The release of the ARWU marked the emergence of the global phase of rankings. Prior to that, rankings—such as U.S. News and World Report’s college rankings, which were first published in 1983—were primarily about measuring national reputation and performance and providing information to students and parents. By placing higher education quality within a wider comparative and international framework, the ARWU was different. It immediately illustrated that national preeminence was no longer sufficient and that the higher education world was multipolar. In doing so, it set the cat among the pigeons.

Within months of the ARWU’s publication, the rankings were being called “a major wake-up call” for European higher education. To the consternation of European policy makers and academics, their universities made up only about one-third of the world’s top 100 institutions. Over the years, the precise number has ebbed and flowed, but the proportion has remained relatively static, depending on the ranking. European concern was set against the backdrop of the European Union’s (EU) ambitious Lisbon Agenda; launched in 2000, it sought to make Europe “the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world.” Strong, competitive, and modern universities lay at the heart of that goal.

In 2005, the German government launched the Exzellenzinitiative (Initiative for Excellence), replacing its long-standing policy support for equity across all universities with a plan to promote excellence among only a few. (Versions of this have since been introduced in many other European countries, including France, Spain, and Russia, and also around the world.) The French were equally troubled: in 2008, the French Sénat released a report arguing that the country’s researchers were being disadvantaged in favor of English-speaking institutions. A 2008 conference organized under the auspices of the French Presidency of the European Council championed the idea of a new EU ranking.

In contrast to the Shanghai ranking, which concentrates only on research, it was argued that the EU ranking should give due regard to the diversity of institutional missions and the breadth of higher education’s activity across teaching, research, and engagement. (It should be noted that the term “diversity” differs in other countries from its usage in the U.S., where it typically refers to ethnicity, race, and gender; elsewhere it describes a diverse range of college and university missions or purposes.) In 2005, the EU sponsored the first phase of a European classification system, launched as U-Map in 2009. In the same year, a consortium was established to test the feasibility of a multidimensional ranking, released as U-Multirank in 2011 with an operational version due for 2014.

U-Map is Europe’s version of the U.S. Carnegie Classification system. Based on the desire to highlight the diversity of European higher education institutions (HEIs), U-Map was designed as an interactive online tool that allows various stakeholders to choose the multidimensional classification attributes that are most important to them. There are twenty-nine indicators across six dimensions using official and institutional data: teaching and learning, students, research, knowledge exchange, international orientation, and regional engagement. Results are produced as a radar or sunburst diagram[CE1] , with each dimension represented by a different color, in order to provide a visual representation of an institution’s characteristics.

Figure 1

Source: Van Vught et al., U-Map: European Classification of Higher Education (Enschede, Netherlands: University of Twente Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies, 2010), http://www.u-map.org/U-MAP_report.pdf, p. 37.

U-Map is promoted as a profiling tool, to facilitate easy comparison between different institutions and inform student choice or strategic decision making by institutions or governments. So far more than 230 HEIs, primarily in Europe, have signed up and added their profiles to U-Map; the aim is to have 1,000 European HEIs involved by the end of 2013. The U-Map concept has been taken up and developed in different jurisdictions to showcase institutional diversity.

The Nordic countries launched their own U-Map, albeit with lower-than-expected participation, especially from Sweden and Denmark. In the meantime, Norway and the Republic of Ireland have developed their own versions. These are more complex, benefiting from access to a wider range of national and institutional data, but they share some similarities, including the visualisation of the results. In these instances, the maps are used to display institutional differences and to inform strategic dialogues between the government and/or ministry and HEIs about institutional targets and resourcing. An Australian model has recently been developed by the Martin Institute at the University of Melbourne and the Association Centre for Educational Research (ACER).

Borrowing on the experience of U-Map, U-Multirank was conceived to directly challenge the dominance of global rankings at both the conceptual and functional levels. Whereas U-Map profiles what an institution does, U-Multirank aims to assess how well it does these activities. The objective is to overcome complaints that traditional rankings compare apples with oranges rather than apples with apples.

It is being developed by members of the original CHERPA Consortium, which created U-Map and is led by the Centre for Higher Education (CHE) in Germany and the Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies at the University of Twente, plus the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University, the academic publisher Elsevier, the Bertelsmann Foundation, and the software firm Folge 3.

U-Multirank is based on four design principles: it is user driven, whereby each individual or stakeholder group can rank the data according to his/her own preferences; it is multidimensional, with information collected according to five different characteristics; there is peer-group comparability, through which HEIs of similar missions can be compared; and it permits multilevel analysis, in which HEIs can be examined at the institutional level but also at the disciplinary or field-based level and at the department level.

U-Multirank also uses interactive online technology to facilitate multi-functionality. The system does not pre-assign a weighting to each indicator, and there are no composite indicators. This will preclude, the promoters say, the results being aggregated into a single-digit ordinal ranking. At the institutional level, the results will be shown in the sunburst format, while the field-based rankings will draw on the experience of the CHE ranking, which bands universities into three different groups (top, middle, and bottom), using traffic-light colors (green, yellow, and red), as illustrated in Figure 2. The intention is to avoid simplistic league tables.

Figure 2

Source: F. A. Van Vught and F. Ziegele, eds., U-Multirank: Design and Testing the Feasibility of a Multidimensional Global University Ranking (Brussels: European Commission Directorate of Education and Culture, 2010), http://ec.europa.eu/education/higher-education/doc/multirank_en.pdf

During the feasibility phase (2009-2011), about 150 HEIs, primarily from Europe, participated. This was a source of disappointment, particularly since only fifty universities from outside Europe and only two in the U.S. signed up. The implementation phase was launched in January 2013, during the Irish Presidency of the European Council. The threshold of 500 universities has been met with HEIs from more than sixty countries, in line with targets of 75 percent from EU countries and 25 percent from non-EU nations. This phase is being funded with 2 million euros ($2.6 million) for two years by the European Commission, with a possibility of another two years of funding in 2015-16. The ultimate intention is for the ranking to be supported by a foundation or similar independent consortium.

Data collection for the current phase is due to begin shortly, with first results expected in early 2014. This phase will focus on institutional and field-based rankings, including mechanical and electrical engineering, business, and physics. The next phase, due at the end of 2014, will cover universities providing degrees in computer science/IT, sociology, psychology, music, and social work. In response to criticism from research-intensive universities, U-Multirank will facilitate comparison by institutional type. A consultation process on the refined indicators and design of the online tool will continue in parallel with implementation.

The major difficulty plaguing any global ranking is the choice of indicators and the availability of meaningful international comparative data. These issues lie at the heart of the innovative aspects of U-Multirank but are also the source of continued criticism and scepticism. Other concerns arise from the purpose and likely use of the ranking’s results, costs, and name.

The most vocal opposition has come from LERU, the League of European Research Universities, which represents twenty-one research-intensive institutions across Europe, including the universities of Cambridge and Oxford, University College London, Imperial College London, and the University of Edinburgh. LERU formally withdrew its support for the project in January 2013, citing concerns about the need for and cost of U-Multirank—a view that also found favor within the UK House of Lords. In March 2013, following a four-month inquiry into the EU’s contribution to the modernization of European higher education, its EU Social Policies and Consumer Protection Sub-Committee released a report saying that U-Multirank was not a priority for the EU at this time and expressing concern about the administrative burden being placed on institutions to provide the requisite data. It also questioned whether the rankings would ultimately be used to allocate resources for various European research or other programs.

It is fair to say that this criticism should be taken with a grain of salt. There is a pernicious Euro-sceptic sentiment that runs through many UK parliamentary and government statements and is especially strong at the moment. The British government, led by the Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, is struggling to maintain a balanced discussion despite the involvement of the junior coalition partner, the Liberal Democrats, which is a strong supporter of the EU. Cameron has been forced to declare a simple “in-out” referendum on EU membership in reaction to the growing strength of the right-wing UK Independence Party (UKIP), which is eating into his own party support.

LERU criticism is probably best understood in terms of its membership, which is strongly led by UK-based universities. They have arguably benefited the most from the English-language bias that permeates the Times Higher Education and QS rankings—and it could be said that they have the most to lose from an alternative format. LERU apart, other UK universities have applied to be part of U-Multirank.

Nonetheless, genuine issues have arisen, most thoroughly documented in two substantial reports by the European University Association,[*] which is also conducting a study of the impact of rankings on European higher education institutions.

Indicators

The choice of indicators is always a source of contention. This arises from whether the indicators measure something meaningful or simply what’s easy to count (to paraphrase Einstein). There is some distinction between the choice of indicators used for institutional and field-based rankings, but overall they combine traditional indicators with some new innovative ones, such as interdisciplinary programs, art-based research outputs, and regional engagement. They also include student satisfaction data.

However, input and output indicators are used interchangeably. For example, “continuous professional development,” or CPD, activity is used as an indicator of knowledge transfer but is measured simply in terms of the number of such courses offered per full-time academic staff. Similar comments can be made about counting the number of staff employed in the technology transfer office or international students. Arts, humanities, and social science research are still underrepresented because of reliance on traditional bibliometric databases, such as Web of Science and Scopus, and engagement and co-publications are viewed primarily through a techno-science lens.

U-Multirank may have more indicators than other rankings, but it has not cracked the problem of measuring the quality of teaching and learning. It had hoped that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) initiative would provide much-needed data, and chose its initial field-based rankings to align with it. But the demise of AHELO, announced in March of this year, after an estimated expenditure of $10 million, put an end to that dream. So it’s back to reliance on expenditure, graduation rates, and academic performance—which, as we know, are poor proxies for teaching and learning outcomes measures.

The U-Multirank team has worked closely with stakeholders to identify new and more useful indicators. But, ultimately, intensity is equated with quality, and this problem is apparent in oral presentations given by team members. In other words, the more there is of a particular activity, the better it is assumed to be. This is then represented in the sunburst graphic as longer (or shorter) legs—resulting in inevitable misinterpretation.

Purpose and Audience

U-Multirank is designed to challenge the methodology and dominance of the big three global rankings—in particular, Shanghai’s ARWU and the Times Higher Education and QS rankings. If it can entice sufficient numbers of U.S. universities—and so far fewer than twenty have signed up—it will also be able to challenge the rankings of U.S. News & World Report.

Use of the term “rankings” to describe what is in effect “banding” has, however, raised some hackles as well as suspicion that it will ultimately produce or facilitate an ordinal ranking. The European Commission has denied that any correlation will be made between the rankings and resource allocation. However, there is already evidence that the EU, as well as other funding agencies, does take rankings into account in the assessment of the “quality” of the research team. Likewise, there is strong evidence that business and employer groups, philanthropic and investment organizations, and other countries—particularly when national scholarships or partnerships are being considered—do factor in rankings.

Another criticism of rankings is that they have a propensity to disproportionately focus on research-intensive universities. This has had the effect of driving up the status and reputation of “world-class” universities who serve privileged students while simultaneously undermining institutional diversity. U-Multirank has embraced diversity as a core principle, but will now be including a series of predefined rankings by institutional type, including research-intensive universities based on about ten research-related, mainly bibliometric, indicators. While this ranking will be made on a multidimensional and more differentiated basis than existing global rankings, public and policy focus may well gravitate toward this particular ranking—thereby undermining the whole purpose of the exercise.

The CHE ranking has wide usage across Germany, and is also used in neighbouring Austria, the Netherlands, and German-speaking cantons of Switzerland. A French version now in development will probably use nine indicators, some of which will take French education peculiarities into account. Nonetheless, it remains to be seen whether the sunburst diagram, as developed by U-Map and U-Multirank, can provide a meaningful comparator framework for students and other stakeholders, especially given concerns about some of the indicators. Despite claims by U-Multirank that it will enhance consumer choice, global rankings today are much more about global and institutional positioning. After all, this was the reason U-Multirank was created.

Data Sources

Critics of rankings often point to an overreliance on institutional self-reporting in the absence of meaningful cross-national comparative data and data definitions. The same problem affects Europe; the definition of who is a student or a faculty member differs from one member state to the next. There has been some discussion about developing a global common data set, but cross-jurisdictional comparisons of educational quality defy simple methods.

Dependence on institutional data has raised questions about the accuracy of reporting and allegations of “gaming,” which have plagued U.S. News and World Report. It has also led to various efforts to boycott rankings in the hope of undermining them—most notably in the U.S. by the Education Conservancy in 2007 and in Canada around the same time. Most of these campaigns have fizzled out, as the boycott has had little effect except to isolate those universities. The main lesson is that being ranked brings visibility, which is necessary oxygen almost regardless of which position the university actually holds in the ranking.

Nevertheless, data accuracy and accessibility remains a potential land mine. Similarly, administrative time and money has come under scrutiny. To get around this, and to ensure that U-Multirank has consistent, accurate, and independent access to data, the EU cleverly commissioned a sister project called EUMIDA, which lays the foundation for regular data collection by national statistical institutes on individual HEIs in EU member states plus Norway and Switzerland, likely to be coordinated through EUROSTAT. The feasibility study was completed in 2010, and the implementation stage is due to start shortly. EUMIDA is a good example of how policy makers can develop solutions to agilely circumvent roadblocks. This effectively nullifies the decision of LERU, and others, to boycott participation.

It also signals an important opportunity. If U-Multirank can pull in data from other national and supranational sources, then it could provide the basis for a worldwide database on higher education. The implications of that would be very significant indeed.

In a globalized world, cross-jurisdictional comparisons are inevitable and only likely to intensify in the future. In addition, demands for greater accountability about higher education performance can no longer be ignored. We have a right to know whether our students’ qualifications are of high quality, are internationally comparable and transferable, and are being achieved at a reasonable and efficient cost. Rankings have arisen because of this information deficit.

Ultimately, new media technologies and formats, such as social media, consumer Web sites and the Internet, and the use of search engines and open-source facilities, will dramatically transform the debate over the coming years by putting more control directly into the hands of users. It is easy to imagine a higher education TripAdvisor, but crowdsourcing carries its own concerns.

In this environment, U-Multirank is a significant improvement on other global rankings. The difficulties encountered by U-Multirank highlight the complexities associated with assessing and comparing quality. Context remains fundamentally important. National or global, public or private, student cohort and learning environment—these dimensions can radically affect the performance of institutions and render simple comparisons meaningless.

However, as an indicator-based system, U-Multirank can only achieve limited transparency, and cannot provide more than a quantitative picture. It cannot pretend to say anything about quality. And if it remains true to its original mission—to be genuinely “multi-rank”—will it struggle to displace other global rankings? Or will decision makers continue to look for simple answers to complex problems?

The post Europe Enters the College Rankings Game appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Predicted grad rate: 47%
Actual grad rate: 50%

Net price: $3,489

Reason it made the cut: CSUF ranks eighth in the nation for bachelor’s degrees awarded to minority students, according to the magazine Diverse: Issues in
Higher Education.

After expanding its enrollment cap in 2003, CSUF grew rapidly and is now the largest campus in the CSU system, serving a small city—30,782—of undergraduates. Amid this accelerated growth, it has maintained a better-than-predicted graduation rate for its students while offering relatively small class sizes (only 10 percent of classes have more than fifty students). One key to CSUF’s success has been to use data to track student performance and identify early on those students who are at risk of falling behind. CSUF deans and academic advisers then reach out to those populations and help to link them to the tools they need to succeed. And while CSUF has not escaped the budget cuts of the last few years that have forced public universities in California to raise tuition rates, it has made an effort to ensure that low-income students continue to receive generous financial aid and nearly $2 million in scholarships and awards every year. The university also offers eight federally funded undergraduate research training programs through its College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics.

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA KEARNEY (NE)

Predicted grad rate: 51%
Actual grad rate: 61%
Net price: $8,940

Reason it made the cut: UNK has managed to outperform its predicted graduation rate by 10 points, partly by providing exceptional assistance to low-income and first-generation college students.

As one of five institutions in the University of Nebraska system, the university maintains a strong commitment to the regional community, including a partnership with Kearney Public Schools that has helped lower the childhood obesity rate in the area. Another program, Kearney Bound, works with local high schools to prepare first-generation students for college. If those students make it to UNK, the university covers their tuition, books, and living expenses and offers an array of support services. UNK provides similar support to its low-income students—roughly 40 percent of UNK’s 5,442 undergraduates receive Pell Grants—through the U.S. Department of Education’s TRIO program, which provides counseling and assistance with everything from filling out financial aid forms to enrolling in the right classes. UNK also offers a robust catalog of online learning opportunities with its highly ranked eCampus for nontraditional students with families and full-time jobs.

APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY (NC)

Predicted grad rate: 63%
Actual grad rate: 65%
Net price: $7,077

Reason it made the cut: With a robust student support network, Appalachian State serves the regional population and graduates the majority of its low-income students without debt.

Founded in 1899 as a teacher’s college and integrated into the University of North Carolina system in 1972, ASU’s mission has always been to broaden access to education in a region long blighted by poverty. To that end, the school has developed a program called Appalachian Commitment to a College Education for Student Success (ACCESS), which supplements federal financial aid to cover the full cost of education—tuition, fees, and room and board—for low-income students for four years. In conjunction with other programs, ACCESS also provides an individually tailored support program for each student, which includes counseling, tutoring, and links to paid internships and careers. More than 60 percent of ACCESS students graduate without student loan debt, and, impressively, 70 percent of the first ACCESS cohort with academic support graduated within five years.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE (CA)

Predicted grad rate: 61%
Actual grad rate: 67%
Net price: $9,224

Reason it made the cut: UC Riverside boasts nearly identical graduation rates for Pell recipients and non-Pell recipients.

At about 57 percent, the proportion of students at UC Riverside on Pell Grants is one of the highest in the nation—and its graduation rate outstrips the predicted rate by 6 points. Part of that extraordinary success rate is due to student support programs that specifically reach out to low-income, remedial, or nontraditional students juggling family and work obligations. In addition, other university programs, like the Pathway Project, help pave the way for regional community college students to transfer to the university in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, by reaching out to potential transfer students with internships and workshops that prepare them for university-level work and future careers. Once those students arrive at UC Riverside, they’re provided with additional tools, including counseling, tutoring, and help securing financial aid—all factors that help them navigate their path to graduation.

CUNY QUEENS COLLEGE (NY)

Predicted grad rate: 49%
Actual grad rate: 53%
Net price: $2,757

Reason it made the cut: With an array of programs to support largely minority, low-income, and nontraditional students, Queens College is making the diversity of its students one of its best assets.

Despite a growing applicant pool and increasing selectivity, Queens College has maintained a commitment to admit a student body that reflects the ethnic and socioeconomic diversity of its New York City borough. To that end, a number of programs at Queens College aim to attract and support minority and low-income students. One program, Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge, begins with intensive workshops for underprepared students struggling with remedial math and English. When they complete those courses, they are organized into learning communities for sustained support throughout their time at the college. Another program, Minority Access to Research Careers, aims to close the minority gap in STEM fields by providing minority and low-income students special exposure to undergraduate research and upping their chances of being accepted into biomedical graduate research programs.

UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA (FL)

Predicted grad rate: 62%
Actual grad rate: 63%
Net price: $8,825

Reason it made the cut: Despite rapid growth and an up-and-coming reputation, the second-largest university in the U.S. has made a concerted effort to keep its net price low.

With its student body growing by 60 percent and operating costs more than doubling since 2000, the cost of attending UCF has increased, but, given the vast resources and diversity its expansion has brought, both its value proposition and selectivity have improved as well. In 2011, Newsweek listed it as one of the top ten national universities least likely to leave graduates in debt. UCF also does a superior job graduating Hispanic and African American students, thanks to an array of dedicated programs, like Brother to Brother, that provide minorities, first-generation students, and underrepresented demographics with additional support for navigating both academics and campus life. In addition, the Burnett Honors College admits 500 outstanding incoming freshmen to a program with a small-school feel but big-school resources on this campus of 60,000. Elsewhere, UCF’s laundry list of preprofessional and professional programs contributes to its large population of adult students—a quarter of the student body is twenty-five or older.

NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY-RALEIGH (NC)

Predicted grad rate: 68%
Actual grad rate: 72%
Net price: $7,345

Reason it made the cut: While the more selective members of North Carolina’s “Research Triangle” in Durham and Chapel Hill attract the lion’s share of attention, NCSU, the largest of the three, offers underrated value.

With Duke University and the University of North Carolina thriving on outstanding academic and research reputations (and with UNC offering an impressive value proposition itself—see our complete list), NCSU might seem like a third wheel. But the Raleigh campus offers resources commensurate to, or exceeding, the others at an astonishingly low net cost for a flagship research institution. A member of the federal TRIO program, NCSU offers a series of outreach and support services to students, including a Talent Search program that provides hands-on counseling to thousands of middle and high school students in the state and offers educational assistance to those with the potential to succeed at the college level. Once they get to NCSU, Student Support Services continues to reach out with tutoring, career counseling, and financial aid advice, helping to deliver better-than-expected graduation rates.

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, MORRIS (MN)

Predicted grad rate: 60%
Actual grad rate: 60%
Net price: $9,255

Reason it made the cut: One of the only public liberal arts schools in the nation, UMM ranks just behind cash-rich Amherst and Williams for bang for the buck among schools of its type.

Morris students, a third of whom are first-generation college-goers, shoulder the lowest debt burden in the University of Minnesota system, and among the lowest in the Midwest. The public school price tag, in tandem with a low student-to-faculty ratio of 15 to 1 and other private/liberal arts school attributes, makes Morris a unique value proposition. And if a liberal arts degree may not seem like the most efficient ticket to social mobility in a depressed economy, consider this: 94 percent of recent Morris grads either went on to pursue advanced degrees or found employment within a year of leaving school, which they attribute to the resources, reputation, and connections that the campus enjoys as part of the University of Minnesota system. In addition to being able to choose from thirty-five different liberal arts majors, Morris’s 1,900 students can select from eight preprofessional programs like engineering and nursing, as well as an online learning program—reminders of that public school status and network despite the school’s small size and capacity.

The post Standout Best-Bang-for-the-Buck Schools appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Shared omnipresence notwithstanding, Zelig isn’t the best pop-cultural exemplar of Lenzner, who evidences none of the agreeable spinelessness of Allen’s character. Instead, with his steady, colorless prose, Lenzner conveys the implacable, unflappable, “just the facts, ma’am” demeanor of that other great pop icon, Sergeant Joe Friday of Dragnet. It helps Lenzner’s credibility that he keeps his attention focused and his emotions under such tight control. Alas, it does little for the liveliness of his prose.

We first encounter Lenzner as a Harvard Law School student bored with the world of corporate law that he encounters as a summer associate. Fortunately, an attentive law firm partner (a descendent of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison—how’s that for a cameo?) steers him into the infinitely more exciting experience of working in Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department. This occurred during the summer of 1964, when Washington was sending a small army of lawyers and investigators into steamy, hostile Philadelphia, Mississippi, to investigate the murders of three young civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. Lenzner makes his investigatory bones in the most pedestrian way possible, finding African American people who had been denied their voting rights by local authorities (numerous) and who were willing to talk about it (rather scarcer), and faithfully recording chapter and verse of what happened to them.

The Investigator:
Fifty Years of
Uncovering the Truth 
by Terry Lenzner
Blue Rider Press, 384 pp.

It is entirely to Lenzner’s credit that he hypes nothing. In fact, in the one tale where Lenzner becomes the hero by finding an eyewitness to the ignominious burial of the three slain workers and cracks the case wide open, he is soon revealed to be a gullible young fool who swallowed a pack of lies. And it is even more to his credit that, in the end, the meticulous record that Lenzner and others diligently compiled proved its value when it was cited by the Supreme Court in its validation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Unfortunately, downplaying has a downside; even his accounts of being frightened generate as much sweat as eating tapioca.

Luckily, as Lenzner moves in his career from the periphery of events to center stage, his story grows more colorful. Zigging while others zagged, as his mentor, the great John Doar, advised him, Lenzner joined Richard Nixon’s administration, and went to work for Donald Rumsfeld at the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), where he worked with (name check alert!) Bill Bradley, the Knicks forward and future senator. Like-minded about the OEO’s mission, Lenzner and Rumsfeld and their wives became terrific friends, and Rumsfeld elevated Lenzner to head the agency’s legal services division. There, the agency’s policy of providing poor people with attorneys to sue underperforming state and local governments ran afoul of powers like Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and California Governor Ronald Reagan. At a White House reception where Lenzner met the president, Nixon recognized him. “So you’re the one causing all the problems,” he said, which caused Mrs. Lenzner to observe to her husband, “Your days are numbered.” What she discerned, the ambitious Rumsfeld could see in 3D, and he soon rid himself of the millstone his friend had become.

Lenzner did not remain at large for long. He joined Ramsey Clark in defending the Harrisburg 8, a group of antiwar activists that included the priests Philip and Daniel Berrigan. Lenzner distinguished himself with an effective cross-examination of one of the government’s witnesses that was so aggressive that Father Phil felt obliged to remind Lenzner that he needed to respect the witness’s humanity. After winning acquittals on all but a few minor charges, Lenzner then spoke to Daniel Ellsberg about representing him in the Pentagon Papers case. But after a meeting in the Hollywood Hills, Lenzner passed, finding the famous leaker to be foolish and insufferably vain. This worked out: Lenzner was consequently free when the powerful Washington attorney Edward Bennett Williams, who had admired his work at the OEO, recommended to Sam Dash, counsel of the Senate Watergate Committee, that he hire Lenzner as an associate.

At this point, Lenzner was in his early thirties, and if he hadn’t had the kind of meteoric ascendency that often characterizes the career paths of great men, he certainly had been terrifically successful in capturing the support of powerful, accomplished men. Unfortunately, the less-than-introspective Lenzner does not explore what specifically it was about him that his friends and mentors so admired. Listening to Lenzner’s account, he just went to work and did his thing, and stuff happened. Just the facts, ma’am.

Lenzner’s work on Sam Ervin’s Watergate Committee is the centerpiece of the memoir. His war stories are tasty in the manner of a good canapé: although they go down easy, you’re immediately looking for the waiter to reappear. The tale that says the most about Lenzner is his account of his aggressive cross-examination of a now nearly forgotten witness named Richard Moore, who had been sent up by the White House to rebut John Dean. Lenzner’s questioning left Moore in a puddle of confusion, but opinion was divided, as Lenzner acknowledges, about whether he went overboard in discrediting Moore. Some people feared that the sight of the tattered Moore might generate a backlash, as though someone hadn’t, you know, respected his humanity.

For Lenzner, the Watergate hearings closed up before much of the dramatic material he uncovered saw the light of day. Among those revelations was that the CIA had recruited the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro, something that would have to wait until the Church Committee hearings a few years later. The House Judiciary Committee had begun impeachment hearings; Ervin thought the stag was bagged, and closed up shop. He did this without, in Lenzner’s opinion, addressing the great unsolved mystery about Watergate, which is why the burglars broke into the offices of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) on that famous June night in 1972 in the first place. What were they looking for? Lenzner maintains he has the answer: the burglars were trying to find documentary proof that Howard Hughes had given Richard Nixon a $100,000 campaign contribution in cash, which he repaid with government favors. The documents were supposedly in the possession of DNC chairman Larry O’Brien, long a Nixon bête noire. This theory of the crime has been floated before, and as far as I can tell, Lenzner’s account here adds nothing new to the explanation. Lenzner also maintains that the infamous eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the White House tapes erased the conversation where Nixon personally ordered the break-in, although he offers nothing in the way of proof. What does add credence, though, is the characteristic imperturbability in which Lenzner cloaked himself from the beginning, his demonstrated tendency to play everything close to the vest. Lenzner comes across like the kind of guy who has a wait-and-see attitude about tomorrow’s sunup; if a man like that feels comfortable adopting such conclusions, then they are worth accepting. Right?

Perhaps. After Watergate, Lenzner participated in other famous cases. Eventually he left the law firm in which he was a name partner, and founded Investigative Group International (IGI), a company whose no-frills name is itself an advertisement for a facts-only philosophy. From there, he went on to help solve the Unabomber case, expose crime and corruption, and help famous people in trouble. Among these was Bill Clinton, service in whose cause earned Lenzner his own subpoena to appear in the Starr Chamber. As Lenzner tells it, the unprepared associate prosecutor never laid a glove on him. Lenzner wears this war wound like a crown.

In The Investigator, Lenzner may give us just the facts, but perhaps not all the facts. One famous client that is all but unmentioned in the book is the Brown & Williamson tobacco company. The company hired Lenzner to look for material in the background of Jeffrey Wigand, a former company executive turned whistleblower, who was telling the world that the tobacco companies were lying about the results of tests they had conducted into the danger of cigarettes. Very simply, they wanted Lenzner to impeach Wigand’s credibility. According to the Washington Post,

IGI compiled a massive 500-page file titled “The Misconduct of Jeffrey S. Wigand Available in the Public Record” that amounted to the gleanings of phone records, medical records, typographical errors and police blotter effluvia purporting to portray Wigand as a liar, shoplifter, plagiarist, wife-beater and expense-account cheater, among other categories of malfeasance.

Whatever facts may have been included in the report, the investigation backfired. IGI’s strenuousness became the issue, an example of the lengths to which the tobacco companies were willing to go to thwart Wigand’s allegations. Wigand’s lawyer called the report “a smear campaign”; the Wall Street Journal said that many of the findings were “backed by scant or contradictory evidence” and some were “demonstrably untrue.” William Safire called Lenzner a bully and Frank Rich called him a creep. Lenzner later told Fortune that some facts in the report “were not completely developed.” Meanwhile, Wigand was celebrated. He ended up being profiled in Vanity Fair, and Russell Crowe was nominated for an Oscar for portraying him in Michael Mann’s film The Insider. (The role of “Private Investigator” was played by Douglas McGrath.)

Lenzner refers to this investigation briefly, and one of the two occasions was just to remind Ken Starr’s associate that he and Starr were on Brown & Williamson’s payroll at the same time. No effort is made to discuss the incident, no consideration is given to the criticisms, even to rebut them, and certainly no attempt is made to tie accusations of creep and bully and smear to cross-examinations that made Philip Berrigan wince and left Richard Moore in shreds. And once we realize this, the just the facts, ma’am approach no longer bolsters credibility, because all we can think of is other facts that we may not have been told, and other investigations that didn’t get written about, and other clients whose names will forever remain unmentioned. In The Investigator, a peerless investigator’s examination of a subject he would seem to know peerlessly well cannot be judged thorough enough to be complete.

Investigator, probe thyself.

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The United States, says Rosecrance, who directs the Project on U.S.-China Relations at Harvard’s Belfer Center, is in decline and can do little to reverse it. According to inexorable historical logic, “the scepter of primacy” is moving to China. Instead of doing anything about this, the United States “sits numb,” a “decadent” nation that, under President Barack Obama, has been “able to skate over the cracks in the pavement.” Meanwhile, China is the vigorous challenger marching toward global dominance.

For Rosecrance, this state of affairs threatens to spark a “new world war,” and he leans heavily on a parallel with the European alliances and power balancing of a century ago. He makes clear that China is the twenty-first-century incarnation of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany in the belle époque.

The Resurgence of the West:
How a Transatlantic Union
Can Prevent War and
Restore the United
States and Europe
by Richard Rosecrance
Yale University Press, 204 pp.

The only hope for a bright American future and for heading off this clash lies in a “new Western union,” first with Europe and then with Japan. Rosecrance draws a quick sketch of world economic history to develop the idea that bigger economic units are generally more successful than smaller ones in sustaining growth and living standards. Thus, countries must join together in larger economic unions. Geopolitically, a union of Europe and the United States would create an “overbalance of power” vis-à-vis China and hopefully deter any aggression on their part. Unless the two halves of the West come together, Rosecrance says, “they will both lose ground.”

As far-fetched as this idea sounds, a version of it is actually moving forward. In his State of the Union address earlier this year Obama called for a “comprehensive Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership” (TTIP) with the European Union, a free trade pact that he said would support “millions of good-paying American jobs.” European leaders, long interested in such an agreement, readily assented. In July negotiators from the United States and the EU met in Washington for the first round of talks on a deal that would eliminate tariffs and harmonize regulations on all manner of goods and services traded across the Atlantic, from cars to energy to pharmaceuticals to agricultural products. A second round of negotiations is scheduled to take place in Brussels in October.

Rosecrance doesn’t mention any of this in his new book, The Resurgence of the West: How a Transatlantic Union Can Prevent War and Restore the United States and Europe, which presumably went to press before Obama gave his State of the Union address. But the arguments he makes for a U.S./EU free trade zone are generally the same as those offered by the administration and other TTIP advocates.

The first argument is that such a deal would provide two comparably developed and already-intertwined continental economies a source of added growth that both desperately need. Despite its reputation as economically rigid, Europe has many world-beating industrial companies, is a key part of what some call the “new industrial revolution,” and is a hotbed of entrepreneurial enthusiasm. The EU also remains the United States’ largest and most important global economic partner. Since 2010, for example, during the worst years of the European financial crisis, over half of U.S. foreign direct investment (FDI) went into Europe. And while European FDI into the United States has fallen, it is still several times the amount that Europe sends into China. Since 2000, trade between the U.S. and the EU has risen 68 percent. American services exports to the European Union have more than doubled over the same period.

More commerce could potentially flow between the two by eliminating trade barriers. Tariffs between the U.S. and the EU, though relatively low, add 5 to 7 percent to the cost of goods and services. The need for American and European companies to comply with a maze of competing safety and environmental regulation in order to sell to each other adds another 10 to 20 percent. Eliminating tariffs and harmonizing standards—agreeing, for instance, that cars built in Europe that meet EU safety standards can be sold in the United States, and vice versa—could boost transatlantic trade by as much as $180 billion a year.

The second argument is more strategic in nature: by creating the world’s largest trade zone, the TTIP would in effect let America and the EU set ground rules for global trade. As it stands now, when Western countries accuse China of unacceptable economic behavior—currency manipulation, dumping, turning a blind eye to piracy of intellectual property—there’s not much they can do. They can charge Beijing with violating WTO rules, but cases brought to the WTO are costly and take forever. Or they can slap a tariff on Chinese goods, but no one country, even the United States, has an economy so big that the threat of limiting access to its markets is enough to necessarily change China’s behavior. A combined U.S./EU free trade zone, however, would be another matter. By creating probably the largest economic unit in world history—fulfilling the dreams of centuries of imperial strategists—the United States and Europe will pressure China not only to behave better but also to reform itself politically.

For all the big think in his book, however, Rosecrance devotes a mere three pages to the mechanics of getting economic unification done. It would begin with Congress approving fast-track trade authority for the president, followed by an American-European customs union (no tariffs), then reform of all non-tariff barriers such as subsidies and labor restrictions. Finally, a “single external tariff would construct barriers against the rest of the world.” Voilà!

The negotiators in Brussels and Washington will be relieved to hear that their task in negotiating the TTIP will be this easy. These might be the right milestones, but, in reality, there are immense commercial and political barriers to overcome. Will the Europeans ever accept genetically modified foods designed by Monsanto? Will Silicon Valley or national security hawks accept tougher EU-style privacy protections? And will Republican lawmakers support fast-track authority for a treaty negotiated by Barack Obama?

Rosecrance subscribes to the fall-from-grace theory of American political history—the virtuous and unified Founding Fathers “thought cooperation would always be forthcoming,” but “gaps in the constitutional system” and our own contemporary depravity have conspired to ruin their vision. Does he think a prospective transatlantic union will transcend political dysfunction?

Problematically, then, while Rosecrance spends most of his time on the economic dimensions of a union with Europe, he goes much further in his thinking than anything coming out of official Washington. At several points he mentions economic “and political” (emphasis mine) integration. How feasible is this? What are the political consequences of, as Rosecrance puts it, an “intermixture of sovereignty”? An idea of this scope deserves to be accompanied by a realistic and politically astute plan for making it happen, which is absent from this book.

For Rosecrance, such integration is a matter of when, not if: it “will happen,” and, once it does, the U.S. and Europe should approach China about joining in a formal capacity. At that point, China will have no choice but to cooperate. Rosecrance seems optimistic that China can be brought into this union. After all, China is highly economically interdependent with the rest of the world. It is, for example, “totally dependent on the U.S. Navy to secure the sea lanes to the Middle East and provide access to desperately needed oil.”

Only on the penultimate page, however, does Rosecrance slip in that the rule of law and protection of political liberties might be preconditions for China to join in a tariff bloc. Since Greece, Spain, and Portugal all moved from military rule to democracy and EU membership, it should be easy, right?

In the last two years, China has reacted angrily to Obama’s “pivot to Asia,” especially his administration’s efforts to finalize another large trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), with several Asian and South American countries, which China perceived as an attempt at encirclement and exclusion from a large trading bloc. China eventually said it was looking into whether it might be interested in the TPP, but its initial response must at least raise the question that it could react similarly to the TTIP. The great-power realist in Rosecrance recognizes this. Global production chains are, in theory, a barrier to war, but “history suggests that rising nations partly disregard their interdependence.”

Can a transatlantic economic and political union achieve all that Rosecrance says? Can it stimulate the European and American economies, attract Japan, deter Chinese aggression, eliminate “warfare among great powers,” and overcome political dysfunction in the United States? That’s a lot to hang on a trade deal, even the biggest in history.

To its great credit, even if it doesn’t speak in such grand terms, the Obama administration has taken the first step by launching negotiations over the TTIP. With the Doha round of global trade talks failing and Chinese investment creating a “string of pearls” around the south Pacific and Indian Ocean, tighter economic links with Europe may be the best—Rosecrance would say only—way to build a new set of rules that enhance American power and constrain Chinese influence. Getting there, however, will be far from easy.

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Yet this domestic tally tells us less about Wilson than the cold record suggests. He enjoyed strong Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress during his first term, easing passage of his legislative agenda. His views on race were, if lamentable, very much in keeping with the times; and it should be noted that Palmer led his witch hunts while Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke. Thus the true measure of his success or failure lies in the realm of foreign policy.

Wilson
by A. Scott Berg
Putnam Adult, 832 pp.

Here Wilson’s achievement was to lead the United States into World War I. He refrained from intervening in Europe’s war for as long as possible, but then intervened with purpose, sending doughboys and America’s mighty Navy across the Atlantic at a critical moment in the campaign. The move proved decisive: as military historian John Keegan writes in his authoritative The First World War, “Rare are the times in a great war when the fortunes of one side or the other are transformed by the sudden accretion of a disequilibrating reinforcement.”

The experience turned the United States into a world power and established the hallmarks of its foreign policy: solidarity with the Atlantic allies, a moral component to international decision making, and a commitment to global institutions. The word “idealism” is often associated with Wilson’s name, and for good reason: World War I marked the point at which the United States began acting abroad on the basis of principles in addition to interests. This worldview is dismissed as a sham by many other countries and has produced some of our thorniest problems in the past twenty years—Rwanda and the Balkans in the 1990s, Iraq in the 2000s, and now Syria. But that does not necessarily invalidate liberal internationalism or detract from Wilson’s vision.

Yet his other major foreign policy failure followed directly from American involvement in the war. Wilson expended great capital negotiating the Treaty of Versailles, which set the terms of peace and, on Wilson’s insistence, contained the League of Nations covenant. But the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the treaty. The League of Nations was Wilson’s baby—the fourteenth of fourteen points he drafted to end the war—and its rejection was a crushing humiliation from which he never recovered. Wilson completed the final year and a half of his presidency a bitter and broken man. Although the League offered a template and structure for the United Nations, it failed to keep the peace that the Allies so painstakingly negotiated at Paris in 1919.

A major new biography by Pulitzer Prize winner A. Scott Berg reveals how Wilson’s personality contributed to his failures in office. Woodrow Wilson was “a man of flagrant morality,” Berg writes. To put it less charitably, he was grandiloquent, tempestuous, self-righteous, and stubborn to the point of pigheadedness. Berg’s pages overflow with Wilson’s grudges and excommunications; “The President is a wonderful hater,” remarked French Prime Minister Georges Clémenceau, who tangled with him in Paris. The British diplomat Harold Nicholson wrote that Wilson’s “spiritual and mental rigidity” was his undoing. “It rendered him as incapable of withstanding criticism as of absorbing advice. It rendered him blind to all realities which did not accord with his preconceived theory.”

A bit strong? Consider Wilson’s comments to William McCombs, the chairman of his campaign committee, on election night in 1912. “Before we proceed, I wish it clearly understood that I owe you nothing. God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States. Neither you nor any other mortal could have prevented that.” Or consider his righteous indignation at the way Senate Republicans outmaneuvered him at the close of the war: “I have seen fools resist Providence before and I have seen the destruction, as will come upon these again—utter destruction and contempt. That we shall prevail is as sure as that God reigns.” Sigmund Freud was not the only man to diagnose the president with a Christ complex.

Wilson’s frightful messianism infused his determination to advance the League of Nations at the Paris Peace Conference. Other heads of government muttered that establishing the League really had very little to do with the business of concluding the war. The clever allies even used Wilson’s single-mindedness as leverage, extracting concessions as the price of their support for the League: in this way Britain secured Wilson’s agreement to try Kaiser Wilhelm II, and France solidified its claim to occupy the Rhenish Republic. Back home, Wilson probably could have won ratification of the Versailles Treaty if only he had compromised with moderate senators. But he would not budge, insisting that any change to its terms would stain the nation’s honor. “The President has strangled his own child,” observed one baffled senator before the final vote.

It is difficult to reconcile Wilson’s difficult personality with the great esteem in which Americans held and continue to hold him. Berg covers much ground, but surprisingly does not identify this contradiction. The truth is, Wilson is beloved because he was that rarest of breeds: a principled politician. Who wouldn’t like a president with some spine—it is why we watched The West Wing. Moreover, one notices again and again in Wilson that the man’s principles were usually right. He alone at Versailles argued from the outset that harsh terms against Germany would only precipitate another war. His domestic agenda was filled with much-needed progressive reforms. While president of Princeton, he led a campaign for merit over privilege, turning the university from a brats’ club into a prestigious research institution. And on the Versailles Treaty, Wilson was right that Senate Republicans merely wanted to score political points and undercut his prestige. In fact, Berg shows that they decided to scupper the treaty before it was even written.

But a principled politician can resemble a stampeding elephant: nothing will stand in his way, and eventually he ends up lost with two broken tusks. Wilson ran himself ragged in support of the treaty, and died bewildered and angry that all had gone wrong. Professor Joseph Nye recently observed that Wilson’s presidency resembles George W. Bush’s: high moralism, big risks, more vision than execution. And Wilson’s stubborn insistence on establishing the League at Versailles echoes Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s push to streamline the military during the Iraq War. Others disagreed, circumstances changed, it wasn’t the right time—but the secretary forged on. Moreover, Wilson’s utter refusal to compromise over the Versailles Treaty sounds like nothing in politics today so much as Tea Party intransigence. That Wilson was debilitated by illness during the last phase of the treaty debate is some excuse, but he showed little flexibility even while he was well.

Berg’s Wilson offers an intimate portrait of this aloof president. John Milton Cooper’s Woodrow Wilson (2009) is more focused and sharply analyzed, but contains less detail on Wilson the man. Berg is particularly strong in narrating certain dramatic set pieces: the cabinet meeting that led to war; the address to Congress asking for a declaration; the whistle-stop tour in support of the treaty; the stroke that ultimately incapacitated him. (That is one area where Wilson’s judgment—or that of his inner circle—was not infallible. It was a disservice to the country that Wilson lingered in office for a year and a half rather than resigning.)

Nevertheless, the book does have its faults. Although Berg appropriately criticizes Wilson for the Red Scare and for rigidity over the League, he at times gets caught up in the mystique of the professor-president in the top hat and pince-nez. This enchantment manifests itself in an inordinate number of superlatives: in Paris Wilson received “the most massive display of acclamation and affection ever heaped on a single human being”; of the League, “No man had ever gone to such lengths for a cause”; Wilson’s letters to his wife comprised “one of the most expansive love correspondences in history.” When Berg is not coming up with sentences like these, he is quoting like-minded stuff from others. The effect is to make the reader question his judgment. It is a small detraction from a very good book, but it is more than mere semantics. Something about Woodrow Wilson causes us to get carried away—to elide the details and embrace the man of vision and big ideas. Sometimes a politician must take a stand: few voters will support a candidate who won’t. But Wilson is the president who stood and stood until he fell down on his face. Sometimes a politician needs to compromise.

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They were quite different in personality. John Foster was the dour fire-and-brimstone secretary of state. Harold Macmillan declared, “His speech was slow but it easily kept pace with his thoughts.” Allen, by contrast, was the suave and secretive spymaster (author Rebecca West, asked if she had been one of his mistresses, replied, “Alas, no, but I wish I had been”), but both inherited an evangelical streak that they translated into a secular war against communism. Their influence lingers on in the massive national security state that they helped construct during the early years of the Cold War and that continues to expand and search relentlessly for fresh enemies to justify its own existence.

The Brothers:
John Foster Dulles,
Allen Dulles, and Their
Secret World War
by Stephen Kinzer
Henry Holt, 416 pp.

Both brothers have been the subject of previous biographies, with Allen enjoying perhaps the most perspicuous by Burton Hersh, a longtime student of the intelligence agencies. But Kinzer, a former longtime foreign correspondent for the New York Times, effectively joins them in his panoramic survey of their lives. He traverses a great deal of ground, some of which he previously covered in his study of the 1954 coup in Iran All the Shah’s Men, and he is an acidulous critic of American foreign policy. His main point is that America, or at least a man like Allen Dulles, was not an innocent abroad. Instead, the Dulles brothers were calculating figures who essentially turned American foreign policy into an annex of the business interests of their old law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, deftly annealing moralism about American democracy to their own self-interest. To be sure, Wilsonian liberal internationalism was predicated on the notion that more-interconnected financial interests would tie nations together peacefully. But for much of the eastern establishment to which the Dulleses belonged, the distinction between a corporation’s interests and the American government’s was indiscernible, prompting Kinzer to call John Foster “one of the American elite’s most ruthlessly effective and best-paid courtiers.”

John Foster and Allen Dulles were born into a family of public servants and men of the cloth. Their father was a Presbyterian minister, and his father before him was a Presbyterian missionary. Their maternal grandfather, John Watson Foster, grew up in Indiana on the frontier. He was a newspaper editor who became a stalwart member of the Republican Party and was appointed secretary of state by Benjamin Harrison. Foster encouraged a rebellion in 1893 in Hawaii of white settlers against Queen Liliuokalani and sent troops in to support the insurrection. “This,” writes Kinzer, “made John Watson Foster the first American secretary of state to participate in the overthrow of a foreign government.” After his government service, he set up shop as a lobbyist for big business. As small children, John Foster and Allen got to stay with him in his Dupont Circle mansion, where

[b]oth brothers came to feel at ease in the most rarefied circle. They dined with ambassadors, senators, cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices, and other grand figures including William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, Andrew Carnegie, and Woodrow Wilson.… From these long evenings they absorbed not only the precepts, ideas, and perceptions that shaped America’s ruling class, but also its style, vocabulary, and attitudes.

Pivotal for both brothers was the opportunity to attend the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. They had an important ally in their quest to reach the diplomatic big time: Uncle Robert Lansing, who was Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state. Neither Allen nor John Foster played big roles in drafting the Treaty of Versailles, but they did make numerous connections. Kinzer believes that the two fell fully under Wilson’s spell: “He was the quintessential missionary diplomat: cool, pontifical, sternly moralistic, and certain that he was acting as an instrument of divine will. Both brothers took his example to heart.”

It is John Foster who attracts Kinzer’s ire more than Allen. For all his moralism, John Foster got it wrong when it came to Hitler’s Germany (unlike Allen, who warned his brother that the Nazis were a dangerous bunch). His deep affection for German culture and learning and his business interests blinded him to the true nature of the Nazi regime. He saw Nazism as a bulwark against communism rather than as a totalitarian society intent on mass murder. John Foster described France and Britain as “static” societies—a precursor of Donald Rumsfeld dismissing “Old Europe”—and claimed that the future would be decisively shaped by new, dynamic powers such as Germany, Italy, and Japan. According to Kinzer, John Foster worked closely with Hitler’s finance minister, Hjalmar Schacht, to help “[t]he National Socialist state find rich sources of financing in the United States for its public agencies, banks, and industries.” John Foster supported the isolationist America First movement. Even though his partners at Sullivan & Cromwell forced him to close the firm’s offices in Berlin in 1935, he remained blasé about the Nazi regime. He visited Germany in 1936, 1937, and 1939: “Apparently nothing he saw disturbed him,” writes Kinzer.

Allen’s great moment of glory, by contrast, came in battling the Nazis as a member of the Office of Strategic Services, which was headed by the World War I hero and lawyer William Donovan. Allen was dispatched to Bern, Switzerland, where he created a web of spies and informants to discover what was happening behind enemy lines and in Nazi Germany itself. Eventually, he began parachuting agents into occupied countries and directing guerrilla attacks on Nazi targets. By 1944, Allen was focused on how best to contain and even roll back Soviet power in postwar Europe. He sought out Nazi commanders in Italy to see if they would agree to an early surrender, and succeeded. Operation Sunrise relied on the cooperation of figures such as General Karl Wolff, commander of SS forces in Italy—who was later found to be complicit in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews by a German court—to assent to cutting a deal with the Americans.

With Allen ensconced in Bern, John Foster started his own comeback toward the end of World War II. He had become close friends with the Time magazine publisher Henry Luce, who was busy championing the idea of an American Century. Both were pro-business, internationalist Republicans shaped by Calvinist principles—Luce, born in China, was himself the son of a Presbyterian missionary. Despite Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s initial misgivings, he ended up appointing John Foster to the American delegation to the negotiations in San Francisco in 1945, where fifty countries met, including the Soviet Union, to establish the United Nations. John Foster, who had begun to espouse a militantly anticommunist line, clashed with Andrei Vishinsky, the Soviet deputy foreign minister and former chief prosecutor at Stalin’s purge trials.

But it wasn’t until the 1952 election that the political fortunes of the Dulles brothers were sealed. John Foster pursued a very hard line against communism—rhetorically. But Eisenhower essentially ignored his advice when it came to Korea, where John Foster advised no negotiations and sending armies across the demilitarized zone. Instead, Eisenhower went to Korea and decided to accept a cease-fire. When it came to covert action, however, Eisenhower was more receptive. Allen, who was appointed CIA director, worked hand in glove with his brother to topple various regimes deemed hostile to American interests. But, as Kinzer emphasizes, many of Allen’s projects were busts. He commanded 15,000 employees in fifty countries with an annual budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars, no accounting necessary, but “he had remarkably little to show for it. All three of his main operations in Eastern Europe, aimed at stirring anti-Communist resistance in Poland, Ukraine, and Albania, collapsed in defeat.” In 1960 the U-2 spying incident, in which American Air Force pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down by Soviet planes, also helped to wreck incipient negotiations with the Soviets over easing the Cold War.

Still, Allen was a busy man at the CIA. Under him the agency had a hand in overthrowing the Mossadegh government in Iran and the Ãrbenz regime in Guatemala, and connived at the murder of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. What he seems most to have resembled, in the crucible of the Cold War, is former Vice President Dick Cheney. According to Kinzer, he “established secret prisons in Germany, Japan and the Panama Canal Zone.”

But perhaps the brothers’ most malignant legacy was John Foster’s intransigence about Indochina. He told Americans in 1954 that as part of the global crusade against communism it was imperative to counter Ho Chi Minh and his communist forces in North Vietnam. Winston Churchill, for one, was appalled by John Foster’s conduct during negotiations in Geneva over Vietnam’s future in 1954: “Dull, unimaginative, uncomprehending. So clumsy I hope he will disappear.” To John Foster’s horror, negotiations meant that Vietnam would be partitioned and Ho would attain power. He left Geneva in a huff after a week. But successes in Iran and Guatemala, Kinzer reports, had convinced Eisenhower, John Foster, and Allen that this “third monster,” as Kinzer puts it, could be quashed. The road to American military involvement in Vietnam had begun.

The real disasters started after Eisenhower left office. The obsession with ousting Fidel Castro led to the Bay of Pigs, an operation that Eisenhower had told John F. Kennedy was imperative when they met in the Oval Office. Kennedy, young and inexperienced, assented. But Allen Dulles, aging and cavalier, never even bothered to supervise the project, leaving it to his deputy Richard Bissell, who forged ahead in the conviction that even if the motley crew of Cuban exiles came to grief, Kennedy would, at the last moment, rescue them with American firepower. The president refused. And Allen had to resign from the CIA.

In his conclusion, Kinzer suggests that the story of the Dulles brothers is the story of America. “As long as Americans believe their country has vital interests everywhere on earth, they will be led by people who believe the same,” he writes. Kinzer is surely right to raise doubts about the perfervid embrace of American exceptionalism that has become de rigueur for politicians, Democratic or Republican, to asseverate piously. But perhaps he falls into his own form of moralism, his own nostalgia for an America that never really existed, when he seems to posit the existence of an Edenic country that was once free of the corrupting embrace of the rest of the world. For America does, in fact, have interests abroad. The problem with the Dulles brothers is not that they espoused contact with the rest of the world but that they relied on a militarized form of crusading confrontation that continues to bedevil America.

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To establish the set of colleges included in the rankings, we started with the 1,761 colleges that are listed in the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Post-secondary Education Data System as having a Carnegie basic classification of research, master’s, baccalaureate, and baccalaureate/associate’s colleges and are not exclusively graduate schools. We then excluded 143 colleges which reported that at least half of the undergraduate degrees awarded in 2010-11 were not bachelor’s degrees, as well as thirteen colleges with fewer than 100 undergraduate students in fall 2011. 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 any of the three main measures used in the social mobility section (percent Pell, graduation rate, and net price) in the past three years. This resulted in a final sample of 1,572 colleges and includes public, private nonprofit, and for-profit colleges.

Each of our three categories 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. 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 had no data and were given zeros on these measures. Some schools that dropped in our service rankings this year completed an application in 2011 and therefore received credit in last year’s rankings, but did not submit an application in 2012 and therefore did not receive credit on these measures in this year’s rankings. (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 tell 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 SAT score and the percentage of students admitted. This indicated which selective universities (since selectivity is highly correlated with 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 ACT, we converted ACT scores into SAT 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 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, either using data from a prior year or 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. One school, the California Institute of Technology, had a predicted graduation rate of over 100 percent. We adjusted this predicted graduation rate 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. One college, Berea College, reported a negative net price and was scaled back to the smallest positive net price reported by any college ($909). 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.

When Luodan Li told his parents he wanted to go to college in the United States, his mother teased him, saying he was just running away from the gaokao, China’s high-stakes, famously anxiety-inducing national entrance exam for domestic universities.

Luodan, who is from Shanghai, relented and did well enough on his exams to be placed at East China Normal University, a nationally renowned research institution in his hometown. But Luodan was disappointed that “all the emphasis was just on getting in,” and it wasn’t long before his parents changed their mind. “They saw all their friends’ children were going to America,” Luodan said, “and they thought that I was falling behind.”

Now that he had his chance, Luodan realized that he didn’t know where to start with the complex process of applying to an American college, so he contacted an agency in Shanghai, one of thousands across the country that have made an industry of helping wealthy Chinese students apply to American colleges. For anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000, the agency takes care of every detail of the application process, from assisting students in writing their essays to providing letters of recommendation. The agency gave Luodan a list of schools based on rankings from the U.S. News & World Report and told him to choose six. Luodan’s parents paid the agency, half up front and half a few months later when he got his acceptance letter from Purdue University.

In the fall of 2010, when Luodan got to Purdue, in West Lafayette, Indiana, he was part of an enormous wave of new Chinese undergraduates arriving on campus. In the past five years, the number of Chinese undergrads at Purdue has grown from just 127 to 2,755, mirroring a similar trend at colleges and universities across the U.S.

Since 2006, the total number of international students at U.S. colleges and universities has ballooned by roughly 200,000—growing to more than 764,000 in less than six years, according to data collected by the Institute of International Education and the Department of State. The biggest single group of new international students is from China, which now sends more students than any other country to the U.S. In a trend that is expected to continue, China has increased the number of students it sends to the U.S. by 20 percent every year since 2008, reaching 194,029 last fall.

These new Chinese students have enrolled at American institutions large and small, public and private, with the greatest numbers going to the public, flagship campuses of state universities like the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Washington, or the Big Ten. Big state schools, like Purdue, already had sizable international student populations, but they have increased their undergraduate Chinese student enrollment dramatically, doubling or even quadrupling their total international enrollments in just a few years.

While administrators promote the diversity and global perspectives these new students bring to campus, it’s clear that such high-minded goals are not the only motivation for enrolling large numbers of foreign students. With state spending on higher education declining sharply over the last five years—it’s down an average of 28 percent nationwide—out-of-state and international students who pay full tuition (and sometimes even additional tuition) have kept these institutions in the black. As state assemblies have cut back, the people of China have picked up the tab.

Colleges mostly see this as a win-win situation, solving budget woes and adding to the value of the school’s education at the same time. But with the impact of the boom still reverberating, pockets of dissent are emerging. In states like Washington and California, there are growing complaints that the influx of foreign students is crowding local students out of their own state schools. Meanwhile, at least some Chinese students are complaining that American universities exploit them by charging extra fees. It’s difficult to argue against the valuable opportunities for cultural exchange and public diplomacy that international education provides. But at the current scale, Chinese students have become so concentrated on some campuses that in many ways it’s as if they were attending separate schools within schools.

International students bring a lot of money into the United States, contributing roughly $22 billion to the U.S. economy in 2012, according to one estimate. Francisco Sánchez, the undersecretary for international trade at the Commerce Department, has said the U.S. has “no better export” than higher education, and Larry Summers, former secretary of the treasury and former Harvard president, lists “exporting higher education”—bringing more international students to American institutions—as a key part of his recommendations for economic growth. Many business interests also argue in favor of reforming immigration policy to allow more foreign-born students not only to come to the U.S. but also to remain and work after their studies are complete.

As government support for state schools declines, the tuition paid by foreign students is ever more important. In Indiana, international students bring $688 million in economic benefits, equivalent to 40 percent of what the state spends on higher education every year. At Purdue, the tuition paid by international undergraduates since 2007 accounts for almost half of all the new revenue it has raised through tuition. This is partly because of the expanding enrollment of international students, and partly because of the tuition hikes Purdue has specifically levied on students from abroad. Two years ago, Purdue decided that on top of the $27,646 it already charged all out-of-state students in tuition each year, it would charge incoming international students another $1,000. Last spring, they doubled that fee to $2,000, which will soon add up to an additional $10 million per year for the university.

After the fees doubled last year, the Chinese Students and Scholars Association organized a protest on campus, unfurling banners that read, “We are not cash cows!,” “Education is not a business!,” and “Increase our voice, not our fee.” But the applications from China have continued to roll in. Chinese parents who have spent years saving nest eggs to send their child to university see highly ranked American public schools as a great value compared to private colleges. With growing wealth and a lack of educational infrastructure in China—and millions of single children reaching college age—Chinese parents are willing to pay the price for an American education, which they consider the best in the world.

Up, up, and away: Undergraduates from China account for a large part of the rapid increase in international student visas in recent years.

In the win-win situation that many universities envision, these Chinese families are subsidizing the education of in-state students while enriching the college experience for everyone. But the numbers tell a more complicated story.

According to data on Purdue’s Web site, from 2007 to 2012, while the total campus population, graduate and undergraduate, stayed about flat, the number of students from Indiana fell by 3,323. During the same period, the enrollment of Chinese students increased by 3,156, a nearly one-to-one replacement of Hoosiers for Chinese students. At the undergraduate level, the enrollment of Indiana resident undergrads fell by 3,447, despite Indiana’s high school graduating class increasing roughly 10 percent; international students increased by 2,864. The Great Recession occurred during this period, an event that presumably increased the numbers of Americans trying to get into public schools because their parents could no longer afford pricy private schools.

Purdue is not unique in this pattern. Just across the state border from Purdue at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, there are 268 fewer undergrad students from Illinois today than there were in 2003, and 3,318 more international students.

Six years ago, after administrators at Urbana-Champaign announced plans to enroll more out-of-state undergrads, there was a widespread public outcry. The administrators backed down, promising to keep out-of-state enrollment at roughly 10 or 12 percent. But since then, they’ve quietly enrolled more and more international students—who, like at Purdue, pay even more tuition than American out-of-staters. The percentage of out-of-state and international enrollment grew to 25 percent of last year’s freshman class.

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the percentage of in-state residents that make up the freshman class has declined by 8 percent in the past ten years. During the same time period, the percentage of the class made up by international students has jumped from less than 2 percent to 9.6 percent, according to a report produced by the university’s Committee for Undergraduate Recruitment, Admissions, and Financial Aid.

In Washington State, the perception that in-state students have lost their admissions edge to out-of-state and international students became so intense that the legislature passed a bill in 2011 requiring that a minimum of 4,000 Washington residents be admitted in each freshman class. This spring, another bill was proposed that would further raise tuition for international students by 20 percent, with the increased revenue going to the general fund for higher education in the state. The University of Washington protested, saying the increase would drive away international students, and the measure didn’t pass.

Marguerite Roza, who studies the financing of public higher education at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, analyzed the admissions data for the University of Washington, and found that in 2011—prior to the passage of the law requiring in-state quotas—Washingtonians did in fact have to give way to nonresidents. Her study only looked at out-of-state students compared to in-state students, because international students’ admissions profiles are too dissimilar to be compared. But the boom in international students was certainly relevant to her findings, she said, and the fact that they are not in the same admissions pool is significant. “I think the universities see the international students as a source of revenue that won’t affect their [U.S. News & World Report] rankings,” she said. After all, competition for out-of-state U.S. students can drive down a school’s selectivity, average SAT scores, and other measures that are important to the rankings, but international student applications often buoy a school’s selectivity, and those students who are admitted without SAT scores aren’t factored into U.S. News & World Report calculations.

The search for out-of-state tuition dollars has been going on for a long time, but it was somewhat kept in check by a limited pool of students, and the possible loss of prestige from lowering standards. But a limitless supply of international students changes the game quite a bit, Roza said. “People say, ‘Oh well, they’re supporting our kids,’” she said, referring to the financial benefits of having out-of-state and international students. “But they aren’t supporting our kids if our kids aren’t getting in.”

The fact that the international admissions process is so different from the domestic one has also led to questions about how to ensure the integrity of the process, not to mention the quality of the students, especially since foreign recruiting has become big business in China. Officials at Purdue say they don’t recruit in China, and don’t plan to, but the fact is they don’t have to.

Since 2006, Purdue has received a seemingly endless supply of applications from well-qualified, well-financed students from China. As a result, Purdue only accepts 40 percent of international applicants—a much lower rate of acceptance than for Indiana residents or U.S. nonresidents, and on paper the international applicants often have a higher academic profile than other applicant pools. Michael Brzezinski, Purdue’s dean of international programs, argues that concerns over international students’ quality are overblown. “Our international students have better first-year retention rates and graduation rates than the rest of the student body,” he said. “They are doing quite well here.”

Lost in translation: Luodan Li, a Purdue undergraduate from Shanghai, started a Chinese-language campus magazine, Voice, to help Chinese students integrate with their American peers.

That said, directly comparing international and American students can be tricky. For one, the university doesn’t require the SAT or ACT for international admissions. And for another, international students’ applications arrive at the university’s doorstep primarily via for-profit agencies, which, in their most benign form, are like expensive and very attentive guidance counselors. But they range dramatically in their scrupulousness. Recent reports have alleged that agencies in China are falsifying information, inventing student bios, writing student essays, and manipulating transcripts. After all, a good portion of their payment depends on whether their customer is accepted. For admissions committees at U.S. institutions, deciphering whether a prospective international student is qualified, or more qualified than an in-state student, is therefore more difficult than it might seem.

“It’s a classic scenario of a developing market,” said David Hawkins, director of public policy and research for the National Association for College Admission Counseling, about the use of agencies for recruiting student abroad. “The borders are not well determined.” Hawkins’s organization recently released a report recommending best practices for recruiting abroad, a scene that he has characterized as a “gold rush.” The recommendations call for strict guidelines to ensure transparency and institutional accountability in the use of paid agents. But even for universities that don’t pay agents to recruit abroad, gray areas remain in the relationship, Hawkins said, since the university is largely dependent on their services for international applications.

While Chinese students have long performed quite well at the graduate level, there are also concerns that the students in the new wave of Chinese undergraduates are having special difficulties. Not only are they younger, but as undergraduates they face different expectations than do graduate students to engage in classroom discussions and group work, participate in extracurricular activities, and generally contribute to a vibrant, cross-cultural campus vibe that they were ostensibly brought to the university to help create. Unlike graduate-level math, science, or engineering courses, which used to account for the majority of Chinese student enrollment, undergraduate degree programs require students to take a breadth of humanities and social studies classes that often push the limits of their English-language abilities.

Jian Xueqin, the director of Peking University High School’s International Division, summarized the issues that this new wave has brought to campuses in an online column. “I … can’t ignore the stories I’ve heard from colleagues and former students about how Chinese students behave on American campuses,” he wrote. “I’ve heard complaints that Chinese students segregate themselves, and only speak Mandarin. They breeze through the math and science courses, but reading and writing in English frustrate them. Plagiarism and disciplinary violations are rife. Americans, historically accustomed to the stereotypically polite and diligent Chinese student, become overwhelmed when confronted with this new crop.” He worries that the stage is being set for a backlash.

And the dissatisfaction can go both ways, with many Chinese students reporting a general impression that Americans have no interest in learning anything about Chinese culture or attempting to understand them. Emil Cheung, who is from Hong Kong and graduated from Purdue in May, pointed to language as a major barrier for engagement, but also said that both Chinese and American students had a notable lack of interest in crossing the cultural divide. Despite his interest in basketball, Emil said he didn’t manage to make any real American friends. One of the main benefits of attending Purdue, he said, was getting to interact with Chinese students from different regions of China and “learning to speak better Chinese.” In this respect, too, the size of Chinese student populations on large campuses is less than ideal, creating an environment that can allow students to isolate themselves in their own community.

Intent on bridging this cultural divide, Luodan, the Purdue student from Shanghai, has started a magazine for Chinese students to help them integrate on campus. (The latest issue contains a breakdown of the Greek system for international students.) While the magazine is currently mostly in Chinese, Luodan plans to print more English stories and give American students insight into the Chinese community as well. Luodan’s magazine also sends out daily news roundups via text message to Chinese students, helping educate the Chinese student community about things like student senate elections.

Students like Luodan are one of the reasons American universities stand to gain from admitting more international students. He did well in class, provided a valuable addition to Purdue’s undergraduate life, and left a positive mark on the university. And, of course, during his time as an undergraduate his parents infused almost $120,000 in tuition into Purdue’s coffers—and that’s not including room and board and cost of living for four years. Luodan and his family, and the thousands of other Chinese students who have come before and after him these past few years, have arguably helped to keep the doors open at Purdue during tough economic times. This spring, Purdue announced that it would freeze tuition for all students for two years, marking the first time the college has not raised tuition since 1976.

But that doesn’t mean we should disregard all the issues that accompany a historic shift in the numbers and role of international students on American campuses. When viewed through a wider lens it’s impossible to ignore such challenges as the unsavory practices of the international admissions agencies, the poor integration of many international students on campuses, and the displacement of in-state students. And while universities may have liberated themselves somewhat from the fickle purse strings of state legislatures, they have also exposed themselves to the vagaries of foreign governments and immigration regimes. Even if the influx of Chinese students has saved public universities in the short term, a system that relies so heavily on international tuition dollars seems to strike at the core of the universities’ missions to serve the states that have supported them for so many decades. It raises the specter of a downward spiral of state disinvestment and decreasing public support for universities, adding grease to the slippery slope of increasing privatization.

Tim Sands, Purdue’s provost and vice president for academic affairs, said the “land-grant culture” at Purdue, serving the needs of the state as a public institution, was still very important to the university and aligned with its global aspirations, but he also alluded to the thorny discussions the university is having about the direction in which it’s headed. “There’s no question that as your revenue sources change, your stakeholders change as well,” he said.

Calls to recalibrate the enrollment strategy have already begun in states like Washington and California, and while the reactions elsewhere have been more muted, that may change as the budgetary problems in the state legislatures become less dire. Advocating for fewer international students may seem shortsighted or populist to some, but the eagerness of universities to cash in on the global value of American higher education without weighing the consequences seems equally shortsighted, ignoring the long-standing bargain inherent in public education.

If public universities are going to continue to enroll the increasing numbers of students from around the world who are willing to pay top dollar for an American degree, they would do well to remember what is bringing those students here in the first place: widely respected, quality institutions. By improving and regulating the international recruiting and admissions process, expanding enrollment rather than displacing in-state residents, and taking on smaller numbers of international students from a more diverse pool of countries, universities would help to ensure that U.S. higher education remains the envy of the world.

The post International Students: Separate but Profitable appeared first on Washington Monthly.

But as it turned out, Nugent did get to go to Princeton, graduating cum laude in 1973, because the university offered to cover the full cost of her tuition. That life-changing break launched her on a distinguished academic career that culminated in her serving as president of Kenyon College for ten years before stepping down this past June. And it also helps to explain why Nugent now spends much of her time speaking out against a trend in higher education that is making stories of upward mobility like hers less and less common.

“Financial aid available to the lowest-income students has plummeted, and financial aid to the highest has soared,” she says. The trend is so powerful that, try as she might, even Nugent herself could not resist it during her presidency at Kenyon. The school found itself engaged in a relentless arms race in which it felt compelled to offer more and more of its financial aid to precisely those students who need it least.

Today, many leaders in higher education would like to break free of the commercial logic that leads to this perverse result. But it can be difficult to escape, especially for schools that lack deep endowments and have to compete hard for revenue. Either a school offers tuition discounts to students from affluent families, or else those students (and the revenue they could provide) wind up going to other institutions that offer similar or more generous discounts.

There is now a whole industry of consultants who will gladly explain the math—not that it is very difficult to grasp. After all, if a school offers a single low-income student a full scholarship of $20,000, the school may feel good about itself, but it’s out $20,000. But if it can attract four affluent students to its campus instead, by offering them each a $5,000 discount off full tuition, it can collect the balance in revenue and come out way ahead financially. Such competitive discounting to the affluent may not be equitable, and it may not be sustainable over the long term, but once the cycle starts it can be very difficult for any one institution to resist unless they all do.

Today, these tuition discounts usually come in the guise of “merit scholarships,” but often the students who get them are hardly the best and the brightest. For example, 10 percent of college admissions directors at four-year colleges (and nearly 20 percent of those at private liberal arts colleges) admit that they give affluent students a significant leg up in the admissions process—meaning that they are admitting affluent students with lower grades and test scores than other applicants. Indeed, nearly a fifth of all students receiving so-called merit scholarships have less than a B average, and a largely overlapping 19 percent have only mediocre SAT scores, according to a report by the National Center for Education Statistics.

These colleges are, in other words, providing affirmative action for the wealthy, and the scale has grown very large. During the 1995-96 school year, only 24 percent of first-time, full-time students at private colleges received merit aid; by the 2007-08 school year that number had risen to 44 percent.

Of course, it’s true that all schools would prefer to offer merit aid only to students who are highly accomplished academically. If nothing else, attracting more students with high grade point averages and high SATs helps bolster an institution’s ranking on college guides such as those published each year by the U.S. News & World Report. But such is the competition to boost short-term revenue that so-called merit aid often goes these days to students who have little academic merit.

Adding to the inequity are two related trends. First, the proportion of low-income students who receive financial aid of any kind has continued to fall since the mid-1990s. And moreover, for those who do receive aid, the amount of tuition they must still finance on their own has soared. Indeed, these days the net price paid by low-income students is often as high as, or higher than, that paid by more affluent students at the same institution. Nearly two-thirds of private institutions charge their poorest students (those whose families make $30,000 or less annually) a net price of over $15,000 a year.

This is one reason why even after historic increases in Pell Grant funding, the gap between the percentage of high- and low-income students who go to college remains as wide as ever. Low-income students are paying more and more out of their own pockets while their wealthier counterparts get discounts. There is compelling evidence to suggest that many schools are engaged in an elaborate shell game: using Pell Grants to supplant institutional aid they would otherwise have provided to financially needy students, and then shifting these funds to help recruit wealthier students.

By now, the trend has spread to many public colleges and universities as well and is rapidly getting worse as those institutions struggle with declining support from state governments. In a survey it conducted last year of nearly 600 college admissions directors, Inside Higher Ed found that more than one-third of public colleges and nearly two-thirds of private colleges engage in “gapping”—providing lower-income students with aid packages that don’t come close to meeting their financial need.

Ending this vicious spiral will not be easy. “I’m very involved nationally in trying to urge colleges to cut back on merit aid, and so I really regret that we end up doing more of it,” Nugent told Kenyon’s student newspaper last November. Yet she and many college presidents who agree with her see no easy way out. “I just don’t know how colleges are going to step off of that merry-go-round.”

To understand how this cycle came about and what might be done about it, take a closer look at Ohio, home state of Kenyon and also a state that some have called “ground zero” in the merit aid arms race that has been sweeping the country. With dozens of private nonprofit colleges and strong public universities competing for a shrinking population of college-age students, nearly all the schools in the state are aggressively using merit aid to attract the students they most desire, and, in many instances, must have to survive.

As chronicled by Elizabeth A. Duffy and Idana Goldberg in their 1997 book, Crafting a Class, the arms race in Ohio began in the 1980s when Ohio Wesleyan University became the first of the state’s liberal arts colleges to institute a merit aid program. The school hoped to lure away more highly qualified students from Ohio’s lower-cost public universities by offering tuition discounts to students with good grades and test scores.

The program helped bring Ohio Wesleyan the results it wanted, at least at first. But its early success soon caught the attention of other private colleges in the state and drove them to respond with their own scholarships. As a result, Ohio Wesleyan found that it had to expand its program significantly just to keep pace. By 1994, the school was providing merit aid to 39 percent of its students.

Once the cycle began, it became harder and harder for even schools opposed to merit aid to resist expanding its use. In the 1970s, for example, Denison University, in Granville, Ohio, had flirted with the idea of starting a merit aid program but rejected it on the grounds that it would trigger a bidding war among the colleges for high-achieving students. “Using such scholarships is likely to lead us into a cut-throat competition with other schools to ‘buy’ talent,” Denison’s Admissions and Financial Aid Council wrote in 1977.

By the late 1980s, however, Denison realized that it could not sit on the sidelines any longer as it lost more and more coveted applicants to other colleges that were aggressively awarding non-need-based aid. Denison thus started a relatively modest program that provided small awards to fewer than 10 percent of its students. When that proved insufficient, it doubled the proportion of students the program served, and increased the size of the awards. After nonetheless missing its enrollment targets by several hundred students, the school expanded the program even further in 1994. On the advice of outside consultants, Denison began providing scholarships of up to $5,000 each to students who graduated in the top half of their high school classes and had SAT scores of at least 1050.

This discounting helped Denison to boost its enrollment and net tuition revenue. “You spend money to make money,” a senior member of Denison’s admissions staff told U.S. News in a 1998 article that described the school’s merit aid program. Since then, the discounting has also helped to raise the average SAT scores of Denison’s freshman class by attracting students who might otherwise have gone to better-known, more prestigious schools. But while no one can be categorically against an institution of higher learning lowering its prices to attract talented, paying students, this particular form of price discrimination has broader and longer-term effects.

At Denison, for example, the school’s lowest-income students now must pay an average net price of nearly $19,000 in tuition. Put another way, even though most of these students are receiving Pell Grants from the federal government, Denison is charging them such high tuition and offering them so little need-based aid that most must take on crippling debts to attend. Should Denison really be offering wealthy students discounts even as it pushes up the prices needy students must pay?

There is also the question of how such competitive discounting affects the solvency of higher education as a whole. For some of Denison’s nearby competitors, like Wittenberg University—a 168-year-old liberal arts college located in Springfield, in southwestern Ohio—the consequences of Ohio’s merit aid arms race have been quite damaging. With an endowment that is about a sixth the size of Denison’s, Wittenberg relies much more heavily on tuition revenue to finance its operations than its wealthier rival. But to keep up with the competition, Wittenberg must discount its tuition significantly, leaving the school less to spend in other important areas related to the school’s academic mission. “It’s hard to compete with free,” Laurie Joyner, Wittenberg’s president, told the Springfield News-Sun last year.

The state’s most exclusive schools, Kenyon and Oberlin, held out the longest against joining the merit aid arms race. Both competed most directly with elite liberal arts colleges in the Northeast that had long forsworn merit aid. But even they could not resist the pressure coming from other institutions in the state that were aggressively using merit aid.

Oberlin, with its progressive history and long-held commitment to social justice, was the last to cave. By the early 1990s, the college’s financial fortunes were flagging. The school was spending an increasing share of its budget on need-based financial aid but was having trouble nailing down a class with the quality of students it was seeking. Oberlin found itself admitting more than two-thirds of the students who applied—an unusually high number for a college of its stature.

Administrators there came to the conclusion that their aid practices were not sustainable. “I suspect that for many students our financial aid offers are less attractive than those of other schools—that our financial aid policy may be a primary cause of our loss of market power,” Alfred MacKay, Oberlin’s acting president, wrote in 1991 in an article that ran in a campus publication, entitled “The College May Need to Change Its Strategy.”

It took another two years for the whole campus to come onboard. In late 1993, following months of intense discussions, the faculty governing body signed off on a plan for the college to start using merit aid to pursue the students it most desired. In addition, the school became “need aware,” meaning that it would no longer ignore a student’s ability to pay when offering admissions.

At the end of the decade, Nancy Dye, Oberlin’s then president, argued that the school had to ramp up its merit aid program even further. According to accounts in the student newspaper of the campus-wide discussions that occurred at the time, some faculty members objected. “What I’m afraid of is that we’ll end up providing a discount to wealthy students and end up with the reputation as the type of ‘country club’ school we swore we’d never be,” Gary Kornblith, a history professor, stated during a general faculty meeting on the president’s proposal.

But Dye won the day, in part, by stressing the need for the school to keep up with its rivals. “Colleges like Wooster and Denison are trying to use the current financial aid market as a way of upgrading the quality of students by offering substantial amounts of aid,” she said. “We do compete with them, despite what some people think.”

Meanwhile Kenyon, having held out as long as it could, now finds that not only must it offer substantial aid to affluent students, but these students and their families have come to view such aid as an entitlement. Mid-April is the time of year that Jennifer Delahunty, Kenyon’s dean of admissions and financial aid, dreads the most. That’s because sitting on her desk every April is a very large pile of appeals from students Kenyon has accepted but whose families want the college to at least match the financial aide packages they have received from competing schools. “You know how there was the age of the enlightenment?” the blunt-speaking Delahunty asks. “Well, this is the age of entitlement, in the sense that ‘XYZ school gave me a merit scholarship, why don’t you?’ ”

Delahunty acknowledges that colleges have helped encourage this sense of entitlement by giving out awards that are not tied to actual need, and that Kenyon is an active participant in the arms race. But while Kenyon is experimenting with cutting back on merit scholarships, there seems to be no way for the school to disarm unilaterally. “Kenyon, Wooster, Oberlin, and Denison are all going after the same group of kids both in the Midwest and nationally, and we’re all trying to stand out,” Delahunty says.

So, increasingly, are public institutions, both in Ohio and across the country. Declining government support and institutional status-seeking have worked hand in hand to encourage state colleges and universities to join the same merit aid arms race as their private counterparts.

Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, provides a good example. Michael S. Kabbaz, Miami’s indefatigable associate vice president of enrollment management, is on a mission to make the school into a “destination institution” for out-of-state students who are at the top of their class and whose families can afford to pay full freight. To capture the attention of these students, the public university offers many of them hefty amounts of merit aid.

“I come to work every day realizing that if we’re not out there being much more aggressive in attracting these great students, they have options virtually anywhere in the country,” says Kabbaz.

Increasingly, Miami’s focus is on competing nationally against Big Ten schools, like Indiana University, for top students. This goal may seem far flung from the traditional mission of public universities. But given the fiscal realities Miami is facing, Kabbaz sees no alternative to the approach he is pursuing.

Over the last five years, the state of Ohio has slashed spending per student at its public universities by nearly 30 percent. Back in the 1970s, state appropriations covered about three-quarters of Miami University’s annual budget. Today, it accounts for only 11 percent. The school now relies on tuition revenues to cover 55 percent of its budget.

“We can’t control what the state has in store for us over the next ten, fifteen, twenty years,” Kabbaz says. “But we can develop alternative revenue sources so we are able to sustain whatever comes down from the state.”

These issues came to a head for the university in 2009. In addition to the state budget cuts, the school suffered a major financial blow when it missed its enrollment target by 350 students. “That created urgency for the university,” Kabbaz says. “The university said that this could never happen again.”

It was at this point that the university’s “nonresidency strategy” came into focus. The Strategic Priorities Task Force—convened by Miami’s president, David C. Hodge, and made up of faculty and administrators—urged the school to significantly expand its out-of-state recruiting. The committee warned that a failure to do so would be harmful to the institution because of the state budget cuts and Ohio’s shrinking college-age population.

“Widening our reach in enrollment will not be easy, nor will it be accomplished without significant investments in our capability to recruit, attract, and retain students less familiar with Miami’s reputation for excellence,” the task force wrote. “Even so, it is necessary for our future prosperity.”

In the years since, the school has placed recruiters in affluent areas of the country, including Connecticut, northern Virginia, and San Diego. Today, nearly 40 percent of Miami’s students come from outside of Ohio.

The institution also established automatic scholarships for both in-state and out-of-state students who achieve high standardized test scores and good grades. For example, students who have SAT scores of at least 1400 in critical reading and math and have earned a cumulative grade point average of 3.70 are eligible for half-tuition or full-tuition scholarships for four years. About 70 percent of the school’s students receive some sort of scholarship through the program.

Supplementing these efforts, Kabbaz has created the Academic Scholars Program, in which the highest-achieving students receive more-generous aid awards than they would get through the school’s main merit scholarship program. The university also offers these students special academic opportunities, such as personalized mentorships with top faculty, participation in funded research projects, and guaranteed internships.

All in all, Miami University provided $44 million in institutional aid this year, with two-thirds of it going to non-need-based aid. According to data that the school has provided to the College Board, the university was only able to meet the full financial need of about 17 percent of the student aid recipients on its campus in the 2011-12 academic year. Meanwhile, 22 percent of freshmen had no financial need and received merit scholarships that year, with an average award of about $6,500.

Miami’s stress on market positioning and revenue maximization through the use of strategic tuition discounting or price discrimination is now quite typical of public universities. Indeed, public university presidents appear to be even more resistant to the idea of giving up non-need-based aid than their private college peers. According to the Inside Higher Ed survey, 71 percent of public four-year colleges said they wouldn’t eliminate merit aid even if their competitors did so. In comparison, only 48 percent of private college leaders disagreed or strongly disagreed with the idea.

At schools such as Pennsylvania State, in-state students attending the university’s flagship campus in University Park pay about $16,000 in tuition and fees annually. Yet despite the fact that Penn State spends nearly $14 million a year on institutional aid, its lowest-income in-state students pay an average net price of nearly $17,000. At the same time, about 6 percent of the school’s first-time freshmen received an average of $3,800 in so-called merit aid in the 2010-11 school year. Institutions of higher learning used to complement the government’s efforts to promote equal opportunity by using their financial aid resources to open the doors to the neediest students. But those days appear to be in the past.

For several decades, starting in the 1950s, groups of private colleges worked together to try to prevent bidding wars from breaking out over much-sought-after students. By the 1970s, as many as 150 colleges across the country were meeting with their competitors to compare the aid awards they were offering to students.

The most famous of these was the Overlap Group, which was made up of twenty-three elite private colleges, including all of the members of the Ivy League, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a number of highly selective liberal arts colleges in New England. These schools essentially agreed to determine the appropriate aid award for every student admitted to more than one of the institutions. According to the colleges involved, these arrangements were meant to ensure that students could choose among the institutions without cost being a significant factor, and that the colleges could reserve their aid dollars for the neediest students.

In the view of the U.S. Department of Justice, however, these discussions had a much different purpose: price fixing. In 1991, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against the members of the Overlap Group, charging that they had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act “by illegally conspiring to restrain price competition for financial aid” to prospective students. To get the Justice Department to drop its suit, the eight Ivy League colleges quickly capitulated, signing a consent decree in which they agreed to end their discussions. (MIT, which was the only school to fight the lawsuit, eventually reached its own settlement with the government.) The Ivy League’s action convinced other private college groups to disband as well.

In 1994, former members of the Overlap Group persuaded Congress to pass a bill allowing certain private colleges to hold meetings to discuss general institutional aid policies and to refine the formula the institutions use for measuring a student’s need. The schools are forbidden, however, from negotiating individual students’ aid awards. And participation in these discussions is limited to a small and ever-shrinking number of colleges: those that are completely “need blind,” meaning that they never take a family’s income into consideration when admitting students.

Nugent and the other private college presidents with whom she’s working argue that Congress must revise the law to allow a much wider group of institutions to participate in these types of discussions. “Allowing conversation about financial aid priorities and policies among schools could catalyze the creation of a better system,” says Tori Haring-Smith, the president of Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, who has been actively involved in the campaign.

But even if a much greater number of colleges were given the opportunity to work together to try to stem the merit aid arms race, would they want to?

The signs are not encouraging. A recent survey by Inside Higher Ed asked 841 college presidents whether “they would eliminate non-need-based aid if their competitors also agreed to do so.” The results: only a quarter of the respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the idea, while nearly 60 percent made clear that they are not interested in changing their practices.

At the very least, we should consider whether so-called merit aid is a form of price discrimination that ought to be illegal, since it is both unfair and inefficient. While it may help some individual schools to maximize their own revenues or attract more desirable students at the expense of other institutions, it does nothing to improve either the quality or the financing of higher education as a whole and may well make both worse. When a kid is lured from going to Oberlin to going to Denison by a $5,000 “merit” scholarship, that does not make him or her more or less meritorious. Nor does it change in any obvious way how well such a student will do in college or life. But that $5,000 cannot now be spent on another student who, though he or she may have higher grades and scores, cannot afford to go to either school, or perhaps to any school at all. Meanwhile, if both Oberlin and Denison, and a lot of other fine schools like them, go broke by engaging in competitive cycles of discounting to wealthy students, how does that serve any social purpose?

Short of banning the practice of offering the biggest tuition discounts to those best able to pay, the federal government needs to scrutinize institutions that both enroll few low-income students and charge them high net prices. To prevent such institutions from using public dollars as a substitute for offering their own aid to financially needy students, or as a means of financing discounts for affluent students, they should be required to match at least a share of the Pell dollars they receive.

At the same time, however, we can’t lose sight of the root cause of the problem. Between stagnating or declining real wages and relentlessly rising tuition costs, an ever-rising share of the population, including most of the middle class, requires financial assistance to have equal access to higher education. Getting a $5,000 discount on a $40,000 tuition bill hardly leaves most middle-class families able to afford college without taking on debts they should not, and is all the more cruel when the list price has been inflated by $5,000 just as a sales gimmick.

The explosion of student debt that occurred over the last generation masked the problem for a while, but has proved unsustainable. A large part of the answer (much easier said than done, of course) is to drive down tuition costs through improvements in efficiency. But we cannot pretend that it is possible to reverse the growing trend toward inequality and diminished upward mobility as long as more and more institutions of higher learning, including public universities, face a growing imperative to maximize tuition revenues at the expense of other values.

The post Merit Aid Madness appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Imagine you’re a twenty-five-year-old high school graduate. You’re married, you have two kids, you work full-time as an office manager for a local company. You’ve taken a few classes at your community college nearby but haven’t finished your degree. With a family to raise, you want to earn more money, perhaps working with computers, your passion. You think of yourself as the creative type, and your friends tell you there’s a good living to be made in Web design. What do you do?

One option is to enroll at DeVry University, where an associate’s degree in Web design will cost you roughly $39,000 in tuition and five full semesters—at least two years—of class time. You could also go back to your local community college and pay much less, about $2,000, for an eight-course certificate in Web design basics.

Or you could simply log on to openbadges.org, and, from the comfort of your home, learn what you need to know, at your own pace—for free.

Web browser maker Mozilla launched openbadges.org in 2011 to promote what they call “digital badges” to anyone who can demonstrate that they’ve mastered a specific skill. Much like Boy Scout merit badges, participants can earn their way up the badge ladder. Aspiring Web designers, for example, can earn a badge as a “Code Whisperer,” an “Editor,” a “Div Master,” or a “Super Styler,” depending on their ability to demonstrate their coding skills and to build their own Web projects. At the top are the “HTML Basic” and “I am a Webmaker” badges, stepping stones for becoming the Eagle Scout of the Mozilla digital badge world: a “Mozilla Webmaker Master.”

Each badge earned gets you an icon to display on your digital resume or as part of your online profile, which you can show to prospective employers. More than 1,000 groups and employers, including NASA, Disney-Pixar, the Smithsonian Institution, the New York City Department of Education, and Microsoft, are now offering or honoring badges recognizing a wide variety of skills. At the annual summit of the Clinton Global Initiative this summer, former President Bill Clinton endorsed the idea of badging and urged more employers to participate.

While badges are gaining steam, they are actually just one example of many new so-called skills-based credentials that are cropping up in different industries—from Web design to retail to manufacturing—thanks to employers’ and students’ growing disenchantment with traditional college degrees.

From an employer’s perspective, traditional degrees aren’t always all that useful, even though most jobs today require the high level of skills that post-secondary education is supposed to confer. While degrees serve as a kind of baseline measure of a job candidate’s reliability—this person showed up for class (most of the time) for X number of years—they don’t reveal much about an applicant’s actual skills. Because they really only measure the amount of time a student has spent in a classroom, rather than the skills a student has acquired, degrees confer little beyond the selectivity of the college that granted them.

From the students’ perspective, earning a college degree is increasingly prohibitively expensive. It’s also often impossibly time-consuming, especially for the growing number of prospective students who are also trying to juggle family and a full-time job. But as long as traditional degrees are the only admission ticket to better-paying jobs, people with aspirations, who often have valuable on-the-job skill sets but no degree to prove it, can find themselves unable to move up in life.

With all this in mind, a new movement has arisen that is championing alternative avenues to credentials and traditional college degrees. In some cases, companies are bypassing traditional higher education entirely by creating new credentialing systems from scratch, like those Mozilla badges. In other cases, companies have begun partnering with traditional institutions of higher education, such as community colleges or local four-year universities, that are willing to offer their workers college credit for the skills they learn on the job.

Ultimately, these innovations could be a significant boon to students. Particularly for those at the bottom of the economic ladder, the benefit could be better access to cheaper and faster post-secondary education—a must in the changing job market. But these innovations could also threaten the business model of traditional colleges and universities that are unwilling to adapt.

As the senior vice president for the nonprofit Manufacturing Institute, Brent Weil hears complaints from his member companies all the time. When he asks them how they find new workers to hire, the top of the list is word of mouth and the second is for-profit staffing agencies. At the bottom of the list, “somewhere near the margin of error,” he says, is the current system of higher education, which, he argues, fails to produce enough qualified graduates.

In its 2011 “skills gap” report, the institute claimed that as many as 600,000 jobs were going unfilled due to a shortage of workers with the right skills, especially the higher-order skills that are increasingly a must in technology-driven, advanced manufacturing. In addition to specific skills such as precision machining, manufacturers say they need people who can work in teams, solve problems, and communicate with their colleagues, as well as simply show up on time. In theory, a certificate or degree from, say, a community college, should be a guarantee that a person has gained these work habits and thinking skills. In practice, too often, it is not.

Frustrated by this state of affairs, the manufacturing industry began developing its own system of industry-approved credentials for prospective employees. In 2011, the Manufacturing Institute unveiled a pyramid of “stackable credentials” that workers can collect in the same way that budding Webmasters can earn a progression of badges from Mozilla.

At the bottom of the pyramid is a basic credential—the National Career Readiness Certificate developed by the ACT testing service—attesting to the core workplace skills, such as critical thinking and teamwork, that every worker is expected to have. At the top are a variety of “skills certifications,” also organized by increasing levels of knowledge, that workers can earn in specific jobs such as machining, welding, construction, and automation.

“Machining Level I,” for example, qualifies a worker for entry-level jobs, while “Machining Level III” would put someone in the running for the highest-paid and most advanced work—with a potential salary of up to $80,000. In the past two years, more than 84,000 manufacturing workers have earned certifications under the new system, and the industry’s goal is to issue at least 500,000 by 2016.

As with badges, the new system standardizes the skill sets required by manufacturing into an organized system that the entire industry has agreed to recognize. In the past, workers and employers had to pick through as many as 450 different certificates of varying quality, offered by a slew of industry trade groups, many of whose revenues were based on the fees collected from offering credentials, as well as by community and for-profit colleges of dubious merit (think Sally Struthers promising on late-night TV that you, too, could become a mechanic by mail).

Under the new system, each industry-endorsed credential indicates a defined set of skills and is issued only by accredited providers. To earn a credential, workers must pass both a standardized written test and a practical skills assessment (for example, building a part). Like the euro, which replaced the lira, franc, drachma, and so on, the new credentials are intended to be the industry’s common currency.

As a result, Weil says, the new credentials provide both portability and precision about a worker’s or job applicant’s skills. The result is a market value “above and beyond college.” In fact, he says, “in some cases, employers prefer certification over a two-year degree.”

Moreover, these credentials can be earned through multiple pathways, not just by going to school. Current workers, for example, can apply for certifications based on skills they’ve learned or are learning on the job (and thus have a portable credential they can take elsewhere, which they didn’t have before).

Workers can also pick up skills in apprenticeship programs organized by the Department of Labor, company training courses, and industry-sponsored workshops, and, of course, in school. The industry-endorsed National Institute for Metalworking Skills, for example, accredits dozens of institutions across the country that are teaching the skills necessary to get an industry credential, including career and technical schools, military bases, job corps centers, and traditional colleges. Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Career and Technical Institute, for example, is one of roughly forty schools nationwide that now specialize in teaching to industry standards in fields like laboratory engineering and “computer numerical controlled” technology, a form of high-tech machining.

The potential for anyone to earn credentials through a variety of means could especially benefit older, displaced, or disadvantaged workers for whom traditional education is not an option. This is a major reason why the White House and several foundations have championed the manufacturers’ efforts.

At the Dunwoody College of Technology in Minneapolis, for example, prospective workers can take part in a twenty-four-week accelerated credentialing program as part of the Manufacturing Institute’s Right Skills Now Initiative, geared toward unemployed, displaced, and low-skilled workers. Participants in this program spend eighteen weeks in the classroom learning computer numerical controlled technology followed by a six-week paid internship. At the end of the program, students earn a certificate from Dunwoody, one semester of credit toward an associate’s degree in machine tool technology, and, if they pass the tests, four professional certifications from the National Institute for Metalworking Skills.

The manufacturers’ new system of credentialing has turned out to be the tip of the spear in a broader industry push around alternative credentials and the recognition of skills. In the last couple of years, the energy, construction, and transportation sectors have begun following the manufacturers’ lead; all are currently working to develop and offer their own industry-specific credentials with the help of such standards-setting bodies as the American National Standards Institute.

Other industries, such as retail and fast food, have taken a different tack. Instead of coming up with their own credentialing system, they are working to persuade colleges to convert the skills their workers acquire on the job into traditional academic units that they can accumulate to earn a traditional college degree. In this case, the “badge” is college credit.

Not just for Boy Scouts:
You too can earn these badges
from Mozilla by learning
and demonstrating Web design skills.

Walmart, for example, announced a new work-for-credits partnership with the online American Public University (APU) in 2010 that provides its employees with college credit for work experience. Roughly 100 different positions qualify for the program, including cashiers, store managers, photo technicians, and inventory supervisors. To get the credit, full-time workers have to be on the job for at least one year, get good performance reviews, and take part in in-house trainings. Karan Powell, APU’s provost, says approximately 5,000 Walmart employees nationwide are now enrolled in the program.

Walmart employee Henry Jordan used this program to earn his bachelor’s degree in management online from APU this past summer. Jordan started out in Walmart’s pet department and rose through the ranks to senior management. His years at Walmart translated into thirty credits at APU, which shaved the equivalent of one full-time year off his course work.

He says this work-for-credit program is the only way he could have gone back to school. “There are lots of people like me who are taking care of families, raising kids, and who have to work,” he said, adding that in his experience many retail workers are learning many of the same skills they would otherwise be learning in college. As a store manager, for example, Jordan said he was essentially running a multimillion-dollar business, with responsibility for personnel, marketing, managing inventory, and environmental and legal compliance, as well as keeping an eye on the books.

APU’s Powell said that figuring out which jobs and skills deserved college credit was a painstaking and complex process that involved mapping the skills learned in a particular job against the objectives of a particular class. “We knew it would get a lot of scrutiny, so we went above and beyond,” Powell said.

This idea of finding new pathways toward higher education isn’t entirely novel. In fact, the National Career Readiness Certificate at the foundation of the manufacturers’ credentialing system is part of the WorkKeys skills assessment system first developed by ACT in 1992. The nontraditional work-for-credit programs, like Walmart’s partnership with APU, were preceded by the nonprofit online Western Governors University, which since 1999 has pioneered the concepts of providing college credit for work skills and focusing on competency versus class time. This involves carefully testing students to see what knowledge and skills they have already picked up in school or at work and then teaching them only the extra information and capacities they’ll need to perform certain professional jobs that Western Governors confers degrees in—human resource management, say, or network administration.

Traditionally, employers have often been reluctant to invest a great deal in training their employees for fear that the investment will be lost if a newly up-skilled employee goes to work for the company’s competitor. But the explosion of industry interest in these nontraditional avenues of training is evidence that to an extent the calculation is changing.

Yes, some employees will seek greener pastures, but offering ways to earn credentials and degrees also turns out to be a great tool for recruiting and retaining the best people, say representatives from both the manufacturing and retail sectors. Industry-approved credentialing programs save companies money by allowing them to cherry-pick people with exactly the skills they need, rather than spending money on recruiting and training people who may not work out. It also helps improve their respective industries’ images if they are perceived as dirty and dangerous, or simply low-skilled.

Peg Walton, senior director for workforce readiness at Corporate Voices for Working Families, says many businesses across the country are clamoring to get college credit for their workers, primarily through partnerships with colleges similar to the one between Walmart and APU. Starbucks, for example, launched Starbucks U, where workers can get college credit from the City University of Seattle for completing such in-house trainings as Barista 100 and Barista Basics. And Jiffy Lube workers can now get credit from the University of Maryland University College for trainings from Jiffy Lube University. UPS and energy giant AREVA have also launched partnerships to convert work skills into college credit.

Whatever the motivations, escalating industry interest in alternative credentials is feeding a larger debate about the very purpose of a college degree—what it should measure and what it should mean. Should colleges produce graduates ready to work? Or should their goal be to produce well-rounded citizens, however that may be defined? Take liberal arts colleges, for example. Liberal arts majors earn an average of $31,000 a year when they first graduate, according to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, even though their degrees have likely cost at least three times that much. Are those colleges failing their students? Or are they providing value that’s not economically transferable? Is that worth it?

So long as college costs and student debt are spiraling upward, credentialing advocates say the balance should tip toward more pragmatic aims for higher education. “People go to college because they want to work,” Walton of Corporate Voices says simply.

Emily DeRocco, who served in the Department of Labor as the assistant secretary for employment and training under President George W. Bush and is now the principal of the consulting firm E3, agrees. She hopes the push toward skills-based credentials will act as a “wedge” forcing traditional institutions of higher education to consider new ways of thinking about their industry. In particular, she hopes higher education will embrace competency-based education, where what matters is a student’s mastery of specific skills, not the amount of time they spend in class or the alleged prestige of their school. Under a competency-based model, community college graduates could potentially be on equal footing with Harvard MBAs.

Parminder Jassal, the incoming executive director of the ACT Foundation, says competency-based credentials would especially benefit young, low-income, or adult learners, for whom a traditional path to a college degree is impractical.

Jassal points out that much of the K-12 world has already embraced competency-based education—the Common Core State Standards currently being rolled out in most of the nation’s schools are the most obvious example. The Obama administration has also championed the idea.

And, if you think about it, it’s not outside the mold of traditional education, says DeRocco. Much of graduate and professional education, including medicine and law, is already geared toward occupational skills, not general knowledge.

In the meantime, students in traditional higher education settings, like community colleges and four-year universities, are already benefiting from the influence of industry’s push to make higher education more focused on skills. For one thing, more traditional four-year institutions are welcoming tighter partnerships with industry and acknowledging industry’s needs for specific skills in shaping course work.

The Maryland Cybersecurity Center, launched by the University of Maryland at College Park in 2010, boasts partnerships with more than a dozen companies, including Northrop Grumman, SAIC, and Google. A new honors program starting this fall was the product of a $1.1 million investment by Northrop Grumman and comes with a paid internship opportunity for students—an attractive feature. “Parents think cybersecurity is a highly employable field, and if you get an honors degree from this program, you will be über-employable,” said the university’s Eric Chapman.

Jan Klevis, the director of post-secondary and workforce education at Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Institute, envisions a “seamless pathway” between work and school that is the ultimate result of the credentialing movement. She imagines working adults having the opportunity to attend school part-time while earning credentials that are not only valuable within an industry but can later be converted into college credit. Under this system, she says, “you can get a four-year degree for under $10,000.”

The prototype of this future student might be forty-six-year-old Joe Weischedel. As a professional truck driver, Weischedel spent two decades hauling everything from produce to chemicals up and down the East Coast and across the country. On his longest hauls, he’s spent as much as four weeks away from home. After stints in community college as well as Temple University in Philadelphia, Weischedel joined the Army for four years and served as a combat medic. Around 2000, he tried college again with a few online classes at the University of Maryland and the University of Phoenix but ended up dropping out.

In 2010, he resumed the college education he had abandoned years earlier and enrolled online at APU. After receiving college credit for the skills he picked up in the military, it took him two years to earn his degree, taking two classes at a time and studying (while sometimes attending classes online) in hotel rooms on the road. This summer, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree, with honors, in transportation and logistics management. He also earned a professional certification from the American Society of Transportation and Logistics.

Today, Weischedel is looking at senior logistics management jobs that could quadruple his current salary driving trucks. “I had the practical experience, but I didn’t have the paper,” he said. “There was a ceiling before, but now I’ve broken through.”

Image credit: Mozilla, Lehigh Career & Technical School

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