In one of the most popular pieces ever posted by The New Republic, “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League,” former Yale professor William Deresiewicz sharply criticizes the elite education offered at Ivy League and other prestigious universities for producing graduates who have become efficient cognitive machines rather than passionate and creative thinkers with a deep understanding of themselves and the world.
“Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it,” he writes.
“Is there anything that I can do, a lot of young people have written to ask me, to avoid becoming an out-of-touch, entitled little shit? I don’t have a satisfying answer, short of telling them to transfer to a public university. You cannot cogitate your way to sympathy with people of different backgrounds, still less to knowledge of them. You need to interact with them directly, and it has to be on an equal footing….”
(In fact, Deresiewicz also emphasizes that private liberal arts colleges, apart from the most selective, can still provide an education that invites students to move beyond their proven but allegedly narrow channels to success.)
Our position is not anti-Ivy League—but if Deresiewicz has a point about the class and cultural “bubble” of elite institutions, we believe that there is a middle path that offers highly-talented students a combination of rigorous, smaller classes within the context of large, truly diverse universities. Public university honors programs vary in the “elite” status conferred upon honors students, but in all cases honors students mix extensively with non-honors students, spending two-thirds to three-fourths of their class time with them, often in upper-division sections in which the majority of students are more focused and mature.
In some cases, prospective students look at public honors programs as a backup if they do not get into their dream school–an Ivy, Stanford, MIT, Chicago, Vanderbilt, etc. Aside from lower costs and somewhat less demanding entrance requirements (some are very high, however), public honors programs can also be appealing across state lines because of the tuition waivers and merit awards that many of them offer. A student in New York state, for example, can look to many excellent public honors options in warmer climates, as well as programs in New York and in neighboring states.
But again, if Deresiewicz is making a valid point with his criticisms, what some students consider as a backup choice–public honors programs–could in the long run turn out to be the best choice.
At the core of Deresiewicz’s polemic is his concern that the intense, instrumental focus on gaining admission to elite universities has forced talented students into narrow paths at increasingly early ages. By the time the students reach their dream schools (if they ever do so), many have set aside what they would have loved to learn in favor of what they have had to learn, or perhaps master is the better word. Once in place at Harvard, Yale, or MIT, according to Deresiewicz, they associate with others mostly like themselves, brilliant young people for whom thinking is not for nourishing the truest self but for pushing the self along an almost predetermined path.
“But it is only through the act of establishing communication between the mind and the heart, the mind and experience, that you become an individual, a unique being—a soul,” Deresiewicz writes. “The job of college is to assist you to begin to do that. Books, ideas, works of art and thought, the pressure of the minds around you that are looking for their own answers in their own ways.” [Emphasis added.]
One of the best things about the large public universities in which honors programs function is that diversity–and not only racial or gender diversity, but true class diversity—guarantees that there will be thousands of students with every perspective imaginable.
Some honors students and certainly many of their non-honors classmates are first or second generation college students who have to work at real jobs while they are going to school, or have to commute and thus deal with their parents and siblings at the same time they are being transformed by their learning.
Even if some honors students in the most selective public university programs have been as over-focused as the typical Ivy student on learning for admissions’ sake, these honors students will still spend much of their time with honors and non-honors students for whom learning has retained its edge—challenges to long-held beliefs, excitement in discovery, thrill in eventual accomplishment.
These are students who have not been jaded by years of stair-stepping their way into elite programs, but who have, out of necessity or adherence to an independent streak, taken a more circuitous and individualistic path. Having been less consumed by the college preparation grind along the way, they are more likely to be transformed by the college experience itself, a process that can be contagious. If Deresiewicz is right, they will be the students who find at least some of “their own answers in their own ways,” or, even better, find that the search for answers never ends.
Last year, we wrote that the Forbes America’s Best Colleges rankings had suddenly become more friendly to public universities after several years of relegating many of them to the high three figures in the numerical rankings. In 2013, 19 public universities (not counting the military academies) made it into the top 100; but this year, that number dropped to only 14.
Worse, all but two of the 14 that remain in the top 100 lost ground, some by a large amount.
It is not unusual for anyone who ranks or evaluates colleges to make changes in their ranking methodologies. We have done the same for our next edition of the Review, although we will not be using numerical rankings this time around.
For 2014, Forbes (or rather the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP), which does the work for the magazine) has increased the weight of the student debt factor from 17.5% to 25%. At the same time, the weight for “Academic Success” went down modestly, from 11.25% to 10%. Both of these probably hurt public universities: the debt, because state support still has not caught up with costs; the academic success because CCAP counts National Science Foundation Fellowships and Fulbright awards, many of which are won by students and faculty at public research universities.
Yet here is another puzzling aspect of the rankings: the Forbes Best Value rankings, which about which we will write in a future post, list many of the same schools that dropped in the overall rankings. And student debt is a major metric in the value rankings.
At least the bizarre rankings that marked the Forbes list for the first few years have mostly gone away. No longer do we see, for example, a university ranked 320th one year and rise to 168th the next. And it is good to keep in mind that the Forbes rankings lump all private and public universities and liberal arts colleges into one huge group; so a Forbes ranking of, say, 65 or 70 for a public university is a much stronger ranking than a U.S. News “national university ranking” in the same range.
Still, it is difficult to understand how some of the public universities could have dropped so far in just one year.
Below are the Forbes rankings of public universities in the top 100, for 2013 and 2014 respectively. The first parenthesis is the 2013 ranking, and the second parenthesis is the 2014 ranking.
Editor’s note: The following essay is by Dr. Joan Digby, a professor at Long Island University and Director of the Honors program. Although we look at basic “outcomes” in trying to evaluate public honors colleges and programs, we agree with Dr. Digby’s criticism of the growing regimentation of higher ed in America and the current over-emphasis on business and bureaucratic terminology. Our abandonment of numerical rankings reflects our own concern that there are limits to quantifying the real value of higher learning. This essay is from the website of the National Collegiate Honors Council….
When my goddaughter was eight years old, she was permitted to come from London to New York for a two-week visit. Elanor was precocious and had been asking when she could make this trip from the time she was four. When eight arrived, she was packed and ready. I had never had children, so living with an eight-year-old was an intense experience. What she mainly wanted to do was solve Rubik’s Cube in five minutes flat. When that didn’t happen, she erupted into a volcano of screams and tears. Eventually she figured out how to solve the puzzle and brought her completion time down to about three minutes.
If Ernő Rubik were naming his puzzle, today he would probably go for the pun and call it Rubric’s Cube since rubrics are all people talk about now in education. Remember when the word “paradigm” appeared in every high-toned article? Well, it has been replaced by “rubric.” Here a rubric, there a rubric, everywhere a rubric rubric . . . Old MacDonald had several, and they all add up to little boxes far less colorful and ingenious than Rubik’s Cube.
I’m betting that most of the people who use the word “rubric” know very little about its meaning or history. Rubric means red ochre—red earth—as in BryceCanyon and Sedona. Red headers were used in medieval manuscripts as section or chapter markers, and you can bet that the Whore of Babylon got herself some fancy rubrics over the years. Through most of its history, the word has been attached to religious texts and liturgy; rubrics were used as direction indicators for conducting divine services. In a system that separates church and state, it’s a wonder that the word has achieved so universal a secular makeover. Now it’s just a fancy word for a scoring grid. Think boxes! Wouldn’t they look sweet colored in red?
For decades I have been involved in university honors education. The essence of the honors approach is, dare I say, teaching “outside the box.” Everyone knows that you can’t put round ideas into square boxes, everyone except the people who do “outcomes assessment,” the pervasive vogue in filling in squares with useless information. Here, for example, is the classic definition of rubric as spelled out by the authors of a terrifying little handbook designed to help people who are still awake at three in the morning looking to speed up grading papers: “At its most basic, a rubric is a scoring tool that lays out the specific expectations for an assignment” (Stevens and Levi 3). There it is, a “tool” to measure “specific expectations,” and those are precisely what we do not want to elicit from students, especially in honors but to my mind across the university.
My goal is not to score or measure students against preconceived expectations but to encourage the unexpected, the breakthrough response that is utterly new, different, and thus exciting—such as a recent student analysis of Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” in light of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, an approach that made me rethink the story altogether. The operative word here is “think.” Students attend college, in part, to learn how to think, and we help them engage deeply in “critical thinking.” Wouldn’t it then be hypocritical to take their thoughtful reflections and score them like mindless robots, circling or checking little boxes? Sure it would. That is why, whenever I hear anyone suggest using a “rubric” to grade an essay, I want to let out the bloodcurdling (appropriately red image) scream of an eight-year-old. I’m practicing. I can do it.
What I can’t and won’t do is fill in the little boxes. My field is literature—that is, thought and sensibility expressed in words. My field encourages the subjective, anecdotal, oddly shaped experiences that constitute creative writing. I can tell you a thousand stories about my students, how and what they learn and what will be the outcome of their education. I know their outcome (the plural is ugly) because I write to them for years after they leave school. Many are now my colleagues on campus and my friends all over the world. I can tell you their stories, but I can’t and won’t fill in boxes pretending that these will turn into measurable data. If my colleagues want to do the boxes, I won’t object, but “I’d prefer not to.”
Nor will I read portfolios and brood on what can be gathered about the student writers. English teachers read papers for a living. We assess them, write useful comments, and then return them graded to the students so that they can revise. Doing this is in our blood. For what reason would we dive into a pile of papers on which we are prohibited from writing comments for the sake of producing statistics that don’t even go back to the authors? All writers need suggestions and corrections. If we are not reading papers with the express purpose of providing the students with constructive help, then the act of reading is a waste of time.
I regret to acknowledge that the language and fake measuring tools of the data crunchers have infected even my own department, which now has been coerced into producing lists of goals and objectives with such chalk-grating phrases as “students will use writing as a meaning-making tool” and “generate an interpretation of literature . . . .” Not only the mechanistic language of the document but the fascistic insistence that students “will do” this or that strikes me as an utterly dystopian vision of a university education.
At the very least, English departments everywhere should be the ones to point out that goals and objectives are synonyms and that what the assessment folks really mean are goals and strategies for achieving them. But “goals and objectives” has become a cant phrase at the core of the outcomes ritual, and I’m afraid there is nothing much we can do to change that.
Whoever came up with the phrase “outcomes assessment” probably has no idea how a liberal education works. We teach, students learn, and, if we are lucky, students reciprocally teach us something in a symbiotic relationship that does not require external administration. It works like this: students attend classes, read, write, engage in labs and other learning activities, pass their courses, even do well, and in time graduate. Faculty enjoy teaching and feel rewarded by the successes of their students. Bingo. That’s it. Nothing more to say or prove. No boxes to fill in. Anyone with an urge to produce data can take attendance at Commencement.
Other horrors have bubbled up to pollute the waters of our Pierian Spring. In addition to rubrics, we now have templates for everything we do. A template is essentially a mold that lets us replicate a structure. In different industries it means a gauge or guide, a horizontal beam functioning to distribute weight, or a wedge used to support a ship’s keel. You can find out more at students’ new best friend, www.dictionary.com. Yet nowhere in this most accessible word hoard is there a specifically academic meaning for template, a word that must come up at least once in every academic meeting. The template craze implies that everything we do can and must be measured to fit a certain mold. Not only the word but the increasing use of templates in the university reveal the degree to which academia has become an industrial operation.
In fact, we don’t need templates any more than we need rubrics. They come from the same family of low-level ideas responsible for the mechanical modes of teaching that I reject. If I were a medievalist, I would write an allegorical morality play, an updated version of The Castle of Perseverance, in which virtuous Professors battle vicious Rubrics and Templates, winning the day by driving them off with Open Books—
I concede, maybe Digital Books!
University education, what’s left of it, is at a decisive crossroad that requires us to take a stand against the models that administrations and consultants and accrediting agencies are forcing on us. The liberal arts and sciences are under serious attack, and, if we don’t defend the virtues of imagination and spontaneity in our classes, we will all be teaching from rigid syllabi according to rubrics and templates spelled out week by week as teachers of fifth-grade classes are forced to do.
It so happens that my grandmother, born in 1887, was a fifth-grade teacher. Every Sunday evening she sat at the kitchen table filling out hour-by-hour syllabi for the week to come. I remember a book with little cards, like the library cards we used to tuck into book pockets. No pun intended, but her last name was Tuck. Even then my grandmother resented the mechanical nature of her obligation, calling it with utter contempt “busy work.”
Part of what convinced me to go into college teaching was the desire to avoid busy work and to teach what I was trained to do without people peering over my shoulder or making me fill out needless forms. Throughout my career I have given students general reading lists, telling them that we will get through as many of the works as our discussions allow, eliminate some and add others if our interests take us in different directions. I always say, “There are no literature police to come and check on whether we have read exactly what is printed on this paper.”
But now the literature police have arrived. More and more there is pressure to write a syllabus and stick to it so as to meet absurdly regimented, generally fictitious, and misnamed goals and objectives. This is no way to run a university course and is instead the surest way to drive inspiration out of university teaching and learning.
Tragically, the university is rapidly becoming fifth grade. The terminology that has seeped into university teaching from the lower grades has, to my great horror, also mated with business so that the demons we are now facing believe that we will do as we are told by top-down management so that we attract students, bring in tuition dollars, increase endowments, and pass Go with our regional accreditation bodies. If this sounds like a board game, it is—or perhaps a computer game since everything seems to be played out in distance learning, distance teaching, anything but face-to-face, open-ended, free-form discussion and debate. This pernicious trend has made me one Angry Bird!
Around the campus I see that my young colleagues are running scared. They are afraid that they won’t get tenure and that tenure itself will soon disappear. They are afraid that their small department will be absorbed by another, bigger one. They are afraid that their classes will be cancelled and they will ultimately lose their jobs. We are not in familiar territory because all of the power and control have been misappropriated by business operatives calling for outcomes. We need to remind them that a university—and especially an honors program—is in essence a faculty teaching students. Administrators are hired hands secondary to this endeavor. Moreover, only one outcome is important: students graduate and go into the world to become the next generation of educated people. We need to clear all the rubrics and templates out of the way so that we can teach and they can learn.
To my mind there is nothing but folly in searching for “measurable outcomes”; this is a quest as doomed as searching for the meaning of life. Those who remember Monty Python will get the idea and imagine the Knights Templates dressed up in rubric baldrics, entertaining us with a jolly good “Outcomes Assessment Joust.”
We have noticed that many students apply to prominent public universities and then, almost as an afterthought, begin to wonder if the honors program at University A makes that school a better choice than regular admission to the higher-ranked University B.
A far better way to look at honors is to evaluate programs in some depth at the earliest stages of the college application process. Otherwise, students realize too late that the honors application or scholarship deadlines have already passed, or find themselves searching for anecdotal evidence with little time to spare.
Honors colleges and programs differ greatly in size, quality, curricula, housing, overall philosophy, and financial aid opportunities. Working through the maze of differences can be a daunting prospect, especially when time is an issue. When it comes to honors programs, many of the most important questions can be answered only by consideration of those all-important “details.” Below are twenty steps that should be very useful in helping you make the best decision regardless of whether you want a public or private university honors program:
1. Match basic admission requirements with your test scores, GPA, and essays.
2. Request actual average admission statistics. These may vary greatly from basic (minimum) requirements. In general, honors students will have average test scores 6-10% higher than the 25th percentile of accepted students for the university as a whole. The 25th percentile scores are available from U.S. News and other sources. If there is a wide gap between the basic and average stats, and your stats are much closer to the basic stats, then you can probably find a better option. That said, if the admissions requirements are more holistic and less stats-driven, you may be fine.
3. Determine the size of the honors program (mean size in major public universities is ~1,700, but programs may be as small as 140 or as large as 6,000).
4. Ask the fish-to-pond question: Are honors students big fish in a small pond or is the pond full of sizable fish? The more selective the university as a whole, the bigger all the fish. Some parents and prospective students might prefer an honors program that stands apart on campus, while others might like a program that is more expansive. Perhaps if you are not sold on the overall quality of the university, you might choose the former; if you think the university as a whole has a strong student body or you simply prefer a non-elitist atmosphere, then you might like the latter.
5. Assess the quality of the city, surrounding area, and climate.
6. Determine the curriculum requirements as a percentage of graduation requirements. Generally, the number of honors hours should be at least 25% of the total required for graduation.
7. Determine the number of honors sections per semester/quarter.
8. Evaluate the reputation of university in preferred or likely areas of study.
9. Ask whether there are special research opportunities for undergrads and if an honors thesis is required.
10. Ask about staff size, the number of advisers, and availability to students, as well as special freshmen orientation programs.
If the above check out, then:
1. Ask about the number of honors sections, by discipline, per semester or quarter and try to verify; determine the average enrollment in honors seminars and sections. The average class size can vary greatly among honors programs, from fewer than 10 students per class to more than 35. Most seminars and all-honors sections should have around 25 students or fewer, although in almost every case you will find that there are a few large classes, notably in first-year sciences and economics. Some honors programs have few or no honors courses in certain disciplines.
2. Ask about the types of honors sections: all-honors seminars; all-honors sections offered by honors or a department; “mixed” sections of honors and non-honors students; and the percentage of honors contract/option/conversion courses per average student at time of graduation.
Mixed sections may be small or, more often, large sections that can have more than 100 total students in 3-4 credit hour courses. Of these students, maybe 10-20 could be honors students, who then meet for one hour a week (rarely, two hours a week) in separate “discussion” or “recitation” sections. These sections can be led by tenured professors but are typically led by adjunct faculty or graduate students. Ask how many sections are mixed, and of these, ask how many of the main section classes are large.
Contract courses are regular–and often larger–sections with both honors and non-honors students, mostly the latter, in which honors students do extra work or have their own discussion sections. While most programs have some contract courses, they are generally more prevalent in large honors colleges and programs. There are advantages and disadvantages associated with contract courses. They can speed graduation, offer more flexibility, expand the influence of honors in the university as a whole, and foster contacts with mentoring faculty. But their quality and size may vary greatly.
3. Ask about tuition discounts, scholarships, continuing financial aid, including special recruitment of national merit scholars.
4. Determine if there is priority registration for honors students and, if so, type of priority registration.
5. Research the types of special honors housing for freshmen and upperclassmen, if any, including basic floor plans, on-site laundry, suite or corridor-style rooms, air-conditioning, location of nearest dining hall, proximity of major classroom buildings (especially in preferred disciplines), and availability of shuttles and other transportation on campus. If there is no special honors housing, it is often a sign that the honors program does not want to foster the big fish in a small pond atmosphere. The absence of priority registration may be an additional sign.
6. Research the study-abroad opportunities; some universities have a separate division for study-abroad programs.
7. Ask about the presence and involvement of advisers for prestigious scholarships, such as Goldwater, Rhodes, Marshall, Truman, etc., and program success in achieving these awards.
8. Ask about additional fees for participation in honors and ask about the percentage of honors “completers.” These are honors students who actually complete all of the honors requirements and graduate with some form of honors. There are many programs that have completion rates as low as 25% and a few with completion rates higher than 80%. (This is different from the graduation rate, which, for freshmen honors entrants, is anywhere from 79%–99% after six years.)
9. Now, try to assess the quality of the honors program versus quality of university as a whole.
10. VISIT the college if you have not done so and try to question current honors students. Some of the information mentioned above can only come from a personal visit or be learned after a student has been accepted.
Editor’s Note: The following article by Nancy M. West, Director, University of Missouri Honors College, originally appeared in the January 27, 2014, edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
At a baseball game two summers ago, as other parents cheered on their kids, I argued about the value of an honors college with the father of my son’s teammate, whom I’ll call Tyler.
Tyler’s dad is the kind of parent who blares constant “advice” to the coach and points out the mistakes of every child on the team but his own. Between innings, he asked what I did for a living. When I told him I had just been appointed to direct the Honors College at the University of Missouri, he sneered. “My ex-wife wants our oldest son to enroll in that, but I’m opposed. He plans to be a doctor. He needs good grades. He shouldn’t be taking harder classes.”
Then he looked me straight in the eye and asked, “What’s the point of an honors college, anyway?” It was hot, and I wanted to smack him. So I gave him a snooty answer about how I thought “any parent would want his child to challenge himself.” Needless to say, he didn’t respond well.
That exchange turned out to be the first of many conversations I’ve had about the value of an honors college. Like Tyler’s dad, though more politely, prospective students express concern that the challenge of an honors curriculum will jeopardize their GPAs, and therefore their chances of finding a job or getting into graduate school. So do their parents. Some people on campus bristle at the “elitism” of honors colleges, uncomfortable with the notion of singling out students for special attention and benefits.
Both of these viewpoints are understandable. More distressing has been my realization that the honors college often needs to be defended to administrators, from department chairs upward. Honors education has never been a cost-effective enterprise, given its demands for quality instruction, small classes, enhanced opportunities, and personalized service to students. As more and more colleges gravitate toward larger classes and online delivery, honors now seems like a luxury they can no longer afford.
We need then to think about honors colleges in a way that deals with current anxieties and economic pressures. And we need to state their value so that it can resonate with many people, even Tyler’s dad.
So what is the point of an honors college? There are two ways to answer that question. The first is in terms of students. Most high-ability students need individual attention. Honors colleges provide that. More important, they promote the value of striving for the best one can do. In an academic culture tainted by grade inflation, honors colleges celebrate true accomplishment, instilling in students the pride that comes with being thoroughly in earnest about their education.
As to GPA concerns: My experience has been that honors students often do better in their honors courses than in their non-honors courses. The reasons for this success are partly the quality of the instruction, partly the mentoring students receive from professors, but mainly the firepower that comes from putting smart, motivated students together. In the words of Rachel Harper, who coordinates our honors humanities series, “Surrounded by other high-achieving and curious students—both in their classes and in their living arrangements—honors students feel pressure in the best of ways to do well.”
Honors is thus the “natural home of pure meritocracy,” as my colleague David Setzer argues. Universities need such a home more than ever. While colleges become more like companies, and “excellence” increasingly refers to financial success, surely we can justify the value of an honors college by guaranteeing that it remains one space on the campus where deep thought flourishes, and where “excellence” still possesses meaning.
The other way to answer the question of an honors college’s value is in terms of its benefit to a university. For one, honors colleges enhance the prestige of their universities by enrolling high-achieving students who provide a leavening influence on the campus and then go on to achieve great things.
They also have the potential to serve as a “third place” for their universities. In 1989, the sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term “third place” to refer to environments, separate from work and home, which people visit frequently and voluntarily. Examples include coffeehouses, cafes, salons, and the Internet.
Although they vary wildly in look and feel, third places share certain fundamental traits. They act as social levelers, discounting class status as a marker of social significance. Their mood is playful; their atmosphere is warm and friendly. They promote group creativity and lively conversation. Most important, they serve as anchors of a community, fostering broad and less scripted interactions than those we have at home or our regular workplaces.
“These shared areas have played an outsized role in the history of new ideas,” observes Oldenburg. And yet compared with other countries, America does not place much importance on third places. And what’s true of our country is also true of our universities. Faculty and staff rarely venture beyond the buildings that house their departments. University officials sequester themselves in spacious offices located within buildings populated exclusively by administrative offices. And students—too many of them these days—go from their classrooms to their part-time jobs to their apartments.
Universities need third places in order for new kinds of research and thinking to propagate. Honors colleges, meanwhile, need a new identity in order to successfully assert their value in the future.
Thinking about honors colleges as third places gives us a new and non-elitist way of asserting their value to a university. It reinforces how they can serve as spaces of creativity; conversation; intellectualism; collegiality. It also reinforces their potential as homes of interdisciplinarity. Like all third places, honors colleges are neutral ground, separate from departments and yet in the business of serving them all; as such, they provide an ideal space for the kind of “in between” collaboration required by interdisciplinary work. Honors colleges are where team-teaching—that activity we all say we should do more of but can’t because of departmental restrictions—really can happen.
This spring, thanks to the cooperation of the art history and English departments, I’m team-teaching an honors course called “Thinking About Color” with two other professors. The course is wildly interdisciplinary, focusing on subjects like Technicolor and the history of mauve. Our planning meetings for the course have been electrifying, intellectually and pedagogically. And in each meeting, ideas for collaborative research bubble up. I can’t remember ever feeling this creative, or collegial, about my teaching.
The answers I’ve articulated here all arrive at the same conclusion, which is that the “point of an honors college” is its idealism. Honors represents higher education at its best and most aspirational. If I could replay that dreadful conversation with Tyler’s dad from two years ago, that is what I’d tell him.
I’d also point out that my son, Silas, hit a double that day.
Editor’s note: The following post is by Kate Tromble and Mandy Zatynski, writing for The Equity Line.
The Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) 2014 estimates tell us one important thing about the Pell Grant program: It is sustainable — and it can stay that way if Congress manages its money well.
The 2014 budget estimate, released this week, forecasts surpluses for the Pell Grant program this year and next year — $7.7 billion and $3.6 billion, respectively. But that’ll only last so long: By 2016, Pell Grants will see a funding gap of a little less than $1 billion, according to estimates. (That’s a lot less than last year’s projections, which projected an almost-$6 billion funding gap.)
The new numbers mean, first and foremost, that the naysayers can stop screaming that we need to cut, reimagine, or reconfigure the Pell Grant program. The program isn’t costing as much as anticipated, the economy is getting better, and Congress is managing its higher education spending — at least as far as Pell Grants go — wisely.
But the new projections also mean Congress must continue to choose wisely. Rather than using the Pell surplus to fund other initiatives, as it likes to do, Congress needs to save for the future. By storing those billions away, Congress can avoid that funding gap and continue giving thousands of hard-working, low-income students the financial support they need to afford college.
For a while now we have written about alternative ways to view the annual U.S. News college rankings. (Please see An Alternative List of 2013 U.S. News College Rankings for an example.) Our view is that these rankings have placed too much emphasis on the financial resources and selectivity of institutions, often to the detriment of public universities. So far, the negative impact of that over-emphasis has been significant but not profound.
But for the last two years, the magazine is upping the ante–and lowering the “value” of public universities–by assigning over-performance or under-performance rankingsbased on a comparison of a given school’s undergraduate academic reputation with the magazine’s ranking. If the U.S. News rank is better than the reputation rank, then the school has over-performed relative to its reputation. If the magazine rank is worse than the reputation rank, then the school is under-performing.
The magazine’s resident number-cruncher, Robert Morse, is clear about the new analysis and its impact on public research universities:
“Many of the over-performers are relatively small research universities that grant fewer doctorates and conduct less research than others schools in their category. All the under-performers are large public universities—in some cases the top ‘flagship’ public in their state—whose academic reputation rank exceeds the performance in the academic indicators.” [Emphasis added.]
So, anyway, that’s the shot across the bow from U.S. News. Now for some facts and explanation.
U.S. News ranks universities based on “inputs” and “outputs.”The former include test scores, high school gpa, and multiple categories related to financial resources; the latter include grad rates, student to faculty ratios, and class size.The problem with the rankings is largely due to an over-emphasis on inputs.
For example, almost all leading private universities have strong financial resources, and this allows them to hire more faculty and achieve better student to faculty ratios, which in turn results in lower class sizes.So wealthy universities get credit for both their wealth (an input) and for what the wealth produces (an output).This compounds the impact of financial resources.
What works well for wealthy private universities has a compound negative effect on public universities.They are penalized for having less money, and then penalized again for having, say, too many large classes.A better system would consider only the output—the class sizes.Likewise, allocating points for high selectivity (an input) and high graduation rates (a directly related output) magnifies the mostly legitimate consideration of grad rates in favor of the most selective institutions.Yes, Harvard has a high graduation rate; but if you took students from the University of Michigan, or UVA, who had SAT scores of 2200 and higher, they would have a comparable graduation rate.
If you say, well, more money always wins out, please go to our link above. There we write that if you strip away the alumni giving, the impact of endowment, and other financial metrics and focus only on the essentials of academic reputation, graduation rates, and small classes, the publics do better overall than they do when the financial metrics and their magnifying impact are included.
There are 26 public universities among the top 50 national universities with the best academic reputations.Of these 26 public institutions, only 3 are ranked higher than their reputations, leaving 23 of the nation’s best public universities with the stigma of “under-performance.”Does this make sense to you—that academics are that wrong about their peers, while U.S. News is absolutely right?Or could the real problem be the methodology of U.S. News?
While doing research for an upcoming article on the positive impact that honors programs can have on the performance of women majoring in STEM subjects, we made some discoveries that were surprising (at least to us) about why young women who are fully capable of successful careers in engineering, computer science, etc., have chosen other demanding careers instead.
Experts point to a troublesome shortage in the STEM fields that, in addition to engineering and computer science, also include biological and physical sciences and mathematics. The problem is expected to worsen. Those who are most concerned about the shortage focus on its impact on the economy and on the nation’s competitive position in the world.
Now that about 57 percent of college students are women (more like 65 percent in honors), many observers argue that the nation needs increased numbers of them meet the need for STEM grads. Yet at the same time, women are not enrolling or persisting in most STEM majors in numbers thought to be sufficiently high, and scholars, advocates, and pundits have sounded multiple alarms, most of them having to do with the very real gender bias in the sciences, classroom climate, lack of role models, and, occasionally, the alleged deficiencies in math that have for decades been associated with women.
Those in the business and political world who are most concerned about competition and economics are often the very people who champion the role of individual freedom and choice, especially when money and careers are involved. While we believe that gender bias, stereotypes, and role expectations, along with a paucity of mentors, are in fact some of the reasons that many young women do not major in STEM subjects, we also credit young women for exercising thoughtful, market-related choices about the best way to combine their interests and values to best effect, not only for themselves but for the larger society.
But first let’s consider the alleged shortcomings of women in mastering the skills necessary for STEM work, beginning with the math issue. Women now make up 44 percent of math majors and they earn 43.3 percent of math degrees. It is true that 44 percent shows that they are under-represented in the field based on their total percentage of college enrollment, but the sizable percentage they do have in the math discipline and their persistence in obtaining math degrees argue that the perceived lack of math skills is at least questionable and that many women do in fact have the math skills to become engineers or computer professionals–if they choose to do so.
In the biological sciences, women earn 58.5 percent of the degrees; in the physical sciences, 40.7 percent. It is true that in engineering they earn only 18.3 percent of the degrees and in computer science only 18.1 percent. But wait, here is where the (very) rational choice comes in.
One reason that many women study the sciences and math is that, even though they may not pursue careers in those specific fields, they do make up a majority–or even super-majority–of health care professionals who need math and science preparation to meet their goals. They frequently have the quantitative skills to become engineers and computer scientists, but their values and a keen job market assessment lead them elsewhere.
According to the NCES, the health professions include not only physicians and nurses (and their many specialty fields) but also audiology, speech therapy, physical therapy, and related sub-fields.
The nursing shortage hit the U.S. in 1998, before the STEM shortage. In 2000, there were 72,986 nursing graduates; in 2010, that number had grown to 161,540. Some 85.1 percent of health professions graduates are women, including just over 90 percent of registered nurses and 48.3 percent of physicians.
Even though STEM grads in a few fields make more money than most health professions graduates straight out of college, after ten years people working in health care often earn more, sometimes much more, especially when graduate and professional degrees are considered. And the health-related careers are likely less vulnerable to sudden technological changes or market disruptions.
One may say that women have been acting according to their role expectations or their values by becoming nurses. Recent research also shows that women, with higher verbal ability to go along with quantitative skills, simply have a broader range of choices as a result. But however significant these factors may be, it is a fact that women in nursing and allied health professions are also (1) meeting an urgent national priority and (2) making good salaries for themselves. Sounds a lot like the argument for pursing STEM studies.
Even granting STEM a priority position, we must still ask, what would happen if, say, half the women who are going into health professions reversed course now and decided to become engineers? Would the nation be better off, at a time when almost all health professions are understaffed? And would far more pressure be placed on men to take up nursing and other health-related careers instead of business?
If we speak of stereotypes, many people would say that men are, or at least have been, more competitive in their natures than women because of the almost complete male dominance of sports in the last century, and long before. Another stereotype often follows: this competitive nature is better suited to the business world, and that world is, after all, the one that really counts.
This makes us wonder if the current pressure on women to study STEM subjects, particularly the ones most related to the business world, is largely a product of what the still predominantly masculine realms of business and politics want to see. True, many of the demands for more women in STEM come from women, especially in academe, and if women really want the typically more austere and less engaged corporate jobs in engineering and computer science, or want to be professors in those fields, then they should certainly be able pursue those goals free from bias or stereotypical expectations.
But it may well be that most young women are already making choices that have less to do with being “winners” than with being true to themselves.
If the recent Supreme Court decision in Fisher v. The University of Texas at Austin ultimately leads to a prohibition on using race-conscious factors in college admissions, one counter-intuitive result could be that middle-class applicants of all races may find it more difficult to get into selective public institutions.
Currently, UT Austin is required to allocate 75 percent of its freshmen spaces to students who graduate in the top 8 percent of their high school classes (2013-2014 academic year). The remainder of the places may be filled with some consideration given to an applicant’s race, along with many other factors, including socioeconomic status.
Many of the students who are automatically admitted through the top 8 percent formula come from minimally desegregated high schools in poor urban and rural areas of the state, so the automatic formula is a proxy for increasing the enrollment of minority students, many from Dallas, Houston, and the Rio Grande Valley. About 37 percent of the automatic admits are minority students.
The second group–the 25 percent who do not have to be in the top 8 percent of their high school classes–includes a much higher proportion of students who come from more rigorous high schools. The “holistic” process utilized to admit these students emphasizes test scores, high school gpa, quality of the high school, leadership, extracurricular activities, work, etc., along with special factors, including race. But only about 22 percent of holistic admits are minority students.
The interesting thing about the holistic process is that, even though a smaller percentage of minorities are admitted this way, the socioeconomic status of these students is higher, meaning that they “diversify diversity” by including minority students from all socioeconomic levels in the university population. Aside from being a way to counter racial stereotypes that may be held by white students, these minority students also pay more of the costs of attending UT Austin.
Many high-achieving students of all races also gain admission through the holistic process. Students at demanding high schools may not rank in the top 8 percent, but many have high SAT scores and even have gpas that are higher than many of the automatic admits. (The average SAT scores of holistic admits in a recent year was 1902, but for automatic admits the average was 1812.)
For legal purposes, the automatic admission process is considered “race neutral,” and so would likely be allowed to continue if “race conscious” plans are eventually disallowed. But since the automatic plans are proxies for using race, and because they are also proxies for admitting lower-income students, the use of automatic admission practices alone would leave less room for many high-achieving students of all races who come from strong schools in middle class or high income districts.
The admission of more low-income students will all place greater demands on the ability of the universities to provide financial support to middle-class students.
The University of Colorado at Boulder has experimented with a more sophisticated admissions system that provides “boosts” to applicants who have some degree of disadvantage coupled with evidence of over-achievement. Highly-qualified applicants who are not disadvantaged are not penalized, yet the boosts for other applicants will still yield a student body with more lower-income students. Again, added pressure on financial resources is one result.
The Colorado plan is a laudable attempt to increase access, promote diversity, and avoid overt racial considerations. The point of this article is not to criticize these goals but only to point out the possible impact that the changes in college admissions could have on the middle class.
So in the end, while some non-minority families might complain about what they see as favoritism in current race-conscious practices, the change to race-neutral options might make it even more difficult for middle-class students to gain entrance to selective schools and receive some financial assistance in the process.
Bill Destler, president of Rochester Institute of Technology, recently posted on the Huff Post College Pagethat college rankings are universally deficient because of their focus on “inputs” such as SAT scores and high school gpa’s. He might well have added financial resources to the list.
Although we have published a de facto ranking of public university honors programs that isn’t based on any of these criteria, we agree that all rankings, including our own, have deficiencies.
We also agree with Destler that the annual Forbes rankings are the most deficient of all because, even though they claim to rely on output measures, they also focus on “data” from Rate My Professor and Payscale.Com. The first is subjective, and the second reduces the value of a college education to dollars and cents.
The Forbes rankings also have a strong bias against public universities, part of which comes from a desire on the part of the people behind the rankings to “reform” public universities so that they become places for cheap, assembly-line education rather than research institutions with outstanding academic programs.
Destler also points out that rankings based on return on investment will only affirm what most people already know: universities with large numbers of STEM grads, especially in engineering, will necessarily fare better in the rankings because engineering as a field often provides excellent starting salaries for new graduates.
Destler is also correct in claiming that all rankings distort the value of universities to the extent that their rankings methodology apply uniform input measures to essentially dissimilar institutions. Grad rates for a private university that accepts only 6 percent of its applicants will clearly be higher than a college with a 65 percent acceptance rate based on the extremely selectivity of the former.
In the case of our rankings, we would say that the overreach is somewhat less severe, since all the honors programs we follow have much lower acceptance rates than most colleges and because our dominant category is honors curriculum, which can be extensive and demanding regardless of admissions requirements.
In addition, we have two basic rankings, Overall Excellence and Honors Factors Only. The former does generally favor honors programs in universities that have more uniform excellence across the student body because there is a metric for achieving Rhodes, Marshall, Truman, and Goldwater awards by all students, and not just those won by honors students.
But Honors Factors excludes the metric for prestigious award and is based strictly on honors-specific elements such as curriculum, grad rates, honors housing, and study-abroad programs.
In the end, our rankings are only suggestive, not definitive. The same is true for all rankings. They are best used to suggest possible routes on the journey rather than pinpointing the final destination.
