on the many colleges and universities too busy helping diverse students improve their lives and careers to be caught up in the decadence of the self-proclaimed leaders in the field. 

These are highlights from this year’s Washington Monthly college rankings.

National Universities

Our list of top national universities is a mix of familiar elite schools and public universities that should receive more credit than they often do. There are a handful of top-flight private research universities, such as Stanford, Harvard, and Yale, with so much money that they’re able to provide generous financial aid to low-income students, help them graduate, and support leading research all at the same time. They deserve credit, but they’re also using a model that can’t be replicated or expanded at any scale. Together, Harvard and Yale own more than 10 percent of all the university endowment assets in America while enrolling about .15 percent of all college freshmen. 

Real improvement will mean following the example of institutions like Cal State–Fresno, our twenty-fourth-ranked national university, which enrolls an unusually large number of low-income and first-generation students and helps them graduate into good-paying jobs. For families that make less than $75,000, the school’s average net price is under $5,000. Or Rutgers University’s Newark campus, which has a very high graduation rate given its economically and academically diverse student body and produces graduates who are more likely than most to get good jobs and pay back their loans. 

Arizona State University has grown into a research powerhouse while keeping its admissions criteria open to a wide array of students. It also has succeeded in fostering very high student voting rates (see Daniel Block, “The Voting Wars Come to Campus“), pushing it near the top of our service rankings. 

There are also some familiar universities at the very bottom of our rankings. Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. is well known as an ardent supporter of President Trump and a generous patron of Miami-area hotel pool attendants. But Liberty’s graduation rate is eight percentage points lower than it ought to be, given the makeup of its student body, and outcomes for Pell Grant students are especially terrible. Yet Liberty charges students from households earning less than $75,000 per year a net price of over $24,000, one of the highest prices in the nation. That forces Liberty students to take on a lot of debt. Five years after leaving Liberty, only 50 percent of those students have paid back even $1 on the principal of their loans. Liberty conducts little or no research, awards no doctorates in science and engineering, and, despite its alleged mission of “sensitivity to the needs of others” and “social responsibility,” makes almost no discernible contributions to public service. We rank Liberty 387 out of 395.

Liberal Arts Colleges

Washington and Lee, our top-ranked liberal arts college, offers an unbeatable combination of inexpensive tuition and great job outcomes for graduates. Berea College is perennially a top five school on our rankings because it was designed for social mobility. Amherst College is a more traditional elite liberal arts school, but it enrolls a significantly larger percentage of Pell Grant students than its highly selective peers. 

Bryn Mawr spends more on funded research than any other liberal arts college and is among the very best in graduating women who go on to earn PhDs. Agnes Scott College in Georgia, another all-women’s school, is tops in sending alumni into the Peace Corps. College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Massachusetts, stands out in helping graduates get good-paying jobs and pay their loans back. For a variety of reasons, women’s colleges and Jesuit schools tend to score highly on our criteria. 

Regional Campuses

Selective research universities and liberal arts colleges have historically received most of the rankings attention because they compete for students in a national market. But they enroll only a small fraction of undergraduates. Most college students instead attend a midsized regional public university or community college near home. Students, policymakers, and university trustees therefore need to know who their local leaders and laggards really are. That’s why we separately rank smaller institutions that primarily educate students seeking bachelor’s or master’s degrees and tend to draw from a regional applicant pool. 

SUNY Geneseo, our second-ranked master’s-granting institution, benefits from New York State’s continued investment in higher learning. While nearly all states enacted large cuts to university budgets after the Great Recession, a few, including New York and California, have restored almost all of the lost money, or even increased investment. Geneseo is second out of more than 500 master’s institutions on our service rankings. CUNY Baruch College also ranks high, with an eight-year graduation rate of 70 percent and, unusually, a higher success rate for Pell Grant students than others. Half of Baruch’s enrollment is composed of first-generation students, continuing CUNY’s historic role as a vector of upward mobility for immigrants to New York City, and the net price remains very low for middle- and lower-income families, at a little more than $4,000 per year. 

Trinity University, a private college with Presbyterian roots in San Antonio, can’t quite match public university prices, and graduates don’t earn a ton of money in the first few years out of school. But Trinity’s loan repayment rate of 92 percent is extraordinarily high, perhaps because of a strong career and academic focus, besting all other master’s institutions in sending graduates to doctoral programs. Goshen College, in Indiana, our second-ranked bachelor’s-granting institution, also has a Christian tradition. Forty percent of Goshen undergrads are first-generation students, making its 69 percent graduation rate impressively high. Like Trinity, Goshen also sends a strong cohort of graduates into doctoral programs and manages their financial aid so they can repay their loans. 

People generally don’t think of institutions like Goshen and Trinity as of a kind; they’re 1,300 miles apart and don’t play football against each other on weekends. But the schools are, in many ways, the face of what successful twenty-first-century higher education needs to look like: academically rigorous, demographically diverse, rooted in scholarly and ethical value systems that promote learning and engagement with the world. 

The challenge is to make that definition of excellence the standard in academia and public life. What we saw in bold letters this year, and have known for much longer, is that universities that chase the lure of fame and money instead will eventually come to bad ends. We’re glad to promote a different perspective: not what colleges do for themselves, but what they do for their country.

Note: A previous version of this article included inaccurate information about the number of Pell-grant eligible students who graduate from USC each year. The inaccurate information was submitted by USC itself to the U.S. Department of Education. 

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

Among the thousands of personal appeals on the crowdfunding site GoFundMe, you’ll find a 2017 campaign for a young woman named Kirstin, a then high school junior with wavy light brown hair, hazel eyes, and a smile that hints at suppressed excitement.

“Kirstin’s Invited to Stanford!” the page, created by Kirstin’s aunt, declares. “My 16-year-old niece has been offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. After working hard her entire school career to achieve a goal, she has done it!”

Kirstin, it turns out, was not admitted as an undergraduate, but was raising funds for an “Intensive Law & Trial” summer program offered on the Stanford University campus. Tuition for the ten-day program runs to $4,095, not including airfare and pocket money. “Stanford, one of the most prestigious law schools in the country, is impressed enough with her to have invited her to this program in Palo Alto, California this summer,” the post continues. “Her extended family is trying hard to raise the deposit of $800.00 by week’s end so this opportunity does not slip through her fingers.”

Search “pre-college” on GoFundMe.com and you’ll find dozens of similar campaigns from hopeful students dazzled by the allure of two weeks on an elite campus. “Going to the Summer @ Brown PreCollege Program would give me a preview of what life would be like if I attend the school of my dreams,” reads a 2018 campaign by Benjina, from Newark, New Jersey. “This program will give me the experience of a lifetime,” writes Yakeleen, a high schooler from Tucson, Arizona, hoping to raise $2,200 to attend Harvard’s pre-college program. “Coming from a low income background while being a first generation student, this is a grand oppurtunity [sic] I intend on taking advantage of.”

These posts reflect the growing trend of summer “pre-college” programs at the nation’s most prestigious universities. Stanford, which launched its “pre-collegiate studies” program in 2012, hosts three-week summer sessions for high schoolers with course options on more than fifty different subjects, in addition to the mock trial program Kirstin hoped to attend. Similar programs abound at other elite institutions. In fact, of the top forty schools ranked in U.S. News & World Report, all but one—Dartmouth—offer some sort of summer program for high school students (and, in some cases, even middle schoolers). “More and more colleges and universities are offering short-term on-campus programs that offer a taste of what life would be like at their institution,” reports the International Association for College Admission Counseling.

These programs can offer precocious teens an enriching, hands-on preview of college life. But they also exploit both the allure of brand-name universities and families’ anxieties about an increasingly cutthroat college admissions process in which “summer experiences” matter. While even ambitious teens once spent their summers scooping ice cream or lazing by the pool, they now choose from a dizzying array of summer options, including trips to every corner of the planet and camps in every subject from robotics to equestrianism. “Admissions officers want to see that students are spending at least a few of their weeks productively during the summer,” said Andrew Belasco, CEO of the college advising firm College Transitions.

The popularity of summer pre-college programs suggests that many kids and parents see them as a good way to get a leg up on college admissions. And many universities, including Columbia and Johns Hopkins, explicitly encourage that belief. But admissions experts I spoke to were unanimous that, when it comes to getting into college, the benefits of most pre-college programs are negligible. The big winners, rather, are the schools themselves, who use pre-college programs to generate millions of dollars in revenue while relying on marketing practices that oversell the programs’ benefits, including elaborate admissions processes that imply a misleading degree of selectivity.

And while the target demographic is most likely the sort of upper-middle-class family that can afford expensive private university education, it’s clear that the universities are consciously drawing in families who struggle to afford the programs’ high costs. Some schools, including Stanford, distribute “fundraising guides” encouraging students to solicit contributions, including through crowdsourcing sites like GoFundMe. “With successful planning, creativity and resilience, students have worked with their community to achieve the goal of funding,” Stanford’s guide reads. “This is a great opportunity to gain leadership skills and connect to your community.”

For Kirstin’s family, creativity appears to have taken the form of debt. “We came up short but Kirstin saved and raised $650.00 on her own,” her aunt wrote in an update posted July 2017. “Brian and I put the balance of her tuition on credit because we are not letting this pass her by.”

To be fair, summer pre-college programs sound like a lot of fun for teenage overachievers. “They’re summer camp,” said Brian Taylor, managing director of the New York–based admissions consulting firm Ivy Coach. At Harvard, for example, pre-college students live on campus, eat at the dining halls, and explore such topics as “the psychology of color-blindness” and the “science of happiness.” UCLA’s program promises “Movie premieres. Comedy shows. Major league baseball and soccer games,” along with excursions to Santa Monica Beach and shopping in Beverly Hills.

For careful shoppers who understand what they’re buying, the programs can be richly rewarding. Michele Gilman, a law professor at the University of Baltimore, sent her daughter to Brown for a summer workshop in number theory. “It was a chance for her to explore an interest in a way that she couldn’t access in high school,” Gilman said.

Shellie Bressler, another Washington, D.C.–area parent, said she sent her sons to pre-college programs so they’d know what to expect as college freshmen living away from home. “I wanted them to see what it’s like to live in a dorm with a stranger and have freedom and flexibility outside of their classes,” she said. Other parents say the programs helped their children figure out what kind of school they wanted to attend: big city versus bucolic college town; liberal arts college versus research university.

In these cases, the experience can pay off. Gilman’s daughter, for example, now attends Brown and is majoring in math. “She ended up applying early decision to Brown and got in,” Gilman said. “And I think it’s because she had such a good experience over the summer. She loved the campus, she loved the town. Her interest in Brown grew from that.”

But college admissions experts say that for many families, these experiences aren’t worth the often very hefty price tags. Harvard’s two-week session costs $4,600, while Brown charges $2,776 for one week and $6,976 for a four-week version. Some programs offer college credit, but it comes at a steep premium. Duke, for example, offers a non-credit “Summer Academy” for $6,745; its “Summer College” program, which allows students to take one Duke course for credit, costs an additional $2,800. By comparison, the cost of an entire semester’s worth of credits at North Carolina community colleges is capped at $1,216.

More to the point, these prices don’t buy what many parents believe they’re getting with a pre-college program: a backdoor way to get their kid accepted to their dream school. I interviewed half a dozen professional admissions consultants, most of them former college admissions officers, and all of them said that pre-college programs generally don’t give kids a special edge on their applications or carry the prestige that many families think they do. “Some of our parents who come to us have paid thousands of dollars to these programs thinking their students get an advantage, which is just not the case,” said Belasco, the CEO of College Transitions. “People attend these programs all the time and then don’t get in,” said Ivey Consulting’s Anna Ivey. “It can be heartbreaking because they’ve fallen in love with the school.”

(Kirstin’s fundraiser for Stanford’s pre-college law program, for instance, declares, “Attending Stanford has been a lifelong dream of Kirstin’s.” Her family didn’t respond to multiple interview requests, but a student with her name, from the same small town in Vermont, made the dean’s list at the University of New Hampshire last fall.)

One reason these programs don’t blow the socks off admissions officers is that they don’t reflect either the academic rigor or the selective admissions of the institutions that host them. Many pre-college programs are run by separate departments within a university (often the school of professional studies), or even by an outside company, and so have no connection to undergraduate education or admissions.

Among the private, for-profit companies that run pre-college programs is Envision, a subsidiary of the global educational travel company WorldStrides. In addition to programs at Johns Hopkins, UCLA, Yale, Rice, Georgia Tech, and other schools, Envision runs the Stanford-based mock trial program that was the subject of Kirstin’s GoFundMe campaign. Although that program hires Stanford Law School faculty to help teach some classes, the fine print on the Envision site notes, “This cultural excursion is not affiliated with Stanford Law School in any way.” It is, in other words, a side hustle for Stanford professors. Children “invited” to attend are invited by the company, which also runs the admissions process, not by Stanford Law. Likewise with Envision’s “Global Young Leaders Conference,” a ten-day excursion costing $3,095 that includes embassy visits, a tour of D.C., and “real world simulations” that seem very much like what one would do in a high school Model United Nations. Like the mock trial program, the application process is managed entirely by the company, although college credit is offered through George Mason University.

Unsurprisingly, given all this outsourcing, summer pre-college programs are not nearly as selective as undergraduate admissions at the institutions hosting them—or as families are sometimes led to believe. This is evident from the sheer volumes of students admitted. Stanford’s website, for instance, says its summer program serves more than 3,000 students—or nearly double the number it admitted this year to its freshman class. As tightly as the gates are shut for undergraduate admissions, they are flung wide open during summer. That’s another reason why admissions offices aren’t likely to be impressed by an Ivy League pre-college program on a student’s resume.

“Yeah, they might ask you to write an essay or even ask for a recommendation letter, but if you can afford the price tag and you show evidence you can handle it by being a halfway decent student, you’re going to be accepted,” said Elizabeth Heaton, a former admissions officer at the University of Pennsylvania who is now vice president of educational consulting at Bright Horizons College Coach. “I don’t think I’ve had a student apply to those programs and not get in.”

While some programs require a minimum GPA, the standard tends to be forgiving. Johns Hopkins, for example, where the average high school GPA of incoming freshmen is 3.93, requires only a 3.0 minimum GPA for its summer “immersion” program ($2,575, one week, no college credit). “Most of our programs are not super selective,” said Liz Ringel, chief marketing officer for Summer Discovery, a company that runs pre-college programs on fourteen campuses, including the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins, and other top-tier institutions. “We want to make sure that students are in good academic standing, they haven’t been expelled, they don’t have any disciplinary action against them, and they are going to enjoy the experience on campus.”

Ultimately, schools may be less interested in a student’s academic brilliance than in their ability to pay. Among the college admissions consultants I interviewed, the consensus was that a primary purpose of these pre-college summer programs is making money. “Colleges are businesses, and one of the reasons they run summer programs is because they have all of these empty dorm rooms that ideally they could fill with people and make use of the resources that are already there,” said Bright Horizons’ Heaton. In 2015, a Brown University administrator told the campus newspaper that the school’s summer program had brought in $6 million that year, 70 percent of which was essentially profit. “The summer program,” the paper reported, “is one of several efforts administrators have made in recent years to diversify the University’s revenue streams and reduce its reliance on undergraduate tuition.”

It should be said that there are a few long-standing summer programs that do signal true academic achievement to admissions officers. These include MIT’s Minority Introduction to Engineering and Science, a free program limited to eighty high school juniors, and the Princeton University Preparatory Program, another tuition-free initiative for low-income high schoolers from neighboring school districts. MIT’s website attempts to distinguish these efforts from others by cautioning that while “[m]ost summer programs admit all or most students who can pay the (high) tuition . . . a number of competitive admission summer programs select only the best students on the basis of merit and are often free or comparatively affordable.”

To their credit, some colleges are fairly up-front that going to their pre-college program won’t be a boon with the admissions office. Rice University’s website, for example, flatly states that “Admission to Rice Summer Sessions does not in any way influence your admission to Rice as an undergraduate.”

Nevertheless, many parents and students still believe otherwise. Some of this is due to a general conviction that any edge, however small, is worth it in the college admissions arms race. But colleges help encourage these perceptions though practices that create the impression that the programs are more selective and valuable than they probably are. Some institutions, for instance, explicitly argue in their marketing materials that their pre-college programs will make students more competitive. Columbia University’s pre-college website promises “an Ivy League achievement for your college transcript,” while Johns Hopkins urges students to “Get an edge on the competition for college admissions.”

At the same time, Sean Recroft, the assistant dean for summer programs at Johns Hopkins, said admission to summer pre-college programs doesn’t help students get into Hopkins later. “It does not hurt if you do a program and do well,” he said. “But we’re certainly not a feeder to Hopkins undergraduate programs.”

Perhaps the most common way that colleges build an aura of prestige around pre-college is by requiring students to go through an onerous application process that mimics the selectivity of undergraduate admissions. Harvard, for instance, requires a $75 nonrefundable application fee, a “counselor report,” and transcripts. Deadlines are as early as February, creating a sense of urgency in submitting applications, and the website mentions the role of an “admissions committee” in reviewing applications. Stanford University’s “Pre-Collegiate Summer Institutes” likewise requires a $65 application fee, transcripts, one to four teacher recommendations, and even work samples (depending on the program). And a blog post on Brown’s pre-college site warns, “Take the pre-college application as seriously as you would a college application.”

College Transitions’ Andrew Belasco argues that there’s a purpose to having such elaborate admissions processes for programs that ultimately aren’t very selective. “It gets people to buy in,” he said. “You’re more likely to commit if you have to invest something beforehand and more likely to think it’s a legitimate program.”

The techniques seem to work. Back at the crowdfunding site GoFundMe, an earnest-looking teen with glasses and brunette waves named Emma was hoping to raise $3,650 for another Stanford pre-college program this summer. “As would be expected, the entire application process was a difficult one, as it was aimed towards thousands of kids who will possibly be our next leaders,” she wrote. “As a result, the application itself was based off Stanford’s college application which included teacher recommendations, national test scores, work samples, essays, and more. It was honestly a miracle just to get in!”

These GoFundMe campaigns are evidence of at least some students’ inflated sense of the prestige of pre-college programs. They are also evidence of how some schools are encouraging students to go to extraordinary lengths to raise the money to attend. Pre-college programs don’t qualify for federal financial aid, and while some schools offer grants or scholarships to cover the cost, the amount is typically minimal. Notre Dame’s Office of Pre-College Programs, for instance, says on its website that it only offers “[v]ery limited need-based, partial scholarships” and “does not offer merit-based financial assistance or scholarships.”

In lieu of aid, some schools are more likely to direct students to fundraising guides. In addition to Stanford, these schools include top-tier institutions like Northwestern, Brown, Emory, and Brandeis. The results of these tactics are what you see on GoFundMe.

“I’m calling to raise $2500 for the program at Northeastern because I truly do not want to let go of such an amazing, rigorous program that will inevitably help me pursue my dreams, and I believe that anyone given such a great opportunity should never pass it up because of financial difficulties,” writes Mealaktey, a high schooler in Rhode Island. “I also cannot pass up the opportunity to study at the university I am highly interested in applying to in the future.”

Some of the guides supplied by schools suggest tactics like bake sales and online auctions and even include a sample fundraising letter with blanks for students to fill in, like this, from Washington University: “I am a student at (name of school) and have recently been accepted by Washington University in St. Louis to attend a summer program for outstanding students. I have maintained a grade point average of ____ and have been highly involved in (list activities, teams, community work). I have enrolled in (name of courses or program), because I am passionate about _________.”

Not surprisingly, the for-profit pre-college company Envision also offers a fundraising guide for students, along with a link to Fundraising.com, where students can sell popcorn, mugs, T-shirts, and other products. “Make fundraising part of your personal success story,” Envision’s site says.

“It’s absolutely appalling,” said Anna Ivey, the admissions consultant, of these tactics. “So many schools that have summer programs are richer than God. They don’t need to be taking money from teenagers hoping to score some extra points in the admissions process.”

So what is the “best” summer experience for high schoolers?

For one thing, there are far cheaper ways to explore an academic interest over the summer than a pre-college summer program. “Take a class at a community college,” said Colleen Ganjian, founder of DC College Counseling. Ivey suggested taking a free online course from platforms such as edX.org, which features many of the same top-tier schools. “I understand it’s fun to be on the actual campus,” she said. “But at what price? And for what benefit?”

Admissions counselors also say that teens should do what they used to do, before the pre-college and summer experience fad took hold: get a job. “College admissions officers love jobs,” said Ivy Coach’s Brian Taylor. “It doesn’t matter if you work at McDonald’s. If you need a job to help your family pay the bills, that makes you likable, and that’s a huge part of the process.”

“A job is great,” said Stefanie Niles, president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling and a vice president at Ohio Wesleyan University. “They have the opportunity to make money, manage their money, they learn about responsibility, they’re working in a team setting. There’s a lot you can learn from a summer job.” Niles added, however, that the “ideal” summer experience is up to students and there is no magic formula. “From the admissions side, we like to see students participate in activities that help them grow, that expose them to new ideas, and where they may be challenged in new and interesting ways.”

Nevertheless, so long as the college admissions process remains opaque and increasingly competitive, and so long as parents and students become ever more desperate for the brass ring of acceptance into a selective institution, the allure of pre-college summer programs will only grow. In fact, the next frontier is pre-college for middle schoolers, which more schools are beginning to offer. Summer Discovery, for instance, said it currently runs two such “junior discovery” programs, at UCLA and Georgetown, but could be expanding its offerings next year to accommodate parent demand.

Parents, meanwhile, are reluctant to pass up any conceivable potential advantage for their kids. “Guilt plays into a lot of this,” said one parent who sent her kids to multiple pre-college programs. “Don’t you want to give your kids a leg up?” But rather than a competitive edge, pre-college programs may too often be selling big dreams, false hopes, and a tantalizing taste of an elite education that is ultimately out of reach.

The post The Pre-College Racket appeared first on Washington Monthly.

American colleges and universities are known throughout the world for the innovations they nurture and produce, from breakthroughs in solar power, chemotherapy research, and touchscreen technology, to the creation of the spreadsheet. But when it comes to innovating internally—by changing their structure and design to better serve their students—they are notoriously hidebound. For example: nearly 30 percent of all undergraduates are now over the age of twenty-five, but the vast majority of college classes are still held during the workday, not on weekends and evenings when adults with full-time jobs can take them. This is one of the many ways in which colleges have not adapted to the changing needs of the average student. 

That said, there’s growing pressure on them to change. Students and parents are outraged by exorbitant tuition costs and the high levels of debt they have to take on; employers are frustrated by a mismatch between the skills they’re looking for and the ones newly minted college graduates have cultivated; and policymakers are increasingly concerned about the huge number of students, mostly from modest backgrounds, who start college but don’t finish, and are left with no credential that could help them get a good job to pay off their student debt. As a consequence, there’s now more oxygen for higher education leaders who want to start doing things differently. 

A few years ago, we began profiling in our annual College Guide the institutions and individuals—be they college presidents, academics, researchers, private-sector entrepreneurs, or lawmakers—who were coming up with innovative ways to make college work better, rather than helping universities increase their endowments and climb up the U.S. News & World Report rankings. This year, we take stock of how those ideas have progressed and spread, and what policymakers are doing to advance them. 

Predictive Analytics 

One of the biggest challenges facing higher education is the need to not just enroll more students, but keep them. Only around 40 percent of the students who enroll in college each year graduate in four years. (For students of modest means, the odds are even worse.) With such a high number of dropouts, institutions are under increasing pressure to help students persist until they earn a diploma. It turns out that the emergence of Big Data can help. 

Georgia State University, in partnership with the consulting firm EAB, was one of the first universities to pioneer predictive analytics—the use of past data to forecast future behavior and design interventions to shape it—in an academic setting. The aim was to use troves of digital information to identify predictors of when a student was at risk of failing. The school found, for example, that if a student earned a C or lower in an introductory course for their chosen major, they were statistically less likely to graduate. So now, when that happens, an adviser will reach out and help the student identify another course of study with a better chance of success. In recent years, GSU’s graduation rate has risen by more than 30 percent. Even more remarkably, the school has eliminated the racial achievement gap, and now awards more bachelor’s degrees to African Americans than any other nonprofit college in the country. 

Now, more than 500 schools are partnering with EAB and other firms to apply predictive analytics models to improve student outcomes and replicate Georgia State’s success. One of the most innovative companies is Civitas Learning, based in Austin, Texas, which is now working with more than 300 colleges, including the University of South Florida and Utah State. Civitas’s basic thesis is that the best indicator of whether a student will graduate is not grades or test scores or demographics—it’s their behavior. Habits like logging into their online class portal reflect engagement, which is what ultimately determines whether a student succeeds. 

Predictive analytics isn’t magic. It only works when a college uses the data as a basis for changing the way it interacts with students. The University of South Florida, for instance, which Civitas began working with in 2014, created a “persistence committee” representing different parts of the university—from faculty to student affairs—to meet weekly to review student data and identify red flags. For students who raise alarms, the committee dispatches an academic advocate to figure out what’s going on and develop a remedy. It seems to be working. In 2011, USF’s six-year graduation rate was 52 percent. Now it’s 73 percent. 

The Texting Revolution 

While predictive analytics can identify students who need help, providing that help on a mass scale is expensive. It’s simply not possible for most of the schools that serve lower-income students—which tend to be poorly funded open-access public universities and community colleges—to hire a lot more trained guidance counselors. And so the race is on in higher education to find low-cost digital solutions.

One of those involves something called chatbots. If you’ve ever sought help from your bank or Apple using their online chat function, you’ve probably experienced this without knowing it: your initial questions are being answered by an algorithm. It’s only when those responses prove insufficient that a human being is brought in.

Georgia State was the first to apply this automated live chat service in a college setting, allowing students to ask questions, whether about financial aid or enrollment deadlines, and receive an answer almost immediately. The technology also addresses the fact that, as university president Mark Becker put it, “Students are vampires, and they tend to ask questions at one o’clock in the morning. And we tend not to have our financial aid staff sitting at their computers at one a.m.”

Students who seek information on their own are one thing. It’s those who don’t, but should, who are most likely to drop out. The most cost-effective way to find these students is not in the dining hall or the dorms or even the classroom. It’s on their phones. That’s why Georgia State began using automation to send text messages to students with critical reminders about deadlines and opportunities, and, when necessary, to let them know they have an outstanding assignment that needs to be turned in. 

Another pioneer in connecting via text is Trinity Washington University, an urban campus in Washington, D.C. Trinity uses Starfish Retention Solutions to notify students when they’ve missed an assignment or earned a poor grade. At the same time, the school sends out “Kudos” notices after they’ve earned a good grade, or after a professor puts in a notice through the system. “You had people who actually cared that you were getting everything that needed to be done,” said Deanna Stripling, who graduated from Trinity last year. “If something needed to be done, they would send you a reminder.”

A number of other schools have adopted similar techniques. The software company AdmitHub created Georgia State’s two-way messaging platform, and one of its competitors, Signal Vine, has partnered with schools like the University of Texas–Austin, Texas A&M, and the University of New Mexico. 

Ben Castleman, who founded and runs the Nudge⁴ Solutions Lab out of the University of Virginia, has taken the concept a step further. In 2011, he realized he could use texting to address the national phenomenon known as “summer melt,” in which low-income students sign up for college after graduating from high school but don’t show up in the fall. His idea was that texting students to remind them to fill out pre-enrollment paperwork would increase the likelihood that they started college on time. Sure enough, a recent study found that 72 percent of low-income students who received reminders ended up matriculating, compared with 66 percent in the control group of students who didn’t.

But texting is not a cure-all. And sending too many can backfire, as students start getting annoyed. So Alan Tripp, who previously cofounded the education consulting firm InsideTrack, created a new company called Motimatic to take digital intervention one step further. The company works with schools to buy ad space on students’ social media feeds and then installs messages that can serve as either a reminder or encouragement. In some cases, the ads merely reinforce the idea of being a student. For struggling students who are tempted to give up, it can be just the extra push they need. A recent study found that students who interacted with Motimatic messaging in the fall of 2015 had a 5 percent higher retention rate than those who didn’t. 

Competency-Based Education 

One of the hottest trends in higher ed reform is competency-based education. Under this model, students are able to complete courses once they can demonstrate mastery in the subject, not after they’ve fulfilled mandated seat-time requirements. If the course material is entirely new to the student, she might finish it in anywhere from eight to eighteen weeks. But if she is already familiar with the topic, she can immediately take the final. This allows students to move through the system as soon as they’re ready. That’s especially useful for adult students, who are not only typically trying to earn a degree while working full-time and raising kids—and for whom time is thus a precious commodity—but who have also likely learned skills on the job that overlap with some of what they’re being taught in class. 

First pioneered at Western Governors University—a revolutionary nonprofit, online institution created in 1997 by nineteen governors, mostly from western states—the idea came from one of its founders, former Colorado Governor Roy Romer, who wanted to hold schools accountable for teaching students competencies while streamlining the process. That has worked in ways Romer might not have imagined. Roughly 91 percent of WGU’s students are adults, and tuition remains low (a little over $6,500 a year). And, according to a 2018 Harris Poll Online survey, 87 percent of WGU graduates said they were employed in their degree field. 

Over the last ten years, the concept has been spreading. In 2009, then Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels announced a partnership with the school to create WGU Indiana, the first online university to become part of a state system. Today, the average time it takes to earn a bachelor’s degree at WGU is two and a half years. Now, other states—Texas, Nevada, Washington, Missouri, and Tennessee—have developed similar partnerships with Western Governors. 

But there’s major blockage in the spread of this innovation, and it’s located in D.C. Under law, students are generally only eligible for federal financial aid if the classes they take are measured in standard credit hours, which competency-based classes are not. (One of the benefits of creating state-based versions of WGU, as Indiana did, is that it makes it more likely that students can receive financial aid from the state.) 

The good news is that there’s a growing movement to get Washington to bust open the credit-hour monopoly. Amy Laitinen of New America, Charla Long of the Competency-Based Education Network, and others have been pushing for lawmakers to change the conditions by which financial aid is disbursed. In 2011, Laitinen was researching the issue when she stumbled upon a provision in a 2006 law that called for the federal government to exercise “direct assessment” when determining a school’s financial aid eligibility. The Obama administration used that loophole to issue an invitation to universities to experiment with competency-based models without losing access to federal financial aid. But it did so cautiously, with a host of preconditions meant to avoid giving predatory for-profit colleges—of which there are many—a further chance to peddle useless and expensive degrees. Because of the added red tape, few colleges took advantage of the opportunity. 

The debate, however, continues. During the Department of Education’s rulemaking session last winter, there was a lengthy discussion about credit-hour reform. It didn’t result in any immediate changes to federal policy, but as Julie Peller, executive director of Higher Learning Advocates, told me, it revealed a growing awareness that the current system “measures time, not learning”—and that isn’t serving the needs of students. While the exact reform that is needed remains a conundrum—there does need to be some way to ensure that federal loans aren’t going toward exploitative institutions—a consensus is building that the current system has got to change. 

Income-Sharing Agreements 

The problem isn’t just that too many students aren’t graduating. It’s that many of those who do aren’t able to get a decent-paying job afterward. One idea to address that is to make universities share in the financial risk if students fail to succeed in the job market. This was the thinking when Purdue University—under the leadership of Daniels, who became its president after leaving the governor’s mansion—launched a program called “Back a Boiler,” which allows students to borrow money from the school and agree to pay it back by giving the university a percentage of their salary. (The idea is now being championed, though not exclusively, by conservative thought leaders, including at the American Enterprise Institute.)

This isn’t, at some level, much different from simply taking out a loan. After all, you still owe money that, research shows, can hinder you from getting married or buying a home. Anthony Carnevale of Georgetown University, a skeptic of income-sharing agreements, referred to them as a form of “indentured servitude.” Proponents, however, say that making schools have “skin in the game” creates an incentive for them to improve the quality and marketability of the degrees they’re offering. Other schools to have since adopted this model include the University of Utah, Colorado Mountain College, Lackawanna College, Clarkson University, and Messiah College. 

Yet, because these arrangements are so new, they are not yet regulated. Private companies have gotten into the business of issuing income-sharing agreements to students, increasing the possibility of exploitation. For that reason, several members of the U.S. Senate, including Democrats Chris Coons and Mark Warner and Republicans Todd Young and Marco Rubio, proposed a bill in July to establish some rules of the road, such as creating an income threshold for when repayment obligations kick in and capping obligations at 20 percent of a graduate’s income. 

Remedial Education Reform 

Too many students, for too long, have been getting caught in the remedial education trap. This happens when students deemed unprepared for college-level work are placed in remedial classes before they can advance to courses that count toward a degree. This discouraging experience appears to hurt students more than it helps them. Research out of Columbia University shows that fewer than half of the students who are referred to remediation advance beyond it. For African Americans and older and part-time students, the results are even worse. All in all, students who are forced to take remedial classes have a much worse chance of graduating than comparable students who aren’t. 

That realization led two California community college professors, Katie Hern and Myra Snell, to develop the California Acceleration Project, one of the most ambitious applications of what’s called “corequisite education.” In a corequisite model, students take remedial courses and regular, for-credit ones at the same time, often through courses where remedial work is included alongside the normal curriculum, instead of having to pass the remediation gauntlet before earning any credit. Study after study has demonstrated far higher course pass rates through the corequisite model than through traditional remedial courses. 

But while that approach has boosted success rates, it hasn’t changed the fact that many students placed into remediation shouldn’t be there in the first place. For decades, thousands of schools have relied on standardized tests to determine which students should be shunted into remedial programs. This is despite mounting evidence that these downscale versions of the SAT, for which students are seldom, if ever, asked to prepare, aren’t very good at predicting future academic success. 

Judith Scott-Clayton of Columbia University was one of the first to notice that high school grades were better indicators of whether a student is ready for college-level math and English. Other data shows that placement tests were holding back people who would succeed if allowed to take regular courses. That includes research done by the Multiple Measures Assessment Project, a nonprofit made up of California community college staff. The group’s analysis of California public college data led state lawmakers to pass legislation in 2017 requiring community colleges to demonstrate evidence that a student is “highly unlikely” to succeed in a college-level course before placing them in remediation. The only metrics that can count as evidence are the student’s high school course work or grades. 

The New Urban Work College

There has long been a small group of rural colleges, including Berea College in Kentucky and the College of the Ozarks in Missouri, that have provided decent educations to poor students through a work requirement. While the two schools are different in many ways, the basic model is the same: every student works a job—whether on campus or off—that essentially pays for his or her tuition. 

In 2007, Michael Sorrell brought this same concept to the small, historically black urban college that he was taking over as president and that was, by all accounts, failing. At the time, Paul Quinn College, in Dallas, only had about 250 students enrolled—and it was struggling to keep them. So Sorrell undertook a dramatic plan that included eliminating the football program and turning the field into a farm. This was the first step of creating what he calls the “New Urban College Model.” Another way to put it: he’s transplanting the rural work college idea to the big city. In addition to operating the farm, students are also placed in a variety of part-time jobs in firms around the Dallas metro area. They earn a salary that first goes toward paying off their tuition, and then goes into their pockets. Ultimately, this new approach enabled Sorrell to lower tuition at Paul Quinn by almost $10,000 while increasing enrollment. 

Sorrell also reinvented the college’s curriculum so that students would be gaining the skills that employers wanted. After taking over, he arranged a series of meetings in which company executives and hiring managers told him they wanted job applicants who could write and speak well and analyze data efficiently. In response, he mandated that every class include curricula to help students develop those skills. 

In July 2018, the college expanded to Plano, a Dallas suburb twenty miles from the original campus but far richer in nearby work opportunities. Paul Quinn College Plano is, in Michael Sorrell’s words, a “campus-less campus.” Classes are held in rented or donated corporate office space, with precious university funds spent on finding students nearby apartments. Students attend classes three days a week and spend two days working paid internships at companies like JPMorgan Chase, Liberty Mutual, FedEx, and Aimbridge Hospitality. Sorrell is betting that the skills and connections they gain from their internships will land them good job offers when they graduate.

Other colleges around the country are beginning to adopt Sorrell’s work model, including Kuyper College in Michigan and Wilberforce University in Ohio, both of which are doing so through a grant from the University Innovation Alliance. (Clinton College in South Carolina has also expressed interest and is in the early stages of transitioning into a work college.) 

College Advising 

The distribution of guidance counselors is an underappreciated inequity in American education. Data from Utah shows that students who meet with a college access adviser three to five times are twice as likely to go to college. But many students don’t have that opportunity. According to the most recent publicly available data, the national average student-to-counselor ratio is 482 to 1. (The American School Counselor Association recommends a maximum of 250 to 1.) Those figures don’t fully reflect the disparities between rich school districts and poor urban and rural ones. 

Most children who grow up in affluent areas have at least two things going for them when applying to college: parents who have degrees and are intensely committed to helping them get into the best possible school (which can include paying for test prep, helping with essays, and taking them on campus visits), and on-staff high school counselors ready to assist with the application process. Low-income students, however, often have neither. 

Counselors in economically distressed neighborhoods rarely get to spend much time on college advising when they’re helping students who may be homeless, food insecure, or touched by violence. A recent survey of high school counselors found that only 33 percent of U.S. public high schools have a full-time or part-time counselor focused exclusively on college advising, compared to 68 percent of private schools. In other words, the students who need help the most are the ones getting it the least. 

That’s where two groups come in: College Possible and College Advising Corps. Both recruit promising recent college graduates to counsel high school students in poor areas around the country. College Possible, which was founded in 2000, is a nonprofit staffed by AmeriCorps members who do on-the-ground advising in needy high schools. College Advising Corps, which started in 2005, likewise inserts advisers in schools all around the country. While the organization’s scope is modest, it has proven that its approach works. In 2016–17, students who met with a CAC adviser were 30 percent more likely to apply to college—and 24 percent more likely to be accepted—than those who didn’t. 

Now, thanks in part to that proof of concept, lawmakers in a number of states are starting to work on policy solutions. Utah is currently developing an initiative to install an adviser in every high school in the state by 2022. Meanwhile, North Carolina lawmakers are working on legislation that would place a college adviser in every county. 

Other states have also been considering ways to ensure that high school students enroll in college. Texas and Louisiana have each passed laws requiring students to complete their federal student aid, or FAFSA, forms to graduate. The idea is to effectively preempt the possibility that, come August, the student won’t be able to start because they haven’t finished their paperwork. The germ for this experiment came from a few schools that forced or incentivized their students to complete FAFSA forms in order to go to senior prom. “This is one of the most innovative policy approaches that really gets inside the seventeen-year-old mind-set,” Nicole Hurd, the founder and CEO of College Advising Corps, told me. 

It’s not easy to innovate. But the more that university leaders, reformers, and entrepreneurs step inside the shoes of students, the more they’re able to develop cutting-edge ideas that can make college more accessible and effective. Those breakthroughs may not always make headlines, but they represent the ideals of American higher education at its best.

The post Teaching the Ivory Tower New Tricks appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Texas: home of corn dogs, Matthew McConaughey, and some of America’s most restrictive voting laws. To register yourself, you have to print out a form and deliver it to the county clerk, because unlike most states, Texas has no online voter registration. To help register others, you must be certified as a “volunteer deputy registrar,” a process that requires either taking an exam or attending an often long and awkwardly timed training session. Your certificate is only valid in the county where it is obtained.

The state has also made it harder to cast a ballot. Between 2013 and 2016, Texas eliminated more than 400 polling locations, the largest drop in any state during that time. In 2013, after years of litigation, it implemented a strict voter ID law. The law, which lists seven kinds of acceptable IDs, became infamous for its brazenly partisan implications—handgun licenses are okay, for example, while student IDs are not. 

All of which makes the following statistic so surprising: at the University of Texas at Austin, the state’s flagship university, undergraduate turnout increased from almost 39 percent to 53 percent between 2012 and 2016. Over that same time period, national youth turnout stayed roughly constant. The National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement at Tufts University, which calculates campus voting rates, has not yet released numbers for last year’s midterms. But at UT Austin’s on-campus polling locations, the number of early ballots cast was more than three times higher than it was in 2014. (Travis County only provides polling site specific data for early voting.)

The state of Texas is not alone in seeming to apply tougher voting rules to college students, who as a group are more left leaning than the overall electorate. In New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, and Arizona—all presidential battlegrounds—Republican-controlled legislatures have created particular obstacles for college voters. And yet, in the midst of this clampdown, there are clear signs that students and schools are surmounting voting barriers and countering their impact—and not just in Texas. At Arizona State University in Tempe, for example, despite a restrictive voter ID law and new limits on mail-in ballot collection, student voting rates went up by double digits between 2012 and 2016. 

That’s because at institutions like UT Austin and ASU Tempe, students and staff work to make registering and voting as easy as possible, even as Texas and Arizona have made it harder. They find new, creative ways of registering students. They explain complex voting requirements. They work with local officials to increase polling access on campus. In doing so, they are supported by a growing network of national organizations that provide funding, share information, and help schools develop plans to simplify getting out the vote. (The Washington Monthly incorporates data from these organizations in its college rankings. Both UT Austin and ASU Tempe received perfect scores.) 

These efforts appear to be making a difference. Nationwide, college voting rates increased by more than three percentage points between 2012 and 2016, more than the overall turnout increase. Between 2014 and 2018, youth turnout rose by nearly a third. 

In an era of high partisanship and close contests, student voting can make a tremendous impact. In Arizona, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema won her U.S. Senate seat by 55,900 votes, roughly the size of ASU Tempe’s student population. In Texas, youth turnout tripled between 2014 and 2018, and Democrat Beto O’Rourke overperformed in counties with a high percentage of young voters. That means that UT Austin was at the vanguard of a trend that helped bring O’Rourke surprisingly close to unseating Ted Cruz from the U.S. Senate. 

The increase in student voting is counterintuitive, but it fits a broader pattern. Even as franchise restrictions target certain communities, political scientists have found that they do not usually result in lower proportional turnout. There is little evidence that voter ID laws have led to markedly less voting among racial minorities, even though minorities are far less likely than white people to possess the kinds of identification these laws require. Researchers aren’t quite sure why. But several have suggested that the reason is counter-mobilization: the harder a state works to suppress turnout, the harder people fight back.

This, of course, doesn’t stop legislatures from passing even more restrictive measures. Texas, for example, recently passed a law that will limit early voting, and it is considering implementing harsher penalties for registration mistakes. Arizona is adding restrictions on early voting. The result is a game of whack-a-mole between lawmakers and voting activists. As the former find more and more ways to limit the franchise, the latter create more and more tools to get out the vote. 

There are twenty million college students in the United States. They are younger and more diverse than the country as a whole. The result of the 2020 election could hinge on who wins this turnout fight.

On August 5, 2015, a federal appeals court ruled that Texas’s voter ID law violated the Voting Rights Act. The state’s attorney general vowed to enforce it anyway.

Later that month, a friendly and fast-talking former journalist named Kassie Phebillo arrived in Austin to begin a PhD in political communications at the University of Texas. To support herself financially, she took a job overseeing TX Votes, the nonpartisan organization charged by the university with increasing turnout. At the time, the group barely existed. It had just one returning member, and both of Phebillo’s would-be supervisors had left the school before she even showed up.

Still, Phebillo was drawn to the opportunity to learn more about her field and to mentor students. “I’m a first-gen college student,” she said. “Having those relationships changed my life, and so I try to do that for others.” She sat down with the sole returning TX Votes member—then senior Zach Foust—and began discussing how to restructure the group. They studied how other schools worked to get out the vote and found themselves particularly interested in colleges where students partnered with diverse groups to boost registration and turnout. The two decided to establish a civic engagement alliance and began recruiting a host of student clubs, political and nonpolitical alike, to come on board. By the end of the 2015–16 school year, a small but eclectic group of campus organizations had joined—from the Longhorn League of United Latin American Citizens to the chess club.

Phebillo and Foust asked that clubs in the alliance have one member become a volunteer deputy registrar, part of a broader strategy to create a network of students who could register voters across campus. To accomplish that, Phebillo brought county officials to campus to hold registrar training sessions and asked TX Votes members to bring their friends. Like any good college event planner, they provided free pizza to attract a bigger audience. The events were popular. Between September 2015 and the 2016 election, TX Votes helped train well over 100 volunteer deputy registrars. Together, they registered more than 17,000 voters. 

I met Phebillo at UT Austin in early July 2019, in the middle of one of the university’s many freshman orientation sessions. She gave me a partial tour of campus. Inside the offices of the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life, she showed me a shelf stocked with national turnout awards and trophies won by TX Votes. One award was for having the most improved undergraduate turnout rate of any college in the country.

Later, I joined Phebillo at the student activities fair, where representatives of TX Votes were trying to recruit new members. Rising sophomore Janae Steggall was especially busy, hustling for the attention of what seemed like every incoming freshman who passed by. “What’s your major?” she would shout. Whatever the reply, Steggall would motion the student closer and deliver her pitch: “Awesome! We’re TX Votes, a nonpartisan organization on campus focused on voter registration and education.”

As I chatted with Phebillo and her team, it became clear that TX Votes has developed a sizable footprint on campus. Phebillo told me that during the 2016–17 school year, TX Votes deepened its involvement in the network of national organizations that help universities bolster turnout. It participated in both the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge and the Voter Friendly Campus program, drawing up a detailed plan that both created new initiatives and evaluated past work. After the 2016 election, the group further expanded its civic engagement alliance, which now has more than 100 organizational members. In March 2017, Phebillo became certified to train volunteer deputy registrars herself, allowing TX Votes to increase its training output. 

One year later, in March 2018, several TX Votes members successfully campaigned to get the county to open a second polling place on campus. The group also devised a new strategy for registering students: visiting classrooms. Class, they reasoned, is where college students go (or, at least, are supposed to go), and students might be more tempted to register if everyone around them were registering as well. But to take advantage of this, TX Votes first needed permission from the university’s faculty.

“We emailed every single professor teaching a course at this university in fall 2018,” Anthony Zhang, the group’s incoming president, told me. “We had to manually compile that list, starting with accounting and going all the way down to Yiddish.” 

I asked how long it took to get contact information for the school’s roughly 3,000 faculty. Zhang shook his head. “I honestly don’t even want to think about it,” he said.

Enough professors got on board to keep TX Votes busy throughout early fall 2018. In total, they visited 264 classrooms before the midterm election. The group trained hundreds of new registrars. Collectively, UT Austin volunteer deputy registrars signed nearly 14,000 people up to vote. Phebillo told me that she spent weeks shuttling back and forth from UT Austin to the Travis County tax office carrying thick stacks of registration forms. She even postponed her honeymoon by a week to make sure TX Votes submitted all its forms before Texas’s October deadline. “Note to self,” she recalled thinking. “Don’t get married right before the deadline to get registered to vote.” 

The ten days vacationing in Colorado, however, were only a temporary respite. On election day, Phebillo had to solve problems involving Texas voting requirements. The ID law, she said, causes confusion among both voters and poll workers. During the 2018 elections, for example, Phebillo heard that UT students were being turned away at the polls because they had Texas IDs that listed addresses outside of Austin—which is legal under Texas law. So she called the county clerk’s office.

“I had to make this call and say, ‘This is happening on campus, and people are posting about it on social media already,’ ” Phebillo told me. She warned the county that if the problem wasn’t resolved, it would be on the front page of the campus newspaper the next day. “It was fixed immediately,” she said.

Janae Steggall said this kind of advocacy was critical in helping overwhelmed young voters. “I know that as a student and as a young person, when a person—especially in a voting station—says no and they turn you away, you feel hopeless,” she said. “If they don’t know about TX Votes, if they don’t know about Kassie [Phebillo], then they don’t vote.”

Much of Phebillo’s success stems from her good relationships with officials in Travis County—one of the islands of blue in red Texas. She knows both the tax assessor, who is charged with overseeing voter registration, and the county clerk very well. Both have proven willing to partner with students. They endorsed and helped champion the students’ proposal for a second on-campus polling site. The tax assessor, Bruce Elfant, is an alum of UT Austin. “We know we’re privileged to be in Travis County,” Phebillo said. 

When it comes to student voting, Arizona has a lot in common with Texas. The state’s voter ID law excludes student IDs. Between 2012 and 2016, the number of polling places across the state fell by more than 200. And in 2016, the state’s GOP-controlled legislature passed a law that made collecting and turning in another voter’s completed ballot, even with the voter’s permission, a felony. This meant that Arizonans could no longer rely on friends or community groups to help them vote.

But students and administrators at ASU Tempe, which comprises more than half of the total ASU student body, managed to overcome these impediments. Between 2012 and 2016, ASU Tempe’s voting rate increased by 11 percent. Like UT Austin, the school conducts widespread voter registration drives. The university works to get students registered when they move into dorms and reminds them to vote on its online portal. But the most important part of ASU Tempe’s voter engagement work was expanding polling access on campus. And that was not easy to do.

That’s because, unlike Travis County in Texas, Arizona’s Maricopa County is not known for being voter friendly. Until 2017, the county’s chief officer for registration and voting was Republican Helen Purcell, whose twenty-eight-year tenure as county recorder drew controversy. In 2012, Purcell became nationally infamous when her office put out Spanish-language voter flyers with the wrong election date. Then, during a 2016 special election, the office misprinted Spanish-language ballots. Between 2012 and 2016, Purcell reduced the number of primary election polling places in Maricopa County by 70 percent, and on primary election day, many voters were caught waiting in five-plus-hour lines.

Purcell told me that she regretted the errors. She felt especially bad about cutting the number of polling sites. “It was my decision,” she said. “It was not a good decision. I took responsibility for it and apologize for it.”

Before 2016, ASU Tempe had an early-voting site on campus, but students had to leave campus to vote on election day. This was a longtime point of contention between Purcell and the university’s student leaders, who campaigned year after year for that to change. Eventually, Purcell agreed to move a polling station onto campus. Beginning on November 8, 2016, students who registered at their university housing could vote on campus on election day. 

That was also the day that Democrat Adrian Fontes defeated Purcell. The campaign was high profile, dominated by controversies over Purcell’s elections management. Once in office, Fontes took steps to make voting easier. Starting in 2018, any resident of Maricopa County could print and cast their ballot at the ASU Tempe campus site on election day, even if they lived in a different precinct. This was significant, because Maricopa County is enormous: it’s home to more than half of Arizona’s population and is geographically larger than New Jersey. The change meant that many ASU students who grew up in other precincts in the county no longer had to re-register or travel home in order to vote on election day.

At ASU, students are still struggling to overcome some of Arizona’s more burdensome voting requirements. Victoria Ochoa, a recent ASU graduate who worked to increase the school’s turnout, told me that the ID requirements have sown confusion among students, many of whom come from out of state and are afraid that obtaining some kind of Arizona ID might impact their access to financial aid. That isn’t true, Ochoa said, but “there’s been no easy way to explain that.”

To solve this problem, the student government is working to get administrators to provide students with zero-fee utility bills, which would provide proof of address to students and could potentially be used as voter IDs. It’s a technique they learned about from a national democratic engagement conference. The ASU students and staff I spoke with are optimistic that it will work.

The fight to increase student access to the franchise will not be easy. Many states continue to make voting laws more restrictive. In 2019, for example, Texas passed legislation that effectively bars “mobile voting”—early-voting sites that move from place to place. The law is expected to hit Travis County especially hard. “Travis County cannot afford to replace all of those mobile voting locations with permanent voting sites,” Dana DeBeauvoir, the county clerk, told one Austin news outlet. 

Arizona, meanwhile, just passed a new law that extends its ID requirements to early voting. This will create headaches for students at Arizona State. Of the ASU students who cast ballots in 2016, more than 50 percent did so before election day. Elsewhere, voting is becoming even trickier. Iowa recently passed legislation requiring voter IDs and imposing a variety of new burdens on registration, early voting, and absentee voting. In the 2018 elections, Arkansas enshrined voter ID requirements in the state’s constitution. And in 2018, New Hampshire’s GOP-controlled legislature passed a bill that appears surgically tailored to prevent students from voting. As of this past July, New Hampshire residents who want to vote need to register their vehicle in the state, or risk paying a fine. In an interview with NBC, a Dartmouth student who spent $300 re-registering his car described the law as a “poll tax.” (New Hampshire Democrats, who took control of the legislature last November, passed legislation to repeal the law, but it was vetoed by Republican Governor Chris Sununu.)

In other words, the game of whack-a-mole continues. University students and staffers find new ways to surmount obstacles to voting rights, and legislators find new obstacles to put up. This helps explain why Democrats have increasingly pushed for nationwide measures to protect voting rights. The first bill Democrats introduced upon assuming control of the House of Representatives would require all states to implement automatic voter registration for federal races. Separately, several Democrats have introduced legislation to allow any voter to cast their ballot by mail, prior to election day. 

But, to state the obvious, those bills are going nowhere as long as the GOP controls the Senate and White House. Until that changes, it’s up to turnout activists to overcome whatever barriers are put in their path. “I really see my role as constantly thinking about how we can do what we can do better, and always within the letter of the law,” Kassie Phebillo told me. Back at the University of Texas club fair, Janae Steggall was still busy trying to get new students to join TX Votes. 

“Hi! What’s your major?” she said to an incoming freshman wandering by the booth. “Business,” he replied. She motioned him in. “Awesome!” she said. “We’re TX Votes, a nonpartisan organization on campus focused on voter registration and education.” The student listened carefully as Steggall made her pitch. “You sold me,” he said when she finished. Then, he signed up.

The post The Voting Wars Come to Campus appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Lila Scher has been working since she was fourteen. Growing up in St. Paul, Minnesota, she worked as a line cook at the state fair making tacos and nachos. In high school, she was a busser and runner at a brunch spot near her house. And when she got into college at George Washington University, in D.C., she knew she’d have to keep working. During her first semester she was constantly on the hunt for jobs. 

By the spring, she had landed one, handling IT requests from professors. Was it her dream job? No. Did she get yelled at by professors who were angry that their projector wasn’t working? Yes. Was she interested in IT? Not really. 

But there were upsides. She could fit shifts in between her classes, and she didn’t have a commute. She liked her supervisor, who let her work more hours when she was tight on money, and who served as a reference when she applied to other jobs. Having the job helped her learn to manage her time, and she could sometimes get homework done during shifts between calls. Plus, she was getting her first professional office experience. The job required learning to speak with authority, even to professors. “I grew in that way quite a bit,” she said. 

That’s financial aid money at work. Scher’s on-campus job was a federal work study position. Her experience is fairly typical: more than half a million students across the country reshelve books in campus libraries, swipe IDs at the front desks of gyms, and answer phones in administrative offices as part of their financial aid package. The federal government kicks in a large portion of their wages. In one controversial instance, work study students at Harvard were employed to clean dorms. 

It’s one of the oldest federal aid programs, created in the mid-1960s with the goal of helping low-income students work their way through college. But it hasn’t kept pace with the changing economics of higher education. Today, most college students need to work during school whether they get work study or not. Meanwhile, unlike in the 1960s and ’70s, work study wages in 2019 do not even come close to covering tuition. But, like a baggy old sweater that’s now ironically hip, work study still suits the current higher ed landscape—just for different reasons. 

First, while work study will probably never go back to covering the cost of tuition on its own, students will always need reliable ways to earn money for living expenses, even if some form of tuition-free college is in our future. Second, there’s the ongoing quest to improve graduation rates; research shows that the convenience of work study helps students stay in school and graduate. Third, with some tweaks, the program is positioned to connect more students with high-quality work experiences that could lead to jobs after graduation. Plus, work study is a rare species in contemporary politics: it has the support of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. 

But to capitalize on any of those strengths, lawmakers need to correct a glaring injustice baked into the core of the program: rich, expensive, elite private schools get a huge share of the money, but educate few of the low-income students who most need it. The community colleges and public four-year universities that do serve the less wealthy don’t get nearly as much funding per student. If Congress wants to help more low-income students complete college and land a good job when they finish, fixing work study is an obvious place to start.

Work study was created as part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, enacted by Congress along with a raft of other antipoverty work programs. The stated goal was to “stimulate and promote the part-time employment of students” pursuing higher education “who are from low-income families” and need to earn money to go to school. Jobs were supposed to either relate to a student’s academic interests or serve the public. (Congress later required that a small portion of the money given to each school go to students doing community service.)

Today, the program seems even more necessary. The college student population looks much more like the country as a whole than it did in the early days of work study; there are far more low-income people who attend college and need a job to afford it. One in ten full-time students works more than thirty-five hours per week, and students today work about twice as much outside of school as students did in the ’70s. Yet even as tuition rates have blown through the roof in recent decades, the work study budget has sagged. In the ’70s, the average allotment per student could cover 90 percent of tuition. Now, the average award is about $1,550 per year, so small that out of all the students I talked to, none of them even thought of it as money for tuition. They used it for gas, pasta, laundry, subway cards, shampoo—stuff they needed for life.

But while work study no longer covers tuition, research shows that it helps with a different problem: graduation rates. More than 40 percent of students who started college in 2012 hadn’t earned a degree six years later. For students receiving Pell Grants from the government—a decent proxy for low-income students—the numbers are even worse. People who leave school without a degree are often trapped, with high-interest loans rising like water in a sealed chamber, locked out of the higher-earning, degree-requiring jobs that could offer an escape.

Work study can help. Judith Scott-Clayton, a professor of economics and education at Columbia University, has found that, for students who were planning to work during college no matter what, participation in work study is linked to higher graduation rates. That’s likely because work study students mostly get jobs on campus, so they are less likely to have a commute and more likely to have work that can be tailored to their class schedule. And Scott-Clayton suspects that simply being on campus for more hours per week may make students more likely to take advantage of institutional resources—from academic advising to the financial aid office—and get to know staff and other students. 

The effect is strongest for students attending public institutions, including community colleges: they are seven percentage points more likely to graduate if they do work study. That may sound modest, but it’s a substantial boost compared to other forms of aid. Grants, for example, improve a student’s odds by just two to three percentage points. “For a lot of students at public institutions,” Scott-Clayton said, “just getting access to a job that responds to their academic schedule, and where the employer has the student’s interests in mind, is a big benefit.” 

For many undergrads, work study provides a low-stakes way to take a first crack at a professional office environment, learn soft skills, and come away with a reference. For Scher, the IT help desk job was her first time working outside of the food service industry. “It was a very good first step of being like, ‘Oh, okay, this is how you behave in an office setting, this is how you sit at your desk,’ ” she said. Getting some administrative experience under her belt helped her get an internship the next year, and she says that even now that she’s graduated, her work study job is still on her resume. “Learning those things for the first time,” she said, with a supervisor “who understood I was a student first, and that this was maybe my first experience—that was great.”

An unfortunate thing happened when work study was created. In order to decide which schools got what share of the money, universities made their case to regional panels, and the results were not equitable. “The decisions we made were largely subjective,” wrote Robert Huff, who served on one of the panels and was Stanford’s first aid administrator. Schools had to submit data to prove how much money they needed, but it was hard to independently verify the information. A report from the Government Accountability Office found that aid officers were often airbrushing their numbers to support inflated requests. 

Ultimately, aid officers from expensive, private schools proved most adept at the game, and their institutions ended up with much of the pot at the expense of public universities and community colleges, which serve far more low-income students. In the 1980s, Congress sought to correct the imbalance by creating a “fair share” formula. But the formula would only apply to new funding for the program. Congress promised the existing winners that their allocations wouldn’t change greatly. 

Unfortunately, Congress hasn’t invested much new money in the program since then. In fact, the total inflation-adjusted budget for work study in 2016 was lower than it was in 1980. More than half of it still goes to schools that were grandfathered in. As a result, a high-income student at a private four-year college is more likely to get work study than a low-income student at a public four-year school. The way money is doled out is “divorced from any sort of useful metric you could think of,” said Reid Setzer, who analyzed the program while working at Young Invincibles, an organization that advances young people’s policy interests. 

Policy researchers have been calling on lawmakers to fix the distribution breakdown for decades. But attempts have always failed, thanks in part to successful lobbying efforts from university associations and prestigious schools. According to Greg Winter’s reporting for the New York Times, 

Such disparities have been a sore point among universities for years, leftovers from an era when federal money was given to colleges on an individual, almost negotiable basis. Now, for the first time in more than two decades, the nation’s financial aid officers are calling for the imbalances to be wiped away, replaced by a system that steers financial aid toward the universities that poor students actually attend, rather than those with the biggest reputations.

That was written in 2003. In the sixteen intervening years, little has changed. 

Today, community colleges get just over a third of the work study money that private, four-year institutions receive, despite educating far more low- and middle-income students. Scott-Clayton found that, in 2017, New York University received more work study money from the government than all twenty-four of the City University of New York’s public schools combined. Harvard, which has a nearly $40 billion endowment, got more than $3.5 million in work study funding in 2016. 

Mechanically, it’s a simple problem to fix. Congress would just need to rewrite the rules about how schools get money. The stumbling block has always been politics. But were Congress to attempt to rejigger the formula again, they’d be doing so in a different political climate. In the wake of public outrage over rich families bribing their way into prestigious schools by paying to inflate test scores or cutting deals with athletic coaches, elected officials may be more willing to take on the likes of Stanford and Yale. 

Even better than simply expanding the work study budget would be to retrofit it to address one of the biggest challenges in higher education today: placing students in well-paying jobs after they graduate.

Employers aren’t investing as much time and money into training new workers as they used to. That’s in part because expectations have changed, and fewer people start a job out of college planning to stay for twenty years and work their way up—a timeline that drove employers to invest in entry-level workers. Instead, employers now expect new hires to have gained professional skills while still in college. A survey by the Chronicle of Higher Education recently found that the first thing employers look for in recent graduates is internship experience. 

That’s one reason why students of means, who can afford to take unpaid internships during college, have a leg up when it comes to getting hired after graduation. Meanwhile, as it exists right now, work study isn’t focused on helping students get experience in their field of interest. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Some colleges already facilitate internships for students as a way to bridge the gap between school and career. At Northeastern University, for example, students can participate in a “cooperative education program,” or co-op: six-month periods spent away from classes working full-time in jobs related to their career goals. In most cases, the employer pays the student’s wages. According to the school, half of Northeastern students who participate receive a job offer from one of their co-op employers, and more than 90 percent of students have a job or are enrolled in graduate school less than a year after graduating.

Northeastern has for years been pushing Congress and the Department of Education to change some of the rules around work study so that it can be applied to co-op jobs. (Currently it can only be used for part-time employment.) And in the past year, both the Trump administration and members of Congress have gotten behind the idea. In March, Democratic Senator and presidential candidate Kirsten Gillibrand cosponsored a bill with Republican Senator Pat Toomey that would allow students to use work study to take full-time jobs for short periods. 

The Department of Education appears receptive, too. Earlier this year it announced an experiment, slated to start in the fall, that will provide extra money to select schools to facilitate off-campus work experiences for work study students. Those students can take full-time internships, and the government will pay the same share of student wages whether they work at for-profit companies, nonprofits, or on-campus employers. If the department finds that participation boosts students’ chances of getting a job after graduating, those changes could be implemented on a national scale. 

But to do that, and to make sure work study reaches the students who could benefit most from it, Congress will have to give the program more money. Alarmingly, the Trump administration has recommended cutting work study’s budget by more than half, despite its own Education Department’s declared interest in using the program to connect students with high-quality work experiences. Recent proposals from congressional Democrats and Republicans have called for increasing the work study budget. But even Democratic proposals, which would more than double program spending by 2023, come up short. Reaching every Pell Grant student, to use a rough benchmark, would require increasing the current budget more than ninefold—and that’s before adding in extra money for schools to set up programs with off-campus employers, or raising the amount that students are paid. But work study is so small now—last year’s budget was just over $1 billion—that even with an increase of that order, it would still be trivial relative to overall higher education spending.

The fact that, Trump budget requests aside, there is broad consensus that work study needs more funding gives reason for hope. Unlike so many questions in contemporary politics, what to do about work study is not deeply polarizing. But what work study is may be even worse: part of a larger, complex bill that Congress has failed to act on for years. Its best chance for improvement comes through the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, the sprawling higher ed omnibus bill that governs everything from school accreditation to student loans. It’s typically updated every four to six years, but has languished since 2008, yet another victim of congressional dysfunction. 

Lamar Alexander, leading the charge to reauthorize the HEA as the chair of the Senate’s education committee, promised in a February New York Times op-ed to fix student aid within the next six months. But even if he and his colleagues make good on that pledge, the resulting law is likely to just nibble around the edges. At a time when students are graduating with enormous debt burdens—if they’re graduating at all—and struggling to make the leap to a good career, Congress has confined its thinking to incrementalism. It should recognize work study for the secret weapon that it is: a politically popular program that could make a major dent in the triple crisis of affordability, graduation rates, and the job pipeline. All it needs is some more ambition.

The post Putting Work Study to Work appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Sitting in her office at Microsoft headquarters, just outside Seattle, Melissa Curry still can’t believe her luck. Seven years ago, her life seemed to be headed for disaster. First, she was laid off from a good-paying job as a dealer at Great American Casino. Next, the state suspended her gaming license over outstanding speeding tickets. Suddenly, she was unemployed and barred from working in another casino. In her early thirties, raising a son on her own, and with no college degree, Curry knew she was in grave danger of falling into poverty.

Like many adults seeking a path to a new career, Curry enrolled in a nearby community college, Green River College. Still, as a Native American woman whose parents didn’t go to college, the odds appeared to be against her. Fewer than 10 percent of bachelor’s degrees in computer science are awarded to women of color, and fewer than 15 percent of students who enroll in community college go on to complete a bachelor’s degree within six years. And yet, four years later, Curry graduated from Green River with a bachelor’s in software development and a job lined up at Microsoft, where she is now a program manager. 

Curry worked hard to get where she is. But she also had the good fortune of living in one of only two states that make it easy to get a bachelor’s degree—a prerequisite to a good-paying job in the tech sector—from community college. A consistent finding in higher education research is that students are more likely to complete a bachelor’s degree when they can do it all at one institution. But for the vast majority of people who start at community college, that’s not an option; the only way to complete a bachelor’s is by transferring to a four-year university. And it’s the transfer process that leaves many students behind. According to data from the National Student Clearinghouse, less than a third of community college students who enrolled in 2010 transferred to a four-year institution, and of those, only 42 percent completed their degree within six years—just 13 percent of the original group. Transfer and graduation rates are especially low for African American, Native American, Hispanic, and low-income students, who are significantly more likely to attend community college than white middle- and higher-income students. Studies of community college transfer consistently show disproportionately low odds of earning a bachelor’s degree for minority students, especially African Americans and Hispanics, a phenomenon that researchers call the “racial transfer gap.”

Curry doubts that she would have continued her education if she could not have stayed at Green River. Figuring out where and how to transfer would have been too time consuming, and no option would have been as convenient. She also knew that she would lose the support of the faculty, advisers, and peers who helped her succeed during her first two years. “If I hadn’t been at Green River and been able to continue right on,” she says, “I would never have gotten a bachelor’s degree.” 

Better leveraging the country’s network of 941 public community colleges to offer baccalaureate programs like the one that moved Curry from unemployed single mom to a program manager at Microsoft may seem uncontroversial. But while twenty-five states technically permit community colleges to award bachelor’s degrees, Washington and Florida are the only ones that allow it to happen at scale, rather than in a narrow set of subjects and circumstances. As a result, only 121 community and technical colleges around the country allow students to complete a bachelor’s without transferring, and two-thirds of such graduates in 2017 came from programs in Florida and Washington. 

Why? Overwhelmingly, the opposition in other states comes from public four-year universities. Allowing more institutions to deliver bachelor’s degrees upends a status quo that gives state universities a monopoly on public baccalaureate education and supplies them with a steady stream of transfer students. As a result, when states consider following the example of Washington and Florida, public universities lobby hard against it. 

But data from both states should dispel concerns that the programs are siphoning off students who would otherwise enroll in a public university. Recent analysis from Washington shows that the graduates look more like traditional community college students: they are older than university students, with an average age of thirty-two, and are more racially and economically diverse. The same is true in Florida, where state department of education data indicates that three out of four students enrolled in community college bachelor’s programs are from underserved populations. In other words, many students who get a bachelor’s degree from a community college wouldn’t otherwise have gotten it from a public university; they just wouldn’t have gotten one at all.

More research is needed, but the early evidence suggests that expanding baccalaureate programs at community colleges could go a long way toward increasing the share of Americans with degrees and addressing racial and class disparities. Study after study points to the economic and social value of bachelor’s degrees and to the vulnerability of Americans without them. Since the Great Recession, almost 75 percent of new jobs have gone to bachelor’s degree holders. Creating more opportunities for Americans to experience those benefits could be as simple as letting more college students finish where they start. 

The push to let Washington’s community and technology colleges grant bachelor’s degrees began in 2001, as part of a broader effort to increase degree attainment across the state. College leaders were particularly concerned about the lack of transfer opportunities for students completing “associate of applied science” (AAS) programs. These occupationally focused degrees, popular with many adult and first-generation students, are designed to help students move directly into the labor market, not into a four-year university. But as the educational requirements of jobs increased, graduates of AAS programs needed more ways to advance their careers. In 2005, the Washington legislature authorized four pilot “bachelor’s of applied science” programs that would provide a seamless pathway for AAS graduates to move onto a career-focused bachelor’s degree without needing to transfer. 

In 2010, the pilots were deemed successful enough that the state extended them and created a process for approving additional programs in fields with unmet student or labor market demand. The lion’s share of programs are in health care, business, and information technology. Today, twenty-eight of the system’s thirty-four colleges offer or are approved and getting ready to offer bachelor’s degrees, with 110 programs in total. 

While the largest baccalaureate programs in Washington are in the Seattle area, a growing number are offered in more rural parts of the state, often in fields like education, health care, and business, which are critical to sustaining local economies. Centralia College, for example, a ninety-minute drive from Seattle, feels a world away from the fast-paced, youthful, and crowded urban center. Like many small communities, Centralia is struggling to recruit and retain teachers. And while the town is home to the state’s longest continuously operating community college, there are no four-year institutions there. Residents interested in becoming a teacher used to have three primary options: they could enroll in nearby St. Martin’s University, a private, Catholic school with an annual tuition of over $38,000; go to the University of Washington–Tacoma, which is more affordable but requires an hour-plus commute each way; or sign up for a fully online program. 

At the urging of the county school superintendents, Centralia College sought approval from the state to offer a bachelor’s of applied science in K–8 education and special education. The request was approved in 2015, and the college began accepting applications in the winter of 2017. The response exceeded expectations, confirming what many in the community had suspected: there was a pool of local adults interested in becoming teachers but, for a variety of reasons, not enrolling (or not completing) the programs at St. Martin’s, UW-Tacoma, or online. 

Reluctant to turn anyone away, the college created two cohorts, for a total of fifty-three students; this June, forty-five of the original students graduated on time.

 “The program will give us a stable pipeline of teachers who are from the community and plan to stay here” said Connie Smejkal, the dean of instruction overseeing the program. 

The biggest barrier to spreading this model to other states is the resistance of existing public four-year colleges. A recent survey revealed that 70 percent of public university presidents consider efforts by community colleges to grant bachelor’s degrees “mission creep.” A majority also rejected the notion that community colleges are well positioned to increase access to students for whom public baccalaureates are inaccessible due to cost or geography. 

Underlying this skepticism, however, are more prosaic concerns around enrollments and funding. When states consider plans for letting community colleges award bachelor’s degrees, public universities are first in line to try to stop them. When universities are unable to fend off authorizing legislation, they often use their influence to limit the types of degrees that can be offered to niche fields or require extensive pilot projects, or both. In Michigan, for example, community colleges were only able to secure authority to award bachelor’s degrees in four fields: concrete technology, maritime studies, energy production, and culinary arts. In California, where public universities are over-enrolled and two-to-four-year transfer processes are notoriously weak, the community college system was only able to eke out authority for fifteen pilot baccalaureate programs, many in narrow fields like “Equine and Ranch Management.” 

To be clear, blurring the lines between community colleges and universities is not without risks. Community college leaders themselves worry that expanding into the baccalaureate market might distract from their historic focus serving students otherwise unable to attend four-year universities, like low-income students, underprepared students, and adult learners. Another legitimate concern is that the emphasis on affordability might come at the expense of quality. In Washington, the colleges are required to charge about the same for any upper-division courses as a student would pay at a public university, making the overall cost of the bachelor’s degree the same regardless of whether students transfer. But in states without similar safeguards, including Florida, community college baccalaureates could undercut university offerings even as state legislatures continue to disinvest from higher education. 

The case of Washington, however, suggests that community college bachelor’s programs need not undermine the other goals of public higher education. Data collected by the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges on student demographics and outcomes strongly suggests that the programs are adding to the state’s overall degree attainment, rather than simply rearranging the existing student population. More than 3,000 students have completed baccalaureate degree programs at community colleges in Washington since 2010, and they are more economically diverse than students in associate’s degree programs, who, in turn, are more diverse than undergraduates in public universities. At an average of thirty-two years old, community college applied baccalaureate students are also significantly older than the average transfer student. The programs appear to be serving a population whose needs would otherwise be unmet. 

If we use post-graduation outcomes as a proxy for degree quality, there is also good news. Students in fields like health care and education tend to do well right out of the gate, likely because they are using the degrees to advance in their existing careers. Graduates of business programs take longer to make good money, suggesting that students are embarking on new careers. In short, applied baccalaureate graduates appear to enjoy many of the same economic and social benefits that come with a traditional college degree. 

Melissa Curry’s son started his freshman year at Washington State this fall, where he also plans to study computer science. Curry earns too much for him to qualify for financial aid, but she has no complaints. “That’s how it’s supposed to work,” she says. 

While that might be true, it too rarely does. The overwhelming majority of students who start at a community college with the intention of completing a bachelor’s degree don’t, putting them at a severe disadvantage in today’s economy. Curry is doing her part to change that. Green River’s first graduate to break into Microsoft has made sure she wasn’t the last, keeping an eye out for internship opportunities and job openings. So far, four more Green River graduates have made the improbable journey from first-generation community college student to a full-time job at Microsoft.

The challenge of getting more students to the finish line of a bachelor’s degree has vexed higher education for decades. The two-plus-two transfer models have improved but still leave more students behind than not. Online universities continue to enroll millions of students, but graduate far fewer. Bachelor’s programs like those offered through Washington’s community colleges will never achieve the scale that universities can provide, particularly online. But when they are well designed and supported through smart policy, they are likely to graduate a much higher share of the students who enroll in them and set them up for success in their local economy. 

And if that’s not the mission of the community college, what is?

The post Escaping the Transfer Trap appeared first on Washington Monthly.

By the time you get around to reading this, my son Adam and I will be driving his old SUV, stuffed, Clampett-like, with clothes and cooking utensils, from Washington, D.C., to Washington State to drop him off for his first year at Evergreen State College. When Adam announced that he wanted to go there, I was wary. All I knew about Evergreen was that it was nearly 3,000 miles away and the type of ultra-left campus that keeps Fox News producers employed. (In 2017, protests against a professor who questioned the tactics of a student racial justice campaign grew so intense that graduation had to be held off campus.) But then Adam pointed something else out to me: my own magazine lists Evergreen as the number one master’s university in the country.

So, after fifteen years of publishing an alternative set of college rankings, I have become a customer. This is one reason why we launched the rankings in the first place: to provide the kind of useful information that students and their parents weren’t getting from U.S. News & World Report. 

But we also had a larger ambition: to change the way policymakers think about what constitutes quality in higher education. For decades, a school was considered “good” if it was exclusive, wealthy, and prestigious—like a country club, but with lectures instead of golf. That definition, which the U.S. News rankings validate and accentuate, warps the entire higher education sector. It tempts ambitious presidents of non-elite colleges to tighten admissions standards, leaving other institutions to educate the 90-plus percent of students who can’t get into selective schools but need a college credential to have a shot at a middle-class income. It encourages state lawmakers to pass higher education budgets that result in per-pupil spending at public research universities, which tend to cater to affluent white students, that is more than twice as high as community colleges, which disproportionately enroll low-income and minority students. And it ultimately leads to the kind of venality we’re seeing in the Operation Varsity Blues scandal, where rich parents, panicked at the prospect of having to put a State U sticker on the back of their Teslas, bribed their kids’ ways into elite schools. 

We designed the Washington Monthly’s college rankings to have the opposite effect, with metrics that redefine what a “good” college is. To score well in our rankings, a school needs to help lots of non-wealthy students earn marketable degrees at reasonable prices, produce plenty of scholarship and scholars, and encourage its students to become generous and active citizens. If every college did that, America would be a more equitable, prosperous, and democratic country. 

The good news is that our new definition of quality is gaining traction. More and more colleges are adopting innovative approaches to help students of modest means succeed (see Eric Cortellessa, “Teaching the Ivory Tower New Tricks”) and to inspire all of their students to vote (see Daniel Block, “The Voting Wars Come to Campus” and “America’s Best Colleges for Student Voting 2019”). Both political parties are pushing policies aimed at making post-secondary education (vocational as well as traditional two- and four-year programs) more affordable, and in this issue we offer a few more ideas—like turning work study into a pathway for post-college employment (see Grace Gedye, “Putting Work Study to Work”) and letting community colleges award bachelor’s degrees (see Mary Alice McCarthy and Debra Bragg, “Escaping the Transfer Trap”). Even U.S. News is (slowly) moving in the right direction: last year it added a “social mobility” component to its otherwise quack rankings system.

The bad news is that the old definition of quality in higher education still has a profound grip on our collective consciousness. That explains the success of the latest higher ed hustle, one Anne Kim exposes in this issue (“The Pre-College Racket”): elite schools recruiting high school students to sign up for insanely expensive pre-college summer programs by implying—or at least doing little to discourage the belief—that doing so will give them a leg up on the admissions process. (Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.) 

The college my son has chosen is not one of those avaricious elite institutions—which he thinks are overrated and ridiculous. Evergreen is a funky public liberal arts school that suits him morally and academically (multidisciplinary classes, focus on social justice, strong environmental science program), is diverse racially and economically, helps its students earn degrees that lead to decent-paying jobs, and charges tuition that won’t break Dad’s bank account. I am proud of, and grateful to, Adam for choosing a college that precisely fits this magazine’s definition of “good.” 

The post When College Rankings Get Personal appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Compare the following two colleges: 

College A, it turns out, is Sarah Lawrence, a liberal arts college located in the wealthy suburbs north of New York City. College B is Baruch College, part of the City University of New York system. Sarah Lawrence has all the trappings of an elite institution: national name recognition, beautiful brick buildings, and a long list of famous alumni, from J. J. Abrams to Barbara Walters. It’s the kind of place people might think of when they imagine the quintessential college experience.

Baruch? Not so much. It has no traditional campus and sits in an unglamorous part of Midtown Manhattan. Nearly half of its students are the first in their family to go to college. If you’re not from the New York area, you probably haven’t heard of it at all. Even if you are, you might think of it as a perfectly fine public school, but not elite. And yet the two colleges are quite comparable academically. 

Here’s where they’re not comparable at all: cost. The average student from a household making less than $75,000 a year will pay a net price of $24,682 per year to attend Sarah Lawrence. At Baruch, the same student will pay $4,128. (Almost all students at Baruch pay in-state tuition.) 

If you’re surprised to learn that a more prestigious and expensive college is arguably less selective than a public commuter school, don’t feel too bad. (Selectivity includes acceptance rates, but also the academic qualifications of incoming students.) It’s how we’ve been trained to think about higher education in this country. With thousands of colleges in the United States, and so many factors by which we could potentially judge them, we tend to fall back on vague indicia of prestige and name recognition. In other words, we—especially, but far from exclusively, people from well-to-do backgrounds—tend to think of “good schools” as the places where rich people send their kids. That goes a long way to explaining why so many people are capable of looking at a place like Baruch, a highly selective college that produces good outcomes for students for an incredibly low price—where, in fact, Pell Grant–eligible students (a shorthand for low-income) are an amazing 8 percent more likely to graduate than other students—and think it’s somehow “worse” than Sarah Lawrence.

Selectivity is at the heart of most conversations about college quality. But, during the fifteen years that the Washington Monthly has published its college rankings, we have proudly paid very little attention to selectivity. Why? Because the media’s obsession with simplistic and, in many cases, easily gamed measures of prestige has had deeply unfortunate consequences for American higher education by encouraging institutions to plow attention and resources into the things that matter to the U.S. News & World Report rankings—standardized test scores, faculty salary, expert opinion (that is, brand recognition)—instead of trying to help more students, especially disadvantaged ones, get a quality education. 

That’s not to say selectivity doesn’t matter. It does. Research shows that going to a more selective school has a big impact on future earnings for students whose parents are poor or didn’t go to college themselves. In fact, as damaging as our obsession with prestige can be, the real scandal of elite academia is the fact that a huge proportion of the most talented, qualified low-income students don’t even apply to selective colleges—often because they don’t think they can afford to go. 

That’s why, for the first time in five years, we’ve brought back our “affordable elite” ranking. We took the 208 most selective colleges and universities in the country, according to Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges, and ranked them according to a combination of metrics, including net price and students’ future earnings, that track how well they promote income equality and upward social mobility. (Net price means tuition and fees, plus room and board and other expenses, minus financial aid. Last year, the average for all full-time students at four-year private nonprofit universities was about $27,000; at publics, about $15,000.)

Consider the top fifty as a great starting point for any high-achieving student looking for a college that will provide a great education while improving—not sandbagging—their financial prospects. Consider the bottom fifty as a guide to those institutions that are trading on brand-name reputations while either educating very few low-income students, ripping off the ones who do attend, or both. 

The Ivy Plus 

“Affordable” is probably not the first word that comes to mind when you think of Stanford, possibly the most selective national university in the country. (Last year, it only accepted 4.3 percent of applicants.) But Stanford shines in our social mobility metrics by having the lowest net price—only $2,800 for families making less than $75,000 a year—of the entire list. (The average for the top fifty colleges is $10,323.) It also comes near the top of the field for students’ future earnings, and, somewhat more surprisingly, educates an impressive percentage of first-generation students. 

Stanford is part of a broader and very welcome trend: many of the wealthiest and most prestigious colleges in the country have made a serious commitment to providing generous financial aid to students who need it. That helps explain why six Ivy League universities, plus MIT and Duke, also appear in our top fifty. 

Those colleges, in other words, are an incredible deal for the middle-class and low-income students they accept. Where they still lag behind is in the overall number of such students they educate. These elite, “Ivy Plus” universities have barely increased incoming class sizes for multiple generations, even as the college-going population has surged. That, of course, helps them keep the almighty acceptance rate low. So while they deserve credit for improving their financial aid packages, they also deserve reproach for not opening their doors to more deserving students. With their multibillion-dollar endowments, they could afford it.

The Publics 

Public universities don’t tend to dominate national rankings of elite universities, but many perform extremely well on our list. Most noteworthy are the colleges that make up the University of California system. Three of them appear in our top ten, and it’s easy to see why: they each graduate around 1,500 Pell students each year, or roughly five times the number that Harvard does—a truly impressive contribution to upward mobility for students from modest backgrounds. Recognition is also due to the University of Florida. While it’s best known for its big-time football and basketball programs, Florida’s flagship public university grants more bachelor’s degrees to Pell-eligible students than any other school on our list, and charges even less than the colleges in the California system. 

But the news from the public sector isn’t all so great. When the defending national champion Clemson Tigers take the football field against in-state rival University of South Carolina this fall, both teams will be representing big-name public universities that do a lousy job furthering the public good. Students who attend those schools end up earning significantly less money than expected given their demographic and academic makeup. Graduation rates for Pell students lag behind the non-Pell population by double digits. Along with the University of Alabama–Huntsville (where an appalling 40 percent of students haven’t paid back $1 in loan principal five years after graduating), Auburn University, and the University of Pittsburgh, these public institutions need to start remembering that the public is who they’re supposed to be serving. 

Private Universities and Liberal Arts Colleges

Most of the household names toward the bottom of our list, however, are private nonprofits. Tucked together in the bottom quartile are a handful of well-regarded liberal arts colleges, including Oberlin and Bard, ranked 179 and 180, where students from families making under $75,000 a year pay $17,307 and $20,096 on average, respectively, and which educate a trivial number of low-income students. (Sarah Lawrence is number 156.) We also find near the bottom a number of big-name national universities with outrageous price tags and poor outcomes, like Tulane ($20,003), Hofstra ($30,010), and Baylor ($28,484). Baylor at least has graduated a substantial 467 Pell students on average over the last two years; but given the amount of debt those students have to take on and their low earning potential ($50,899 per year, about $6,000 less than expected), they’d likely be better off going elsewhere. 

To be fair to the bottom dwellers, it’s a lot easier to give generous financial aid packages while remaining academically elite when you’ve got a massive endowment, like Harvard. But that excuse only goes so far. Let’s do one more college comparison. Georgetown’s endowment per student is about $90,000—far less than other prestigious private national universities. Yet Georgetown costs middle- and low-income families an average of only $10,560; graduates 222 Pell students a year, at only a 1 percent lower rate than the rest of the student body; and sends graduates into careers that earn a median of $90,491 ten years after entering. As a result, it ranks tenth on our list. 

The University of Tulsa, meanwhile, has roughly $250,000 per student. Yet it places dead last, largely because it costs the same families $20,787 and graduates only seventy-six Pell students per year—at a 15 percent lower rate than non-Pell students. And its graduates earn a median of only $46,954, more than $14,000 less than their demographic and academic profiles would predict. Endowment, in other words, isn’t destiny. Intentions matter more than anything, and too many colleges with ample resources are failing their students, and the country, because they apparently just don’t care enough to do better.

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For decades, students have been among America’s least faithful voters. In 2014, only 20 percent of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds cast ballots—a record low, and well below that year’s already abysmal national turnout rate of 37 percent. The youth turnout rate in 2016 was 46 percent, much higher than during the midterms, but still 15 percent less than the overall rate and 24 percent less than turnout among people over seventy. It’s therefore little wonder that both parties prioritize the issues facing older Americans over the problems facing younger ones.

But if the most recent elections are any indication, that is changing. More than 35 percent of people aged eighteen to twenty-nine voted in 2018—the highest midterm turnout by young Americans ever recorded. This demographic voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, helping propel the party’s many House and gubernatorial victories. Democratic presidential aspirants are now foregrounding plans that would make college more affordable and ease, or even erase, the $1.5 trillion in student debt now held by Americans.

The Washington Monthly believes that colleges have a responsibility to inspire students to be active citizens. That’s why our rankings have long rewarded schools whose students give back to the country by participating in the military, the Peace Corps, and other forms of national service. Last year, in the lead-up to the midterms, we added another, first-of-its-kind set of metrics: how well colleges encourage their students to vote. We repeated that exercise in this year’s rankings.

These top performers may surprise you. While a few are big-name private colleges, like George Washington University and Brown University, the vast majority are public institutions, many of them lesser-known schools like Michigan’s Ferris State University and the University of Minnesota Duluth. Indeed, some of America’s most famous schools, like the California Institute of Technology and Carleton College, earned the lowest possible score (zero) on our college voting metrics. 

It doesn’t take universities all that much effort to boost student voting. Students themselves will do most of the work if given half a chance, even in the face of efforts by some politicians to suppress their votes, as I explore in in this issue. And because voting tends to be habitual—if you vote in this election, you’re far more likely to vote in the next one, and the ones after that—colleges and universities have an opportunity to boost democratic participation not only in 2020 but for years, or even decades, to come. We hope the example set by the institutions on our honor roll will inspire more schools to get into the democracy-building game.

The post America’s Best Colleges for Student Voting 2019 appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When most Americans think of the words “college student,” they think of eighteen- or nineteen-year-olds, fresh out of high school. That’s outdated. As of 2018, nearly 30 percent of undergraduates are over the age of twenty-five. They are not arriving on campus with their parents in minivans. Instead, they are coming to college, or coming back to college, after several years or even decades in the workforce. Many still work: nearly half of all undergraduates are financially independent, and more than 80 percent of part-time students work. 

Traditional college rankings are not very helpful for these students. Working adults generally don’t care about average ACT scores or donation rates of alumni. They need information about what a college or university will do to make it easy for them to enroll, succeed, and finish their degrees. They care about things like affordability, support services, and classes that can fit around work and family obligations. They need to find out if a college is going to work for them as the person they are at this stage in their lives. 

This is a radical concept for many in traditional higher ed institutions, which essentially tell students, “If you want the privilege of attending our school, you need to change your life to make it work.” Colleges for adult learners flip that script and say, “We’ve figured out strategies and services that will help you fit learning into your life as it is right now.”

That is why the Washington Monthly ranks the best colleges for adult learners and why the magazine partnered with the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning to publish last year’s Never Too Late: The Adult Student’s Guide to College. These resources are intended to help adults find colleges that will meet them where they are. This year’s list of best-ranked colleges for adult learners taps national data to identify schools that make it easy for students to transfer, offer flexibility in their scheduling, provide services outside of banking hours, and make it possible for part-time students to succeed after they graduate.

The colleges that made the top spots suggest that many kinds of institutions can work for adults. Golden Gate University, in California, which takes the top spot for the fourth year running, has a clear mandate to serve adults. The twelfth-ranked Southern New Hampshire University provides online and self-paced options. Regional public institutions are also well represented. 

America’s most prestigious universities, by contrast, are not. Only one Ivy made the top fifty. While several public flagships do feature on our list, their actual enrollment rate of students age twenty-five or over is very low. 

Community colleges are ranked separately. Across the board, these schools make it easy for anyone to enroll, but the best ones for adults offer flexible scheduling and a range of career-focused options. The second-ranked two-year college, Wisconsin’s Lakeshore Technical College, offers blended, online, and a range of other distance learning formats, as well as ways to accelerate course completion. Meanwhile, thirteenth-ranked North Shore Community College, in Massachusetts, provides students with clear pathways from course work to careers and allows students to earn credit for what they have learned elsewhere. 

Adults who seek out these kinds of colleges aren’t the sort of students who have wealthy, well-connected parents pulling strings in the admissions process. They are students who make big sacrifices of their time and resources to pursue their goals. They deserve a different kind of college: the kind that designs programs and services to ensure that returning adults succeed.

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