To establish the set of colleges included in the rankings, we started with the 1,727 colleges in the fifty states that are listed in the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System as having a Carnegie basic classification of research, master’s, baccalaureate, and baccalaureate/associate’s colleges, are not exclusively graduate schools, and participate in federal financial aid programs. We then excluded 134 baccalaureate and baccalaureate/associate’s-level colleges that reported that at least half of the undergraduate degrees awarded in 2012 were below the bachelor’s degree level, as well as eleven colleges with fewer than 100 undergraduate students in fall 2012. Next, we decided to exclude the five federal military academies (Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Merchant Marine, and Navy) because their unique missions make them difficult to evaluate using our methodology. Our rankings are based in part on the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants and the percentage of students enrolled in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), whereas the service academies provide all students with free tuition (and thus no Pell Grants) and commission graduates as officers in the armed services (and thus not the ROTC program). Our final set of exclusions was to not rank colleges that had not reported data on the three main measures used in the social mobility section (percent Pell, graduation rate, and net price) at least once in the past three years. This resulted in a final sample of 1,540 colleges and includes public, private nonprofit, and for-profit colleges.

The primary change in this year’s rankings is the use of the three most recent years of data (each equally weighted) instead of the most recent year of data, as we had done in the past. This helps reduce wild swings in rankings, particularly at smaller colleges where a few more students graduating or defaulting on their student loans would have substantial implications for their rankings. Using the average of multiple years would hurt the ranking position of colleges that have exhibited rapid improvements in their outcomes, but the truth is that few colleges can move the dial this quickly. This will reduce size of the year-to-year changes in a college’s rankings going forward, which may sell fewer magazines but paints a more accurate picture of performance.

Each of our three categories (service, research, and social mobility) includes several components. We have determined the community service score by measuring each school’s performance in five different areas: the size of each school’s Air Force, Army, and Navy ROTC programs, relative to the size of the school; the number of alumni currently serving in the Peace Corps, relative to the size of the school; the percentage of federal work-study grant money spent on community service projects; a combined score based on the number of students participating in community service and total service hours performed, both relative to school size; and a combined score based on the number of full-time staff supporting community service, relative to the total number of staff, the number of academic courses that incorporate service, relative to school size, and whether the institution provides scholarships for community service.

The latter two measures are based on data reported to the Corporation for National and Community Service by colleges and universities in their applications for the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll (data is available for 2011 and 2012, but not 2013—making this the only set of measures where two years of data were used instead of three). The first is a measure of student participation in community service, and the second is a measure of institutional support for service. Colleges that did not submit applications in a given year had no data and were given zeros on these measures. (Our advice to those schools: If you care about service, believe you do a good job of promoting it, and want the world to know, then fill out the application!)

The research score for national universities is also based on five measurements: the total amount of an institution’s research spending (from the Center for Measuring University Performance and the National Science Foundation); the number of science and engineering PhDs awarded by the university; the number of undergraduate alumni who have gone on to receive a PhD in any subject, relative to the size of the school; the number of faculty receiving prestigious awards, relative to the number of full-time faculty; and the number of faculty in the National Academies, relative to the number of full-time faculty. For national universities, we weighted each of these components equally to determine a school’s final score in the category. For liberal arts colleges, master’s universities, and baccalaureate colleges, which do not have extensive doctoral programs, science and engineering PhDs were excluded and we gave double weight to the number of alumni who go on to get PhDs. Faculty awards and National Academy membership were not included in the research score for these institutions because such data is available for only a relative handful of these schools.

As some readers have pointed out in previous years, our research score rewards large schools for their size. This is intentional. It is the huge numbers of scientists, engineers, and PhDs that larger universities produce, combined with their enormous amounts of research spending, that will help keep America competitive in an increasingly global economy. But the two measures of university research quality—faculty awards and National Academy members, relative to the number of full-time faculty (from the Center for Measuring University Performance)—are independent of a school’s size.

The social mobility score is more complicated. We have data from the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System survey that tells us the percentage of a school’s students receiving Pell Grants, which is a good measure of a school’s commitment to educating lower-income students. We’d like to know how many of these Pell Grant recipients graduate, but schools aren’t required to report those figures. Still, because lower-income students at any school are less likely to graduate than wealthier ones, the percentage of Pell Grant recipients is a meaningful indicator in and of itself. If a campus has a large percentage of Pell Grant students—that is to say, if its student body is disproportionately poor—it will tend to diminish the school’s overall graduation rate.

We first predicted the percentage of students on Pell Grants based on the average ACT/SAT score and the percentage of students admitted. This indicated which selective universities (since selectivity is highly correlated with ACT/SAT scores and admit rates) are making the effort to enroll low-income students. (Since most schools only provide the twenty-fifth percentile and the seventy-fifth percentile of scores, we took the mean of the two. For schools where a majority of students took the SAT, we converted SAT scores into ACT equivalents.)

The predicted graduation rate measure is based on research by Robert Kelchen, assistant professor in the Department of Education Leadership, Management and Policy at Seton Hall University and methodologist for this year’s college guide, and Douglas N. Harris, associate professor at Tulane University. In addition to the percentage of Pell recipients and the average ACT/SAT score, the graduation rate prediction formula includes the percentage of students receiving student loans, the admit rate, the racial/ethnic and gender makeup of the student body, the number of students (overall and full-time), and institutional characteristics such as whether a college is primarily residential. We estimated this predicted graduation rate measure in a regression model separately for each classification using average data from the last three years, imputing for missing data when necessary. Schools with graduation rates that are higher than the “average” school with similar stats score better than schools that match or, worse, undershoot the mark. Two colleges, the California Institute of Technology and Harvey Mudd College, had predicted graduation rates of just over 100 percent. We adjusted these predicted graduation rates to 100 percent.

We then divided the difference between the actual and predicted graduation rate by the net price of attendance, defined as the average price that first-time, full-time students who receive financial aid pay for college after subtracting need-based financial aid. This cost-adjusted graduation rate measure rewards colleges that do a good job of both graduating students and keeping costs low. The two social mobility formulas (actual vs. predicted percent Pell and cost-adjusted graduation rate performance) were weighted equally.

The post A Note on methodology: 4-year colleges and universities appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Student loan default rates. This represents the percentage of students who took out federal student loans and defaulted within three years of leaving college. A college received 3 points for a default rate below 2 percent, 2 points between 2 percent and 4 percent, 1 point between 4 percent and 6 percent, and no points for being above 6 percent.

Percent of students receiving Pell Grants. This is a measure of effort in serving students of modest financial means. A college received 3 points if at least 40 percent of students received Pell Grants, 2 points between 30 percent and 40 percent, 1 point between 20 percent and 30 percent, and no points for being below 20 percent.

Graduation rates. This represents the percentage of first-time, full-time students who graduated within six years. A college received 3 points for a graduation rate above 90 percent, 2 points between 75 percent and 90 percent, 1 point between 60 percent and 75 percent, and no points for being below 60 percent.

Graduation rate performance. This measure compares the actual graduation rate between 2010 and 2012 to the predicted graduation rate generated from a regression controlling for student-level and college-level characteristics. A college received 3 points if the actual graduation rate exceeded the predicted rate by at least 5 percent, 2 points if the actual rate exceeded the predicted rate by between 0 percent and 5 percent, 1 point if the actual rate was below the predicted rate by no more than 5 percent, and 0 points if the actual rate was at least 5 percent below the predicted rate

Net price of attendance. This represents the average cost of attendance students with family incomes below $75,000 pay after taking grant and scholarship aid into account. A college received 3 points for a net price below $10,000, 2 points between $10,000 and $15,000, 1 point between $15,000 and $20,000, and no points for being over $20,000. —Eds.

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Stanford has long had a reputation for offering its students a pipeline to Silicon Valley. But as tech becomes an increasingly cool career choice among high-achieving Millennials, Harvard is scrambling to catch up with its West Coast competitor, bolstering its offerings by building an engineering quad, beefing up its computer science department, and funding tech accelerators and incubators on campus. Computer science is the fastest-growing concentration at the university, and CS 50 (Intro to Computer Science) is the hottest class on campus.

This emerging interest in tech would be great if students were gravitating toward start-ups, where new jobs and innovations are hatched. But at both Harvard and Stanford, most of the interest focuses on established firms, particularly in the social media category, and the way students talk about the value of these jobs sounds disturbingly like students’ valorization of marquee-name, prestige jobs on Wall Street.

Foster, a student pursuing a concentration in computer science at Harvard, noted wryly, “I guess I’d define an ordinary job as anything that’s not working at Google, Facebook, McKinsey, or Boston Consulting Group.” Another student, Imogene, echoed Foster, saying, “It’s really unfortunate the way that Harvard students believe things should be. If you say you spent your summer at Goldman, that’s impressive. You say you spent your summer building a company that’s going to be a big thing, it’s not as impressive because it doesn’t have a name.” She went on, “If you want respect by name on Harvard’s campus, you go to Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.”

The desire to find a job that has high name recognition and an established tournament system remains as strong as ever. Silicon Valley and Bay Area titans are becoming the functional equivalent of elite Wall Street firms and management consultancies in terms of recruiting top students by playing to their sense of competitiveness and status anxieties. Moreover, the day-to-day duties that many bright young recruits perform at these firms is not actually much different than what they would be doing at JPMorgan or Bain, as the big tech firms like Apple and Google become increasingly preoccupied with various forms of rent seeking, from acquiring smaller companies and attacking rivals in court to borrowing money to buy back their own stock and minimizing taxes through the use of offshore banks.

The post Is High Tech the Answer? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Working for the government can be a great career choice—maybe not as remunerative as a job on Wall Street, but potentially far more rewarding and socially useful. There are federal jobs available for almost every interest and skill, whether that’s politics, physics, art, or even event planning. And, contrary to popular conception, 84 percent of federal government jobs are outside of the Washington, D.C., area, so you can tailor your employment opportunities around where you most want to live. (Fifty thousand federal government employees work abroad, in more than 140 foreign countries.)

President Obama signed an executive order in 2010 creating the Pathways Programs with the expressed aim of attracting greater numbers of talented and diverse young adults into government work. The Pathways Programs are comprised of three divisions.

The Internship Program, designed for current students, provides paid work opportunities in federal agencies for a limited period of time. Interns can work either on a part-time or full-time basis.

Next there is the Recent Graduates Program, which is open to individuals who have completed, within the previous two years, an associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s, professional, doctorate, vocational, or technical degree or certificate from a qualifying educational institution. These recent graduates can work in federal agencies while also taking advantage of substantial career training and mentorship opportunities.

Lastly, the Presidential Management Fellows Program is a leadership and career-development program for those with newly minted graduate degrees.

In all three divisions of the Pathways Programs, if you successfully complete the term of service you can receive what is known as “noncompetitive eligibility” when applying for federal jobs. This means that your employer can convert you straight from a Pathways participant into a permanent employee or you can apply for other federal positions without having to go through the standard, and highly competitive, USAJOBS application process.

Channing Martin, a former Pathways intern in the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), was hired immediately after her internship ended into a permanent, full-time position at the OPM; she now works as a program and management analyst. “As a high schooler I was always really interested in diversity and inclusion issues,” Channing said, “and when I realized this intern program existed, I was really attracted to that.” Channing spent her yearlong internship on a rotation between different departments within the OPM, having the chance to get her feet wet in a broad range of governmental duties and responsibilities, experimenting with tasks ranging from understanding the role of performance management to supporting efforts to expand equal pay to learning how to write requirements for database systems. Channing did all this while balancing her time as a full-time student; she spent her second year at Carnegie Mellon’s public policy graduate school living in D.C., interning during the day and taking classes by night.

“Interning for the federal government allows you to check out exactly what kind of work they do and decide if it resonates with you,” said Tim McManus, vice president for education and outreach at the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that advocates for the reinvigoration of the civil service workforce. “If you go and do an internship at the EPA or the Department of Energy, you’ll be exposed to not just the mission but the way the agency works. Is the culture one that is good for you? Is it fast-paced? Is it too slow? You have the ability to see for yourself.”

The post How to Find a Career with Uncle Sam appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In his new book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, the consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader argues that on many issues, from undeclared wars to unprosecuted Wall Street crimes, liberal and conservative citizens increasingly agree with each other, and that, by working together, they can take back Washington. After Washington Monthly contributing editor Timothy Noah wrote a respectful, if skeptical, review of Nader’s book for the Washington Post, we asked him to sit down with Nader for a wide-ranging interview.

Here’s an edited version of that conversation.

Tim Noah: This is a very polarized moment in American politics. Can we expect politicians to bargain in good faith?
Ralph Nader: Polarization is a controlling process. It is instinctual in ruling groups in any culture. You try to divide and rule. When you get down to where people live, work, and raise their families, if a strong appeal is made that’s empirically based—like people getting killed in auto crashes before seat belts—the ideological labels that people put on themselves tend to shrink away.

TN: Do you buy into the notion that Republicans obstruct more than Democrats?
RN: I don’t have the answer to the breed of Republicanism that is on Capitol Hill. I don’t know where these guys come from, other than totally gerrymandered districts.

TN: Democrats are very insulated as well, and you aren’t seeing the same tendency toward extremism there.
RN: Not yet. The Republicans are proactive and the Democrats are reactive. And that reverberates [with] the voters. And that’s why there are far more “least-worst” voters on the progressive-liberal side.

TN: What do you mean by “least-worst”?
RN: “Least-worst” means even if they hate the corporate Democrats, they will vote for them because the Republicans are worse. [But] the Democrats are more corporate than I’ve ever seen on Capitol Hill, by and large.

TN: I would guess that a great deal of the Tea Party agenda scares corporate America to death, and pushes it into the arms of Democrats. For example, it doesn’t want to see the Export-Import Bank shut down.
RN: Yeah, that started before the Tea Party. I mean Clinton, the Clintons were perfect examples of corporate Democrats. He wrote the blueprint.

TN: Let’s talk about “too big to fail.” There’s a very interesting ideological convergence there, because conservatives don’t want to have to bail out the banks again. Do you see any hope of limiting the size of banks?
RN: Yeah. I think both sides see that once the economy is on the cliff due to Wall Street, they can’t say no [to a bailout]. And that’s why I think you’re up to almost 90 percent in support of breaking up the big banks.

TN: So how do you get over that hump in Congress? It seems part of what’s happened is that the Democrats have chased Wall Street into the arms of Republicans. And the Republican leadership is taking a doctrinaire pro-Wall Street position that’s at odds with conservative thinking.
RN: That’s right. Congress is the last to get the message of this book. And, you know, Obama raised more money from Wall Street than any presidential candidate, including McCain. I think what we are seeing here is, increasingly, both parties are blocking massive public opinion that hasn’t gone operational yet, except here and there. For example, it’s about to go operational, if the Trans-Pacific [Partnership] agreement is sent to the House, they have a left-right majority to block fast track. It went operational on the [2012] Whistleblower Protection [Enhancement] Act, against the corporate lobbies that hated it. It’s going to be victorious on [raising the] minimum wage.

TN: You think so?
RN: You already have six companies that say they will go for it or they won’t oppose it. McDonald’s, Walmart, and Target are already on board. The Gap. You don’t need many more for the tipping point.

TN: Why do you think these corporations are coming around?
RN: We met with Walmart twice. And we said, “Do you know what $30 billion will do to our economy? Where do you think a lot of these low-wage workers who just got a restoration will spend their money? They’re going to spend it at Walmart.” Walmart’s big problem is stagnant sales. And they put out a comment a few weeks ago saying it’s because people don’t have enough money!
The other thing is turnover. They have huge turnover, which is costly, even though they have part-time work. [As a result,] they don’t have [high productivity,] as Costco [does]. Costco starts at $11.50 plus benefits. It is finally getting through to them. But the subtext of this is that it’s easier than we think to change this country on issue after issue after issue.

TN: We know about the fast-food workers who are getting underpaid, but there’s also the plight of the franchise owners. The contract terms that they have to sign on to are unbelievable. The failure rate of franchisees is actually higher than the failure rate for other small businesses.
RN: Well, back in the ’50s, the auto dealers were in that situation. And they mobilized, and they got the Dealers Day in Court Act. So they have a stronger statutory basis. But it’s restricted to auto dealer contracts. The others have never been able to organize.

TN: And there’s this interesting cultural divide, too. The franchisees are usually Republicans. They in effect are trying to form unions of their own, and the big fast-food companies are trying to prevent them from doing that, sometimes making it contractually forbidden. That’s a good example of what you are writing about in your book. What stands between franchisees and minimum-wage workers—two groups that ought to be natural allies—is nothing more than ideology.
RN: What’s more conservative than freedom of contract? It’s one of the pillars of a free society. Both sides [should] get to negotiate a contract. It’s not just a take-it-or-leave-it deal from one side.

TN: You talk a lot about corporatism in your book, and it’s never clear to me whether you’re talking about an actual ideology.
RN: [Large corporations] have one thing in common. To use their benign phrasing, they want predictability. To get predictability, they have to have control. To get control, they have to try to control markets through joint ventures, cartels, monopolization, all the techniques that are known and permitted by our Justice Department.
What are the countervailing forces? Number one is government. If they can control government as the principal challenger to corporate power, both directly and how it can empower trade unions, consumer groups, access to Department of Justice actions, they’re at third base in so many ways.

TN: So what you’re describing is not really an ideology. It’s merely the exercise of power.
RN: It’s a strategy that doesn’t want to go to ideological levels visibly, because then it’s more vulnerable. The one thing corporations have learned is: Do not present a visible coherent strategy of domination, because then you’ll provoke all sorts of counterforces, you make it easy for people to go after you. What you do is you keep talking free market, you keep talking free enterprise, you keep talking overregulation.
Corporatism inside the boardroom is the feeling that the people best able to run the political economy are the rich and powerful. They got rich and powerful because they are smart, they are goal oriented, because their success is society’s success.

TN: Final question: What’s the best-run government program you know about, either current or historic?
RN: You’re dealing with somebody who has higher expectations than normal. By the way, you know why government gets a bad rap? Because the right wing beats up on it all the time, and the left is never satisfied with the agencies, because they’re so routinely succumbing to corporate pressure. So there’s nobody praising government.
I can say the auto safety standards—the early ones—were very successful. I could say that we haven’t had a thalidomide scandal since the thalidomide disaster occurred in western Europe [around 1960]. You know, something’s working, given the proliferation of drugs. I can say lead mostly has been eliminated from the environment—it’s less present in your blood now, and in children’s blood. Other agencies in the top tier would be the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, the Coast Guard, the U.S. Forest Service (apart from the pressures from the timber industry), the under-budgeted National Park Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—to name a few.
We’ve got these cars recalled. We have less deadly toxic pollutants in many rivers. You can actually fish in certain lakes. But let’s face it: the companies never let go of these regulatory agencies, and they never let go of the contracting agencies like Medicare and the Pentagon. And they never let go of the granting agencies like the Interior Department. So I have to go segment by segment. Now, it may surprise you that one of the success stories, which is being seriously slandered, is the U.S. Postal Service, throughout history.

TN: Success story prior to its being privatized?
RN: Prior and after. If it wasn’t burdened with huge annual prepayments for retirement and health insurance—monstrous prepayments—in the last two, three years it would have broken even, even with the recession and the Internet. You’re talking about getting buffeted by UPS and FedEx, buffeted by the Internet and emailing, and buffeted by the recession.
I know its warts, but consider this: it’s the only giant corporation I know of in America that is a creditor of the U.S. government. A net creditor. The U.S. government owes the Postal Service about $60 billion. Now, the Postal Service has borrowed, because it’s defaulted on the payment—they’re about $15 billion in the red. But if you set it off against what the government owes the Postal Service, it is a net creditor. Now show me any other company. Show me General Electric. They’re all getting corporate welfare! Intel’s on welfare, Cisco’s on welfare, it’s the R&D credit. They have to pay them to do R&D! Boeing is on welfare, General Electric … but corporatists are always slamming the Postal Service again and again. The morale must be pretty bad. Talk to your postal person. It’s really low morale.

TN: Do you have a position on Saturday delivery?
RN: Continue it, because [otherwise] people won’t post anything on Thursday.
If they just were a little more revenue oriented—first of all, they’re not managed properly. It’s what my sergeant said in the Army: “You know, you guys, with all your bitching, let me tell you something about the Army. It’s a system devised by geniuses so that it can be run by idiots like you.” [Laughter.]
Corporate officials and privatizers dominate the USPS board of directors—talk about conflicts of interest! And that’s been under Democrats and Republicans. Number two, the head of the Postal Service, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe and his predecessor, it’s like they can’t think of saying, How do you increase revenue? And one way is better management at the local level so small businesses don’t have to wait in line so much; but the others are, for example, they can’t deliver beer and wine because Congress tells them they can’t deliver beer and wine. The USPS doesn’t have much of a lobby on Capitol Hill. If it wasn’t for the unions, they would have virtually no lobby. So in spite of that, you put a letter in the mail, and it goes to Seattle or Alexandria for the same price, and it gets there! I think it’s being subjected to extensive preventable erosions—it’s amazing, the system that was put in place, starting with Benjamin Franklin.

The post The <i>Monthly</i> Interview: Ralph Nader appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The deal is this: Washington gives institutions of higher learning about $150 billion a year in the form of student aid, research grants, and various tax breaks. In return, those institutions promise the federal government … nothing. Schools are under no obligation to demonstrate that they’ve spent that money effectively—by, say, keeping prices down, or increasing their graduation rates, or helping more lower-income students get degrees, or showing that any of their students have learned a damn thing. The money just flows, year after year, in ever-greater amounts.

The administration’s new ratings, which are scheduled to go into effect in time for the 2015-16 school year, will be the first concrete step by Washington to demand some accountability for that investment. Individual colleges will be graded on measures of access (such as the percentage of Pell students they enroll), affordability (the net price of attendance), and outcome (graduation rates, loan default rates, and so on). Such metrics may seem familiar to longtime readers of the Washington Monthly, since we’ve been ranking schools that way for years in our annual college guide, which we proudly offer again in this issue. Our coverage begins on page 19.

But we’re just one magazine. It’s obviously a much bigger deal for the federal government to define the higher ed hierarchy in this way, so different from the conventional view, epitomized by the U.S. News & World Report, in which college status is based on reputation, money, and exclusivity. Like nutrition labeling or Energy Star ratings, the new federal college ratings, if done right, will give prospective students and their families better information with which to make their decisions. That, in turn, should put more market pressure on colleges and universities to deliver more value for the money.

There are a lot of colleges out there that won’t look so good on such a rating system. Some of them could be put out of business, especially if federal dollars are tied to the ratings, as the president would like to see Congress do (he can implement the rating system itself by executive action). Not surprisingly, the trade associations that represent colleges and universities in Washington are doing everything they can to block the administration. As Laura Colarusso and Jon Marcus report, their lobbyists are partnering with Republicans in Congress to frame the ratings as both an oppressive regulation and an unconstitutional White House power grab—the message du jour of the GOP going into the November elections.

Crafting a rating system that serves the interests of students and taxpayers but is also fair to colleges will certainly be tricky. As Ben Miller shows, just figuring out which colleges are the worst performers is tough given the wide variety of ways they can fail students. Moreover, universities are complicated human organizations and can be damaged in unintended ways by ill-considered federal rules. Zachary Schrag demonstrates this in his story about institutional review boards (IRBs), federally mandated entities meant to curb unethical behavior by university researchers that in practice have wound up also stifling perfectly benign scholarship. The answer is not to abandon the ethics regulation entirely but to craft a more balanced version, as Schrag shows other countries have successfully done.

Indeed, in addition to adding some new regulations on the higher education sector, we need to scale back others, specifically those that restrict the entry of innovative new players into the market. Kevin Carey profiles one such player, a company that runs “boot camps”—intense, short-duration courses meant to give college graduates the specific skills they need to land good-paying jobs. Currently, students can’t use federal grants and loans to attend boot camps. Remove that restriction and boot camps could give more-expensive master’s degree programs at traditional colleges a run for their money. The whole way we connect college grads to jobs in this country is due for an overhaul. Amy Binder makes that clear in her story of how elite schools like Harvard are complicit in a rigged recruiting game that funnels a disproportionate number of their graduates to Wall Street, where many wind up hating both their jobs and themselves.

The deal that higher education has traditionally enjoyed in America—billions in tax dollars, zero responsibility for results—is certainly a sweet one. But in an era when a college degree has never been more expensive or more important for upward mobility, it’s one we can no longer afford. Federal power must be exercised with care. But it must be exercised.

The post The Beginning of the End of Higher Education’s Special Deal appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Early last winter, the Justice Department fined Toyota $1.2 billion for failing to disclose a possible electronic defect that turned out not to exist. Shortly afterward, it became clear that General Motors had spent years covering up an all-too-real defect that, by the Reuters count, killed seventy-four people. If $1.2 billion was the proper fine for regulatory error, the fine for GM’s grotesque disregard of human life should be far higher. And there should be clawback of the roughly $145 million in bonuses conferred on Richard Wagoner, Ed Whitacre, Dan Akerson, and Mary Barra, CEOs during the period of the cover-up. Wagoner got an $8 million severance even though the company lost $65 billion under his leadership; he also made the biggest auto blunder since the Edsel, investing billions in the Hummer brand fiasco. CEOs say their extravagant paydays are justified because the buck stops with them: then, when something goes wrong, they claim they knew nothing and had no responsibility. Yet after running what the company’s own report called a management culture of “incompetence and neglect,” GM’s CEOs keep the money they awarded themselves.

Cleaner air later

The White House has unveiled commendable fuel-efficiency standards for automakers—but the rules will not become strict until after Barack Obama leaves office. Whether they ever actually take effect, only time will tell. For now, the government-favored GM continues to build such monstrosities as a fifteen-mpg Camaro and a fourteen-mpg Escalade, both of which emit ten tons of greenhouse gases annually.

Religious criminals belong in jail

Recently Pope Francis told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica that 8,000 priests—about 2 percent of the Roman clergy—are pedophiles. The first step in recovery is to admit the problem, so this is progress. The number ought to shock. There are bad apples in every organization, but could it really be that 2 percent of elementary schoolteachers or camp counselors grope or rape kids? In the United States, about half a percent of men are registered sex offenders. This suggests clergy are four times more likely to be sex offenders than adult men in general.

The Vatican has said the Catholic Church has paid $2.5 billion in civil settlements involving the sexual abuse of children. But almost none of the priests’ names have been reported to law enforcement—meaning that, unlike other kinds of rapists, godly rapists don’t face prison time. Why should there be no prosecution of crimes by clergy? If a priest were raped, the church would be outraged if the offender were only assigned a period of prayer and penance.

Since 2002, Bernard Law, former head of the Boston archdiocese, has lived in Rome to avoid answering Massachusetts charges regarding obstruction of justice for child rapes during his administration. Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski, defrocked for sexually abusing children, faces only a Vatican City tribunal. They and the thousands of child-abusing priests who hide from the law are doing something both morally wrong and cowardly. The Christ-like act would be to surrender and accept the consequences.

BP can’t stop spills of oil or money

BP is being bilked in the distribution of Deepwater Horizon settlement money—poetic justice for an arrogant company that killed workers and thumbed its nose at the environment. It is a double dose of poetic justice that for all its power and pounds sterling BP was too dumb to realize that Louisiana’s Napoleonic-rooted civil code is notoriously crooked. The company freely agreed to a distribution procedure that was just asking the Louisiana bar to pick BP’s pocket. Other beneficiaries include the New York Times and the Washington Post, which have received millions of dollars’ worth of full-page BP ads whining about the bilking.

Use Amazon to order an X-47B

Defense-bill markup time in Washington annually leads to military contractors purchasing local advertising. The Northrop Grumman X-47B was touted in Post ads, while the news station WTOP ran spots extolling the P-8 antisubmarine aircraft. Military funding ads feature flag waving and misrepresentation. Boeing bought full pages declaring that ending construction of the EA-18G electronic warfare jet would “leave the U.S. Navy without future Growlers.” Classic half-truth: the Navy already has 100 of the planes, more than needed for any contingency. If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, defense contracting is the last refuge of crony capitalism.

At the start of a defense budget cycle, the White House and the Pentagon propose dramatic cuts. Once members of Congress have maxed out campaign donations and promotional appearances at military bases, they add back everything, a process known on the Hill as “plus-up.”

The United States has ten supercarriers—versus zero for the rest of the world. Five years ago the Enterprise, the oldest carrier in the fleet—christened in the Eisenhower administration—was slated for decommissioning. Congress insisted on a $662 million plus-up. Even afterward, the Enterprise was barely functional, and now she is being scrapped, the extra money pure waste. When this budget cycle kicked off, the White House proposed to dry-dock the George Washington, leaving the United States with a 9-0 advantage over the rest of the world, with two super-advanced supercarriers under construction. House and Senate members plussed-up the Washington. That will keep the Austrian navy in check!

Important procurement fights concern the Air Force’s A-10 antitank plane, the Navy’s littoral combat ship (LCS), and the Army’s years-long bungling of the need for modern armor. The A-10 has been praised in these pages, and in James Fallows’s 1982 National Defense—a book that has stood the test of time well—for being a relatively inexpensive, reliable jet based on rugged low tech. Its design is dated, but proven: in Iraq and Afghanistan, the plane performed well. Soldiers love the A-10 because its mission is close-air support of Army and Marine units in battle. The Air Force dislikes the A-10 for the same reason. Flyboys want to soar high in the sky, not come down to the deck to aid grunts.

Now the Air Force proposes to retire the A-10, leaving the United States without a close-support jet. Getting rid of the A-10 would allow the Air Force to argue that the F-35 is needed for the air-to-ground role—though this plane was designed for air-to-air missions. The F-35 is the Air Force’s number-one funding priority, and the treasure chest of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor.

Adjusting for inflation, F-35 program cost has grown 71 percent in the past decade, to $400 billion, the largest defense contract ever. Yet the F-35 sputters in trials; in July, F-35s were grounded after one caught fire on the runway. The F-35 has been in production for eight years, but still is not ready for combat. The Air Force so yearns to rationalize blank checks for this clunker—it’s the Spruce Goose of stealth—that the two-star James Jones told a congressional committee that if the service doesn’t win permission to junk the A-10, it will respond by retiring all B-1 bombers.

As the Air Force made known that it would go to the mat for F-35 money, Lockheed Martin’s stock price soared from $115 to $170. Defenders of the blank checks include New Hampshire Senators Kelly Ayotte (Republican) and Jeanne Shaheen (Democrat), because the Granite State won some F-35 subcontracts—showing that pork transcends both party and gender.

As for the Army, its M1 main tank and M2 light tank need to be replaced: both are too heavy for likely uses, and lack long-range weapons. The Army threw billions out the window on an advanced-tank project, the Future Combat System, that never led to hardware. A successor, the Ground Combat Vehicle, faces cancellation. Pentagon procurement is so badly mismanaged that half of the world’s defense spending occurs in the United States, yet modernization of U.S. armor is overdue.

Then there’s the littoral combat ship, which, like the F-35, has persistent technical faults. Lead ships of the class are the Freedom and the Independence, whose names are a lot better than their performance. The LCS is a corvette the Navy began designing a decade ago, to control the Guinea Coast of Africa. This was foresight on the Navy’s part; at the time, the U.S. oil boom had not happened, and military analysts believed the nation would become dependent on African petroleum. Instead oil imports are declining, and the less the United States has to do with Nigeria, the better. Shallow-draft and light on firepower, the LCS is unsuited to the blue-water duties that are the Navy’s core mission. Production has been cut from fifty-two to thirty-two, with further reductions in store.

When the Pentagon’s 2015 budget was released, dropping the planned LCS buy, several pundits wrung their hands that America was becoming weak. The boat is a white elephant! The mainstream media’s grasp of military affairs is shown by LCS commentary in another way. For years the Navy has employed a cover story that the purpose of the LCS is to chase pirates. Coast Guard cutters are ideal for that role, which does not require the missiles an LCS carries. As best I am aware, no major newspaper reported that the LCS was designed for use off the coast of Africa.

At least the House Armed Services Committee had its priorities in order. The chairman named this year’s defense bill after himself, announcing—I am not making this up—the Howard P. “Buck” McKeon National Defense Authorization Act.

Yet the Pentagon is a model of efficiency compared to …

Standing in the shadow of Georgetown’s magnificent Key Bridge, completed in 1923, the president recently lamented that construction of highways, bridges, and mass transit is stagnant. Obama’s explanation: “We are not spending enough” on infrastructure.

We’re not getting enough for what we do spend. The Tappan Zee Bridge, north of New York City, was completed in 1955, at a cost of $650 million in today’s money; a replacement under construction will cost at least $4 billion, six times as much. The John F. Kennedy Memorial Bridge in Louisville, completed in 1963 for $80 million in today’s money, is being replaced with a new bridge costing more than $1 billion, a dozen times as much. A generation ago, the final underground segments of Washington’s Metro system cost $215 million a mile in today’s money. New subway tunnels being dug in Seattle and San Francisco are costing a billion dollars a mile.

Not far from the White House is a light-rail project—the Purple Line for Montgomery County, Maryland. It’s insanely overpriced at $150 million per mile for aboveground construction on land the relevant government authorities already own. Also near the White House, Metro’s Silver Line expansion is costing $245 million per mile for one very complicated flyover but otherwise routine aboveground work.

In addition to being insanely expensive, contemporary government infrastructure efforts are ridiculously slow. Repaving three miles of River Road, a commuter artery into the nation’s capital, is scheduled to take about a year. A pedestrian underpass is being built to allow people to walk from a Metro stop to the Bethesda Naval Hospital without having to dodge traffic on a busy thoroughfare. Slated to cost $68 million and take four years—for a walkway!—the project is everything that’s wrong with modern government-run infrastructure work in a nutshell.

Part of the reason for high cost and glacial tempo is union work rules that are designed to slow construction. Federal law generally requires project labor agreements (once called Davis-Bacon rules) that mandate maximum hiring coupled to minimum pace. Yet Europe’s strong unions do not prevent cost-effective infrastructure construction. The new East London line extension rail project will cost $85 million per mile, or barely more than half the price of the Purple Line in suburban Washington, D.C., though London’s congestion makes the city among the most difficult places in the world for heavy engineering.

Part of the problem is that when the federal government is paying for a locally managed project, the incentive is to drag it out and keep funny money flowing. The East London contracts involved substantial financial penalties for delay; in the U.S., federally backed mass transit contracts all but award prizes for delay.

Liberals have trouble facing up to the bloated cost of infrastructure in the U.S. because they can’t admit when government runs things poorly: whatever the problem, the solution must always be more spending. The inability of federally backed projects to be reasonably priced and on time discredits government. Rather than ask for more money to distribute, Obama should roll up his sleeves and make government construction spending efficient.

Shoot ’em in the head

Botched chemical executions in Arizona and Oklahoma have caused condemned men—both monsters who murdered the helpless—to die moaning in pain. The Supreme Court can’t make up its mind whether chemical execution is cruel in constitutional terms. A Utah state lawmaker was scorned by popular opinion for saying the firing squad is more humane than the lethal cocktail. Only eight states still use the chair, which causes horrific suffering.

Killing can be justified if to defend self or others. The incarcerated pose no threat; for that reason, capital punishment is unjust. Yet if there is to be capital punishment, let’s shoot ’em in the head.

Being shot in the head is the fastest way to die, thus is the least inhumane form of execution. Firing squads aim for the heart, so death takes a moment. With a shot to the head there is no suffering, life just ends. Sure, brains splatter everywhere, but let’s not get all squeamish. Shoot death row convicts in the head, and televise executions to maximize the deterrent effect.

I am not saying this in “modest proposal” terms, but, rather, in earnest. Prosecutors and many voters want those who commit mortal sins executed in some bloodless, genteel manner that allows society to wash its hands. If executions were by a shot to the head, and anyone could watch, support for capital punishment would evaporate.

Nowhere to go but up

America’s space program continues to lack vision. Officials talk vaguely of a manned Mars flight, but that’s out of the question with current propulsion technology. A pretty basic Mars mission would weigh about 4,000 tons at departure from low earth orbit. That’s the mass of a Perry-class frigate, and the U.S. is not sending a frigate to Mars anytime soon. Putting those 4,000 tons into orbit would require the launching of thirty Saturn V-class rockets. The entire Apollo moon program entailed twelve Saturn V launches.

NASA space science (probes, telescopes, earth study) is going well, but manned concepts remain aimless—astronauts taking each other’s blood pressure on the Space Station, whose achievements are, ahem, we’ll get back to you. A reasonable way to prioritize NASA would be the following: space science, propulsion research, and work on an asteroid defense. Asteroid defense sounds like a bad Bruce Willis movie, but in the last twenty years it’s been discovered that there are far more “near-earth objects” than previously thought. The count is 11,143 as I write this, two-thirds of them located in the last decade. New research shows that deadly space strikes have been uncomfortably recent. The Tunguska event was 1908; if that rock had hit a major city instead of Siberia, loss of life would have been awful. According to some theories, multiple large objects falling from space caused the sixth century’s mini ice ages: a similar sudden cooling happening today would knock out global agriculture.

The Obama White House has paid some attention to developments in asteroid research, and authorized an initiative to snag an asteroid using an automated probe, transfer the rock to orbit around the moon, then send astronauts to stage an inspection. This seems like a colossal waste of money—but perhaps will get the public enthused about doing something real about the space-rock threat.

Here’s the problem. Orion, the new space capsule that may receive an unmanned test late this year, is barely improved over the Apollo capsule of the 1960s. The Space Launch System (SLS), the new Saturn V-class rocket that Orion would ride atop, is years behind schedule. Recent estimates total the cost of the SLS to be about $5 billion or more per launch, versus $2 billion, in today’s dollars, for Saturn V. The drive, discipline, and optimism that once characterized U.S. space efforts have been replaced with the same featherbedded foot dragging found in federal infrastructure projects. “America’s incoherent space program is unable to accomplish anything other than to spend money,” space historian Robert Zimmerman wrote recently. And with “Space Launch System,” NASA can’t even do names anymore.

Is Afghanistan the new Flanders Field?

Thousands of American service members—and tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians—died as a result of U.S. attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan. Fallujah, taken by U.S. Marines at terrible cost in 2004, was back in insurgent hands this year. Obama says most U.S. combat forces will leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014. The certain result is that there, as in Iraq, the cities and towns that American soldiers died to liberate will return to the control of the very forces we wanted to oust. Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger, a former Air Force pilot who flew missions above Iraq and Afghanistan, summed up the feeling of many when he said, “We owe it to the Americans who gave their lives for our cause” not to walk away. But do we, in fact, owe this debt to the dead?

The 1915 poem “In Flanders Field”—the most influential literary words since the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”—helped convince Britons to support World War I. Written in the voice of those who fell at Ypres, it declares, “Take up our quarrel with the foe / To you from failing hands we throw the torch / If ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep.” This reasoning has been used to sustain bloodshed in many nations and contexts. In her outstanding new book Japan 1941, Tokyo-born historian Eri Hotta reports that Hideki Tojo opposed Japanese withdrawal from China—the obstacle to normalization of Washington-Tokyo relations before Pearl Harbor—because he “insisted it was inconceivable for Japan to withdraw troops from China in light of all the heroic souls” already lost there.

War should continue for one reason alone: if it is a moral necessity. Those who died early in World War II had to be followed to the grave by others. In Iraq and Afghanistan, there is no moral clarity: soldiers can’t even say what their mission is. It was always the case that whatever would happen when we left Iraq and Afghanistan, would happen when we left. Accepting this does not break faith with the fallen. The military dead do not wish to be joined. They have far too much company already.

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High school students who are inundated with personalized letters and emails (and even partially filled-out applications) from colleges urging them to apply may mistakenly think that the institutions contacting them are intending to admit them. In reality, schools often encourage students to apply so that they can reject them.

The aim of the game for colleges is to boost the number of students who apply and can be rejected. By doing this, the schools see their acceptance rates fall, making them appear to be more selective—which helps them rise up the U.S. News & World Report rankings.

Take Northeastern University in Boston. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the university sends nearly 200,000 personalized letters to high school students each year. The institution then follows up these letters with emails, making it seem that the school is wooing these individuals.

These tactics appear to be paying off. Nearly 50,000 students applied to Northeastern this year for 2,800 spots in the fall 2014 class—“more than in any previous year and a ratio of 18 applicants per seat,” the university boasted in a news release.

Lowering its acceptance rates is at least one factor in why Northeastern has catapulted up the U.S. News rankings, rising more than 100 spots since 2002.

#2 A college may not be as selective as it seems.

Another way that colleges attempt to appear more selective than they really are is through use of the Common Application, a standard form that students can use to easily apply to multiple colleges. Colleges have found that they can use the Common App to inflate their applications in order to lower their acceptance rate—one of the measures used to determine an institution’s ranking in U.S. News. As it turns out, the proliferation of the Common App has enabled students to easily apply to more than one school even if they are underqualified. Indeed, students are applying to more schools than ever before. In 2000, just a couple of years after the online Common App was introduced, only 12 percent of students applied to seven or more schools; in 2011, 29 percent did.

The University of Chicago provides an example of the factors behind this trend. For years, the university publicly rejected the use of the Common App. In fact, it marketed its own application as the “Uncommon Application.” But by 2007, Chicago officials caved to the demands of looking as competitive as the other schools using the Common App. As the vice president and dean of college enrollment told the Brown Daily at the time, “We took note of the fact that two of our major competitors, Northwestern and [the University of Pennsylvania], had decided to accept the Common Application.”

What was the result of the University of Chicago allowing the Common App? By 2013, the school increased the number of applications it received by more than 20,000 and reduced its acceptance rate by over 24 percentage points. This helped move Chicago from being ranked number nine nationally by U.S. News in 2007 to number five by 2014—ahead of its competitors Northwestern and the University of Pennsylvania.

#3 You may be rejected or wait-listed at a college simply because you are not wealthy.

Every year, a substantial number of private colleges reject or wait-list a certain proportion of applicants not because of grades or test scores or because they would not be a “good fit,” but, rather, simply because their families aren’t rich enough to pay full freight. These schools, in other words, are “need aware” when admitting a share of their students.

This may seem unjust. But colleges say they have no other choice because they have only a limited amount of money to spend on financial aid. “While financial aid is one of the top three expenditures at Oberlin, the amount of funds available is still finite, and we do have to take that into account in the admissions process,” says Elizabeth Houston, who works in the admissions office at Oberlin College.

“If, for instance, we admitted a class comprised entirely of students who could make no financial contribution to their education, we simply couldn’t afford it,” explains Houston in a blog post on the college’s website. “That’s an extreme case, but even taking into account the natural mix of income levels a college might see in their applicant pool, there are still very few institutions that are wealthy enough to afford to be completely need-blind and still meet 100 percent of demonstrated need.”

According to colleges, this typically doesn’t affect low-income students who are at the top of their class. Finances are only taken into account with more marginal students, they say.

Still, in a survey conducted by Inside Higher Ed in 2011, 19 percent of admissions directors at private liberal arts colleges reported that they admit full-pay students with lower grades and test scores than other applicants. These colleges are, in other words, providing affirmative action for the wealthy, despite all of the extraordinary advantages that these students have over their less-fortunate peers.

#4 Low-income students are not always better off at need-blind colleges.

It’s true that the most elite and wealthiest private colleges, like Harvard University and Amherst College, meet the full demonstrated financial need of their low- and moderate-income students. But many other colleges that boast about being need-blind don’t come close. Instead, they leave students with a hefty gap between what the government says they should be expected to pay and what they are being charged.

New York University, for example, admits students regardless of their financial need. However, NYU students from families making $30,000 or less face a daunting average net price—the amount students and their parents must pay after all grant aid has been exhausted—of $24,265 per year. (See “America’s Affordable Elite Colleges” page and our full rankings at washingtonmonthly.com, which calculate net price of attendance based on three-year averages.) That means that the lowest-income families are on the hook for an amount that is nearly equal to or even more than their yearly earnings.

Financially needy students who qualify for admission at NYU may actually be better off at “need-aware” schools that meet the full demonstrated need of the low-income students they do enroll.

#5 Need-blind schools are not really blind about their applicants’ need.

Administrators at purportedly need-blind colleges don’t necessarily need to know an applicant’s family income to know if he or she is poor, because they have plenty of other clues.

For example, admissions officers know where applicants live and what high school they attended, and whether or not they worked after school or participated in a plethora of extracurricular activities. Admissions staff members also know the occupations of the applicants’ parents and whether they attended college, and, more importantly, whether the student is a legacy. And these administrators can learn a lot about students’ backgrounds from their college application essays.

So if a need-blind school is looking to admit a much larger share of affluent students for budgetary reasons, it could easily do so without knowing exactly how much an applicant’s family earned last year.

#6 It isn’t always free to apply for financial aid.

Come financial aid season, many students and families realize that they must fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) in order to get a financial aid package from their school. What many families may not realize is that very selective, elite institutions often require a student to fill out another, more extensive form for financial aid. And unlike the FAFSA, this secondary financial aid application—the College Board’s CSS/Financial Aid PROFILE—isn’t free. The PROFILE is expensive, costing a student $25 just to register and send it to one college, and then $16 for each additional college.

Over the past few years, the U.S. Department of Education has been simplifying the FAFSA in an effort to reduce the barriers that low- and middle-income families face when filling out an unduly complex form. As a result, the number of questions asked on the FAFSA has been reduced, and parents can now use a data-retrieval tool through the IRS to pre-fill answers to many of the questions. These changes have significantly reduced the average time students and families take to complete the application.

But the simplification of the FAFSA has been cause for concern among selective colleges who are hesitant to part with any institutional aid dollars. This has pushed many institutions to require the PROFILE in order to determine institutional aid eligibility. Since FAFSA simplification has removed some questions regarding a family’s assets and savings, institutions have adopted the PROFILE to understand exactly how many assets a family owns—including in many instances their house and the make and model of their car—before giving them any aid.

#7 The order that you list colleges on the FAFSA may come back to haunt you.

Even if a student is lucky and only has to fill out the FAFSA to get financial aid, he should be wary about the order in which he lists the colleges where he’d like to send the application. According to a recent article in Inside Higher Ed, “Some colleges are denying admissions and perhaps reducing financial aid to students based on a single, non-financial, non-academic question that students submit to the federal government on their [FAFSA].” It turns out that colleges see exactly the order the student listed the schools on the FAFSA and have become savvy at admitting, wait-listing, and packaging aid depending on the student’s ordering.

Enrollment managers and management firms—the people charged with figuring out just how many students to admit to “yield” a class—have discovered that students often choose colleges on the FAFSA in preferential order. Inside Higher Ed reported that Augustana College, for example, found that 60 percent of the students who list the school first on the FAFSA end up enrolling, compared with 30 percent of those who list it second, and just 10 percent of those who list it third. Like Augustana, some schools look at a student’s “FAFSA position” to determine admissions decisions—completely unbeknownst to the student. A school does this to improve its yield rate, to ensure that it is able to enroll exactly the class it wants.

Some schools may also be taking the “FAFSA position” into account when awarding their own financial aid dollars to students—providing less generous aid packages to students who list the college first on the FAFSA. These colleges don’t want to waste precious institutional aid dollars on students who are already likely to attend without the help.

The problem is that not all students necessarily list schools in preferential order, or there may be very little difference among a student’s number one, number two, and number three option. Worse yet, the whole process is completely opaque to students. They have no idea that their chances of being admitted and receiving a generous financial aid package may ride largely on the order in which they list schools on the FAFSA.

#8 Financial aid award letters may make options seem more affordable than they really are.

Colleges don’t always come clean about how much students and families are going to have to pay to attend an institution. The “financial aid award letters” that colleges send aid applicants they’ve accepted often make their schools look more affordable than they really are.

One problem is that many colleges and universities package both grants and scholarships with loans and work-study allowances. This blurs how much students and parents are going to owe, often leading them to believe they are getting a great deal when in reality they are taking on a large amount of debt. Some colleges and universities include Parent PLUS loans in the “aid” packages they offer students, in order to bring their purported price down to zero. The Parent PLUS loan, which parents borrow on behalf of their children, come with a higher interest rate and less repayment flexibility than other federal student loans. Additionally, parents have to undergo a credit check to get a Parent PLUS loan. This means that a student and his or her parents may accept the financial aid package, put down a nonrefundable deposit to the institution, and then suddenly find themselves facing steep gaps in financial aid if the parent gets rejected for the loan.

Adding to the confusion over financial aid packages is that each institution has developed its own award letter, making it difficult for students to make an apples-to-apples price comparison among the institutions to which they’ve been accepted. This could lead them to make a suboptimal choice in terms of which school will provide the best aid package while also still being a good fit academically and socially.

#9 Some aid packages are designed to dissuade you from enrolling.

Many colleges offer extremely generous aid packages to the students they most desire, and leave large funding “gaps” for others in whom they are less interested. In the parlance of enrollment management, this is called “admit-deny,” in which schools provide students with aid packages that don’t come close to meeting their financial need in order to discourage them from enrolling.

“Admit-deny is when you give someone a financial-aid package that is so rotten that you hope they get the message, ‘Don’t come,’” Mark Heffron, a senior vice president at the enrollment management firm Noel-Levitz, told the Atlantic Monthly back in 2005. “They don’t always get the message.”

Under this model, top students receive substantial amounts of grants and either need-based or merit-based scholarships. Those who are less desired have to take on a substantial amount of debt if they want to attend—either through private loans or federal PLUS loans for their parents.

Schools that engage in these practices don’t tend to advertise them. An exception is Muhlenberg College, a small private college in Pennsylvania, which includes a page on its website entitled “The Real Deal on Financial Aid.”

“It used to be that you could try for that reach school and if you got in, you didn’t have to worry because everybody who got in, who needed money, got money,” the college’s financial aid office states. “Today, however, as colleges are asked to fund more and more of their own operation with less and less assistance from government, foundations, and families, they are increasingly reluctant to part with their money to enroll students who don’t raise their academic profile.”

#10 Often the financial aid you receive your first year will be less generous the following year.

Students and families beware: the plum financial aid package you receive your freshman year may not be quite as impressive your sophomore year. The bait and switch of financial aid packages from year to year is known as “front-loading financial aid.” According to Mark Kantrowitz, a financial aid expert, about half of all colleges front-load grants and scholarships so that students receive a bigger discount their first couple of years but then face a financial aid package filled with loans in subsequent years.

Part of the problem is that many parents and students are unaware that they must apply for financial aid every year they are in school and that the price they pay can vary dramatically from year to year. A scholarship may come with a GPA requirement, for example, but it could also just be a one-time award given to incoming freshmen to attract them to the school. Think of it as a signing bonus—or tuition discount—that disappears by year two.

According to a study done by Kantrowitz, enough colleges front-load aid that the average net price for returning students—the price students pay after grants and scholarships are accounted for—is about $1,400 more. He also found that the more selective a college is, the less likely it is that it will front-load grants. What’s the best way to figure out if you’ll be the victim of a financial aid package bait and switch? Ask the college. Only problem is that some colleges will be less honest than others.

The post Ten Ways Colleges Work You Over appeared first on Washington Monthly.

But before Sue could even approach any of the women she hoped to interview, she needed to get permission from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, the Department of Corrections, and, crucially, the Harvard Committee on the Use of Human Subjects, also known as an institutional review board, or IRB. And it was at Harvard that she faced her greatest hurdles.

The Harvard IRB wanted to put all kinds of restrictions on Sue’s work. It didn’t want her to talk to women who had dealt with trauma or active mental illness. (That would have excluded just about all the women in her study.) It wanted her to get her informants’ signatures on written consent forms with complex legal language that, as Sue soon discovered, the women were unable to understand. It fretted that Sue would advise women to terminate pregnancies. And it forbade her from observing women outside of such controlled spaces as hospitals and jails, as much for Sue’s safety as for that of the women she studied.

Much of this struck Sue as bizarre. She had worked in tough neighborhoods before, in Durban, South Africa, as well as North Philadelphia and Bedford-Stuyvesant, not to mention local jails, so she knew what kinds of risks she was facing. More importantly, she knew the women she wanted to study, and what kinds of risks they were facing. While the IRB feared that Sue’s questions about drug use would spark cravings in recovering addicts, the former addicts themselves knew that friends, family, and familiar places were more likely to spark cravings than a question from a graduate student.

Sue was ready to acknowledge her ethical responsibilities as a researcher, but the IRB seemed detached from reality and left her feeling, she said, “alienated, oppositional, and isolated.” She was eventually able to win the approvals she needed, but the experience was searing enough that she subsequently wrote an essay in which she warned others about the ways “IRBs can actually impede, slow down and alter our research.” Indeed, anyone who cares about universities’ ability to study society and train researchers should worry about the obstacles IRBs can impose.

IRBs exist at just about every university or hospital that gets federal funding for research involving human beings, whether that means medical studies or just phone interviews. (The same rules do not apply to for-profit corporations, except drug companies.) The boards themselves are composed of a mix of researchers, administrators, and some members who are not affiliated with the institution and do not conduct research themselves, but who are supposed to represent the voice of the community. Along with the boards, larger institutions have IRB offices with staffing that can range from just three or four administrators to dozens, with annual budgets easily exceeding $1 million.

Regardless of the number of administrators employed, the IRB machinery exemplifies the way federal regulation can combine with institutional self-preservation to hamper a core mission of the university. The university exists to ask questions, yet IRBs forbid some questions to be asked. The university exists to spread truth, yet IRBs insist on altering facts in published accounts. (See, for example, our story about the career aspirations of Harvard and Stanford students. The story contains intentional inaccuracy inserted at the insistence of an IRB that was concerned to protect the identity of these students, even though most had no problem with being quoted by name.)

And even when researchers persevere, the IRB can function as a drag, limiting what they can achieve. A 2012 study found that preparing and complying with IRB protocols (as well as analogous protocols for animal research) “were by far the most time-consuming” administrative burdens faced by researchers with federal grants. While this survey focused on researchers in all fields, individual social scientists endure similar friction. For universities to do their best work, they need a better system.

The federal government invented the IRB with excellent intentions. In the mid-1960s, the Public Health Service learned that a few medical researchers were doing some troubling things with their grants. Two doctors had injected cancer cells into elderly hospital patients. They were sure that their bodies would reject the cancer, so they didn’t bother asking their permission or telling them what they were doing. Another had tried—unsuccessfully—to transplant an animal kidney into a human being, without seeking anyone’s approval.

To rein in such cowboys, in 1966 the surgeon general required grant recipients to secure “an independent determination of the protection of the rights and welfare of the individual or individuals involved.” Instead of a federal agency making the determination, each research hospital or university would have to establish its own IRB, a local office responsible for compliance with federal rules.

The need for such bodies appeared even more acute a few years later, when investigative journalists broke the news of additional abuses by federal researchers. At the University of Cincinnati, a researcher had used Army funds to judge the effect of nuclear combat on soldiers by exposing dozens of cancer patients—most of them black and poor—to massive doses of radiation. And the Public Health Service had, for decades, monitored the health of hundreds of African Americans with syphilis, deceiving them with colored aspirin tablets into thinking they were receiving medical treatment. More than any other research, this Tuskegee Syphilis Study, as it became known, led to congressional attention and, in 1974, to a statutory requirement that Public Health Service grants for human experimentation receive IRB review.

Policymakers figured that if IRB oversight made sense for medical research, it must also be the right tool for governing social science interviews, surveys, and ethnography. Anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists disagreed, explaining that their work was less predictable—and less hazardous—than medical experiments and should not be governed by the same procedures. As one sociology department warned in 1979, “These proposals display a profound ignorance of social science research requirements, techniques and methodology … and an unbelievably arrogant disdain for First Amendment protections of free speech.”

Nevertheless, federal regulators proceeded on their course, adopting a definition of human subjects research that includes not only medical and psychological experimentation but almost every form of systematic interaction between researchers and the people they study. In other words, altering someone’s DNA in a gene therapy trial or asking their taste in movies fall into the same broad category.

To be sure, even simple interviews can pose real ethical challenges. Some social scientists deceive their subjects in an effort to see if they harbor racial or gender biases that they would not admit (or even perceive) if questioned directly. More commonly, researchers accompany questions about sexuality, criminal behavior, or other sensitive topics with promises of confidentiality. In a recent case at Boston College, such promises proved inadequate when the British government secured recordings of former Irish Republican Army operatives who had spoken of an unsolved murder. A good oversight system would teach researchers techniques for keeping such material confidential, or at least for avoiding offering assurances that can’t be kept.

Unfortunately, in practice IRB review too often turns into a farcical imitation of ethical deliberation, as boards obsess over typographical errors or wildly improbable dangers while ignoring empirical evidence about the kinds of research that have caused trouble in the past. Like other forms of over-bureaucratization, they can do real damage to universities.

Most obviously, IRBs hinder research through simple delay. Even the most basic reviews can take weeks, while a more complex review by the full IRB can take many months. Since IRBs often only meet monthly, multiple revisions make the process drag on. Sue waited half a year for clearance. When Northwestern University professor Brian Mustanski sought clearance for a foundation-funded study of young members of sexual minorities, multiple rounds of IRB review consumed ten of the twenty-four months of funding. Fortunately, Mustanski was able to persuade the IRB to retract its demand for parental permission; had he confined his study to youth willing to involve their parents, it would have skewed his results.

Other researchers are less successful. Graduate student Sarah Young tried to get approval to interview Chinese mothers about their views on the one-child policy. The women were willing, and she had scholars at a Chinese university willing to host her. But after three months of unreturned emails and phone calls, and finally an in-person meeting with an administrator who belittled her knowledge of Chinese history, Young abandoned her plans to travel to China or conduct interviews.

When IRBs do respond, they can set conditions on researchers’ methods. Some of the most striking restrictions concern research about pressing public concerns, just the sort of thing that we might want to encourage scholars to pursue. Sociologist Jack Katz has tracked IRB interference with studies of Mormon sexuality, university admissions practices, and labor conditions at Indian casinos. Though the IRBs no doubt claimed ethical concerns, the effect is to block politically sensitive research.

Geographer Joshua Inwood wanted to interview people who had helped Greensboro, North Carolina, deal with the unhealed wounds left by a fatal 1979 attack by Klansmen and Nazis on a communist-led demonstration. His IRB chair summoned him to a meeting with the university general counsel, who wanted to vet all of Inwood’s manuscripts before he sent them out to peer review. Inwood resisted this demand, but he was forced to agree not to identify public officials by name, lest the airing of their views lead to electoral defeat. His published scholarship leaves out important quotations from the interviews he conducted, in favor of statements from public hearings and newspapers. “I’ve got this notion of American democracy, where public officials should be accountable for their views,” Inwood laments. “That shouldn’t be a harm; it should be part of the process.” Dreading a career in which his research would be constrained by an unreasonable IRB, Inwood moved to a different university.

Even innocuous studies are at risk. A pair of researchers who wanted to survey music education majors about why they had chosen that profession faced so many burdensome requirements that their sample was reduced from several thousand to 250. The same thing happened to a doctoral student who sought to survey college professors about the knowledge and skills they hoped to impart. Forced by the University of South Florida IRB to seek permission from every university whose faculty she wished to contact, she struggled simply to get messages returned by many of those other IRBs.

At the City University of New York, it took a librarian five months to get approval to ask students about their study habits and their use of the library. Unsurprisingly, she reported, “fear of the complexity of IRB regulations has led librarian researchers I know to simply avoid any research involving library users.”

If a researcher can complete her study, an IRB may still insist that she not report everything she learned. An IRB forbade anthropologist Scott Atran from identifying the terrorist networks he was studying, so that rather than write about, say, Hamas, he would have to refer to “Group A.” This issue of the magazine features work by Amy Binder, whose important research (and subsequent book) on campus conservatism was degraded by foolish IRB requirements. Forced to keep secret not only the names of the students they interviewed but even the sites of their work, Binder and her coauthor could not quote the students’ writing in campus newspapers or explore the influence of specific faculty members. And by keeping real names out of the final book, the IRB prevented future journalists and historians from understanding the early careers of the next generation’s Karl Rove or Dinesh D’Souza.

While faculty and advanced graduate students are the researchers most likely to face IRB troubles, undergraduates are affected as well. Some professors have stopped assigning interview projects, judging it not worth the bother. And ambitious students writing capstone theses must plan well in advance to get approval before their senior year. Whatever the outcome of an individual project, IRB rules can make both teaching and research more timid.

Balancing the interests of researchers, research participants, and society at large is not easy. As Harvard IRB chair E. L. Pattullo wrote in 1978, “There is no sieve, consistent with the maintenance of a healthy research enterprise, which will ensure against every possibility of subject abuse.” Short of prohibiting or permitting all research, any system will impose too much scrutiny on some studies and too little on others.

Still, we can do better than we are doing now. The simplest, boldest reform would be to restrict IRB jurisdiction to a narrow range of research projects. Finland, for example, requires researchers to seek ethics review only when they intervene “in the physical integrity of subjects,” deviate from informed consent, study children under the age of fifteen, use “exceptionally strong stimuli,” or risk subjects’ long-term mental health or security. All of these terms would require elaboration, but a study like Sue’s—based on interviews with consenting adults—would likely proceed without any mandatory review.

Closer to home, Canada has shown what reforms are possible when the rule-making process is made more inclusive. In 1998, Canada imposed a system much like that in the United States, resulting in howls of protest from researchers and what sociologist Will van den Hoonaard has called “increasing homogeneity and impoverishment of the social-scientific methods.”

But unlike U.S. regulators, Canadian rule makers listened to these critics and included them in a revision process. New guidelines, issued in 2010, include an entirely new chapter on qualitative research, acknowledging that since qualitative researchers do not plan experiments in advance, ethics boards cannot demand the same detailed protocols common in medical studies. The chapter also notes that anonymity isn’t for everyone, whether because narrators wish to be named or because people in power deserve to be held to account for their actions.

Canada also guarantees its researchers the right to appeal decisions of ethics boards, and endorses academic freedom, including “freedom of inquiry, the right to disseminate the results of that inquiry, freedom to challenge conventional thought, freedom to express one’s opinion about the institution, its administration or the system in which one works, and freedom from institutional censorship.” That may sound obvious, but it is the envy of U.S. scholars, who see IRBs as failing to consider such freedom in their quest to protect from every imaginable harm.

And in the United States, the federal government has finally at least acknowledged the problem. In 2011, the Department of Health and Human Services, along with the Office of Science and Technology Policy, conceded that “overregulating social and behavioral research in general may serve to distract attention from attempts to identify those social and behavioral research studies that do pose threats to the welfare of subjects and thus do merit significant oversight.” More generally, they accepted the need to reduce “burden, delay, and ambiguity” for investigators in all areas of research. Scholarly associations were quick to agree, as was a National Research Council study, which hoped to “increase the efficiency and effectiveness of human subjects’ protection, while reducing burden overall.”

One key proposal in the 2011 announcement called for a shift from reliance on prior review of nearly every protocol to a system in which, for low-risk types of research, “researchers would file with their institution or IRB a brief registration form (about one page long) that provides essential information about the study.” These forms could be audited periodically to make sure researchers were playing fair, but researchers would not have to wait weeks or months before starting their work.

A complementary proposal from the National Research Council would be to “build a stronger evidence base” about the effects of participating in research. That reform would help researchers like Sue, whose IRB knows little about the real-world ethical dilemmas that ethnographers face, and tends to base its decision on what bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel has termed “gut reactions … which is worthless.”

Unfortunately, regulators have not acted in the three years since the federal proposals were published. Part of the problem may be resistance from Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research (PRIM&R), a nonprofit that certifies—and thus tends to represent—IRB administrators whose career tracks depend on continued IRB jurisdiction, and that has enjoyed close contact with federal regulators. In its comments at the time, PRIM&R argued against empowering researchers to determine by themselves what studies require review. If there’s to be a one-page form, PRIM&R wants its members checking off on it.

Another reason for the holdup is that so many different federal agencies now share IRB regulations (known as the Common Rule), and each would need to agree on any reform. As a Department of Veterans Affairs research official warned in early 2013, “Given the current political climate and the often divergent interests of the seventeen agencies that adhere to the rule, meaningful systemic modernization of the Common Rule is not likely to occur any time soon.” By summer 2014, rumors spread that the next step, a proposed revised regulation, might appear within months—but also that it could make things worse, not better.

The post You Can’t Ask That appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In 2010, Bastian Nichols moved into his freshman dorm at Harvard without much thought of what he would do after graduation. He felt sure that in time he’d find a career that matched his passions (among them, journalism and travel), but while in college he would experiment at becoming “a more interesting person.”* His concentration in psychology and comparative literature matched his general philosophy. So did his choice of summer jobs, which ranged from leading a bike trip through Austria and working in a theater in Croatia to doing post-production work in an Italian film company.

Yet, as senior year approached, Nichols began to feel anxious about life after Harvard. He described being “scared because I was like, ‘Crap, I’ve got a year left, and I just don’t even know what I could possibly do.’” Feeling he had few choices, in the early weeks of his senior year Nichols began working with Harvard’s Office of Career Services to find a job in management consulting. Much to the dismay of peers who thought that at least he would be a holdout, he will begin his job at one of the country’s top three consulting firms this fall.

Nichols followed a path that is now well worn by a huge segment of America’s “best and brightest.” It starts when they arrive as freshmen on elite campuses, full of a sense of idealism and limitless possibility. It quickly leads to a bizarre status game in which they wind up in a frenzied competition with each other over jobs that they had previously never heard of or thought of as dull and lacking much social purpose.

The most obvious case in point is the huge number of elite university students who wind up working on Wall Street or in a handful of elite management consulting firms such as McKinsey & Company or Bain. In 2007, just before the global financial meltdown, almost 50 percent of Harvard seniors (58 percent of the men, 43 percent of the women) took jobs on Wall Street. That number contracted sharply during the Great Recession, but after 2009 it began rising again. Among this year’s graduating class at Harvard, 31 percent took jobs that will channel their energies into derivatives, mergers, and often destructive outsourcing. And many more tried out for such positions. According to a study by the sociologist Lauren Rivera, a full 70 percent of Harvard’s senior class submits résumés to Wall Street and consulting firms.

Meanwhile, among Harvard seniors who had secured employment last spring, a mere 3.5 percent were headed to government and politics, 5 percent to health-related fields, and 8.8 percent to any form of public service. Only high-tech fields captured the interest of graduating seniors at anywhere near the level of finance and consulting, and even this seemingly healthy countertrend has problems. (See “Is High Tech the Answer?.)

What explains this skew in how America’s top students wind up applying their talents?

With rare exceptions, the explanation does not lie with the values students pick up from their professors, most of whom are horrified that so many of their protégés march off in lockstep to banking and consulting. Bastian Nichols recalled that when he told a faculty member that he had landed a job at McKinsey, the professor’s body language said it all. “He was sort of like, ‘Oh, there goes another one; we’ve lost another one to the consulting venue.’”

Nor does the explanation reside in some generational change that has caused huge numbers of bright young Millennials to adopt Michael Milken or Mitt Romney as a role model. In fact, like Nichols, many if not most students who find themselves working on Wall Street tend to have much broader interests that they have set aside. Consequently, as Kevin Roose has written in his new book, Young Money, many wind up hating their jobs. Incessant Excel and PowerPoint drudgery, being on call to superiors at all hours of the night, putting in eighty to a hundred hours of work per week, traveling constantly, in the case of consulting, and feeling, overall, like a cog in a meaningless machine—all work against a balanced, productive life. The search for exit strategies becomes a preoccupation of many who take these positions.

Nor is the explanation that it was ever so. According to Karen Ho, an anthropologist at the University of Minnesota and the author of Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, students interested in corporate America in the mid-twentieth century tended to choose management training in industrial, aerospace, or chemical industries to earn their stripes. Wall Street partners did recruit a handful of Ivy League undergrads through networks of upper-class family and friends and, later, more from MBA programs. But comparatively few undergrads went directly from campus to Wall Street. Indeed, the big draw, especially in the 1970s, was the law and medical schools.

One partial explanation for why career routes have changed is, of course, the money that newly minted graduates from top schools can make on Wall Street or with consulting firms. Entry-level analysts typically make $70,000 to $90,000 a year, with the prospect of making much more. But for bright students from elite universities, there are lots of opportunities in many other fast-growing sectors, including energy and health care. Yet comparatively few wind up in such occupations.

Moreover, assuming that people choose careers with regard only to money is naive, and particularly so when it comes to highly status-conscious and competitive students at top universities. In order for large numbers of elite students to end up working at jobs that most had never heard of when they arrived on campus—and that most will find soul killing—they have to first learn that these jobs exist and come to think of them as prestigious. How does that happen?

To gain insight into this question I, along with two graduate students, Nick Bloom and Daniel Davis, interviewed sixty students and recent alums at Harvard and Stanford. Although not based on a random sample, our study included students from a variety of backgrounds, majors (called “concentrations” at Harvard), and career plans— or actual first jobs, in the case of alumni. Our research shows that students don’t just gravitate automatically to jobs in finance and consulting. Rather, this is in large part a story of universities helping to organizationally manufacture students’ aspirations for these positions.

Before students can clamor for jobs in investment banks or consulting firms, they first have to learn what these esoteric professions are. Of our sixty interviewees, only two students said they were familiar with these careers when they entered college, and one of these was the daughter of a Wall Street banker who had attended an elite business school.

Far more typical are students like William, a junior at Harvard who told us that before arriving on campus, he “didn’t know there were consulting firms like McKinsey or Bain. I didn’t know that there were big investment banks like JPMorgan. I didn’t know that those really existed or what they did, and that wasn’t a thing for me, something I aspired to be.”

Most students come to campus with vague plans about their professional lives, along the lines of a Harvard alum named Kevin, who said he planned to “study philosophy and go to law school and have a nice life,” or Olivia, who had chosen Stanford because she dreamed of launching a start-up. Another junior at Harvard laughingly recalled that he “thought careers in finance were like being a bank teller, being an accountant, or something.” Yet despite their utter lack of knowledge of these jobs, all four of these students are currently pursuing or, in the case of the two alums, have already taken their first jobs in finance or consulting firms.

So what happened? The explanation starts with changes in how Wall Street firms and management consulting firms go about filling their ranks. Starting in the 1980s, these firms adopted a recruitment strategy that targeted undergraduate students at a handful of elite colleges in a way that other profitable, fast-growing industries—like the energy, health care, and high-tech sectors—did not.

This wasn’t so much because banks and consulting firms had a greater demand for young brainpower. Rather, these other industries managed to find the talent they needed—to, say, devise new medicines or software or oil exploration techniques—from the broad array of American colleges and universities. While happy to hire Ivy Leaguers, they didn’t inordinately seek them out. Wall Street and the consulting firms, by contrast, developed business models that relied on the appearance of brainpower in order to win clients. This put a premium on recruiting from a handful of universities with the highest worldwide brand equity. Top students from Purdue or UCLA might be just as good, or even better, at putting together spreadsheets. But being able to boast that you have a team of kids from Harvard is important when you are trying to sell high-cost consulting and financial services of uncertain value.

To get to those kids, the nation’s top banks and consulting firms began by competing with each other to become “platinum” members of the career services programs run by the most elite schools. Winners of this pay-for-play competition get the best tables at campus career fairs, access to students’ email in-boxes, entrée to the most impressive banquet rooms for holding information sessions and receptions, bundled delivery of applicants’ résumés, and space and scheduled times to hold one-on-one interviews, among other goods and services known as “recruitment.”

The recruitment process gins up early in the fall term and ends well before the academic year is over. Firms seek to sign up recruits as soon as possible, since it cuts off competing employers by removing fresh talent from the market. At the top of the calendar are firms’ information sessions, which are designed to educate students not only on the nitty-gritty of the application process (résumé-writing workshops, dates for résumé drops) but, more importantly, on what it means personally and socially to work for a high-prestige firm.

Marketing is heavy. Firms seek to make themselves the inevitable choice of students through slick video presentations, excellent food (more than one interviewee mentioned this perk), and a show of raw human talent. Investment banks and consulting firms do not send human resources personnel to work the room; they send teams of professionals to woo the young crowd, including recent graduates of the very schools where recruitment is taking place—an effective strategy for making the jobs relatable.

Most freshmen remain reasonably insulated from recruiters, but once students come back to school as sophomores they find it impossible not to notice their older peers’ “stampede to start applying” for jobs on Wall Street, as Nathan, a Harvard alum, put it. Whether observing seniors going through recruitment for the two-year analyst jobs post-graduation, or juniors going through recruitment for coveted summer internships (which with luck and hard work can be converted to an offer for an analyst position the following year), younger students take notice.

Nathan, who successfully landed a junior internship and then a job at a top investment bank, told us how these presentations simultaneously warmed him up for these jobs and also wore him down. “At Harvard,” he said, “you always want to seize every opportunity you can,” which is why he went to the sessions offered by the firms and gathered the “glossy pamphlets,” where everything “sounds so amazing.”

But it wasn’t just excitement that led him to apply; it was also, he said, “inertia.” Portraying himself as “extremely risk averse,” Nathan told us he hadn’t made “a conscious decision to pursue banking. It was more, I guess—I mean, I hate to use the term ‘fear of missing out.’ I didn’t know what I was missing by not applying, so I ended up doing my research and tossing my hat in.” Convinced by the information sessions that he would miss gaining “marketable skills” if he didn’t bite, he bit hard and prepared his file.

In addition to formal presentations, firms also work with student-run organizations to have an omnipresence on campus. One Stanford student named Sadie revealed that consulting firms “are really good at getting an ‘in’ with various student group leaders and saying ‘Hey, can you forward this information out to your networks?’”

According to another Stanford student, Devon, who is an officer in one of the pre-professional clubs on campus, banks “come and they do presentations for the general population, but then they’ll have sessions with just the finance kids. Things like that really help them get connected and get noticed and already stand out before the process even starts because they have us for approval.”

This, and the flyers that cover campus during high season and the emails flooding students’ in-boxes, means that “students get to know these recruiters and see them around—a lot,” said Noelle from Harvard. All of this enhances the sense that the jobs are a natural fit, since no other employment sector comes close to this level of visibility. Understating recruitment’s effects, one Harvard grad said drolly, “There’s a lot of pressure in the whole recruiting system: ‘Oh my god, I have to get a job at McKinsey! I have to get a job at Goldman!’”

Six weeks after the presentation phase begins, recruitment momentum shifts to résumé drops. Here, too, career service offices play an essential role. When students at elite universities go through recruitment for finance and consulting jobs, they have a direct path to these firms that students at other universities do not. Harvard résumés are reviewed only against other Harvard résumés, Stanford only against Stanford. Career services sets deadlines for these résumé drops, collects students’ cover letters and transcripts, and bundles the pieces of information together for delivery to the firms. The next few weeks are tense as students wait to hear if they have cleared this hurdle.

The next phase of the process begins when firms send out first-round interview requests to selected applicants and begin their series of meetings with seniors. These meetings, which are held on campus in career services facilities, mark the beginning of the headiest phase of competition (and concomitant anxiety) in the whole process. Students running around in suits prevail on campus; they annoy their professors by skipping weeks of classes in order to make their appointments; they hope for an invitation to do second rounds on campus two weeks later, and pray for an eventual invitation to fly to the corporate offices to seal the deal.

The joke, according to some of our interviewees, is that in September and then again in January and February, students going through recruitment are “part-time students, full-time recruiting.” This is a reflection of the amount of time they spend living in the career services offices doing interview after interview after interview.

Noelle’s description of her own successful navigation of this stage of the process at Harvard mirrors the experience of many:

You do maybe one interview onsite, two interviews onsite, maybe one phone interview, and then they fly you out to New York, and that takes up a lot of time. I mean it’s great. You get airplane miles, you get paid for your hotel, they’re treating you like royalty. You get great meals, you get reimbursed, everything like that. But the thing is that you miss so much class. There are kids who are literally flying down to New York three times a week for three different interviews. It’s nuts. And it’s really stressful. It’s really competitive. I’ve heard stories of roommates who don’t talk to each other because they’re competing against each other for the same jobs.

Why are so many Harvard and Stanford students vulnerable to getting caught up in such competitions? Most are well aware that they are competing for a narrow band of jobs, and that however boring and purposeless those jobs may be, immediate prestige will go to the winners of this highly structured competition.

To say that this creates cognitive dissonance or, at the very least, ambivalence for many students is putting things mildly. They both accept and abhor that being recruited by Wall Street or certain consulting firms has become a measure of how smart and talented they are. Much of this ambivalence comes from the tension between, on the one hand, wanting an ideal job that would take advantage of their individual interests and passions and, on the other, landing a position that accelerates their careers and fits well within the prestige system as it has come to exist on campus.

Both Opal, an engineering student at Stanford, and Kacie, a senior at Harvard with a concentration in the social sciences, expressed such ambivalence. At Stanford, Opal said, what counts as prestigious is how your job accomplishments look alongside other people’s. Her university “is competitive in the sense that you’re not measuring yourself against yourself, like the progress you’ve made over the past four years. You’re measuring yourself against others.”

Kacie, meanwhile, revealed how high-recognition jobs are used as the sine qua non metric for these assessments. “I feel like most people want to have jobs where other people know where they’re working,” she said. “They don’t want to work for some no-name company that nobody’s ever heard of.” Even students who try hard to find alternatives to the financial services path discover that competing for such jobs becomes an affirmation of how they rank with respect to their peers.

Bastian Nichols spoke eloquently on this subject, showing how his biography led to his destination in consulting. Since he was two years old, he said, he was told by his parents to “study really hard to get into a good school. Do well in school so that you get a good job.” Reflecting on how he has adhered to this advice, he said, “Okay, well, I’ve done all those things so far,” but he wonders how he is supposed to know what a “good job” is.

Looking around at his classmates and what his university promotes as a prestigious choice gave him the answer:

I guess a good job means consulting or finance because, well, look, that’s what the Office of Career Services has. When I talk to my peers, that’s what my peers are talking about. For someone like me who had very limited professional experience, who didn’t really have any baseline for what one could do, it was like, hey, I just see that these are the things that people from Harvard go do.

Of the 31 percent of graduating Harvard seniors going into finance and consulting, only 6.39 percent say that they expect to remain in those sectors (0.68 percent of those going into consulting jobs and 5.71 percent of those heading to financial services).

This mismatch between action and aspiration underscores how influential campus recruiters for Wall Street and consulting firms have become. Highly competitive, status-conscious students go to these firms because of the structured pathway that leads straight to them, even as they rationalize that they are on their way to some more noble end.

But what if institutions of higher learning didn’t just passively accept the role that these firms play in acculturating their students and diverting them into unfulfilling careers of limited social value? Opal echoed other students when she told us, “I just think Stanford could do a much better job at cultivating the idea that it’s okay not to go into consulting and finance, and to also encourage a more level playing field for smaller nonprofits.” At both Harvard and Stanford we heard requests percolating up for more options.

Other students offered promising ideas for how universities might pragmatically alleviate some of these structural imbalances between consulting and finance firms and other organizations. Sadie, an alum with interests in public policy, suggested, for example, “If you’re McKinsey, you [should have to] sponsor two or three of the smaller nonprofit organizations to which we already give a discount so that they can come to the career fair too. Or something that creates … almost like a progressive taxation system on companies with more resources.”

Whether or not this particular idea is practical, Sadie’s basic intuition that there must be ways to arrange pathways to alternative careers that undergrads from elite schools might choose is a sound one. Proof of concept comes from Teach for America, the nonprofit founded by Wendy Kopp. As a Princeton undergraduate, Kopp had the profound insight that she could lure elite students into teaching in low-income schools by creating the same kind of high-stakes, tournament-like competition that Wall Street and consulting firms use. Today, nearly 10 percent of Ivy League undergrads apply to Teach for America. Having originally started with the Ivy League, the organization now recruits at hundreds of other selective but not-so-elite campuses and annually places 10,000 graduates from these colleges and universities in low-performing schools throughout the country.

The experience of Teach for America proves that with the right structure, people who might otherwise wind up at Goldman or Bain can be persuaded to try their hand at careers where they can at least attempt to remedy the country’s biggest problems. If Teach for America can do this, what’s keeping other organizations from trying—for instance, the federal government? Experts have been warning for years of the coming retirement of hundreds of thousands of the most experienced and competent federal workers, many of whom were inspired by John F. Kennedy to choose public service. Now there is a severe lack of similarily talented and enthusiastic new recruits to take their place. Fortunately, the Obama administration has taken an important first step toward solving that recruitment problem by creating short-term jobs within federal agencies for young college students and recent graduates—positions not unlike those that Wall Street and consulting firms began offering back in the 1980s. (See Rachel Cohen, “How to Find a Career With Uncle Sam.”) What’s missing is a coordinated, campus-based federal effort to recruit more top students into applying for those jobs.

But the public sector is hardly the only place where Harvard and Stanford grads might find rewarding careers that contribute to bettering the nation. America would also benefit if more of our most competitive students went into traditional corporate and nonprofit management, or applied their talents to such critical sectors as health care, transportation, agriculture, and energy—anything but careers based on financial wheeling and dealing and the hollowing out of more productive enterprises.

How these other sectors might be mobilized to recruit more energetically on Ivy League campuses—if only to keep those students away from JPMorgan and Bain—is a difficult question. But if anyone can figure it out, it’s Harvard and Stanford, with their vast endowments and super-well-connected alumni networks to draw on. In doing so they’d be blazing a path that, with luck, other campuses could follow. But the first step is for these elite schools to recognize that their students are flocking to Wall Street and consulting firms less by choice than because of a rigged recruiting game that the schools themselves have helped to create.

The post Why Are Harvard Grads Still Flocking to Wall Street? appeared first on Washington Monthly.