The post 2017 College Rankings appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For the last twelve years, the Washington Monthly has published a different kind of college ranking.

Unlike the prestige- and wealth-driven metrics put out by the likes of U.S. News & World Report, our rankings measure what colleges do for their country.

Instead of rewarding colleges for the number of applications they reject, we give them credit for enrolling unusually large numbers of low-income and first-generation students. Instead of assuming that the most expensive schools are also the best, we recognize universities that produce research, train the next generation of scientists and PhDs, and instill their graduates with an ethos of public service.

Our rankings are meant to be more than just a guide for potential students. An educated, enlightened society is a better society, for everyone. We all have a stake in how well our colleges succeed.

To that end, we’ve called for colleges to release much more information about themselves—in particular, how much their students learn.

And we’ve seen leaders of both parties, at the highest levels of government, respond. Not long after our first rankings were published, George W. Bush’s education secretary, Margaret Spellings, issued a high-profile report calling for colleges to release more information about how well undergraduates are educated, and be accountable for the results.

The Obama administration then developed a “College Scorecard” that shows prospective students how likely they are to get a good job and pay back their loans. When Obama announced an ambitious (though ultimately unfulfilled) effort to tie federal aid to a new college ratings system, the measures he proposed sounded an awful lot like the Monthly rankings. The world was getting better—too slowly, but moving in the right direction.

Then came Trump.

It’s hard to know exactly where the president and his education secretary, Betsy DeVos, stand when it comes to making higher education more transparent, accountable, and focused on the best interests of students and citizens. Neither are distinguished in the collegiate and policy-making fields.

Trump, of course, infamously ran a grifty real estate seminar disguised as an eponymous university and said, “I love the poorly educated!” because the degree-less were more likely to give him votes. DeVos is a free market ideologue from the world of K–12 schools. She has chosen not to fill the most important higher education position in her department, the undersecretary of education. Her most significant actions to date have involved rolling back Obama regulations designed to protect students from predatory for-profit schools (see Stephen Burd, “Borrower’s Remorse,”) and campus sexual assault.

Which is a shame, because our 2017 rankings show promise and peril in equal measure. There are still colleges and universities, most of them public, making fantastic contributions to the public good. But there are also schools, some of them prestigious and conventionally well regarded, that appear to be little more than expensive sorting machines for the already privileged. They’re inward-facing places that spend their resources mostly on themselves.

Here are the highlights of what we found.

National Universities

While the U.S. News list of “best” national universities is dominated by elite private institutions, ours is stocked with public research universities like UC Davis, the University of Washington, and Texas A&M. UC San Diego, our second-ranked public university, is a research powerhouse where over one-third of students come from first-generation and low-income families. Very few institutions manage the combination of academic excellence and economic opportunity so well.

Other public schools, like Utah State and Fresno State, are traditionally seen as second-tier institutions. We rank them among our twenty best. Given its demographics, Utah State is unusually good at graduating students who go on to high-paying jobs while successfully paying back their loans. Cal State has a stellar graduation rate relative to other colleges with a similar admissions profile, and its net price of attendance (what students pay after scholarships are deducted from tuition) is among the very lowest nationwide.

Our rankings are topped by familiar names: Stanford, Harvard, MIT. In their wealth and exclusivity, these schools are such extreme outliers that they tend to overwhelm the statistical models we use to predict outcomes like earnings and graduation rates. For the low-income and first-generation students who get in, they offer fantastic educational opportunities at almost no cost.

The problem is that no elite private schools seem seriously interested in enrolling more students to meet ever-growing demand. Harvard hasn’t significantly increased the size of its freshman class in decades, even as the college-going population has grown and applications have skyrocketed. Only a fifth of the students at the University of Illinois at Chicago, an urban research university that falls just outside our top fifty, are Latino. Yet by itself, it educates more Latino students than Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and Duke combined.

The Illinois Institute of Technology, also Chicago based, is a private engineering school that enrolls significant numbers of low-income and first-generation students. Tuition is middle of the road, but IIT makes up for it by excelling in preparing students for well-paying jobs that earn enough to pay back student loans. IIT also spends 30 percent of its work-study money on paying students for public service–oriented jobs with local nonprofit and community organizations, putting it among the top twenty institutions on that measure nationwide.

Then there are the private schools that don’t even pretend to use their wealth to make opportunity affordable. An unusually large number of the worst offenders seem to be located in Texas. Coming in at number 267 out of 303, Texas Christian University can at least say it is outperforming Southern Methodist, Dallas Baptist, and Texas Wesleyan, which rank even worse.

But the poster boy for Lone Star losers is Baylor University, ranked 288th, and home to a horrifying series of rape and sexual assault allegations centered on the (surprise!) football team, which were then downplayed and covered up by an administration run by a man who is apparently determined to drop the last shovel of dirt on the grave of irony: now-former Baylor president Kenneth Starr. Yes, that Kenneth Starr.

Baylor enjoys a conventionally good reputation and a comfortable slot at number 71 in the U.S. News rankings largely because it’s expensive and somewhat exclusive—fewer than half of applicants are admitted, and the average SAT score is over 1,200. What’s remarkable is how little else there is to Baylor—how little it does for its country.

Given its student demographics and SAT profile, Baylor students are less likely to graduate on time, get a good job, or pay back their loans than they should be. Baylor also enrolls relatively few low-income and first-generation students, and charges the neediest families extraordinarily large amounts of money: tuition at Baylor is $28,000 a year, one of the steepest bills nationwide. Baylor produces relatively little funded research or science and engineering PhDs, has almost no faculty with distinguished awards and appointments as we measure them (see our methodology, p. 120), and spends none of its federal work-study money on service. The only thing Baylor is good at, by our measures, is enrolling undergraduates in the ROTC.

Liberal Arts Colleges

Berea College, a sui generis institution dedicated to educating low-income and first-generation students in Appalachia, is again our highest-ranked liberal arts college. College opportunity is a perennial favorite charitable cause, and the fortunes earned in this second Gilded Age are yielding gigantic new philanthropies. Some moguls turned benefactors might look to Berea as an organizational model: low cost, values driven, and highly focused on strengthening a crucial rung on the ladder of economic opportunity.

Amherst College continues to shine as a top school with a firm commitment to enrolling students eligible for federal Pell Grants. Bryn Mawr spends more money on research than any other liberal arts college and is among our highest-ranked service schools. Harvey Mudd is tops for undergraduates who go on to earn PhDs. Washington and Lee University has stellar earnings results for graduates and some of the most affordable tuition in the country.

The College of the Holy Cross, a Jesuit institution in Massachusetts, is one of America’s oldest Catholic liberal arts colleges. It’s a standout in three areas: students are unusually likely to graduate on time, get well-paying jobs, and pay off their loans. Even in a time of burgeoning debt, price inflation, and uncertain labor markets, some colleges excel at the nuts-and-bolts value proposition of higher education: a supportive path to a diploma and a career. Holy Cross is one.

Regional Campuses

The national higher education market is dominated by well-known research universities and liberal arts colleges. But most students go to college elsewhere, in community colleges or public schools that serve a dedicated region. Here, too, there are standouts and laggards aplenty.

St. John’s College in New Mexico is the western outpost of a long-established, intellectually quirky college dedicated to close reading of the Great Books of the Western world. It’s expensive, and a fair share of Johnnies drop out before making it all the way through Plutarch. But no master’s-granting college in the country sends more undergrads on to earn PhDs, and St. John’s Peace Corps matriculation rate is almost as strong.

Fairfield University in Connecticut is another school in the private, Jesuit, and New England–born Holy Cross vein where many more people graduate and get a good job than the demographics would predict.

Like the University of California system in our national university rankings, the California State system dominates the upper end of our master’s list, with a wide array of public institutions that remain unusually affordable and accessible to first-generation students while making considerable contributions to research.

The United States has over 12,000 miles of ocean coastline, which puts graduates of its seven public maritime academies in high demand. Two of them, one in Maine and the other the Cal State campus in Vallejo, produce unusually high student earnings, putting them among our top ten bachelor’s-granting schools. Calvin College in Michigan is yet another school with a strong Christian tradition where students are unusually likely to finish college and pay back loans.

What Next?

The Washington Monthly college rankings project is dedicated to both the cause and use of higher education data. We’ve called for colleges and policymakers to put more long-hidden or deliberately uncalculated information into the public arena, where it can improve student choices and paint a more nuanced picture of collegiate success. As new data has become available, we’ve incorporated it into our rankings, while holding fast to our values of economic opportunity, scientific progress, and service. The result has been a steady coming-into-focus, with the colleges that balance their obligations to students and knowledge production while remaining affordable emerging at the top of our lists.

The Trump era will likely put that progress on hold. The president’s strategy of making text out of the Republican Party’s white supremacist subtext hardly bodes well for the millions of immigrant and minority college students struggling to earn degrees. His crude big business populism and reflexive opposition to federal regulation play right into the hands of established organizations that profit from a lack of public information. To be clear, not all of these incumbents are for-profit corporations. They also include public and nonprofit colleges and universities that, as our rankings show, could do far more to advance the broad national interest in higher learning.

But we’re also optimistic that the present regime is only a bump on the long road to insight. It’s hard to keep data under wraps, particularly when the constituency for better information about colleges is so large. The hundreds of under-recognized colleges that we’ve identified and elevated over the years are a testament to the breadth of America’s higher education excellence, and to the pressing need to expand our national vision of what collegiate success ought to mean.

We’ll continue to use the best available information to advance an inclusive vision of higher education greatness. We’re confident that cause will outlast the present regime.

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

In college, as in life, youth and glamor go together. The top schools on the U.S. News & World Report rankings and similar college lists recruit virtually all of their freshmen right out of high school—or perhaps after a “gap year” spent, say, saving baby sea turtles in Australia.

By contrast, colleges that cater to adult students, the kind with jobs and families, aren’t given much attention or credit by the usual gatekeepers. There’s never been a good reason for this bias, and it makes even less sense today, when roughly 40 percent of all college students are adults (defined as twenty-five years old or older). Yes, America’s young people are our future, as the commencement speakers say. But with rampant income inequality and stagnant wages, our higher education system must also do more to help adults earn the diplomas they need to get ahead.

Unfortunately, the nation’s “best” colleges aren’t doing their part. They aren’t recruiting more adult students or offering them the services they need—like abundant evening and weekend classes to accommodate work and family schedules. And the publications that ignore these shortcomings are part of the problem, not the solution.

That’s why last year the Washington Monthly launched a first-of-its-kind ranking of four-year and two-year colleges that do the best job of serving adult learners. We’ve updated those rankings this year. To create them, we took data from two federal government sources as well as the College Board’s Annual Survey of Colleges and combined them into seven general measures of colleges’ openness and responsiveness to adult students and to how well those students fared once they left. Our rankings for four-year schools can be found here, for two-year schools here, and a detailed methodology is available here.

The first thing you’ll notice in our ranking of four-year universities is the complete absence of Ivy League and other elite private schools. There are also no for-profit colleges on the list (even though 59 percent of their students are adults) other than Walden University in Minnesota (number 93), a private institution organized as a “public benefit corporation.” While a few flagship public universities like the University of Iowa (number 11) and University of Texas at Austin (number 61) make the cut, the top 100 is dominated largely by unheralded regional state and private nonprofit schools.

Bellevue University in Nebraska, for instance, falls into the “unranked” category on the U.S. News rankings but is number six on our list. The school does well on a host of our metrics, including how much their students earn annually ten years after entering college ($61,406) and the share of its students—82 percent—who are adults. Southern Illinois University–Carbondale is number 214 on U.S. News’s ranking of national universities but number 36 on our best for adult learners list. Only 19 percent of SIUC students are adults, but it makes up for that with the highest possible scores for metrics of adult friendliness, like flexibility of programs and the ease with which it accepts credits from other colleges.

U.S. News doesn’t even bother to rank two-year community colleges. But these schools are the workhorses of higher education, and especially valuable resources for adult students—44 percent of community college students are adults. The colleges on our two-year list—schools like Central Texas College and Montgomery College in Maryland—may be largely unknown outside their communities, but they deserve a moment in the national spotlight for delivering quality educations for adult learners.

Several of our top 100 four-year and two-year colleges have something else to recommend them. Instead of resting on their laurels, they are constantly challenging themselves to get better, as you’ll see in an accompanying feature, “The Twelve Most Innovative Colleges for Adult Learners”.

Policymakers and journalists have a blind spot when it comes to adult learners because of their own traditional college experiences: most went to college (probably selective ones) right after high school and didn’t stop until they had a diploma or two. But for nearly half of all American college students, the path is different, and tougher. Instead of dorm rooms and late-night bull sessions with friends, they’re hitting the books at the kitchen table by themselves after putting the kids to bed. But there’s plenty that colleges can do to make the adult learner’s experience less hard, and more rewarding. The schools on our lists are proof of that. By honoring them, we hope to spur more colleges to follow their lead.

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

The next sample restriction was to exclude colleges that did not have data on all of the outcome measures. Another 587 colleges were dropped for not participating in the College Board’s Annual Survey of Colleges, which is key in our rankings. Fifty-seven colleges did not have data on the percent of adult students, 287 colleges did not have data on average earnings of independent students, and we excluded thirty-eight colleges that participated in the federal student loan program but did not report a separate repayment rate for independent students. As we used the percentage of adult students as one of our metrics, colleges with insufficient numbers of independent students to have a separate repayment rate for independent students were unlikely to score highly in this ranking anyway. For twenty colleges that served at least 75 percent adult students and did not have separate data on earnings or repayment rates for independent students, we instead used data for all students. Our resulting sample is 2,425 colleges, of which 1,133 are considered four-year colleges (based on Carnegie classification and whether they awarded more bachelor’s degrees than certificates or associate’s degrees) and 1,292 are two-year colleges.

We used the same seven metrics in this year’s rankings as we did in our inaugural rankings for adult students in 2016. They are the following:

(1) Ease of transfer/enrollment. This is designed to reflect how easy it is for adult students to either initially enroll or transfer in a given college. It includes data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and the College Board’s Annual Survey of Colleges on whether there is an orientation program for transfer students, whether transcript review is available prior to admission, whether students can transfer in at an upper level (seniors for four-year colleges and sophomores for two-year colleges), whether a college is test-optional for adult students or open admission (four-year colleges only), and whether a transfer adviser is available. Four-year colleges could score up to five points on this metric, while two-year colleges could score up to four points.

(2) Flexibility of programs. This metric considers whether colleges are flexible enough to meet the needs of adult students, and again is based on IPEDS and College Board data. Colleges receive a point if they allow credits to be earned by life experience/prior learning assessment, if credits can be earned via examination, if accelerated programs are available, if at least some distance programs are available, if independent study classes are available, if student-designed majors are allowed, if weekend and/or evening classes are offered, if academic support is available after 6 p.m., or if academic support is available on weekends. Colleges could earn a maximum of nine points on this metric.

(3) Services available for adult students. This is based on IPEDS and College Board data and reflects whether a college offers services that adult students are most likely to use. Colleges receive a point if they offer general services for adult students, financial aid counseling, on-campus daycare, counseling services, job placement services, or veterans’ services. Colleges could earn at most six points on this metric.

(4) The percent of adult students (age 25+) at the college. This measure is from IPEDS and represents the percentage of undergraduate students who are age twenty-five or older, which is the age at which students are automatically considered as independent from their parents for financial aid purposes. We used this measure instead of the percentage of independent students from the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard due to there being no missing data on this measure and the extremely strong correlation between the
two measures.

(5) Mean earnings of adult students ten years after entering college. Here, we used newly released data from the College Scorecard to examine what the average earnings were for independent students a decade after they entered college regardless of whether they graduated or dropped out. (Independent students include all adult students, as well as younger students who are veterans or have children of their own—people who benefit from additional flexibility.) We would ideally like to compare this to students’ earnings before they entered (or reentered) college, but this is still a big step forward in showing which colleges seem to serve their adult students well.

(6) Loan repayment rates of adult students five years after entering repayment. We use this metric from the College Scorecard to see what percentage of a college’s former independent students were able to pay down at least $1 of their loan’s principal five years after entering repayment (typically, six months after leaving college). This is the updated loan repayment rate released by the Department of Education in January 2017 after they fixed a coding error that made repayment rates appear artificially high. For the 115 colleges (all two-year institutions) that did not participate in the federal student loan program and did not fully meet all students’ financial need, we assigned those colleges a repayment rate of zero. Recent research by the Institute for College Access and Success showed that nearly one million students attend community colleges that will not offer their students federal loans, instead steering them to private loans with far less favorable terms to borrowers. Additionally, Mark Wiederspan of Arizona State University found an empirical relationship between colleges that refuse to offer federal loans and worse academic outcomes for their students.

(7) Tuition and fees for in-district students. This metric comes from IPEDS and is a simple measure of affordability. We do not use net price in the adult student rankings because net price data is only available for first-time, full-time students—a far cry from this group of students.

We constructed the rankings by rescaling each of the first three measures to have a maximum score of five points each. We then standardized each of the other four measures separately for two-year and four-year colleges to have a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one, trimming back a small number of observations that were more than five standard deviations away from the mean. The resulting rankings are then a sum of each of the seven measures, and we show the top 100 colleges in
each sector.

The post A Note on Methodology: Best Colleges for Adult Learners appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Universities may be full of brilliant minds, but as institutions, they tend to be slow learners. They can take years to recognize facts that ought to be screamingly obvious—for instance, that their graduation rates are too low—and then years more to figure out what to do about the problem, if they figure it out at all.

Another way to put this is that American colleges and universities, as organizations, are not very innovative. Or at least not innovative in the areas in which they most need improving. (They do tend to excel at finding new and better ways to hit up alumni for donations.)

That’s why, for the last couple of years, the Washington Monthly has been profiling the most innovative people we could find in higher education—be they college presidents, administrators, faculty members, or outside researchers. By highlighting individuals who are devising reforms that make their institutions measurably better on the metrics we care about—providing quality degrees at lower cost, getting more students to graduate, and so on—our hope has been to encourage more people to try.

This year we’re focused on innovation in the area of adult students, where the institutional “slow learner” problem is especially severe. The share of college students who are adults—defined as twenty-five years old or older—is now about 40 percent. But most colleges haven’t adapted. For instance, they still schedule the majority of classes around midday, which is convenient for late-night-partying undergrads, rather than at night and on weekends, when grownups with jobs and families can actually attend them.

As you’ll see in the profiles below—and in our ranking of the best colleges for adult learners (introduction here; rankings begin here)—elite colleges don’t make the cut. Despite supposedly having the cleverest professors and students, they tend to be the slowest learners when it comes to serving adult students. It’s the unheralded schools, the kind U.S. News and other gatekeepers don’t notice or celebrate, that are figuring it out. Not all of the schools below made it onto our top 100 lists; a few were not even within shouting distance. But they are all doing something right that other schools ought to emulate.

Odessa College (ranked #209 in best 2-year colleges for adults)

Six years ago, Odessa College was the worst community college in West Texas. Its majority-Hispanic student body had a graduation rate in the single digits, overall enrollment was low, and the number of “stop-outs”—students leaving school intending to return later—was huge, especially whenever the local oil and gas industry was booming. “The oil and gas industry dominates the college-going culture in our region,” said Donald Wood, Odessa’s vice president for institutional effectiveness. “When unemployment is high, college enrollments go up. When the oil and gas industry is hiring, college enrollments go down.”

But over the past five years, Odessa has improved dramatically. Metrics are way up across the board, enough to place it at number 209 (out of the nearly 1,300 two-year schools we looked at) on our list of the best colleges for adult learners. It also caught the attention of the Aspen Institute, placing as a finalist for this year’s Prize for Community College Excellence. According to school officials, the improvement was due to two simple yet significant changes to the school’s structure and teaching method.

First, in 2011, Odessa targeted teaching with its Drop Rate Improvement Program. Through internal research, the administration had discovered that while personal and financial issues contributed to students’ decision to drop classes—in turn making them more likely to drop out of school altogether—having good relationships with instructors could overcome those factors. After studying what instructors with high retention rates were doing differently from instructors with low retention rates, the school identified four practices of successful teachers, which Odessa turned into a four-pillar teaching framework: use students’ names from the first day of class onward; intervene early if a student is having obvious problems (like falling asleep in class, or failing the first exam); meet one on one with students at least once per term, preferably early; and lay out clear expectations and penalties in the syllabus, while judging infractions on a case-by-case basis. New instructors are trained in this framework.

Second, in 2014, Odessa transitioned all of its core courses—80 percent of its offerings—from sixteen-week semesters to two eight-week terms, something no Texas school had ever done. The idea was to double the number of opportunities students have to enroll in classes and increase the course completion rate. Instead of taking four or five classes in a sixteen-week term, full-time students take just two classes per eight-week term; part-time students take just one. The class hours are doubled in order to fit sixteen weeks of curriculum into eight weeks, which allows students to still qualify for Pell Grants. To help students manage the increased classroom hours, Odessa offers courses at various times of day and on weekends.

The first semester with eight-week terms yielded the largest enrollment in Odessa’s seventy-one-year history, and the numbers have grown each year since—even though regional unemployment is low. The school also saw a 4 percent increase in course completion and a 3 percent increase in student success (earning a C- or higher) a year after implementation.

Offering eight-week terms and improving instruction both got students in the classroom and made it easier for them to stay. The course completion rate is now over 90 percent, up from around 85 percent. Odessa has also experienced a dramatic increase in annual graduation/transfer rates, from 15 percent to 32 percent in five years. And achievement gaps are shrinking. Hispanic men were historically among the lowest-performing student groups at Odessa. But now they complete 96 percent of the classes they start, get at least a C in 78 percent of those classes, and have more than doubled their graduation rate in the last five years.

University of Maryland University College (ranked #88 in best 4-year colleges for adults)

University of Maryland University College (UMUC), a member of the University of Maryland system that offers fully online and hybrid degrees, is once again ranked in our top 100 four-year schools for adult learners, thanks to its large adult student population, low tuition costs, and high average earnings for graduates. But what those numbers don’t capture is UMUC’s reputation for serving military and veteran students at home and abroad. The college was founded in the wake of World War II with the intent of serving returning veterans, and it was the first university to send professors overseas to offer classes to active-duty service members. Now that was distance learning.

Shortly after joining UMUC in September 2015, Keith Hauk, the associate vice president of veterans initiatives, visited the University of Maryland, College Park (Maryland’s flagship public university), for a meeting with that school’s ROTC detachment. Hauk, himself a veteran, passed through the school’s veterans’ lounge and found five students sitting together, trying to figure out how to get through their calculus course. UMUC has a lounge on its campus, but because the vast majority of students who use veterans’ benefits take classes online, it wasn’t serving military students the way College Park’s was serving theirs. That got Hauk thinking about how to build something like a virtual student union for UMUC’s online military student body.

Last summer, Hauk’s vision came to fruition as the MIL-VET Checkpoint, a web tool dedicated to helping UMUC students about to leave the military make a successful transition to civilian life. It connects veterans and service members with other veterans, veterans’ counselors, and information about job opportunities and academic resources.

That’s just one of several recent UMUC veteran initiatives. The VA maintains the right to repossess any education benefit money from a student who doesn’t maintain good academic standing, and from the school he or she is attending. UMUC found that the courses most responsible for subpar academic performances were general education math and writing requirements. So the school partnered with Tutor.com to provide free tutoring to students using their VA benefits. More internal research showed that a significant portion of veterans faced gaps between the full cost of school and their federal financial aid and VA benefits. In response, UMUC established the Veterans Assistance Fund, which also helps cover prior learning assessments and provides up to $3,000 of supplemental income to students who work in a low-pay or unpaid internship in their industry of choice. “Oftentimes, these funds make the difference between dropping out of school or not,” says Kelly Wilmeth, vice president of UMUC’s stateside military operations.

Community College of Philadelphia (2-year, #465)

It’s well established that early childhood education is crucial to child development and academic achievement, which has implications well into adulthood. In an effort to improve the quality of that education, multiple cities and states—including Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.—have passed legislation requiring early educators to have a college degree. But the average associate’s degree costs around $10,000 a year, and a bachelor’s about $25,000. That’s a steep entry price for a profession that pays a median wage of $14 an hour.

About three years ago, Cheryl Feldman, executive director of District 1199C Training and Upgrading Fund, a
Philadelphia-based nonprofit, dusted off an old idea: an early childhood educator apprenticeship program. (She had led the creation of a statewide program from 2000 to 2004, but the funding dried up.) Feldman connected with Amy Saia, an assistant professor of early childhood education at the Community College of Philadelphia (CCP).

Thus began a two-year planning process that paid off this year when the apprenticeship program finally launched. As of this writing, there are thirty-six apprentices and nineteen participating employers, including nonprofit, for-profit, union, and nonunion. Completion of the two-year program will result in a certificate from the U.S. Department of Labor, an associate’s degree, and lead teacher certification for Philadelphia-area early childhood education centers. The apprentices will complete 4,000 hours of on-the-job learning with the help of a worksite mentor and will receive college credits as well as wages. They face limited out-of pocket costs (they are sponsored by their employers), and earn progressively higher pay as they advance through the program. A specialized transfer program lets qualifying apprentices who graduate from CCP earn a bachelor’s degree at Drexel debt-free.

CCP is not a great performer on our rankings for adult learners. But its apprenticeship program could be a national model as other states and municipalities grapple with how to up-skill their early childhood education workforce. Saia recently gave presentations to two national early education associations. “There has never been a model to incorporate the child care workforce toward completion of an associate’s degree,” she said. “To me, this model is a no-brainer.”

Salt Lake Community College (2-year, #296) 

We often think of education in terms of time. An associate’s degree is usually described as a two-year degree, a bachelor’s as a four-year. But on average, full-time students take 3.3 years to earn an associate’s and 5.7 years to earn a bachelor’s. This slow pace deters many from ever getting the degree at all: the longer the time to degree, the higher the dropout rate.

The problem is that earning a degree typically requires accumulating enough “credit hours,” a measure of the amount of time spent in a classroom. That’s hard for adults, who are often juggling work and family. In recent years, education policy thinkers have begun to reconsider the wisdom of the credit-hour system. Instead of seat time, wouldn’t it be better to award credit based on what students have actually learned? This model has come to be called “competency-based education.” In CBE, students move at their own pace and advance by showing mastery of specific knowledge and skills (“competencies”) on exams designed by subject-matter experts. Adults with work experience can convert knowledge learned on the job into college credit through exams or portfolios of past work, judged using prior learning assessments. Despite its clear promise, very few colleges have implemented CBE on a broad scale. Why? Because federal financial aid eligibility is generally based on the credit-hour system. Without that eligibility, schools run the potentially fatal risk of limiting their applicant pool to people who can pay without federal loans. The Obama administration tried creating ways for schools to get permission to implement CBE without losing access to aid, but the processes proved too slow or onerous for most colleges.

But innovators often take risks, which is how Salt Lake Community College (SLCC) ended up on our list. Since 2014, using a $2.3 million federal grant, SLCC has converted twenty programs in its School of Applied Technology (SAT) to CBE—even though there was no guarantee they would get approved for federal aid.

SAT is devoted to one-year or shorter programs that provide training in high-demand, high-paying jobs. Instead of scheduled classes, students are only required to appear in lab once a week, though the vast majority exceed that requirement. SAT students are about thirty-five years old on average, so they often arrive with relevant experience in their field, which they can use to skip redundant course work. Gone are traditional sixteen-week semesters; a student earns her certification as a network engineer, for instance, as soon as she demonstrates competency in all the required skill areas, such as server installation and configuration. “It removes time as the constant of learning, and makes learning the constant and time the variable,” said Eric Heiser, the dean of SAT.

SLCC implemented this expansive CBE program despite a painfully slow process to receive permission from the U.S. Department of Education to give financial aid. “We weren’t going to be held up by federal regulations,” Heiser recalled. SLCC stuck with the process and finally received permission this past July. They’re only one of around a half-dozen schools to have made it through.

SLCC’s experience thus far has become a reference point for colleges nationwide that are exploring CBE. Heiser has warned schools that SLCC was probably too aggressive in its sudden, large-scale implementation. But the potential upside could be enormous, and some early results seem promising. Faculty have bought in to the model and are reporting increased engagement from students. In some programs completion rates have more than doubled, but Heiser is careful to say that there’s not yet enough data to attribute it entirely to the new model. Nonetheless, he said, “We like what we’re seeing.”

Southern New Hampshire University, College for America (4-year, #22)

No discussion about innovation in higher education for adult learners would be complete without mentioning Southern New Hampshire University, another pioneer in competency-based education. A repeat top-fifty school in our rankings, with a 70 percent adult student body, SNHU made waves in 2014 when it began offering bachelor’s degrees through its College for America, a fully online college exclusively devoted to offering CBE to working adults.

Martha Rush-Mueller, director of public/non-profit partnerships at SNHU, helped create College for America’s business model, which relies on partnerships with employers. A few years ago, while thinking about potential partnerships, it occurred to her that she had ignored the biggest employer in America: the federal government, which directly employs 2.8 million civilians, including the Postal Service. Rush-Mueller reached out to the Office of Personnel Management and began a two-year process of establishing a partnership.

The federal government has a talent problem. Fifty years of small-government dogma have kept it from expanding to meet the growing demands placed on it. Without the ability to hire enough new staff, it’s often up to existing federal workers to keep up with changing responsibilities. They don’t always succeed. This has direct costs for taxpayers. Acquisitions officers are often overwhelmed by the size and complexity of contracts, which leads to overspending on subpar products and services (see, for example, the F-35 fighter jet). And with Medicare and Medicaid responsible for a quarter of federal spending, there’s a need for workers to be educated in health care management.

As of March, all federal employees, their spouses, and their extended families are eligible to earn their associate’s or bachelor’s at College for America for $3,000 annual tuition instead of the full $5,000, and the school has been approved for Pell Grant funding. With rolling enrollment, new students start the first of every month, and have a thirty-day trial period to decide if they want to continue to take courses. “It’s an all-you-can-learn buffet,” says Rush-Mueller. “It’s entirely self-paced so students can finish as fast or slow as is convenient for them.”

Bunker Hill Community College (2-year, #49) 

Bunker Hill (BHCC) is Massachusetts’s biggest community college, serving 13,000 students in Boston, and just breaks the top fifty in our best colleges for adults. BHCC has taken a particularly innovative approach to a problem that is startlingly common among community college students: hunger. According to a recent study, 67 percent of community college students in America are “food insecure”—that is, they lack consistent access to food. Thirty-three percent are regularly hungry. BHCC’s student body is no exception to this national crisis. Nearly half of students skip meals, or eat less than they’d like to, because they don’t have enough money.

It’s hard to succeed in school when you can’t afford to eat. So BHCC has implemented a number of programs to feed its students. Last year it initiated the One Solid Meal program, which provides free cafeteria meals or food gift cards to students. Unsurprisingly, the school found that participation in the program correlated strongly with academic completion. BHCC also partners with Panera, which delivers loaves of unpurchased bread, and local universities, who freeze leftover cafeteria food into TV-dinner-style packages. The college has an on-campus branch of Single Stop, a national nonprofit organization that provides a one-stop shop where people can access resources on health care, taxes, housing, food, and financial aid. To further reduce costs for its students, BHCC joined the Open Educational Resources (OER) Degree Initiative, a growing national effort to create college courses and degree programs that use only freely accessible, openly licensed textbooks and other media instead of the usual expensive proprietary materials.

Western Governors University (4-year, #101)

It was 2009, and then Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels was trying to figure out how to expand the state’s public higher education system to include online offerings. At the time, Indiana placed forty-second among states in the proportion of adults with a postsecondary credential. Building Indiana-specific online universities would solve two problems. The first was one of perception. People, in particular adult learners, are often bound to a sense of place. An online university, by definition, has no place, and continues to be perceived as having less legitimacy and lower standards than a brick-and-mortar school. But a state-branded online school would gain legitimacy while also solving the second problem: embedding it within a state higher ed system, thereby giving online students access to existing public resources like grants and aid and making transfers between schools easier.

But Indiana, like other states at the time, wasn’t making much headway: building an online university from scratch required inordinate amounts of time, money (in the midst of a recession), and political buy-in from existing institutions.

Then Daniels met with Robert Mendenhall, then the president of Western Governors University.

WGU was founded twenty years ago by then Utah Governor Mike Leavitt and twelve other governors, mostly from western states. A nonprofit online university that pioneered the use of competency-based education, WGU’s founding mission was to provide an affordable distance-learning alternative to adults who had never finished college. Students are tutored, not taught in formal classes, and can earn credits whenever they demonstrate competency in subject areas. Today, 93 percent of WGU’s students are adults—the average age is thirty-six—and tuition is just over $6,000, half the national average. One of its first programs was an online CBE teachers’ college; the secondary math education program was ranked best in the country by the National Council on Teacher Quality in 2014. A 2016 Gallup poll found that recent WGU graduates have an 81 percent employment rate.

In WGU, Daniels found his solution. Scott Jenkins, at the time Daniels’s education policy director, was in the room for the meeting with Mendenhall. “Mitch immediately got it. He asked Mendenhall, ‘Could we brand that for Indiana? Could we charter WGU for Indiana and make WGU Indiana’s online university?’” That’s precisely what happened in June 2010 when Daniels signed an executive order establishing WGU Indiana as “Indiana’s eighth state university,” as he called it.

WGU Indiana is more a brand than its own university; the academic programs and the curriculum are done out of Salt Lake City. All that changed was the creation of a WGU Indiana administration in Indianapolis to work within the state’s system. The results have been excellent. Enrollments to WGU doubled between 2011 and 2015, and the number of WGU graduates has increased by an average of 97 percent every year between 2011 and 2015. The average time to a bachelor’s is two and a half years.

Daniels’s idea has since been replicated in Washington, Texas, Missouri, Tennessee, and Nevada. Each state saw a significant increase in enrollment, and number of graduates, after announcing their respective affiliations. Teaming up with WGU might be the most cost-effective, least politically fraught way to bring online CBE to the state level.

Broward College (2-year, #74)

You are the owner of a small but growing business. You need to hire someone who knows how to use QuickBooks, an accounting software platform. Two résumés land on your desk. Both candidates just graduated from community colleges with associate’s degrees in accounting technology and have similar transcripts. None of that tells you if either one knows how to use QuickBooks, and you’re not about to go digging into course catalogs to find out. But then you notice in one résumé—the one that lists Broward College under education—the following item: QuickBooks Certified User. That is an industry certification, which means that the applicant passed an exam created by the makers of QuickBooks (Intuit Inc.) that tests proficiency in their software. Your hiring decision is suddenly easy.

Industry certifications tell employers what academic credentials alone do not: proof of professional proficiency in a certain skill. They are usually created by industry associations, like the American Welding Society, but sometimes by specific companies, like Intuit. Employers in applied technical fields like manufacturing and information technology tend to want workers who can use particular tools. Community colleges, meanwhile, are supposed to give their graduates marketable skills. The problem is that employers have to take the college’s word for it that those recent graduates actually have the skills they need.

To address this gap between the academy and the job market, in 2013 Florida expanded existing state law to reward postsecondary institutions financially for the number of certifications its students earn. And for the last four years, Broward College—which placed a respectable seventy-fourth in our rankings—has led the state in the number of industry certifications earned by students. As the biggest community college in the state (Broward enrolls about 63,000 students), it had a huge built-in advantage. What’s impressive is how quickly it’s expanding its certification efforts. During the 2016–17 academic year, Broward students earned 1,339 certifications, a dramatic increase from the 147 earned in the 2013–14 school year. Part of that success comes from embedding industry certifications into programs of study so that students earn industry certifications while completing their academic program. One popular way of embedding: making an industry certification exam a class’s final exam and covering the cost of the examination fee with vouchers.

Broward is also “stacking” certifications—aligning the order of their course work to correspond with the order of certifications students need. Someone studying to be a network security specialist, for example, will first pass the Cisco Certified Entry Networking Technician exam, a prerequisite to the Cisco Certified Network Associate Security exam. This approach means that students who drop out are more likely to at least have a credential with value on the job market. That matters, because Broward’s graduation rate, while higher than the national average for community colleges, is still only around 30 percent.

Last year’s 1,339 certifications have translated into almost $1.1 million in performance funding from the state. Though not required to do so, Broward returns 50 percent of those funds to its departments. The IT department, which was not getting as many students certified as other departments, used some of its money to create an IT boot camp where students get to collaborate with each other and faculty members for four days prior to taking certification exams. According to the school, the department saw a 300 percent increase in industry certifications last year.

Texas A&M University–Texarkana (4-year, #683)

Prior learning assessments are close to being standard at any school claiming to be great for adult learners. The concept is simple enough: if you walk into school with previous academic and/or work experience, PLAs allow schools to gauge what you know and translate it into credits toward your degree. This saves students time and money.

That’s basically how Texas A&M University–Texarkana (TAMUT) was using PLAs when Lisa Myers arrived in 2013 to start work as an administrator and adult education instructor. But after doing some research, Myers realized that the model’s focus on letting teachers measure what a student already knew was missing something important: the chance for students to learn something new. So she set about refreshing the PLA model. Today, TAMUT students use PLAs to think about their learning, often in the form of reflective essays, and analyze it using adult learning theory and models. This new model recognizes and enhances more soft skills, like conflict resolution and time management, which a body of psychological and economic research shows are crucial to success in any occupation. The school has also folded in PLA assessments, which usually cost students between $125 to $250 out of pocket, into the overall cost of tuition, which allows financial aid to cover the cost.

By our ranking metrics, TAMUT (683rd out of the 1,133 four-year schools we examined) is in the middle of the pack. But PLAs are an important tool in improving college for adults, and TAMUT is leading the way on improving how they’re used. Becky Klein-Collins, an expert on competency-based education at the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, says she “would definitely consider [TAMUT’s] approach to be in best-practice territory.”

Monroe Community College (2-year, #551) 

Most adults who go back to school are trying to enhance their job prospects. They trust that their school knows enough about the labor market to prepare them accordingly. But that trust can be misplaced. Like armies prepared to fight the last war, not the next one, colleges too often create programs of study preparing students for the last economy, even while marketing themselves as being responsive to current trends.

Monroe Community College in Rochester, New York, comes in almost exactly in the middle of our rankings, but it is at the cutting edge of making college more responsive to changes in the labor market. In response to the devastation that the Great Recession wrought in Rochester, Monroe’s president formed a new office, the Economic Development and Innovative Workforce Services Division, and hired Todd Oldham to lead it. Its goal was to gather information about the regional economy and use that data to help Monroe’s programs keep up with economic demands. “All the talk [from local businesses at the time] was skills gaps,” Oldham said. But the information was largely anecdotal.

So he started digging around. Since its founding, the division has created a database of approximately 2,400 businesses in the Rochester area and has conducted detailed surveys on things like what positions need filling and what skills are most desired. It has also mined employment statistics from local and state government sources and job-posting sites, and has tracked where graduates of Monroe and other nearby colleges find jobs. The result is granular real-time data on the regional labor market for four workforce “clusters”: advanced manufacturing, applied technologies, health care, and information and computer technology.

Monroe uses this hyper-detailed labor data to revise its course offerings to help prepare students to get a job. For instance, 2012 data showed that there would be approximately 231 annual middle-skill tooling and machining job openings in the Rochester area, but that Monroe and the other local colleges were only producing seventy-two qualified graduates. So, in 2013, MCC created a twenty-two-week-long accelerated precision machining certificate program. Ninety percent of the first cohort found jobs upon graduating, and every year since has seen similar employment numbers. The college has made plans to roll out similar programs for other areas where there’s unmet demand, in particular office technology and optics. (Xerox and Kodak maintain a large presence in Rochester.)

The division at first took all this data and released published reports. But a printed report, unlike an economy, is frozen in time. Earlier this year, with the help of a donation from the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, Monroe launched a freely accessible online platform, which automatically mines the latest data. (You can play with the data at mcclmi.com.)

Chaffey College (2-year, #257)

One of the hottest buzzwords in education circles today is “growth mind-set.” Unlike people with fixed mind-sets, who think that intelligence and talent are predetermined and can’t be improved, people with growth mind-sets believe that intellectual ability improves with hard work. The concept comes from the work of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, who has found that students who believe intelligence is malleable do better academically than students who think it’s set in stone. Educators around the country have pledged their allegiance to growth mind-set, but Dweck herself sees evidence that her ideas are often not being fully or accurately applied. “You can’t just declare that you have a growth mind-set,” she told an audience in 2015. “Growth mind-set is hard. Many educators are trying to skip the journey.”

Not at Chaffey College. In 2013, Cindy Walker, the college’s faculty success center facilitator, was looking for ways to improve teaching effectiveness at Chaffey. The school primarily serves minorities, many from low-income backgrounds, in the Los Angeles area. Chaffey was underwhelmed by the results of an initiative focusing on study skills in the classroom. After reading some research on the psychology of hope, Walker began to suspect that there was something deeper sapping students’ motivation. Did students fundamentally believe that they belonged in college and could succeed? Walker attended a workshop led by Dweck, and something clicked. “I saw that a lot of those concepts and strategies around mind-set were very complementary to the research around hope, and it filled in some gaps,” Walker said. For the next two years, she held workshops of her own to train teachers and talk to students. She met with administrators, too, including the admissions and financial aid offices and even the library staff and tutors.

The result is that growth mind-set has become baked into how Chaffey functions. It’s in the school’s new mission statement, and administrators refer to it when doing strategic planning. One example is Chaffey’s faculty advising program. Internal research found that students wanted more career guidance. The faculty advising program matches students with particular career interests to faculty with corresponding expertise. The faculty are trained in helping students cultivate Dweck-esque mind-set. In fact, the commitment to growth mind-set affects how syllabi are structured (less crime and punishment, more goal setting) and even how word problems in tests are presented (actual example from a biology class: “You are a thriving paleontologist and need to share this concept with colleagues . . .”).

All of this has contributed to Chaffey’s recent successes. The number of degrees awarded to Hispanic Chaffey College students increased by 31 percent only one year after Walker began introducing growth mind-set. This year, Chaffey graduated its largest class ever and the school was listed as an Aspen Prize finalist.

University of Wyoming (4-year, #14)

University of Wyoming is a repeat top-twenty school for adult learners in our rankings. It stands out for its affordability (ranked second overall among four-year schools), its high loan repayment rate (73 percent), and its services for adults, who make up nearly a third of the student body. UW has an adult student council and a dedicated “nontraditional student center” with a staff dedicated to connecting older students with academic and economic resources.

But the university recently identified a shortcoming. UW is the only four-year public institution in the state, and more than 60 percent of Wyoming postsecondary students begin their studies at one of the state’s seven public community colleges, the highest rate in the country. For decades, Wyoming has had a statewide course articulation agreement—formal agreements between UW and the community colleges documenting the transfer policies for a specific academic program or degree. Articulation agreements are meant to ensure that students who transfer schools won’t have to repeat course work they’ve already done.

The problem is that course articulation does not necessarily translate into credit toward a degree. For example, if a university deems another college’s curriculum to be not as rigorous as its own, a student’s transfer credits may count as electives or general education requirements and not toward his intended major, meaning he will have to repeat material from his community college program in order to graduate. This increases the time and money transfer students have to spend.

The issue is not unique to Wyoming. A 2014 Department of Education study found that, nationwide, transfers lose an average of thirteen credits when they move schools, and nearly 40 percent of transfers get no credit for the work they have already completed. A 2016 study by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found that, perversely, “students with an associate degree took [an average of] 8.2 years to graduate with a bachelor’s degree, whereas students without an associate degree took 5.1 years.”

Administrators at UW realized that they were part of this national problem. Despite those long-standing articulation agreements, UW transfers with associate’s degrees had only a 24 percent two-year graduation rate, and they had on average twenty-one transferred credits that counted as electives rather than degree requirements. Those who did graduate UW earned an average of twenty more credits than students who didn’t transfer—a sign of the extra time and money the system was costing them.

So, since 2015, UW has been developing a new kind of articulation agreement, one between corresponding departments at UW and the community colleges, rather than between the institutions as a whole. This allows UW department faculty to work with their counterparts at each corresponding community college department to make sure transfer students are learning the same things as UW freshmen and sophomores. In return, UW allows transfers to apply their class credit toward their UW major. “Students coming in with an associate degree are completely prepared for junior-level course work at UW and are on track to graduate with a bachelor’s in two years,” said Mary Aguayo, the interim vice president for enrollment management.

The post The Twelve Most Innovative Colleges for Adult Learners appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Here at the Washington Monthly, we’re thrilled to see more national attention on the topic of social mobility. Since 2012, we’ve ranked America’s four-year colleges and universities based on their “bang for the buck”—that is, the extent to which they charge students who aren’t rich a reasonable price for quality education that will advance them in their careers. CUNY, UTEP, and Cal State campuses have all scored high on our rankings over the years because they excel to varying degrees at enrolling low-income students and helping them graduate and find good jobs—exactly the kinds of success markers we expect would produce the long-term results documented by Chetty et al.

Last year, we made major changes to the rankings methodology to incorporate new data from the U.S.
Department of Education’s College Scorecard, which will likely continue to be updated under the Trump administration with useful information on earnings, student loan repayment rates, and the percentage of first-generation students, among a host of other factors. Our 2017 Best Bang for the Buck rankings, which are broken down by region, can be found starting here. (We used the same data and methodology to create the social mobility portion of the main rankings; the methodology is explained here.)

The top best bang colleges in each of our five regions reflect a diverse group of institutions. Elite schools Harvard University and Amherst College (tops in the Northeast) both enroll unusually high proportions of first-generation students for their level of selectivity, and both institutions have strong post-college outcomes. Washington and Lee University (Southeast) has just 10 percent of students receiving Pell Grants (the second lowest in the region, after Elon University), but those who are admitted pay almost nothing out of pocket. Berea College (South) and College of the Ozarks (Midwest) are familiar to many in the higher education world for being tuition-free colleges that primarily serve low-income students. The University of Washington–
Tacoma is best in the West for serving large proportions of lower-income and first-generation students at a low price, and setting them up to earn, ten years after enrolling, $53,700 a year—nearly $12,000 more than former students from other colleges who have similar backgrounds earn.

Although MIT, Georgetown, Davidson, and Stanford make the top ten in their regions, most of the top institutions are more humble, moderately selective public and private colleges. CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice (where 55 percent of students receive Pell Grants and 48 percent are first-generation college-goers) checks in right behind Williams College in the Northeast. Mississippi’s Tougaloo College appears at number 7 in the South, with 89 percent of its students receiving Pell Grants and with its students’ post-graduation earnings of $28,200 more than $3,400 better than expected in low-cost Mississippi. Out west, California State University campuses occupy eleven of the top twenty-nine positions alongside five University of California peers.

The bottom of the rankings features a mix of expensive private nonprofit colleges with mediocre outcomes and branch campuses of for-profit colleges. Catholic University of America is in the bottom ten for the Southeast thanks to its very low rate of Pell recipients for its selectivity (just 13 percent) and its high net price of over $31,000 per year for families making less than $75,000. Baylor University, the University of Miami, High Point University, and Belmont University are other examples of low-performing colleges with little economic diversity and middling student earnings in spite of high price tags. If you’re looking at attending one of these colleges, we hope the data in these rankings will inspire you to ask hard questions about what that college is doing to provide students and their families with a better bang for the buck.

The post America’s Best Bang for the Buck Colleges 2017 appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On a Wednesday afternoon late last October, a thousand or so students at the University of Houston–Downtown (UHD) gathered on a campus lawn festooned with red and blue balloons, where they were joined by the school’s mascot, the Ed-U-Gator, a dancing costumed alligator. The occasion was Walk 2 Vote, a civic engagement initiative that’s part festival, part voter mobilization effort. Rhymes from Bun B, the Houston rap icon, blared from speakers as the students grabbed free food and drinks, mingling with comedians, musical guests, and politicians who worked the crowd. After Representative Sheila Jackson Lee ascended to the stage and urged students to head to the polls, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner took the microphone: “We need every single person to go out and vote and take it seriously. And it starts right here on the campus of UHD.”

Then, on cue, a sea of students, led by a mariachi band, walked ten minutes south into the heart of downtown Houston—passing a hipster cocktail bar and a dimly lit storefront advertising 24/7 bail bonds—to vote early at the county board of elections office.

The goal of Walk 2 Vote is to “make voting fun again,” said John Locke, who chaired the Walk 2 Vote committee last year. The festival itself is just one of three phases of the event. In early fall, the committee recruits students for voter deputy training. (Archaic state election law requires Texans to receive training before they can register voters.) Then, nearly every day in the student union, which looks out onto Houston’s skyline, the Walk 2 Vote committee sets up tables to register voters, putting together campaigns like “Eat 2 Pledge”: register to vote and sign a pledge to cast a ballot, get a free hot dog.

Locke, a thirty-three-year-old known around campus for his daily uniform of crisp business suit and tie, took an unlikely path to becoming a voter turnout activist. Raised by a single mother in Greenspoint, a gritty Houston neighborhood nicknamed “Gunspoint” by locals, Locke dropped out of high school during tenth grade. (He later earned a GED.) “I mixed in with the wrong type of people,” he said. “I found myself getting in trouble, suffering from drug addiction, and all that good stuff that comes with not being in the right place.” In 2011, he was convicted of felony drug possession and spent a year in jail.

The Harris County Jail happens to be about a hundred yards away from UHD. Through the slit of his cell window, Locke would peer out across the White Oak bayou and study the details of the campus. “I used to look down at students going to school,” he said as he gave me a tour on a blustery morning in early May, during finals week. He pointed out the jail, a nondescript brick fortress that looms over the college, eerily camouflaged to blend in with the surrounding utilitarian campus architecture. “And I was like, ‘I’m going to be a student here one day.’ ”

Locke—who just coincidentally shares a name with the English philosopher—was released in 2012. He was living in a homeless shelter just a block west of campus when he enrolled at UHD that summer, at the age of twenty-eight, to major in psychology. Outside the classroom, he discovered a passion for combatting homelessness in Houston, working with the local chapter of Food Not Bombs, an organization that feeds homeless people. A friend urged Locke to get involved with student government, and to join Walk 2 Vote, even though he had never voted in his life.

That friend, Ivan Sanchez, founded Walk 2 Vote in the fall of 2012 during his tenure as student body president. He conceived of it, he told me, after a course on Hispanic politics opened his eyes to the underrepresentation of Latinos in local politics in a city in which they make up 44 percent of the population. In 2012, Walk 2 Vote’s first year, nearly 400 students made the trek to vote early. In 2014, Locke was elected student body president and took over the initiative. That year, 600 walked to the polls, and in 2016, Locke’s last semester as a UHD student, the number reached around 1,000.

Clearly, Walk 2 Vote has been successful in mobilizing students to vote. Just under half of UHD students voted in 2012, and 18.6 percent cast ballots in the 2014 midterms, when voting rates tend to be lowest. At first glance, those numbers may seem hardly inspiring. But they are close to the national average for all colleges and universities—46.9 percent in 2012 and 18.8 in 2014—according to the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE) at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life. That’s significantly higher than what you would expect from a commuter school that closely mirrors the demographics of Houston itself: 46 percent of students are Latino, just 17 percent are white, and half of students come from families that make less than $40,000 annually. Considering that Latino and low-income people vote at very low rates, matching the national average is impressive. While NSLVE hasn’t yet released student voting rates from 2016, students and administrators at UHD expect that with the growth of Walk 2 Vote, the university will have its highest measured turnout rate yet.

On November 8, the presidential election was decided by fewer people than showed up to watch Clemson’s football team demolish Syracuse 54–0 three days earlier. In the aftermath of an election in which just 60 percent of eligible Americans participated, get-out-the-vote efforts have taken on a new urgency. College students are a key demographic to target, since people under thirty vote at abysmally low rates: the 19.9 percent turnout among eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds in the 2014 midterms was the lowest ever recorded. (Roughly 40 percent of college students are over twenty-five.) College students are about 10 percentage points more likely to vote than young people who aren’t enrolled in college, but given that education and income are key predictors of voting, their rate of participation is still shockingly low—and a major missed opportunity for democratic participation.

If mobilized, this bloc of upward of twenty million students—equivalent to 10 percent of all registered voters—has the capability to send shock waves throughout the political system. Glimpses of this potential surfaced in 2016. More primary voters under thirty voted for Bernie Sanders than for Clinton and Trump combined, a wave of support that carried Sanders deep into a surprisingly close contest.

But the promise of college student voting transcends the potential to influence the next election. Voting is mostly driven by habit: casting a ballot in the previous election is a stronger predictor of future voting than indicators like education and age. Since voting habits that are formed in young adulthood tend to stick, institutions of higher education are in a unique position to tangibly mold voters for life and fortify American democracy at a moment when it’s shakier than it has ever been. The University of Houston–Downtown’s Walk 2 Vote initiative is one example of how colleges can encourage students to take that first, crucial step to a life of active citizenry. The problem is, few colleges in America bother to even try.

What makes the present state of campus voting so disquieting is that colleges used to count preparing students for the civic responsibility of democracy among their most sacred duties. “If you go back to the pre-Revolutionary period, it was just remarkable how engaged some of the college students were in taking politics seriously,” said John Thelin, a historian of higher education at the University of Kentucky. “An inordinate number of college graduates were active in the Revolution and the framing of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It really came out of their undergraduate experience.”

When Thomas Jefferson enrolled at William & Mary in 1760, American higher education was an enclave reserved almost entirely for the sons of the well-to-do. As Americans pushed westward, colleges began dotting the map: by 1880, the U.S. had 800 colleges, five times as many as the entire continent of Europe. Most of these budding institutions were created to educate the clergy, teachers, and other scholarly professionals a growing nation required, and their civic mission was made clear in their founding documents. After World War II, with the GI Bill opening up colleges to the masses and America pitted in an ideological struggle against the Soviet Union, President Harry Truman formed a commission to chart the future of American higher education. Higher Education for American Democracy, the six-volume tome compiled by the Truman Commission, urged colleges to embed civics throughout classroom and campus life, not just in political science and history courses. The commission concluded that “education is the foundation of democratic liberties. Without an educated citizenry alert to preserve and extend freedom, it would not long endure.” These bracing words were followed up with virtually no action, however; having identified a great national need, the U.S. government didn’t require that colleges do anything to fill it.

The role of college in instilling democratic habits gained new urgency again in the 1960s, as students incensed by the Vietnam War and racial inequality began engaging in massive, occasionally violent campus protests. Members of Congress, perturbed by the unrest, decided that “what we need to do is get students out of their provost’s office and get them to vote,” said Jenny Diamond Cheng, a lecturer at Vanderbilt Law School who studies the Twenty-sixth Amendment, which lowered the voter age from twenty-one to eighteen in 1971. But the voting rate for eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds has never eclipsed its initial peak in 1972, the first election in which eighteen-year-olds could vote, in part because colleges were never asked to actively encourage their students to vote. The most Washington did was give them a nudge with a provision in the Higher Education Act of 1998 requiring universities to make a good-faith effort to distribute voter registration forms to all students. But at least as of 2004—the last time anyone checked—only 17 percent of institutions had actually complied.

Meanwhile, far from working to encourage college student voting, many Republican-controlled state legislatures are doing the opposite, crafting statutory obstacles that depress turnout among young people, who tend to lean liberal. Tennessee’s voter ID law, passed in 2011, allows administrators and faculty to vote with their university-issued IDs, but explicitly prevents students from doing the same. Four other states have similar voter ID restrictions, including Texas, where legislators in 2013 implemented a law that recognizes gun permits but not student IDs.

In the absence of any real investment in voting from American universities, it has been up to individuals like John Locke to fill the void.

What would it look like if colleges actually did foster engaged voting behavior? NSLVE is trying to figure that out. Since 2012, the organization has worked with colleges to calculate their precise student voting and registration rates by combining national voting records with enrollment data provided by a nonprofit called the National Student Clearinghouse. More than 1,000 colleges have granted NSLVE permission to analyze their enrollment records, giving researchers a database of 8.5 million student records to attempt to reverse-engineer a secret sauce for colleges to cultivate voting. Since 2012, NSLVE has identified dozens of institutions as positive outliers, meaning that their student voting rates are statistically higher than what their demographics would predict.

Nancy Thomas, who runs NSLVE out of Tufts University’s Institute for Democracy & Higher Education, believes that colleges have to focus on two facets of campus voting—logistical and motivational—to boost student turnout. “Removing the nuts-and-bolts barriers to voting should be a given: providing registration materials, tabling, finding a way for students to get to the polls,” she said, explaining the logistical components. “But then there is a whole other side, and it has to do with motivation. And I think that’s a much more complicated picture, and frankly much more important.”

At the University of Houston–Downtown, one of NSLVE’s positive outliers, Walk 2 Vote is proving successful by turning the logistical into the motivational—by making voting fun, as Locke put it. Locke and the Walk 2 Vote committee understand that building community enthusiasm around voting is more important than moralistic exhortations. “I’m not a citizen, but I can still have people sign pledge cards that they’re going to vote,” said Mustapha Nyallay, who succeeded Locke as student body president before graduating in May. “I play my part to make sure students are excited about voting. It’s all about creating that momentum.”

NSLVE has observed that at positive outlier institutions, faculty and administrators foster conditions for political participation constantly, not just during election years. Political discussions are embedded in the classroom and campus life through panels and events about political topics. And several of these colleges have mandatory first-year seminars in which students learn how to discuss and debate issues, both political and nonpolitical.

To see how another positive outlier campus is putting NSLVE’s theory to practice, in May I visited Northern Kentucky University, a public university of more than 15,000 students tucked into the hilly Kentucky suburbs of Cincinnati. Professors and administrators at NKU are proactive about creating a campus-wide consciousness about politics and civic engagement. And it seems to be working: 60.2 percent of students voted in 2012, and 27.1 percent in 2014.

The Scripps Howard Center for Civic Engagement is the fulcrum of efforts to create a full-time culture of political participation. The center hosts frequent small-group discussions on contentious political issues, facilitated by students and professors, called “Democracy Square LIVE!” Every week, it posts a public affairs question on a large whiteboard wall near a major thoroughfare on campus, inviting student comments. Mark Neikirk, the center’s director, said civic engagement is something “that we have to be working on all the time in a variety of ways. You don’t get 15,000 students who come to one event. You have to find them in different places and keep it up.” By seeking out partnerships with student groups and professors, Neikirk hopes to engage the broadest possible share of the student body.

During election seasons, Steven Weiss has the task of making politics seem exciting on campus. Since 2012, the communications professor has partnered with Neikirk to host interactive debate-watching parties inside the college’s “digitorium”—a lecture hall with a wall-sized high-tech video display. “Since we had such a big screen, we were able to populate it with a whole bunch of stuff,” Weiss said. “We have the feed in one screen, a Twitter feed in another screen to see everybody’s comments, and we have a third one with instant polling.” By keeping the mood light and deftly inserting humor, or attempts at it, into his list of questions—“Who has a better tie: Obama or Romney?”—Weiss tries to attract even the politically disengaged.

Ryan Salzman, a political science professor, integrates political awareness and civics into all of his classes. It’s not hard: Salzman himself is a city councilman in the small riverfront town of Bellevue, Kentucky. Salzman, who was awarded a civic education award in March from the Kentucky secretary of state’s office, said discussing his experiences as a politician helps maintain student interest in politics when national elections aren’t in the headlines. “Everyone wants to talk about the president; well, I talk about the mayor,” he told me. “Everyone wants to talk about Congress; well, let’s talk about the Kentucky General Assembly. A lot of what I seek to do in my classes is educate my students that these policies are crafted, executed, assessed, and reevaluated all within five miles of where they live and work.”

Schools like the University of Houston–Downtown and Northern Kentucky University are working to get their students excited about voting, but there’s no one incentivizing colleges themselves to invest in getting students to go to the polls. Governments and accreditation organizations are supposed to hold colleges’ feet to the fire, but there are no consequences for colleges that have lost sight of their public goal of preparing students to participate in democracy. Until that happens, the path toward increasing student voting rates will have to come from the bottom up.

John Locke is doing his part. Since he graduated in December, Locke has created his own nonprofit to turn Walk 2 Vote into a national movement. In 2016, Indiana University, the University of Iowa, and the University of Houston all held their own iterations of Walk 2 Vote, and Locke has ambitions of expanding the initiative to at least another twenty-five institutions by 2018.

Of course, Walk 2 Vote by itself is no panacea: for colleges with a substantial number of students voting absentee, or with no easily accessible early-voting location, it’s difficult to envision the event doing much to boost voting rates. Sandra Shapshay, an Indiana University professor who helped plan that school’s Walk 2 Vote—which featured a fall harvest theme of pumpkins and hay bales decorated with American flags—said the twenty-minute walk to the nearest early-voting location may have discouraged some students from participating.

Still, to begin to start fixing the dilemma of low voting rates, and to prove that students have the potential to participate more if given a nudge, colleges will need a lot more entrepreneurial initiatives like Walk 2 Vote—meaning a lot more entrepreneurs like John Locke.

“There is an energy that comes from students that doesn’t come from other generations,” Locke said as he walked me back to my hotel, his bald head gleaming under the unforgiving Houston sun. “When you can empower students to believe in their own potential of what they can accomplish, that’s a really life-changing experience.”

The post Young People Don’t Vote. Can Colleges Change That? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Tucked amid high-rise public housing projects between the bottom of Chinatown and the elbow of the East River is a tidy five-story brick building that houses University Neighborhood High School, a New York City public school. Nancy Corona spent the last two years working there as a member of the College Advising Corps, a nonprofit organization that places recent college graduates into high schools to help kids with the college application process. (For now, think Teach For America, but college advising.) When I visited, in early April, she had a meeting scheduled after school with a senior I’ll call David. Though bright, David had been missing classes—Corona suspected he was depressed—and was at risk of not graduating. Corona braced herself for a tough conversation.

But David had good news. He had been making it to school more regularly in the morning, despite a long commute from the Bronx. If he kept it up, he had a good shot at graduating. He had even signed up to attend community college in the fall. The problem was this: his dad was refusing to submit his tax information so David could apply for financial aid. Without that aid, there was no way he could afford to go.

David lived with his adult sister. Their dad lived with his girlfriend. He stopped by often to check in, David said, but their relationship was tense. “He was distrustful about me actually applying to college and getting accepted,” he told Corona. “He said, ‘Why should I do this for you if you’re not going to do what it takes to graduate?’ I didn’t know what to say to that.”

If you have kids in high school, I’m guessing your role in the college process looks a little different. If you’re a regular reader of this magazine, there’s a good chance you’re a member of the upper middle class; you almost certainly have a college degree. You’re probably pretty invested in getting your children into the best possible school. Maybe you’re helping with their essays, driving them to campus visits, or paying for SAT prep.

Most kids like David don’t have that advantage. Seventy-three percent of students at University Neighborhood High School qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Nearly half are Hispanic; most of the rest are black or Asian, including many recent Chinese immigrants. The odds are that they are the first in their families to go to college (called “first generation” in education circles). This means that their parents, while wanting the best for their kids, may not have the expertise to help them navigate admissions and financial aid.

So that job falls to the school guidance counselor. But most schools don’t have a Nancy Corona. In fact, the United States does a terrible job supplying guidance counselors for public school students. The American School Counselor Association recommends a maximum student-counselor ratio of 250 to 1, but only three small states—New Hampshire, Vermont, and Wyoming–—meet that number. According to the most recent public data, the national average is 482. Some states are particularly bad: California has 760 students for every counselor, Arizona 924. With such huge caseloads, even the most motivated counselor is lucky to get a few hours of one-on-one time all year with the average student.

The statewide ratio numbers alone understate the severity of the problem. First, they conceal disparities between rich districts and poor districts within states. Second, even where ratios are the same, counselors in poorer schools have more to deal with—violence, hunger, homelessness—than those in richer ones, who have time to go over application essays and letters of recommendation. According to a 2015 survey by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, counselors at public schools spent 22 percent of their time on college counseling, compared to 55 percent at private schools. Put simply, the kids who get college admissions help don’t need it, and the ones who need it don’t get it.

The good news is that the problem is far from insurmountable. Studies of the College Advising Corps suggest that providing dedicated college counselors to disadvantaged kids can move the needle on what should be the most urgent priority in American higher education: getting more low-income, first-generation, and minority students into college. And a few local and state governments are beginning to recognize the importance of well-funded, well-managed school counseling.

The question is whether more political leaders will wake up to the long-term value of investing in positions that are among the easiest to cut when budgets are tight. As James S. Murphy noted in the Atlantic last year, counselors don’t rate highly in public perception of where to invest in education. A 2016 national survey asked people what the top spending priority should be if taxes were raised to fund public schools. Spending on counselors came in last, chosen by only 6 percent of respondents—behind school supplies. Only thirty states require that high school students have access to counseling; the seven most populous states aren’t among them. Fewer than half of the thirty set a minimum counselor-student ratio, and those that do set it far higher than the recommended 1 to 250.

Providing more counseling is no panacea. Inequality in postsecondary education is a complex problem that starts before kids are even born. But establishing a robust advising program is relatively straightforward to implement, pays clear dividends, and attacks one of the most unfair parts of the admissions process—the random luck of being born to parents who went to college.

The typical guidance counselor actually does three jobs: behavioral and emotional counseling; academic support (helping students choose classes and so on); and advising on college or other post-graduation plans. Asking one person to do all three tasks is pretty weird—a bit like having your therapist look over your résumé. In poorer districts, especially, the behavioral-emotional side of the job can be overwhelming, as counselors help cope with the myriad nonacademic stresses that can arise from poverty. Add in the miscellaneous responsibilities they’re often saddled with, like exam proctoring and administrative duties, and little time is left for the nitty-gritty of college applications. In tacit recognition of this fact, most districts don’t even include postsecondary advising when they evaluate counselors. In response to a 2012 survey by the College Board, only 39 percent of counselors said they were held accountable for their students’ college application and acceptance rates.

Rich high schools generally don’t ask counselors to do it all. Elite private schools like Collegiate, in New York, or Sidwell Friends, in Washington, D.C., have stand-alone college advising departments with deep connections to admissions offices. Public schools in wealthy districts, where high property taxes pay for more resources, likely have at least a counselor or two on staff focused exclusively on college. According to the 2015 survey, “[Thirty] percent of public schools reported employing at least one counselor (full- or part-time) whose exclusive responsibility was to provide college counseling, compared to 73 percent of private schools.” And don’t forget that many well-to-do parents spend thousands of dollars on private admissions consulting.

Then you have public schools like the one I went to, in upper-middle-class Westfield, New Jersey. It’s the kind of town where some kids drive BMWs and some ride the bus, but most kids’ parents went to college and almost everyone graduates. Westfield High School doesn’t have a dedicated college office, but the guidance counselors have manageable caseloads (about 200 students each) and experience with the ins and outs of the college application process.

My counselor, Liz McDermott, was exceptional—but I would have been fine without her. My mom and dad, like most of my friends’ parents, went to selective colleges themselves and stayed up to date on things like the difference between early action and early decision. They weren’t going to let me blow it. When I called McDermott a few weeks ago, she said parents have gotten even more involved than when I was a student at Westfield, in the early aughts. Of course, even in affluent towns, plenty of children come from disadvantaged backgrounds or have problems that demand the attention of counselors. But McDermott was only half joking when she said that much of her job now involves getting parents to back off and let their kids take more responsibility. The schools where guidance counselors are the most helpful with college applications are also the ones where they’re the least necessary.

Things are very different in places where most students’ parents didn’t go to college. That’s one of the insights behind the College Advising Corps, which was founded in 2005. The organization partners with universities to place recent graduates—“near peers,” in education jargon—in high schools where most students are low-income, underrepresented minorities, or the first in their family to go to college. Most of the advisers, by design, come from a background similar to that of the students they work with. They supplement the existing counseling staff, and are officially on the payroll of the partner university wherever they work; their salaries come half from the university and half from philanthropic and public sources. (In New York City, the partner university is NYU.) Their job is strictly postsecondary advising: helping kids get into the best program they can, whether it’s a four-year university, two-year community college, or vocational training program. The program has a major presence not just in urban areas like New York City, but also in rural districts, where many high-achieving students may never have considered applying to an out-of-state school. Since its founding it has grown to serve nearly 200,000 kids a year.

“I don’t know what I would do without Nancy,” said Kathleen Hernandez, one of the two guidance counselors at University Neighborhood High School, referring to Nancy Corona, the College Advising Corps adviser. Hernandez is comfortable advising kids about college, but other priorities often get in the way. She listed a few: dealing with pregnancies; stocking snacks for kids who don’t get enough food at home; helping kids process the death of a family member. “They’re trying to get along with their day,” she said of her students, “but they’re constantly having to be resilient because they have no other choice.”

Corona grew up in Queens and graduated from Lawrence University, in Wisconsin. At UNHS she worked out of an unused classroom converted into an advising office. When I visited, there was a constant churn of students coming in during off periods for advice—on filling out confusing forms, interpreting financial aid offers, registering for placement tests.

It’s easy to overlook just how complicated the college process is—and the poorer you are, the more baroque it gets. As a group of seniors huddled around her desk during a free period one afternoon, Nancy and the kids spoke in a jargon-laden shorthand that reflected many hours spent wrangling with the demands of applying for financial aid.

“Even with an EFC that’s not zero, your tuition should still be covered by Pell and TAP,” she told a boy who had gotten into Sarah Lawrence College but was worried about affording it. He nodded knowingly, but I had to check my notes later: that’s “expected family contribution,” federal Pell Grants for low-income students, and New York State’s Tuition Assistance Program, an additional grant for New York residents to go to in-state schools. If you have teenage children, imagine them trying to keep track of all this—plus the difference between tuition, room and board, activity fees, and so on—on their own. That’s the situation many first-generation college-bound students are in.

“While I don’t have a degree in counseling, I do have technical mastery over the little details,” said Corona. “How to register for the SAT; where and when should you register; giving the student the time and attention to say, ‘Let’s look at Google Maps to find the right place for you. Are you sure you can wake up at 7:45 in the morning? Do you have a Metrocard? Will you be able to afford the fare to go on a weekend?’ ”

The College Advising Corps isn’t the only group trying to close the counseling gap. College Possible, an AmeriCorps organization, has been placing recent graduates in high schools for two-year terms since 2000. They provide after-school assistance and focus both on admissions and on ACT and SAT prep. In Washington, D.C., the non-profit DC-CAP, established in 1999, has a college adviser in every high school.

But the CAC is particularly well positioned to answer the most important question: Does it work? DC-CAP, because of its very comprehensiveness, doesn’t have a control to compare its students to. College Possible’s advisers work with small cohorts of students who had to apply for the program, meaning there’s self-selection; kids who apply are already more likely to make it to college. The CAC, on the other hand, is open to the whole school, not just students who apply and are chosen. That, plus the program’s size and narrowly defined focus on post-secondary advising, makes it easier to measure its impact.

Which the organization does, constantly, with help from Stanford researchers. One study found that in New York City, where the CAC has a large presence, the rate of college enrollment rose by an average of 16 percentage points in the two years after a school got an adviser. Crucially, CAC advisees stay in college at around the national rate, despite being disproportionately at risk of dropping out based on their demographics—perhaps because the program emphasizes sending kids to schools that have solid graduation statistics.

A second Stanford-based study, a randomly controlled trial of the CAC’s programs in Texas, found modest but positive results, with a crucial, if predictable, caveat: the impact depends on school size. At big schools, the effect of an adviser was almost negligible, while at smaller schools, an adviser increased the rate of college enrollment the fall after graduation by 2 to 3 percentage points overall. (That could explain some of the New York numbers: high schools there are very small.) The researchers noted particularly “strong significant effects for males, Hispanics, and for low-income students.” The increase, they concluded, would more than pay for itself through the greater earnings and tax base that accrue from more students getting degrees.

So there’s evidence that supplying dedicated college advisers can pay dividends in terms of low-income, first-generation, and minority kids getting a college education. But the research also suggests that it only works if the number of advisers is high enough. So the next question is: Can it scale?

One Stanford admissions essay asks applicants to write a note to their future roommate. Samit (not his real name), a junior in Tampa, Florida, wrote about his favorite fast food restaurant (Checkers), his favorite author (Nicholas Sparks), and his feelings on texting (ambivalent).

Not gonna cut it. An unironic appreciation for fast food and lowbrow fiction won’t catch the eye of a Stanford admissions officer. But buried in Samit’s essay was a one-line reference to doing volunteer work to prevent child marriage in Bangladesh, where his family is from, each summer. Write more about that!

Someone probably would have told Samit this if his parents were plugged into the college process, or if his school counselor had time for him, or if he could afford private admissions consulting. But Samit’s parents moved back to Bangladesh when he started high school; he lives with his older brother, a rising senior at the University of South Florida. His guidance counselor, he said, is too busy to help.

That’s where I came in. Samit and I connected through UStrive, a web-based advising platform that pairs adult volunteers with high school students who are seeking help with the college application process. I created a mentor profile in June, when enterprising juniors were getting their affairs in order for applications this fall. I filled out a short profile and was pretty quickly matched with a few kids, including Samit. The platform includes a video chat, but Samit and I did a voice call. He told me about his academic background: an elite SAT verbal score, a solid math score, and good but not spectacular grades. His top choice was Yale, and he was targeting other Ivy League schools and Stanford; if those didn’t work out, he figured he would go somewhere in-state, like the University of Florida or University of Miami. He would need a full ride no matter what.

Samit was motivated and self-aware enough to know he needed help with his essays. What he didn’t know is that there are plenty of selective schools that are easier to get into than Yale but offer better financial aid, and academic support, than the University of Miami—a private university that costs even poor families around $25,000 per year after financial aid. Samit and I agreed that part of our goal this summer would be to add some of those colleges to his list.

The UStrive platform has a lot going for it. It can connect kids and adults anywhere in the country, regardless of what local resources are available. It pulls data from the federal government’s College Scorecard to allow students to see, for example, what the real cost of a given school would likely be based on their family finances. But it also has clear limitations. Some are technological and will likely be fixed in an upcoming update. But more important, I wasn’t really sure how to use my time with the students I was mentoring. The curriculum materials are vague, and there’s no training. It seems like a lot to ask of a volunteer to figure out how to be a college adviser on the fly. (A user experience manager told me the next update will include efforts to make the resources more useful and self-explanatory.)

After a few weeks of mentoring students on the UStrive platform, I came away with the sense that it’s an excellent resource for already-motivated kids who need help with specific tasks. But I felt skeptical that an online mentoring program could come close to filling in the gap that an in-person adviser could. Even the kids I matched with, who had taken the initiative to sign up, had trouble showing up for our appointments consistently. They’re teenagers, after all, and no one was forcing them to talk to me.

For the past two years, the College Advising Corps, College Possible, and a few other organizations have partnered with CollegePoint, a Bloomberg-funded web advising project aimed specifically at high-performing, low-income kids. An evaluation is pending. Nicole Hurd, the CAC’s founder and CEO, hopes the project will help determine the strengths and limitations of web-based advising. She distinguished between “transactional” work, like editing an essay or helping a student look up a certain deadline, and “relational” or “inspirational” work, like convincing a student he’s college material. “That kind of stuff is never going to be done by a nudge, it’s never going to be done by a text,” she said. “We’re trying to figure out the combination of in-person and technology to be effective.”

Abdul Aziz is a CAC adviser at Digital Arts and Cinema Technology High School in Brooklyn. He immigrated with his family from Bangladesh as a child and grew up in East New York, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, before making it to Franklin & Marshall College. Short and handsome, with sleepy eyes and a low-key saunter, Aziz could pass for an especially cool high school senior. When I visited, it was first period, and juniors were straggling into the auditorium for a presentation by a recruiter from the State University of New York system. They had taken the SAT the previous day. “Shakeem!” Aziz called to a surly kid sitting too far back, waving at him to move up. “Good morning.” Shakeem sauntered over and gave Aziz a fist bump. “How’d the test go?” Aziz asked. “It went okay.” Another boy walked up and offered a handshake. Abdul countered with a fist bump. “You know I don’t do that,” the boy said. Aziz retorted, “I don’t know where your hand has been.”

Aziz saw building that kind of rapport as central to the job. During the academic year, he often stayed after school to hang out and play games with students. His desktop background was a picture of him with members of last year’s senior class, taken on one of the many college visits he organized. He could tell me what each kid was up to now; almost all were in college. Aziz also had to be dogged with students’ parents. They wanted the best for their kids, he said, but tended not to be engaged in the college process. He had to call some parents a dozen times before they filled out their part of the federal financial aid application forms.

It’s hard to imagine doing what Aziz does over video chat.

But can you scale up something that relies on face-to-face contact? It’s not as outlandish an idea as it sounds. In New York City, with new support from the city’s department of education, the CAC is more than doubling its reach this fall, going from twenty-three schools to fifty, and plans to double again next year.

What would it take to go truly national? The CAC’s Nicole Hurd estimates that there are about 1.4 million low-income students in the country who fit the need profile her organization targets, based on U.S. Department of Education data. To serve them at a 1-to-200 ratio would require 7,000 advisers, about ten times the number the CAC currently provides. At a salary of $25,000 per year, that would cost $175 million annually in adviser pay, by far the biggest program cost. (Of course, it might be hard to find that many idealists willing to work for so little money.)

Traci Kirtley, the chief program officer of College Possible, did a similar calculation. “We think it would cost about a billion dollars to serve every low-income student with a coach like this,” she said. College Possible coaches work with a smaller group of students than CAC advisers, making the cost per student much greater. But even a billion dollars isn’t that much money on a national scale. As Kirtley pointed out, it’s about what the federal government already spends per year on less cost-effective college access programs. Now, the Trump administration has proposed slashing even that spending, so it’s unrealistic to expect more federal investment anytime soon. But a future presidential candidate interested in low-cost, high-impact college access interventions could do worse than proposing a few hundred million dollars in federal funding to expand evidence-based programs like the CAC that supplement school counseling staffs.

Colorado has made the most aggressive wide-scale public investment in beefed-up school counseling. In 2008, the state legislature established a grant program that provides funding to add counselors to lower-income public schools. Unlike the CAC, these counselors aren’t focused specifically on college advising. Still, some early evaluations are promising: according to a 2016 report, the rate of postsecondary enrollment in districts that received funding went from 31 percent in 2011 to 44 percent in 2014 while the statewide rate remained stable. The program also has had a measurable effect on dropout rates, leading the state department of education to calculate that, given the burden dropouts place on government services, it saves the state much more than it costs. Whatever the specific model, it’s hard to argue against making a more serious investment in college advising for the high schoolers who most need it.

It took Nancy Corona a few days to work up the courage to call David’s dad. As a young woman herself, not quite two years out of college, she still got nervous about this kind of conversation. But eventually she got him on the phone and convinced him to submit his tax information so David could complete his financial aid application. In June, she texted me a picture from the school’s graduation ceremony. In it, she stands beside David, who wears a cap and gown and a shy smile. “Graduation was today and his father was there to see it!” she wrote.

In the fall, David will start at LaGuardia Community College. Success is far from certain: LaGuardia has a low graduation rate, and David can’t rely on his parents to support and guide him. But it’s a start. A college degree remains the best path to upward mobility for kids like David, and without Corona he probably wouldn’t be going anywhere.

The post A College Adviser in Every School appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In 2015, a New York Times op-ed acidly observed that Yale University had spent $480 million that year on fees for hedge fund managers to grow the university’s already massive endowment—while spending just $170 million on tuition assistance and fellowships for its students.

“We’ve lost sight of the idea that students, not fund managers, should be the primary beneficiaries of a university’s endowment,” wrote law professor Victor Fleischer, whose 2006 proposal to change the tax treatment of “carried interest” became a liberal cause célèbre. “The private-equity folks get cash; students take out loans.”

Though Fleischer’s screed was not the first to attack elite college endowments—progressive commentator and former Clinton administration Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has also railed against them—it presaged a wave of criticism that has since become a storm. Shortly after Fleischer’s op-ed was published, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell grabbed the baton, launching what’s become an ongoing, high-profile crusade against fat-cat university fund-raising. In 2016, he dedicated an entire podcast to the absurdity of billionaires donating millions in endowment dollars to schools that don’t need the money, and later waged a very public war against Stanford University for its fund-raising appeals to alumni. “If Stanford, with $22 billion in the bank, still has needy undergraduates, how are they spending the billions they ALREADY have?” he tweeted in February.

It’s not just liberals like Gladwell who are outraged. The GOP-led Congress has held at least two separate hearings examining the taxpayer subsidies that support endowments, which are now potentially under scrutiny as part of tax reform (assuming Congress gets there). Even Donald Trump has weighed in. “Many universities spend more on private equity fund managers than on tuition programs,” said then presidential candidate Trump last September, channeling Fleischer’s critique (albeit a little iffy on the details).

Observers of higher education have long known, of course, about the grotesque piles of cash the nation’s elite schools have been accumulating, as well as the glaring inequality between these schools and their poorer kin. According to a 2016 analysis by the Education Trust, 75 percent of the nation’s total college endowment wealth is held by less than 4 percent of phenomenally wealthy schools.

In addition to Yale, whose endowment was a whopping $25.4 billion in 2016, the holders of these outsized endowments include Harvard ($34.5 billion), Stanford ($22.4 billion), Princeton ($22.2 billion), and MIT ($13.2 billion), as well as top-tier state schools such as the University of Michigan ($9.7 billion) and the University of Virginia ($5.9 billion). In 2016, the fifty wealthiest universities in the country owned $331 billion in endowment wealth—a figure equal to roughly triple the size of California’s state budget last year and ten times that of Pennsylvania.

The nation’s elite schools have long been politically sacrosanct—as have their tax-exempt endowments—but that may no longer be the case. The 2016 election gave vent to the anti-elite, anti-establishment populism that had been building on both the left and the right. It’s no shock, then, that the elite higher education establishment would become the inevitable target of these twin resentments—as the hoarders of privilege on the left and as purveyors of liberal indoctrination on the right. What’s happening now is a convergence of both liberal and conservative concerns about the size of university endowments, the extreme and growing inequality between rich schools and the rest, and the way in which the wealthiest universities are spending their endowments (or not). If Democrats can champion change without also reinforcing conservative hostility to academia, the result could be long-needed reforms that prompt—or force—America’s elite colleges and universities to spend more of their wealth on their intended mission: broadening educational and economic opportunities for more students.

Endowments have come under the microscope before—in 2008, Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley and Montana Democratic Senator Max Baucus launched an inquiry into 136 colleges, asking them for details on their endowments and spending on student aid. When the financial crisis temporarily shrank university endowments, interest in the issue shrank too, and no legislation resulted.

But that’s changing. Last year New York Republican Representative Tom Reed began circulating a draft bill requiring schools with endowments larger than $1 billion to spend more money on tuition assistance for “working families” or face heavy penalties. Meanwhile, Democratic legislators in Connecticut introduced a bill in 2016 to tax the commercial property held by Yale, a measure proponents say would generate $65.2 million for the state.

One indication that colleges are taking the threat to their endowments more seriously than they did in 2008 is the fact that they’ve ramped up K Street in their defense. In April 2017, Bloomberg reported that almost two dozen schools, including Princeton and Cornell, filed lobbying disclosure forms listing endowments as an issue.

Endowments are becoming a political target because they are increasingly (and rightly) seen as both a cause and a consequence of the growing inequities in higher education and the economy. Harvard raises orders of magnitude more money for its endowment than a typical college, not because it has, say, a superior alumni relations department. Rather, it’s because it recruits elite students, mostly from affluent backgrounds, who after graduation get recruited to big banks and consulting firms, who then become part of the .01 percent of Americans who earn a disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth, and who then gratefully write $1 million checks to their alma mater.

This self-reinforcing loop of privilege is then further accelerated by the U.S. tax code. One recently published analysis, by the Haas Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, calculates that the tax subsidies supporting college endowments totaled $19.6 billion in 2012. This includes the value of the tax exemptions provided to the universities themselves as well as the value of tax deductions to donors. This figure, moreover, includes the value of state and local tax breaks enjoyed by schools that use tax-exempt bonds to finance infrastructure projects rather than dipping directly into their endowments—a strategy known as “indirect tax arbitrage.” “It’s not like this is private money built up the old-fashioned way,” said Mark Schneider, vice president of the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and a longtime proponent of endowment reform.

Further compounding this inequality are various other government subsidies that schools receive. Counting the value of tax breaks given to schools and their donors, as well as direct federal support such as grants for research and work study (yes, elite schools get more of both these types of dollars), “private” schools such as Stanford and Princeton get far more government help than “public” universities and community colleges, despite the fact that public schools are the institutions far more likely to service the middle and working class. According to a 2015 analysis by AIR’s Schneider and Nexus Research, Stanford receives roughly $63,000 a year per student in direct and indirect public subsidies, while its in-state neighbor Cal State Fullerton receives just $4,000. “[W]hat justifies the high per-student government subsidies at the elite private universities, and the low per-student subsidies in public universities?” wrote Robert Reich, citing similar research. “There is no justification.”

Like liberals, conservatives say that they too are concerned about college affordability. “It is a disservice to the next generation of students that colleges continue to stock pile large sums of money that are tax exempt, and for which donors receive tax deductions, while tuition costs continue to rise,” said Representative Reed, a leading Trump supporter, in a statement accompanying his endowment reform legislation.

Elite universities argue that their endowments do indeed benefit students as well as provide vital support for research and university infrastructure. Harvard, for instance, noted in its response to Congress that it spent $175 million on undergraduate financial aid in 2015 and that just one in four of its graduates leaves with student debt.

That there is some truth to such a claim is reflected in the fact that Stanford, Harvard, and MIT are the top three schools on the Washington Monthly’s rankings of national universities, which measure schools in part on the net tuition they charge lower- and middle-income students, those students’ graduation rates, and how much they earn after leaving college. These schools do indeed offer spectacular educational opportunities at virtually no cost to students of modest means who are lucky enough to get in.

The problem is that very few such students ever get in.

Researchers at UC Berkeley’s Haas Institute, for example, found that elite schools have not expanded their admissions capacity, even as their endowments have ballooned. “Schools in the top 5 percent have maintained the same low levels of total undergraduate enrollment since 1990,” wrote Charlie Eaton, the study’s lead author.

Moreover, the vast majority of these limited slots are going to wealthy kids. Recent research from Stanford’s Raj Chetty and colleagues found that children from the top 1 percent of families by income were seventy-seven times more likely to go to an Ivy League school than children who grew up in the bottom fifth of families. Among the twelve schools the study dubbed the “Ivy League plus”—the eight Ivy League schools, together with the University of Chicago, MIT, Stanford, and Duke—just 3.8 percent of students came from the bottom 20 percent of families, while 14.5 percent were raised as one-percenters. At Harvard, more than 70 percent of the student body came from the top 20 percent of households, compared to only 3 percent from the bottom fifth.

Chetty also found that the share of poorer kids in elite schools hasn’t much improved over time. While the number of children from low-income families attending college rose during the 2000s, the vast majority of those children ended up at two-year colleges or for-profit schools; the share of these students at selective schools did not change much at all. Likewise, a separate analysis by the Education Trust found that nearly half of the schools with endowments of $500 million or more “enroll so few Pell Grant recipients that they are in the bottom 5 percent nationally.”

The bottom line, Chetty’s study concluded, is that access to elite colleges by low-income students has remained “largely unchanged.” “[T]here is substantial income segregation across colleges, with students from rich families predominantly attending some institutions while students from poor families attend others.”

The fact that conservatives have now joined liberals in wanting to do something about the gross inequities in college endowments could lead to a bright spot of progress in an otherwise dismal legislative landscape this year. But liberals should embrace this newfound conservative enthusiasm with some caution.

A particular worry is that the narrow issue of endowment reform will become engulfed in a broader attack against public support for higher education. That’s an outcome that the nation’s public colleges—the ones that don’t have big endowments, and few enough subsidies—can ill afford.

There are, unfortunately, some danger signs afoot, including a sudden rise in partisanship around the value of colleges and universities. A June 2017 poll by the Pew Research Center, for example, found that 58 percent of Republicans now say that colleges and universities have “a negative effect on the country,” up from 45 percent last year. By comparison, nearly three-quarters of Democrats see college positively.

Education also proved to be a fault line in the 2016 election, with stark divisions in the voting patterns of those who have a college degree and those who do not. While Trump’s staunchest supporters were the non-college vote—including 67 percent of non-college-educated whites and 51 percent of all voters with a high school education or less—Clinton was the favorite of educated elites, garnering 58 percent of voters with post-graduate degrees and just 28 percent of non-college-educated whites. In 2012, in contrast, it was GOP candidate Mitt Romney who won the majority of college graduates (by 51 percent), while Barack Obama won voters without a college degree (by exactly the same margin).

Education may be, in fact, the next cultural partisan divide, displacing old divisions over issues like gay marriage, which are receding in relative prominence. A defining trait of Trumpism is its anti-intellectualism—personified by Trump himself. And it’s no accident that the emergence of this educational-political gap coincides with a constant and concerted attack by conservative media on the nation’s colleges, under the guise of campus free speech, critiques of “political correctness,” and so on.

The risk is that conservatives use the legitimate case for endowment reform as the Trojan horse for its assault on higher education. One way to stop this from happening is for the nation’s elite universities to step up and reform themselves—by voluntarily using more of their endowment wealth to expand class sizes and grow the share of lower-income students they enroll. Schools argue that many of the donations they receive are earmarked for specific purposes by their wealthy donors. But that only means that they should work harder at steering donors away from vanity projects, and eschew college rankings metrics that encourage more spending on student perks such as food courts and lazy rivers instead of on more useful benefits such as lower tuitions and increased academic services. By taking on these reforms, elite institutions can help defang the coming assault on their status while creating the broader access to opportunity that Americans would like to see.

Unfortunately, schools seem to prefer their accustomed defensive crouch, as evidenced by their lobbying push to preserve the status quo. That’s why liberals and conservatives should seize the current moment to work together on endowment reform legislation.

An excellent approach is the proposal offered up by AIR’s Mark Schneider and Jorge Klor de Alva, president of Nexus Research, which is narrowly targeted toward the class of schools that can easily afford to be more generous. In particular, Schneider and de Alva propose a relatively small (0.5 percent to 2 percent) federal excise tax on endowments over $500 million, which would be offset by the amount schools spend on financial aid. Moreover, the taxes would be earmarked for the support of public regional and community colleges.

“Our proposal lets colleges write off the money that goes to low-income students—and if they don’t do it, we tax them and transfer that money to community colleges, which is where we’re going to be getting the bulk of our workers in the future,” Schneider said.

Schneider and de Alva’s proposal would spare the vast majority of schools (most of which have endowments that are negligible by comparison, if they have one at all), create incentives for wealthy schools to do the right thing, and potentially expand funding for community colleges. Another advantage is that it would encourage more schools to spend, not hoard, their accumulating wealth. According to the Education Trust, many elite schools with large endowments spend less than 5 percent of their assets per year—the threshold spending requirement currently imposed on tax-exempt charitable foundations, but not on university endowments. The Education Trust’s analysis finds that bumping up the spend rate at the thirty-five wealthiest schools that did not meet this threshold in 2013 would generate an additional $418 million in potential financial aid funding.

What would make the Schneider–de Alva proposal even stronger is the addition of metrics to ensure that additional endowment spending is targeted at the bottom 80 percent of Americans, and that the share of these students at elite schools increases. Specifically, schools should be required to report the dollar amount and share of their endowment spending that goes toward financial aid, the share of such aid that goes to households in the bottom 80 percent, and the share of their student body that comes from lower-income households. And while Schneider and de Alva propose allowing schools to write off endowment funds that pay for financial aid for lower-income students, schools should also be allowed to write off funds spent on expanding class sizes—provided that these additional slots go to students from lower-income families. A sensible, narrowly tailored, and non-punitive plan for equitable endowment reform such as this could go a long way toward making access to an elite education a reality for greater numbers of deserving students.

In the era of Trump, many of America’s colleges pride themselves as the defenders of democracy, liberal values, and merit. But the best way to accomplish that mission might be to ensure that higher education itself retains its democratic commitment to opportunity. The first step is to take a hard look at how elite schools deploy the vast wealth at their command.

The post Ivy League Endowments Under Fire appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Four floors above a dull cinder-block lobby in a nondescript building at Ohio State University, the doors of a slow-moving elevator open on an unexpectedly futuristic 10,000-square-foot laboratory bristling with technology. It’s a reveal reminiscent of a James Bond movie. In fact, the researchers who run this year-old, $750,000 lab at OSU’s Spine Research Institute resort often to Hollywood comparisons.

Thin beams of blue light shoot from thirty-six of the same kind of infrared motion cameras used to create lifelike characters for films like Avatar. In this case, the researchers are studying the movements of a volunteer fitted with sensors that track his skeleton and muscles as he bends and lifts. Among other things, they say, their work could lead to the kind of robotic exoskeletons imagined in the movie Aliens.

The complex and cutting-edge research here combines the expertise of the university’s medical and engineering faculties to study something decidedly commonplace: back pain, which affects as many as eight out of every ten Americans, accounts for more than 100 million annual lost workdays in the United States alone, and has accelerated the opioid addiction crisis.

“The growth of the technology around us has become so familiar that we don’t question where it comes from,” says Bruce McPheron, an entomologist and the university’s executive vice president and provost, looking on. “And where it happens consistently is at a university.”

But university research is in trouble, and so is an economy more dependent on it than many people understand. Federal funding for basic research—more than half of it conducted on university campuses like this one—has effectively declined since 2008, failing to keep pace with inflation. This is before we take into account Trump administration proposals to slash the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) budgets by billions of dollars more.

Trump’s cuts would affect all research universities, but not equally. The problem is more pronounced at public universities than privates, and especially at public institutions in the Midwest, which have historically conducted some of the nation’s most important research. These schools are desperately needed to diversify economies that rely disproportionately on manufacturing and agriculture and lack the wealthy private institutions that fuel the knowledge industries found in Silicon Valley or along Boston’s 128/I-95 corridor. Yet many flagship midwestern research universities are being weakened by deep state budget cuts. Threats to pensions (in Illinois) and tenure (in Wisconsin) portend an exodus of faculty and their all-important research funding, and have already resulted in a frenzy of poaching by better-funded and higher-paying private institutions, industry, and international competitors.

While private institutions are better shielded from funding cuts by huge endowments, midwestern public universities have much thinner buffers. The endowments of the universities of Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois and Ohio State, which together enroll nearly 190,000 students, add up to about $11 billion—less than a third of Harvard’s $37.6 billion. Together, Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, which enroll about 50,000 students combined, have more than $73 billion in the bank to help during lean times. They also have robust revenues from high tuitions, wealthy alumni donors, strong credit, and other support to fall back on. Compare that to the public university system in Illinois, which has cut its higher education budget so deeply that Moody’s downgraded seven universities, including five to junk bond status.

This ominous reality could widen regional inequality, as brainpower, talent, and jobs leave the Midwest and the Rust Belt—where existing economic decline may have contributed to the decisive shift of voters toward Donald Trump—for places with well-endowed private and better-funded public universities. Already, some midwestern universities have had to spend millions from their battered budgets to hang on to research faculty being lured away by wealthier schools. A handful of faculty have already left, taking with them most if not all of their outside funding.

“We’re in the early stages of the stratification of public research universities,” said Dan Reed, vice president for research and economic development at the University of Iowa. “The good ones will remain competitive. The rest may decline.” Those include the major public universities established since the 1860s, when a federal grant set aside land for them in every state. “We spent 150-plus years building a public higher education system that was the envy of the world,” said Reed, who got his graduate degrees at Purdue, in Indiana. “And we could in a decade do so much damage that it could take us thirty years to recover.”

That land grant was called the Morrill Act. Abraham Lincoln signed it into law during the depths of the Civil War, in 1862, resulting in the establishment or major expansion of, among others, Purdue, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Minnesota, the University of Missouri, and Ohio State. Along with many other major public universities in the Midwest, each would go on to have an outsized impact.

It was at Illinois that the first modern internet browser was developed, along with other advances in computer science and technology including early versions of instant messaging, multiplayer games, and touch screens. Today, researchers there are working on a new treatment for brain cancer, a way to boost photosynthesis to increase crop yields, and a solution to the growing problem of antibiotic resistance.

Scientists at the University of Minnesota created the precursor to the World Wide Web, performed the first open-heart surgery, and developed GORE-TEX waterproof fabric. The University of Wisconsin is where human embryonic stem cells first were isolated, and it has since become a center of stem cell research. Researchers there are trying to develop new drugs to fight the Ebola and West Nile viruses. The University of Iowa’s Virtual Soldier Research Program uses human modeling and simulation to design new military equipment, and its National Advanced Driving Simulator is heavily involved in driverless-vehicle research.

Universities perform more than half of all basic research in America, and public research universities in particular account for nearly 60 percent of the $63.7 billion allocated annually by the federal government for research. That spending, in turn, produces more than 2,600 patents and 400 companies a year, according to the National Science Board.

The impact on local economies is hard to miss. In places like Columbus, Ohio, and Columbia, Missouri, the big research universities are among the most important institutions in town. The checkerboard patchwork of farms on the approach to Port Columbus International Airport gives way to office buildings housing high-tech companies spun off by Ohio State and the affluent suburbs where their employees live. The real estate company CBRE ranks the city as the country’s top small market for attracting tech talent.

More than one in five graduate students who worked on sponsored research at eight Big Ten universities studied by Ohio State economist Bruce Weinberg, including Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Purdue, and Ohio State, stayed in the state where they attended school—13 percent of them within fifty miles of the campus. That may not sound like a lot—and, indeed, the exodus of highly educated people is a serious problem—but it’s significant when you consider that the jobs for these students exist in a national labor market. People with engineering PhDs from Minnesota could take their talents anywhere. If even 20 percent stick around, that’s a big win for states that can’t expect an influx of educated elites from other parts of the country. These graduates provide an educated workforce that employers need, create jobs themselves by starting their own businesses, and pay taxes.

These universities have served as bulwarks against a decades-long trend of economic activity fleeing smaller cities and the center of the country for the coasts. Since the 1980s, deregulation and corporate consolidation have led to a drastic hollowing out of the local industries that once sustained heartland cities. (For more on this subject, see Brian S. Feldman’s “The Real Reason Middle America Should Be Angry,” in our March/April/May 2016 issue.) But you can’t just pick up a university and move it from Madison to New York in the way you can with a bank, an insurance company, or even a factory.

“What difference does having a major research university in a place like Wisconsin make?” said University of Wisconsin Chancellor Rebecca Blank. “It’s the future of the state.” If Blank is right, then current trends put that future in doubt for much of the Midwest. Many of these same universities have suffered some of the nation’s deepest cuts to public higher education. Illinois reduced per-student spending by an inflation-adjusted 54 percent between 2008 and last year, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The figure was 22 percent in Iowa and Missouri, 21 percent in Michigan, 15 percent in Minnesota and Ohio, and 6 percent in Indiana. While higher education funding increased last year in thirty-eight states, Scott Walker’s 2015–17 budget cut another $250 million from the University of Wisconsin system. The University of Iowa recently had its state appropriation cut by 6 percent, including an unexpected $9 million in the middle of the fiscal year.

The University of Missouri is eliminating about 400 employee positions, many through layoffs, after protests over race and other issues resulted in the resignations of the chancellor and system president and a major drop in enrollment. That decline, plus state budget cuts, will cost the school more than $31 million, though it hopes to make up some of that shortfall by increasing tuition.

These financial woes would only be made worse by Trump’s proposed budget, which would cut funding by between 11 percent and 18 percent for the federal agencies that provide the bulk of government support for university research. Congress has so far resisted this call, instead adding $2 billion to the NIH and $8.7 million to the NSF in the five-month budget extension approved in April. But budget cuts remain a threat. So does a Trump budget proposal to eliminate so-called indirect cost payments—billions of dollars’ worth of federal reimbursements for overhead such as lab space and support staff to conduct the research. (The House Republicans’ 2018 budget plan rejects that idea, at least for medical research.)

Private universities with big endowments and wealthy donors may be able to weather the storm. (So, too, may the handful of public universities, like the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia, that receive far more private than public funding.) But most public research institutions won’t.

This is not abstract or anecdotal. Midwestern public universities are already experiencing a pattern of relative decline, based on NSF rankings of universities by total research-and-development expenditures.

From fiscal years 2007 to 2015, according to NSF data, federal funding for university- and college-based research grew by 8 percent nationwide. But for the seven states generally considered by research organizations to make up the Midwest—Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin (to its definition of “Midwest,” the U.S. Census Bureau adds Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota)—the increase was only 4 percent. Both those numbers lag far behind the roughly 14 percent inflation during that time period, meaning that federal funding for university research actually decreased overall, and it decreased more in the Midwest. As private and better-funded public universities elsewhere in the country found alternative sources of support, they pushed their midwestern rivals down the research rankings.

The University of Wisconsin–Madison was ranked second in 2008; in 2015, for the first time since the figures have been tracked, it fell out of the top five. Ohio State dropped from tenth to twentieth, Missouri from seventy-first to eighty-fifth. The University of Iowa rose from sixtieth in 2008 to a peak of thirty-ninth in 2010, but has since fallen back to forty-ninth. Purdue, for which the NSF rankings date only from 2010, has slipped from thirty-second then to thirty-seventh now.

Some experts caution against reading too much into these numbers. Big changes in research rankings could result from shifts in the type of research under way, said Howard Gobstein, executive vice president at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. Biomedical research, for example, costs more and brings in bigger grants than research in the humanities.

The question is how long that can last. In Illinois, for instance, research output has stayed surprisingly steady as of 2015, the most recent year for which full data is available. But since then, a budget impasse has resulted in some of the deepest cuts to higher education in the nation. (Thanks to a legislative override, the more than two-year budget standoff finally ended in July, but significant damage had already been done to university enrollments, staffing, and facilities.)

“It really is amazing that the administrators and staff can keep it together by cutting everywhere they can,” said Arthur Kramer, who last year left a post as head of the University of Illinois’s Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, a 313,000-square-foot research center, for a provost position at private Northeastern University in Boston. “But this can’t go on forever.”

Rebecca Blank, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has been outspoken about the problems facing her institution and others like it. She told the state board of regents in 2015 that budget cuts had hastened Wisconsin’s much-lamented fall out of the top five of the NSF rankings; more reductions, she warned, would further jeopardize the school’s standing as a top research university. (Governor Scott Walker’s proposed budget would restore $105 million over the next two years to the University of Wisconsin system, and an additional $35 million to offset money lost from cutting tuition. But that’s still a full $110 million less than what the system lost in the 2015–17 budget.)

Prodded by Walker, Wisconsin’s legislature changed tenure protections to allow for the firing of tenured faculty for reasons other than an imminent threat to the survival of the institution—the threshold in many other systems. The result has been something many other public universities are reluctant to discuss, but that Blank addresses frankly: the raiding of her faculty by better-endowed institutions.

More than 140 Wisconsin faculty members were approached with job offers by other universities, including Harvard and Temple, last year, a third more than the year before. Most of them stayed, thanks in large part to salary increases of as much as 49 percent, plus inducements like new research equipment and teaching and research assistants. All of that cost the already cash-strapped university nearly $24 million. Still, twenty-nine faculty members left, and with each one of them what the university calculates is an average of $271,795 worth of research funding, or nearly $8 million total. That included the award-winning chemist Laura Kiessling and the biochemist Ronald Raines, who both went to MIT.

“We lost some of our very best people,” Blank said. “It is our very best faculty that get outside offers. If you’re looking at research dollars, those are the people who are bringing in millions in research funding. And the people you replace them with bring in much less. So those retention issues have a real impact.”

There’s equal concern about attracting top new faculty. “Reputations matter here,” Blank said. “If you’ve been a university people have wanted to be coming to for twenty-five years, and suddenly they don’t, that will be very deadly.” Private and better-funded public universities can continue to offer talented new professors not only more money, but also more stability—and they can continue to treat midwestern universities like candy stores, shopping there for star faculty who may be ready to jump ship.

Illinois lost a slightly smaller number of professors—twenty-two, up from thirteen in the year before. There, the ongoing budget uncertainty has been made worse not because of changes to tenure but because of threats to pensions earned by public employees including those at universities.

Most Wisconsin faculty cited salary as the reason for leaving or entertaining job offers. Blank said the median offer promised a salary 30 percent higher. Pay is another area in which public universities are losing ground—especially those in the Midwest, unable to get more money from their legislatures for counteroffers. The University of Wisconsin system requested $78 million this year for faculty raises. Walker has offered less than $12 million. University of Iowa President Bruce Harreld said in a statement that his faculty is being “cherry-picked by other institutions.” But when he asked the legislature in 2015 for $4.5 million to retain key faculty and recruit more, the request was turned down. (The university announced in late June that it would find $4.9 million from its existing budget to give some of its faculty raises.)

Full professors at public doctoral universities already make 24 percent less than their counterparts at private ones, according to the American Association of University Professors. “And full professors at public universities in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin earn 9 percent less than those at institutions on the West Coast, 17 percent less than those in the Mid Atlantic states, and 28 percent less than those in New England.”

“Clearly, private universities have an advantage in this case to expand their faculty, because they haven’t been dependent on state funding,” said Barbara McFadden Allen, executive director of the Big Ten Academic Alliance. “If you’re in Illinois and you haven’t had a budget for three years, your faculty are restless.”

That’s what Kramer saw among his University of Illinois colleagues before he left, along with his wife, Laurie, who was also a professor there. “A number of the faculty came to me and said either their spouse was worried or they were worried or they both were worried about the pension situation,” he said. “I had a budget cut every year. It gets tough. It also gets frustrating.”

While the decline in public research funding may hurt midwestern communities first, in the long run it puts the national economy at risk. The long slide in American R&D has triggered warnings since 2007, when a commission of experts from the National Academy of Science, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine produced a report ominously titled Rising Above the Gathering Storm. It urged that the federal government do no less than double spending on research.

Instead, the situation worsened. By 2012, the National Science Board pronounced itself “concerned about the continued ability” of public universities to “conduct the basic science and engineering research that leads to innovations.” In a 2013 survey by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, more than three-quarters of provosts said federal spending cuts tied to sequestration were taking a toll on their universities, including in research. The state cuts have only made things worse.

Meanwhile, global economic rivals have continued to approach and even surpass the level of American research output. The U.S. share of all research and development funding worldwide dropped from more than a third to barely a quarter from 2003 to 2013, the most recent period for which the figures are available, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. China could catch up by 2030 based on current trends. Last year, Chinese researchers for the first time filed more patents applications in the life sciences than their U.S. counterparts. The historical global leader in science and technology, the United States is now ninth among the nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in the proportion of gross domestic product spent on research.

Because basic science can take decades to translate into new drugs or products, the consequences of this won’t be immediately visible. That makes it hard to argue for renewed investment in research in a political system that doesn’t prioritize long-term thinking. Nor does private industry always want to invest in the years of research it can take to translate fundamental discoveries into the kind of marketable commodities that drive the American economy—and that often originate at universities.

“We’ve been in the lead long enough that people think we always will be, [but] we cannot assume that we are going to lead the world in technology twenty or thirty years from now,” Wisconsin’s Blank said. “I think we’ve stalled out.”

Meanwhile, doctoral students and younger faculty are leaving, too, or are stuck in limbo while awaiting research funding of their own. Where the NIH funded more than 30 percent of its grant proposals as recently as 2000, it now approves just over 15 percent of them. The NSF approves only one in four proposals. The average age at which researchers win their first NIH grant now is forty-two, up from thirty-eight in 1980.

“It’s getting more competitive to get this funding, and that’s your bread and butter if you want to get a faculty position,” said Billy McCulloch, a twenty-six-year-old doctoral candidate at Ohio State who is developing a next-generation fuel cell. McCullough does want a position in academia, but he’s almost certain there won’t be one for him; many of his friends are getting jobs in Asia.

“The long-term consequence of this is a significant brain drain,” said Nicholas C. Burbules, an education professor at the University of Illinois. “Other countries around the world are looking at what’s happening here with eagerness and snapping people up. It takes a long time to build up quality and talent at this level. It doesn’t take very long to lose it.”

There are some efforts being made to reverse these trends. Universities are trying to do more to make the public understand their value, while more private philanthropic money has been flowing into research.

“We are working hard to diversify the funding sources of the faculty funding portfolios,” says Susan Olesik, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Ohio State, as she gives a tour of a two-year-old, $120 million building that combines chemical and biomolecular engineering research. “It’s a matter of survival.”

But without a renewed commitment to research funding from the federal and state governments, that survival is in serious doubt. The system of public research universities that Abraham Lincoln helped create—the one that became the envy of the rest of the world and a central component of America’s dominance of science, technology, and the global economy—has become an afterthought and even a target of state and national political leaders. Declining university research may be less visible than decaying roads and rail systems, but the results could be even more devastating and harder to reverse.

Behind Olesik, in a frigid room crammed with $15.4 million worth of nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers that look like stubby spaceships, scientists are analyzing how polymer chains interact, down to their individual amino acids. The results will help the state’s important polymer industry avoid costly impurities. There’s a steady wheezing of compressors and a whoosh as a sample is whisked through a tube and into a huge white tank, where superconducting magnets are bathed in liquid helium to keep them at a temperature of minus 273 degrees Celsius.

Olesik gestures toward the researchers working in the lab. “They will leave,” she says. She is referring not just to her own staff, but also to the bright young researchers working in centers like hers on this campus and others across the Midwest. “That’s the problem.”

The post The Looming Decline of the Public Research University appeared first on Washington Monthly.