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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Sunday, September 16, 2007

UD Live Blogs Her Reading
Of an Article that Appeared
Two Hours Ago On the Washington
Monthly
Magazine Website



'In 2003, Ted Kennedy tried to nudge America’s colleges and universities toward changing two of the least defensible practices in the modern admissions process. The first is legacy preferences, in which schools heavily favor applications from the children of alumni, often ahead of students with stronger academic resumes but less-well-connected parents. The second practice, early decision, where schools make it easier for prospective students to get admitted if they’ll commit to attending at the time they apply, has a similar effect, since wealthier candidates don’t need to compare financial aid packages and can therefore more easily commit to a school early. Taken together, the two practices fly in the face of the ideal of American meritocracy, and reduce the opportunities for young people of more modest backgrounds to go to selective colleges.'


The writer goes on to note, in this lengthy article about the powerful and (the article claims) corrupt higher education lobby in DC, that both ideas failed to get anywhere because the organizations at One Dupont Circle (the building down the street from UD's office where all the ed lobbyists can be found) used their pull to kill them.


'For years, colleges and universities have hidden behind the argument that America’s system of higher education is the best in the world to insulate themselves from scrutiny and accountability, and to operate with a remarkable degree of autonomy from Washington, given the funds lavished on them by the federal government. [As you know, UD is a big proponent of university autonomy. Europe's universities will continue to be shitty (most of them) until they can get clear of their governments.] The claim that our higher ed system really is the best in the world, however, is becoming less and less true every year. In 1980, the United States led Canada by 10 percent in the percentage of its population with a college degree, and was ahead of the United Kingdom by 11 percent and France by 19 percent, according to a recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. By 2000, those leads had shrunk to 3, 6, and 10 percent respectively—and the evidence suggests that the gaps have continued to narrow since then. [As you may also know, UD considers the number of degree holders in itself a meaningless statistic. If your universities are wretched or bogus, if your students are merely going through the motions and being handed a degree, it doesn't mean anything that lots of them are attending and graduating.] Meanwhile, colleges, especially elite private institutions, have been raising tuition far faster than the rate of inflation year after year after year, outpacing the meager growth in federal tuition subsidies. That’s put a squeeze on middle-class families and forced students deeper and deeper into debt. [True, but not a dire situation, and not degrading the quality of American institutions generally.] Worst of all, the information that policy makers and the public need to begin turning these problems around —which schools are educating their students effectively, and how tuition dollars are really being spent —remains locked in the ivory tower. '[Yes, more sunlight's needed. But the locked in the tower image overstates things.]


Here's the heart of the writer's complaint:


'On a range of issues, higher ed has stood up for its own narrow strategic or pecuniary concerns, rather than the broader interests of students or the country at large. In short, though it represents institutions that loudly proclaim a mission of public service, the higher education lobby more often acts like any other Washington trade group. Today, one of the most significant roadblocks to fixing many of the pressing problems of our troubled system of higher education is the higher education lobby itself.'



The higher ed lobby has enormous political leverage in part because of...


'... admissions, [which] looms large in the lives of powerful decision makers and their families. According to Daniel Golden, the author of The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges—And Who Gets Left Outside the Gates, they routinely admit the children of legislators who aren’t the best candidates. (For example, Golden cites the case of then Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s son, who in 2005, despite not being in the top 20 percent of his high school class, was admitted to Vanderbilt, an elite private school at which 80 percent of students finished in the top tenth of their class.) Barmak Nassirian, a lobbyist for the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO), admitted to me, “We live in a system in which people take care of each other. I’m not going to say that doesn’t happen.”'


This sounds right. There's the great irony, for instance, that Ted Kennedy, who championed the two failed reforms with which the article starts -- gutting both legacy admissions and early decision -- was himself the classic legacy admit, a dim bulb who went Harvard because of his family's influence.

When the writer turns to our scandalous schools of education -- the sorts of places that turn out Glenn Poshards -- he's on firm ground:


[I]n the late 1990s the Clinton administration tried to ... [improve] colleges’ notoriously lackluster teacher-training programs. The Education Department put together a proposal requiring states to report the percentage of teacher-training-program graduates from each school who pass the state licensure exam, and to report which of their education schools, many of which are affiliated with major universities, were underperforming. [Drop of which are.] Schools that consistently failed to produce graduates capable of passing the exams would lose their eligibility to receive federal aid for teacher training.

For many colleges, teacher-training programs, which can count on a steady stream of applicants and have relatively low administrative costs, represent a crucial revenue source —and the higher ed lobby went into overdrive to protect it. “They didn’t want publicly accessible info for the performance of their graduates,” says Sara Mead, who worked on implementation at the Education Department. “They didn’t want to be held accountable. They would come up with all sorts of technical objections, but that was the real issue.” Sarah Flanagan of NAICU insists that the proposal would have discriminated against historically black colleges, or any colleges that let in low-income students, since standardized tests like state licensure exams are racially and socioeconomically biased. But Kati Haycock of Education Trust, a nonprofit education organization, calls that notion “preposterous … These are low-level exams. People who cannot pass the exam should not be teachers. There are plenty of African Americans who can pass these exams and then some.”

This time, higher ed lost, and a version of the proposal passed Congress. But the lobby didn’t give up. During the department’s rule-making process on implementing the law in 1999, lobbyists showed up at every meeting with complaints and objections, watering down the effect of the legislation. In addition, higher ed mobilized at the state level, prevailing upon state governments to set absurdly lenient testing standards —in some cases, schools essentially avoided compliance by simply defining a “program completer” as someone who had passed the licensing exam, ensuring a 100 percent success rate. Nine years after its passage, most experts agree the law has done little to improve teacher quality.


Strong stuff. The lobby champions mediocrity and condemns many public school students to substandard educations.

Strong stuff, too, on the resistance of universities to the publication for each school of various measures of their students' success:


A student-unit-record system would lay bare some of the tricks of the trade that higher ed would just as soon keep under wraps. First, it would make public just how much aid many institutions give to academically strong middle- and upper-class students, simply to encourage them to attend and thereby boost the school’s academic ranking in college guides like U.S. News’s. Perhaps more important, the system would undercut higher ed’s longstanding efforts to keep the federal government out of the business of regulating college tuition in order to deal with the growing problem of college affordability. As average tuition has continued to rise since the early ’90s, making college increasingly unaffordable for students from low-income families, the lobby’s chief argument against federal regulation is that, thanks to financial aid and scholarship programs, many students—more than half, at some schools—don’t pay the full “sticker price.” And since no one knows exactly how much they do pay on average, the government shouldn’t try to intervene based on incomplete information. The existence of a record system would fix this problem by giving the government that information, paving the way, higher ed fears, for the feds to regulate tuition rates. It would also reveal to students that many of their peers don’t pay full price, making those who do pony up the full rate less willing to keep doing so as costs rise, according to some experts. [While UD doesn't think federal regulation of tuition is a good idea, she thinks the writer's basically correct that higher ed will have to start revealing far more of its operations, and will have to provide much more data on student achievement.]


The writer concludes:


[T]he federal government should demand, and colleges should accept, the disclosure of key information—like what colleges are spending money on, and how well they’re teaching—so that it can be made available to ordinary citizens, who can then decide what to do with their own tuition dollars.