Important lessons learned

[PurpleTitan]

Most of money spent by the Federal government on higher ed is in Federal loans (over $100B) and Pell Grants ($35B). The loan cost is probably due mostly to defaults.

That’s roughly equal to what all the states spend on higher level ed (including Cc’s).

I’ve heard that a significant portion of that Federal expenditure goes to for-profits, many of whom are little more than diploma mills.

So you know what, if we just get rid of Federal loans and Pell grants, we can make all publics tuition-free. Would make it tougher for truly poor kids, though. Especially those that can’t commute to a college.

[roycroftmom]

I think OP has made an argument for investing in our K12 system, and maybe community colleges. She shouldn’t be spending her time or our tax dollars on remedial reading. I am sorry her university admitted such students, it wasn’t in anyone’s best interests.

[HazeGrey]

The true cost of Federal student loans became hidden once Treasury took over as the direct lender as part of Obamacare. The Federal Credit Reform Act doesn’t require Treasury to take or report any impairments to their student loan portfolio the way that a private sector lender with financial reporting requirements would. For example, there has been no adjustment taken or cost disclosed for the potential loss associated with the different income based repayment plans that include loan principal/interest forgiveness. When it happens, it will just vanish from Treasury’s balance sheet. The cynic in me says that’s on purpose so no one really knows the true cost of something that sounds like a good public policy idea on paper.

[bennty]

@PurpleTitan

Thanks for the insight. These are the average flagships, right? What about the elite flagships (though the UCs and Wisconsin have seen cuts recently, though Cal has the brand name to launch a bunch of expensive masters programs) and the publics that are almost private except in name because they have gotten so little financial support from their state for a long time now (UVa, PSU, and CU)?

Cal is a weird entity since faculty have historically been the governance, though that’s changed a lot in the last decade or so, and it’s got Nobels flapping all around. I don’t understand how their money works, either. They seemed to me kind of normal state-U, operationally, until maybe 20-30 years ago? And then something happened that I’m not in touch with. The other places – Penn State, CU, UW – are all much closer to “average flagships”. What you have to remember is that their marketing and their realities are overlapping but not the same – yes, they’ve got famous people, famous departments, famous programs, but they’re also giant state universities serving a small city’s worth of students every year, and a whole lot of those kids are there for beer and football and drum circles. While they won’t have some of the worst-off students’ problems to contend with because those kids won’t make it through admissions, there’s still plenty to go around.

So my guess – and I don’t know – is that faculty at those places are a smidge better-supported than they are in the middle of the pack, and are less often told “no, there’s no money for that,” but that unless they’re in the prestige departments they’re subject to the same pressures as state U profs are anywhere else. I’m also guessing it could be worse in some ways to be in the prestige depts, because then they’re trying to compete with the staggeringly well-funded and -supported colleagues at the top privates.

Some of this is just the nature of academia and the people who show up to work there.

The private-in-all-but-name thing is weird, too. It leaves you subject to the vagaries of the statehouse, which can cause real problems and (if you’re me) leave you inclined to flip legislators the bird and invite them to do something about it, but there are a couple of massive advantages to being a state entity, one of which is that your records are public. We’d have no idea what kind of grifting or negligence was going on otherwise, nor would we see what kind of strategic decisions were being taken. And if you want to see Daniel in the lion’s den, watch an open house with a dean or presidential candidate and faculty/staff/students/community members slinging questions. People actually pay attention, and care. The other big deal’s that the state legislators are responsive to angry voter calls, so every time you try to raise tuition it’s a big public fight, which I think is a good thing.

[bennty]

@roycroftmom

I think OP has made an argument for investing in our K12 system, and maybe community colleges. She shouldn’t be spending her time or our tax dollars on remedial reading. I am sorry her university admitted such students, it wasn’t in anyone’s best interests.

100%, as the kids say.

The thing about investing in K12 – which is a house-on-fire priority, if you ask me – is that you’re still pouring a lot of money down the drain so long as you have as many kids as we do in and near poverty. If the kids have nowhere they can do homework, and nobody to help, and they’re homeless now and then or keep moving around, and they’re taking care of siblings and sick parents when they get home, and they’re hungry, and so on – and if no one at home is teaching them that their lives matter and they have futures, because the parents themselves don’t believe it, because nothing around them makes the case – then you can throw money at the schools day and night and you still won’t do so well. So part of fixing K12 is to do with inequality, which circles back around to the post at the top, which is about the top sliver of the society unmooring and floating up and away with nearly all the goodies.

A while ago I had reason to look up Gini coefficients for a bunch of countries, and found that the America I’d grown up in was the equivalent of modern Canada, equalitywise. My expectations for my role in this society, my voice, my value, my trajectory – very different from my students’, who grew up in another, much harder America. Accordingly, college for me and college for them are very different things. They just want a fighting chance at paying off the loans someday. They don’t expect to be happy but would like to be solvent. And the idea of adults they don’t know, in the same society, doing things to help them get a good start is a weird and mysterious one for them.

[roycroftmom]

Absent providing many kids with new families, which can’t happen, I am uncertain as to how to address deeply rooted poverty in an effective manner. People who do not believe their lives matter are not going to make good parents.

[twoinanddone]

@ucbalumnus

In Florida, there are current bills to cut back on various state scholarships.

The Benacquisto scholarship for OOS students has only been there for a few years (2016, I think) and the bill is not to cut down the scholarship but to put the funding for them into the general funds (which might then cut them). It is not to cut them to 1980 levels. It’s still VERY cheap to go to public schools in Florida with tuition at about $7k per year for instate.

[hebegebe]

The original post in this thread started with the OP stating that her daughter applied many places but ended up at her state flagship, followed by dozens of posts from her about how the world is stacked against kids these days and it’s impossible for kids without prep school to get into elite schools. I understand the disappointment that many parents face.

But since Ivy Day was yesterday and Stanford was today, I thought I would offer a couple of real-life anecdotes of my own. One of my son’s friends, who attends our local public school, was accepted into Yale EA, Harvard RD and MIT RD. Another one of his friends was accepted into CalTech EA, MIT EA, and Stanford RD.

And lest you think that these are kids of extraordinary privilege that have been groomed since birth with college advisors that write the applications for them, the kid who got into Yale EA was planning to ED to Penn. When my son asked him why Penn, his friend said no reason except he thought it was likely the best school he could get into, and nobody told him otherwise. My son suggested he aim for Yale EA instead (my son knew that Yale particularly likes STEM kids, and his friend was a strong one), and it worked out exceptionally well.

Let me repeat. Elite schools are admitting completely unhooked kids from a public school, including one kid that managed to put together his applications without any useful parental guidance on where he should aim.

[ucbalumnus]

@hebegebe

I thought I would offer a couple of real-life anecdotes of my own. One of my son’s friends, who attends our local public school, was accepted into Yale EA, Harvard RD and MIT RD. Another one of his friends was accepted into CalTech EA, MIT EA, and Stanford RD.

I would not be surprised if multiple admissions (for those who did not use ED) or shutouts were both a lot more common than the distribution of number of admissions to the most selective colleges would be if all college admissions decisions were independent as sometimes erroneously assumed. Those who get multiple admissions to the most selective colleges presumably have something that multiple colleges like (somewhere in the subjectively graded parts like ECs, essays, and recommendations, assuming stats are top-end), while those who get shut out of the most selective colleges may have been equally unimpressive to all of the most selective colleges they applied to.

[hebegebe]

@HazeGrey

The true cost of Federal student loans became hidden once Treasury took over as the direct lender as part of Obamacare. The Federal Credit Reform Act doesn’t require Treasury to take or report any impairments to their student loan portfolio the way that a private sector lender with financial reporting requirements would.

It’s even worse than that. If a publicly listed company was as loose with its financials as Treasury is with student loan losses, the SEC would be seeking criminal indictments for accounting fraud.

[hebegebe]

@ucbalumnus

I would not be surprised if multiple admissions (for those who did not use ED) or shutouts were both a lot more common than the distribution of number of admissions to the most selective colleges would be if all college admissions decisions were independent as sometimes erroneously assumed.

Admissions decisions are clearly correlated. However, the number of cross-admits is limited simply because of the extremely high yields at each place (70% or better).

[ucbalumnus]

ED obviously prevents a lot of potential multiple-admit scenarios among the most selective colleges.

REA/SCEA/EA may have some effect, if students (affordably) get into their first choice and decide not to complete other applications because their first choice is now a safety.

[Data10]

@hebegebe

Admissions decisions are clearly correlated. However, the number of cross-admits is limited simply because of the extremely high yields at each place (70% or better).

In addition to selectivity, the high yield is influenced by admitting a large portion of class from an early group that is restricted from applying to any other peer colleges during the early round. In your example, one of the kids who was admitted to Yale SCEA kept applying to other colleges in RD. However, the more typical scenario is that the student applies SCEA to their first choice school and doesn’t apply anywhere else RD, if admitted to that first choice.

The yield is difference between RD and overall can be quite significant at selective colleges that offer SCEA/ED. For example, the 2019 CDS (before COVID) suggests a 52% RD yield at Penn and 45% RD yield at Brown. In the Harvard lawsuit sample, Harvard had a near perfect yield on REA compared to 68% on RD. All these numbers are certainly high, but it also implies that kids who are admitted RD often have other great options to choose from.

We often focus on the hooked admits on this forum. The portion of hooked students can be quite substantial, but are still usually a minority of the overall admits. The majority of admits instead are usually unhooked and come from a wide variety of different HSs. For example, assuming there is some overlap between athlete and LDCs, the paper at https://tyleransom.github.io/research/legacyathlete.pdf suggests that the majority of Harvard’s overall admits were White or Asian kids without ALDC hooks during the multi-year sample. It’s not an especially rare event for a kid to be admitted unhooked rather than hooked.

The same paper found that if the Harvard admission reader flagged the applicant as likely SES “disadvantaged” (typically corresponds to less than ~median household income), the applicant received an average 4.6x boost in chance of admission over not low SES applicants applicant with the same hook status, application ratings, and same many other controls (assuming White applicant, different relationship for URMs). The boost for SES “disadvantaged” applicants was smaller than the boost than associated with any analyzed hooked group, but was still significant.

[bennty]

@PurpleTitan

Most of money spent by the Federal government on higher ed is in Federal loans (over $100B) and Pell Grants ($35B). The loan cost is probably due mostly to defaults.

That’s roughly equal to what all the states spend on higher level ed (including Cc’s).

I’ve heard that a significant portion of that Federal expenditure goes to for-profits, many of whom are little more than diploma mills.

So you know what, if we just get rid of Federal loans and Pell grants, we can make all publics tuition-free. Would make it tougher for truly poor kids, though. Especially those that can’t commute to a college.

Or we could just recognize that education is an expensive, labor-intensive thing, and pay what it costs. I remember realizing one year that the tax breaks afforded the NFL swamped NSF’s budget. Choices and decisions, just like they used to teach you about freshman year.

One of the nicer things I’ve been able to do was to testify to a Senate subcommittee on for-profits about their practices. Legislation happened, then under Trump went away. I’m looking forward to its return. These people deserve to walk around wearing barrels. They prey on the poorest and most ignorant, get them to sign away their Pell grants and max on student loans, and then they charge them fantastic money for non-degrees, which they don’t get anyway because the “schools” keep moving the goalposts. Nothing’s accredited, nothing will transfer, everything’s far more expensive than community college.

Profs are there largely to roust the butts out of bed and into seats where they can be counted.

@hebegebe

The original post in this thread started with the OP stating that her daughter applied many places but ended up at her state flagship, followed by dozens of posts from her about how the world is stacked against kids these days and it’s impossible for kids without prep school to get into elite schools.

And that’s a pretty substantial misrepresentation of what I’ve said.

[bennty]

@roycroftmom

Absent providing many kids with new families, which can’t happen, I am uncertain as to how to address deeply rooted poverty in an effective manner. People who do not believe their lives matter are not going to make good parents.

This is not true, and if it were, we’d have children suffering much more than they do.

Addressing poverty is not a mysterious thing, just generally unpopular with people who have bags and bags of money. It involves substantial, chronic redistribution and preventing the privileged from arranging systems that concentrate privilege and prey on the defenseless further. Many of the educational problems we have that are related to childhood poverty didn’t exist forty years ago because we lived in a much more redistributive society in America then. It took quite a bit of time to teach people that greed was good; they resisted that message for a decade or so before it really took hold.

A good way to start is to reduce COA at state Us to the point where it doesn’t strip the leaves off three generations at once. That’s been going on since at least the early aughts. Very good for portfolios. Very bad for society.

[ucbalumnus]

@bennty

A good way to start is to reduce COA at state Us to the point where it doesn’t strip the leaves off three generations at once. That’s been going on since at least the early aughts. Very good for portfolios. Very bad for society.

Of course, that is a multifaceted problem. State spending on universities comes from state tax revenue, and competes with other state spending needs. One of the state spending needs is prisons, which become much more costly due to (a) the crime wave that peaked in 1991, and (b) the political reaction to the crime wave in terms of longer sentences.

[bennty]

@PurpleTitan

This passage and a few others reminds me of @Twoin18’s comment that to someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Do jobs in Germany in general require less thought, the ability to connect, make distinctions, decisions, etc.?
Yet they are managing to run a high-skill economy with a tertiary education rate below the OECD average (the US tertiary education rate is above the OECD average). They do have a strong apprenticeship tradition that not only instills pride in a craft/trade (they have apprenticeships for programmers; the Swiss do for bankers) but also teaches theoretical/classroom material.

Those technical schools are no joke and are also building on much more robust social welfare and K12 foundations than US public universities are. If we had those advantagees, and if Americans were willing to accept the sort of “here’s your track” directive that German students will, I think it could work well.

[ucbalumnus]

@bennty

if Americans were willing to accept the sort of “here’s your track” directive that German students will, I think it could work well.

Hard tracking starting at middle school age in the US would likely be viewed with suspicion in terms of whether some of the tracking decisions were made on the basis of SES, race/ethnicity, parent pressure, or other factors besides the student’s abilities, motivation, and interests*. Even without that, students’ interests can change, and their abilities and motivation may be at a different level later compared to what middle school may have predicted.

*In the US, there is often suspicion about this kind of thing with respect to placement in advanced or honors courses in middle or high school.

[1NJParent]

@bennty

Yes. That would not be true if the task were to train people in a sharply limited set of complex rote tasks with well-defined decision trees. In that case a community college could do the job fine. Once a job actually requires thought, the ability to make subtle distinctions, the ability to connect what’s happening on the job to events and analogues outside the job, and the ability to make complex decisions and plans and communicate these to other people, you need the kind of training in thinking you find in universities.

Personally, I think this is a disaster. While we can radically improve the position of most people coming into universities, making the society’s workings, even the mundane ones, more complex than most people will ever be equipped for will always go poorly. The best you can do at that point is infantilize people by trying to predict a handful of the most common complexities they’ll encounter, and building a very simple interface and hiding the complexity behind it, but by the time you’re done doing that, you’re not far from robots anyhow. This is part of what I mean when I say that STEM alone, or even in the majority, is not an education that kits you out for societal planning. If you build a world that MS engineers like, you get people having to go to college to understand how to install a floor or a water softener or fix a car.

It seems to me that if our goal of higher education is to make sure everyone functions well in a modern and technologically driven world, we’ll fail miserably and no amount of investment will be sufficient to alter the outcome. If our educational system can’t teach an average kid some basic skills in his/her first dozen years of education, it wouldn’t be able to do so in the next four. Besides, aren’t some of these skills better learned outside of the classrooms? I assume most of your students know how to use their smartphones without ever taking a class. Do they not?

[hebegebe]

@bennty

Or we could just recognize that education is an expensive, labor-intensive thing, and pay what it costs.

A residential college (as opposed to commuter college) provides both an education and an important social experience. During this year of COVID, the social part was certainly lacking, but the educational part was fulfilled without any noticeable difference for my kids.

Since it’s been shown that remote education part can work quite well, do we actually need to maintain the existing expensive cost structure? When it comes to standard classes like Chemistry or Calculus, why is it necessary for every college to assign their own professors, of varying quality, to teach them? Would we not be better off finding the best teachers nationally, streaming their classes, and then following up with ample teaching assistant support? Of course this doesn’t work for lab classes or many writing classes, but we have to recognize that much of the cost structure is based on the model that all teaching had to be done in person, and that’s no longer true at all.

For that matter, MIT has most of its courses available online, so the teaching part is free and of generally very high quality. If the only goal of a college was to educate, those video streams coupled with teaching assistants would do it.

But of course we all know that education is only a small part of it. College is also about credentialing and the prestige effects of that credentialing. Realistically, nobody would take a degree from State U seriously if all they did was repackage MIT OpenCourseware (if allowed to do so). For online courses to be taken seriously, professors really need to be from the same school.

The college that I think best understands this new model is Arizona State, which now has an extensive number of programs now available online. It is a nationally recognized and respected university. But it’s currently still expensive, and about the same cost as in-person classes. But I think that’s largely due to not wanting to devalue their in-person classes, as opposed to its actual cost structure. The next step for their online courses would be to get rid of the higher out-of-state tuition for online courses. If they do that, and reduce tuition to about $7k per year or less, they have a chance to successfully roll this out nationally.

In summary, if the goal of college is to educate, it can be done for far less than the existing expensive cost structure. But there will be tremendous resistance from vested interests such as university professors who will rightly worry about their jobs (among those that remain, it will become even more publish or perish). But the demographic decline in college age students is in full swing, and there are already too many universities in existence now.

A four-year residential college experience has been a wonderful rite of passage for generations. But we have to recognize that the residential part in particular is a luxury good, and not one that taxpayers are responsible for funding. I personally would be happy to have my taxes pay for every qualified student to be able to attend a public college with an annual price tag of $10k or less.