Thirteen years ago, the Washington Monthly set out to solve a problem. The higher education market was dominated by the U.S. News & World Report rankings, which reward wealth, fame, and exclusivity. College leaders responded to the temptation of better U.S. News scores by raising prices, chasing status, and marketing themselves to the children of privilege.

We thought the nation needed exactly the opposite: smart, well-run colleges that enrolled students from all walks of life and helped them earn a high-quality diploma at an affordable price. Colleges that instilled a sense of service and public obligation while producing groundbreaking research.

So we decided to do something about it and create our own ranking—not based on what colleges do for themselves, but on what they do for their country. After all, everyone benefits when colleges push the boundaries of scientific discovery and provide paths to opportunity for the next generation of low-income students. And everyone pays for college, through taxes and other forms of public support.

Today, the Washington Monthly rankings are often listed alongside (or above) U.S. News when colleges tout their national standing. We rate schools on three equally weighted criteria: social mobility, research, and public service. Instead of rewarding schools that reject 95 percent of applicants, we give high marks to colleges that enroll lots of low-income students and help them graduate and earn a good living without too much debt. We factor in pure research spending and the number of undergraduates who go on to earn PhDs. And we give extra weight to colleges that send their graduates out into the world to serve the community at large.

For most of our rankings history, policymakers followed our lead. Both the Bush and Obama administrations challenged the entrenched higher education lobby to disclose more information about student success. Innovative institutions began touting their ability to enroll bigger, more diverse classes and help them land good jobs after graduation.

Then Donald Trump was elected, and forward momentum at the federal level ground to a halt. In last year’s College Guide, we speculated about how bad a higher education secretary Betsy DeVos might turn out to be. She has somehow been even worse. Data gathering has stopped while DeVos and a collection of former for-profit college executives have begun ripping up Obama-era regulations designed to protect students from predatory schools.

The human cost of these actions will be enormous. But the higher education sector has an opportunity to push back, by taking a strong public stand against the Trump agenda, and by offering students a better deal than the boiler rooms full of telemarketers who are doubtless filling up now that DeVos has declared open season on vulnerable students.

There are plenty of examples to choose from: colleges and universities you’ve likely never heard of that do a fantastic job of opening their doors to a wide array of students and giving them a great twenty-first-century education. Indeed, that’s probably why you’ve never heard of them—because the lure of wealth, fame, and exclusivity is still a powerful force in defining higher education excellence.

We know colleges can do better. Here are some of the institutions leading the way.

National Universities

The upper echelon of the U.S. News ranking of national universities—big, research-focused institutions that draw students from around the country—is a who’s who of expensive private schools. Not a single public university makes their top twenty. Ours, by contrast, includes a range of great public schools, from research powerhouses in the University of California system to land-grant universities like Texas A&M to regional innovators like Utah State. These schools do more than just enroll enough low-income students to keep up appearances. At some, first-generation and needy students make up nearly half the freshman class.

To be sure, there are some familiar names on top of our list: Harvard, Stanford, MIT. This is a testament to the fact that you truly can have it all—if you already have it all. There is a tiny coterie of incredibly wealthy institutions whose multibillion-dollar endowments allow them to keep real tuition low for non-rich students while producing sky-high graduation rates and attracting star researchers. The problem is that this organizational model is neither replicable nor expandable. The really interesting universities are just a little farther down our list.

Augusta University doesn’t even get an individual ranking in U.S. News: it’s listed as “#231–#300,” in a seventy-way tie for last place. Yet in our rankings, it comes in at number 30. Augusta is a public research university in Georgia that enrolls an economically and racially diverse student body, nearly two-thirds of whom are women. With a focus on in-demand jobs in the health care sector, Augusta graduates earn far more money than our statistical models predict and pay their loans back at a much higher rate, all for an affordable net price of about $10,000 per year for families earning less than $75,000.

Michigan Technological University isn’t nearly as well known as the other public universities in that state that routinely compete for football and basketball championships. We rank it number 36 because it scores well on all three of our metrics, combining solid social mobility and research results with stellar public service numbers. In addition to sending an unusual number of students into ROTC and the Peace Corps, MTU got the highest possible score on our new “voting engagement” measure by participating in the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement, voluntarily publishing student voting rates, and releasing an action plan to improve civic engagement.

National Louis University, a private nonprofit university near Chicago, sits just outside our top fifty because it has a much higher graduation rate than our models predict given the large number of low-income students it enrolls. National Louis is also one of only a handful of universities with a higher graduation rate for students who are eligible for Pell Grants than for non-Pell students, another new measure we added this year.

Then there are the universities at the bottom of our rankings, many of which enjoy some measure of prestige or success in the national market. Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. regularly denounces federal involvement in higher education—except when it comes to filling his school’s bank account, which overflows with revenues from federal grant and loan programs. But while Liberty is happy to take money from Pell Grant students, it doesn’t seem to care much about helping them graduate. Liberty has one of the worst Pell/non-Pell graduation rate disparities in the nation. This is probably why, five years after leaving Liberty, barely half of students have paid back even a single dollar of principal on their student loans. Liberty also conducts scant funded research and sends a minimal number of students on to earn PhDs.

There are public universities in the lower reaches of our rankings—we’re looking at you, Eastern Michigan and the University of Kansas—along with a bunch of overpriced private universities pretending, too often successfully, that being good and being expensive are exactly the same. If you’re thinking about sending your kids to Drexel, Hofstra, or Marquette, think again.

Then there’s our third-lowest-ranked national school, Catholic University, in Washington, D.C. In 1900, Catholic was one of the fourteen original founders of the Association of American Universities. Nearly all the rest—including Harvard, Princeton, and Berkeley—are near the top of our rankings. Catholic’s service and research numbers are in the middle of the pack. It ranks near the bottom overall because its social mobility numbers are remarkably bad.

Only 13 percent of Catholic U students qualify for Pell Grants, and only 14 percent are first-generation undergrads, among the stingiest rates nationwide. But despite enrolling few low- and moderate-income students, it charges them a net price of nearly $32,000 per year, among the very highest. Catholic isn’t just indifferent to the idea of providing low-income students with an affordable college education. It appears to be openly hostile. God said he who oppresseth the poor reproacheth his Maker. We agree.

Liberal Arts Colleges

Berea College has become our perennial top-ranked liberal arts college because of its unique mission of providing a great free education to low-income and first-generation students in Kentucky and Appalachia, with a strong commitment to service. Washington and Lee, in Virginia, climbed up to the second spot this year with strong across-the-board graduation rates, very high earnings among alumni, and generous financial aid for low- and moderate-income students. Harvey Mudd College, in California, at number 3, sends more graduates into PhD programs than any other liberal arts school.

Women’s colleges often score well on our rankings, including high marks for Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, and Barnard. Salem College, in North Carolina, was originally founded as a girls’ school by the Moravian Church in 1772, making it the oldest women’s college in the South. More than half of Salem women receive Pell Grants, a much higher rate than our models predict given the school’s solid ACT scores. It also graduates Pell students at unusually high rates. Agnes Scott College in Georgia is yet another women’s school that outperforms on the Washington Monthly rankings, with admirable social mobility and research numbers and strong ongoing commitment to the Peace Corps.

Regional Campuses

While national universities and the upper echelon of liberal arts colleges tend to dominate the national sense of what higher education is and ought to be, most students go elsewhere. Regional campuses, which focus more on teaching and draw most of their students from nearby, are the workhorses of the four-year sector, enrolling tens of thousands of students who have jobs, families, homes off campus, or all of the above. Students like these, whom the government classifies as “nontraditional,” in fact make up the majority of America’s undergrads.

Just as University of California schools crowd the top of our national universities list, the California State University campuses at San Bernardino, Stanislaus, Bakersfield, and Los Angeles rank third, fourth, fifth, and sixth respectively on our ranking of master’s-granting universities. They are topped only by SUNY-Geneseo, a highly selective liberal arts school within the competitive and affordable SUNY system, and Evergreen State College, which will be our number 1 master’s campus as long as it continues to have stellar social mobility and service numbers while producing alumnae like Kathleen Hanna and two of the founding members of the rock band Sleater-Kinney.

Our bottom-ranked master’s institution, all the way down at number 695, is South University’s online campus. Although located in Georgia, South University is actually named for John T. South, who bought the unaccredited Draughon’s Practical Business College in 1974 and rode a wave of federal student loan money to modest fame and great fortune, christening his college after himself—and prompting a lawsuit from the actual University of the South—before selling it for $50 million to the notorious for-profit operator EDMC, which further expanded into the online gold rush in the 2000s, producing student outcomes so terrible that it fell into hot water with its accreditor. EDMC was ultimately saved when the school was in turn bought by a Pentecostal “nonprofit” called the Dream Center Foundation, using a loan partially financed by the chair of the foundation itself, thus relieving it of for-profit oversight. South University Online has a six-year graduation rate of 2 percent for Pell and non-Pell students alike. It conducts no research and provides no service, and nearly three-quarters of its former students can’t pay down their loans.

What’s Next?

Although Betsy DeVos made her bones as a pro-privatization K–12 education reformer, her lasting legacy, if any, will likely be in higher education. She and her team of industry executives have aggressively moved to gut regulations that stand between the people who operate institutions like South University and enormous piles of student and taxpayer money. And when students are inevitably defrauded, DeVos is working hard to make it nearly impossible for their crushing student loan balances to be forgiven.

A malign side effect of the DeVos deregulatory agenda will be a reduction in the flow of useful information. Regulations require data. The earnings numbers we use in our social mobility rankings, for example, come from an agreement between the Department of Education and the IRS to generate the information needed to hold for-profit colleges accountable for whether program graduates make enough money to pay back their loans. If those regulations are erased, as DeVos is explicitly planning, the need for supporting data disappears. Even in this corner of the public policy universe, the Trump administration’s prostration to the desires of big business is making the world a worse place to be. (DeVos has proposed to disclose new information about how much graduates of individual programs within colleges earn, a good idea that originated during the Obama administration. But following through on that pledge would involve a commitment to the public good that has so far been lacking.)

The good news is that traditions and mechanisms for creating better information aren’t erased so easily. The data spigot is a lot easier to turn back on once it has been built in the first place. There’s a growing appetite among students and policymakers for authentic information about college quality—not the number of treadmills in the student athletic center or the size of the football stadium, but real data about how colleges prepare people for life, citizenship, and careers. The Washington Monthly rankings are part of a larger project to fundamentally change the way people understand higher learning. It began long before Trump was inflicted on the American body politic, and it will continue long after he’s gone.

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

Earlier this year, Donald Trump said this to a group of Republican lawmakers: “Today you have community colleges and you have all of the—when I was growing up we had vocational schools . . . You learn mechanical, you learn bricklaying and carpentry and all of these things. We don’t have that very much anymore. And I think the word ‘vocational’ is a much better word than in many cases a community college. A lot of people don’t know what a community college means or represents.”

Donald Trump says a lot of ignorant things. But in this case he was reflecting a blind spot common among American elites. For all the talk in political and policy circles about the need for skilled workers, most members of the leadership class have no real concept of how millions of working-class Americans actually get the skills they need for better jobs.

The answer is that they primarily do so by earning vocational certificates. These are credentials that typically take a year or so to get and provide job skills to work in particular fields—say, as a dental assistant, an auto mechanic, or, yes, a bricklayer. And they are mostly provided by, you guessed it, community colleges (for-profit schools are the second biggest purveyor, and private nonprofit colleges are a distant third).

None of this is news to members of the working class who rely on these credentials to get ahead in life. On average, certificate holders earn about 20 percent more per year than those with just a high school degree, according to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. And while the president seems to think vocational education is in decline, the number of such certificates awarded has, in fact, been climbing for years, from about 566,000 in 1998–99 to about 1.06 million in 2013–14, the latest year for which federal data is available.

In a way, Trump’s cluelessness is understandable. The major media outlets, Fox News included, seldom cover community colleges, preferring to focus on the elite four-year schools that most journalists themselves attended. U.S. News & World Report doesn’t even bother to rank community colleges.

The Washington Monthly is different. We were the first publication to rank America’s best community colleges, back in 2007 (we did so again in 2009, 2010, and 2013). Other outlets have since followed suit. But all those rankings are based on two-year associate’s degrees. No publication has ever ranked certificate programs.

Until now. In this issue, we inaugurate our first-ever ranking of America’s best colleges for vocational certificates. To create the rankings, we pulled numbers from the U.S. Department of Education’s “gainful employment” database, released in the final weeks of the Obama administration. This is the data behind a controversial regulation of the same name that would cut off federal student financial aid to career-oriented schools whose students earn so little after graduation that they can’t pay back their loans. We selected the twelve most common undergraduate certificate programs (welding, medical office assistant, and so on) and ranked the colleges that offer them by the median earnings of their students three years after graduation. For informational purposes, we also show the median debt-to-earnings ratios, annual debt payments, estimated total debt, and outcome under gainful employment—pass, at risk (“zone”), or fail—for the schools. You can see the full rankings here. 

Looking at the lists, the first thing you might notice is that some of these programs—nursing, welding, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning)—lead to relatively decent-paying careers. For instance, graduates from the HVAC program at Perry Technical Institute, a private nonprofit college in Washington State, make $47,685 annually three years after graduating. That’s nearly twice what a typical American age twenty-five to thirty-four with only a high school degree makes a year.

Some other programs, however—skin care, medical clinic assistant—don’t lead to high incomes. Graduates of the number 1 school for cosmetology, Josef’s School of Hair Design in Fargo, North Dakota, make only $26,432. That statistic is a bit deceptive in that cosmetologists—as well as massage therapists and others in direct-service fields—can also garner substantial tip income that doesn’t show up in these numbers. But back-office professionals, like medical office assistants and pharmacy techs, aren’t earning tip income—just low salaries.

Another thing you’ll notice is the huge disparity between the best and worst schools in each field. For instance, students who earned certificates in medical insurance coding from Columbus State Community College in Ohio, the top-scoring school in that category, have median annual incomes of $35,250 three years out. That’s almost four times more than the $9,796 earned by graduates of Bryan University in Springfield, Missouri, a for-profit. And Bryan grads are saddled with more than twice the amount of debt ($13,720) as Columbus State grads ($5,782).

The gap is even bigger in other fields. Welding certificate holders from top-ranked Northern Wyoming Community College make six times more per year ($52,225) than those who attended bottom-ranked Peninsula College in Washington State ($8,739). The earnings differential for massage therapists is ten to one.

To put these disparities into perspective, students of Harvard University, the top school on our list of four-year national universities, earned about $90,000 ten years after entering. That’s only two and a third times the roughly $38,000 annual income of those who attended Argosy University in Orange County, California, the lowest-performing school on that list. And Harvard is highly selective, whereas Argosy is “open admissions”—it accepts almost all applicants. You’d expect the gap between four-year schools to be much bigger than the one separating the best and worst certificate-granting schools, nearly all of which are open admissions. Instead, it’s the other way around.

What this tells you is that the performance of the schools at the bottom of the certificates rankings is not just relatively bad—it is absolutely, screamingly, catastrophically bad. Consider this: A full-time worker who is paid the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour earns an annual income of $15,080. The students from all but one of the colleges on the twelve “worst” lists make less than that—in some cases, way, way less. Massage therapy graduates of Intercoast Colleges, a for-profit chain in Orange, California, that ranks dead last in that field, earn $2,707 a year. And that’s median earnings—meaning half of them make less. Certificates from such schools are worse than useless—they’re toxic, because they typically saddle students with debts they may never be able to pay off.

What kinds of schools are these? Our rankings make that clear, too. Some of the worst-performing institutions in these categories are community colleges, a fact that may confound liberals who defend public colleges. The vast majority, however, are for-profits, a fact that ought to trouble conservatives. To scramble expectations even further, note that a few of the best-performing colleges are for-profits, though the great majority are community colleges.

Shutting down the worst-performing certificate-granting schools—regardless of whether they are for-profit, nonprofit, or public—would be a major advance in the fight against inequality and a big help to working-class Americans looking to get ahead. That’s what the gainful employment rule—created by the Obama administration against tremendous resistance from Republicans and the for-profit college industry—was set up to do.

Earlier this year, however, Trump’s Education Department proposed eliminating the rule’s sanctions against low-performing schools. Then, this summer, the New York Times reported that the department was considering abandoning the gainful employment rule altogether in favor of a system that would reveal program-level earnings and debt data for all colleges, not just those that grant certificates. Such a reporting system would actually be a step forward for transparency, but without sanctions against low-performing schools it wouldn’t provide much accountability.

Implicit in Trump’s endorsement of vocational education is that it is universally a wonderful thing. Many elites voice the same sentiments—including lawmakers in both parties who have recently proposed making shorter-term certificate programs eligible for federal student aid (see Jared Bass and Clare McCann, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Higher Education Policy.”). But while the instinct to put more resources into vocational education is right—it could help more Americans attain the better-paying “middle skill” jobs many companies these days find hard to fill—the undifferentiated enthusiasm for the idea bespeaks an ignorance of what the reality of that education looks like. Our hope is that these new rankings will shed light on that reality, while helping prospective students find the best colleges, and avoid the worst.

The post America’s Best and Worst Colleges for Vocational Certificates appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Colleges and universities around the U.S. are facing a profound enrollment crisis. The number of students entering American institutions of higher education has dropped for seven straight years, as the vast Millennial generation ages out of prime college-going years and older students who flooded into colleges after the recession have found jobs. Since last spring alone, enrollment in postsecondary programs decreased by about 230,000 students.

Declines have been steepest in the Northeast and Midwest, where the overall population is stagnant or shrinking—and where, ironically, a disproportionate number of colleges and universities are located. An even bigger drop-off is likely to hit a decade from now, thanks to falling birth rates since the 2008 financial crisis, according to demographers. Declining enrollment has already led a number of for-profit colleges and a few small liberal arts schools to close or merge. It has put other schools under serious financial pressure, especially less-selective institutions like community colleges and regional state universities, which typically serve students from their surrounding communities rather than recruiting them—as elite schools do—from across the country.

But for all the fiscal pain, falling enrollment has an upside: it has led many schools to change their behavior in socially beneficial ways. To boost admissions, for instance, colleges are increasingly cutting tuition prices and recruiting among groups they generally used to ignore, including minorities, adults, and first-generation students. Some institutions are also doing more to help such students, who are often underprepared academically and in danger of dropping out. This requires higher up-front expenditures for things like college counselors but results in more tuition revenue for the universities as students stay in school longer. (See Kevin Carey, “Why More Colleges Should Treat Students Like Numbers.”)

In such an environment, it’s probably only a matter of time before schools start actively recruiting students like Justin Roslonek. A senior at Rutgers University–Newark, Roslonek lives in an apartment near campus. On many Sundays, you can find him at Our Lady of Czestochowa, a cocoa-colored brick Catholic church in Harrison, where he hangs out with his grandmother. He loves the traditional Polish food he grew up eating, but can’t hide his affinity for greasy Chinese American fare. A marketing major in the business school with a GPA just shy of 3.9, he is due to graduate this December.

He also spent more than a decade and a half behind bars for attempted homicide in a robbery-related incident committed when he was sixteen years old.

Former prisoners aren’t much of a presence on most American college campuses. But fifty-four of them are currently enrolled at Rutgers-Newark and its sister campuses in Camden and New Brunswick. Another sixty have already graduated with bachelor’s degrees from Rutgers, and eight have earned master’s degrees.

What brought them to Rutgers was an innovative program called the New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons Consortium (NJ-STEP), a partnership between the state’s department of corrections and several two- and four-year colleges in the state. Under NJ-STEP, inmates can take college classes while in prison (more than 500 are currently doing so) and, when they leave, have their credits transfer smoothly to participating colleges—something that happens too seldom in other prison education programs.

Helping current and former incarcerated people attend college offers many obvious social advantages—studies show, for instance, that prisoners who take classes while behind bars have considerably lower recidivism rates than those who do not. But for hard-pressed colleges and universities, the potential advantages are also monetary. Roslonek and all the other formerly incarcerated students attending Rutgers pay an average of $15,000 in annual tuition and fees, just like other in-state students—typically a combination of Pell Grants, student loans, work-study dollars, and whatever other money they and their families can cobble together. That works out to about $1 million in annual revenue for the university, according to Dr. Todd Clear, a professor of criminal justice and former administrator at Rutgers-Newark, and one of the founders of the NJ-STEP program. The NJ-STEP students require more services, including dedicated counselors, than other students. But that’s true of many of the nontraditional students that Rutgers-Newark and other colleges are increasingly recruiting. All costs considered, formerly incarcerated students are a net revenue raiser for the university, Clear believes, though an evaluation of the program’s finances is just getting under way.

If Clear turns out to be right, it could be a timely development, because the decline in college enrollment is happening just as the country is witnessing the beginnings of another major trend: the de-incarceration of America’s swollen prison system. The United States has roughly a million and a half men and women serving prison sentences, far more as a percentage of the population than any country other than the tiny nation of the Seychelles. Disgust over this reality, at a time when crime rates have been falling, has led to calls from both liberals and conservatives to radically reduce incarceration rates. That is (slowly) happening: the total number of inmates in state and federal prisons has been shrinking slightly for eight years in a row, with about 600,000 released annually. With so many people locked up, that number will likely remain high for years, or even grow if criminal justice reform measures ever pass at the state and federal levels. If only a fraction of them are funneled into college—Clear estimates that around 10 percent of inmates are able to do college-level work—it could mean tens of thousands of lives transformed and hundreds of millions of extra dollars for hard-pressed colleges and universities.

Providing college classes and even degrees to prisoners is hardly a new idea. But the politics of the issue have long been toxic, with law-abiding voters wondering why criminals should be given free educations while they themselves are forced to tap their savings and take out loans to put their own children through college. By allowing prisoners to become paying students, the NJ-STEP program could point to a possible path through that political minefield.

Arguments that prisoners in America ought to have access to education go back to before the founding of the country. But programs to deliver that education only started growing in earnest after a 1972 amendment to the Higher Education Act made inmates eligible for Pell Grants. During the tough-on-crime 1980s and early ’90s, a number of congressional Republicans and conservative Democrats started arguing against Pells for prisoners, on the grounds that the grants were ineffective and unfair to law-abiding students and their families. Pell eligibility for inmates was eliminated in the 1994 crime bill signed by Bill Clinton. After that, the number of postsecondary prison education programs plummeted, from several hundred to about a dozen.

In recent years, new research has reaffirmed the wisdom of prison education programs—a 2014 RAND Corporation study found that every dollar invested in prison-based education yields $4 to $5 of taxpayer savings in reduced incarceration costs. In 2015, President Obama created, by executive action, the Second Chance Pell pilot program, which gives Pell Grants to students in both state and federal prisons and involves sixty-five colleges spread out across the twenty-seven states that participate.

Rutgers University–Newark is one of the participating colleges. It, in turn, primarily oversees the NJ-STEP program, which involves a coalition of four colleges and universities—Rutgers, Drew University, Princeton University, and Raritan Valley Community College—whose faculty teach inmates in seven of the state’s prisons. NJ-STEP staff recruit potential students and help them register, choose classes, and navigate financial aid and other paperwork. Importantly, credits from any of the prison-taught courses automatically transfer to any of the participating community colleges once the inmates are out of prison. After that, students with enough credits can transfer those community college credentials to a four-year school like Rutgers. In this way, NJ-STEP helps solve one of the abiding flaws of prison college programs nationwide—that ex-offenders often find that colleges won’t accept the credits they earned behind bars.

The move from prison to campus life can be a difficult one. To ease the transition, formerly incarcerated students who arrive at Rutgers receive support and social services through a program called Mountainview Communities. MVC counselors—many of whom are themselves former prisoners—help with things like campus networking, housing, financial management, legal issues, and job hunting. MVC also provides a dedicated physical space for formerly incarcerated students to gather, work, and lend support to each other.

One student who benefited from Mountainview services is Carmelo Ortiz. A soft-spoken man who spends a lot of time with his fellow church parishioners and his girlfriend, Ortiz did thirty years on felony murder charges in a robbery that went wrong. He was the getaway driver, but he wound up getting the same amount of prison time as the actual shooter.

When he first got to Rutgers, Ortiz was close to living in a homeless shelter. “Sometimes I felt like I was worse off than when I was locked up,” he recalled. Mountainview counselors found him permanent housing, helped him get an ID card—a seemingly small thing, but not easy to procure if you’ve been behind bars for three decades—and guided him in other ways. “This program was instrumental in keeping me focused. It helped me navigate a lot of challenges, and I always turn to them for guidance and help,” Ortiz said. Now, Ortiz is part of an honors program for high-achieving and socially conscious students at Rutgers, to which MVC connected him. He also works as a research assistant, and is finishing up a project focused on prison record expungement, which he’ll present at a conference. He’s made the dean’s list for the past two semesters, won a competitive Braven Fellowship to develop his leadership skills, and is slated to graduate next spring.

Even with help from dedicated counselors, however, formerly incarcerated students on campus face hurdles most normal students can barely fathom. Justin Roslonek once had an accounting class that was entirely online. To a typical college student, that might sound like a godsend, but to Roslonek, it was the start of an excruciating semester. As a condition of his parole, the halfway house he was living in didn’t have internet access, which meant that all research for class assignments had to be shoved into small pockets of time in between classes, labs, meetings with professors, travel between locations, and check-ins with parole officers. “It chips off your time left and right, until you’re left with crumbs,” Roslonek said.

And students like Roslonek can’t just come early or stay late and finish work in college computer labs or public libraries: they have strict curfews that, if violated, could land them back in prison. And if students have children or families to attend to as well? They’ll have to fit that in too. “[Classes like that] destroyed me,” Roslonek said.

The social and emotional aspects aren’t much easier to adjust to. The smallest things can morph into situations that cause dread and embarrassment for recently released students. Roslonek recounted a time when he was a part of a study group for a Rutgers statistical methods course. The group of four or five students had already been meeting up for weeks on campus when one day one of them asked Roslonek for his cell phone number. But having been incarcerated, and while living in a halfway house, he wasn’t allowed to have a cell phone. So Roslonek had to say no. “I saw the puzzled look, the disappointment—that I wouldn’t even share my cell number with him, after all the weeks we’d been studying together. I saw this look on his face. It just doesn’t compute. People’s dogs have phones. How do I not have a phone?”

When students reveal their criminal history, said Roslonek, it’s a kind of “coming out”; they have to make tough choices about whether they’re going to disclose personal information, and they harbor fears about what will happen if they do. In Roslonek’s case, he wound up just telling the truth about why he couldn’t give his study partner his number: “I had to think pretty quickly. My assessment was that he was a genuinely nice kid. Who in the world knows what a halfway house is if they’re quote ‘normal people’ in society? They don’t know what the requirements or the restrictions of a halfway house are.” Then he pulled out his halfway house ID card for the other student to see, in what turned out to be a polite but awkward show-and-tell.

Despite difficulties like these, NJ-STEP students graduate at the same rates as other Rutgers students, and many have gone on to accomplish amazing things. Walter Fortson, who spent two years in prison for selling crack cocaine, graduated from Rutgers-Newark in 2012 and went on to win a prestigious Truman Scholarship and earn a master’s degree from Cambridge University. Benjamin Chin, who did time in a youth correctional facility on an assault conviction before graduating from Rutgers–New Brunswick in 2014, also became a Truman Scholar and is now doing policy development at the federal Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation. Two other students spent the summer in the Czech Republic conducting molecular biophysics research through Princeton. Others are eyeing careers as social workers or considering entering PhD programs.

Todd Clear, the Rutgers-Newark professor who oversees NJ-STEP, is not only proud of his students’ accomplishments, he’s also convinced that there is a clear economic (and ethical) incentive for colleges of all types to do what New Jersey has done. “Every single state could do this,” he insisted. Danette Howard, senior vice president and chief strategy officer at the Lumina Foundation, who is studying prison education programs around the country, agreed: “This could be a way for colleges to bring in a new and different form of revenue.” She added that because NJ-STEP students are meeting Rutgers’s admissions criteria and bringing their own tuition dollars with them, “they are not taking away opportunities for other students.” Therefore, she said, the program could be a model that helps overcome the tough politics that typically surrounds efforts to expand higher education opportunities for incarcerated people.

The economics of the program, however, only work because students in NJ-STEP are able to access Pell Grants while they’re behind bars, thanks to Rutgers’s participation in the Second Chance Pell pilot program launched by Obama. So the big question is: What will happen to that program? Technically, funding for it runs out at the end of the year. But the Trump administration has signaled that it would like to see that funding continue. Key Senate Republicans have even voiced support for completely overturning the provision in the 1994 crime bill that blocked inmates from gaining access to Pell Grants.

This is, however, highly unlikely to happen in 2018, given that reauthorization of the main legislation guiding federal higher education policy has stalled (see Jared Bass and Clare McCann, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Higher Education Policy.”). Regulations will also be needed to make sure that unscrupulous for-profit schools don’t exploit the prison Pell dollars without delivering quality outcomes. Scams like these were common three decades ago and were cited by lawmakers who supported the anti-Pell provisions in the 1994 crime bill.

But if the flow of Pell dollars for prison education does eventually open up, it could be a real boost to colleges and universities struggling with their bottom lines—and a game changer for incarcerated people hoping to make the most of their lives on the outside.

The post The Prison-to-College Pipeline appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The University of South Florida looks a lot like the surrounding city of Tampa Bay, which is to say that it looks like most of the American places that have filled up with people over the last 100 years: sunny and sprawling and composed of newish brick, glass, and concrete buildings between five and ten stories high. You may not have heard of USF, or at least not in a way that made a lasting impression, because it isn’t a synecdoche for the allegedly meritocratic class system, nor the home of a championship football team. It is merely the kind of university where most young adults actually get a college education.

Like many of the public institutions that make up the backbone of the American higher education system, USF’s future is uncertain. Four decades of tax-revolt politics and mismanaged finances have led state legislatures to slash public funding for higher learning, forcing public universities to raise tuition and compete on the open market against schools with comparative advantages. Community college degrees are cheap, short, and job focused. The most prestigious universities provide the stamp of selectivity. For-profit schools aggressively market convenient online programs. Small liberal arts colleges offer a personalized experience where everybody knows your name.

While USF is trying to compete in each of these arenas (the football team was 10–2 last year), the main point of being a sizable public university is to serve a large and diverse population of students. Not just the top 1 percent, but people who represent the whole population of Florida, including immigrants, first-generation students, low-income families, and people of color. Educating 51,000 students at three campuses spread across Tampa, Sarasota, and St. Petersburg can lead to the standard rap on big state schools, namely that students are anonymous, unnoticed, and disconnected—“just a number.”

Which is why the most interesting thing about USF is how it is turning the whole idea of students as numbers on its head. Numbers, after all, can be analyzed. They can be acted upon and changed. The real tragedy of modern higher education is when students aren’t even seen as numbers—when, in other words, they aren’t seen at all.

USF and a small but growing number of colleges and universities are at the forefront of using information technology and advanced statistical analysis to see students in whole new ways. By sifting through vast stores of information that have accumulated in various administrative and educational data systems, they are discovering patterns about students that they never knew about before—why some succeed while others fail, and what can be done to help them. As a result, they’re starting to crack the stubborn, widespread problem of high college dropout rates, and point toward a future where besieged public institutions can continue to thrive.

“Predictive analytics” is the name for this data-dependent approach, and you can be forgiven for wondering if it’s just another overhyped high-tech fad. The techno-optimism of the late 1990s and early 2000s has given way to a world in which the tendency of technological innovation to improve our lives is much more in doubt. The exploitation of our personal data can border on the dystopian, whether it’s Cambridge Analytica mining our Facebook profiles or health insurance companies raising our rates based on our online shopping history.

But there are reasons to believe that predictive analytics in higher ed could end up being the real deal. First, institutions like USF have already shown that it can work to improve student outcomes. At Georgia State University, for example, analytics was a key part of a push that saw a 30 percent jump in bachelor’s degrees conferred in a five-year span. Second, there is an ecosystem of vendors who already know how to gather and interpret the data—schools don’t have to figure it out on their own. Finally, there are powerful economic incentives for other schools to hop on the bandwagon. As more states shift to performance-funding mechanisms that reward colleges for rates of persistence (students sticking around year to year) and graduation, there’s more pressure to figure out not just how to get students to apply and attend, but how to keep them in once they arrive. And with a flattening or even declining population of college-age students, all but the most selective schools will have to start considering a broader pool of applicants, including ones who might be less academically promising. Figuring out how to get more of them to graduate means more years of tuition dollars coming in.

If more institutions start behaving like USF, the results could be enormous. Even boosting graduation rates by just 5 percent nationwide would mean another hundred thousand people earning a bachelor’s degree every year.

But there are headwinds pushing against the successful spread of predictive analytics. Universities may be politically liberal, but they’re institutionally conservative. Administration and academics tend to be walled off from each other. Making productive use of all the data that now exists on students will require them to shed some deeply ingrained bad habits. Collecting the data is the easy part. Using it the right way is the challenge.

The state of Florida began the twentieth century with three public universities: Florida State and Florida A&M in Tallahassee, and the University of Florida in Gainesville. By the mid-1950s, it still had only three, for the simple reason that most of the state below Gainesville was a hot, humid, barely habitable swamp for half the year. But then affordable air conditioning became available, so the legislature established a new public university in what was then, practically speaking, south Florida: USF, in Tampa Bay.

As the state grew in population over the next half century, USF grew with it. The state legislature encouraged expansion by providing financial rewards to universities that got larger. It didn’t matter how many students graduated, just how many walked in the front door.

Then 2008 happened. Florida’s economy had been buoyed by the housing bubble and suffered immensely during the crash. To manage a shrinking budget, the legislature made a fundamental change. In 2013, it passed a law establishing “performance funding” for Florida’s public universities. A pool of state funding would be directly tied to a school’s score on certain criteria, including persistence and graduation rates. The three worst-performing schools would miss out on this funding entirely.

This was a challenge for Florida university administrations, in large part because of the peculiar way modern universities are organized. Traditionally, the administration is in charge of facilities and finances and athletics. It also runs the admissions and financial aid offices and so decides which and how many undergraduates to enroll. But once students arrive on campus, they’re turned over to the faculty, who advise and teach however they see fit. The relationship between professors and administrators at the typical research university is less an ongoing partnership than a fragile detente between warring tribes.

But USF had a head start. It had already launched an initiative aimed at improving student outcomes under the leadership of its well-respected president, Judy Genshaft, who had been on the job for ten years and had built up credibility with congenitally suspicious faculty. In 2010, the administration appointed a respected historian of Latin American history named Paul Dosal to be the university’s vice provost for student success. It was a new job title, one that existed at few if any other universities at the time. The fact that “student success” is not a goal around which most colleges are administratively organized says a lot about why so many college students are unsuccessful.

USF began by turning college advising over to a cadre of trained professional full-time advisers. Faculty were happy to give up the responsibility, since it meant more time for teaching and research. The advisers noticed—and USF data confirmed—that many students were slamming into a relatively small number of required courses with high rates of withdrawal and failure. That created frustration and squandered time and money—two things USF’s most vulnerable students didn’t have to spare. The courses were reengineered, without, the university notes, compromising academic rigor.

The university also took a hard look at its financial aid system. Historically, colleges have spent the most time and energy examining students before they actually enroll. Drawing on methods honed in the cauldron of airline ticket pricing, expensive consultants help colleges analyze the troves of financial information students and parents are required to disgorge during the admissions process, along with standardized tests, high school transcripts, and indicators of student interest (campus visits, legacy status, interviews), to estimate how likely a given student is to apply for admission, the odds of them accepting an offer, and the price it will take to close the sale.

USF realized that it had been misallocating financial aid. Some students were getting more than they needed, others not enough. The financial aid office redirected aid to students when it made the difference between them enrolling part time or full time, or between studying during the day and holding down a full-time job. Research shows that, as you’d expect, full-time students with room in their schedule for schoolwork are far more likely to graduate on time.

The reforms worked. The percent of freshman who graduated in four years increased from 43 percent for those who enrolled in 2009 to nearly 60 percent for those who enrolled in 2013. Impressively, the gains were spread evenly across demographic groups. Slightly more than half of USF’s undergraduates are nonwhite, and nearly 40 percent have income low enough to qualify for a federal Pell Grant. USF’s graduation rates for minority and low-income students are as good or better than their white and more affluent peers—one of the reasons USF’s Washington Monthly ranking is substantially higher than its ranking from U.S. News & World Report.

But by 2015, the improvement had started to flatten out. Meanwhile, the performance funding bill passed by the legislature had dangled another incentive: if USF could meet a series of goals, including a 90 percent rate of freshmen returning for their sophomore year and 70 percent graduating in six years, it would be designated the state’s third “preeminent” public research university, alongside the University of Florida and Florida State, which would make it the first addition to that club since the nineteenth century.

Dosal and his peers knew that the only way to make more progress was to delve even deeper into the sacrosanct realms of teaching and learning, by taking advantage of information the university had never had before.

At USF, as with nearly all universities, student services like health care and residential life had been kept on one side of an administration/faculty demilitarized zone, with academic affairs on the other. So Dosal—recently and very deliberately promoted to vice provost for student affairs and student success—created a new body called the Persistence Committee. Every Thursday morning during the academic year, representatives from fifteen different sections of the university convene in a nondescript conference room, around a set of four beige tables pushed together into a rectangle, and look at pie graphs on a computer screen.

The numbers on the screen are generated by a private Texas-based company called Civitas Learning. Colleges hire Civitas to analyze the troves of digital information that are now routinely gathered about anyone enrolled in higher education. Some data comes from the admissions office, as well as bureaucratic databases maintained by the bursar and registrar. More information is pulled from the university’s online learning management systems (LMS), where students watch videos, join discussion groups, collaborate on writing assignments, and conduct virtual experiments. Civitas even looks at data from the all-purpose smart cards that keep track of students’ meal balances, store money to spend at the bookstore, and unlock the doors to the library, gym, and dorm. College students circa 2018 spend their days in a cocoon of digital information. Who they went to high school with, what they buy, where they go, when they show up for class, and how they learn—it’s all recorded in a university-controlled data system.

Civitas sifted through ten years of USF data and examined over 300 different variables to identify warning signs for students at risk of dropping out. They found that student behavior is much more predictive than simple demographics. Students who log on to the LMS, download materials, click on lectures, and contribute to discussions are much less likely to drop out than students who don’t. Student engagement can now be measured in real time.

These insights are used to analyze USF’s recently enrolled students, flagging risk factors in their prior academic record, and, more importantly, patterns of behavior once they start taking classes. This data is what the Persistence Committee looks at every Thursday morning.

Usually, most of the students are coded blue for a “Very High” likelihood of persisting. (USF is more selective than most public universities, with a 45 percent acceptance rate and an average SAT score of over 1,200.) But there are also hundreds of students assigned to increasingly alarming colors, all the way to red for “Very Low.” These students are in crisis, right now. Some of them were in the blue category until very recently, when something set off alarm bells inside the system. The job of the Persistence Committee is to figure out what went wrong, and to help before it’s too late.

One morning last fall, the system flagged a young man named Christian. His persistence score had been oscillating back and forth for several weeks, suggesting that he was going days without engaging online with any of his classes. His high school record and aid application didn’t raise any obvious red flags—he was financially and academically prepared to succeed. But something was going wrong.

So the committee dispatched an “academic advocate” to find out more. USF’s Academic Advocacy office is new, created in 2013 and separate from academic advising. It’s another title that doesn’t exist at most universities. Advocates work full time, using a case-management approach, to help students navigate past barriers to graduation wherever they arise. Christian, it turned out, was far from his home in New York and away from his family for the first time. His longtime girlfriend lived in North Carolina, adding to his sense of isolation. He and his advocate began to meet regularly, developing a friendship. He was interested in business, so she steered him toward a friend in the business school for advice, which led to his declaring an interest in majoring in business analytics and intelligence. He managed to keep afloat academically in the first semester, and he raised his GPA to 3.78 in the spring as he moved into the courses that excited him. Now he’s settled in and on track toward graduation.

Another student, Nathan, wasn’t flagged by the system until his first-semester midterm grades came in. He was trying hard, engaging with classes, but not succeeding. Another academic advocate took the case. Nathan didn’t have just one problem: he needed help with course material, time management, and making connections to other students. Meanwhile, his bad midterms were threatening a catastrophic first semester and academic probation. The advocate did triage, helping Nathan withdraw from two classes and focus on the rest. The spring semester went better, and he’s getting ready to start an IT major soon. Sometimes the problems are financial, and the bursar’s office can arrange a small grant or loan.

Sometimes the vagaries of dormitory living are the issue, and residential life intervenes. Socially isolated students might benefit from coaching from upperclassmen. Substance abuse and mental health problems aren’t uncommon among today’s college students, which is where the health services people come in.

Advanced analytics can yield better, faster insights into which students are faltering. But the toughest cases almost always require human judgment to understand what kinds of help students need. In some ways, the most radical innovation at USF isn’t the sophisticated statistical analysis on the computer screen. It’s the table all of the different university offices are sitting around at the same time.

So far, the Persistence Committee appears to be working. The numbers are starting to move up again. Last year, the university received $84.6 million from a state funding formula that rewards persistence, graduation, and the percent of students eligible for Pell Grants, more than any university in the state other than the flagship University of Florida. And in June, thanks to its freshman persistence rate cracking the 90 percent threshold, USF was officially granted “preeminent” status.

Now other universities are coming to USF for advice. The question is whether it’s just an example of an unusually well-run university finding new ways to be better, or the harbinger of a revolution in the way colleges and universities help students succeed.

As a sector, higher education is relatively late to using predictive analytics to improve student performance. Since the 1990s, municipal police departments have been identifying geographic areas where crimes are likely to occur. In the private sector, car companies crunch the numbers to predict whether customers will buy a car at the end of a lease or switch to a new lease with a competitor. Elsewhere in Florida, Hillsborough County has pioneered statistical analysis to identify who in the child welfare system is most at risk.

The use of advanced statistical analysis to optimize the admissions and financial aid process dates back to the 1970s, proving that colleges are very capable of devoting their significant intellectual and financial resources to problems that affect their economic well-being. But industry surveys suggest that USF, while no longer unique, is still among the minority of colleges and universities analytically focused on student success. A 2016 KPMG report found that colleges are still most likely to use data analytics for budgeting, enrollment, fund-raising, and “supply chain optimization,” as opposed to academics. Another report found that, even at universities that are using analytics on behalf of students, less than 10 percent have created the kind of institution-wide student success dashboards used by USF. In part, that’s because boosting front-end enrollment and leaving success to the faculty remains a tempting short-term method of fattening the bottom line.

But the numbers are definitely growing. By the mid-2000s, it had become clear that universities were sitting on large databases that could be used for more than just keeping track of course credits and parking tickets. In the late 2000s, just as USF was starting on its quest to improve student success, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (which, full disclosure, provides financial support to New America, where I work, and to the Washington Monthly) convened a group of researchers and practitioners who were interested in analyzing data about student success. Mark Milliron, then a Gates program officer, went on to cofound Civitas. Those meetings were a nexus of parties who have since spread out to form a burgeoning field. Georgia State University has gained national prominence by using predictive analytics to improve graduation rates for black students in Atlanta, helped by the consulting firm EAB. Other colleges have built home-grown systems for similar ends.

Cost is a factor slowing the spread of analytics. In addition to paying consultants, it’s expensive to hire a whole new staff of academic advocates and advisers. Less-pricey alternatives include automated solutions like sending out text message reminders to students whom the data flags as only mildly at risk. USF has been experimenting with these strategies, too.

But automation creates potential pitfalls. Algorithms don’t have ethics. A system that blindly works to optimize the odds of student persistence might end up advising low-income and minority students to avoid courses where low-income and minority students have historically fallen short. That course could be the gateway into careers in science and medicine. It might have been historically taught in a way that was indifferent to the particular, addressable challenges that students from different backgrounds bring to college.

This new, active approach to managing college education is arguably returning colleges to a form of the in loco parentis role that they abandoned after the sexual revolution. Instead of policing student morals and protecting undergraduate virtue, colleges have become data-fueled fairy godmothers, invisibly looking over each student’s real and virtual shoulders, ready to intervene when a crisis comes. Of course, that’s arguably another way of saying “surveillance.” By matriculating, students are opting in to the kind of constant, multi-valent algorithmic scrutiny that increasingly characterizes modern life. But the flip side of scrutiny is indifference. When colleges ignore at-risk students, those students usually fail.

There’s also the problem of changing organizations that generally maneuver like an ocean liner whose captain requires unanimous approval from three committees before turning the wheel. Unusually, USF has had the same president since 2000 and the same provost since 2008. That kind of continuity buys time to build confidence and buy-in from the faculty, who tend to be deeply conservative in their attitude toward reform.

Even then, you need the right leadership. Not someone like, say, former Mount St. Mary’s University president Simon Newman, who told his staff in 2015 to improve the freshman persistence rate by administering a survey to new undergrads and then using the results to kick out the most at-risk students before the date in late September when freshman persistence rates are calculated. “This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies,” he told his staff via email, “but you can’t. You just have to drown the bunnies . . . put a Glock to their heads.” (Newman resigned after the school newspaper reported the email.)

The true frontier of college data analytics is inside the classroom. As progressive and successful as USF has been, the big table where the Persistence Committee meets is still missing the faculty themselves. The Civitas process can see course grades and test scores and the intensity and frequency of how students engage with their courses. But neither the analysis nor the solutions are truly centered on core acts of learning. That remains the province of professors, students, and the shrouded relationships between them.

One industry survey asked colleges what their analytic data was used for. For enrollment and financial aid, about two-thirds use data to make projections and more than a quarter expect a proactive response from the people charged with aid and admissions decisions. For “faculty teaching performance,” less than 3 percent expected a proactive response. Some professors, particularly the younger digital natives, embrace the possibilities of teaching with digital information. But it remains, as always, up to them.

This will be the future organizational battlefield of higher learning. Established colleges and universities retain many advantages: brand names, regulatory protection, public subsidies, tax preferences, credential-to-employment path dependency, sheer cultural capital. But the same tools that make innovations like the Persistence Committee possible can also be used by new organizations unburdened by old administrative traditions. The most effective colleges will empower teachers with yet-to-be-invented methods of analyzing data about how individual students learn. Teaching that way won’t be voluntary. It will be the creed and mission of colleges that live and thrive.

The post Why More Colleges Should Treat Students Like Numbers appeared first on Washington Monthly.

After graduating from her rural Pennsylvania high school in 2005, Tesla Rae Moore did what many, perhaps most American high school seniors today expect to do: she left home for college with her sights set on a four-year degree. But when she was a sophomore in nursing school at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, the unexpected intervened: she became pregnant with her son.

“It was a high-risk pregnancy, and I decided to stop the program,” she said. Moore returned to her hometown of Kane, a community of about 3,500 nestled at the edge of the Allegheny National Forest in northwestern Pennsylvania. At first just intending to take a break, she ended up dropping out. “I was going to go back, and then it was just one of those things,” she said. “Life happened.”

Moore didn’t lose her desire to return to school; she just couldn’t figure out how to make it work as the years went by and her family grew. “I’m a single mom, and the only income earner, so I couldn’t quit my job to go to school,” she said. “And if I took classes all day, I’d have to work at night, and who would take care of the kids?” Given her work and family obligations, Moore couldn’t fit in college unless she could attend classes nearby. But getting to Pitt-Bradford, the nearest four-year school, required a round-trip commute of an hour and a half. The nearest community college, in Butler County, was a two-hour drive each way. Moore didn’t have that kind of time to spare. Online-only classes might have been a solution, but Moore felt she needed more structure to succeed. “Especially for somebody that’s been out of school, it takes a lot of discipline,” she said.

A surprising number of Americans face the same problem Moore did. According to the Urban Institute, nearly one in five American adults—as many as forty-one million people—lives twenty-five miles or more from the nearest college or university, or in areas where a single community college is the only source of broad-access public higher education within that distance. Three million of the Americans in these so-called “higher education deserts” lack broadband internet, as well.

In the past, a dearth of colleges in a particular area might not have mattered as much. But as the full-time, four-year, residential experience of college becomes increasingly expensive and less attainable, and as more students must juggle work and family responsibilities, proximity to school could be the deciding factor in whether a student pursues a degree or, as in Moore’s case, finishes one. Meanwhile, online-only programs are still an imperfect substitute for in-person education. According to the Department of Education, as many as 70 percent of undergraduates in 2012 were “nontraditional” students in some way—such as by having delayed enrollment, having a job and/or children, or attending part time.

The impact goes beyond would-be students themselves. Communities that lack local universities and colleges also often lag in economic development, as they miss out on the spin-off start-up businesses and cultural amenities that institutions of higher education often create and that are increasingly necessary to attracting upscale residents and businesses. Growing up in an education desert thus not only makes it harder to attend college, but also means there are fewer opportunities for upward mobility in your hometown even if you do graduate.

Better access to higher education in rural America would help heal these inequities. It could improve rates of college going and completion among rural students, help area workers upgrade their skills, and boost local economic development by providing businesses with a pipeline for skilled talent. Rural students would also benefit by not being forced to leave home for college—not only lowering their education costs but also potentially slowing or even reversing the population declines currently plaguing rural areas.

But establishing a college or university in every rural area that needs one is a cost-prohibitive proposition. The distribution of colleges and universities is the result of politics, population growth, and historical accidents settled decades or even centuries ago. A few states, however, are pioneering a leaner, cheaper approach that relies on technology to create oases of learning in higher education deserts. Variously called “higher education centers” or “virtual colleges,” these innovative institutions provide physical infrastructure for existing colleges and universities to offer online and in-person instruction in places where no brick-and-mortar higher education institutions exist. In some areas, they also offer occupational training in line with the needs of local businesses and act as pop-up satellite campuses, community colleges, and training agencies rolled into one.

One of the regions experimenting with—and already benefiting from—this new model of higher education is rural northern Pennsylvania, where Tesla Rae Moore’s town of Kane is located. In 2014, Pennsylvania’s legislature authorized the creation of a “rural regional college” tasked with bringing greater higher education opportunities to an area encompassing 7,000 square miles over nine counties. Initially launched as the Education Consortium of Upper Allegheny, with a budget of just $1.2 million, the effort was rechristened the Northern Pennsylvania Regional College (NPRC) in 2017. (The legislature recently approved a $5 million total budget for the next three years.)

The NPRC does not feature a typical college campus. Rather than a single flagship location, the college operates six different “hubs”—physical mini campuses—scattered throughout the region, plus numerous “classrooms” using borrowed space from local high schools, public libraries, and other community buildings. The NPRC doesn’t confer its own degrees; rather, it provides the infrastructure for other accredited institutions to extend their reach through “blended” offerings combining virtual and in-person teaching.

The Pennsylvania initiative turned out to be what ultimately rescued Moore’s aspirations to finish her education. She became one of its first graduates, earning an associate’s degree in business administration from Gannon University, a private Catholic university based in Erie, Pennsylvania. Four nights a week, Moore drove to the local high school, where she joined her classes via videoconference. “We could see each other and talk to each other and had a real-time professor,” she said. She was also spared the two-hour trip to Erie, which would have been impossible for her to manage with her two young children and full-time job. The fact that she could take night classes meant she got to keep her day job and could find babysitting more easily.

Ultimately, Moore was able to jump from a job as an aide at a group home to a position in Northwest Bank’s corporate headquarters in nearby Warren. “I thought I was going to be hired as a teller in one of the branches,” she said. “Being enrolled part time got my foot in the door immediately.” For Moore, going back to school paid off. If more rural areas provided opportunities like the NPRC, it could lead to a lot more stories like Moore’s, and go a long way toward equalizing higher education access and, with it, economic opportunity in the places now being left behind.

Joseph Nairn, founding president of the NPRC, said the institution’s physical presence offers two benefits over strictly online schools. First, it provides the many students who don’t have broadband internet at home a way to get online. Second, requiring students to attend classes provides the structure many of them need to stay on track. “The model of having students come to a site and interact with teachers and students leads to better outcomes,” he said. “We are imposing discipline without requiring people to commute some ungodly distance or requiring people to pack up and move to a residential setting.”

Moore agrees. “I know some people who have graduated from online schooling, but I know a lot of people who weren’t able to finish their courses,” she said. The NPRC “offers so much more than online school does, especially for somebody that’s been out of school. I had a time that I had to be in front of my professor, and I had a time when I had to go in for my test. It was a lot more structured, like traditional education.”

Similar models have been adopted by Virginia and Maryland, which have launched rural higher education centers of their own. Like the NPRC, these centers typically partner with other institutions to offer college and community college courses and, in some cases, occupational training, either under one roof or through a network of physical and virtual sites. The Southern Virginia Higher Education Center, for instance, occupies two renovated tobacco warehouses in South Boston, Virginia. It offers classes through Longwood University and Danville Community College as well as occupational training in welding, IT, nursing, and “mechatronics,” an emerging field linked to advanced manufacturing. In Maryland, the Southern Maryland Higher Education Center offers specific courses from ten different institutions, including Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland.

For Michael Esdaile of Martinsville, Virginia, the opportunity to earn a degree was the door to stability in an area where good jobs are scarce. Originally from Connecticut, Esdaile moved to rural southern Virginia in 2008 with his wife and two children to help care for his ailing mother-in-law. Despite two years at the University of Pennsylvania and positions at several large IT companies, Esdaile didn’t have a degree. “I found myself looking for work with quite a bit of experience but no credential, which put me at a severe disadvantage,” he said. “I did security work and pretty much anything I could find.”

What turned things around for Esdaile was one of Virginia’s higher education centers, the New College Institute, through which he completed a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Virginia Commonwealth University. Like Moore, Esdaile attended a virtual classroom, teleconferencing with his classmates in Richmond, three hours away. He also attended in-person classes at New College Institute’s Martinsville facilities. After graduating in 2013, Esdaile immediately found an accounting job at the high-end furniture company Hooker Furniture, headquartered in Martinsville, where he has worked ever since.

For both Moore and Esdaile, continuing education was both affordable and convenient. The NPRC, for instance, charges students $185 per credit hour (and $60 per credit hour for “dual-enrolled” high school students who want a head start on college). “My entire two years was less than a year in the nursing program” at Pitt-Bradford, Moore said. Esdaile said his degree cost him a total of about $20,000—also less than the average sticker price for one year’s tuition, room, and board at a public university.

Another NCI attendee who lives near Martinsville, Taylor Morris, likewise cited the importance of cost savings. After two years of community college, Morris went to Longwood University, two and a half hours away, but came back home after a semester. “I could have made it away from home, but I decided it was nice to be home and be able to work,” she said. “I think if I had stayed, my debt would probably be triple.” In 2017, she finished her bachelor’s in education via NCI—from Longwood University—and accepted a job this year teaching fourth grade at a local elementary school.

Forest County school superintendent Amanda Hetrick, who is also an NPRC trustee, said that in her part of Pennsylvania (one county over from where Moore lives), as many as half or more of the students who leave for college come back home without a degree. “But they still all have the debt. They end up with two or three part-time jobs—at the gas station, the Subway, the hardware store. They piece together a living, but there are very few options,” she said. If they’re lucky, she said, they’re able to snag a job at the state prison in Marienville, one of the region’s biggest employers.

Hetrick hopes new institutions like the NPRC can help her former students build on the college experience they do have. “They have bits and pieces,” she said. “If we can get those bits and pieces together, we can get them to an industry credential or an associate’s degree.”

Better local access to higher education could also improve the chances of her current students succeeding in college, Hetrick said, by enabling kids to enroll in college courses while still in high school. One reason so many rural students drop out of college, she said, is that they are unprepared for the course work and the environment. “With dual enrollment, we’re exposing them to college-level work,” said Hetrick. “A lot of my kids are first-generation college-goers. They don’t know the language. When somebody says ‘Go see the registrar,’ they don’t know what that means.”

A final benefit of expanding rural higher education, in addition to improving individuals’ opportunities for advancement, is its potential to boost local economic development. In southern and western Virginia, for instance, the state’s higher education centers are helping to rebuild a region hollowed out by the loss of manufacturing and tobacco.

From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, Halifax County, Virginia, saw multiple nearby factories shut down: textile maker J. P. Stevens closed its South Boston plant in 2000, and two years later the candy company Russell Stover and another textile manufacturer, Burlington Industries, followed suit. Meanwhile, the region’s once-prosperous tobacco farmers found themselves in losing fights against both China’s burgeoning tobacco industry and the U.S. government’s efforts to reduce smoking. Over just a four-year period, estimated current town manager Tom Raab, South Boston “probably lost $50 million in payroll out of the community” and another $50 million in lost tobacco sales.

As the region struggled to reinvent itself, it was handicapped by the lack of nearby colleges and universities that could lend intellectual capital, train workers in new skills, and help local business and community leaders plan new economic development. The region’s five higher education centers, however, are at least partly filling that void. Chief among these institutions is the Southern Virginia Higher Education Center (SVHEC) in South Boston, which started life in a 500-square-foot trailer in 1986 but now occupies 100,000 gleaming square feet of renovated space in its two repurposed tobacco warehouses. In addition to traditional classrooms, SVHEC offers hands-on lab space for its welding, IT, and mechatronics students. Its nurse training facilities include several mock patient rooms complete with mannequins for practicing procedures such as giving injections and taking vital signs. Recently, SVHEC also opened an “innovation center” to provide manufacturing and consulting services to local businesses. Earlier this spring, the lab was developing prototypes of recyclable wine barrels for Virginia wineries.

Executive director Betty Adams said the center tries to tailor its course offerings to the needs of local businesses, and to help attract new industries. “We can be more innovative than a traditional institution of higher education, which means we can respond more quickly,” she said. “We’ve had industries come to us and say, ‘We can’t find the trained workers we need. We need you to help us.’ ” In 2017, Adams said, the center placed 173 students into new jobs.

Many of the center’s students, Adams said, are those for whom traditional schooling didn’t pan out. “We get people in here who’ve never had success before, but they get a credential and it helps them get a job or a better job and then they start thinking, ‘Wow, I want to come back and get another credential,’ and it builds on itself. That’s educational empowerment.” Adams and others caution that institutions like hers are by no means a panacea for rural students. So far, these institutions provide a limited array of courses and can’t substitute for the comprehensive offerings of a full-fledged college or university. And despite lower costs, affordability is still an issue for many students. The hybrid structure also means fewer support services for students who struggle.

Nevertheless, Northern Pennsylvania Regional College’s Joseph Nairn argues that by bringing opportunities for higher education where none had existed before, the model he is pioneering could be a boon to other rural areas around the country. “There’s a lot of pent-up demand for this kind of education,” he said. “We’re not going to build a gym or a swimming pool. But if you want to get a good education and continue to work your job or stay in your community or take care of your kids, we can provide you with that opportunity. We represent the kind of radical innovation that higher education needs right now.”

The post An Innovative Fix for Rural Higher Education Deserts appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On December 12, 2017, a long line of lobbyists, advocates, and reporters began to form outside a stately hearing room in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C. Inside, Representative Virginia Foxx, a Republican from North Carolina, was preparing to launch one of the most important acts of her tenure as chair of the House’s education committee: a comprehensive rewrite of the law governing the American system of higher education, the Higher Education Act (HEA). A former community college president herself, Foxx had ideas about how to guide the nation’s sprawling collection of colleges and universities and the enormous federal student aid system that keeps them afloat. Now, for the first time, she was going to fully reveal her plan to the nation: H.R. 4508, the Promoting Real Opportunity, Success, and Prosperity Through Education Reform (PROSPER) Act.

It had been nearly a decade since the HEA was last reauthorized. In that time, American higher education had witnessed an economic crisis that devastated state funding for higher learning. Student debt skyrocketed, the for-profit higher education industry cycled through scandal and collapse, and small liberal arts colleges began disappearing from the map. At the same time, a relentlessly competitive labor market was making advanced skills and credentials more essential than ever before.

But in recent years, a comprehensive rewrite that would respond to these changes had taken a back seat to a crowded legislative agenda and tumultuous politics in Congress. The Senate had yet to produce its own proposal this term, and that created an opening for Foxx to plant her legislative flag first, setting the agenda for everything that followed.

Foxx began the committee meeting by invoking the idea of “lifelong learning” as the “root of all innovation,” which, she said, is needed for prosperity and to fill six million jobs that American employers can’t fill at the wages they’d like to pay. She then blasted colleges for continually hiking tuition. “Today, Americans carry more than $1 trillion in student debt,” Foxx said. “College costs continue to surge, leaving millions of families to pay the price for well-intentioned but poorly executed federal involvement.” The HEA didn’t just need to be reauthorized, she said. It needed to be reformed.

Sitting next to Foxx was her Democratic counterpart, Robert “Bobby” Scott, whose district contains Hampton and Old Dominion Universities, among others, and who was the first African American U.S. representative elected from Virginia since Reconstruction. Himself a graduate of two of the nation’s finest colleges—he received his bachelor’s from Harvard and his law degree from Boston College—Scott was mindful of the HEA’s origins as a pillar of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. “The promise of the HEA has eroded, and for far too many of our students, access to economic opportunity provided through higher education is now out of reach,” he warned.

As other committee members offered testimony, the battle lines became clear. Foxx and the Republicans wanted to deregulate the industry, reduce or eliminate federal subsidies, promote private-sector competition, and make higher education more responsive to the needs of business. Right-wing media stories portraying today’s college students as coddled and entitled and college administrators as leftist enemies of free speech added to Republicans’ sense that the system was badly in need of reform. But as skeptics of any kind of federal intervention, they were trying to figure out how to upend the higher education system without actually passing a law that would require states and colleges to take real action.

Democrats, by contrast, called for a renewed crackdown on predatory for-profit schools. With respect to traditional public and private nonprofit colleges, they were more sanguine, mostly focusing instead on expanding federal financial aid programs to make those schools less expensive. They, too, were reluctant to pursue strong new federal policies aimed at holding accountable those colleges with low graduation rates and low rates of student loan repayment.

Despite their ever-widening differences, Republican and Democratic lawmakers have something in common: both parties are beholden to the colleges and universities that provide jobs, economic development, and social capital in their home states and districts. Many members of Congress are proud alumni of their state universities and give great deference to college presidents who lobby against regulation. The higher education lobby is a formidable force for preserving the status quo.

The movement to reform higher education is also facing a headwind in the form of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and the Trump administration, who have launched an aggressive deregulatory agenda, effectively giving away the store to for-profit colleges while starving the U.S. Department of Education of the staff and resources it needs to monitor a system that serves twenty million college students every year. DeVos’s desultory enforcement of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which President Barack Obama signed into law in 2015, has already become one of the biggest barriers to moving HEA forward. As the HEA is to higher education, ESSA is to K–12 education, and it represents one of the last major bipartisan compromises on a comprehensive piece of education legislation. So Democrats point to the Department of Education’s mishandling of ESSA implementation as a reason their Republican opponents can’t be trusted to negotiate a deal on higher education.

With virtually no House Democrats willing to support her legislation, Foxx has to rely on Republicans to get to the needed 218 votes. All indications are that the votes aren’t there, so the bill has yet to be brought to the floor. Things are even worse in the Senate, where Foxx’s counterpart, Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee and the powerful chairman of the Senate’s education committee, has held three hearings on reauthorization but produced no bill. Over the summer, he effectively threw in the towel, announcing that the Senate would not take up the reauthorization of the HEA this year, given political differences within the chamber.

As the November midterm elections draw near, the chances of passing an HEA reauthorization approach zero. But even if there will be no vote this year, the fight over HEA reauthorization so far has clarified the issues and battle lines that we are likely to see next year when a new Congress, with possible new leadership in one or both houses, takes up the challenge. So what follows are the highlights of the fight so far, and a road map for what’s still to come.

Don’t Count Accountability Out

For decades, Washington offered U.S. colleges and universities a sweet deal. In return for about $150 billion a year in federal subsidies, institutions have been asked to meet only the lowest of bars. Washington does not require them to, say, boost graduation rates or recruit more lower-income students or even prove that their students are learning anything. The money just flows out, with virtually no accountability for results.

That began to change a bit under Obama. While his administration fell short of its proposal to create a federal ranking system for college performance and ask lawmakers to tie federal funding to it, it did push through a number of tough regulatory changes. These include a “gainful employment” rule to cut off federal aid access for low-value certificate and for-profit programs, a “state authorization” rule that requires colleges to meet any state requirements to offer online courses, and a rule designed to provide relief for borrowers who were defrauded by their (overwhelmingly for-profit) schools and hold the colleges accountable.

Betsy DeVos is already well on her way to eliminating all three rules via executive action. The PROSPER Act would do the same, but go further, wiping away the authority of DeVos’s successors to regulate on these—and most other—issues, ever again.

On the other side of the Hill, Senate Republicans have argued against Obama-era regulations as unfairly targeting for-profit colleges, and have instead been more interested recently in the notion of “risk sharing” applied to all colleges. When students who borrow leave a school, they carry their debt with them, and taxpayers have a clear interest in seeing that money returned, on time and in full. Yet when millions of students each year fail to repay their loans, colleges bear none of the risk; they got paid up front. Under most risk-sharing proposals, including the one Alexander offered up in a white paper, the department would fine a college for a portion of the expected-but-unpaid amount of students’ loan balances.

At least in theory, a risk-sharing proposal holds great appeal. It could help reclaim some of the taxpayer dollars lost to delinquent and defaulted student loans, and gives colleges an incentive to minimize debt and maximize students’ completion of valuable credentials. But nailing down the details is no small task, and risks the ire of the higher education lobby, bringing political peril to lawmakers in both parties. Foxx’s bill and the House Democrats’ alternative, the Aim Higher Act, both prove the challenge: the former makes modest changes to an existing policy and calls it risk sharing; the latter is filled with expensive, popular-with-the-base ideas like free community college and refinancing of student loan interest rates, but light on ideas to hold colleges and universities accountable for results.

New policies around risk sharing, stricter standards for the current default rate measure, and the removal from the federal financial aid system of colleges that leave graduates with unaffordable amounts of debt could all force colleges to take the need for reform seriously. But past efforts to increase the regulation of colleges to ensure that taxpayer dollars are invested in better programs have taken a combination of educational crisis and political courage. Today, that commitment to countering the will of the higher education lobby appears to be lacking on Capitol Hill.

FAFSA: The Long and Short of It

If there’s one area of cross-party agreement in higher education, it’s this: the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, is too long. It’s the oft-maligned form all students seeking federal student aid must fill out, requiring applicants to complete dozens of questions about their and their families’ financial circumstances. For many, that alone can prove an insurmountable barrier. According to one counseling organization, nearly half of low-income high school seniors may not complete a FAFSA at all.

But while there’s universal and bipartisan agreement that the FAFSA is too long, agreement on how—and how much—to shorten it has been elusive. Foxx’s FAFSA simplification proposal is pretty minimal: optimizing the FAFSA for mobile phones, so applicants can fill out the form without access to a computer.

Lamar Alexander has a more radical vision. While most applicants complete the FAFSA online—where some questions can be skipped based on previous answers, and tax information can be directly imported from tax returns—Senator Alexander can’t resist the prop of dropping a paper copy of the FAFSA to the floor to showcase its sheer length. A proposal he authored with Democratic Senator Michael Bennet a few years back would have put the FAFSA on a postcard, dropping it to just two questions: family size and family income. Other Democrats have proposed eliminating a smaller set of questions that would be unlikely to change most students’ aid awards—like questions about families’ assets, such as savings accounts and investment properties—and automatically granting more students the maximum eligible aid.

While a mobile app has its benefits, the next HEA reauthorization should change not just how families fill out the form, but the very form itself. The questions on the form are part of a federal formula for determining who gets what aid, and how much. Drastically shrinking the form or removing questions not only limits the ability to make sometimes-meaningful distinctions between the wealth and income of different households, it also impacts what aid families qualify for. Moreover, if the FAFSA provides too little information, colleges or states that rely on the form may be motivated to create and use their own, separate applications—ones that might not be offered for free—making the process less simple, on balance. A middle ground, like the one charted in a budget proposal by President Obama, would eliminate some questions related to families’ assets that are hard to complete and have little effect on most students’ aid eligibility, and align the form with information collected through our taxes.

An Act of Transparency

For decades, American car buyers have been able to go to auto dealers and read a sticker affixed to vehicle windows with key disclosures mandated by the federal government. This information includes the manufacturer’s suggested retail price for the car, as well as performance metrics like miles per gallon, vehicle emissions, and safety ratings. In 2006, a commission headed by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings concluded that the federal government should provide higher education shoppers with equivalent information for colleges and universities. The metrics, such as the median income of graduates from specific universities and programs, would be derived by connecting data on individual student outcomes that the federal government has in its own databases. This would mean not only better information for prospective college students, but also less paperwork for colleges and universities in the long term.

It would be a win for everybody—except for those institutions that would wind up looking below average on the metrics, especially expensive, smaller nonprofit colleges and universities. The trade association representing these institutions argued that the Spellings plan would be a violation of students’ privacy and in 2008 persuaded Congress to ban any administration from creating such a system. The lawmaker who led the efforts to impose the ban in the House was none other than Virginia Foxx.

The Obama administration in its final years disclosed, for the first time, information on outcomes such as the typical earnings of students who graduate from a particular college or university—but only for federal grant and loan recipients, excluding a sizable portion of the student population. While that was a helpful advance, the specific information that would most help students, like earnings for graduates of particular programs at those colleges, can only be derived by lifting the congressional ban.

Last year, a bill to do just that, the College Transparency Act, was introduced in both chambers. It quickly gained steam: a dozen senators evenly split across the parties signed on to the bill in the Senate, along with more than thirty Republicans and Democrats in the House. Foxx made sure that the legislation never became part of her PROSPER Act, but she had to muscle Republican members of her committee to do so. While the Senate has not acted on its version either, support for the measure keeps growing, with new cosponsors from both ends of the political spectrum jumping on board. Whether there’s an HEA reauthorization now or later—with Foxx running the show in the House or not—inclusion of the College Transparency Act has started to feel more likely even amid the uncertainty on other issues.

Student Loans: Keep It Simple

Choice in the marketplace is generally considered a good thing, and there is certainly a lot of it in the federal student market. Currently, the Department of Education offers low- and middle-income students subsidized loans that don’t carry interest until after the student leaves school, and unsubsidized loans that accrue interest from day one and are available to all comers who ask for them. It also offers loans to graduate students, and loans to parents of students working toward an undergraduate degree or certificate.

But too much choice can also present problems. When deciding on student loans, many prospective students and their parents struggle to understand—or even identify—the terms and benefits of each individual stream of federal dollars. Some of those loans carry relatively high interest rates and can present big risks; graduate loans are limited only by total tuition and living costs. And rather than provide the lowest-income parents of undergraduates with sufficient grant aid for their children, the federal government deems them eligible for significant amounts of federal loans they’ll likely never be able to repay.

Republicans say they want to streamline federal loans into one program, with one type of loan each for undergraduates, graduate students, and parents. But while it would be a positive step to limit the burden on students and families to understand these complex financial products before they ever step foot on a college campus, it could be a net negative if those simplifications make college less affordable. Republican lawmakers have brought their simplification agenda to the forefront, obscuring the party’s other agenda: to reduce the amount of federal spending on higher education. For instance, Foxx’s HEA bill would consolidate all of the grants for low-income students, but without pooling the money to increase the grant proportionately. Cutting need-based grants from two programs to one means less scholarship funding to go around. And as proposed by both Foxx and Alexander, one loan to undergraduates means an end to the in-school interest benefit currently offered to low- and middle-income borrowers.

All told, less federal money to help students go to college could mean that some students never enter college, that others can’t afford to finish, or even that some take out risky private loans that carry few of the protections of federal loans—like the guarantee that if a borrower dies before repaying the loans, that debt will be wiped away. Democrats don’t plan to let these dollars go without a fight, though. Patty Murray of Washington State, the ranking Democrat on the Senate education committee, warned in a hearing earlier this year that “simplification cannot mean elimination of aid—especially as college costs continue to rise.”

Repaying loans is also complicated. Currently, there are nine repayment options available to students, each carrying different terms, repayment options, and disadvantages and advantages for borrowers. Having so many choices puts borrowers at risk of ending up in a suboptimal plan. For instance, borrowers are automatically dumped into the shortest repayment plan, a ten-year standard schedule that does little to recognize the long-term nature of payoffs associated with higher education and likely contributes to the one million borrowers a year who default on their loans.

Many advocates and researchers have instead made the case that one of those choices, income-driven repayment (IDR) plans, could help solve problems of delinquency and default. Under IDR, monthly loan repayments can’t exceed a fixed percentage of a borrower’s income—as low as $0 a month during unemployment—and if after twenty or twenty-five years that borrower’s earnings have been too low to fully pay off the loan, the balance owed is forgiven. But many students encounter logistical problems with IDR and fail to enroll or reenroll. Some have suggested making IDR the default—or even the only—repayment plan, with the federal government automatically calculating payments, much as it deducts taxes from paychecks. That could mean less confusion and a clearer path to affordable payments, which would be a welcome change for the low-earning borrowers most at risk of winding up in default on their loans. But it also means fewer options for the millions of borrowers enrolled in one of the department’s other plans, who may prefer greater certainty in their expected repayment; and it’s an expensive proposal when lower monthly payments and big loan forgiveness amounts are accounted for. Simpler isn’t always better for every borrower.

Asking for Forgiveness

In 2007, Congress created the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) Program, which forgives any loan balances left after ten years of payments made through IDR for individuals who are working in the government or at a nonprofit. While the first handful of borrowers have only just received forgiveness, the unclear wording of the statute and subsequent regulations have left out to dry many borrowers who thought they would be eligible, like public service workers not in nonprofit organizations or public servants who enrolled in a repayment plan other than IDR. In recognition of the confusion, Congress this year funded a limited-time-only program for students who thought they would get loan forgiveness for their public service but learned too late that they’d been in the wrong repayment plan.

Republican education leaders want to eliminate public service loan forgiveness and included a repeal in Foxx’s proposed bill, arguing that it is costly and disproportionately benefits well-paid and high-debt borrowers like government lawyers. But during the House’s markup, a Democratic congressman argued that the loan forgiveness program should be expanded, not eliminated, to cover farmers like the ones in his district. A vote on that amendment found two Republican defectors on the committee to join all seventeen Democrats. And signs suggest that this is one of the largest areas of concern among veterans’ and servicemembers’ groups, with even the Trump administration’s Department of Defense writing to Congress that the program is a key recruitment tool that shouldn’t be eliminated.

With tensions running high over the future of the program, it’s clear that its elimination will be next to impossible—and that the public believes strongly in the mission of PSLF. Instead, lawmakers should focus on making the program implementable: limiting eligibility to clear-cut cases of public service jobs like teaching and government work, capping forgiveness benefits to ensure that taxpayers are protected, and improving outreach and applications to help more of the eligible borrowers who are less likely to know about the program access those benefits.

Get to Work

Within both parties there is widespread recognition that more needs to be done to help Americans who aren’t aiming for four-year degrees but who do need some kind of postsecondary credential to make it in the modern economy. Many colleges would like to make these credentials even quicker to earn, by offering shorter programs that students can complete in as few as eight weeks, which currently aren’t eligible for federal student aid. To that end, House and Senate Democrats have proposed that Pell Grants should be expanded to those very short-term programs. House Republicans went even further, proposing to permit short-term programs access to federal loans as well as grants. The idea is aggressively supported by everyone from the community colleges that currently offer non-credit-bearing short-term programs to the Chamber of Commerce.

But few have grappled with the fact that opening the federal spigot to short-term programs will likely lead to billions of dollars being spent on slickly marketed, low-quality programs, especially by for-profits, that are of questionable value in the workplace. The Democratic proposal would add data reporting requirements, but do little to guarantee a reasonable return on investment for the new programs. The Republican proposal would be even more costly, and do even less to protect students’ and taxpayers’ investments.

One of the most radical innovations included in Foxx’s bill is an idea that actually came from the Obama administration. In 2015, the Department of Education announced an experiment known as EQUIP, which allowed a small group of colleges to outsource more than half of their programs to nonaccredited, unofficial educational providers like pricey high-tech coding boot camps that offer little financial aid and thus serve often as finishing schools for bachelor’s-degree graduates looking for a hard skill set to boost their earnings in the white-hot market for technical expertise. The experiment was led by then Under Secretary of Education Ted Mitchell, who described that the institutions participating in the experiment would be the “bankers” for the program. Since leaving the department, Mitchell has become the president of the lobbying association for colleges and universities.

But what was a small-scale experiment in which only eight institutions were invited to participate—one that is still barely off the ground, with only a single college approved to disburse federal aid—apparently holds great appeal for Foxx’s office. PROSPER proposes to codify the experiment in law outright, creating an obvious blind spot in federal oversight: unqualified providers could offer a college education, without all the rigmarole of actually being a college. Aside from a perfunctory review of the contract between the institution and the provider, no independent accreditation would be required to verify the quality of the curriculum or the credentials of the faculty; nor would there be any assessment of the program’s financial viability to ensure that taxpayers wouldn’t be on the hook to discharge students’ loans if the program shuttered abruptly, as several have in recent years.

As lawmakers approach the HEA reauthorization process anew in the next Congress, they must meet the significant risk these types of nontraditional programs present with hard and fast requirements that they either prove their worth to students or be denied access to taxpayer dollars altogether. Student debt presents a problem for students who don’t graduate, or who complete with low-value credentials that don’t let them earn enough to repay their debt—and a problem for the taxpayers who finance those loans, as well. Those problems will only be heightened as colleges struggling from enrollment declines find new ways to benefit from the gold rush for new types of credentials granted access to federal dollars.

A Competent CBE Proposal

Another reform that has broad support in general but sparks disagreement over the particulars is so-called competency-based education (CBE). The idea of CBE is that instead of having to sit through classes for a set amount of time—which is how most college programs work—students can move at their own pace, often in online classes, and advance by showing mastery of specific knowledge and skills (“competencies”) on exams designed by subject-matter experts. They may also get credit for skills learned on the job by taking exams and building portfolios of their prior work that are judged by outside experts.

CBE is a rapidly growing field, with more than 600 programs in operation or being developed today. And it’s an attractive concept next to traditional education, in which a passing grade doesn’t necessarily mean that students have truly learned the skills. To qualify for federal student aid, however, the programs must convert their structure to the time-based model through which Congress awards federal aid, and members of both parties want to change that.

But CBE programs are not without risk: to taxpayers, because of the subjectiveness with which “competencies” are measured and then paid for, and to students, who may struggle with a format that leaves schedules loose and lets students languish longer in the program, accruing more debt along the way. A key question for lawmakers is how to adapt the existing federal aid system to accommodate and pay for these programs, without further damaging the higher education system. Today, most CBE programs convert their competencies to an estimation of credit hours, what one witness in a Senate hearing called the “currency of the U.S. higher education system,” to ensure that they’re financed comparably to traditional programs. Foxx would take an aggressive—some would say reckless—approach, making all CBE programs fully eligible for aid outside of the credit-hour system.

A separate, bipartisan House bill would take a more thoughtful approach by allowing the department to pilot CBE programs with a few select schools before providing all such programs with access to taxpayer dollars outside of the current system. A CBE pilot could help avoid some of the hazards that come with letting colleges set their own standards for what amount of learning the federal government should pay full price for. But in last month’s committee meeting on the House side, a vote to include the pilot was rejected by Republicans, setting the stage for future fights about how quickly, not whether, to expand financial aid access to these programs.

With the summer recess now here, passage of an HEA reauthorization looks near impossible, and this iteration of the PROSPER Act is destined to become a casualty of the legislative process. Moreover, internal politics, fights over who will become the next speaker of the House, and an inability to address immigration and the humanitarian disaster involving children and families at the border have placed higher education on a back burner. Still, the partisan battles that happen here will repeat themselves in the next go-around, and the thoughts and ideas contained in this bill will set the stage for future conversations around HEA reauthorization.

The post Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Higher Education Policy appeared first on Washington Monthly.

College students invite stereotyping. According to Hollywood, they spend most of their time at raucous frat parties. In the mind of conservative media, they’re entitled snowflakes who demand safe spaces and cultural Marxism. Judging by the attention paid by mainstream or liberal journalists, meanwhile, you might think that most college students attend Harvard, Yale, or Stanford.

What all these clichés about college kids have in common is that they’re about, well, kids. Yet the truth is that a full 30 percent of undergraduates are adults, defined by the government as twenty-five years old and older. These adult learners are too often ignored by university leaders and policymakers, whose own college experience was typically the traditional full-time, straight-out-of-high-school kind.

That’s why, in 2016, the Washington Monthly became the first publication to rank colleges according to how well they cater to adult learners. We took data from two federal government sources, as well as the College Board’s Annual Survey of Colleges, and combined them into seven measures of colleges’ openness and responsiveness to adult students and of how well those students fare once they leave. Click here for our rankings of four-year colleges, and here for two-year; click here for a detailed methodology.

Adult students tend to attend college part time, since they have to balance school with earning a living and, often, raising a family. That means they have different needs: flexible course schedules with plenty of weekend and evening offerings; adult-focused support like on-campus daycare; and the ability to easily transfer or apply previous course work.

When you take these needs into account, the ranking of which schools are “best” starts to look very different from what you find in U.S. News & World Report and other magazines. Elite private colleges are hard to find, and only a few selective state schools—notably the Universities of Utah and Iowa, and Virginia’s George Mason University—make our top 100 four-year school list.

Our rankings are instead dominated by little-known regional public and private nonprofit institutions. Golden Gate University, where 89 percent of students are adults, retains its perch atop the four-year college list. For-profit schools fare poorly, despite the fact that they enroll large numbers of adults. The problem is that they tend to charge too much without delivering the increased future salaries that most adult students are looking for.

This year, for the first time, we had access to federal data on graduation rates for part-time students—which includes the vast majority of adult learners—as well as full-time ones. The addition of that data point explains why two Ivy League schools—Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania—made the top twenty despite not even cracking the top hundred last year. The grad rates for part-timers at those schools—100 percent at Cornell, 90 percent at Penn—blow every other institution on our list out of the water. So do the mean earnings for students ten years after enrollment.

In other words, these schools are a great deal for adults who get in. The problem is that very few do. At Cornell, students twenty-five and older make up only 1 percent of the student body; Penn fares just a little better, with 8 percent. Just imagine how much better the adult learner population would be served if elite institutions like these opened their doors to more of them.

The post America’s Best Colleges for Adult Learners appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Unlike most traditional college rankings, the Washington Monthly’s have always made colleges’ contribution to social mobility a priority. We started our annual Best Bang for the Buck rankings back in 2012 using little more than graduation rates for first-time, full-time students, the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants, and the typical price that moderate-income families pay for college after grant aid. Thankfully, more data on social mobility has become available over the last few years as policymakers have placed more of a focus on social mobility. In spite of its stated intention to downsize the U.S. Department of Education (or even merge it with the Department of Labor), the Trump administration has so far continued to provide data on loan repayment rates, earnings, and the percentage of first-generation students, data that was first made available back in 2015 by the Obama administration.

We have long advocated in these pages for better graduation rate data, and this year the Department of Education introduced two new sets of statistics that show a clearer picture of social mobility. Graduation rates are now available for all students—not just first-time, full-time students, who make up an ever-smaller share of college students—as well as separate graduation rate data for Pell Grant recipients. We are pleased to incorporate this data into the 2018 Best Bang for the Buck rankings, which are broken down by region. (We used the same data and methodology to create the social mobility portion of the main rankings; the methodology is explained here.)

The Best Bang for the Buck colleges across each of the five regions are a mix of some of America’s most elite institutions and hidden gems that make up for a lack of name recognition with strong student outcomes and a commitment to social mobility. In the Northeast, the public Massachusetts Maritime Academy (with a low net price, and average annual earnings of around $80,000 ten years after starting college) noses out Harvard and Princeton, while landlubbers may wish to consider fourth-ranked Rutgers-Camden. Berea College and College of the Ozarks, which both primarily serve students from modest financial backgrounds at low prices, maintain their top rankings in the South and Midwest regions, respectively.

Georgia’s Augusta University (where 43 percent of students receive Pell Grants) is number 2 in the Southeast and a great option for students who want more socioeconomic diversity than number 1, Washington and Lee (10 percent Pell), and number 3, Georgetown (13 percent Pell). Finally, two California State University campuses (Stanislaus and Bakersfield) are best in the West. That’s in large part because their Pell and non-Pell students graduate at the same rate, and because nearly 60 percent of their students are the first in their family to attend college. Cal State deserves additional credit for placing twelve of its campuses in the top thirty in the West region, showing a commitment to social mobility within both the system and the state.

As usual, the bottom of the rankings features not just middling public universities and for-profit institutions, but also a striking number of private nonprofit colleges with strong national reputations that are not living up to the hype for middle-class students. Baylor, Catholic, Chapman, Hofstra, and Tulane are all well-known, relatively prestigious universities. They also serve few Pell recipients and first-generation students, charge students high net prices, and graduate Pell recipients at lower rates than other students. The website for High Point University, ranked fourth from the bottom in the Southeast, proudly features a “campus concierge” that provides free iPad rentals, among other offerings. The recreational facilities include—just to scratch the surface—three sand volleyball courts, five heated pools, and four fourteen-person jacuzzi hot tubs. (There is also an indoor, apparently unheated, pool, and another hot tub, of unspecified capacity.) Yet with an annual net price of $33,433 and median post-college earnings of $38,176, we can think of some better uses of students’ and parents’ money.

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When Benjamin Franklin founded the Academy and College of Philadelphia—later renamed the University of Pennsylvania—his aim was not just to provide promising students with useful educations. It was also, in the words of the school’s charter, to impress upon the “tender minds” of its students “the several dutys they owe to the Society in which they live” and to “render them serviceable in the several Publick Stations to which they may be called.”

Similar language about civic responsibility is embedded in the founding documents of Princeton, Brown, and hundreds of other colleges that were created across America during and after the time of the Revolution. It can also be found in the establishing papers of the great land-grant universities created in the wake of the Civil War. That includes the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College—today’s Ohio State University—whose trustees wrote in 1873 that the new school’s mission was to educate students not only as “farmers or mechanics, but as men, fitted by education and attainments for the greater usefulness and higher duties of citizenship.”

The federal government endorsed that civic ideal in 1946, when a commission formed by President Harry Truman recommended that civics be embedded throughout all college curricula and concluded that “[w]ithout an educated citizenry alert to preserve and extend freedom, it would not long endure.” In 1971, eager to give protesting college students a bigger stake in the political system, Congress and the states ratified the Twenty-sixth Amendment, which lowered the voter age from twenty-one to eighteen. And in 1998, Congress reaffirmed colleges’ civic mission yet again by mandating that universities distribute voter registration forms to all students.

Despite these lofty intentions, however, Washington has never put much muscle behind its demand that the American higher education system live up to its civic duties—and, not surprisingly, the system mostly has not. Only 17 percent of colleges and universities have complied with the voting registration requirements of the 1998 law—at least as of 2004, the last time anyone bothered to check. A current House bill would eliminate those requirements altogether. Meanwhile, several GOP-controlled states over the last decade—most recently New Hampshire this summer—have passed laws making it harder for college students to cast ballots. (Under a Texas law passed in 2013, student IDs can’t be used for voting purposes—but gun permits can.) The predictable result of this indifference, indeed hostility, to student voting is that fewer students vote. The 2014 midterms saw the lowest rate of turnout among eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds ever recorded.

The press shares some responsibility. None of the major publications that rank colleges and universities use any kind of civic engagement data in their metrics—with one exception. Since 2005, the Washington Monthly rankings have factored in the degree to which colleges and universities encourage their students to give back to their country and communities, such as by providing matching funds for AmeriCorps or offering community service opportunities to work-study students.

Perhaps the ultimate test of whether institutions are living up to their civic mission would be the voting rates of their students. Unfortunately, those numbers aren’t publicly available. But this year, for the first time, we’ve included the next best thing in our main college rankings: four measures of a college’s commitment to encouraging voting by its students. An institution receives one point in the “service” portion of our rankings if it has signed up for or participated in Tufts University’s National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE). This program helps colleges calculate their precise student voting and registration rates by combining national voting records with enrollment data. A college receives a second point if it has signed up for the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, an effort that uses NSLVE data to help colleges create plans to boost their students’ voting rates and civic participation. An ALL IN school gets another point for releasing its NSLVE data publicly, and a fourth point for making its ALL IN action plan public.

It’s a motley group of institutions—ranging from Ivies like Harvard and Brown to lesser-known publics like Kennesaw State University. Still, there is a pattern. More than three-quarters of the top schools are public universities, even though private nonprofit schools make up the bulk of the rankings overall. That’s a clear sign that these colleges are more in tune with their democratic missions.

Equally telling are the colleges and universities that didn’t come close to making the list. MIT and Caltech—schools that sit atop the U.S. News & World Report rankings—earned the lowest possible score (zero) on our civic engagement metrics. Other prestige institutions scored a lowly one point, including, Princeton, Georgetown, Columbia and UC Berkeley. NSLVE and the ALL IN Democracy Challenge reached out to all of these schools. Perhaps they had other priorities.

It doesn’t take much for a university to have a profound effect on the civic engagement of its students. Since voting habits tend to crystallize in young adulthood—vote in one election, and you’re far more likely to do so again—colleges and universities have an unparalleled opportunity to create voters not just for the next election, but for life. The colleges that invest in student voting aren’t just helping their Washington Monthly rankings—they’re helping the country.

Due to a data categorization error, the original version of this story listed 21 colleges that did not have perfect 4-out-of-4 scores. Those colleges have been removed from the list. We regret the error. 

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In June, as the Supreme Court term was nearing completion, voting rights activists and election lawyers were holding their breath, waiting for a decision in Gill v. Whitford, a Wisconsin case challenging the constitutionality of partisan gerrymandering. The plaintiffs argued that, in the 2011 redistricting, Republicans had effectively locked Democrats out of the political process in the state by making it almost impossible for them to translate popular vote victories into majority representation. In 2012, they pointed out, Democrats won more than 50 percent of the popular vote, but only managed to secure 39 percent of the seats in the state assembly. Two years later, the Republicans won 52 percent of the vote and nearly 63 percent of the state legislative seats. And in 2016, with the same share of the popular vote, they captured sixty-four of ninety-nine state assembly seats. Republicans did this, as they have in states across the country, by using sophisticated software to alternately “pack” and “crack” Democratic voters—sticking as many into already Democratic-leaning districts as possible, to waste their votes, while spreading the rest into safe Republican districts, to prevent them from forming a majority—with surgical precision.

Aggrieved Wisconsin Democrats sued to overturn the state election maps, arguing that the partisan gerrymandering violated both their Fourteenth Amendment rights to equal protection, by diluting the power of their votes compared with Republicans, and their First Amendment rights, by targeting them on the basis of their political affiliation. In November 2016, a federal court agreed. The state appealed, and the Supreme Court later agreed to hear the case, leaving Democrats hopeful that the Court might finally put a stop to the nationwide Republican effort to use gerrymandering to lock itself in power. Former Attorney General Eric Holder cheered the Court’s decision to take up the case. The justices, he said, “will have a chance to rein in an aggressive new breed of data-driven gerrymandering that divides communities and diminishes the voice of many Americans.” Most of that hope rested on a single justice: Anthony Kennedy, who in a 2004 opinion had suggested that he was open to the idea that partisan gerrymandering was unconstitutional. He all but invited the Gill case. But in June, instead of striking down the GOP maps in Wisconsin, a tired Kennedy punted, along with the rest of the Court, and sent the case back to the lower court for further deliberations on whether the plaintiffs even had standing to sue in the first place. Nine days later, he announced his retirement.

Gill may come back to the Court as soon as next year. That means Kennedy’s retirement puts partisan gerrymandering into the hands of his replacement—who, as of this writing, is all but certain to be D.C. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh. While Kavanaugh clerked for Kennedy, he has said his real hero is the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, a noted foe of the Voting Rights Act who spent his early years as a lawyer in the 1960s assisting with a Republican poll-watching program accused of harassing and trying to turn away black voters. In 2011, Kavanaugh endorsed the modern version of that program, upholding a South Carolina law requiring a government-issued ID for voting, even though the Obama administration had found that it violated the Voting Rights Act because it could disenfranchise tens of thousands of minority voters.

Kennedy may not have been a voting rights champion, but he occasionally threw in with the liberals to strike down racial gerrymandering schemes. His unpredictable voting patterns also likely prevented conservatives from bringing the most extreme cases to the Court out of fear of a bad ruling from Kennedy. But after his retirement, the future for voting rights doesn’t look bright. So Carol Anderson’s new book, One Person, No Vote, is well timed.

Anderson is a professor at Emory University and the author of White Rage, a book that framed events like the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, not as evidence of black rage, but as the result of a white backlash to the strides made by African Americans, not least of which was the election of Barack Obama. Similarly, One Person, No Vote provides a historical context for recent attacks on voting rights and frames voter suppression as a white revolt against minority progress in democratic participation.

In a slim volume, Anderson details the outrages of Republican efforts to target largely minority voters and to limit their influence in elections. She explores the way Republican state officials have closed polling stations and curtailed early voting in minority neighborhoods and created strict voter ID laws designed to deter voting under the pretense of fighting nonexistent voter fraud. She touches on the Gill case in Wisconsin, and devotes appropriate scorn to the 2013 Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder, in which the Court’s conservatives—including Kennedy—struck down a key section of the Voting Rights Act, allowing many of these recent suppression measures to take effect and probably helping put Donald Trump in the White House.

In Wisconsin, Anderson points out, the onslaught of voter suppression tactics implemented by the gerrymandered, GOP-controlled state legislature was likely responsible for the huge drop in minority turnout in the state in 2016. In 2012, black voting rates in the state reached a high of 74 percent, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress. By 2016, that figure fell to 55 percent. The drop was even more dramatic in heavily black Milwaukee, where in 2016, she writes, “fifty thousand fewer votes were cast in a state that Donald Trump won by only twenty-seven thousand ballots.” Some of this was doubtless due to not having a black candidate on the ballot in 2016, but Anderson notes that the drop-off in black turnout far exceeded the predictions of experts like Nate Silver.

Anderson also reminds us that the person now in charge of protecting the right to vote is Attorney General Jeff Sessions. In 1985, Sessions distinguished himself as the Alabama attorney general by gratuitously prosecuting civil rights activists who had the nerve to try to register minority voters in a county where African Americans made up 60 percent of the population, but where every single elected official was white. When the activists finally succeeded in electing black representatives to the local school board and county commission, Sessions went to war on them under the guise of rooting out fraud. Even though the prosecution failed, Sessions succeeded in putting the fear of God in African American voters. Two black women testified to a grand jury that they wouldn’t be voting anymore.

Blood-boiling stories like these come rapid-fire in Anderson’s narrative, which is also peppered with a brief history of voter suppression dating back to Reconstruction. (When it comes to white people trying to prevent black people from voting, there’s really nothing new under the sun.) She ends on an optimistic note, however. In a chapter entitled “The Resistance,” Anderson finds hope in the quiet efforts of black activists and young people in Alabama during the 2017 special election to fill Sessions’s vacated Senate seat. They managed to work around every obstacle thrown up by the white GOP power structure—from voter ID and felon disenfranchisement laws to too few voting machines to mysteriously missing wheelchair ramps at polling places—to defeat accused pedophile Roy Moore and elect Doug Jones, making him the first Democratic senator from Alabama in twenty-five years.

The story of recent GOP voter suppression efforts is one of the most important on the political landscape, and Anderson’s righteous indignation over it is more than justified. But, ultimately, her book is unsatisfying, even maddening. In large part, that’s because it’s mostly a clip job of the sort often put out by conservative authors. As I was reading, much of the material seemed familiar to me—really familiar, and not just because I’ve covered these issues for years as a reporter. A quick check of the footnotes revealed why: Anderson draws extensively from work done by no fewer than five of my colleagues at Mother Jones, particularly Ari Berman, who wrote his own book on voter suppression in 2015. I even found my own work in there, along with repeated citations of other liberal writers from Slate and the Center for American Progress’s news site, ThinkProgress.

Anderson appears to have conducted few or no original interviews that might have fleshed out some of her arguments. Quotes from experts like Kristen Clarke, who has been on the front lines of the voting rights battles as executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, come from previously published sources, which is inexplicable given how accessible Clarke is.

That said, Anderson’s work still provides value in simply connecting the dots, properly situating the seemingly disparate attacks on minority voting as part of a long-running trend of white people trying to maintain their grip on power by whatever means necessary. As Anderson suggests, the Jones election provides a road map for future political activism, but it also shows the significant uphill battle minority voters face just to exercise the franchise in the twenty-first century. The looming arrival of Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, and dozens of Trump appointees throughout the federal judiciary, isn’t going to make it any easier.

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