The short answer is: probably. While studies of past recessions suggest that the unlucky Great Recession grads will do less well economically than those graduating during better times, they are still likely to earn more and have better job prospects than their peers who lack college credentials. The June 2011 unemployment rate for those with only a high school diploma, for example, was 10 percent, as opposed to 4.4 percent for those with a college degree. And earnings for college graduates were 66 percent higher in 2010 than for high school graduates. Moreover, the benefits of a college degree are not just financial: college graduates tend to lead healthier lives, have lower divorce rates, and have children who are better prepared for school. On average, a college degree is a worthwhile, if increasingly expensive, investment.

But the key phrase in that answer is “on average.” Graduates of some colleges make a lot more money than graduates of others. It would be helpful if students and parents had information on which was which when choosing colleges, so graduates could avoid the unemployment line the next time the economy implodes. Unfortunately, colleges have been slow to collect earnings data about their graduates—or if they have it, they keep it to themselves. As a result, some people don’t realize they’ve enrolled in the wrong college until it’s too late.

Fortunately, new job market information is starting to become available. Some states are using Labor Department data to track the earnings of college graduates who work within the state. The U.S. Department of Education will soon begin evaluating career-focused programs, primarily in for-profit colleges, by comparing graduates’ earnings to the size of their student loans. The day is coming when we’ll know how much the graduates of every college—possibly even every department or program within a college—earn after they finish school.

And thanks to an innovative online company called Payscale, we can get a sneak preview of how that information will change the way colleges are rated and ranked. Payscale runs a Web site that asks users to complete a voluntary survey about their earnings, job history, and educational background. In return, people get a report on how their salary compares with others with similar backgrounds doing similar jobs—which they can then take into their next round of pay negotiations at work. That’s the service Payscale offers. But the company has also decided to do something else with the data it has collected. Using its trove of survey responses, Payscale has set out to calculate the thirty-year “return on investment” (ROI) for different colleges by comparing their tuition to the lifetime earnings of their graduates.

Because it’s self-reported, Payscale’s data isn’t perfect. Nor are average alumni earnings over thirty years necessarily the best measure; that figure won’t, for instance, reflect recent changes, positive or negative, at a college. But Payscale’s database of more than a million profiles still provides a valuable window on the wide disparities of college earnings outcomes, which range from less than $100,000 to over $1.8 million. In other words, graduates of some schools will see a payoff on their college investment that is nearly twenty times higher than graduates of other schools.

Topping Payscale’s return on investment ranking are prestigious schools with a strong focus on science and engineering, like the California Institute of Technology and Harvey Mudd College. Among schools with a more liberal arts bent, the top performers are also household names, like Dartmouth College, Stanford University, and Princeton University.

But it’s difficult to disentangle the merits of the schools themselves from the talents of the students they recruit. Payscale’s top thirty ROI schools have a median SAT score above 1370— and you would expect students with high SAT scores to do well. At the Washington Monthly, however, we want to measure the value that schools add, not the inputs they attract. So for our own ranking we used a strategy similar to the one we employ for the graduation rate and Pell Grant enrollment measures in our social mobility ranking: We calculated a “predicted” return on investment for our national universities (the only group with a critical mass of Payscale data) based on each school’s average SAT score. Then we ranked schools based on the difference between their actual ROI for graduates, from Payscale’s data, and our predicted measure.

Some of the results were surprising. The Polytechnic Institute of New York University, for instance, turned up number one on our return on investment calculation, but ranks 153rd in the ranking of national universities. NYU-Poly provides its students—almost half of whom receive Pell Grants—with the prospect of a nearly $1.6 million thirty-year payoff on their college degree. Similarly, our second-place university is the New Jersey Institute of Technology, a public institution with 29 percent Pell Grant enrollment and a thirty-year ROI of almost $1.5 million. Both of these schools edge out well-known Cal Tech, which ranks third on this list. Other less prestigious schools like Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the Colorado School of Mines are in the top five, beating schools like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, and Duke University.

It makes sense that many of these top schools specialize in high-paying fields like science and engineering. But not everyone wants to be an engineer. So we ranked schools again, this time controlling for both SAT scores and the percent of students receiving bachelor’s degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math. This produced another crop of previously under-recognized universities. The University of Massachusetts Lowell, for example, is a public institution with midrange SAT scores that admits 73 percent of those who apply. It’s the kind of place that doesn’t register very high on the prestige-o-meter—it’s 183rd on the U.S. News rankings. But it winds up at number four in our calculations because its graduates, who tend to major in practical areas like business administration, computer sciences, engineering, and health professions, do unusually well in the job market.

Compare that to Brandeis, a private university about twenty-five miles away from Lowell. The highly selective Brandeis is number thirty-four on the U.S. News ranking. It also showed up on a recently released federal government list of the highest-priced universities in the country (the total cost to attend is nearly $55,000 per year). But the return on that investment falls short of other universities, particularly given Brandeis’s relatively high SAT scores: based on our ROI calculations, Brandeis comes in at number 240, three spots from the bottom.

Our calculations scramble the U.S. News hierarchy in all sorts of ways. A handful of the top ten—Dartmouth, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania—stay on top. But others slip— Harvard, for example, falls, to twentieth place. Still other prestigious schools, like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell University, and Yale, don’t break the top sixty, trailing lesser-known public institutions like George Mason University, San Diego State University, and Northern Illinois University, all of which make the top thirty when their alumni’s earnings are taken into account.

Because Payscale doesn’t have data for every college, we couldn’t include our ROI calculations in our national university rankings. But if we did, it would shake up our list, too, moving Stanford University to number one. The University of California, Santa Barbara, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Pennsylvania move into the top ten, bumping out Case Western Reserve University, Jackson State University, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Getting a job and making money aren’t the only reasons to go to college, of course. But they’re the main reasons for most students. As the current brutal job market shows, it’s critically important for students to get a diploma that will pay off. And as more earnings data becomes available from public and private sources, the time when all colleges will be judged by measures like ROI is quickly approaching. Our first look at the likely results suggests that some colleges won’t be able to hide behind nationwide averages for college graduate earnings anymore. Others, though, will get deserved credit for preparing students to succeed in their careers, in good times as well as bad.

The post Is Our Students Earning? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

To this list of high honors, Tuskegee can now claim an additional, if more modest, one: it is first in this year’s Washington Monthly rankings of baccalaureate colleges. With 67 percent of its students receiving Pell Grants and a graduation rate 7 percentage points higher than predicted, Tuskegee ranks eleventh on our social mobility measure among baccalaureate colleges. It ranks second in the proportion of its students participating in ROTC. Its total research expenditures are more than double those of the next-highest college, and it is twenty-first in the percentage of graduates going on to get their PhD.

Yet when most people think of America’s top colleges, Tuskegee might not come to mind. Part of the reason is the category, “baccalaureate college,” to which it is relegated by the nonprofit Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The term refers to schools that focus on undergraduate education but offer fewer than half of their degrees in the liberal arts. Any organization that ranks schools based on Carnegie’s widely followed classification scheme—as do U.S. News & World Report and the Washington Monthly—is obliged to evaluate baccalaureate colleges in a separate category. But that makes it hard to tell how the best of those schools compete with better-known national universities and liberal arts colleges.

U.S. News makes drawing comparisons even more difficult by breaking up its ranking of baccalaureate colleges (which the magazine now calls “regional colleges”) into four separate regional groupings: North, South, West, and Midwest. Tuskegee ranks number five among “regional colleges” in the South. The publication gives the same treatment to “master’s universities,” a Carnegie classification encompassing schools that offer a range of undergraduate and some master’s-level programs but few doctoral degrees. How does the best master’s university in the Midwest stack up against the second best in the North? U.S. News won’t tell you.

So when we decided to rank master’s and baccalaureate institutions for the first time last year, we avoided U.S. News’s regional categories. We also, of course, evaluated the schools based on our own criteria (service, social mobility, and research) rather than those of U.S. News (fame, exclusivity, and money). Not surprisingly, there are some big differences in the results.

St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas, with high rankings in both social mobility and service, takes the number two spot among master’s universities in our rankings this year but comes in at nineteenth among regional universities in the West according to U.S. News. Alfred University, a private college in upstate New York, places eighth in our ranking of master’s universities but twentieth among U.S. News’s ranking of regional universities in the North. And Unity College, a small private college in Maine that calls itself “America’s Environmental College,” ranks first in service among baccalaureate colleges and seventeenth overall, but goes unranked altogether by U.S. News.

Like Tuskegee, other historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) get lost in the U.S. News rankings but do well on ours. Xavier University in Louisiana, for example, ranks twenty-second among regional universities in the South according to U.S. News, but places eleventh among master’s universities on our rankings. Xavier’s high rating is due to a strong showing on our social mobility and research measures, including a ninth-place ranking for students who go on to get their PhD. This shouldn’t be surprising— Xavier produces the largest number of African American medical school applicants in the country. North Carolina’s Elizabeth City State University ranks fifth among our baccalaureate colleges, with a strong showing across all three of our ranking categories, but places twenty-second among U.S. News’s regional colleges in the South. Twelve of our top fifty baccalaureate colleges are HBCUs—five of those are unranked in U.S. News and only one, Tuskegee, makes it into the top ten in its region.

We were still left wondering how our top master’s universities and baccalaureate colleges would compare to the national universities and liberal arts colleges. So, after making a slight adjustment in the rankings to account for the lack of PhD programs at baccalaureate and master’s universities, we added our top ten baccalaureate colleges and top ten master’s universities to our national universities and liberal arts rankings to see how the rankings would change. We found that the best of the master’s universities and baccalaureate colleges compete quite well. Five master’s universities and baccalaureate colleges made the top thirty among national universities, and six placed in the top thirty among liberal arts colleges, including little-known institutions like Keuka College and Elizabeth City State University. St. Mary’s University came in eighth overall among national universities due to its strong social mobility and service scores—just above the University of Chicago. And Tuskegee ranked sixth among liberal arts colleges and twenty-sixth among national universities, beating out schools like Amherst College and the University of Pennsylvania.

Other schools shined on individual measures. Our number five master’s university, the University of Portland, for example, placed second among national universities in the number of its alumni joining the Peace Corps, just behind American University in Washington, D.C. And Cooper Union in New York City ranked fifteenth among national universities in the percentage of students going on to get their PhD, beating out its New York City neighbor Columbia University.

Despite its storied history and strong record of research and service, Tuskegee University does not get the same recognition or front-page coverage of many of the national universities or liberal arts colleges. But the school, and the many other successful master’s universities and baccalaureate colleges on our list, deserve the same attention for their ability to serve their students, and the country, well.

The post America’s Best Master’s Universities and Baccalaureate Colleges appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Immigrants Raising Citizens:
Undocumented Parents and Their
Young Children
by Hirokazu Yoshikawa
Russell Sage Foundation, 196 pp.

Most of us can only guess about this girl’s life, or who she will become in the future. But we could use more than guesswork. There are estimated to be more than four million native-born children with at least one undocumented parent living in America today, roughly one child per public school classroom in the country. All are birthright citizens of the United States. Does the undocumented status of their parents negatively affect their chances of growing up to be productive citizens? If so, in what ways, and what might be done to help them? These are hard questions to answer, because few people have studied the lives of children with undocumented parents, in large part because families fear they will be deported.

A new book, Immigrants Raising Citizens: Undocumented Parents and Their Young Children, steps into the breach. Its author, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, a professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, has conducted a first-of-its-kind study of how the documentation status of parents in America may be affecting their children’s development. He finds that hardships common among undocumented parents, such as low wages and social isolation, can harm their infants’ cognitive development at a startlingly young age—as early as twenty-four months into their lives.

Yoshikawa didn’t set out to study children of the undocumented. He and his colleagues had designed a study to examine survival strategies among low-income immigrant families in New York City. But they quickly realized that the families’ immigration status, rather than their economic standing, was what often drove behaviors of both parents and children, and so the researchers adjusted their study to better examine this phenomenon. Yoshikawa and his team recruited 400 low-income mothers with newborns from public hospitals in New York City and tracked them for the first thirty-six months of the children’s lives. These subjects all self-identified as being Chinese, Mexican, Dominican, or African American, the four largest ethnic groups in the city. Some had documents and others didn’t, and the researchers did not ask up front about the participants’ immigration status. Still, during hours of extensive interviews, the study’s subjects opened up and were willing to divulge that one or more of their family members were in the U.S. without papers. The researchers were then able to track behavior patterns common among the undocumented: they typically worked at extremely low-paying jobs and lacked the most basic of amenities, such as a driver’s license or a bank account, further isolating them from society at large.

Many undocumented workers’ jobs are in plain sight—they provide affordable housekeeping and landscaping services, or sell cheap flowers on the street corner. In most cases, child care is provided by a friend or relative, or from a local child care provider who is unlikely to be professionally trained to work with children. This lack of enrollment in professional child care is, in turn, associated with lower levels of cognitive development among children at three years old, likely because untrained caregivers don’t give children enough of the kind of interaction and stimulation that helps young brains develop.

Three-year-old Lucio is the son of two undocumented Mexican immigrants. His mother, Alfreda, takes care of Lucio and some neighbors’ children during the day, and works the overnight shift at a Mexican restaurant in Brooklyn on the weekends. She is committed to her son’s learning, but she is often exhausted, sometimes even nodding off during job interviews. She also has little social support from friends or relatives.

Compare Lucio to Alberto, whose documented Dominican mother has a unionized (though still low-wage) job and a reliable social network. Alberto enjoys more toys, social interactions, and other stimulating experiences that enable his brain to grow. At the end of thirty-six months, his cognitive skills are three standard deviations above Lucio’s.

Stories like these, gleaned from the researcher’s interviews and observation sessions, make up the bulk of Immigrants Raising Citizens, with quantitative data and analysis taking a backseat. And this is a real problem with the book: we don’t get a sense of how much these delays matter, if or how they can be compensated for, or how they compare to other groups of Americans—say, non-immigrants at the same income level.

Yoshikawa is a good storyteller, though, and his study is compelling because he has managed to coax a lot of intimate information from his subjects. His anecdotes make clear that the consequences of living in poverty in America are more diverse and nuanced than most of us would imagine. The difference between an undocumented mother who has knowledgeable friends and a driver’s license and an undocumented mother who lacks both can be the difference between a relatively normal American life and one that is riddled with isolation, depression, and some of the worst working conditions in the country.

Diversity among the undocumented comes with its share of surprises. Take the case of infants from the Chinese subgroup: of the fifty-six undocumented Chinese mothers in the study, forty chose to send their infants back to China (often to a single county in Fujian Province) to be raised by grandparents until preschool. Chinese parents reported that their choice was economically motivated: raising children is expensive, and the Chinese parents had often incurred large smuggling fees just to get into the United States—larger than those paid by Mexicans or Dominicans. While the study’s Dominicans generally just overstayed tourist or work visas and Mexican parents paid between $1,000 and $2,000 to be snuck across the border, one Chinese mother reports that she is still $25,000 in debt to the smuggler who brought her into the United States in 1990.

The geography of undocumented Mexican families in New York City is another surprise. Because New York has historically been less of a destination city for Mexican immigrants, there are fewer Mexican neighborhood, and newly arrived immigrants are more likely to be scattered across the city. Dominican families, in contrast, have been immigrating to New York in waves since the 1950s and have a gathering place and a community anchor in the city’s Washington Heights neighborhood. The lack of centralization and a co-ethnic social network among Mexican families creates what Yoshikawa calls a “distressing lack of access to social capital.” This isolation phenomenon is hidden in other studies, including the author’s own pilot study. That study recruited families from low-income ethnic communities and social service organizations in East Harlem. The disparities between families in the pilot study and those in the main sample, who were recruited from public hospitals, were stark, Yoshikawa writes. “It was the difference between knowing about the immigrant workers’ march and not knowing about it,” he explains, “between hearing about the existence of Head Start and public libraries and not learning about them.”

The book covers a host of experiences among the undocumented immigrants in New York City. Imagine the potential diversity of the nation’s undocumented, a population in plain sight of the nonimmigrant public with what is likely to be astounding array of hidden lifestyles and survival strategies. Some strategies are simple, such as renting the living room of an apartment to boarders, which is common among the Mexican families. Some are more complicated, like the network of Chinese American “travel agents” for hire by Chinese parents in New York, who will fly a baby to his grandparents in Fujian Province for around $1,000 plus the cost of a plane ticket.

Yoshikawa writes as an education researcher who is studying the effects of a parent’s documentation on their young children, choosing to focus more on case studies and path models than broader discourse on immigration. In doing this, he often sidesteps immigration politics, framing arguments according to cognitive benefits or losses that are experienced by the legal children of the undocumented.

But the author can’t help but eventually make the case for his preferred policy fixes, three in particular: easing the path to citizenship (that is, immigration reform); strengthening labor laws and working conditions (that is, more unionization); and improving community-based support organizations that serve undocumented families. The reader is left with a feeling that much of the book has been building toward a previously unannounced advocacy message—and not a very persuasive one, in that none of his trio of reforms is likely to happen or be easy to pull off. Meanwhile, Yoshikawa gives short shrift to some targeted and valuable ideas—like having more social workers on hand at hospitals to help enroll parents with newborns in community programs—that might be achievable regardless of whether or not broad immigration reform happens.

Still, the education field needs more research like this to inform policymakers. Hispanic and English language-learning students are among the groups in America who perform lowest on standardized tests and are least likely to graduate from high school, and we have virtually no national strategy for how to shape the estimated 350,000 children of undocumented immigrants born in the United States last year—8 percent of all newborns— into productive members of tomorrow’s labor force. This is where Immigrants Raising Citizens, and similar works that will, one hopes, be written in its wake, could turn out to be quite valuable.

If you are interested in purchasing this book, we have included a link for your convenience.

The post “My Mommy Doesn’t Have Any Papers” appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Germany’s Genocide
of the Herero: Kaiser
Wilhelm II, His General,
His Settlers, His Soldiers
by Jeremy Sarkin
James Currey, 264 pp.

The Kaiser’s Holocaust:
Germany’s Forgotten Genocide
and the Colonial Roots of Nazism
by David Olusoga and
Casper W. Erichsen
Faber and Faber, 400 pp.

For this vision to succeed, vast tracts of free land were required to lure Germanic emigrants to the rough African countryside and the trials of pioneer life. The primary obstacle was that ancestral people like the Herero and Nama tribes already lived on the choicest land, many of them on a great, arable plateau with plentiful fresh water and surrounded by the boundless Namib and Kalahari deserts.

Too little has been written about this period in German history; there is, however, a growing literature—in German and English—on Germany’s mass murder of the Herero and Nama peoples in southwestern Africa between 1904 and 1907. South African legal scholar Jeremy Sarkin presents a compelling case against Germany and in favor of reparations for today’s Herero (for whom he acts as legal counsel) in his book Germany’s Genocide of the Herero. Another new contribution is The Kaiser’s Holocaust, by Anglo-Nigerian author David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen, a Danish-born historian living in Africa. Both these titles make much the same argument, in line with current scholarship, namely, that the German empire’s onslaught against these tribes-people clearly constitutes genocide, and that many of its elements—like supremacist racial theories, the quest for Lebensraum, Social Darwinism, and even the use of concentration camps—reemerged later in the Nazi Reich.

German authorities in Africa during the 1880s displayed no particular knack for colonial governance. Indeed, the handful of German settlers there—as well as powerful nationalistic lobbies back home—kicked up a storm, demanding better farming land and a more decisive subjugation of the natives. Initially, German administrations employed the conventional tools of colonial rule to divest the tribes of their property: dirty tricks, fraud, extortion, and brute force. Yet the Herero in particular, a tribe of cattle herders, were defiant and armed, quickly serving up the Germans a full-scale revolt that was no match for the protectorate’s modest Schutztruppe.

To quell the Herero uprising, the Kaiser turned to General Lothar von Trotha, a husky, bald-pated Saxon with a thick handlebar mustache and black leather riding boots. A hardened military man harboring a ferocious hatred of black Africans, von Trotha had crushed previous uprisings in Germany’s eastern African colonies and elsewhere. In May 1904, he was named commander in chief of the Kaiser’s army in German South West Africa—what is now Namibia—with 6,000 well-trained reinforcements as well as the latest in European armaments, including mounted rapid-fire machine guns, light portable artillery, and repeating rifles.

Von Trotha didn’t mince words about his objectives. “All the tribes of Africa share the same mentality, in that they only retreat when confronted by violence,” he wrote to the German military high command. “My policy was and is, to apply such violence with the utmost degree of terrorism and brutality. I will exterminate the rebellious tribes with rivers of blood.”

“With an enormous army standing idle under his colors,” write Olusoga and Erichsen, “the rising of the Herero offered Wilhelm II and Germany the rare opportunity to showcase her military might and underline her status as a colonial power.” In contrast to the civilian governor he was replacing, von Trotha understood that his mission, sanctioned by the Kaiser, was not simply to put down the uprising, but to annihilate the rebellious Herero, whom he described in his diary as “Unmenschen”—nonhumans. The Herero would be punished, and a message would be sent to Germany’s possessions everywhere about the consequences of dissent and the inevitability of the white man’s subjugation of inferior races.

Von Trotha planned from the beginning to rid the entire territory of the Herero once and for all. Without giving negotiations a thought, he had his forces encircle the Waterberg—the expansive plateau named “Water Mountain” by the Dutch—where an estimated 50,000 Herero, about two-thirds of the tribe’s total number, either lived permanently or had fled to during the hostilities. The Herero, expecting talks or even contemplating leaving the territory for good, had had no warning when artillery shells and grenades began raining down on their encampments on August 11. The massacre, now known as the Battle of Waterberg, continued all day, until the Herero warriors finally broke through the German lines bordering the Kalahari Desert—which was exactly what von Trotha had intended.

The Herero fighters, women, children, and their cattle rushed headlong into the vast desert sands (in present-day Botswana) with the Germans in pursuit. Von Trotha had given the order that no prisoners be taken. For weeks German soldiers hunted down the refugees, executing them on sight. One German guide present at the Waterberg siege described what he witnessed:

After the battle all men, women, and children who fell into German hands, wounded or otherwise, were mercilessly put to death. Then the Germans set off in pursuit of the rest, and all those found by the wayside and in the sandveld were shot down and bayoneted to death. The mass of the Herero men were unarmed and thus unable to offer resistance.

By the time the Germans tracked down the last survivors, the brutal sun and lack of nourishment had already taken their toll, as one German private described: “The greater part of the Herero nation and their cattle lay dead in the bush, lining the path of their morbid march. Everyone among us realized what had happened here.”

But von Trotha wasn’t finished. He divided up his units, putting half along the desert’s perimeter to shoot any Herero trying to make it back to their homeland and water sources, while the other half conducted mopping-up operations elsewhere in the territory. The general’s Vernichtungsbefehl (“extermination order”) of August 2, 1904—which today survives in the Botswana National Archives in Gaberone—is the most incriminating single piece of evidence illustrating the Germans’ intention to completely eradicate the local population. The edict, signed by the “Great General of the Mighty Kaiser,” reads,

The Herero people will have to leave the country. Otherwise I shall force them to do so by means of guns. Within the German boundaries, every Herero, whether found armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, will be shot. I shall not accept any more women or children. I shall drive them back to their people otherwise I shall order them to be shot.

This proclamation, argue Olusoga and Erichsen,

was the explicit and official confirmation of the policies that most of the German units had followed since the battle of Waterberg. The aim of the conflict was to eradicate the Herero as an ethnic group from German South West Africa, either by extermination or by their wholesale expulsion from the colony.

The authors call the document “an explicit, written declaration of intent to commit genocide.” The Germans pinned the proclamation on the backs of Herero women and children refugees, ordering them to bring in any of their people still living in the desert. Most experts gauge that between 60,000 and 90,000 Herero were killed—roughly 75 to 85 percent of their total population. The German troops returned from the long killing raids physically exhausted and emotionally shattered.

Some of the protectorate’s civilian administrators argued that the colony needed local tribespeople as a steady supply of free labor power. So in German South West Africa in early 1905 the first concentration camps of the twentieth century opened. A German missionary there wrote that the Herero prisoners, mostly women and children,

were placed behind a double row of barbed wire and housed in pathetic structures constructed out of simple sacking and planks.… From early morning to late at night, on weekends as well as holidays, they had to work under the clubs of the overseers until they broke down.

The missionary was appalled at the cruelty and the “brutish sense of supremacy that is found among the troops and civilians here.” The prisoners who survived the grueling conditions of the camps— mortality rates were as high as 70 percent—were hired out to private companies and local farmers as slave laborers.

The ethnic cleansing of the Herero wasn’t the end of the Germans’ killing mission. The fate of the Herero caused the Nama people, initially on better terms with the colonialists, to rise up. Unlike the unsuspecting Herero, the Nama sensed what was in store for them and waged a fierce guerilla war against von Trotha’s forces; in the end, the losses inflicted on the Germans prompted von Trotha’s recall to Berlin. Nevertheless, 10,000 Nama would lose their lives before the killing and internments finally stopped in 1907. Wilhelm II lavished praise on von Trotha for his loyal service to the Fatherland, bestowing on him the highest military accolade of the day.

In the aftermath of the 1904-07 campaign, the colony exploded in size, although it never lived up to expectations as a New Germany or a lucrative economic asset. “With the Herero and the Nama decimated and the survivors reduced to virtual slaves,” write Olusoga and Erichsen, “German South West Africa truly belongs to the Germans.” By 1908 the colony had seized forty-six million hectares of land from the region’s tribes. Five years later, there were 1,331 German farms, compared to just 480 before the Herero and Nama wars. The size of the white population grew from 300 settlers in 1891 to 5,000 in 1904 and 15,000 in 1913. Even if the settlers were never able to shrug off the superficiality and materialism of modernity the way nationalist ideologues had foreseen, the community was an ethnically pure society that lived according to white supremacist convictions.

While German ownership of South West Africa, as with its other colonies, came to an abrupt end with World War I, the genocide’s beneficiaries mostly remained in the territory. South Africa took control of the area, and the region’s inhabitants suffered under the apartheid system for another seven decades. Namibia only gained its independence in 1990.

In the growing scholarship on genocide, which has expanded the category beyond the Holocaust, the destruction of the Herero and the Nama is now commonly regarded as the first genocide of the twentieth century. Whether or not the Kaiser explicitly envisioned— and, as Sarkin claims “orchestrated”— the tribes’ complete eradication, he and other top officials in Germany certainly were well aware of the atrocities of 1904-07, and thus share the responsibility. Von Trotha was by no means a rogue figure operating on his own, as some observers have tried to argue.

Nevertheless, it is a mistake to equate the African genocide with the Holocaust as such, which the unfortunate title of Olusoga and Erichsen’s book does. There are enough significant differences between the means and volume of the Nazis’ mechanized slaughter of six million Jews and the 1904-07 massacres to distinguish them from each other. But since Olusoga and Erichsen don’t even attempt to make this argument, one might assume the title wasn’t their idea, but rather that of the Faber and Faber marketing department.

Professional scholars are, however, attaching greater legitimacy to the links between the German-run colonizing of Africa and the ideology of the Nazi dictatorship. The imperial Germans’ rationale for Lebensraum, for example, was explicitly articulated at the turn of the century and drove the German colonial enterprise. The Nazis didn’t invent this discourse, they picked up on it—and applied it closer to home, in eastern Europe.

In the same spirit, Olusoga, Erichsen, and Sarkin all illustrate how dominant racist thinking had become in Wilhelmine Germany. Von Trotha understood his mission as a “race war,” no less than did Adolf Hitler. Crass Social Darwinist ideas of biological supremacy and survival-of-the-fittest theories had won out over the ostensibly humanitarian, nineteenth-century logic of colonialism as a mission to civilize backward Africans. The Germans under von Trotha went on to pioneer a society in South West Africa based on racial laws. The concentration camps built to house the Herero served as field laboratories for racial science. The German scientists, who believed utterly in the need to have racial purity, used the Herero prisoners as human guinea pigs, conducting gruesome medical experiments on the tribespeople who had been either worked to death or killed by disease— another domain that became later associated with the Nazis.

Today, the descendants of the Herero survivors in Namibia live an unhappy existence of poverty and social exclusion, the legacy of the colonial tragedy. Much of the land confiscated at the time is still in the hands of German owners. In 2004, on the 100th anniversary of the Waterberg massacre, the German government publicly apologized for the atrocities committed in Germany’s name. But it still refuses to pay the Herero reparations. This cause is one Jeremy Sarkin has made his own, and hopefully these fine books will aid the Herero’s case in the world’s courts of justice.

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No statistic about higher education commands more attention—and anxiety—among members of the public than the rising price of admission. Since 1980, inflation- adjusted tuition at public universities has tripled; at private universities it has more than doubled. Compared to all other goods and services in the American economy, including medical care, only “cigarettes and other tobacco products” have seen prices rise faster than the cost of going to college. And for all that, parents who sign away ever-larger tuition checks can be forgiven for doubting whether universities are spending those additional funds in ways that make their kids’ educations better—to say nothing of three times better.

Between 1975 and 2005, total spending by American higher educational institutions, stated in constant dollars, tripled, to more than $325 billion per year. Over the same period, the faculty-to-student ratio has remained fairly constant, at approximately fifteen or sixteen students per instructor. One thing that has changed, dramatically, is the administrator-per-student ratio. In 1975, colleges employed one administrator for every eighty-four students and one professional staffer—admissions officers, information technology specialists, and the like—for every fifty students. By 2005, the administrator-to-student ratio had dropped to one administrator for every sixty-eight students while the ratio of professional staffers had dropped to one for every twenty-one students.

Apparently, as colleges and universities have had more money to spend, they have not chosen to spend it on expanding their instructional resources—that is, on paying faculty. They have chosen, instead, to enhance their administrative and staff resources. A comprehensive study published by the Delta Cost Project in 2010 reported that between 1998 and 2008, America’s private colleges increased spending on instruction by 22 percent while increasing spending on administration and staff support by 36 percent. Parents who wonder why college tuition is so high and why it increases so much each year may be less than pleased to learn that their sons and daughters will have an opportunity to interact with more administrators and staffers— but not more professors. Well, you can’t have everything.

Of course, universities have always employed administrators. When I was a graduate student in the 1960s and a young professor in the 1970s, however, top administrators were generally drawn from the faculty, and even midlevel managerial tasks were directed by faculty members. These moonlighting academics typically occupied administrative slots on a part-time or temporary basis and planned in due course to return to full-time teaching and research. Whatever their individual faults and gifts, faculty administrators seldom had to be reminded that the purpose of a university was the promotion of education and research, and their own short-term managerial endeavors tended not to distract them from their long-term academic commitments.

Alas, today’s full-time professional administrators tend to view management as an end in and of itself. Most have no faculty experience, and even those who have spent time in a classroom or laboratory often hope to make administration their life’s work and have no plan to return to teaching. For many of these career managers, promoting teaching and research is less important than expanding their own administrative domains. Under their supervision, the means have become the end.

Every year, hosts of administrators and staffers are added to college and university payrolls, even as schools claim to be battling budget crises that are forcing them to reduce the size of their full-time faculties. As a result, universities are now filled with armies of functionaries—vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, provosts, associate provosts, vice provosts, assistant provosts, deans, deanlets, and deanlings, all of whom command staffers and assistants—who, more and more, direct the operations of every school. If there is any hope of getting higher education costs in line, and improving its quality—and I think there is, though the hour is late—it begins with taking a pair of shears to the overgrown administrative bureaucracy.

Forty years ago, America’s colleges employed more professors than administrators. The efforts of 446,830 professors were supported by 268,952 administrators and staffers. Over the past four decades, though, the number of full-time professors or “full-time equivalents”—that is, slots filled by two or more part-time faculty members whose combined hours equal those of a full-timer—increased slightly more than 50 percent. That percentage is comparable to the growth in student enrollments during the same time period. But the number of administrators and administrative staffers employed by those schools increased by an astonishing 85 percent and 240 percent, respectively.

Today, administrators and staffers safely outnumber full-time faculty members on campus. In 2005, colleges and universities employed more than 675,000 fulltime faculty members or full-time equivalents. In the same year, America’s colleges and universities employed more than 190,000 individuals classified by the federal government as “executive, administrative and managerial employees.” Another 566,405 college and university employees were classified as “other professional.” This category includes IT specialists, counselors, auditors, accountants, admissions officers, development officers, alumni relations officials, human resources staffers, editors and writers for school publications, attorneys, and a slew of others. These “other professionals” are not administrators, but they work for the administration and serve as its arms, legs, eyes, ears, and mouthpieces.

Before they employed an army of professional staffers, administrators were forced to rely on the cooperation of the faculty to carry out tasks ranging from admissions to planning. An administration that lost the confidence of the faculty might find itself unable to function. Today, ranks of staffers form a bulwark of administrative power in the contemporary university. These administrative staffers do not work for or, in many cases, even share information with the faculty. They help make the administration, in the language of political science, “relatively autonomous,” marginalizing the faculty.

While some administrative posts continue to be held by senior professors on a part-time basis, their ranks are gradually dwindling as their jobs are taken over by fulltime managers. College administrations frequently tout the fiscal advantages of using part-time, “adjunct” faculty to teach courses. They fail, however, to apply the same logic to their own ranks. Over the past thirty years, the percentage of faculty members who are hired on a part-time basis has increased so dramatically that today almost half of the nation’s professors work only part-time. And yet the percentage of administrators who are part-time employees has fallen during the same time period.

Administrators are not only well staffed, they are also well paid. Vice presidents at the University of Maryland, for example, earn well over $200,000, and deans earn nearly as much. Both groups saw their salaries increase as much as 50 percent between 1998 and 2003, a period of financial retrenchment and sharp tuition increases at the university. The University of Maryland at College Park—which employs six vice presidents, six associate vice presidents, five assistant vice presidents, six assistants to the president, and six assistants to the vice presidents—has long been noted for its bloated and extortionate bureaucracy, but it actually does not seem to be much of an exception. Administrative salaries are on the rise everywhere in the nation. By 2007, the median salary paid to the president of a doctoral degree-granting institution was $325,000. Eighty-one presidents earned more than $500,000, and twelve earned over $1 million. Presidents, at least, might perform important services for their schools. Somewhat more difficult to explain is the fact that by 2010 even some of the ubiquitous and largely interchangeable deanlets and deanlings earned six-figure salaries.

If you have any remaining doubt about where colleges and universities have been spending their increasing tuition and other revenues, consider this: between 1947 and 1995 (the last year for which the relevant data was published), administrative costs increased from barely 9 percent to nearly 15 percent of college and university budgets. More recent data, though not strictly comparable, follows a similar pattern. During this same time period, stated in constant dollars, overall university spending increased 148 percent. Instructional spending increased only 128 percent, 20 points less than the overall rate of spending increase. Administrative spending, though, increased by a whopping 235 percent.

Three main explanations are often adduced for the sharp growth in the number of university administrators over the past thirty years. One is that there have been new sorts of demands for administrative services that require more managers per student or faculty member than was true in the past. Universities today have an elaborate IT infrastructure, enhanced student services, a more extensive fund-raising and lobbying apparatus, and so on, than was common thirty years ago. Of course, it might also be said that during this same time period, whole new fields of teaching and research opened in such areas as computer science, genetics, chemical biology, and physics. Other new research and teaching fields opened because of ongoing changes in the world economy and international order. And yet, faculty growth between 1975 and 2005 simply kept pace with growth in enrollments and substantially lagged behind administrative and staff growth. When push came to shove, colleges chose to invest in management rather than in teaching and research.

A second common explanation given for the expansion of administration in recent years is the growing need to respond to mandates and record-keeping demands from federal and state governments as well as numerous licensure and accreditation bodies. It is certainly true that large numbers of administrators spend a good deal of time preparing reports and collecting data for these and other agencies. But as burdensome as this paperwork blizzard might be, it is not clear that it explains the growth in administrative personnel that we have observed. Often, affirmative action reporting is cited as the most time consuming of the various governmental mandates. As the economist Barbara Bergmann has pointed out, however, across the nation only a handful of administrators and staffers are employed in this endeavor.

More generally, we would expect that if administrative growth were mainly a response to external mandates, growth should be greater at state schools, which are more exposed to government obligations, than at private institutions, which are freer to manage their own affairs in their own way. Yet, when we examine the data, precisely the opposite seems to be the case. Between 1975 and 2005, the number of administrators and managers employed by public institutions increased by 66 percent. During the same time period, the number of administrators employed by private colleges and universities grew by 135 percent (see Table 4). These numbers seem inconsistent with the idea that external mandates have been the forces driving administrative growth at America’s institutions of higher education.

A third explanation has to do with the conduct of the faculty. Many faculty members, it is often said, regard administrative activities as obnoxious chores and are content to allow these to be undertaken by others. While there is some truth to this, it is certainly not the whole story. Often enough, I have observed that professors who are willing to perform administrative tasks lose interest when they find that the committees, councils, and assemblies through which the faculty nominally acts have lost much if not all their power to administrators.

If growth-driven demand, governmental mandates, and faculty preferences are not sufficient explanations for administrative expansion, an alternative explanation might be found in the nature of university bureaucracies themselves. In particular, administrative growth may be seen primarily as a result of efforts by administrators to aggrandize their own roles in academic life. Students of bureaucracy have frequently observed that administrators have a strong incentive to maximize the power and prestige of whatever office they hold by working to increase its staff and budget. To justify such increases, they often seek to capture functions currently performed by others or invent new functions for themselves that might or might not further the organization’s main mission.

Such behavior is common on today’s campuses. At one school, an inventive group of administrators created the “Committee on Traditions,” whose mission seemed to be the identification and restoration of forgotten university traditions or, failing that, the creation of new traditions. Another group of deans constituted themselves as the “War Zones Task Force.” This group recruited staffers, held many meetings, and prepared a number of reports whose upshot seemed to be that students should be discouraged from traveling to war zones, unless, of course, their home was in a war zone. But perhaps the expansion of university bureaucracies is best illustrated by an ad placed by a Colorado school, which sought a “Coordinator of College Liaisons.” Depending on how you read it, this is either a ridiculous example of bureaucratic layering or an intrusion into an area of student life that hardly requires administrative assistance.

The number of administrators and staffers on university campuses has increased so rapidly in recent years that often there is not enough work to keep all of them busy. To fill their time, administrators engage in a number of make-work activities. This includes endless rounds of meetings, mostly with other administrators, often consisting of reports from and plans for other meetings. For example, at a recent “president’s staff meeting” at an Ohio community college, eleven of the eighteen agenda items discussed by administrators involved plans for future meetings or discussions of other recently held meetings. At a gathering of the “Process Management Steering Committee” of a Midwestern community college, virtually the entire meeting was devoted to planning subsequent meetings by process management teams, including the “search committee training team,” the “faculty advising and mentoring team,” and the “culture team,” which was said to be meeting with “renewed energy.” The culture team was apparently also close to making a recommendation on the composition of a “Culture Committee.” Since culture is a notoriously abstruse issue, this committee may need to meet for years, if not decades, to unravel its complexities.

When they face particularly challenging problems, academic administrators sometimes find that ordinary meetings in campus offices do not allow them the freedom from distraction they require. To allow them to focus fully and without interruption, administrators sometimes find it necessary to schedule off-campus administrative retreats where they can work without fear that the day-to-day concerns of the campus will disturb their deliberations. Sometimes these retreats include athletic and role-playing activities that are supposed to help improve the staff’s spirit of camaraderie and ability to function as a team. For example, at a 2007 professional development retreat, Michigan Tech staffers broke into teams and spent several hours building furniture from pieces of cardboard and duct tape. Many staff retreats also include presentations by professional speakers who appear to specialize in psychobabble. Topics at recent retreats included “Do You Want to Succeed?” “Reflective Resensitizing,” and “Waking Up the Inner World.” In all likelihood, the administrators and staffers privileged to attend these important talks spent the next several weeks reporting on them at meetings with colleagues who had been deprived of the opportunity to learn firsthand how to make certain that their inner worlds remained on alert.

Administrative budgets frequently include travel funds, on the theory that conference participation will hone administrators’ skills and provide them with new information and ideas that will ultimately serve their school’s interests. We can be absolutely certain that this would be the only reason administrators would even consider dragging themselves to Maui during the winter for a series of workshops sponsored by the North American Association of Summer Sessions. Given the expense and hardship usually occasioned by travel to Hawaii, it is entirely appropriate for colleges to foot this sort of bill.

Another ubiquitous make-work exercise is the formation of a “strategic plan.” Until recent years, colleges engaged in little formal planning. Today, however, virtually every college and university in the nation has an elaborate strategic plan. This is typically a lengthy document— some are 100 pages long or more—that purports to articulate the school’s mission, its leadership’s vision of the future, and the various steps that are needed to achieve the school’s goals. The typical plan takes six months to two years to write and requires countless hours of work from senior administrators and their staffs.

A plan that was really designed to guide an organization’s efforts to achieve future objectives, as it might be promulgated by a corporation or a military agency, would typically present concrete objectives, a timetable for their realization, an outline of the tactics that will be employed, a precise assignment of staff responsibilities, and a budget. Some university plans approach this model. Most, however, are simply expanded “vision statements” that are often forgotten soon after they are promulgated. My university has presented two systemwide strategic plans and one arts and sciences strategic plan in the last fifteen years. No one can remember much about any of these plans, but another one is currently in the works. The plan is not a blueprint for the future. It is, instead, a management tool for the present. The ubiquity of planning at America’s colleges and universities is another reflection and reinforcement of the ongoing growth of administrative power.

There is, to be sure, one realm in which administrators as a class have proven extraordinarily adept. This is the general domain of fund-raising. Even during the depths of the recession in 2009, schools were able to raise money. On the one hand, the donors who give selflessly to their schools deserve to be commended for their beneficence. At the same time, it should still be noted that, as is so often the case in the not-for-profit world, university administrators appropriate much of this money to support—what else?—more administration.

The stress on fund-raising has enabled more than a few university presidents to acquire luxurious offices, lavish residences, and an assortment of perks in addition to princely salaries. Some enjoy the services of a chauffeur when they commute to work and a household staff when they entertain or even relax at home. These and many other perquisites are usually defended by administrators as needed to carry out their social duties and, particularly, to impress their schools’ wealthy benefactors. Yet no study has ever proved that presidents who arrive at fundraising events in chauffeur-driven limousines are more likely to succeed in their capital campaign goals or in any other endeavor than their counterparts who drive their own cars or come by taxi or, for that matter, by subway. I have personally known university presidents who were outstanding fund-raisers but, nevertheless, lived frugally and always traveled as cheaply as possible. Among college officials, though, the spendthrifts seem to outnumber the penny pinchers.

College presidents are usually the guiltiest parties, since they are in the best position to authorize expenditures, and many are more than happy to use school funds to burnish their own images. One recent case in point is that of Benjamin Ladner, the former president of American University in Washington, D.C. Soon after arriving on the campus in 1994, Ladner and his wife, who dubbed herself AU’s “first lady,” declared that the president’s official residence was inadequate and had the university build an expensive new house, which included a waterfall and pond behind the patio, a few blocks from the campus. They outfitted the house with expensive furnishings, china, and stemware. At university expense, the Ladners employed a chauffeur, a cook, a social secretary, and numerous other personal staff members. They hosted gala events to which they invited prominent Washington figures. They traveled abroad frequently, generally charging their first-class tickets to the university.

Matters came to a head in March 2005, when an anonymous whistleblower wrote to the board of trustees accusing the Ladners of “severe expense account violations.” An extensive audit subsequently revealed hundreds of thousands of dollars in questionable spending, some personal but most associated with President Ladner’s frenetic image-polishing efforts. Over the previous several years, the Ladners had charged the university for $6,000 in club dues, $54,000 in drivers’ costs, $220,000 in chefs’ services, $44,000 for alcohol, and $100,000 in services from their social secretary.

After months of bruising battles within the AU board, Ladner’s contract was terminated—though he and the first lady received a generous severance package. While Ladner mingled with the rich and famous at the school’s expense, faculty members had to settle for miserly annual salary increases and students saw their tuitions rise markedly every year.

The expansion of college and university administration has not been coupled with the development of adequate mechanisms of oversight and supervision, particularly for senior managers. University boards, which technically oversee the administrations, are generally not well prepared for the task. One recent study found that 40 percent of university trustees said they were not prepared for the job and 42 percent indicated that they spent less than five hours a month on board business. Many trustees serve because of loyalty to their school and say they have “faith” in its administration. They do not go out of their way to look for problems, and administrators are generally able to satisfy trustees with the rosy pictures of college life presented at weekend board meetings.

Moreover, university boards do not have the same legal responsibilities borne by corporate boards. Most federal regulations establishing management standards for private-sector firms, such as the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, do not apply to nonprofit entities, and state regulation of university administration is spotty. At the same time, while schools have developed many internal rules and standards applying to the conduct of faculty members and students, few if any have established standards governing administrative conduct or established oversight mechanisms. For the most part, senior administrators police themselves.

The result of this lack of supervision is that a number of college and university administrators have, in recent years, succumbed to the temptation to engage in corrupt practices. In 2008, for example, the director of Tufts University’s Office of Student Activities, Josephine Nealley, was indicted on three counts of larceny for embezzling more than $300,000 in student activities funds. She allegedly transferred the money to her personal bank accounts and used it for purchases and trips. While acting on an anonymous tip regarding Nealley’s activities, university auditors uncovered a second, apparently unrelated case of embezzlement. Raymond Rodriguez, a budget officer, allegedly stole more than $600,000 from the university, which he spent on trips and luxury goods. Rodriguez was indicted on two counts of larceny for his alleged thefts. Both Nealley and Rodriguez entered guilty pleas and were sentenced to prison terms.

In a similar vein, the president of the University of Tennessee was forced to resign when an audit revealed that he had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in university funds on personal trips, entertainment, and purchases. The president’s travel at university expense allegedly included trips to Birmingham, Alabama, where he was said to have a “personal involvement” with the president of another school.

Often, frauds go unnoticed for years because the perpetrators are the accountants and financial officers responsible for fiscal oversight. When fraudulent conduct is discovered, university officials often prefer to allow the perpetrators to resign or retire quietly rather than risk a public brouhaha that might upset donors and lead to questions about the quality of the school’s leadership. Many professors can point to cases at their own school when crooked administrators were allowed to leave quietly, sometimes even without being compelled to make restitution for their offenses.

When fraud is exposed and restitution demanded, the sums can be considerable. In January 2008, Roy Johnson, chancellor of Alabama’s community college system, pled guilty to bribery and was required to forfeit the $18 million he admitted receiving in direct and indirect benefits from companies doing business with the colleges he oversaw. As the U.S. attorney who prosecuted the case observed, “Taxpayers must wonder how many more Alabama students could have been educated had money not been wasted on fraud.”

The priorities of the hyper-administrative university emerge most clearly during times of economic crisis, when managers are forced to make choices among spending options. Thanks to the sharp economic downturn that followed America’s 2008 financial crisis, almost every institution, even Harvard, America’s wealthiest school, has been compelled to make substantial cuts in its expenditures. What cuts did university administrations choose to make during these hard times?

A tiny number of schools took the opportunity to confront years of administrative and staff bloat and moved to cut costs by shedding unneeded administrators and their brigades of staffers. The most notable example is the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine, which in February 2009 addressed a $100 million budget deficit by eliminating fifteen “leadership positions,” along with 450 staff jobs, among other cuts. The dean also emphasized that faculty would not be affected by the planned budget cuts. Chicago’s message was clear: administrators and staffers were less important than teaching, research, and—since this involved a medical school—patient care; if the budget had to be cut, it would be done by thinning the school’s administrative ranks, not by reducing its core efforts.

Unfortunately, few if any other colleges and universities copied the Chicago model. Facing budgetary problems, many schools eliminated academic programs and announced across-the-board salary and hiring freezes, which meant that vacant staff and faculty positions, including the positions of many adjunct professors, would remain unfilled until the severity of the crisis eased.

Perverse administrative priorities were even more in evidence at a number of schools that actually raised administrative salaries or opted to spend more money on administrative services while cutting expenditures on teaching and research in the face of budget deficits. For example, in January 2009, facing $19 million in budget cuts and a hiring freeze, Florida Atlantic University awarded raises of 10 percent or more to top administrators, including the school’s president. In a similar vein, in February 2009, the president of the University of Vermont defended the bonuses paid to the school’s twenty-one top administrators against the backdrop of layoffs, job freezes, and program cuts at the university. The university president, Daniel Fogel, asserted that administrative bonuses were based on the principles of “extra pay for extra duties” and “pay for performance.” The president rejected a faculty member’s assertion that paying bonuses to administrators when the school faced an enormous budget deficit seemed similar to the sort of greed recently manifested by the corporate executives who paid themselves bonuses with government bailout money. Fogel said he shared the outrage of those upset at corporate greed, but maintained there was a “world of difference” between the UVM administrative bonuses and bonuses paid to corporate executives. He did not specify what that world might be.

In the meantime the president of Washington State University, Elson Floyd, accepted a $125,000 pay raise, bringing his 2009 salary to $725,000 per year, soon after announcing that financial circumstances required the school to freeze hiring. At another university that had just announced a large budget deficit and mandated salary and hiring freezes, the outgoing president was feted by the board of trustees at a gala 350-person dinner, to which trustees, senior administrators, alumni, donors, and other notables—but no students or faculty—were invited. The dinner, which might as well have been held on the promenade deck of the Titanic, featured musical performances, videos, and a lounge area with hundreds of Chinese newspapers and a tea set to recognize the president’s many trips to China. (No wonder university spending was frozen.) Later, this same university placed restrictions on the use of copy paper by graduate students. Maybe the Chinese newspapers should have been recycled.

On any given campus, the only institution with the actual power to halt the onward march of the all-administrative university is the board of trustees or regents— which, as we’ve seen, tend to be unprepared or disinclined to make waves. But they need to do so if their institutions are to be saved from sinking into the expanding swamp of administrative mediocrity.

To begin with, trustees interested in trimming administrative fat should compare their own school’s ratio of managers and staffers per hundred students to the national mean, which is currently an already inflated nine for private schools and eight for public colleges. If the national mean is nine administrators per hundred students at private colleges, why does Vanderbilt need sixty-four? Why does Rochester need forty and Johns Hopkins thirty-one? Management-minded administrators claim to believe in benchmarking, so they should not object to being benchmarked in this way.

The right kind of media coverage would embolden boards to ask the right questions. In particular, the various publications that rate and rank colleges—U.S. News is the most influential—should take account of administrative bloat in their ratings. After all, a high administrator-to-student ratio means that the school is diverting funds from academic programs to support an overgrown bureaucracy. I am certain that if Vanderbilt or Duke or Hopkins or Rochester or Emory or any of the other most administratively top-heavy schools lost a few notches in the U.S. News rankings because of their particularly egregious administrative bloat, their boards would be forced to act.

But given the general fattening of administrative ranks in recent years, even schools with average administrator-to-student ratios could stand to see major cuts in their administrative staffs and budgets. This could help not only to fill budget holes but, more importantly, to begin a healthy shift in the balance of bureaucratic power within universities. A 10 percent cut in the staff and management ranks would save millions of dollars but would have no effect whatsoever on the operations of most campuses. The deanlets would never be missed; their absence from campus would go unnoticed. A 20 percent or larger cut would begin to be noticed and would have the beneficial effect of substantially reducing administrative power and the ongoing diversion of scarce funds into unproductive channels.

With fewer deanlets to command, senior administrators would be compelled to turn once again to the faculty for administrative support. Such a change would result in better programs and less unchecked power for presidents and provosts. Faculty who work part-time or for part of their careers as administrators tend to ask questions, use judgment, and interfere with arbitrary presidential and provostial decision making. Senior full-time administrators might resent the interference, but the university would benefit from the result. Moreover, with fewer administrators to pay and send to conferences and retreats, more resources might be available for educational programs and student support, the actual items for which parents, donors, and funding agencies think they are paying.

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John Robinson was working nights as an emergency medical technician in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, when he decided to pull his son out of school. David was a second grader with a penchant for acting out, and Robinson, as the parent who stayed home—however groggily—during the day, bore the brunt of the phone calls from the boy’s addled teachers. One afternoon in 2008, during a season of endless parent-teacher conferences and emergency midday pickups, Robinson got a call saying that his son had wrecked a classroom in an uncontrollable fit. A short while later Robinson sat in the familiar grip of a meeting with school officials. “Do you have any suggestions?” they asked him. “Yeah,” he found himself saying. “How about I teach him?”

The teachers persuaded Robinson to send his son to a school for kids with behavioral disorders. But after David had been there for just a few weeks, Robinson found out that the boy was being physically restrained. So Robinson began homeschooling David, arriving home every morning at seven from his eight-hour shift on the ambulance, making breakfast for the two of them, and then teaching through lunch. After that he would steal a few hours of sleep before heading back to work and starting the cycle all over again. The grueling schedule only accelerated Robinson’s growing fatigue with life as a third-shift EMT. “I was starting to feel the burnout,” he recalls, citing what is widely held to be an inevitable fact of life for emergency medical workers. He was desperate to climb out of his job. The problem was that there was no clear next rung on the ladder for him to reach for.

Robinson’s career had been a series of false starts. After serving as a military policeman during the first Gulf War, he’d studied criminal justice at a local community college for a while, then decided it wasn’t for him. He earned his EMT certification—a relatively quick credential—a couple of years later. Fully aware that ambulance work wasn’t really “a lifelong career kind of thing,” Robinson set his sights on a nursing degree, going so far as to earn all the academic prerequisites. But then, just before he pulled David out of school, Robinson ran aground in the great sand trap of contemporary American public higher education: due to a shortage of instructors, there was a two-and-a-half-year waiting list for the nursing program at his local community college. Other state schools, he heard, had wait lists as well. The system was maxed out.

As Robinson’s name inched slowly up the rolls— and as he continued his routine of homeschooling by day and sirens by night—he and his wife started to discuss a new idea. For years, he had been working with kids in his spare time: at a Sunday school, in martial arts lessons, in an afterschool program for children in public housing projects. And now, with his son, Robinson seemed to be making real progress. It was a giant leap—but what if he became a teacher? Better yet, what if he specialized in teaching kids like David, kids who needed special ed? By all accounts, the country was in dire need of such teachers, and the job promised security and solid benefits, perks he had always lacked as an EMT.

With newfound resolve, Robinson began his search for a degree program in special education. And for the first time in his life, he didn’t look to a nearby state college. Given his daily commitments, trucking to campus for a normal class schedule was out of the question. His best, and perhaps only, option, it seemed, was to step out into the wilderness of online education.

Robinson had heard of the University of Phoenix and Kaplan University, schools that cater to working adults via a mixture of online courses and classroom facilities in suburban office parks. But he also knew enough, vaguely, to feel he should steer clear of them. (“When you tell people, ‘I go to the University of Phoenix,’ it’s like, ‘Haha, that’s not a real degree’—you know?”)

Robinson doesn’t remember exactly how he discovered Western Governors University; he thinks he may have clicked on an advertisement generated by a Google search. He noticed that the school was accredited by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, a professional oversight body recognized by the U.S. Department of Education; that seemed promising. (WGU happens to be the only all-online school that bears that distinction.) He also noticed that the university was founded by the governors of nineteen U.S. states, which seemed a legitimate, if unusual, provenance. A phone call with an admissions counselor sealed the deal. He enrolled in July 2009.

With that, Robinson stumbled into one of the most unassuming but revolutionary institutions in American higher education. Western Governors differs in several respects from the crush of online schools that have mushroomed in recent years to serve working adults like Robinson. For one thing, unlike the Phoenixes, Capellas, Ashfords, and Grand Canyons that plaster America’s billboards, Web sites, and subway cars with ads, Western Governors is a nonprofit institution. That means no $100 million marketing budget, and no 30 percent profit margin. For anyone actually enrolled at Western Governors, the biggest difference is simply its price. The average annual cost of tuition at for-profit universities is around $15,600. Tuition at Western Governors, meanwhile, costs a flat rate of just under $6,000 a year.

The reason Western Governors can offer this kind of tuition (which is often, in practice, even cheaper than it looks; more on this later) is because of its signature twist on the idea of a university—a feature that sets it apart not only from its for-profit competitors, but from virtually every other institution of higher education in the country. This innovation allows WGU to offer its students a college degree that is of greater demonstrable value than what its for-profit competitors offer—and do so for about a third the price, in half the time.

That value proposition is catching on with more and more Americans. With just over 25,000 students today, Western Governors is growing at a rate of about 30 percent a year, and has done so for much of the past decade. That kind of rapid expansion may not have been especially remarkable in the online education sector a few years ago, when the industry was booming, but today it renders WGU a stark outlier. After ten years of breakneck growth, for-profit colleges are in damage control mode, having found themselves the recent target of congressional hearings, scathing news investigations, and a tightening regulatory regime. New enrollments at the University of Phoenix dropped by just over 40 percent in the first part of 2011, while tuition has only increased. At Kaplan new enrollments fell by 48 percent in the same period. These collapsing numbers are not merely the short-term results of bad press. The for-profits are suffering because they have a business model that doesn’t quite work anymore; Western Governors is growing because it has one that does.

To understand WGU’s big innovation, it helps to think first about the system we have now. In the United States today, a college degree can signal a variety of things. A diploma from an elite school, for instance, broadcasts the culture, prestige, and exclusivity of the institution that stamped it. But as you move down-market into the vast middle range of American schools, those institution-specific signals either become very weak—verging on inaudible—or very geographically specific. (A diploma from Louisiana State University will get you a lot farther in bayou country than in San Francisco.) And yet colleges all across this spectrum produce the same four-year credential: a bachelor’s degree. So what is the common denominator between a diploma from, say, Cornell and one from Texas Southern University? Simply put: time. At bottom, every college degree is a blunt, dumb testament to its recipient’s persistence. As a recent report from the Center for American Progress put it, a degree means you sat through 120 credit hours of coursework and didn’t fail—whatever “fail” may have meant to your given crop of professors.

This way of doing things has two main drawbacks. The first is that for employers a diploma doesn’t impart all that much useful information. (What does a C student know? Half the material well? All the material by half?) The second major drawback is that for students without a lot of time on their hands—students like John Robinson—it entails a lot of sitting around.

WGU’s answer to the status quo is to offer a degree that is based on competency rather than time. By gathering information from employers, industry experts, and academics, Western Governors formulates a detailed, institution- wide sense of what every graduate of a given degree program needs to know. Then they work backward from there, defining what every student who has taken a given course needs to know. As they go, they design assessments—tests—of all those competencies. “Essentially,” says Kevin Kinser, a professor of education at the State University of New York at Albany, “they’re creating a bar exam for each point along the way that leads to a degree.”

Those fixed standards enable a world of variation. At Western Governors, students aren’t asked to sit in a class any longer than it takes for them to demonstrate that they have mastered the material. In fact, they aren’t asked to sit in a “class” at all. At the beginning of a course, students are given a test called a “pre-assessment.” Then they have a conversation with their mentor—a kind of personal coach assigned to each student for the duration of their degree program—to discuss which concepts in the course they already grasp, which they still need to master, and how to go about closing the gap. The students are then offered a broad set of “learning resources”—a drab phrase, sure, but no more so than “crowded lecture hall”—that may include videos, textbooks, online simulations, conversations with a WGU course mentor (an expert in the subject matter who is on call to answer questions), or even tutors in the student’s hometown.

If the course material is entirely new to a student, she might make her way through it in eight weeks, or eighteen—or eighty, for that matter. Then again, maybe the student is, say, an ex-pastor who’s been selling Nissans in western North Carolina to make ends meet while he earns an MBA in human resources management—and maybe the course is Business Ethics. Ray Shawn McKinnon, the former pastor in question, studied ethics in his early twenties for his bachelor’s in ministry and theology, so he nailed the pre-assessment. Given that success, his mentor allowed him to immediately take the final, which he passed. With that, Business Ethics went down on his transcript—and McKinnon moved on to subjects that genuinely terrified him, like math. “If you can prove your competence,” McKinnon said, “why pay all of that money to sit through something you already know?”

This is where the real power of the Western Governors economic model comes in. Tuition at the school works according to the “all-you-can-eat buffet” principle: $6,000 covers as many courses as you can finish in two semesters. Given the freedom to move at their own pace, many students can finish more than a standard academic load each term. In fact, according to Western Governors, the average time to degree for people who complete their bachelor’s at the school is around thirty months. That’s a college degree in two and a half years—for a total of around fifteen thousand bucks.

By comparison, most for-profit institutions—where the average time to degree is fifty-seven months—have simply found ways to shave down the overhead costs of delivering an otherwise utterly conventional college degree. “Ninety-five percent of online education in the country is really classroom education delivered over a wire,” Robert Mendenhall, the president of WGU, likes to say. “It’s still a professor with fifteen or twenty or thirty students on the other end, and they have a syllabus and assignments.” Given the academic industry standard—a hulking research university— it’s not particularly hard to find marginal efficiencies in the way higher education is delivered. These institutions are just farmers of low-hanging fruit.

Moreover, while they’ve lowered the cost of producing an education, they have seldom lowered the price of acquiring one. Many for-profits have simply pegged their tuition at or near the maximum federal loan allowance, which is itself tied to the soaring tuition rates of traditional brick-and-mortar schools. This is a formula that has produced reliably fat profit margins and rising stock prices, if not necessarily high-quality educations. And it has been ripe for a takedown.

Western Governors was always meant to be a revolutionary institution. Its founders simply had the wrong revolution in mind. On a balmy Sunday evening in June 1995, eighteen governors sat down around a conference table in the mountain resort town of Park City, Utah, and began trading war stories about their states’ higher education systems. It was a special closed-door session of the annual Western Governors Association meeting, and in the absence of reporters, the state executives vented. They all faced the same awful statistics: growing populations, state budgets failing to keep pace. It was painfully clear that public institutions would need to find a way to scale up drastically, and cheaply, if they were to keep up with demand. But universities were fiercely protective of their inefficiencies— and their worst-performing programs. One governor described catching hell for trying to close a barely functional veterinary school. Others had similar tales. Whenever they tried to intervene in their public higher education systems, the governors agreed, they found themselves rebuffed and ridiculed. So, right then and there, they hit on the notion of starting a new university from scratch.

The chief instigators of the idea were Michael Leavitt, then the Republican governor of Utah, and Roy Romer, the Democratic governor of Colorado at the time. Leavitt was a quintessential 1990s futurist, so steeped in ideas about technology’s transformative potential that a Utah student newspaper dubbed him “Governor Leavittate.” It was Leavitt who proposed the then-novel idea of launching the university online, thus allowing it to operate across state lines and reach students in the western hinterlands. Romer brought the idea of “competency- based” education to the table, partly as a means to hold institutions accountable—are students learning a commonly agreed-upon set of competencies, or aren’t they?—and partly to streamline the college experience. As the former head of a flight school, Romer saw the process of acquiring a pilot’s license as a sensible template: if you can demonstrate your abilities, however you came by them, you should receive the credential. (He also liked to evoke the image of Abraham Lincoln studying law out on his own, by candlelight, before being admitted to the Illinois bar.)

That December, the governors organized a conference of state officials, higher education advocates, and technology entrepreneurs at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. The event was half symposium, half ambush. The organizers asked the hotel to set up its main ballroom as if for a prizefight. Their aim: to stage a showdown between the higher education establishment and the idea that eighteen governors had cooked up excitedly in a hotel conference room a few months before. They called it the “Next Generation Virtual University.”

The proposed institution was scarcely more than a vision statement, but it was enough to set off three years of hype surrounding what came to be known as Western Governors University. A series of articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education followed, along with a slew of heady pronouncements about WGU and the future of higher education. For traditional colleges and universities, wrote one prominent commentator at the time, “the scare words of choice are ‘Western Governors University.’ ”

In 1999, Kevin Kinser, then a young doctoral student at Columbia, wrote his dissertation about Western Governors. “There are some institutions which have had an enormous impact on American higher education. Harvard stands out as the first college. Cornell is the crown of the land grant movement. Johns Hopkins is America’s first research university,” he wrote. “Today, like them, the WGU has the potential to set the future direction for higher education.”

Not long thereafter, Kinser’s dissertation adviser actually apologized for suggesting WGU as a subject for his research. By the start of the new millennium, the project looked like a total flop. When Western Governors began accepting applications in 1998, it received only seventy-five in the first two weeks. The next year, the headline “Virtual U Struggles to Get Real” appeared in the Salt Lake Tribune. By the end of 2000, the school had all of 200 students, and a Utah auditor general was officially lambasting it for low enrollments and a failure to compete with other distance education programs. In a year that saw the ignominious collapse of Pets.com, Western Governors was hard to distinguish from all the flotsam sloshing around in the wake of the dot-com bust.

But the school’s slow start was no accident. At the Las Vegas meeting, the founders of Western Governors had picked perhaps their biggest fight with the accreditation establishment, the set of powerful nonprofit industry associations that function as the gatekeepers of academic legitimacy, determining which schools are eligible to take part in federal student financial aid programs. Leavitt, who saw the accreditors as a chief barrier to new ideas in higher education, was determined to make Western Governors a kind of test case for the accreditation of geographically dispersed, online, competency- based programs—and was willing to stake his political capital on making it happen. The process took years, and in the interim, students were naturally reluctant to enroll in an unknown, unaccredited school. (As WGU was slogging through its earnest precedent-setting exercise, meanwhile, for-profit schools with online programs discovered a more expedient workaround: they figured out they could gain accreditation simply by acquiring existing but dying traditional institutions— body-snatcher style—and inheriting theirs.)

By the time Western Governors finally secured its accreditation in 2003—from not just one, but four of the major regional accreditors—times had changed. The online education marketplace was an increasingly crowded bazaar. For-profit schools, fortified by infusions of capital from Wall Street and multimillion-dollar marketing budgets, had begun their decade-long boom. No longer a pure symbol of online education’s upstart potential, Western Governors was just another player looking for an edge in a competitive field.

Trial and error led the university to a tightly focused approach. Initially, the bulk of the school’s offerings had been associate’s degree programs aimed at students attending college for the first time. But those students, who were relatively close in age and experience to the traditional college norm, floundered in WGU’s online, competency- based program. By contrast, adult students with some college and workplace experience thrived. Ironically, that placed Western Governors squarely in contention not with the entrenched traditional institutions that had so frustrated the school’s founders, but with the burgeoning for-profit sector. At Western Governors the average age settled at thirty-six—exactly the same as in University of Phoenix’s online programs. Western Governors was not competing with the sun-dappled quad. It was competing with the billboards on Interstate 10.

The school decided on a curriculum offering bachelor’s and master’s degrees in four “high-demand” areas: education, business, information technology, and health professions, mainly nursing. (Though there are liberal arts components to the school’s bachelor’s programs, Western Governors professes no interest in churning out philosophy, English, or music history grads.) Those areas of curricular focus, too, put Western Governors on much the same playing field as many of the for-profits. But here again the school could offer something distinct. For-profit universities have often built their businesses around supplying the sort of career training that requires no external validation from a professional body. “They target fields where the credential from the university is sufficient,” says Kinser. “So you don’t have a lot of nursing programs in the for-profit sector, because there’s an external nursing exam. You don’t have a lot of law schools, because there’s a bar exam. You have legal assistants or medical assistants”—professions defined only by the piece of paper a university hands you. That, of course, frees the for-profits from an element of external accountability—but at a cost to their credibility.

Western Governors, by contrast, found its model particularly well suited to degree programs that feed directly to an official test of proficiency, such as the Praxis national teachers’ exams. Such external tests dovetail naturally with the school’s system of competency assessments, and in some cases are essentially folded in among them. For example, before he graduates with his MBA in human resources, McKinnon—the North Carolina expastor— will have to pass the national human resources management certification exam. In an online education sector plagued by accusations of low quality, Western Governors can show that its degrees are backstopped by the official guardians of various professions. (It also helps that WGU students tend to score higher than the national average on such professional exams.)

Western Governors attracted students at a steady clip through the mid- and late 2000s—but so did everyone else in the online degree bazaar. The economic crisis of 2008 and the ensuing waves of unemployment were pushing ever more Americans into the market for “retraining,” where a gold rush was on. As public television’s Frontline pointed out last year, some of the for-profits were spending more money on advertising than retail giants like Tide detergent and Revlon cosmetics. Western Governors enjoyed better press than its competitors, but as a nonprofit institution with a modest marketing budget it remained a relatively quiet presence.

Then, in 2009, with the arrival of the Obama administration, the earth began to shift under the for-profits’ feet. After a decade of regulatory inactivity under Bush, Washington began to focus a widening beam of scrutiny on the industry, whose business model had increasingly come to consist of vacuuming up federal student loan dollars with little regard for the academic success of the students who brought them. In 2010, for-profit schools derived three-quarters of their revenue from federal grants and Title IV loans. Though for-profits accounted for just 9 percent of the nation’s enrollments, they attracted 25 percent of the available federal aid money— and wore out plenty of shoe leather doing it. News accounts, most notably by Bloomberg’s Daniel Golden, described for-profit college recruiters bringing their hard sell to casinos, homeless shelters, and military barracks that housed veterans suffering from traumatic brain injury. To many observers, their practices were reminiscent of nothing so much as the tales of subprime mortgage brokers circa 2007, hustling lower-class Americans into adjustable rate loans for houses they couldn’t afford. (See “The Subprime Student Loan Racket,” November/ December 2009.)

2010 was a year of reckoning for the industry. In April, President Obama’s deputy undersecretary of education, Robert Shireman, gave a speech comparing for-profit universities to the Wall Street firms that had brought down the economy, and the stocks of Apollo (Phoenix’s parent company), DeVry, Strayer, and others dove promptly. That summer, Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, the chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, called a series of withering hearings stressing the for-profits’ dropout rates, their accelerating loan defaults, and their degrees’ shoddy performance in the job market. Among those who testified was the hedge fund manager Steve Eisman—who had served as the bluff, de facto hero of Michael Lewis’s nonfiction account of the financial crisis, The Big Short, because of his prescience about the subprime mortgage market. “Until recently, I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive as the subprime mortgage industry,” he began. “I was wrong.”

The chief regulatory threat to the for-profits coalesced in the form of something called the “gainful employment rule.” The federal Higher Education Act states that, in order to be eligible for federal aid money, career-oriented schools must “prepare students for gainful employment in a recognized occupation.” And so the Education Department set out to define “gainful employment” as a ratio of student loan debt to income. If students weren’t earning enough in the workforce to service their debts after leaving a school, the idea went, then the school should not be eligible for aid. The very premise of the rule shook the foundations of the for-profits’ business model. Their stocks dropped to four-year lows. New enrollments started to plunge as waves of bad press reverberated through the market, and as schools began reengineering their models away from the old boiler-room recruitment schemes. The entire industry was suddenly pitched against a ferocious headwind.

Western Governors, however, continued to grow. The school’s enrollment was verging on 25,000 students— up from just 500 in 2003—and its yearly revenues had climbed from $32 million to $111 million. And if 2010 was the worst of years for the for-profits, it was among WGU’s best—not least because of a remarkable announcement made by Indiana’s governor, Mitch Daniels, that June. With the stroke of a pen, he declared that he was creating a new state university: WGU Indiana.

With a decimated manufacturing sector, high unemployment, and college completion rates trailing the rest of the country, Indiana was desperate to graduate more students. (Hand-wringing about the value of a college education aside, the numbers are clear: bachelor’s degree holders earn $20,000 a year more, on average, than high school graduates, and enjoy 50 percent lower unemployment.) Daniels saw WGU as a way to expand the state’s raw higher education capacity, and also to catch Hoosiers who had dropped out of college years ago, giving them a clear route to finishing their degree as working adults. In practice, the creation of WGU Indiana was a wave of the legal wand; it simply meant that students could apply state financial aid toward a degree at Western Governors. But the deal also gave the school the credibility of state backing, along with some free TV spots featuring Governor Daniels himself. Enrollment in the state immediately shot up to twenty times the rate in the rest of the country. And for its part of the bargain, Indiana paid almost nothing. Startup costs for the venture were covered by the Gates and Lumina foundations.

A few months later, the state of Washington signed on to a similar deal, creating WGU Washington. Rumors of talks with more states followed.

Suddenly, WGU had begun playing a role not unlike the one it was designed to play. The economic crisis of 2008 reduced public universities to exactly the circumstances that members of the Western Governors Association had feared in 1995: with state budgets in high distress and populations surging, many universities are capping enrollments, and most are passing more and more of their costs on to students. Western Governors was launched with a set of $100,000 down payments from the states in the Western Governors Association, plus an infusion of $20 million from the federal government and $20 million from industry donors in the private sector. Thus, for a little over $40 million—or the price of a nice new building on a single campus— Western Governors is providing states with a low-cost means to satisfy demand for higher education. “WGU was developed by states, for states,” said a very pleased Mike Leavitt in a recent interview, “for just exactly this type of circumstance.”

If there is one statistic that should give anyone pause about Western Governors, it is the school’s six-year graduation rate as calculated by the federal government: 22 percent. That happens to be the same as the average rate among for-profit colleges, and it is far from heartening. But the statistic comes with a number of caveats. As a matter of policy, the government determines graduation rates by looking only at students who are attending college for the first time and on a full-time basis—in short, the most conventional undergraduates. Like most schools that serve the “nontraditional” demographic, WGU points out that this set of criteria leaves out the vast bulk of its own student body. (The standard retort is that, even if such conventional students make up a tiny proportion of a school’s enrollment, they are the ones most likely to graduate in most circumstances.)

In WGU’s case, there are more caveats. The school’s most recent six-year graduation rate was published in 2010, which means it tracks students who began their studies back in 2004. At the time, most of WGU’s current programs didn’t exist yet, its enrollment stood at around 3,000, and it was in the process of decommissioning its less-than-successful complement of associate’s degrees. In short, Western Governors may simply be too young for this to be a great measure of its success. (Like most schools, Western Governors calculates its six-year graduation rate to include part-time students and those returning to college; that number is 40 percent. But that measure looks back to 2004 as well.)

Another statistic that college watchdogs prize is a school’s retention rate, which gauges whether students persist beyond the first year of study. And here Western Governors fares significantly better. This year, 77 percent of its first-year students hung on for a second year, higher than the national average at both for-profits and traditional schools. (According to the Online Education Database, Western Governors ranks fourth among online schools on this measure.)

Moreover, some data suggests that Western Governors does rather well at seeing older students—its target demographic—through to graduation. A 2010 study funded by the Gates Foundation and carried out by McKinsey and Company compared WGU’s graduation rate, broken down by different age brackets, to that of an anonymous but typical state higher education system. For students beginning a bachelor’s degree in their late twenties, WGU’s completion rate was 18 percentage points higher than the control. For students in their forties, it was 28 percentage points higher. Perhaps not surprisingly, only students who entered college in their late teens fared better in the conventional state system.

Those who do graduate from Western Governors credit their mentors with being the single biggest factor in their success. Playing a role with no real analog in the wider world of higher education, WGU’s mentors operate from home offices and kitchen tables scattered across the country. (But unlike the armies of adjuncts and graduate students who do most of the teaching at both for-profit and traditional schools, mentors work full-time with benefits.) They might advise a student on time management one day and on finding an attorney the next. McKinnon, the ex-pastor studying for his MBA, was working sixty hours a week at the Nissan dealership earlier this year, and his studies were beginning to crumple under the workload. His mentor, Melissa Prentice, gently raised the issue with him during their regular conversations, and McKinnon started discussing his sense of diminishing returns with his wife. Eventually the three of them—as if in a kind of family meeting—jointly decided that it would be best if he quit the dealership to focus on finishing his degree. Remarkably, given the scope of her role in his life, McKinnon has never actually met Melissa—nor is he exactly sure where she lives. “Melissa, I think, is in Seattle,” McKinnon said recently, “or Colorado. She’s incredible.”

The school’s mentors are also in a unique position to survey just how arduous it can be for a grown man or woman in America to finish college and make a fresh start. A few months after John Robinson enrolled at Western Governors in 2009, he lost his job with the ambulance company. His wife had lost her job the year before. In the grim Rhode Island economy, Robinson tried his hand at running a small business, renting a storefront in Woonsocket and opening a martial arts studio. He managed to cultivate enough paying students to cover his overhead, and he started coaching a couple of mixed martial arts cage fighters on the side. But he never cleared much of a profit.

And so, earlier this year, Robinson shuttered his business and moved away from Rhode Island, where he had lived most of his life. He took a job in an auto parts factory in Richmond, Kentucky, where his brother works. These days, Robinson’s schedule is more grueling than ever. He works overnight shifts that can last up to twelve hours, painting shock absorbers on an assembly line—then commutes home at five a.m. through a strange landscape of Baptist churches and fields full of cows.

Robinson’s load has lightened in at least one respect, however. Soon after the family’s move, his son tried going to school for the last part of the year. The experiment went well enough, and David was anxious to play drums in the school band and join the wresting team. So this fall he is entering junior high, and Robinson is putting his homeschooling days behind him. “It had its season,” he says.

While Robinson was in the midst of uprooting his life and replanting it in the Bluegrass State, he had to take a few weeks off from Western Governors; he was simply too exhausted to log on. At another school, the semester might have swept past him. But Robinson’s mentor told him, “You just do what you need to do.” When things had settled back down, he was able to pick up where he had left off. Today he is a little more than halfway through his degree in special education.

Though WGU’s brand of competency-based education may sound high concept, Robinson has found it perfectly intuitive in practice. “To me it made more sense than being in a classroom,” he says. “As soon as you’re done with the work, you get to move on. That just makes more sense.” Now, when he looks back at his prior experiences in college, it is with exasperation. “No offense to the younger kids, but you know, I’m in my thirties. You go in there with eighteen- and nineteen-year- olds, and it’s more of a social thing for them,” he says. “You go sit in a classroom and listen to people ask stupid questions, and the teacher has to go over things, over and over. I was like, oh my gosh, this is just breaking me.”

This time, however, he is determined to finish his degree. “I just don’t have an option anymore. I’m gonna turn forty next year, and now what? I’m not gonna work a dead-end job,” he says. “I’m not a twenty-one-year-old college kid anymore.”

No matter how much market share it seizes from the for-profits, Western Governors is unlikely to fire the imaginations of those who like to think of college as a crucible of open-ended inquiry, critical citizenship, and humanistic contemplation. But it’s worth remembering that not all crucibles look alike. Before he enrolled at Western Governors, John Robinson says, he had never written a paper in his life. Now he has written more than a score of them, and the experience has given him newfound confidence in his own thinking. “Ideas are flowing, I’m making notes of things,” he says. “When I get an idea, I write it down.” The other day, he sat down at his computer with his morning cup of coffee after sleeping off a shift at the factory and discovered, via Facebook alert, that an essay he had submitted to a Christian online magazine had been published.

The education of “nontraditional” students has been a subject fraught with cognitive dissonance in America, where much of the discussion surrounding higher education is unduly preoccupied with matters of prestige and exclusivity. In this context, leaders of for-profit colleges have held up their neglected, underserved student populations as a badge of moral seriousness. “What we do is educate people who would never have a shot, thank you very much,” a former Kaplan executive said in a recent Washington Post article. In effect, the for-profit schools have accused their prestigious critics of looking at the world of working-class, adult students and saying, for all intents and purposes, “Let them eat cake.” And despite their many flaws, the for-profits have a point here. That’s why the country needs more institutions like Western Governors— innovative, low-cost schools offering degrees of demonstrable value—that put both the snobs and the profiteers to shame.

Looking forward, all signs point to WGU’s continued growth. In a recent interview with the online magazine Inside Higher Ed, Mendenhall was bullish about the template set by the school’s deal with Indiana. “Over the next five years we’ll aim to do 10, 12 states and then see where that takes us,” he said. In early August, Governor Rick Perry announced the creation of WGU Texas, and California’s legislature is exploring the feasibility of its own Western Governors subsidiary. Other rumored possible partners include Arizona and Louisiana. Entering into similar agreements with states “would be a rather difficult model for the for-profit sector to duplicate,” says Kevin Kinser. Last summer, California’s community college system tried to arrive at a similar partnership with Kaplan, but the school’s for-profit status made the deal unworkable. (Its increasingly horrible press did not help either.)

In June, the Department of Education handed down the final version of its gainful employment rule. Though more watered down than some reformers had hoped, the new regulation is predicted to render about 5 percent of for-profit programs ineligible for federal aid— effectively shutting them down—starting in 2015. But just as dramatic are the effects the rule is already having on the industry, as schools clamber to reengineer their business models so as not to run afoul of Washington. Last year, 25 percent of students who attended for-profit colleges defaulted on their student loans within three years. In order to survive, schools will have to find some way to bring those numbers down. Phoenix, which not long ago compensated recruiters according to the number of students they enrolled (homeless, addicted, brain injured, or no), has instituted a mandatory three-week student orientation period. The entire sector is grappling with the shock of suddenly having a stake in its students’ success.

WGU, whose model needs no overhauling—and whose student loan default rate is about 5 percent—will only benefit from its competitors’ time in the wilderness. The demand for higher education, after all, is as stronger than ever.

What’s more, it may only be a matter of time before the Western Governors model begins to pose its founders’ challenge to traditional higher education as well. Consider WGU’s college of business, the school’s second largest academic program. Business is the most popular undergraduate major in America. But recently, the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa found that undergraduate students of business learn measurably less than students in other fields. The scholars examined the results of a national essay-based exam called the Collegiate Learning Assessment, and measured how much students’ scores improved over the course of four years in college. Business students’ scores improved scarcely at all.

Colleges across the country regularly administer the Collegiate Learning Assessment. But schools closely guard the results—so loath are they to reveal what their students are, or aren’t, getting out of their studies. By contrast, a Western Governors degree is a fairly straightforward testament to what a graduate knows. It doesn’t seem much of a stretch to imagine that, given the choice, employers might come to prefer the latter.

Earlier this year, the Center for American Progress published a report called “Disrupting College,” by the Harvard business school professor Clayton Christensen and three coauthors. Research universities, Christensen argues, simply weren’t designed to do what we are increasingly asking higher education to do: educate students from wildly different backgrounds for jobs outside the academy in ways that can be measured and assessed. Christensen and his coauthors describe the for-profit and online schools that have cropped up over the past twenty years as a “first wave of educational disruptive innovation.” But that wave arose under a system of regulatory incentives that didn’t either reward student success or punish failure, and so it could break up against reforms like the gainful employment rule. Some schools in that first wave will survive, and others won’t. Phoenix, with its astonishing enrollment of 438,000 students, is fiercely trying to adapt—and, with its multibillion-dollar revenues, it probably will succeed. Corinthian Colleges, a large chain of schools with an average 40 percent default rate—15 percentage points higher than the average in the sector—might not.

At just over 25,000 students, WGU’s enrollment is still a rounding error in the grand scheme of American higher education. The school’s curriculum is relatively narrow, and its model may require a degree of discipline and self-motivation that many students don’t possess. But perhaps more than any other institution out there, Western Governors is aligned with the new pressures shaping the higher education market. The only question is how big it can get.

The post The College For-profits Should Fear appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Like many other two-year college students, Monica Dekany has taken the long route to a degree. After graduating from high school in Glenelg, Maryland, in 1990, she enrolled in a local community college. Her grades were good there, but her direction was lacking. She dropped out, took a job at a fast-food restaurant, moved across the country, and then tried again at Utah State University in 1992. Again, she was able to pass her courses—with As, sometimes—but she still wasn’t sure of what she wanted to study, and eventually she stopped going to school. It wasn’t until many years, several jobs, and one child later that she decided to give college another try. In 2009, she enrolled at Golden West College in Huntington Beach, California, a two-year institution that, like most community colleges, accepts all who apply. Dekany was disappointed that most of her credits from the two other colleges wouldn’t transfer, but no matter: she was motivated enough to start building credits anew.

All she had to do, the registrars told her after she paid her fee, was go down a hallway, pick a cubicle, sidle up to a computer terminal, and take a short test. The “Accuplacer,” as the test is called, was no big deal, they said—nothing she could have studied for. It was just so they could see where she was. Dekany took one test in math and another in English, and was “floored,” as she put it, to learn that she had scored at a level that would consign her to remedial classes, reviews of fundamental material for which she would receive no college credit. “It caught me totally off guard,” Dekany says. The other colleges had let her enroll directly in college-level English and literature classes, and as her transcripts clearly showed, she had passed them. But Golden West told her the test results were all that mattered.

Dekany dutifully enrolled in, and paid for, the remedial—or what colleges euphemistically call “developmental”—courses. She knew everything in the English course already; her daughter’s seventh-grade English class was more advanced. Her math course was similarly low level, but it was taught by a sympathetic professor who helped save her from further remedial work. The college had mandated that Dekany take a second remedial math class before being allowed to take Math 100 for college credit, but her professor thought the requirement made no sense—she was clearly ready for college work. So he arranged for her to take Math 100 at Cal State, Long Beach, where he happened to also teach, and there she got an A.

Dekany went on to excel in college. She’s a member of the Alpha Gamma Sigma honors society, a reporter for the Golden West college newspaper, and the school’s homecoming queen. She’s just a semester away from getting her associate’s degree in social science and on her way to a bachelor’s in counseling. But there’s no getting back what the Accuplacer took from her. Remediation cost her several thousand dollars and set her education and her career back by a year. And if not for her math professor, it would have been even worse.

Dekany barely managed to dodge a fate that is very common among American college students. About 40 percent of them—a total of almost seven million people—go to community colleges, and millions more attend nonselective four-year universities. The vast majority of those institutions require students to take placement tests like the Accuplacer, and more than half the students who take those tests end up in remediation. Unlike Dekany, most students who are assigned to remediation don’t make it through. Some never even show up for
class. Others flunk out. Still more get discouraged and quit.

To be sure, open-access colleges need to assess the knowledge and abilities of incoming students. Dysfunctional public high schools routinely grant diplomas to students who lack basic math and reading skills. As a result, many new college students need help in order to grapple with college-level work. The problem is that colleges have chosen to deal with that challenge by diverting huge numbers of students into a parallel remedial education system with a dismal track record of helping students ultimately graduate from college. Compounding the problem, most colleges place students into the remediation track using nothing more than the results of a short, inexpensive, one-shot multiple-choice test of questionable accuracy and worth.

Most Americans think of the SAT as the ultimate high-stakes college admissions test, but the Accuplacer has more real claim to the title. (As it happens, the same company, the Education Testing Service, produces both exams.) When students apply to selective colleges, they’re evaluated based on high school transcripts, extracurricular pursuits, teacher recommendations, and other factors alongside their SAT scores. In open admissions colleges, placement tests typically trump everything else. If you bomb the SAT, the worst thing that can happen is you can’t go to the college of your choice. If you bomb the Accuplacer, you effectively can’t go to college at all.

The remedial placement process is ground zero for college non-completion in America. If the nation is going to make any headway in helping more students graduate from college, it will have to completely overhaul the way students enrolling in nonselective colleges are tested for college readiness, and make equally fundamental changes in how colleges use that information to help students earn degrees.

Placement testing has long been a dilemma for community colleges, and over the past few decades this crucial gateway to credit-bearing work has swung both open and closed. In the 1970s, responding to students who argued that they essentially had a right to fail, many institutions dropped mandatory placement testing and course prerequisites. The idea, as the researchers Katherine L. Hughes and Judith Scott-Clayton of Columbia University’s Teachers College explain it, was that students were old enough to decide for themselves whether they were ready for college work, and that doing so would only make them more responsible. Maybe they were, and maybe it did, but the new leniency also caused students to fail and drop out in troubling numbers.

Criticism of the relaxed policies came to a head in 1983 with the publication of A Nation at Risk, an alarming federal report that found that high school graduates were not nearly as prepared for postsecondary life as they needed to be. State legislators, who had already started to complain, demanded that standards be set and readiness measured. New Jersey was the first state to require a placement test, an assessment developed by the Educational Testing Service. Officials assumed that 10 to 20 percent of incoming students would fail the test. Instead, according to Hunter R. Boylan, director of the National Center for Developmental Education, 40 percent did. By the late 1990s, any college that did not require a placement test was a rare institution indeed.

Most colleges use one of two assessments: the Accuplacer, which is used by 62 percent of community colleges, and the COMPASS, which is administered by ACT and used by 46 percent of community colleges. (Some institutions use homegrown tests or other measures.) Both are so-called adaptive tests, which means questions are chosen for individual test takers based on how well they do on the previous question. If the student does well, the questions get harder; if he doesn’t, they get easier or stay at the same level. Like the COMPASS, the Accuplacer tests sentence skills, reading comprehension, basic math, and algebra. It also assesses a writing sample.

Students are told, reassuringly, that there is no such thing as failing the Accuplacer or the COMPASS. But there is: students who score below a certain number, or “cut score,” flunk the test for credit-bearing work. In most schools, that means that before they can enroll in for-credit, college-level courses, they have to take and pass remedial classes. At other schools, students with low cut scores can, if they insist, go straight into for-credit courses, though guidance counselors often caution them against it, or misinform them of their options.

While most students who take the SAT know it’s a life-determining experience, the high-stakes nature of the Accuplacer and similar tests comes as distressing news to most of the people who take them. A 2010 study by researchers at Northwestern University surveyed 2,000 students who took placement tests and found that 75 percent of them did not understand the significance of the tests—and two-thirds didn’t realize that remedial classes would earn them no credit. Andrea Venezia, a researcher for the policy organization West-Ed, conducted with colleagues a study of placement policies at California colleges and got similar results: the majority of test takers were unaware that their performance would determine what classes they would be able to take and whether they would receive credit. In a typical comment, one student told the researchers, “The woman at the test center said it doesn’t matter how you place. It’s just to see where you are.” Another misguided student had the placement test confused with a career aptitude assessment. “I thought it was one of those tests you take just to see what kind of field they were going to recommend,” she said.

Because they don’t know what’s coming, most students don’t prepare for the tests, even though studies have shown that a review course can raise scores enough to place students at a higher remedial level or keep them out of remediation altogether. Whereas a student taking the SAT might spend several weeks in a Kaplan or Princeton Review course, doing vocabulary drills and working with sample math problems, the typical community college student takes the placement test stone cold. There are books available, but prep courses are not nearly as numerous or institutionalized as they are for the SAT. (An Amazon search turns up thirty-five results for Accuplacer prep books, compared with 6,158 for SAT guides.) The market for Accuplacer prep is no doubt less attractive: many Accuplacer takers lack the money and the time. Fewer than half of the colleges that responded to Venezia’s survey said they provide any practice.

Students who take the SAT are often encouraged to retake it multiple times to maximize the chance of a high score. Retakes are possible with placement tests as well, but the policies for doing so depend on the institution and, again, they can work against college success. Students at Lane Community College in Oregon, for example, can’t take the test again for three months—essentially a whole semester—which is a potential deal killer for a student who is older, employed, and in a hurry. At one community college in California cited by Venezia, the wait to retake the placement test was three years, a delay tantamount to no second chance at all. “They basically can’t go,” she says.

Even if placement tests are administered inconsistently, and students given too little preparation, the use of them might be easier to defend if they were accurate predictors of whether students will be successful in college work. If fact, little research has been conducted on this crucial question. The College Board points to an independent study it commissioned that found a moderate to strong correlation between Accuplacer test scores and subsequent course performance. ACT did a study of the COMPASS that found essentially the same correlation. But Thomas Bailey, director of the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, an authoritative research organization funded by the federal government’s Institute for Education Sciences, says that the placement tests have, at best, “only a weak relationship with educational performance.”

Indeed, research by Bailey and others suggests that Monica Dekany’s experience is not unusual, and that tests like the Accuplacer and the COMPASS routinely underestimate the ability of large numbers of students to do credit-earning college work. In 2010, Bailey and colleagues Dong Wook Jeong and Sung-Woo Cho led a study that looked at tens of thousands of community college students who scored low on placement tests and other measures but ignored the advice or instruction to take remedial classes and instead enrolled directly in a for-credit course. A full 71 percent passed the for-credit course. That’s not much lower than the 77 percent pass rate for all students who took those for-credit courses. And it’s only slightly lower than the pass rate for students who first took and completed remedial courses. As the researchers note, however, many who start in remedial classes either drop out or fail before they ever take a credit-bearing course. Factor that in, and only about 27 percent of those who agreed to take remedial courses ultimately passed for-credit courses, as opposed to the 72 percent who blew off remediation. “It appears,” the researchers concluded, “that the students in this sample who ignored the advice of their counselors and proceeded directly to college-level courses made wise decisions.” Michael W. Kirst, a former professor of education at Stanford University and a member of the California state board of education, said the findings “suggest strongly that student access may be unfairly denied and that many students capable of success are not given the chance to try.”

This may explain what happened to Monica Dekany. In the early 1990s she had learned enough math and English to pass college courses. Nearly two decades later, she had forgotten enough of that material to fail the Accuplacer. But who actually remembers much of what they learned in college, let alone high school?

Here’s a sample question on the elementary algebra portion of the Accuplacer:

What is the value of 2x² + 3xy – 4y² when x = 2 and y = -4?

A.) -80. B.) 80 C.) -32 D.) 32.

It’s a fairly simple question. (The answer is A.) But many middle-aged adults with college degrees would probably flub it—especially with no opportunity to prepare. Indeed, when Boylan gave the math Accuplacer to forty-two community college faculty members and administrators attending a recent conference, everybody but the math teachers scored poorly. “Almost all of them would have ended up in remediation,” he said.

As measures of basic cognitive skills, tests like the COMPASS and the Accuplacer aren’t bad, say experts like Boylan. But they obviously miss many students who are quite capable of doing college-level work. In part that’s because community colleges tend to use these tests as the main or only determinant of who gets to take credit-bearing courses. They could avoid that by, at the very least, doing what most four-year colleges do, and what the test companies recommend they do: looking at multiple measures of a student’s potential—placement scores, high school grades, recommendations, the fact that a student has already passed college courses. But with state budgets tight and community college classes already oversubscribed, the institutional incentives are to screen students out as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Still, it’s perfectly possible to devise a cost-effective assessment system that would do a much better job of getting the maximum number of students into regular classes. For instance, there are factors beyond cognitive skills that researchers have found to be equal—or better—predictors of college success: attributes like ambition, persistence, willingness to seek help, and a desire to connect with instructors. Some researchers say that the poorer a student’s cognitive skills, the more important these so-called “affective” skills become. Yet only 7 percent of colleges, according to a 2007 survey, collect both affective and cognitive data. This is despite the fact that many relatively cheap measurement tools exist. They include something called the Learning and Study Strategies Inventory (LASSI), an eighty-item assessment that measures things like study skills, motivation, and self-discipline. The combination of an assessment like LASSI, which costs $3.50, and a personal interview with an adviser would produce a far more accurate picture of the applicant, Boylan says, helping schools limit remediation to those who truly need it. If someone falls just below a cut score on the Accuplacer but scores well on the affective assessment, he might best be assigned to a regular course. If the affective assessment and interviews reveal weaknesses, he would likely best be served by remediation.

Even more helpful would be tests that could give more specific and precise information than the Accuplacer or the COMPASS can provide about what students do and do not know. Both testing companies say they are trying to develop more predictive measurements, but according to David T. Conley of the University of Oregon’s Center for Educational Policy Research, placement tests now provide “very little diagnostic information about the specific academic deficiencies that students may have.” Has the student simply forgotten the material and needs only a memory refresher? Or did he never learn the stuff in the first place? The test can’t tell. It also can’t tell if the student needs “a small amount of focused review or a re-teaching of the material from scratch.” In other words, while a test may identify deficiencies, Conley says, it is not particularly useful in helping to fix them.

The clear limitations of placement tests and the abysmal track record of the remediation system have led a growing number of advocates and public officials to call for wholesale reform. Stan Jones, the president of the not-for-profit Complete College America and the former Indiana commissioner of higher education, says he can’t even stand to talk about placement because “the whole system is so awful.” Boylan is just as blunt: “The way these tests are used is awesomely bad.”

The expert consensus is that the problem with the placement system—as with the entire business of remedial education—needs far more than a technical solution. Conley, for one, thinks the very notion of a student being judged as either remedial or college ready presents “a false dichotomy that is in need of fundamental rethinking.” The assumption, he says, should be that all students are college ready and remedial to varying degrees. Thus, he says, a wider range of data should determine their course of study, and readiness should be assessed “as a matter of degrees, not as an absolute.”

Boylan’s ideal system, which would likewise aim for placing the highest possible number of students in regular courses, would use cognitive and affective tests, along with counseling and personal interviews—triangulating, essentially. A student who scored just under the cut might be placed in regular courses and succeed with some tutoring and other support. Students at the low end might need several layers of remediation, but the courses would be targeted to particular weaknesses revealed by placement tests that would be far more diagnostic than the ones used now.

There are promising examples of these ideas being put into practice. One can be found at Austin Peay University, a public four-year institution in Tennessee that admits 90 percent of the students who apply. For years, roughly half of all Austin Peay students were put in remediation, with typically dismal results. In 2007, the university took the bold step of eliminating remediation entirely. Instead of a placement test, underprepared students were given a diagnostic test and enrolled in college-level courses, with the requirement that they spend two hours in a learning laboratory each week, where they received individual tutoring and personalized computer-based instruction tailored to the results of the diagnostic test.

The results were impressive. Before the switch, only 53 percent of students passed developmental math, and only 30 percent completed a for-credit math class within two years. After the elimination of remediation, the percentage of underprepared students completing college-level math more than doubled, to 67 percent. English results were also significant—the percentage of students passing college English increased from 54 percent to 76 percent. Austin Peay saved on the classroom space they had been devoting to remediation, and students ended up saving on tuition because they weren’t paying for remedial courses. Everybody won.

If reforms like these were implemented in all of America’s open-admissions colleges, millions of students who have been swept into ineffective remedial classes by placement tests might be able to move forward with their lives. And these are not just any students. They are young people who worked their way out of bad public high schools from which most students drop out. Or they are adults like Monica Dekany, who, despite false starts, setbacks, and the demands of work and family, are taking the plunge back into college, making time in the mornings and in the evenings when the kids are asleep. Getting a college education is seldom easy for these folks. But the least society can do is not make the task harder than it needs to be.

The post How the Other Half Tests appeared first on Washington Monthly.

(UPDATE: A year later)

O n the morning of February 20, 2011, Jameel Reid woke up in the small apartment he shares with his mother on the far north end of Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood. He ate a cursory breakfast, laced up his sneakers, slung a brown nylon backpack over both shoulders, and walked out to the bus stop, determined to find his future.

Jameel is fourteen years old and a high school freshman, but he looks younger, slight and small. After an hour and a half on public transit, including one transfer and many stops and starts, a city bus deposited him on the side of a road with no sidewalk near Miami International Airport. He walked a while in the gravel as cars rushed by. Finally, he turned a corner and came to the entrance of the Miami Airport convention center, where thousands of people were lined up outside.

At school the week before, a teacher had mentioned Miami’s 2011 National College Fair. Jameel knew he wanted to go to college; so here he was. But after walking into the cavernous convention center, he stopped short. All of the other kids were there with their parents or a group of friends, he realized, with lists of prospective schools at the ready. He was alone. There were hundreds of college booths lined up in rows, each staffed by a smiling representative standing behind a stack of glossy brochures. Which ones should he go to? And when he got there, what should he do?

The floor was crowded, and Jameel, who is nearsighted, belatedly discovered that he had left his glasses at home. Okay—he liked computers and video games and thought maybe he could design them someday. That’s why he had enrolled in Honors Algebra II, the most advanced math class he could sign up for, and put himself on the college-prep science track. Computers were technology, right? That was a place to start. He carefully walked up and down each aisle, squinting at the signs on the wall, looking for colleges that had the word “technology” in their name.

It was hard to get anyone’s attention. Jameel’s voice is whisper soft with a slight stammer, and nearly everyone was bigger and taller. He would stand to the side and wait, for minutes sometimes, invisible to the college recruiters, until a spot opened up at a table where he could move in for a moment and grab a brochure. He stuffed them in his backpack and after several hours finally turned to leave the convention center, find his bus, and head for home.

Jameel is such a smart, motivated young man that it’s tempting to assume that things will work out for him, that he is bound to find his way to a good college or university. But the evidence suggests that such an outcome is far from certain. In 2009, the former Princeton University president William Bowen documented the pervasive problem of “under-matching” in higher education. Bowen examined a group of North Carolina high school students from across the income spectrum whose grades and SAT scores were good enough to get them into a top-tier university. Seventy-three percent of wealthy high performing students actually enrolled in such a university.

Only 41 percent of low-income high-performing students did the same. The under-matching rates for minority students and those whose parents never graduated from high school were similarly low. And under-matched students were significantly less likely to earn a college degree.

There are a number of reasons for this. Bad high schools usually lack the guidance counselors and visiting college recruiters that well-off students take for granted. Parents who haven’t been to college can’t use their experience to guide their children toward higher education. Plus, elite colleges are often very expensive and are becoming more so every year.

But there’s another culprit at work: the college admissions process itself. If you want to buy shares of stock, bid on antiques, search for a job, or look for Mr. Right in 2011, you will likely go to a marketplace driven by the electronic exchange of information. There will be quick, flexible transactions, broad access to buyers and sellers, and powerful algorithms that efficiently match supply and demand. If you are a student looking for a college or a college looking for a student, by contrast, you’re stuck with an archaic, over-complicated, under-managed system that still relies on things like bus trips to airport convention centers and the physical transmission of pieces of paper. That’s why under-matching is so pervasive. The higher education market only works for students who have the resources to overcome its terrible inefficiency. Everyone else is out of luck.

As a result, the odds appear to be against Jameel, who attends a 1,600-student public high school where the large majority of children qualify for the federal free and reduced-price lunch program and the staff of three guidance counselors was cut to two last year. Determination can take you only so far if there’s no one to help you find your way.

But Jameel’s local school system has made one recent move that might work significantly in his favor. A few days after returning from the college fair, Jameel logged on to a new Web site that is the result of a contract between the Miami-Dade County school system and a Boston-based company called ConnectEDU. The site offered Jameel loads of information about different colleges and universities, along with strategies for filling out college applications and getting scholarships and financial aid. It was also a vessel for information about Jameel himself—his grades, courses, and activities, along with short animated quizzes designed to identify his strengths and goals. There were checklists and schedules and friendly reminders, all tailored to the personal aspirations the site had gleaned from Jameel, all focused on identifying the colleges that might meet them.

This is the future of college admissions. The market for matching colleges and students is about to undergo a wholesale transformation to electronic form. When the time comes for Jameel to apply to colleges, ConnectEDU will take all of the information it has gathered and use sophisticated algorithms to find the best colleges likely to accept him—to find a match for Jameel in the same way that Amazon uses millions of sales records to advise customers about what books they might like to buy and Match.com helps the lovelorn find a compatible date. At the same time, on the other side of the looking glass, college admissions officers will be peering into ConnectEDU’s trove of data to search for the right mix of students.

This won’t just help the brightest, most driven kids. Bad matching is a problem throughout higher education, from top to bottom. Among all students who enroll in college, most will either transfer or drop out. For African American students and those whose parents never went to college, the transfer/dropout rate is closer to two-thirds. Most students don’t live in the resource-rich, intensely college-focused environment that upper-middle-class students take for granted. So they often default to whatever college is cheapest and closest to home. Tools like ConnectEDU will give them a way to find something better.

The same tools will create a moment of truth for America’s most renowned institutions of higher education. The status quo in admissions has beneficiaries as well as victims—when a qualified poor student misses out on the Ivy League, a more well-off student usually goes in her stead. That’s one reason there are twenty-five upper-income students in elite colleges and universities for every lower-income student. ConnectEDU will allow admissions deans to reach out and find kids like Jameel with an ease and precision far beyond what they can accomplish today. The top schools swear up and down that they would love to admit more disadvantaged students, if only they could get them to apply. As college admissions transitions to an electronic market, we’ll find out if they really mean it.

If they do, slots in the most elite colleges will be even harder to come by than they are today. In a radically more efficient higher education market, only the brightest and most distinctive students will have a chance to attend the best schools. It’s hard enough to get into an Ivy League university when 30,000 people apply for a few thousand spots. Soon, applicants will be effectively competing with every other student in the world. The whole concept of a college “application” will start to fall by the wayside. And as a result, the higher education system will become more like the meritocracy it has long pretended to be.

I t wasn’t so long ago that the very idea of someone like Jameel Reid going to college seemed absurd. At the end of World War II, America’s elite colleges were still enclaves of white male Protestantism where character, athletic ability, and the family name were far more important than academic prowess. The man most responsible for changing this was Harvard University President James Conant, who believed that an ascendant postwar America needed to be led by an intellectual elite, not the inheritors of privilege. To identify those students, he helped broker the creation of the Educational Testing Service, publisher of the SAT. As Nicholas Lemann describes in his definitive history, The Big Test, this paper-and-pencil test of word associations and math problems would become, and remains, the nation’s single most important instrument for sorting and assigning students to different levels of educational opportunity.

Once Harvard made this shift, other elite universities risked becoming backwaters if they didn’t follow suit. Yale, which came to the admissions revolution later than its archrival did, undertook its shake-up in the mid-1960s, when the university hired a twenty-nine-year-old Yale alum named R. Inslee “Inky” Clark as admissions dean. Clark promptly fired his entire staff, staunched the flow of guaranteed prep school admits, and began hunting for bright students in exotic locales like Brooklyn. The university also phased out admissions policies that discriminated against groups like Catholics, minorities, and women. As the number of Yale students from the likes of Andover fell by half, William F. Buckley, a proud product of the old system, complained that “[t]he son of an alumnus, who goes to a private preparatory school, now has less chance of getting in than some boy from P.S. 109 somewhere.”

One of the first students to benefit from the new system was a Kentuckian named Jeff Brenzel. While his parents had never been to college, they valued education and sent him to an all-boys Catholic high school in Louisville. Brenzel’s father was Catholic and had his heart set on sending his valedictorian son to Notre Dame. But the Xaverian Brothers who ran Jeff’s high school wanted the prestige of Ivy-educated graduates, and Jeff believed in the time-honored principle that one’s parents must be wrong. He enrolled at Yale in 1971, one of only two Kentuckians who made the journey to New Haven that year. If he had been born five years earlier, there would have been no place for him, but he wasn’t, so there was. Brenzel went on to spend two years as a Jesuit novice, earn a PhD in philosophy, and work in the business world for two decades before returning to Yale as director of the alumni association. In 2005, the university asked him to take the job that Inky Clark had used to such effect: admissions dean.

The Yale Office of Undergraduate Admissions is located in a converted mansion on the north side of campus. The dean’s office is on the second floor, facing the street, with a couch, a fireplace, and an expanse of white bookshelves that Brenzel has filled with books about higher education. But the heart of the place is a short elevator ride down, in the basement. There, a single room with a low ceiling and cinderblock walls leads to a set of wide double doors in the rear where, until recently, a fleet of U.S. Postal Service trucks would back up and disgorge an absolutely phenomenal amount of paper every year.

The pile would grow with each passing application season. As the number of college students in America and around the world increased exponentially and the value of college degrees rose, a winner-takes-all effect had taken hold. Prestige led to more prestige, wealth to more wealth. The most elite colleges had become globally recognized, immensely valuable brands with multibillion-dollar endowments. The number of applications for the 1,300 annual spots at Yale shot upward, from just over 14,000 in 2001 to nearly 20,000 in 2005. (More than 27,000 applied for the 2011-12 freshman class.) Since Yale itself wasn’t growing nearly as quickly, admission rates dropped, augmenting the aura of exclusivity and prompting even more people to apply. The numbers at other elite schools looked much the same.

This created a huge data-processing challenge. Every application has multiple parts: transcripts, recommendation letters, SAT scores, Advanced Placement scores, high school profiles, personal essays, and more. When Brenzel arrived at Yale, the pieces didn’t all arrive at once. The ETS would mail official SAT scores, guidance counselors would send sealed teacher recommendations and transcripts, and the students would send the applications. Yale had to hire scores of temporary workers to sit at desks in the basement, opening envelopes, sorting through documents, and putting them in files. Then it had to hire a staff of admissions officers who would pull the tens of thousands of files from rolling metal library shelves installed at the other end of the room, read them, and try to identify the chosen few. Even for a university as rich as Yale, it was hard to keep up.

Yet, paradoxically, Brenzel still didn’t have all the information he needed. The college admissions world had changed drastically since the 1960s. Admissions deans at schools like Yale weren’t just expected to enroll the best and brightest. They were charged with “crafting” a perfectly balanced class of students—one that combined various kinds of budding genius with ethnic, racial, regional, and economic diversity, while simultaneously accommodating the diminished but still-powerful imperative to admit legacies and the children of the rich and powerful.

Brenzel had more than enough applications from well off students whose parents had wangled them into the right Manhattan preschool and shelled out tens of thousands of dollars for private “admissions consultants.” What he didn’t have enough of was first-generation and immigrant college students, people from rural areas, young men and women with unusual and offbeat talents, or, say, low-income black students from the tough part of town with a strong will and an enthusiasm for math. He couldn’t just wait for them to apply—most had no idea that Yale might want them, or that the college’s generous financial aid program would allow them to go for free. With budget cuts forcing many guidance counselors to take on 500 students or more, the public school system wasn’t much help. Brenzel would have to seek these students out.

The problem was that his means of doing so were very limited. It’s one thing to expand the universe of potential feeder high schools from Andover to P.S. 109 and the academically rigorous Catholic high school in the state capital. In this day and age, Brenzel needed to look everywhere. But the last real technological advance in college admissions had happened six decades earlier, with the invention of the SAT. Every year Yale would buy a list of students who scored above a certain SAT threshold and reported having a certain grade point average. Yale would mail these tens of thousands of students a standard glossy brochure. Brenzel knew that most of them weren’t good enough to get into Yale and would be rejected if they applied. But there was no other way to find the few who were good enough to get in.

Most admissions directors don’t lose any sleep over the number of brochures they send out. The more applications, the lower the admission rate, the better the college looks. But Brenzel’s Jesuit training and philosophical education gnawed at him. Inducing unqualified students to apply seemed ethically suspect. What if, because of him, they failed to apply to a good school that would have them? What if he prevented them from making the right match?

He also knew that, by definition, he was missing the most brilliant, interesting, and multidimensional students who happened to fall just short of the threshold SAT. They were out there, somewhere. But he couldn’t see them, and they didn’t know that he was looking.

The problem was hardly unique to Yale. In an ideal world, colleges would be able to study their admissions data, using statistical analysis to identify the patterns and behaviors likely to produce a good match. Are their SAT thresholds set in the right place? What high school courses are best correlated to graduating from college? Colleges have very little ability to answer these questions, because admissions information is still largely stored on pieces of paper. Many colleges have purchased systems that scan transcripts and teacher recommendations into electronic files that can be viewed on computers. But those are just images of pieces of paper. They don’t represent information that can be mined for insight.

Because the information that might help them is entombed in file folders, colleges resort to an expensive, inefficient, scattershot strategy. A typical midrange private college looking to enroll 1,200 freshmen might buy a list of 350,000 names from the College Board. An expensive but poorly targeted direct-mail campaign leads to 11,000 applications. They accept 5,000, of whom only 1,200 choose to enroll. Of those, more than half drop out or transfer, leaving the college struggling to bring in enough tuition revenue to pay their bills and left with no option other than buying another 350,000 names.

Students have a similar problem. It’s hard to choose the right college. Higher education is what economists call an “experiential good,” something you can’t fully understand until after you purchase and experience it. As parents of college age children know, students often assemble a list of prospective schools through a frighteningly arbitrary process of hearsay, peer misinformation, and fleeting impressions gained during slickly produced college tours. Or, worse, they don’t assemble a prospective list at all and default to inexpensive, nearby institutions. Some of those local colleges are terrible places to go to school. (See “College Dropout Factories,” September/October 2010.) Too many students don’t find out until it’s too late.

Soon after settling into the dean’s office, Jeff Brenzel started trying to solve some of these problems. Like many other colleges, Yale began by scanning paper documents into electronic files. The Common Application, which is used by several hundred mostly selective colleges, began providing more information in digital form.

But Brenzel needed to do more than just increase the efficiency of the information flow from existing applicants. He needed to find new applicants, students who weren’t showing up in the traditional pool, and convince them to apply to Yale. To locate them, he turned to someone who had also made it to the Ivy League through a combination of hard work and being in the right place at the right time. His name was Craig Powell, the founder and president of ConnectEDU.

B y the time he reached eighth grade, Craig Powell had all the markings of a classic American achiever. As head of the 1991 middle school student council in rural Maryville, Missouri, he shook hands with the governor and won his school national recognition from President Bush. High school was more of the same: the only freshman on the speech and debate team, youth leadership training, class president four years running. Craig knew that a good college came next. But he didn’t know how to get there—or where “there” even was. All his guidance counselor could suggest was taking the ACT. Craig scored a 28, the equivalent of 1260 on the SAT. That was good, but a hair below the threshold that would have put him on the mailing list of the colleges that matched his powerful but vague aspirations. For most students like Craig, this would have been the end of any grand designs.

But Craig Powell stood out in one other way. In 1994 and 1995, he amassed a record of sixty-three wins and zero losses in Missouri Class 1A wrestling, 189-pound division, taking home the state championship both years. The big midwestern sports machines noticed. Dozens recruited him. Seven college wrestling coaches made the trip to Craig’s living room in Maryville, full scholarships in hand.

He turned them all down. Craig knew that by taking a scholarship he would be seen as a wrestler first, a student second. He graduated from high school with no idea what to do next, other than go to work at a fireworks stand. Again, that could have been the end of his larger aspirations. But what followed instead was a series of improbable events involving a chance phone call; an Army scholarship to an East Coast prep school; a shoulder injury that kept Craig out of West Point; and, ultimately, admission to Brown University—a school Craig had never heard of until after he left Missouri.

Craig was still dating his high school girlfriend when he made it to Brown. She was two years younger and finishing high school in Barnard, Missouri, a no-stoplight town with a graduating class of nine students. She grew up living in a trailer with her divorced mother, a nursing aide who took home $13,000 a year. The biggest event of her senior year involved her uncle being arrested for murder after running over his wife with a combine. Haley was smart, had good grades, and wanted to get the hell out of Barnard, Missouri.

Craig brought Haley to New England to look at schools. She settled on Providence College, filled out the application, and waited for news. In February, Craig began pestering her: Are you sure you filled out all the financial aid forms? Wasn’t there one more? No, she said, it’s fine. Weeks later, good news arrived in the mail. She had gotten in to Providence College. Tears of joy were shed; now they just had to wait for the financial aid package.

More weeks went by. The package never arrived. Finally they called the college. What financial aid? the college said. You never filled out the last form, “Part B”—the one with seven short questions simply confirming that all the financial information you submitted in Part A (like the fact that your divorced mother lives in a trailer and earns $13,000 a year) is still correct. So we assumed you didn’t need any financial aid, and now it’s all gone.

Craig called Providence College pretending to be her uncle (not the one with the combine). He pleaded with their sense of mission and public obligation. Isn’t she the kind of student you’re here to serve? He eventually wore them down, and they cobbled together a financial aid package heavy on loans. Craig and Haley didn’t stay together. But she did enroll at Providence College. In fact, she earned top grades, married the class president, held the ceremony on campus, and still works in higher education today.

While at Brown, Craig showed an early knack for entrepreneurship. He started a company called Ivy Tutors and staffed it with classmates who provided extra help to area high school students. In the process, he realized that northwest Missouri wasn’t the only place where your educational destination had a lot do with where you start. A few blocks north of the Brown campus is Hope High School, a notoriously dysfunctional public institution riddled by poverty and low performance. Directly across the street is Moses Brown School, an elite private academy that sends its graduates into the upper reaches of higher education. Craig charged students from places like Moses Brown one price and used the proceeds to charge parents from places like Hope High much less.

During the summer between semesters, Craig also worked for a large financial firm that invested in the health care industry. The dot-com revolution was well under way, so they sent Craig to San Francisco to spend time with entrepreneurs who were trying to digitize the vast troves of medical information locked in paper medical records. The old analog health record system was wasting phenomenal amounts of money and resulting in substandard—even fatal—medical outcomes.

Craig saw clear parallels in college admissions. In what kind of world can a few checkmarks on Form B be the difference between one kind of life and another? The higher education system had sent seven recruiters promising full scholarships to his living room because he was good at pinning people to a mat. Why hadn’t anyone come because he was smart and driven and the only freshman on the speech and debate team? And what about all the other students who weren’t quite so driven or quite so lucky—shouldn’t they have a choice other than Northwest Missouri State? Craig hadn’t won another tournament, he realized; he had won a lottery—one in which some people got a fistful of tickets and others none at all. That insight, paired with the realization that there was profit to be made in overturning the current system, became the seed of ConnectEDU.

ConnectEDU has two main types of clients. The first are middle and high schools and, by extension, the families served by them. The company sets up a series of Web sites for students, parents, and guidance counselors. All of the students’ academic information—course descriptions, grades, standardized test scores, interest inventories, and more—are loaded in. Starting in the seventh grade, students can log on and start filling out short questionnaires that help them figure out where they might like to go to college. Then the computer program lays out a path describing all the steps the student will need to take to get there. This is what Jameel Reid and his classmates have access to, starting this year.

There’s a lot of focus on course selection. Selective colleges like to see a progression of increasingly difficult courses, particularly in science and math. To take Calculus in the twelfth grade, you have to take Algebra I in the eighth grade. Some students, like Jameel, figure this out on their own. But many others don’t learn how important this is until they start seriously looking at colleges in the eleventh grade or later—years too late. ConnectEDU continually analyzes data from hundreds of thousands of students to refine and identify the pathways that are most likely to lead to college success. The program analyzes lists of potential colleges, compares them to students’ academic trajectory, and tells them if they’re shooting too high or not high enough. (The Air Force uses similar algorithms to adjust the in-flight trajectory of guided missiles.)

The program also tracks deadlines for admissions testing, scholarship applications, and financial aid, and sends alerts to students’ mobile phones when problems—e.g., “You haven’t filled out Part B”—occur. Parents and guidance counselors can also access the data. With many school budgets in crisis and student-to-guidance counselor ratios soaring, such tools can be crucial.

Then, when college application season approaches, the ConnectEDU “SuperAPP” program automatically populates the applications of students’ target colleges with information from its database. Typically, 85 percent of each application is already filled out before students and parents lift a finger. The program helped students in the impoverished Detroit public school system fill out over 4,000 college applications in one week.

All of this is completely free for high schools. That’s because ConnectEDU makes most of its money from the second set of clients: colleges and universities.

Processing paper is expensive and time-consuming. Filing clerks cost money, and admissions officers can’t start reviewing a file until all of the pieces have been assembled. The all-paper process that Yale was still using in 2005 (and many colleges still use today) costs a high-volume admissions department about $30 per application to process and eighty-five days to complete, according to ConnectEDU. Applications that come through ConnectEDU cost about $1 to process and arrive instantaneously. Craig Powell’s business proposition to colleges is straightforward: Give me some of the savings and keep the rest for yourself. Your applications will be cheaper, faster, more accurate, and protected against the kind of fraud that allowed an ethically challenged young man named Adam Wheeler to fake his way into Harvard a few years ago. Instead of pieces of paper with data printed on them, or digital images of pieces of paper, you’ll get actual data that you can analyze to make better decisions about whom to admit.

Business models like this depend on “network effects,” where the more clients you have, the more your service is worth. Software developers want to write apps for the iPhone because there are a lot of iPhones. There are a lot of iPhones because people want to be able to choose from among a lot of apps. Once a business reaches a tipping point of market share, network effect logic takes over and everyone gets rich. Similarly, the value of ConnectEDU to high schools rises as the number of colleges accepting applications from the company’s data system goes up, and the value to colleges rises with each new participating high school.

There are other players in this market, including the Common Application and a company called Naviance, which offers electronic college planning tools for high school students. The virtue of ConnectEDU, though, is that it spans the entire process, from late middle school into college and beyond. The company’s first foray into the market came in 2006, when it signed up three colleges and fifteen high schools. In 2007, it was up to thirty-five high schools and 300 colleges. It began signing up school districts instead of individual schools, then moved to contracts with entire states, starting with Michigan. The number of high schools increased to 700 in 2008, 1,700 in 2009, and 2,500 in 2010. That amounts to about 2.5 million students. The Miami-Dade County school system joined the network last year. The state of Hawaii signed up in May 2011.

The number of colleges using the service has also increased, to 450, representing a decent—though not quite commanding—subset of the schools that receive large numbers of applications. Yale signed up in 2008.

If network effects take hold and millions more students are added to the ConnectEDU system, Craig Powell will soon have a database containing phenomenal amounts of information about students in grades seven to twelve. Things like the exact sequence of courses they have taken, and their grades in each one. Their extracurriculars, Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate test scores, and whether they qualify for the federal free and reduced-price lunch program. Instead of a snapshot of where students are at one point in time, the data will show the pattern of where they have been and where they are headed. It will show, in other words, all of the things that people like Jeff Brenzel want to know about students but can’t get from the College Board. Things he currently only finds out only after students submit an application.

Strict federal privacy laws prevent ConnectEDU from releasing personally identifiable information about students without their permission. But what it can do is let Jeff Brenzel sit down at his desk and search the ConnectEDU database for promising students who don’t show up on the list of names he gets from the College Board. ConnectEDU would then send an e-mail and text message to each student on the list that says “The admissions director of Yale University would like to send you a personal e-mail. Are you interested?” A Facebook-style friend request, in other words. All the College Board can sell is a haystack in which colleges can rummage around, trying to find a needle. ConnectEDU will be selling access to the needle itself.

If students accept his friend request, Brenzel and his staff can start asking them more questions about their academic aspirations. He can do this long before college applications are due, in the sophomore or junior year. If a student falls short on the SAT, Brenzel can encourage them to take it again. If they’re wavering on enrolling in a tough math class in their senior year, he can explain how much colleges like Yale value the inclination to tackle difficult courses.

He can, in other words, start approaching the task of finding the best students in the United States in the same way that big-time wrestling coaches in the Midwest approach the task of recruiting unusually quick and strong young men to wrestle at 189 pounds. He won’t be limited to the relatively small number of high schools to which Yale can send an in-person representative, or to the ones that have placed students at the university before. He won’t have to wait until applications arrive, at which point it’s too late to provide any meaningful advice. The guided-missile algorithms will be turned in the other direction, helping him find the students who are most likely to succeed. He’ll know exactly where to find who he’s looking for, whether it’s Little Haiti or a no-stoplight town in rural Missouri or anywhere else.

Best-of-the-best institutions like Yale are in intense competition with peers like Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford for students who combine brilliance and diverse backgrounds. Much like the SAT in its early days, ConnectEDU will give its early adopters a leg up, which will likely cause their rivals to follow suit. Instead of choosing among tens of thousands of applicants, top schools will eventually be choosing among all 3.3 million students who graduate from high school each year. And as striving students in foreign countries become part of the system (ConnectEDU has clients in Canada and Australia) the number will get larger still. Favored private schools, test prep, essay-writing consultants, and other well-worn paths to privilege for not-quite-exceptional children of means will narrow.

Other colleges slightly lower in the heap talk a good game about serving the public interest, but their actions suggest more dubious motives. As the annual Washington Monthly suggest, some well-known institutions have bought their way up the prestige ladder by all but excluding low-income students, focusing instead on recruiting the children of wealthy donors and politicians, or students whose SAT scores drive up their U.S. News & World Report ranking. Poor students require financial aid, and status-seeking universities would rather spend their money on new buildings and a winning basketball team. If ConnectEDU works as its designers hope, it will smoke out colleges that pay mere lip service to the goal of social mobility. Even if they don’t go looking for the Jameels of this world, ConnectEDU will help the Jameels find them. These schools will be inundated with applications from worthy non-rich students, and they’ll have to explain to the public why their doors are shut.

Most colleges, of course, aren’t very selective; they’re mainly looking to fill seats. Many of these institutions have also signed on as ConnectEDU clients. One can imagine them using a tool like ConnectEDU to indiscriminately spam millions of unsuspecting students, like so many Facebook friend requests from your mom’s cousin’s best friend. That said, less-selective colleges also face a challenge that Jeff Brenzel doesn’t have to worry about: enrolling students who won’t wash out within weeks of arriving. Used wisely, the company’s algorithms will help them find students who are likely to stick, succeed, and maybe even raise the school’s game academically. The new software tools will also help the average student become a shrewder shopper. Rather than defaulting to the local community college or open-access university, they’ll be able to find out earlier in high school what kind of courses will get them into a better college—and where that better college might be. Mediocre local colleges and universities will start to lose their captive audience. As the market becomes more efficient, more students will enroll in the right college at the beginning of the process and emerge with a diploma at the end.

C raig Powell lives in Boston now. His company takes up the entire twentieth floor of a downtown office tower owned by the Federal Reserve. On a clear day, you can look east and see Harvard and MIT. Craig comes to work in the jeans, jacket, and boots of a successful Internet entrepreneur. The only signs of northwest Missouri are his ears, cauliflowered by years on the wrestling mat. He doesn’t want to fix them. They remind him of how far he’s come.

ConnectEDU software designers traveled to Yale last year to interview admissions officers about how, exactly, they would like to search for prospective students. This summer, in the lull before the deluge of applications begins again in the fall, Jeff Brenzel and his staff began putting the ConnectEDU system to work. They’re searching in particular for two qualities: underclassmen with an aptitude for challenging courses in science and math, and low-income students who are earning good grades.

Jameel Reid, meanwhile, is about to begin his sophomore year. He enjoyed Algebra II last school year and got excellent marks, although he didn’t think his teacher was tough enough. For the coming year, he’s signed up for Geometry, Physics, and two computer courses: Engineering Technology and Technology Studies. The university he most wants to attend is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, because he understands it to be one of the best engineering schools. Beyond that, he’s not sure where to apply—somewhere with a good degree in computer sciences, he guesses.

Perhaps Yale or another ConnectEDU client will find Jameel and clear his path to the Ivy League. Or perhaps ConnectEDU will help him find an institution like Purdue University, a well-regarded Midwestern engineering school that would love to enroll more smart minority students. Jameel walked right by the Purdue booth at the college fair, because it didn’t have the word “technology” in its name and he didn’t have anyone along to help him understand what he was missing. Now he does, and that could make all the difference.

The post The End of College Admissions As We Know It appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Liberals’ anger at Obama during the default debate was based on the fact that they actually seemed to think he had the power to do what they wanted him to do. In fact, he did not. The only cards he held were the power of the veto and the Senate Democrats’ ability to reject any Republican legislative proposal. They were no better than a pair of deuces in the poker game he had to play. All he really had was bluff—because to avoid default he had to not merely defeat or veto a bill, but rather get one passed by both houses. To do that, he had to win the support of at least eight to ten Republicans in the Senate and thirty to forty in the House. The votes were never there for a bill liberals would like. The moderate Republicans needed to provide those votes simply do not exist. They are, alas, an extinct species.

If Obama had tried to avoid default by following Bill Clinton’s suggestion that he invoke a never-before-asserted presidential authority implied by the Fourteenth Amendment, his sure and certain fate would have been the same as Clinton’s—impeachment by House Republicans.

The Monkey Wrench Gang

Chuck Todd, NBC’s White House correspondent, recently filling in for Chris Matthews on Hardball, expressed “shock” and seemed to think that it was outrageous for Senator Chuck Schumer to question whether Republicans are “slowing down the recovery on purpose,” so they can win in 2012.

I did not find it at all shocking. In fact, I think it is true of many Republican leaders. You will recall that in October 2010, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, told the National Journal that “the single most important thing for us to achieve is for Obama to be a one-term president.”

When Obama was inaugurated, Rush Limbaugh said, “I hope he fails.” As recently as July 23 of this year, he declared, “Helping Obama hurts the country.” Grover Norquist, the man behind the no-tax-increase pledge signed by 95 percent of Republicans, said this way back in 2003: “We will make it so that a Democrat cannot govern as a Democrat.” And can anyone have any doubt that Eric Cantor, Karl Rove, and Roger Ailes would stop at nothing short of indictable felony to defeat Obama?

Not quite guilty

I will concede there are some innocents who sincerely believe the Tea Party line. But it’s hard to give similar credit to the Republicans who so steadfastly refused to raise the debt ceiling even though they had voted for Paul Ryan’s budget, which, as columnist Matt Miller was first to point out, “[r]acks up over $5.4 trillion in fresh debt over the next decade.”

Status symbol

During the recent embarrassment of Anthony Weiner, I was impressed by much of the praise for his wife, Huma Abedin, but not by Robin Givhan’s in Newsweek: “When Abedin posed for Vogue in 2007, she established herself as a Washington power personality. Last year, she made a return appearance in her wedding gown: a succinct pronouncement that her social currency had only risen in value.”

The drunks still have the car keys

Evidence that the financial industry has not reformed comes from a recent story buried on an inside page of the Wall Street Journal, in which Gregory Zuckerman describes how Morgan Stanley suffered tens of millions of dollars in losses, “in a high-stakes game of chicken over inflation.”

Zuckerman writes, “The trades are a reminder of the risks banks still take, even after the financial crisis.” I wish the Journal ’s editorial page and its ideological allies shared the reporter’s insight.

Massey, still at large

I keep asking when the Department of Justice is going to indict Massey Energy officials like Don Blankenship for their role in causing the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster.

The latest revelation by the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration of the company’s criminal behavior, reported by the Charleston Gazette’s Ken Ward Jr.: “Massey Energy covered up safety hazards at its Upper Big Branch Mine by pressuring mine foremen and safety examiners not to record methane spikes and inoperable explosion-prevention equipment in official records.”

Quittin’ time

Recently, the survival of Cathedral Pharmacy, a local small business, was threatened after CVS Caremark, the manager of the prescription drug program for many federal employees, suddenly stopped allowing its prescriptions to be filled by Cathedral. Arguing that the move was an obvious attempt by CVS Caremark to benefit its chain of pharmacies by driving a competitor out of business, Cathedral sought a temporary restraining order to gain time to make its case for a permanent
injunction to save its business.

When I saw that this seemingly modest request was denied by U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, I was curious, so I read the entire Washington Post story about the case. One of the few clues I could find was this quote from Judge
Leon: “It’s after 7, the air conditioning in the building is off, it’s 78 degrees in here, and I’ve heard all I need to hear.”

All the take that’s fit to print

The report of President Obama’s July 10th press conference in the New York Times illustrates how even the highestquality journalism tends to emphasize the reporter’s “take” on the facts as distinguished from the facts themselves.

With the headline “Obama Grasping Centrist Banner in Debt Impasse,” it begins, “President Obama made no headway in an attempt to forge a crisis-averting budget deal, but he put on full display his attempt to reposition himself as a pragmatic centrist willing to confront both parties and address intractable problems.”

The reporter, Jackie Calmes, began her fifth paragraph, “Mr. Obama’s remarks were among the clearest expressions yet of a repositioning effort that has been underway since the midterm elections last November,” and her sixth with, “Seeking to shed the image of a big government liberal …”

Not only is this too much “take,” it merely parrots the conventional wisdom of the moment—which, by the way, I happen to think was wrong. From the very beginning Obama has sought to present himself as a president of all the people. Remember his campaign speeches? And the effort he made trying to win Republican support for his attempts to reform Wall Street and health care and stimulate the economy? All of these programs were inadequate in the eyes of most liberals.

Follow the money

“Profits thrive in weak recovery,” reports another headline in the Wall Street Journal. Yet, as you know all toowell, the resulting corporate wealth is not being invested in ways that create new jobs. Where is all the money going? One clue is provided by a New York Times survey of what happened to executive salaries in 2010: “the final figures show that median pay for top executives was $10.8 million, a 23% gain from 2009.”

The top earner, Phillippe Dauman of Viacom, took home a nifty $84.5 million.

Living on a jet plane

And when those executives went home, it was in style. A review of FAA records by the Journal found that “between 2007 and 2010, dozens of jets operated by public companies made 30% or more of their trips to or from resort locations. Many were places where the executives own homes.”

For example, the jets of one company, Leucadia, racked up 181 arrivals in the Hamptons and 366 in Jackson Hole.

Damage reports needed

When the budget cuts have been made, I hope reporters will take a look at whether the agencies that protect us from things like dangerous financial practices and unsafe food and pharmaceuticals have been left with enough money for effective fact finding and enforcement. Will agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and the National Transportation Safety Board be adequately funded? What about the programs most likely to produce jobs? Answering all of these questions should rank high in journalists’ priorities.

The importance of shop class

One danger that I had not been aware of was reported by Motoko Rich of the New York Times, who has discovered that the Obama administration wants “to shrink the small amount of federal spending for vocational training in public high schools and community colleges.”

My son, who teaches in a public high school, has been telling me for years that one of his big concerns is the shortage of vocational education opportunities for students whose interests and ambitions do not include higher education in the liberal arts. Rich describes one such student, Matthew Kelly of Greensborough, North Carolina. “Kelly regularly skipped homework and was barely passing some of his classes,” Rich writes, yet “tests showed he had a high intellect.”

Rich continues, “Then his guidance counselor suggested he take some courses at a nearby vocational academy for his junior year. For the first time, the sloe-eyed teenager excelled, earning A’s and B’s in subjects like auto repair, electronics and metals technology. ‘When it comes to practicality, I can do stuff really well,’ said Mr. Kelly.”

Rewards of legal education

How do law schools get away with it? That’s the question you have to ask after reading Monthly alumnus David Segal’s recent article in the New York Times revealing that they have raised tuition and fees “four times faster than the soaring cost of college.”

Law schools have become profit centers for universities, generating the cash to subsidize other departments, and many are adding students, “even during the worst recession in the legal profession’s history.” New York Law School increased the size of its 2009 class by 30 percent, even though its students pony up more than they would have to pay at Harvard for a legal education “that ranks in the bottom third of all law schools.”

The answer to why students do this is, for a few, grounded in a genuine passion for the law. For the rest, it is a combination of at least two of the following factors: they can foot the bill through loans or thanks to a family willing and able to pay; they can’t get a job, at least not one they want; or—and this was true of many of my law school classmates—they are simply marking time as they try to figure out what they really want to do with their lives.

It is this larger group that I want to address. You should know that any decent law school is hard work, and, for those without the passion, it is often quite boring. The combination of difficult and dull means you will be in a constant struggle to focus on the material as you desperately search for new ways to keep yourself awake. It would be much better to spend that time in the Peace Corps or find some other kind of useful work—or just read books and have fun—until you’ve made up your mind about your future.

Give or take a year

One aspect of law school I hope Segal will explore is whether its third year makes sense, other than for providing more revenue for the institution and more delay in facing real life for the student. The basic principles of the law and learning how to think—something that liberal arts colleges often fail to teach and that a good law school does provide —are largely imparted in the first year and completely by the end of the second. And by that time, it will be clear whether the student has the combination of aptitude and passion necessary to enjoy actual practice.

A couple of inconvenient facts

Two common Republican accusations against President Obama are that he wasted vast sums on the stimulus and on the bailout of the financial system. Yet, according to the CBO, as reported by Alan Blinder in the Wall Street Journal, the stimulus produced “at least 1.3 million net new jobs and possibly as many as 3.3 million,” and, according to Fortune’s Allan Sloan and Doris Burke, taxpayers are “coming out ahead” on the bailout by “at least $40 billion and possibly as much as $100 billion eventually.”

Hiding in the hedges

Hedge funds manage $1.5 trillion. They promise the investor Madoff-like returns. Yet they have been unregulated until June of this year, when the SEC finally required them to make at least a few disclosures, like their size, ownership, auditors, and potential conflicts of interest. Even those modest requirements do not apply to family funds (including huge ones like George Soros’s) and only got approved by a 3-2 margin, which both Republican commissioners opposed. Despite these disclosures, we still will not know how these funds go about making money, even when they are doing things that drive prices up or down, distorting true values, or threatening the whole financial system by making huge bets that subprime mortgages are just dandy.

Take two

Back to my objection to what I regarded as the author’s excessive “take” in the story by Jackie Calmes. Newspapers began to get into the “take” business back in the 1970s because they felt their readers were getting their facts the night before on television. Now, of course, television (especially cable) and the Web are dominated by opinion. So the importance of the role of newspapers like the Times in supplying the facts has gained renewed importance.

Still, I should make clear that though I want front-page news stories to emphasize the news and not the “take,” I do think there should be room on the front page for opinion and analysis pieces, if so labeled, as the Washington Post does occasionally with a “Take” heading. I have often felt that the New York Times editorial page was making important points the average reader of its front page alone would not be aware of or understand. For instance, the Times’s editorials would leave no doubt that the single greatest obstacle to a reasonable budget deal was Eric Cantor’s gang. I don’t think the front page made that clear, but it could have been done in a properly labeled sidebar to news stories on the deficit. Indeed, reporting what the facts mean is an essential role of journalism that should not be confined to the ghetto of the editorial pages. Just don’t try to do it by imparting a snarky, wiseguy tone to the only stories that tell what the president and other leaders are saying.

Tactical disenfranchisement

If you had any doubt about the motivations of all those Republicancontrolled legislatures that have been making it more difficult for minorities to vote, Karl Rove should have removed it through his recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, by pointing out that “even a small drop in the share of black voters would wipe out [Obama’s] winning margin in North Carolina.”

Showing they can do it

I’m delighted to report that the District of Columbia’s public schools are now auditioning prospective new teachers. This may seem like common sense, but I can assure you that it has been rare in this country. It at least gives a clue as to whether the applicant can perform in a classroom, bringing life to the raw materials of education. Paper credentials alone can result in the hiring of too many boring teachers.

Warfare state

I urge you to read Warfare State by James Sparrow, an important, if flawed, new book. It corrects conventional history by showing that big government was more the child of World War II than of the New Deal. You can, by the way, see how this happened in the 1943 comedy The More the Merrier, which plays from time to time on Turner Classic Movies and shows the overcrowding that the war brought to Washington.

Sparrow points out that many of the attitudes and values that persisted after the war had their roots back then. The patriotic willingness to pay taxes at much higher rates than we do today lasted through the 1970s. And the assertion of rights encouraged by Roosevelt’s embrace of the four freedoms—of speech and religion and from fear and want—combined with wartime agencies like the Fair Employment Practices Commission exploded in the 1950s and ’60s, first as the civil rights movement and later as the ones for women and homosexuals.

A major factor in Washington’s amazing growth during World War II, Sparrow believes, was the rapid expansion of what has become today’s enormous national security bureaucracy. I agree. But I do not share his belief that antisubversive hysteria had its origins in this period. In fact, J. Edgar Hoover launched his career overseeing the “Red Scare” deportation cases in 1919 for Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, a man who makes Joseph Mc- Carthy seem like a civil libertarian. Anti-red sentiment was so extreme at the time that the socialist leader Eugene Debs was imprisoned simply for opposing American involvement in World War I.

Sparrow suffers from not having been there. He says, for example, that the soldiers and sailors of World War II had a “sense of entitlement” to the G.I. Bill. I was one of them and, like most, had only the vaguest awareness of the bill’s provisions until after the war when I was both surprised and grateful to find out how generous they were. Sparrow also gives undue significance to what he calls “the Army mutiny of 1946,” which his publisher’s press release says belies “the widespread assumption ‘the greatest generation’ was braver and more stoic than today’s youth.”

These were peaceful demonstrations, not mutinies in which officers were shot, overthrown, or set adrift like Captain Bligh. They had absolutely nothing to do with bravery. They happened in 1946, after the battles were fought and the war was over. They were simply an assertion by soldiers, who had done their duty and won the war, that they wanted to go home and were upset by the Army’s constant changing of the rules governing discharge.

Civil society

When Susan Ford Bales asked Cokie Roberts to deliver the eulogy at her late mother’s funeral, she told the Washington journalist, “Mother wants you to talk about the way things used to be.” What the Fords meant, Roberts explained to the Washington Post, was a time when Republicans and Democrats were friends, “when their families were all friends.” Roberts’s father, Congressman Hale Boggs, a Democrat, was one of Republican Gerald Ford’s pals. Both were willing to really listen to one another. That’s why Susan used the words “the way things used to be.”

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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 Reserve Officer Training Corps 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. Many of the schools that dropped in our service rankings this year completed an application in 2009 and therefore received credit in last year’s rankings, but did not submit an application in 2010 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. This year’s guide continues to reward large universities for their research productivity, but these two additional measures also recognize smaller institutions that are doing a good job of producing quality research.

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 on Pell Grants, which is a good measure of a school’s commitment to educating lower-income kids. We’d like to know how many of these Pell Grant recipients graduate, but schools aren’t required to track 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 have a formula that predicts the graduation rate of the average school given its percentage of Pell Grant students and its average SAT score. (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.) 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 comparatively low Pell Grant rate and a comparatively high SAT score, and had a predicted graduation rate of over 100 percent. We adjusted this graduation rate to 100 percent. In addition, we used a second metric that predicted the percentage of students on Pell Grants based on SAT scores. This indicated which selective universities (since selectivity is highly correlated with SAT scores) are making the effort to enroll low-income students. Four schools with extremely high SAT scores had predicted Pell percentages below zero. We adjusted these percentages to zero. The two formulas were weighted equally.

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