Tag: higher education

Tough Breaks for the Blame-Cheap-States Crowd

By
Neal McCluskey

An explanation for explosive college prices that’s very popular with ivory-tower apologists is that state governments have been ruthlessly “defunding” higher ed for years, forcing schools to raise prices. Two new reports help to make clear – as I have argued many times in the past – that this simply doesn’t hold water.

The first report is the annual State Higher Education Executive Officers’ State Higher Education Finance Report.  While it shows that on a per-pupil basis state and local funding has declined over the last few years, total amounts have risen pretty steadily since 2000. Adjusted for inflation, total state and local support dipped from $81.3 billion in 2000 to $78.0 billion in 2005, ballooned to $87.1 billion in 2009, then dropped just a bit to $85.5 billion in 2010. Helping to put it all in perspective, SHEEO reports that in 1985 state and local funding totalled just $65.5 billion. In other words, the general trend line has gone steeply up. But don’t believe me? Take it right from the report:

Some observers have suggested that states are abandoning their historical commitment to public higher education. National data and more careful attention to variable state conditions strongly suggest that such a broad observation is not justified by the available data.

Of course, if total taxpayer funding is generally up but per-student funding is down, increases in enrollment must be significant. And indeed they are. Unfortunately, evidence suggests that that’s very likely not a good thing.

The other bad news for the blame-the-taxpayers crowd is a new report from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity that illustrates that external factors such as decreasing state subsidies are not the main culprit behind skyrocketing prices. Student aid is, because it allows colleges to increase their prices with impunity. Evidence of this includes college prices considerably outpacing overall inflation; hugely declining faculty productivity; tuition growing far beyond instructional costs; and ballooning financial aid that hasn’t been accompanied by decreasing net costs.

Unfortunately, much of this will likely either be dismissed out of hand or just ignored. But the evidence, when you examine it, is awfully compelling: Subsidies, not pennypinchers, are the big problem in higher ed.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy, General, Tax and Budget Policy

Secretly Happy Colleges Should Mean Overtly Angry Taxpayers

By
Neal McCluskey

Yesterday, House Republicans introduced their preliminary list of spending cuts, cuts that were, they declared, ”to go deep.” Unfortunately, coming in at just $74 billion, they were about as deep as onion skin. After all, the total federal budget is well over $3 trillion, and the national debt now exceeds $14 trillion. 

The relatively lilliputian size of the proposed cuts should give any taxpayer major queasiness over Republicans’ desire to truly rein in government. But if that doesn’t scare you, this report from Inside Higher Ed absolutely should:

Shhh. Don’t tell, and they’ll never admit it publicly. But college officials are (very quietly) feeling okay – at least for now – about how Congressional Republicans would treat the programs that matter most to higher education in their first whack at the federal budget.

Why should ivory tower denizens be secretly peppy, and taxpayers openly upset? Because the House GOP pretty much left higher ed funding untouched, despite the fact that the ivory tower is soaking in putrid, taxpayer-funded waste. Quite simply, the federal government pours hundreds of billions of dollars into our ivy-ensconced institutions every year, but what that has largely produced is atrociously low graduation rates; at-best dubious amounts of learning for those who do graduate; ever-fancier facilities; and rampant tuition inflation that renders a higher education no more affordable to students but keeps colleges fat and happy.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: If federal politicians won’t significantly cut ”education” spending – spending that has done next to nothing to increase actual learning – then they are not serious about reining in the deficit or cutting government down to size. They are still, sadly, much more concerned about appearing to “care” about education than doing what needs to be done.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, Tax and Budget Policy

For-profits Fighting Back, Harkin to Flog-on

By
Neal McCluskey

Last week, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Comittee, announced that on February 17 he will continue his obssessive attack on for-profit colleges, holding yet another hearing to determine just how evil profit-seekers are.  At least, that is what will presumably be discussed — the specific subject of the hearing is yet to be identified. But the committee actually tackling, say, rampant waste throughout higher education driven by federal student aid, or just giving for-profit schools an even-handed treatment, would be too huge a turnaround to contemplate.

Despite there being no end in sight to Harkin’s seige, for-profit institutions aren’t just rolling over, and today they launched their latest counterattack. This afternoon the Coalition for Educational Success — a for-profit college advocacy group — filed a lawsuit against the Government Accountability Office. At issue: The GAO’s ”secret shopper” report on for-profit institutions that was eventually — but very stealthily — revealed by the GAO to be riddled with errors, and which could be shown to be an even bigger smear job were the GAO to allow for-profit schools to examine the evidence behind the report. 

Clearly there will be more to come on this, if for no other reason than Harkin’s show-hearings have garnered a lot of coverage in the past. Hopefully, this time potentially disturbing behavior by the GAO, as well as the huge problems federal policy has created throughout higher education — you know, the really important stories — will also get a little attention.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy, General, Tax and Budget Policy

Thank You Mr. Graduate, I Will Have Fries with That!

By
Neal McCluskey

The United States is facing a gigantic debt problem, as we all know. Governments at all levels have simply been spending too much, which most Republicans and Democrats now seem willing to concede. But don’t expect to hear the following from many members of either party: We need to stop spending taxpayer money on sending so many people to college! Indeed, President Obama has already said he’ll support spending cuts but not to education, and few Republicans have ever shown the willingness to flatly declare student aid a costly waste. And maybe they’re right. After all, doesn’t more college education necessarily translate into more productivity and prosperity?

Nope. As I’ve pointed out repeatedly, lots of people never finish the education they start, and colleges just raise tuition to eat up aid increases. What I haven’t discussed as much is the problem of college-grad underemployment: college graduates taking jobs that don’t require college degrees. Well it’s a huge inefficiency, as the good folks at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity point out in a timely new study. And it could become an even bigger problem as President Obama pushes to have the United States lead the world in the percentage of the population with a college degree. As CCAP reports:

Evidence shows that currently more than one-third of college graduates hold jobs that governmental employment experts tell us require less than a college degree. That proportion of underemployed college graduates has tripled over the past four decades.

From an economic standpoint, that’s obviously a lot of waste. So why do our policymakers persist in simplistically asserting that more college education is always a good thing? I can’t read minds, but I’m inclined to agree with the CCAP authors:

[T]he notion of President Obama and many higher education leaders that our nation’s future depends on higher numbers of college graduates is fundamentally flawed. It is based more on assumptions, and perhaps almost an ideological attachment to colleges and universities, than on labor market realities.

Many people, it seems, do just assume that more education – without ever looking at what actually goes on in higher ed – is always a good thing, while others believe that government should constantly funnel money to our precious ivory towers no matter how little of concrete value taxpayers get for their dough. But whatever the reason, the facts almost all point in one direction: We need to spend much less taxpayer money on higher education, not much more.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, General

UConn’s Streak and Title IX

By
Neal McCluskey

Last night, the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team broke the college hoops consecutive win record of 88 games set by UCLA’s men in the early 1970s. In anticipation of this, UConn coach Geno Auriemma caused a bit of a stir by accusing some male sports fans of being upset because a women’s team was threatening a record set by men.

This does not compute. Somewhere there might be a man upset by this – though I haven’t heard one – but I don’t see why: The UCLA men beat men’s teams, the UConn women have beaten women’s teams. It says nothing bad about men that a women’s team has a longer win streak.

Where there might be en element of gender conflict at play is in how UConn got to this point. According to CBSSports.com columnist Gregg Doyel, UConn hasn’t just beaten other teams during its streak, it’s crushed numerous squads that at least by ranking ought to have been competitive with UConn. (It clobbered 22nd-ranked Florida State by 31 points for win number 89.) The talent pool in women’s basketball, Doyel argues, just isn’t deep enough to produce several teams of UConn’s calibre.

Assuming Doyel is correct, why isn’t there the same depth of talent in women’s hoops as has existed in men’s college basketball since at least the end of UCLA’s streak?

Quite possibly, because there aren’t nearly as many women who care about competing in sports, including basketball, at the highest levels as there are men. It’s a very real possibility supported not only by UConn’s dominance, but by what appears to be a strong tendency of other top women’s teams to win games by relatively lopsided margins, and, most tellingly, by significant athletics evidence beyond hoops. All of that, however, flies in the face of the implicit rationale of Title IX, the federal statute requiring colleges to offer equal athletic opportunities to men and women. The law assumes that colleges that fail to offer proportionate roster spots are discriminating against girls, but the reality is that women might just not want to play sports as fervently as men.

UConn’s dominance might be just one more bit of evidence that it is time to stop assuming that there is rampant,  sexist ill will when it comes to college sports, and for government to let people freely choose what interests they pursue. At the very least, it would probably make a lot of people happier than they’d be getting destroyed by the UConn women’s basketball team.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

GAO an Aggressor in War on For-Profits? At Least Someone Cares

By
Neal McCluskey

Today, AEI’s Rick Hess and Andrew Kelly have a piece at Inside Higher Ed highlighting serious evidence of dirty-dealing in a highly influential Government Accountability Office report on for-profit colleges. Hess and Kelly’s piece is well worth a read and I’m glad they’re on the case.

Unfortunately, theirs is about the only cry of alarm over apparent bias at the supposedly incorruptible GAO — potentially a huge story — I’ve seen since I wrote the following last week:

Now, though much needs to be determined about why the myriad changes to the report were made, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to learn that people at the GAO have actually been in on the crusade to demonize proprietary colleges. I also, unfortunately, won’t be surprised if no one pays attention to any of this, and the shameless, responsibility-dodging war on for-profits continues unabated.

Sadly, so far my fears have been realized. Other than Hess and Kelly no one, especially in the mainstream media, is giving this story any of the attention it deserves. Apparently, if someone who’s honest about trying to make a buck is being beaten in an alley, it’s easier just to look the other way.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, Government and Politics

War on For-Profit Colleges Reeks Even Worse

By
Neal McCluskey

As I’ve pointed out repeatedly, though the sector is no doubt rife with waste and home to some dirty-dealers, attacks on for-profit colleges are almost certainly driven by politics and ideology, not educational concerns. Were it otherwise, all of higher education would be taking a beating for its bankrupting waste and widespread failure.

A recent symptom of anti-profit witch-huntery was the misrepresentation of GAO reporting on what “secret shoppers” found while visiting select for-profit institutions. At the time the findings were released I thought the main problem was that members of the media and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) – who has been leading the crusade against for-profit schools – were using the results to smear the whole proprietary sector when the GAO was clear about examining a nonrepresentative sample of schools. Unfortunately, it turns out the GAO might actually be in on the demonization.

On November 30 – without making any announcement that I could find on its website – the GAO released a modified version of its report, and according to a comparison between the old report and new one by the Coalition for Educational Success, the new version contains several changes that cast its for-profit targets in better light than they first appeared.

One vignette, for instance, originally said that a school’s admissions representative told an undercover applicant that she “should” take out maximum federal loans even if she didn’t need all the money. The change says the representative told the applicant that she “could” take maximum loans – a pretty big difference.

Another section went from only reporting that a representative told an applicant that the school has graduates making $120,000 to $130,000 in a job that, according to the GAO, typically makes less than $70,00 a year, to reporting that the representative also informed the applicant that she “could expect a job with a likely starting salary of $13-$14 per hour or $15 if the applicant was lucky.” $15 an hour translates into about $30,000 a year, and completely changes the tenor of the vignette.

According to Stephen Burd of the Center for American Progress, career colleges have been self-servingly crying – or at least whispering – foul over the GAO report for months now. Burd has been a leading for-profit basher, but I’d have been inclined to give only limited credence to concerns about dirty pool, too, until this latest revelation trickled out.

Now, though much needs to be determined about why the myriad changes to the report were made, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to learn that people at the GAO have actually been in on the crusade to demonize proprietary colleges. I also, unfortunately, won’t be surprised if no one pays attention to any of this, and the shameless, responsibility-dodging war on for-profits continues unabated.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

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