In the most recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, philanthropist Bill Gates says that even though education “has not been substantially changed by the internet” thus far, the future is likely to bring fundamental shifts toward online instruction.
Gates advocates greater use of hybrid courses, defined by the Chronicle as those “in which students watch videos from superstar professors as ‘homework’ and use class time for group projects and other interactive activities.”
Even if such an approach might be effective for some colleges or programs, what applicability might online classes have for honors programs, which emphasize the interactions of students and professors in small classes? Should honors programs be on the cutting edge of integrating online learning with instruction in relatively small classes?
But, if so, how would the effectiveness of such honors experiments be assessed? Gates acknowledges (and laments) that there is a lack of evidence showing “where…technology is the best and where face-to-face is the best.” One big problem, he told the Chronicle, is that higher education “is a field without a kind of clear metric that you can experiment [with] and see if you’re still continuing to achieve [increased learning].
“You’d think people would say, ‘We take people with low SATs and make them really good lawyers.’ Instead they say, ‘We take people with very high SATs and we don’t really know what we create, but at least they’re smart when they show up here, so maybe they still are when we’re done with them.’”
Clearly, “maybe” is not good enough for Gates and other reformers. Here it seems that public university honors programs can help in developing curricula that improve measurable skills and that facilitate the transfer of those improvements to the larger university population, including some students who do not have “very high SAT’s.”
Honors curricula are recognized as being highly effective in developing and improving critical thinking and writing skills, both of which are emphasized by the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) tests used by some colleges to measure improvement in important skills between the freshmen and senior years. (The Gates Foundation has connections with the Council on Assistance to Education (CAE), which develops CLA testing.)
Another advantage of honors programs is that the course work and activities of honors students are never entirely segregated from the larger university and inevitably have an impact beyond honors. Therefore, honors programs are and have been a natural vehicle for the transfer of enhanced instruction to the larger university.
A key element in this process would be the assessment of non-honors students who have frequent classes or projects with honors students in order to understand how the interaction is beneficial. The next, and much more difficult, step would be to determine what parts of the process could be used with similar effectiveness in a hybrid context.
The hybrid model that Gates is exploring can sound a bit like the communication and training structure of an international high-tech company: we watch the CEO in a series of online videos; we note his insights and instructions; and we meet and discuss the ways in which they might be developed, used, and enhanced. Then we are graded according to our progress.
But given the hard choices by some public universities, the use of more online instruction might make the advantages of an honors education more readily transferable to the larger university if online lectures and instruction were incorporated into the curriculum, provided that at least some of the assumed cost savings could then be used to fund more frequent small-group discussions and projects.
The founder of Microsoft also believes that many students are marking time in school because “if you’re trying to get through in the appropriate amount of time, you’ll find yourself constantly not able to get yourself into various required courses.”
The Chronicle asked Gates if, in response to this problem, he might “create pressure to make universities into a kind of job-training area without that citizenship focus of that broad liberal arts degree.”
“But I’m the biggest believer in taking a lot of different things,” he said. “And so, yes, it’s important to distinguish when people are taking extra courses that broaden them as a citizen and that would be considered a plus versus they’re just marking time because they’re being held up because the capacity doesn’t exist in the system to let them do what they want to do. If you go through the student survey data, it’s mostly the latter.”
Whatever effect online instruction may have on university curricula, Gates says that “…obviously, anything that has to do with the universities is going to be figured out by people who have worked in universities, and it’s going to be piloted in universities.”
And in that effort, honors learning innovations could lead the way.
With tuition continuing to rise at public colleges and universities across the country in order to compensate for the decline in state funding, one group advocating reform seems more interested in fulfilling an ideological agenda than in actually working to find reasonable solutions to the problem.
Public universities can learn a great deal from the business community about how to focus on performance and efficiency, and initiate sensible, beneficial changes. Often, however, media pundits and some academicians co-opt the practical, commonsense arguments and add their own radical ideological twist.
In a recent article in the highly respected Governing magazine (“Public Universities Reach a Tipping Point”), Peter Harkness writes that the “higher education system’s vocal critics are increasing, particularly among conservatives. Political commentator Pat Buchanan is probably the most blunt: Higher education, he asserts, is ‘one of the biggest rackets going today.’
“The academic underpinnings for that critical view come most prominently from Richard Vedder, Harkness continues, “a self-described ‘dyed-in-the-wool conservative’ who is a retired economics professor from Ohio University and director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. His message is that state support for higher education is falling fast, so the schools are being forced to privatize, which is a good thing. ‘I’m increasingly thinking the government should get out of the business of higher education,’ he has said…”
In fact, Vedder has been thinking this way for many years. He is an influential critic of public universities, with frequent contributions to the Wall Street Journal and Forbes. He has been a principal force in the annual Forbes’ “America’s Top Colleges” rankings, notable for their preference for private institutions and their emphasis on postgraduate salaries as a strong indicator of quality.
Vedder is also a proponent of the Austrian School of Economics, which, at least in its American manifestations, argues that market forces rule and that government has no business in…well, business, or in just about anything else. This is all well and good, as far as individual views go, but the point here is that the position advocated by Vedder, Pat Buchanan, and others is narrow and ideological in the extreme, to the point where not only the decline but the death of many public universities can be dismissed with a shrug.
On January 12 of this year, Vedder concluded one of his regular pieces for Forbes with these words: “like the market-driven private sector, higher education will face something rarely seen in the past: the creation of obvious winners and losers, with the latter group of schools facing, in many cases, extinction.”
The statement encapsulates the ability of ideological critics to use the language of business while embracing radical solutions. Yes, in business there are “winners and losers” and many business suffer “extinction.” But many in the business community, especially in Texas where Vedder’s attacks on UT Austin and Texas A&M have brought educators and business leaders together in support of the universities, are pragmatic and concerned enough to see that the Darwinian demise of a large number of public universities is not good for the state, the nation–or for business.
And, while failed business are often replaced fairly quickly by new ventures, the same process is unlikely for universities, leaving many fewer to choose from and fewer students able to afford the ones that remain.
(Full disclosure: I am an alumnus of UT Austin.)
Vedder has repeatedly cited the University of Virginia as an institution headed for privatization. And it is true that UVA only receives about 7 percent of its funding from the state and is raising $3 billion in private donations. The UVA student body now resembles those of the Ivy League more than it does those of other public universities, with only 8 percent of students coming from low-income families, versus 20 percent in other Virginia universities.
In an article by Julie Davis Bell for the National Conference of State Legislators, UVA economist David Breneman, a specialist in the economics of education, said that some highly selective and well-funded schools can survive by going the privatization route whole other schools less fortunate have little to gain and a great deal to lose. “The blunt fact,” he said, “is that there are many more of the latter than the former.”
One example of where Vedder’s ideology might lead can be found in the private, for-profit schools that he so frequently promotes. In a March post on the friendly site Mindingthecampus.com about a new report on the concerns of university leaders, he wrote that to him “the most interesting finding is that public and private schools have somewhat different top-level issues they ponder, and that the for-profit schools are clearly more student-centered in their concerns than the not-for-profits, a marked contrast to what to some is conventional wisdom.” [Emphasis in original.]
It is true that the for-profit schools are now doing a better job of retaining students through the first year and of seeing students complete short degree or certificate programs. But when it comes to four-year degrees, the outcome is very different.
At about the same time Vedder was writing his article on “extinction,” the National Center for Education Research found that “a sample of students enrolling at for-profit colleges in 2004 were making, on average, between $1,800 to $2,000 less annually than students attending other types of institutions. Six years after entering college, for-profit students are also more likely to be unemployed — and to be unemployed for periods longer than three months.”
The report also found that students at for-profit schools default at a much higher rate: 26 percent with loans of $5,000–$10,000 in student loans defaulted. At community colleges, the rate was 10 percent and at four-year schools it was 7 percent. Students at for-profit schools with loans of $10,000–$20,000 in loans defaulted at a rate of 16 percent, compared to 3 percent at community colleges and 2 percent at four-year colleges.
As a radical solution, some might like these outcomes, so long as the ideology can be served. But for business and university leaders seeking practical solutions, it doesn’t look so good.
State funding for higher education fell by almost $6 billion from 2011 to 2012, and the impact on public honors programs and the U.S. News rankings of state universities is significant.
Although a lot of the drop-off in state support has come about because federal stimulus monies are no longer flowing to universities, the harsh truth is that state appropriations in 2012 are almost $3 billion less than they were in 2007, just before the severe recession hit and well before stimulus funds were available.
Only ten states saw a net increase between 2007 and 2012, and some of the states hit the hardest are those with universities among the fifty that we follow on this site.
(This information comes from the Grapevine Annual Compilation of Data on State Fiscal Support for Higher Education, produced by the Center for Study of Education Policy at Illinois State University, James C. Palmer, Editor.)
The immediate impact on many honors programs will be an increase in class sizes, a wrenching development because smaller class sizes are at the center of the public honors mission to give exceptional students an experience that approximates or surpasses that of students at leading liberal arts and private research universities.
As a part of our lengthy analysis of U.S. News rankings, we have observed that the relationship of the “Financial Resources” and “Faculty Resources” categories utilized by the magazine provide interesting insights into the way the ample resources of many private universities give them such a dominant presence in the rankings. (In separate posts, we discuss the decline of public universities that are among the top 25 in the rankings.)
According to the magazine, the Financial Resources category (10% of the total) is essentially “the average spending per full-time-equivalent student on instruction, research, public service, academic support, student services and institutional support during the 2009 and 2010 fiscal years,” including spending for graduate students. For reasons that are not clear from the explanation, U.S. News also includes as a part of spending the “operations and maintenance” expenses “(for public institutions only.)”
The Faculty Resources category (20% of the total) assigns about two-thirds of its total points for faculty pay and the percentage of classes with 19 or fewer students. The faculty pay is adjusted for cost-of-living variations.
The key to the two categories is the ratio of Faculty Resources to Financial Resources: in other words, how much of the total money available is used for faculty pay and for a sufficient number of faculty (with the highest level of degree) to keep class sizes small.
What budget cuts do to most public universities is make them choose between having a competitive (and higher-paid) faculty that will maintain or boost academic quality or having a greater number of less-qualified faculty so that they can offer more–and smaller–classes. And, almost always, taking only one of these actions requires an increase in tuition.
The well-heeled private research universities are not burdened with this painful choice, and tuition increases are more easily offset for those in need of assistance. On the other hand, since the 50 state universities we track are the best pubic universities in the nation, their choice is generally to hold on to the quality that they have struggled to achieve, even if it means seeing their class sizes go up. And…their U.S. News rankings go down.
Indeed, their rankings would likely suffer regardless of the choice they make between quality faculty and class size. Another, and lesser reason for emphasizing faculty quality in this case is that the U.S. News category of Academic Reputation, at 22.5% of the total, is the most influential single category in the rankings.
As evidence of these relationships, here are some numbers showing the ratio of Faculty Resources to Financial Resources for the 36 leading private institutions and the 14 public institutions that we follow and that are also in the top 50 U.S. News Rankings:
The average ratio of Faculty Resources to Financial Resources for the elite private universities is 1.63 to 1.00, while the ratio for the 14 public institutions is .914 to 1.00. In other words, the private schools are able to spend a disproportionate amount of their money on the areas that U.S. News values the most: faculty compensation, number of faculty per student, and the enhancement of academic reputation.
The two lowest ratios among the private universities are those for Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (.812 to 1.00) and Wake forest (.851 to 1.00). By contrast, only six of the public universities have ratios higher than that of Wake Forest.
So there we have the unhappy equation for public universities in the current climate of state spending reductions: severe cuts+larger classes=general decline in rankings and less interactive honors education. What this means for the nation is that excellence in higher education is becoming increasingly restrictive.
The well-known Kiplinger Best Value Report gives us one measure of how our universities compare when it comes to delivering a college education at a cost that has strong value in relation to the quality of the school. The Kiplinger Report looks at cost from the perspective of net student expenses for tuition, fees, etc. The Report is very useful in that respect. The Report appears to track other national rankings when it comes to the quality side of the equation.
But many visitors to this site want to know whether outstanding public universities can really compete with the private elites, especially the Ivy League schools. So we will offer a comparison that uses as a measure of quality the two most prominent postgraduate fellowships, in terms of the total numbers awarded: the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program grants and the Fulbright Student Fellowship grants. The measure of cost we will use is the amount expended by the universities for each degree granted. We are emphasizing quality and efficiency, rather than quality and consumer expense.
(Summary and Statistics Are at End of Post)
The NSF grants go to more that 2,000 students each year, and about 1,600 students receive the Fulbright grants annually. These awards give us the largest statistical sample that illustrates how institutions public and private compare in at least this one measure of quality. While private elite universities dominate many of the awards given out by private foundations and trusts (Rhodes, Marshall, Gates/Cambridge), the NSF and Fulbright awards, in addition to being far more numerous, must adhere to federal guidelines that reinforce the need for transparency and objectivity.
It is difficult to say exactly how much the best honors programs contribute to excellence within their host universities, but we do know that honors students, as a group, bring the highest test scores and GPAs to their schools, energize honors and non-honors classes, and enhance the reputations of their universities. We also know that honors students benefit greatly from smaller class size and more faculty contact, both key elements in the success of private elites.
After following 50 leading honors programs for many months, we also see that students who are in university-wide honors programs or departmental honors are also those that compete the best for prestigious undergraduate and postgraduate scholarships, which often are seen as a measure of quality.
(We must note that we have included UC Berkeley in the lists below, although UC Berkeley does not, strictly speaking, have a university-wide honors program. The university takes the position that excellence is pervasive on the campus, just as it is in many private elites. Few would argue the point, and certainly we would not.)
The data we use for the cost per degree, by institution, is from the Chronicle of Higher Education. The average cost per degree is for all degrees awarded, undergraduate and graduate, and does not include expenditures for research.
The data for the fellowships comes directly from the National Science Foundation and the Fulbright U.S. Student Program. We selected the 13 public universities that earned the most NSF and Fulbright grants, respectively, and compared them to all eight Ivy League universities along with other private elites that earned the most grants. As a group, these few universities earned almost 40% of all the NSF grants during the two years of 2011 and 2012, and a similarly high percentage of Fulbright grants in 2010 and 2011.
Summary: Students from the public universities earned 778 NSF grants during the two years, and students from the private elites won 723. Out of the total awards to the 26 schools, the public universities earned 51.8% and the private elites won 48.2%. The average institutional cost per degree granted for the public universities in this group is $102,947. The average institutional cost per degree granted for the private universities in this group is $324,505.
Students from the public universities earned 418 Fulbright Student grants during the two years, while students from the private elites won 489 awards. Out of the total awards to the 26 schools, the public universities won 46.1% and the private universities won 53.9%. The average institutional cost per degree granted for the public universities in this group is $108,537. The average institutional cost per degree granted for the private universities is $262,201.
As striking as these comparison are, some of the public universities that have achieved such a high degree of excellence at relatively low cost are the very schools that have been the focus of “reformers” who are bent on focusing on cost savings at the expense of quality. For example, these critics/reformers might say that a cost per degree of approximately $105,600 is outrageous given that the average cost per degree nationwide for four-year public universities is $68,617. And we agree that it is important for students to have access to an inexpensive college education.
But the point here is that, within the broad range of public universities, there must be room for excellence, and excellence does not come cheaply, even if it does come at a relatively low cost at our leading public universities. (In fact, a very few high-performing public universities do come close to or even beat the average cost of $68,617, but they do so mainly by economies of scale in combination with lower regional labor costs.)
Rather than expecting outstanding public universities to achieve impressive results while spending no more than the average that is spent for all state universities, regardless of quality, we should compare the best public universities to the best private universities in order to find a more realistic assessment of their qualitative return on the public investment.
Beneath the data: The much higher expenditures per degree for the private universities are partly a function of their providing a very low student to faculty ratio university-wide, resulting in a high percentage of small classes. All of the private elites have undergraduate enrollments that are much larger than any of the honors programs within the public universities listed below. So a lot of the high cost per degree granted comes from providing small classes to 4,000–8,000 students, or even 14,000 in the case of Cornell.
The average size of the 50 honors programs that we follow is approximately 1,800 students, and they, too, offer small classes. This feature of honors education is great equalizer, and it must be achieved at the same time that the universities are providing a solid education for their typically quite large total undergraduate populations (average of about 25,000 in our group). The honors programs at their best provide smaller versions of the private elite experience for the students fortunate enough to join them.
Another factor is that the institutional costs per degree granted, as shown below in detail, apply to the university as a whole. If the costs were broken down separately for honors students in the public universities, those costs per honors degree granted would rise; however, not all awards are won by honors students, and the extra costs for honors housing, programming, and faculty are already included in the overall costs. Nevertheless, the differences in costs between the private elites and the public elites are not quite as dramatic as the average figures suggest, but the differences still remain very large.
Still another consideration is that the costs per degree are subject to regional cost of living influences. Part of the high cost of public and private universities operating on the East and West coasts, and in parts of the upper Midwest, are affected by the higher cost of living and the greater prevalence of collective bargaining practices. These factors are present especially near the major cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Detroit.
Another matter of note is that the UC campuses generally rely less on honors programs and small classes to produce research stars than they do on highly selective overall admissions requirements and the superior quality of faculty. UC Berkeley is the most striking example of this model, particularly evident in the NSF category, in which Berkeley’s success is remarkable.
NSF Fellowships and Cost Per Degree Granted, by Institution, 2011 and 2012
1. UC Berkeley: total grants (165) cost per degree granted ($97,934)
2. MIT: total grants (115) cost per degree granted ($341,769)
3. Harvard: total grants (82) cost per degree granted ($343,004)
4. Cornell: total grants (78) cost per degree granted ($151,211)
5. Stanford: total grants (76) cost per degree granted ($345,440)
6. UT Austin: total grants (73) cost per degree granted ($88,150).
7. Washington: total grants (66) cost per degree granted ($133,636)
8. Princeton: total grants (61) cost per degree granted ($371,620)
9. Georgia Tech:total grants (59) cost per degree granted ($83,823)
9. Michigan: total grants (59) cost per degree granted ($129,206)
11. Wisconsin: total grants (57) cost per degree granted ($92,402)
11. Caltech: total grants (54) cost per degree granted ($618,681)
11. Yale: total grants (54) cost per degree granted ($502,748)
14. Columbia: total grants (52) cost per degree granted ($226,200)
15. Brown: total grants (45) cost per degree granted ($202,217)
15. Florida: total grants (45) cost per degree granted ($66,767)
15. Illinois: total grants (45) cost per degree granted ($86,083)
18. UCLA: total grants (44) cost per degree granted ($155,681)
19. Maryland: total grants (43) cost per degree granted ($75,806)
20. UC Davis: total grants (42) cost per degree granted ($116,134)
21. UC San Diego: total grants (40) cost per degree granted ($127,401)
21. Arizona: total grants (40) cost per degree granted ($85,829)
23. Duke: total grants (34) cost per degree granted ($287,850)
24. Chicago: total grants (33) cost per degree granted ($267,725)
25. Penn: total grants (25) cost per degree granted ($264,802)
26. Dartmouth: total grants (14) cost per degree granted ($292,754)
Fulbright Student Fellowships and Cost Per Degree Granted, by Institution, 2010 and 2011
1. Michigan: total grants (69) cost per degree granted ($129,206)
2. Yale: total grants (59) cost per degree granted ($502,748)
3. Stanford: total grants (49) cost per degree granted ($345,440)
4. Northwestern: total grants (48) cost per degree granted ($178,716)
5. Chicago: total grants (46) cost per degree granted ($267,725)
6. Columbia: total grants (41) cost per degree granted ($226,200)
7. Washington: total grants (40) cost per degree granted ($136,636)
8. Arizona State: total grants (38) cost per degree granted ($61,520)
8. Harvard: total grants (38) cost per degree granted ($343,004)
10. Boston College: total grants (37) cost per degree granted ($106,401)
11. Cornell: total grants (35) cost per degree granted ($151,211)
12. Princeton: total grants (34) cost per degree granted ($374,620)
13. North Carolina: total grants (33) cost per degree granted ($137,719)
14. Johns Hopkins: total grants (32) cost per degree granted ($269,246)
15. UC Berkeley: total grants (31) cost per degree granted ($97,934)
16. Maryland: total grants (30) cost per degree granted ($75,806)
17. Rutgers: total grants (30) cost per degree granted ($133,842)
18. Arizona: total grants (29) cost per degree granted ($85,289)
19. George Washington: total grants (28) cost per degree granted ($86,190)
19. Illinois: total grants (28) cost per degree granted ($86,083)
21. Pitt: total grants (26) cost per degree granted ($103,393)
22. Penn: total grants (25) cost per degree granted ($264,802)
23. Wisconsin: total grants (24) cost per degree granted ($92,402)
24. UCLA: total grants (21) cost per degree granted ($155,681)
25. Minnesota: total grants (19) cost per degree granted ($118,476)
26. Dartmouth: total grants (17) cost per degree granted ($292,754)
By John Willingham, Editor PublicUniversityHonors.Com
In his State of the Union address last week and then again in his speech on January 27 at the University of Michigan, President Obama made it clear that he has joined the fight to cut college tuition costs and reform the way universities operate so that they can deliver better “value” to students.
Value. The word is everywhere these days. Often it is measured by “outcomes,” another word of the times, less elegant but probably more relevant, suggesting a basic functionality that value may, at least on occasion, transcend.
When it comes to higher education reform, the two words have had a disquieting tendency to converge in meaning, so that what many alleged reformers mean by value is merely a quantitative increase, literally more “out-come” from whatever has been involved in production. In this way, value becomes productivity.
An emphasis on productivity, however, instead of on quality and excellence is a major threat to public university honors programs, where value is qualitative, deriving from smaller—not larger, more “functional”–classes; from outstanding teaching and support; and from the opportunity to work one-on-one with professors on undergraduate research.
Honors graduates benefit their states by often remaining near home and boosting the local economies, and they benefit their universities by improving graduation rates. This is the best form of value, in which the practical, the good of the whole, and the individual’s personal development all come together. But honors programs and colleges already find it difficult, if not quite impossible, to fund the type of education that fosters this true, best value.
The use of the word value in the context of university reform has been circulating for years, but more recently the conservative critics of public universities have indeed used the word as a synonym for “productivity,” by which they mean education on the cheap for as many students as possible. Some of these critics, most notably Richard Vedder of the aptly-named Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP), candidly display their bias against public funding of, well, almost anything.
In addition to being a professor at Ohio University and a proponent of the Austrian school of economics, Vedder is the director of (CCAP) and a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF). The TPPF is a conservative think tank that, with Vedder’s help and Gov. Perry’s support, launched an attack on Texas universities in 2010.
On December 21, 2010, Vedder commented in Forbes magazine that “there is no doubt in my mind today that governmental subsidies to higher education are excessive–our nation would be better off if we spent less. Indeed, I suspect no governmental spending commitment at all would be preferable to the situation today (although the optimum may be greater than zero).” [Emphasis added.]
It is fitting that the quote is from Forbes, because Vedder is also the man behind the annual Forbes‘ “America’s Best Colleges” list, which makes the private university bias of the annual U.S. News rankings look like an amicus brief on behalf of public colleges. Looking at the Forbes rankings of the 34 public research universities that are members of the prestigious American Association of Universities, we find that their average ranking is…243.
Forbes ranks Georgia Tech at 397—or 362 places lower than the university’s U.S. News ranking.
University leaders in Texas are well aware of Vedder because of his work for the TPPF. The foundation and Vedder led the attack on UT-Austin and Texas A&M last year. Vedder wrote a so-called study that criticized UT Austin, especially, for spending too much on academic research and for not requiring faculty to teach enough classes. An A&M professor later argued convincingly that the study was based on sloppy research and poor statistical analysis.
Gov. Perry and the TPPF claimed during the debate in Texas that it was possible to provide a bachelor’s degree to Texas students at a total four-year cost of $10,000. In light of the governor’s campaign for the presidency, the claim does not seem quite so astonishing as it did a year ago.
What is Value for the President?
But now, with President Obama’s recent emphasis on the public university reform issue, the overriding question becomes: What does value mean to the president and to Congress. Will the conservative business definition of productivity take hold, or will the proposed reforms do as little damage as possible to the hard-won gains in quality that most public universities have achieved?
“We are putting colleges on notice,” the president said in his Michigan speech. “You can’t assume that you’ll just jack up tuition every single year. If you can’t stop tuition from going up, then the funding you get from taxpayers each year will go down.”
While prestigious and wealthy private universities can keep pace with expenses because of huge endowments, most public universities cannot, especially after the dramatic cuts in state funding over the past two decades.
It is encouraging that, in his State of the Union speech and in news releases, the president discussed a “shared approach” to control tuition costs, requiring coordinated actions on the part of the federal government, the states, and the public universities themselves.
One part of this shared approach is to make more financial aid available to universities that do the following:
(1) “Setting responsible tuition policy, relatively lower net tuition prices and/or restraining tuition growth;
(2) “Providing good value to students and families, offering quality education and training that prepares graduates to obtain employment and repay their loans; and
(3) “Serving low-income students, enrolling and graduating relatively higher numbers of Pell-eligible students.”
So there’s that word value again, in paragraph 2. One hint from that paragraph is that post-graduation pay and employment will be key measures of value. (And evidence that loans will be repaid.) Indeed, the additional details already provided about the president’s plans make it clear just how important pay and employment will be:
“The President will call for a college scorecard for all degree-granting institutions, designed to provide essential information about college costs, graduation rates, and potential earnings, all in an easy-to-read format that will help students and families choose a college that is well-suited to their needs, priced affordably, and consistent with their career and education goals.” [Emphasis added.]
If the statement above is not a clear enough indication of the importance of income as a value metric, the detailed plan adds the following:
“The President is also proposing to begin collecting earnings and employment information for colleges, so that students can have an even better sense of the post post-graduation outcomes they can expect.” Yes, outcomes.
One reason that the president’s focus on pay causes some disquiet is that Richard Vedder and other conservative critics of public universities likewise cite pay as a critical outcome. But pay, if it is used at all as a measure of educational value, requires careful consideration of geographical factors as well as a deep respect for the differing missions that public universities may have.
Our research at PublicUniversityHonors.Com shows that while postgraduate pay, at entry level and at mid-career, correlates to Forbes and U.S. News rankings, pay does not correlate with some measures of excellence, such as the number of prestigious undergraduate and postgraduate scholarships earned by graduates, or the depth of honors curricula. It is noteworthy that the scholarships and honors curricula DO correlate significantly, as they should if one is concerned about the highest levels of excellence.
If there is in fact an over-emphasis on pay as a metric to determine federal and state support, universities will eventually be forced to reduce resources for the humanities and social sciences, and even some hard sciences, because students who graduate with majors in these disciplines do not earn as much as business, engineering, and computer science graduates.
Honors programs and colleges are already hard-pressed to integrate honors curricula with the demanding departmental requirements for some remunerative majors. With fewer honors and non-honors faculty and course offerings in the less remunerative disciplines, the brightest students may emerge from their public universities with a huge disadvantage as compared to their counterparts from private elites, who will continue to benefit from smaller classes and the development of critical thinking.
No longer will public honors programs be able to compete with the elite private institutions, unless the honors programs or colleges have large private endowments. Few are so fortunate. Public universities as a group will increasingly be identified as training institutions rather than true universities committed to excellence across the disciplines.
The president, to his credit, said that the states “have to do their part by making higher education a higher priority in their budgets…We know that these state budget cuts have been the largest factor in tuition increases over the past decade.”
Yet how realistic is it to hope for stronger state support now that the state legislators and governors have become accustomed to forcing universities to take the brunt of criticism for tuition increases. With legislative support for some flagship universities now below 15 percent of total operating costs, just how far are we already from Richard Vedder’s dream of zero funding?
The productivity crowd has, for the moment, defined what value is. If the president and Congress agree with them, public university graduates may be lucky to get what Rick Perry predicted: a degree worth, maybe, ten grand.
