Strong signs of improvement on graduation
By Christopher B. Swanson | Ed Week
May 31, 2011
For more than two years, average Americans have followed reports on unemployment, the housing market, commodity prices, consumer confidence, and the daily fluctuations of the markets for signals that the economy has finally, and firmly, entered a period of renewed growth and stability. So too have education-watchers been on the lookout, for the better part of a decade, for signs of an educational recovery.
At the heart of the reform agenda lie commitments to combat the U.S. dropout crisis and propel the nation’s schools and its economy at full speed into the 21st century, by ensuring that all students have a chance to earn a meaningful diploma that prepares them for further education and training and a successful adult life. The administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama have espoused such goals, as have major philanthropies, leading nonprofit organizations, prominent business leaders, and state and district policymakers from coast to coast. Even with this high-profile attention and a host of new policy efforts, gaining traction on graduation has been frustratingly difficult.
Read on...
Showing posts with label college readiness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label college readiness. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Monday, May 30, 2011
Behold the power of challenging all high school students — not just the A team
By Jay Mathews, Washington Post
May 19, 2011
West Potomac High School in Fairfax County and Oakland Mills High School in Howard County are as close as schools come to being twins. Both are in affluent counties and serve ethnically and economically diverse populations. Forty-seven percent of West Potomac students and 52 percent of Oakland Mills students are black or Hispanic. Thirty-eight percent at West Potomac and 31 percent at Oakland Mills are from low-income families.
But when I indulge in my obsessive comparison of schools by their college-level course programs, significant differences emerge. Oakland Mills often bars students from taking Advanced Placement classes if they don’t have B’s in previous courses. West Potomac lets in everyone who signs up and pays the test fees. The AP test participation rate at West Potomac is three times what it is at Oakland Mills, but the passing rate on tests at the Fairfax school is lower: 61 percent, compared with 78 percent at Oakland Mills.
That wide gap in approaches to challenging courses is why I started rating high schools 13 years ago by how successful they were at giving students a taste of college trauma. In a national context, as college-level programs such as Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate have become the prime means of preparing students for higher education, giving more students those opportunities has become crucial and controversial. Only half of students who go to college get to take college-level courses in high school, which many educators think is fine and others think is wrong. That controversy is one reason my rankings have drawn such attention.
The national list is being published now for the first time by The Washington Post. We call it The High School Challenge.
The idea for the list came to me as I was completing a book about America’s best public high schools. I kept running into the same mindless policy: Schools refused to let average students take the college-level courses and tests, reserving them for the better students. Research and common sense suggested that C students would learn much and be readier for college if they also took AP, but few schools appreciated that.
To illuminate the issue, I began ranking schools in 1998 on participation in AP and IB tests. Later, I added the Cambridge Advanced International Certificate of E ducation exam to what I named the Challenge Index. The national list started that year in Newsweek, the local list in The Post. This year’s national ranking moved to The Post after The Washington Post Co. sold Newsweek last summer.
The Challenge Index calculation is simple. I wanted everyone to be able to understand it and use it. Add up all the AP, IB or AICE tests taken in a given year. Divide by the number of graduating seniors. The target I set is also simple: Every school should reach a ratio of at least 1.000 — that is, as many college-level tests taken as diplomas issued. Any school that does will make my national list, unless its passing rate on those tests is unusually low or the school is unusually selective.
School leaders in Larchmont, N.Y., Winnetka, Ill., Beverly Hills, Calif., and elsewhere were puzzled and annoyed when I began this exercise. Because schools in those places allowed only their best students to take AP, they ranked lower on my list than some daring schools in less-wealthy communities that opened AP to all who wanted to work hard.
By coincidence, Washington area educators began a massive reform of their rules for placing students in college-level courses and tests. Influenced by the same pioneering teachers who had shown me the power of challenging more students, high schools in Northern Virginia, Maryland and the District created in this metropolitan region what continues to be the heaviest concentration of college-level courses in the country.
My list finds that only 1,910 U.S. public high schools, about 7 percent of the nationwide total, meet the target ratio. In the Washington area, 75 percent of public high schools do.
Some other regions do well, but not that well. Numerous school systems, wary of challenging students they believe are unready, hold the view that AP, IB and AICE are appropriate only for those with A or B averages. Some urban schools are discouraged by low test scores and therefore don’t encourage students to take AP.
But in some low-income communities, schools encourage as many students as possible to take AP, even if they rarely pass the exams, so they will get a sense of what college demands.
My method differs from how high schools are usually rated. Some lists use average SAT or ACT scores, state test scores or the percentage of graduates who go to four-year colleges. Those results are often so influenced by family income that you could get similar rankings by averaging the square footage of the students’ homes. Many principals and teachers have told me they prefer a measure such as mine that puts weight on efforts of school staffs to prepare students for college. They say that shows the quality of the school rather than the economic status of the parents and gives schools full of impoverished students a rare opportunity to shine.
The list draws attention in part because readers love rankings of any sort. It also is regularly denounced by educators who say it is wrong to rank schools based on just one number.
One of the most revealing arguments about this was between me and Patrick Welsh, an acclaimed English teacher at Alexandria’s T.C. Williams High School who frequently contributes to The Post. When we debated the issue in Outlook in 2005, Welsh said: “You’ve unwittingly created an out-of-control monster, a smoke and mirrors numbers game, the equivalent of ranking the teams in the NCAA basketball tournament on the basis of the number of players who got in the game, instead of the final score.”
I thought the metaphor worked better for me, since a school does not exist to beat other schools but to raise the achievement of students. Getting a lot of them into games is likely to sharpen their skills.
Welsh said adding students who read way below grade level into AP meant high achievers weren’t being challenged and low achievers were overwhelmed. I said he ought to visit Wakefield High in Arlington County, a five-minute drive from T.C. Williams. The two schools were demographically similar, serving large numbers of black or Hispanic students, many from poor families. Yet Wakefield teachers urged everyone to try AP and got award-winning results. The month after our debate, Wakefield had a Challenge Index rating of 2.030, compared with T.C. Williams’s 1.494. The percentage of AP tests passed by Wakefield students was higher: 51 percent to 39 percent. Thirty-five percent of the graduating Wakefield senior class had passed at least one AP exam, compared with 20 percent at T.C. Williams.
Mike Grill, the AP coordinator at Wakefield, told me then: “I don’t have patience for teachers who make excuses to explain why students can’t learn in their courses. The issue is not ‘why they can’t learn,’ but rather ‘why can’t you teach them?’ ”
Average students barred from AP usually don’t complain. They are used to being overlooked. But a few protest. Kerry Constabile at Mamaroneck High School in the New York City suburbs was upset when her request to take AP American History was denied because she had less than a B in social studies her sophomore year. She assigned the AP course to herself, getting the homework assignments from friends. She got a 3 on the 5-point AP exam. She was convinced that she would have done better had the school let her in the course.
Students in Howard have the same problem. If they don’t have at least a B in 10th-grade social science or a teacher’s recommendation, they can’t take AP U.S. history. Clarissa Evans, the county’s executive director for secondary curricular programs, said, “we have more work to do” in that area. Howard got a College Board award for improving AP access but still trails many other districts.
Frank Eastham, principal of Oakland Mills, said his teachers have been talking about ways to give more students exposure to AP, “but some think we are setting kids up for failure if we let them take a course for which they haven’t gotten the prerequisite class.”
At West Potomac High, AP Coordinator Drew Hamlin said: “We stress that success in AP courses is achievable for all students who are driven to succeed.”
The situation is worse in inner-city schools, where most students fail the AP exams. But those students often lack strong preliminary courses to get ready.
The inspiration for the list came a decade before I started compiling the AP participation data for schools nationwide. In 1987, I had the AP results from just one school — Garfield High in East Los Angeles. Eighty-five percent of the students were from low-income families, and AP courses had been rare. A few teachers changed that by upgrading lower-level courses so students would be ready for AP.
In 1987, 85 of the 129 Garfield students who took an AP calculus exam got a passing score of 3 or better. Amazingly, 26 percent of all Mexican American students in the country who passed an AP Calculus exam that year were from Garfield.
The famous math teacher Jaime Escalante had about half of them, but the other half were taught by Ben Jimenez. He was not a celebrity, just a competent, hard-working educator.
That statistic has haunted me since. I was glad to see the Garfield teachers recognized, but there was a darker side to the data. Why hadn’t the thousands of other schools in the country with underestimated Mexican Americans (or other kinds of students) done what the Garfield teachers had done? What was stopping them?
Take a look at the new national list and you will see which schools are asking themselves that question and trying to do something about it. I wish there were many more schools on the list than there are.
May 19, 2011
West Potomac High School in Fairfax County and Oakland Mills High School in Howard County are as close as schools come to being twins. Both are in affluent counties and serve ethnically and economically diverse populations. Forty-seven percent of West Potomac students and 52 percent of Oakland Mills students are black or Hispanic. Thirty-eight percent at West Potomac and 31 percent at Oakland Mills are from low-income families.
But when I indulge in my obsessive comparison of schools by their college-level course programs, significant differences emerge. Oakland Mills often bars students from taking Advanced Placement classes if they don’t have B’s in previous courses. West Potomac lets in everyone who signs up and pays the test fees. The AP test participation rate at West Potomac is three times what it is at Oakland Mills, but the passing rate on tests at the Fairfax school is lower: 61 percent, compared with 78 percent at Oakland Mills.
That wide gap in approaches to challenging courses is why I started rating high schools 13 years ago by how successful they were at giving students a taste of college trauma. In a national context, as college-level programs such as Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate have become the prime means of preparing students for higher education, giving more students those opportunities has become crucial and controversial. Only half of students who go to college get to take college-level courses in high school, which many educators think is fine and others think is wrong. That controversy is one reason my rankings have drawn such attention.
The national list is being published now for the first time by The Washington Post. We call it The High School Challenge.
The idea for the list came to me as I was completing a book about America’s best public high schools. I kept running into the same mindless policy: Schools refused to let average students take the college-level courses and tests, reserving them for the better students. Research and common sense suggested that C students would learn much and be readier for college if they also took AP, but few schools appreciated that.
To illuminate the issue, I began ranking schools in 1998 on participation in AP and IB tests. Later, I added the Cambridge Advanced International Certificate of E ducation exam to what I named the Challenge Index. The national list started that year in Newsweek, the local list in The Post. This year’s national ranking moved to The Post after The Washington Post Co. sold Newsweek last summer.
The Challenge Index calculation is simple. I wanted everyone to be able to understand it and use it. Add up all the AP, IB or AICE tests taken in a given year. Divide by the number of graduating seniors. The target I set is also simple: Every school should reach a ratio of at least 1.000 — that is, as many college-level tests taken as diplomas issued. Any school that does will make my national list, unless its passing rate on those tests is unusually low or the school is unusually selective.
School leaders in Larchmont, N.Y., Winnetka, Ill., Beverly Hills, Calif., and elsewhere were puzzled and annoyed when I began this exercise. Because schools in those places allowed only their best students to take AP, they ranked lower on my list than some daring schools in less-wealthy communities that opened AP to all who wanted to work hard.
By coincidence, Washington area educators began a massive reform of their rules for placing students in college-level courses and tests. Influenced by the same pioneering teachers who had shown me the power of challenging more students, high schools in Northern Virginia, Maryland and the District created in this metropolitan region what continues to be the heaviest concentration of college-level courses in the country.
My list finds that only 1,910 U.S. public high schools, about 7 percent of the nationwide total, meet the target ratio. In the Washington area, 75 percent of public high schools do.
Some other regions do well, but not that well. Numerous school systems, wary of challenging students they believe are unready, hold the view that AP, IB and AICE are appropriate only for those with A or B averages. Some urban schools are discouraged by low test scores and therefore don’t encourage students to take AP.
But in some low-income communities, schools encourage as many students as possible to take AP, even if they rarely pass the exams, so they will get a sense of what college demands.
My method differs from how high schools are usually rated. Some lists use average SAT or ACT scores, state test scores or the percentage of graduates who go to four-year colleges. Those results are often so influenced by family income that you could get similar rankings by averaging the square footage of the students’ homes. Many principals and teachers have told me they prefer a measure such as mine that puts weight on efforts of school staffs to prepare students for college. They say that shows the quality of the school rather than the economic status of the parents and gives schools full of impoverished students a rare opportunity to shine.
The list draws attention in part because readers love rankings of any sort. It also is regularly denounced by educators who say it is wrong to rank schools based on just one number.
One of the most revealing arguments about this was between me and Patrick Welsh, an acclaimed English teacher at Alexandria’s T.C. Williams High School who frequently contributes to The Post. When we debated the issue in Outlook in 2005, Welsh said: “You’ve unwittingly created an out-of-control monster, a smoke and mirrors numbers game, the equivalent of ranking the teams in the NCAA basketball tournament on the basis of the number of players who got in the game, instead of the final score.”
I thought the metaphor worked better for me, since a school does not exist to beat other schools but to raise the achievement of students. Getting a lot of them into games is likely to sharpen their skills.
Welsh said adding students who read way below grade level into AP meant high achievers weren’t being challenged and low achievers were overwhelmed. I said he ought to visit Wakefield High in Arlington County, a five-minute drive from T.C. Williams. The two schools were demographically similar, serving large numbers of black or Hispanic students, many from poor families. Yet Wakefield teachers urged everyone to try AP and got award-winning results. The month after our debate, Wakefield had a Challenge Index rating of 2.030, compared with T.C. Williams’s 1.494. The percentage of AP tests passed by Wakefield students was higher: 51 percent to 39 percent. Thirty-five percent of the graduating Wakefield senior class had passed at least one AP exam, compared with 20 percent at T.C. Williams.
Mike Grill, the AP coordinator at Wakefield, told me then: “I don’t have patience for teachers who make excuses to explain why students can’t learn in their courses. The issue is not ‘why they can’t learn,’ but rather ‘why can’t you teach them?’ ”
Average students barred from AP usually don’t complain. They are used to being overlooked. But a few protest. Kerry Constabile at Mamaroneck High School in the New York City suburbs was upset when her request to take AP American History was denied because she had less than a B in social studies her sophomore year. She assigned the AP course to herself, getting the homework assignments from friends. She got a 3 on the 5-point AP exam. She was convinced that she would have done better had the school let her in the course.
Students in Howard have the same problem. If they don’t have at least a B in 10th-grade social science or a teacher’s recommendation, they can’t take AP U.S. history. Clarissa Evans, the county’s executive director for secondary curricular programs, said, “we have more work to do” in that area. Howard got a College Board award for improving AP access but still trails many other districts.
Frank Eastham, principal of Oakland Mills, said his teachers have been talking about ways to give more students exposure to AP, “but some think we are setting kids up for failure if we let them take a course for which they haven’t gotten the prerequisite class.”
At West Potomac High, AP Coordinator Drew Hamlin said: “We stress that success in AP courses is achievable for all students who are driven to succeed.”
The situation is worse in inner-city schools, where most students fail the AP exams. But those students often lack strong preliminary courses to get ready.
The inspiration for the list came a decade before I started compiling the AP participation data for schools nationwide. In 1987, I had the AP results from just one school — Garfield High in East Los Angeles. Eighty-five percent of the students were from low-income families, and AP courses had been rare. A few teachers changed that by upgrading lower-level courses so students would be ready for AP.
In 1987, 85 of the 129 Garfield students who took an AP calculus exam got a passing score of 3 or better. Amazingly, 26 percent of all Mexican American students in the country who passed an AP Calculus exam that year were from Garfield.
The famous math teacher Jaime Escalante had about half of them, but the other half were taught by Ben Jimenez. He was not a celebrity, just a competent, hard-working educator.
That statistic has haunted me since. I was glad to see the Garfield teachers recognized, but there was a darker side to the data. Why hadn’t the thousands of other schools in the country with underestimated Mexican Americans (or other kinds of students) done what the Garfield teachers had done? What was stopping them?
Take a look at the new national list and you will see which schools are asking themselves that question and trying to do something about it. I wish there were many more schools on the list than there are.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Will Common Core Standards Make Students College-Ready?
Huffington Post
04/27/11
UPDATE: Since this story was first published, it has been clarified that 44 states and U.S. territories, not 48, have stated an intention to adopt the standards. The article has been updated to reflect the change.
--------------
Storytime isn't what it used to be. In classrooms across the country, kindergartners aren't just having books read to them -- they're comparing and contrasting characters. And second-graders aren't reciting rhymes -- they're analyzing poetry.
These examples are the Common Core Standards in action. From kindergarten to 12th grade, 15 districts nationwide are currently participating in trial runs of the standards, which urge critical thinking in students and also provide uniform benchmarks for all states to follow.
But the standards also allow schools some flexibility. In Florida, district officals are meeting now to discuss exactly what their standards will look like. Melissa Erickson, president of the Hillsborough County Council of PTA/PTSA, tells Tampa Bay Online she thinks common standards will benefits the entire education community:
Forty-four states and U.S. territories have stated an intention to adopt the standards, introduced last year by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. The measure was endorsed by the Obama administration, and most states quickly jumped on board last year in an attempt to get federal funding through Race to the Top. States that agreed to adopt the standards won points for a share of the $3.4 billion.
The new standards give specific goals -- from kindergarten to 12th grade -- that prepare students for college. The New York Times cites examples of English and history students who are required to go beyond summarizing information by reading media such as long-form magazine articles and synthesizing them with other sources. Students aren't just exposed to different viewpoints, but are also required to analyze the beliefs and biases present in a piece of reading, according to the Times.
But Shael Polakow-Suransky, New York's chief academic officer, says big changes within students won't happen overnight.
And some are simply not pleased with the new standards.
Texas, which has resisted the new standards completely, has now written its own. The standards are founded upon Massachusetts' former benchmarks, according to Boston.com.
Though Massachusetts is one of the states that adopted the standards last year, the Tantasqua Regional school board has petitioned the legislature to now opt out, Education Week reports.
The state's initial adoption of the standards came amid controversy, as Massachusetts leads the country in education scores and was hesitant to forgo its own standards:
As an example, the national standards make little room for the state's strong commitment to literature, Boston.com reports. The Common Core Standards require that by 12th grade, 30 percent of students' readings should be literary and 70 percent should be informational.
The Tantasqua Regional board says the state was too quick to embrace the new standards, excited by the idea of potentially winning Race to the Top dollars. But a state education department spokesman released a statement last year saying Massachusetts believes in a nationwide unified front:
04/27/11
UPDATE: Since this story was first published, it has been clarified that 44 states and U.S. territories, not 48, have stated an intention to adopt the standards. The article has been updated to reflect the change.
--------------
Storytime isn't what it used to be. In classrooms across the country, kindergartners aren't just having books read to them -- they're comparing and contrasting characters. And second-graders aren't reciting rhymes -- they're analyzing poetry.
These examples are the Common Core Standards in action. From kindergarten to 12th grade, 15 districts nationwide are currently participating in trial runs of the standards, which urge critical thinking in students and also provide uniform benchmarks for all states to follow.
But the standards also allow schools some flexibility. In Florida, district officals are meeting now to discuss exactly what their standards will look like. Melissa Erickson, president of the Hillsborough County Council of PTA/PTSA, tells Tampa Bay Online she thinks common standards will benefits the entire education community:
This is the biggest thing right now in education.
Forty-four states and U.S. territories have stated an intention to adopt the standards, introduced last year by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. The measure was endorsed by the Obama administration, and most states quickly jumped on board last year in an attempt to get federal funding through Race to the Top. States that agreed to adopt the standards won points for a share of the $3.4 billion.
The new standards give specific goals -- from kindergarten to 12th grade -- that prepare students for college. The New York Times cites examples of English and history students who are required to go beyond summarizing information by reading media such as long-form magazine articles and synthesizing them with other sources. Students aren't just exposed to different viewpoints, but are also required to analyze the beliefs and biases present in a piece of reading, according to the Times.
But Shael Polakow-Suransky, New York's chief academic officer, says big changes within students won't happen overnight.
"This isn't one of those things where you flip the switch and tomorrow, everything is going to be different," he said.
And some are simply not pleased with the new standards.
Texas, which has resisted the new standards completely, has now written its own. The standards are founded upon Massachusetts' former benchmarks, according to Boston.com.
Though Massachusetts is one of the states that adopted the standards last year, the Tantasqua Regional school board has petitioned the legislature to now opt out, Education Week reports.
The state's initial adoption of the standards came amid controversy, as Massachusetts leads the country in education scores and was hesitant to forgo its own standards:
We have some of the most exacting standards in the United States," said James A. Cooke, the Tantasqua Regional school board say member who initiated discussion of the issue. "Why should we use someone else's standards?
As an example, the national standards make little room for the state's strong commitment to literature, Boston.com reports. The Common Core Standards require that by 12th grade, 30 percent of students' readings should be literary and 70 percent should be informational.
The Tantasqua Regional board says the state was too quick to embrace the new standards, excited by the idea of potentially winning Race to the Top dollars. But a state education department spokesman released a statement last year saying Massachusetts believes in a nationwide unified front:
That said, in today's economy, it makes little sense for 50 states to have 50 separate set [sic] of standards, and for students to be tested using 50 separate assessments. In addition, while we have strong standards now, we would be naïve to assume they cannot be improved, and that we have nothing left to learn from others.
Monday, May 2, 2011
The University Has No Clothes
The notion that a college degree is essentially worthless has become one of the year’s most fashionable ideas, with two prominent venture capitalists (Cornell ’89 and Stanford ’89, by the way) leading the charge.
By Daniel B. Smith | New York Media
May 1, 2011
Pity the American parent! Already beleaguered by depleted 401(k)s and gutted real-estate values, Ponzi schemes and toxic paper, burst bubbles and bear markets, he is now being asked to contend with a new specter: that college, the perennial hope for the next generation, may not be worth the price of the sheepskin on which it prints its degrees.
As long as there have been colleges, there’s been an individualist, anti-college strain in American culture—an affinity for the bootstrap. But it is hard to think of a time when skepticism of the value of higher education has been more prominent than it is right now. Over the past several months, the same sharp and distressing arguments have been popping up in the Times, cable news, the blogosphere, even The Chronicle of Higher Education. The cost of college, as these arguments typically go, has grown far too high, the return far too uncertain, the education far too lax. The specter, it seems, has materialized.
It’s no surprise, given how the Great Recession has corroded public faith in other once-unassailable American institutions, that college should come in for a drubbing. But inevitability is just another word for opportunity, and the two most vocal critics are easy to identify and strikingly similar in entrepreneurial self-image. In the past year or so, James Altucher, a New York–based venture capitalist and finance writer, has emerged through frequent media appearances as something of a poster boy, and his column “8 Alternatives to College” something of an essential text, for the anti-college crusade. The father of two young girls, Altucher has a very personal perspective on college: He doesn’t think he should pay for it. “What am I going to do?” he asked last March on Tech Ticker, a popular investment show on Yahoo. “When [my daughters are] 18 years old, just hand them $200,000 to go off and have a fun time for four years? Why would I want to do that?” To Altucher, higher education is nothing less than an institutionalized scam—college graduates hire only college graduates, creating a closed system that permits schools to charge exorbitant prices and forces students to take on crippling debt. “The cost of college in the past 30 years has gone up tenfold. Health care has only gone up sixfold, and inflation has only gone up threefold. Not only is it a scam, but the college presidents know it. That’s why they keep raising tuition.”
Like Altucher, Peter Thiel is a venture capitalist with strong misgivings about college. Unlike Altucher, he’s a billionaire and Silicon Valley royalty. In 1998, Thiel co-founded PayPal, and six years later, he made the first angel investment in Facebook. (In The Social Network, he is the imposing figure who conspires to oust Eduardo Saverin from the company.) A passionate libertarian—he was a generous supporter of Ron Paul in 2008 and is the main funder of the fringe Seasteading Institute, which aims to establish experimental political communities on offshore platforms—Thiel is deeply skeptical of top-down R&D and anything that smells like groupthink. At PayPal, he hustled $100 million in venture capital just ahead of the dot-com crash, which he anticipated, and he made another well-timed bet for his Clarium Capital Management hedge fund against the housing market in 2007. In higher education, he believes he has identified a third bubble, with all the hallmarks of a classic speculative frenzy—hyperinflated prices, investments by ignorant consumers funded largely by debt, and widespread faith in increasing returns.
When I asked Altucher what his aim was in railing against college, he replied that he wanted to “reduce demand so costs go down”: Persuade enough kids not to enroll and colleges will be forced to change their ways. When I spoke to Thiel from his home in San Francisco in late February, he offered much the same justification for his major salvo in the fight against college—a philanthropic initiative called 20 Under 20. The program, also known as the Thiel Fellowship, will award twenty students 19 years old and younger $100,000 each and the mentorship of some of the most prominent entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. The catch? The winners have to stay out of college for two years. They are to be announced this month.
Their advocacy has made Altucher and Thiel no few enemies. Jacob Weisberg, of Slate, has called the Thiel Fellowship a “nasty” and narcissistic idea that will retard the participants’ intellectual development and funnel whatever altruistic energies they have into getting rich, like Thiel. Altucher has received voluminous hate mail as the result of his media appearances and blog posts, including one from a fan who threatened to murder him and then eat his remains.
But the skepticism is spreading, even among foot soldiers on the academic front lines. In March, “Professor X,” an anonymous English instructor at two middling northeastern colleges, published In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, an expansion of an Atlantic essay arguing that college has been dangerously oversold and that it borders on immoral to ask America’s youth to incur heavy debt for an education for which millions are simply ill-equipped. Professor X’s book came out on the heels of a Harvard Graduate School of Education report that made much the same point. The old policy cri de coeur “college for all,” the report argues, has proved inadequate; rather than shunting everyone into four-year colleges, we should place greater emphasis on vocational programs, internships, and workplace learning. Then, last month, a front-page article in the Times delivered striking news: Student-loan debt in the U.S. is approaching the trillion-dollar mark, outpacing credit-card debt for the first time in history. With all that debt, more and more are asking, what are we buying?
James Altucher is a self-made man. A onetime New Jersey high-school chess champion, he was raised in a middle-class home and taught himself how to invest by preparing for the role as if it were a do-or-die match, obsessively studying the ways of the established masters. (He claims he read every letter Warren Buffett wrote to shareholders and investors from 1957 on.) Yet unlike many of the figures associated with the view that college isn’t needed for success—Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg—Altucher didn’t find his fortune young, and he didn’t drop out of college to pursue it. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Cornell, and he did two years of graduate work in the subject at Carnegie Mellon.
Not surprisingly, Altucher’s detractors often cite his credentials as evidence that he would like to deprive others of a privilege from which he’s benefited. To this, Altucher responds that his college experience is exactly what gives him the knowledge to criticize the institution. “People come back to me,” he says over lunch at a crowded restaurant in Union Square, “very smart, intelligent people, and say, ‘Look, college teaches you how to think, college teaches you how to network, college teaches you how to write.’ Personally, I didn’t learn how to do any of those things in college.” What Altucher learned to do in college, he says, is what all young men—“with almost no exceptions”—learn to do: drink and talk to women.
That training didn’t come cheap. By the time Altucher enrolled, in 1986, private-college tuition was already so high that he had to borrow heavily to attend. “Except for the first semester, I paid for my whole education,” he says. “I borrowed every dime.” He did everything he could to mitigate the expense. He took six classes a semester, stayed on for summer sessions, worked 40 hours a week at the computer lab. In the end, he managed to graduate a year early and still wound up about $40,000 in the hole.
Altucher’s views on higher education aren’t always consistent. “College is like the best thing in the world,” I was surprised to hear him say when I first called him. “It’s idyllic.” Indeed, he sometimes suggests that college is so idyllic it’s wrong to populate it with the young. Instead, he urges students to take time off and take advantage of their youth—to start a business, travel around the world, work for a charity. “What everyone asks then is, ‘How are they going to pay for that?’ Well, it’s one fiftieth of the price of college to do any of those things.”
This isn’t just a matter of harnessing people’s resources more productively, Altucher insists. It’s a matter of harnessing the country’s resources more productively. “Let’s take a step back,” Altucher says. “What’s the other American religion? Owning a home.” For years, the government encouraged home ownership for all citizens. “So we got more and more loans that were considered subprime, and look what that did. The idea, the religion of home ownership for all, turned into a national nightmare, a national apocalypse instead of a religion. The same thing’s going to happen here.”
The economic recession that began at the end of 2007 has had numerous, cascading effects: a decline in property values, retirement savings, birthrates, geographical mobility; an increase in the national deficit, political rancor, mental-health complaints. One effect the recession has conspicuously not had, however—despite what economists say may be the worst job market for graduates since the Great Depression—is on the number of American families who send children off to college each September. Fifty years ago, 48 percent of recent high-school graduates enrolled in a college or university. In 2009, that number was more than 70 percent—a historic high.
What is perhaps even more striking than these figures is that in the opinion of the vast majority of Americans, they’re too low. A 1999 survey sponsored by the Educational Testing Service found that 87 percent of Americans felt the lack of a college education to be a disadvantage in life. Ninety percent of high-school seniors expect they will go on to college, with seven out of ten of those believing they’ll progress from there into a professional career. “Education has been central to the American Dream since the time of the nation’s founding,” Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard, wrote in 2009. But in the decades since World War II, it has been college—not just elementary or high school, as before—that has become “fundamental to cherished values of opportunity.”
Social scientists and historians long ago identified this transformation in American educational expectations as the “college for all” movement, and public leaders and private philanthropists enthusiastically rallied support for it. But the data gathered in recent years on the value of college has been mixed at best, blunting the moral edge of “college for all” and turning some higher-ed advocates into skeptics like Altucher and Thiel.
This new criticism of higher education comes from three main sources. The first is the reality that, while all parents want their kids to complete college, little more than half of those millions who haul their laptops to campus each fall actually end up with a bachelor’s degree. The United States now has the highest college-dropout rate in the industrialized world, and in terms of 25-to-34-year-olds with college degrees, it has fallen from first to twelfth.
The second source is the quality of the education available on campus. Nearly half of all students demonstrate “exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent” gains in the skills measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, even after two years of full-time schooling, according to a study begun in 2005 by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. (Many education reformers have focused their attention to gains from investments on the other end of the spectrum, in pre-K schooling.) In 1961, the average undergraduate spent 25 hours a week hitting the books; by 2003, economists Mindy Marks and Philip Babcock recently found, that average had plummeted to thirteen hours. In a typical semester, one third of the students Arum and Roksa followed for their recent book, Academically Adrift, did not take “any courses that required more than forty pages of reading per week” and half did not take “a single course that required more than twenty pages of writing.”
But it is the data on the economics of college that is most disturbing. It’s bad enough that our colleges are underperforming, one can’t help thinking—but do they have to charge so damned much? In the past 30 years, private-college tuition and fees have increased, in constant 2010 dollars, from $9,500 a year to more than $27,000. Public-college tuition has increased from $2,100 to $7,600. Fifteen years ago, the average student debt at graduation was around $12,700; in 2009, it was $24,000. Over the past quarter-century, the total cost of higher education has grown by 440 percent. “Like many situations too good to be true,” Louis Lataif, the dean emeritus of Boston University’s School of Management, wrote in February for Forbes, “like the dot-com boom, the Enron bubble, the housing boom or the health-care-cost explosion—the ever-increasing cost of university education is not sustainable.”
This analysis, of course, takes a purely utilitarian view of college—higher education, as its many defenders hasten to point out, has a significance for students that defies the cost-benefit ratio. Last year, in response to a Times article titled “Plan B: Skip College,” The New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead published a rousing defense of college’s ability to, among other things, “expose individuals to the signal accomplishments of humankind.” In an essay published in March in The New York Review of Books, critic and professor Peter Brooks dismissed the swelling discontent with college as cranky and narrow-minded. The university is, he wrote, “one of the best things we’ve got, and at times—as when reading these books—it almost seems to me better than what we deserve.”
“What kind of an economic good is college?” Peter Thiel likes to ask. One answer is that college is a luxury good—a high-end commodity whose appeal, like a designer handbag, grows in direct proportion with the size of the sticker price. This is the answer given by such recent polemics as Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—And What We Can Do About It, by the Queens College sociologist Andrew Hacker and the Times science writer Claudia Dreifus. Higher Education? contends that American colleges have transformed from rigorous scholarly communities into corporate-minded youth resorts, where some presidents command salaries of more than $1 million and competition centers on outdoing one another in acquiring high-end amenities (duplex-apartment dormitories, $70 million gyms).
Another possibility is that college is an investment—an expenditure on which one can expect high future returns. This answer is one to which many mainstream economists subscribe. When I spoke to Stephen Rose, a research professor at Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce and the author of Rebound, an optimistic forecast of the postrecession economy, he pointed again and again to what he calls the “totemic number”: 74 percent. That is the financial benefit—the so-called B.A. wage premium—that economists calculate college graduates can now expect to reap relative to their peers with high-school diplomas. It is a number that has nearly doubled over the past 30 years.
Still another possibility is that the primary role of college today is to serve a “signaling” function—like an elegant business suit, an impressive B.A. advertises talent, pedigree, and ambition employers can use as a hiring shorthand. Thiel, for instance, received both an undergraduate and a law degree from Stanford, credentials that he was able to parlay into a clerkship with a federal judge, an associate position at a white-shoe Manhattan firm, and a job trading derivatives at Credit Suisse before he returned West to join the Internet rush.
But of course, Silicon Valley is a mecca of countersignaling—witness the super-status Zuckerbergian hoodie—and it’s no surprise to discover that in the land of the billionaire dropout, an Internet entrepreneur like Thiel sees evidence that higher education inhibits innovation. All he has to do is look around to see a new model university—the college of innovation and pluck.
Thiel does not dismiss those who say that higher education is a luxury good or that for some it might be a worthy investment, but he finds neither account adequate to explain the college bubble. It’s undoubtedly true, he said, that “it’s a lot more fun to go to college than to work.” And yet the fact that college now costs so much, and requires so much debt to complete, “probably leads people to be a lot more stressed out than they otherwise would be, so it’s probably a lot less fun than when it cost less.” His hunch is borne out by a comprehensive 2010 survey of freshmen that found emotional health to be at a record low—in large part because of financial worries.
As for college being a good investment, Thiel believes the 74 percent wage-premium figure to be as inflated as tuition prices. A Clarium report Thiel commissioned in 2009 analyzed government data to argue that, while the return on a college diploma indeed increased markedly between 1978 and 2000, that’s only because the return on a high-school diploma decreased markedly during that same period. “Relative to the past,” the report stated, “students who go to college do better than their peers who do not, but this is simply a mathematical result of their peers doing worse than in the 1970s.” At the same time, more college debt means it takes students much longer to pay back their loans—a consideration Thiel thinks economists are wrong to omit from their calculations. “It’s not just a question of if you get [a degree], you make more money,” he says. “It’s also a question of how many options you’re precluding for the future.” Just as during the real-estate boom people bought more house than they could afford, trapping themselves in burdensome decades-long mortgages, “lots of college debt means that you’re maybe stuck on a particular career track for the next twenty years.”
But if college is neither a luxury good nor an investment, what is it? For Thiel, the commodity college most closely resembles is the humble insurance policy. Americans have become terrified, he says, of what will happen to their children if they don’t send them to college. The recession, widening income inequality, growing job insecurity, the uncertain future of the welfare state, the increasing costs of health care—all have deepened the anxieties that made college such an attractive option for a rising middle class in the first place. “I think that’s the way probably a lot of parents think about it. It’s a way for their kids to be safe, to be protected from the chaos. You’re paying for college because it’s an insurance policy against falling out of the middle class.” The larger question this raises, he says, is, “Why are we spending ten times as much for insurance as we were 30 years ago? And does that tell us something has gone really badly wrong with our country?”
At the core of the Thiel Fellowship application is a pair of open-ended, Miss America–like prompts: “Tell us one thing about the world that you strongly believe is true but that most people believe is not true” and “How do you want to change the world?” Within weeks of the applications going out, responses began to appear online—on Facebook, on student blogs, and on YouTube in the form of PowerPoint and HD-video presentations.
Among the first responses I came across, in February, was on the website of Dale Stephens, a freshman at Hendrix College, in Central Arkansas, which routinely shows up on rankings of the best liberal-arts schools in America. Stephens’s answer to the second question was to propose a new airline that would utilize a single aircraft family, secondary airports, and a single-class seating system to provide inexpensive transatlantic flights. This was no mere daydream: He had already forged contacts with Boeing, Southwest, and several major airport authorities, and he’d devised a business plan that, with adequate seed money, he was convinced could be brought to profitable fruition.
After I read his proposal, I tried to schedule an interview with Stephens. This proved harder than expected. He told me to check his online calendar for an opening; he was booked solid for weeks. When I finally did get through, a couple of days later, it became clear why he was so busy. Stephens’s 19-year-old life is crammed full with intellectual and creative ventures. He is writing a book. He participates in workshops, seminars, conferences. A month before we spoke, he put his airline idea on ice in order to launch an organization that applies the methods of “unschooling”—the self-directed brand of homeschooling with which he was raised—to the realm of higher education. UnCollege, as Stephens calls it, has already garnered coverage from The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Huffington Post, and ABC News. Then, of course, there was his classwork—though he’d already resolved to jettison that distraction. Whether he was awarded a Thiel Fellowship or not, he said, he was going to drop out. He did, at the beginning of last month.
I spoke to a half-dozen applicants, and nearly all offered the same lament: College is impractical. The liberal arts are hazy, its lessons inapplicable to the real world. “The best way to learn is through purpose-driven education,” Max Marmer, a Stanford student who also dropped out recently in favor of entrepreneurship, told me. “Taking classes in itself is worthless.” Listening to these kids—these inordinately gifted, monumentally confident kids—was at once inspiring, intimidating, and a reminder of just how limited in reach the efforts of the anti-college leaders have been. Inevitably, perhaps, both Altucher’s rhetoric and Thiel’s philanthropy have appealed most to that segment of the college population that is bound least by the college system. With their sophistication, self-motivation, and autodidacticism, these students don’t truly need college. Lock the gates of the campus behind them and you can be reasonably certain they’ll do just fine—maybe better.
Attending to these outliers has been a PR boon for the Thiel Fellowship, which is intended, Thiel told me, “to reset the values all the way down the system”—a program of trickle-down entrepreneurship aimed to launch us out of our great stagnation. As Thiel and Altucher surely understand well, now is precisely the moment, with all its uncertainty and anxiety and instability, when systems as stalwart as college seem most in need of reconfiguration. But it is also the time—with all that uncertainty and anxiety and instability—when the millions reliant on a system as stalwart as college are least eager to do any real reconfiguring. The vast majority of undergraduates are in a peculiar and as yet unresolved bind. On the one hand, a college education will likely saddle them with crippling debt and consign them to four underwhelming years in classrooms with fluorescent lighting and drop-tile ceilings. On the other hand, opting out will likely consign them to a lifetime of unsatisfying, low-wage employment. What’s an average kid to do?
May 1, 2011
Pity the American parent! Already beleaguered by depleted 401(k)s and gutted real-estate values, Ponzi schemes and toxic paper, burst bubbles and bear markets, he is now being asked to contend with a new specter: that college, the perennial hope for the next generation, may not be worth the price of the sheepskin on which it prints its degrees.
As long as there have been colleges, there’s been an individualist, anti-college strain in American culture—an affinity for the bootstrap. But it is hard to think of a time when skepticism of the value of higher education has been more prominent than it is right now. Over the past several months, the same sharp and distressing arguments have been popping up in the Times, cable news, the blogosphere, even The Chronicle of Higher Education. The cost of college, as these arguments typically go, has grown far too high, the return far too uncertain, the education far too lax. The specter, it seems, has materialized.
It’s no surprise, given how the Great Recession has corroded public faith in other once-unassailable American institutions, that college should come in for a drubbing. But inevitability is just another word for opportunity, and the two most vocal critics are easy to identify and strikingly similar in entrepreneurial self-image. In the past year or so, James Altucher, a New York–based venture capitalist and finance writer, has emerged through frequent media appearances as something of a poster boy, and his column “8 Alternatives to College” something of an essential text, for the anti-college crusade. The father of two young girls, Altucher has a very personal perspective on college: He doesn’t think he should pay for it. “What am I going to do?” he asked last March on Tech Ticker, a popular investment show on Yahoo. “When [my daughters are] 18 years old, just hand them $200,000 to go off and have a fun time for four years? Why would I want to do that?” To Altucher, higher education is nothing less than an institutionalized scam—college graduates hire only college graduates, creating a closed system that permits schools to charge exorbitant prices and forces students to take on crippling debt. “The cost of college in the past 30 years has gone up tenfold. Health care has only gone up sixfold, and inflation has only gone up threefold. Not only is it a scam, but the college presidents know it. That’s why they keep raising tuition.”
Like Altucher, Peter Thiel is a venture capitalist with strong misgivings about college. Unlike Altucher, he’s a billionaire and Silicon Valley royalty. In 1998, Thiel co-founded PayPal, and six years later, he made the first angel investment in Facebook. (In The Social Network, he is the imposing figure who conspires to oust Eduardo Saverin from the company.) A passionate libertarian—he was a generous supporter of Ron Paul in 2008 and is the main funder of the fringe Seasteading Institute, which aims to establish experimental political communities on offshore platforms—Thiel is deeply skeptical of top-down R&D and anything that smells like groupthink. At PayPal, he hustled $100 million in venture capital just ahead of the dot-com crash, which he anticipated, and he made another well-timed bet for his Clarium Capital Management hedge fund against the housing market in 2007. In higher education, he believes he has identified a third bubble, with all the hallmarks of a classic speculative frenzy—hyperinflated prices, investments by ignorant consumers funded largely by debt, and widespread faith in increasing returns.
When I asked Altucher what his aim was in railing against college, he replied that he wanted to “reduce demand so costs go down”: Persuade enough kids not to enroll and colleges will be forced to change their ways. When I spoke to Thiel from his home in San Francisco in late February, he offered much the same justification for his major salvo in the fight against college—a philanthropic initiative called 20 Under 20. The program, also known as the Thiel Fellowship, will award twenty students 19 years old and younger $100,000 each and the mentorship of some of the most prominent entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. The catch? The winners have to stay out of college for two years. They are to be announced this month.
Their advocacy has made Altucher and Thiel no few enemies. Jacob Weisberg, of Slate, has called the Thiel Fellowship a “nasty” and narcissistic idea that will retard the participants’ intellectual development and funnel whatever altruistic energies they have into getting rich, like Thiel. Altucher has received voluminous hate mail as the result of his media appearances and blog posts, including one from a fan who threatened to murder him and then eat his remains.
But the skepticism is spreading, even among foot soldiers on the academic front lines. In March, “Professor X,” an anonymous English instructor at two middling northeastern colleges, published In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, an expansion of an Atlantic essay arguing that college has been dangerously oversold and that it borders on immoral to ask America’s youth to incur heavy debt for an education for which millions are simply ill-equipped. Professor X’s book came out on the heels of a Harvard Graduate School of Education report that made much the same point. The old policy cri de coeur “college for all,” the report argues, has proved inadequate; rather than shunting everyone into four-year colleges, we should place greater emphasis on vocational programs, internships, and workplace learning. Then, last month, a front-page article in the Times delivered striking news: Student-loan debt in the U.S. is approaching the trillion-dollar mark, outpacing credit-card debt for the first time in history. With all that debt, more and more are asking, what are we buying?
James Altucher is a self-made man. A onetime New Jersey high-school chess champion, he was raised in a middle-class home and taught himself how to invest by preparing for the role as if it were a do-or-die match, obsessively studying the ways of the established masters. (He claims he read every letter Warren Buffett wrote to shareholders and investors from 1957 on.) Yet unlike many of the figures associated with the view that college isn’t needed for success—Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg—Altucher didn’t find his fortune young, and he didn’t drop out of college to pursue it. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Cornell, and he did two years of graduate work in the subject at Carnegie Mellon.
Not surprisingly, Altucher’s detractors often cite his credentials as evidence that he would like to deprive others of a privilege from which he’s benefited. To this, Altucher responds that his college experience is exactly what gives him the knowledge to criticize the institution. “People come back to me,” he says over lunch at a crowded restaurant in Union Square, “very smart, intelligent people, and say, ‘Look, college teaches you how to think, college teaches you how to network, college teaches you how to write.’ Personally, I didn’t learn how to do any of those things in college.” What Altucher learned to do in college, he says, is what all young men—“with almost no exceptions”—learn to do: drink and talk to women.
Altucher has a very personal perspective on college: He doesn’t think he should pay for it.
That training didn’t come cheap. By the time Altucher enrolled, in 1986, private-college tuition was already so high that he had to borrow heavily to attend. “Except for the first semester, I paid for my whole education,” he says. “I borrowed every dime.” He did everything he could to mitigate the expense. He took six classes a semester, stayed on for summer sessions, worked 40 hours a week at the computer lab. In the end, he managed to graduate a year early and still wound up about $40,000 in the hole.
Altucher’s views on higher education aren’t always consistent. “College is like the best thing in the world,” I was surprised to hear him say when I first called him. “It’s idyllic.” Indeed, he sometimes suggests that college is so idyllic it’s wrong to populate it with the young. Instead, he urges students to take time off and take advantage of their youth—to start a business, travel around the world, work for a charity. “What everyone asks then is, ‘How are they going to pay for that?’ Well, it’s one fiftieth of the price of college to do any of those things.”
This isn’t just a matter of harnessing people’s resources more productively, Altucher insists. It’s a matter of harnessing the country’s resources more productively. “Let’s take a step back,” Altucher says. “What’s the other American religion? Owning a home.” For years, the government encouraged home ownership for all citizens. “So we got more and more loans that were considered subprime, and look what that did. The idea, the religion of home ownership for all, turned into a national nightmare, a national apocalypse instead of a religion. The same thing’s going to happen here.”
The economic recession that began at the end of 2007 has had numerous, cascading effects: a decline in property values, retirement savings, birthrates, geographical mobility; an increase in the national deficit, political rancor, mental-health complaints. One effect the recession has conspicuously not had, however—despite what economists say may be the worst job market for graduates since the Great Depression—is on the number of American families who send children off to college each September. Fifty years ago, 48 percent of recent high-school graduates enrolled in a college or university. In 2009, that number was more than 70 percent—a historic high.
What is perhaps even more striking than these figures is that in the opinion of the vast majority of Americans, they’re too low. A 1999 survey sponsored by the Educational Testing Service found that 87 percent of Americans felt the lack of a college education to be a disadvantage in life. Ninety percent of high-school seniors expect they will go on to college, with seven out of ten of those believing they’ll progress from there into a professional career. “Education has been central to the American Dream since the time of the nation’s founding,” Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard, wrote in 2009. But in the decades since World War II, it has been college—not just elementary or high school, as before—that has become “fundamental to cherished values of opportunity.”
Social scientists and historians long ago identified this transformation in American educational expectations as the “college for all” movement, and public leaders and private philanthropists enthusiastically rallied support for it. But the data gathered in recent years on the value of college has been mixed at best, blunting the moral edge of “college for all” and turning some higher-ed advocates into skeptics like Altucher and Thiel.
This new criticism of higher education comes from three main sources. The first is the reality that, while all parents want their kids to complete college, little more than half of those millions who haul their laptops to campus each fall actually end up with a bachelor’s degree. The United States now has the highest college-dropout rate in the industrialized world, and in terms of 25-to-34-year-olds with college degrees, it has fallen from first to twelfth.
The second source is the quality of the education available on campus. Nearly half of all students demonstrate “exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent” gains in the skills measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, even after two years of full-time schooling, according to a study begun in 2005 by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. (Many education reformers have focused their attention to gains from investments on the other end of the spectrum, in pre-K schooling.) In 1961, the average undergraduate spent 25 hours a week hitting the books; by 2003, economists Mindy Marks and Philip Babcock recently found, that average had plummeted to thirteen hours. In a typical semester, one third of the students Arum and Roksa followed for their recent book, Academically Adrift, did not take “any courses that required more than forty pages of reading per week” and half did not take “a single course that required more than twenty pages of writing.”
If college is neither a luxury good nor an investment, what is it?
But it is the data on the economics of college that is most disturbing. It’s bad enough that our colleges are underperforming, one can’t help thinking—but do they have to charge so damned much? In the past 30 years, private-college tuition and fees have increased, in constant 2010 dollars, from $9,500 a year to more than $27,000. Public-college tuition has increased from $2,100 to $7,600. Fifteen years ago, the average student debt at graduation was around $12,700; in 2009, it was $24,000. Over the past quarter-century, the total cost of higher education has grown by 440 percent. “Like many situations too good to be true,” Louis Lataif, the dean emeritus of Boston University’s School of Management, wrote in February for Forbes, “like the dot-com boom, the Enron bubble, the housing boom or the health-care-cost explosion—the ever-increasing cost of university education is not sustainable.”
This analysis, of course, takes a purely utilitarian view of college—higher education, as its many defenders hasten to point out, has a significance for students that defies the cost-benefit ratio. Last year, in response to a Times article titled “Plan B: Skip College,” The New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead published a rousing defense of college’s ability to, among other things, “expose individuals to the signal accomplishments of humankind.” In an essay published in March in The New York Review of Books, critic and professor Peter Brooks dismissed the swelling discontent with college as cranky and narrow-minded. The university is, he wrote, “one of the best things we’ve got, and at times—as when reading these books—it almost seems to me better than what we deserve.”
“What kind of an economic good is college?” Peter Thiel likes to ask. One answer is that college is a luxury good—a high-end commodity whose appeal, like a designer handbag, grows in direct proportion with the size of the sticker price. This is the answer given by such recent polemics as Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—And What We Can Do About It, by the Queens College sociologist Andrew Hacker and the Times science writer Claudia Dreifus. Higher Education? contends that American colleges have transformed from rigorous scholarly communities into corporate-minded youth resorts, where some presidents command salaries of more than $1 million and competition centers on outdoing one another in acquiring high-end amenities (duplex-apartment dormitories, $70 million gyms).
Another possibility is that college is an investment—an expenditure on which one can expect high future returns. This answer is one to which many mainstream economists subscribe. When I spoke to Stephen Rose, a research professor at Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce and the author of Rebound, an optimistic forecast of the postrecession economy, he pointed again and again to what he calls the “totemic number”: 74 percent. That is the financial benefit—the so-called B.A. wage premium—that economists calculate college graduates can now expect to reap relative to their peers with high-school diplomas. It is a number that has nearly doubled over the past 30 years.
Still another possibility is that the primary role of college today is to serve a “signaling” function—like an elegant business suit, an impressive B.A. advertises talent, pedigree, and ambition employers can use as a hiring shorthand. Thiel, for instance, received both an undergraduate and a law degree from Stanford, credentials that he was able to parlay into a clerkship with a federal judge, an associate position at a white-shoe Manhattan firm, and a job trading derivatives at Credit Suisse before he returned West to join the Internet rush.
But of course, Silicon Valley is a mecca of countersignaling—witness the super-status Zuckerbergian hoodie—and it’s no surprise to discover that in the land of the billionaire dropout, an Internet entrepreneur like Thiel sees evidence that higher education inhibits innovation. All he has to do is look around to see a new model university—the college of innovation and pluck.
Thiel does not dismiss those who say that higher education is a luxury good or that for some it might be a worthy investment, but he finds neither account adequate to explain the college bubble. It’s undoubtedly true, he said, that “it’s a lot more fun to go to college than to work.” And yet the fact that college now costs so much, and requires so much debt to complete, “probably leads people to be a lot more stressed out than they otherwise would be, so it’s probably a lot less fun than when it cost less.” His hunch is borne out by a comprehensive 2010 survey of freshmen that found emotional health to be at a record low—in large part because of financial worries.
“Not only is college a scam, but the presidents know it. That’s why they keep raising tuition.”— James Altucher
“College debt means getting stuck on a particular career track for the next twenty years.”—Peter Thiel
As for college being a good investment, Thiel believes the 74 percent wage-premium figure to be as inflated as tuition prices. A Clarium report Thiel commissioned in 2009 analyzed government data to argue that, while the return on a college diploma indeed increased markedly between 1978 and 2000, that’s only because the return on a high-school diploma decreased markedly during that same period. “Relative to the past,” the report stated, “students who go to college do better than their peers who do not, but this is simply a mathematical result of their peers doing worse than in the 1970s.” At the same time, more college debt means it takes students much longer to pay back their loans—a consideration Thiel thinks economists are wrong to omit from their calculations. “It’s not just a question of if you get [a degree], you make more money,” he says. “It’s also a question of how many options you’re precluding for the future.” Just as during the real-estate boom people bought more house than they could afford, trapping themselves in burdensome decades-long mortgages, “lots of college debt means that you’re maybe stuck on a particular career track for the next twenty years.”
But if college is neither a luxury good nor an investment, what is it? For Thiel, the commodity college most closely resembles is the humble insurance policy. Americans have become terrified, he says, of what will happen to their children if they don’t send them to college. The recession, widening income inequality, growing job insecurity, the uncertain future of the welfare state, the increasing costs of health care—all have deepened the anxieties that made college such an attractive option for a rising middle class in the first place. “I think that’s the way probably a lot of parents think about it. It’s a way for their kids to be safe, to be protected from the chaos. You’re paying for college because it’s an insurance policy against falling out of the middle class.” The larger question this raises, he says, is, “Why are we spending ten times as much for insurance as we were 30 years ago? And does that tell us something has gone really badly wrong with our country?”
At the core of the Thiel Fellowship application is a pair of open-ended, Miss America–like prompts: “Tell us one thing about the world that you strongly believe is true but that most people believe is not true” and “How do you want to change the world?” Within weeks of the applications going out, responses began to appear online—on Facebook, on student blogs, and on YouTube in the form of PowerPoint and HD-video presentations.
Among the first responses I came across, in February, was on the website of Dale Stephens, a freshman at Hendrix College, in Central Arkansas, which routinely shows up on rankings of the best liberal-arts schools in America. Stephens’s answer to the second question was to propose a new airline that would utilize a single aircraft family, secondary airports, and a single-class seating system to provide inexpensive transatlantic flights. This was no mere daydream: He had already forged contacts with Boeing, Southwest, and several major airport authorities, and he’d devised a business plan that, with adequate seed money, he was convinced could be brought to profitable fruition.
After I read his proposal, I tried to schedule an interview with Stephens. This proved harder than expected. He told me to check his online calendar for an opening; he was booked solid for weeks. When I finally did get through, a couple of days later, it became clear why he was so busy. Stephens’s 19-year-old life is crammed full with intellectual and creative ventures. He is writing a book. He participates in workshops, seminars, conferences. A month before we spoke, he put his airline idea on ice in order to launch an organization that applies the methods of “unschooling”—the self-directed brand of homeschooling with which he was raised—to the realm of higher education. UnCollege, as Stephens calls it, has already garnered coverage from The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Huffington Post, and ABC News. Then, of course, there was his classwork—though he’d already resolved to jettison that distraction. Whether he was awarded a Thiel Fellowship or not, he said, he was going to drop out. He did, at the beginning of last month.
I spoke to a half-dozen applicants, and nearly all offered the same lament: College is impractical. The liberal arts are hazy, its lessons inapplicable to the real world. “The best way to learn is through purpose-driven education,” Max Marmer, a Stanford student who also dropped out recently in favor of entrepreneurship, told me. “Taking classes in itself is worthless.” Listening to these kids—these inordinately gifted, monumentally confident kids—was at once inspiring, intimidating, and a reminder of just how limited in reach the efforts of the anti-college leaders have been. Inevitably, perhaps, both Altucher’s rhetoric and Thiel’s philanthropy have appealed most to that segment of the college population that is bound least by the college system. With their sophistication, self-motivation, and autodidacticism, these students don’t truly need college. Lock the gates of the campus behind them and you can be reasonably certain they’ll do just fine—maybe better.
Attending to these outliers has been a PR boon for the Thiel Fellowship, which is intended, Thiel told me, “to reset the values all the way down the system”—a program of trickle-down entrepreneurship aimed to launch us out of our great stagnation. As Thiel and Altucher surely understand well, now is precisely the moment, with all its uncertainty and anxiety and instability, when systems as stalwart as college seem most in need of reconfiguration. But it is also the time—with all that uncertainty and anxiety and instability—when the millions reliant on a system as stalwart as college are least eager to do any real reconfiguring. The vast majority of undergraduates are in a peculiar and as yet unresolved bind. On the one hand, a college education will likely saddle them with crippling debt and consign them to four underwhelming years in classrooms with fluorescent lighting and drop-tile ceilings. On the other hand, opting out will likely consign them to a lifetime of unsatisfying, low-wage employment. What’s an average kid to do?
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Advanced Placement courses move from nice add-on to norm on college resumes
By LIAM MIGDAIL-SMITH | The Patriot-News
January 3, 2011
Take the SATs? Check.
Count up activities and community service? Check.
Have three or four college courses already under your belt?
For students hoping to get accepted at higher-end colleges, taking a few Advanced Placement courses — accelerated high school classes that count for college credit depending on how students score on a standardized test — is no longer a nice add-on to college resumes. It’s the norm.
“It’s getting to the point when you don’t see AP courses on a student’s resume, you wonder why,” said Bill Brown, vice president of enrollment at Lebanon Valley College in Annville Township.
Nationally, the Advanced Placement program has grown exponentially since it was introduced in the 1950s.
The number of U.S. students taking AP exams jumped about 50 percent in the last five years, from 1.2 million to 1.8 million, according to the College Board, the agency that oversees AP programs and other standardized testing such as the SATs.
On average, students have access to eight or nine of the 34 AP courses offered by the College Board. They range from calculus to art history.
Several midstate schools are nationally recognized for being far ahead of the pack. Cumberland Valley High School leads with 27 course offerings. That’s more than double the 13 courses the school had in 2005.
Hershey High School offers 21 courses, and West Shore School District’s two high schools each offer 17. Camp Hill High School offers 10, and about half of its students are enrolled in AP courses.
About half of college-bound students take an AP course, said Trevor Packer of the College Board.
“It is very much the norm for students going to selective or highly selective institutions to have taken at least one college-level course,” Packer said.
John Chopka, vice president of enrollment at Messiah College in Upper Allen Township, said AP courses on a resume show a drive to succeed that can be hard to determine from college essays or other parts of an application.
“There’s just a little extra dose of motivation that comes with deciding to take an AP course,” he said.
But can there be too much?
Parents expressed concern at a November Cumberland Valley School Board meeting that the district encouraging AP courses even for freshmen could be stressful for students. The district was looking to cut an honors freshman social studies course so students would be more inclined to take the AP equivalent. There would be an advanced course beyond the college prep track, but it wouldn’t have an honors weight.
Administrators responded to parents’ worries at the meeting by saying that if students are motivated to take the honors course, why not take it a step further with AP?
“The demand of an AP class is similar to a 100-level college class,” said parent Nancy McKinley of Hampden Township. “Developmentally, ninth- and 10th-graders are in a very different place, and it can be very stressful for them.”
McKinley, whose daughter is taking the freshman AP social studies course, said she’s thrilled with the school’s AP program but wants to see other good options for those who aren’t ready to tackle the college-level work.
Kim Clements, a guidance counselor at Cumberland Valley, said most AP courses are offered in the junior and senior years. The honors courses the first two years are designed to prepare students to go into them.
There are students who can take only AP courses, but most of us are not that superhuman, Clements said. It’s important for students to balance their schedules to be rigorous while keeping in mind that college-level courses come with a college-level workload, she said.
“You also don’t want a student to be a basket case of nerves because they’ve overdone it,” Clements said.
The increase in AP programs has brought with it an increase in students overloading and having stress-related issues, she said.
Clements tells her students to home in on their passions. Students should take AP courses in which they’re interested and excel, she said. And when there’s a student doing well in less-difficult courses, she’ll often encourage him to challenge himself and make the jump to AP.
Students say they are happy about AP options but add the classes could be difficult.
“It’s good the school’s really pushing us to take them,” said Cumberland Valley junior Katie Kaplewicz, 16, of Hampden Township. “But sometimes kids take them because they feel they have to, and they don’t really belong in the class.”
Kaplewicz is taking AP English and psychology courses. Her classmate, junior Alison Hellman, said the classes are a few notches above the honors classes she’s taken.
“You definitely have to put more time into the courses,” said Hellman, 17, of Hampden Township.
AP courses carry weight over honors classes on applications because they’re standardized across the board, said Dan Tredinnick, a spokesman for the Derry Township School District. College admissions officers know what’s in an AP course because it’s set by the College Board, versus an honors course that varies from school to school.
“They know they’re looking at apples to apples when they’re comparing different students from different schools,” Tredinnick said.
College admissions officers agree. But they look at the rigor of a student’s schedule as a whole, they added, so it’s fine to have a mix of AP and honors classes.
“I’d rather see a student take a balanced curriculum with some AP courses,” said Brown of Lebanon Valley College.
January 3, 2011
Take the SATs? Check.
Count up activities and community service? Check.
Have three or four college courses already under your belt?
For students hoping to get accepted at higher-end colleges, taking a few Advanced Placement courses — accelerated high school classes that count for college credit depending on how students score on a standardized test — is no longer a nice add-on to college resumes. It’s the norm.
“It’s getting to the point when you don’t see AP courses on a student’s resume, you wonder why,” said Bill Brown, vice president of enrollment at Lebanon Valley College in Annville Township.
Nationally, the Advanced Placement program has grown exponentially since it was introduced in the 1950s.
The number of U.S. students taking AP exams jumped about 50 percent in the last five years, from 1.2 million to 1.8 million, according to the College Board, the agency that oversees AP programs and other standardized testing such as the SATs.
On average, students have access to eight or nine of the 34 AP courses offered by the College Board. They range from calculus to art history.
Several midstate schools are nationally recognized for being far ahead of the pack. Cumberland Valley High School leads with 27 course offerings. That’s more than double the 13 courses the school had in 2005.
Hershey High School offers 21 courses, and West Shore School District’s two high schools each offer 17. Camp Hill High School offers 10, and about half of its students are enrolled in AP courses.
About half of college-bound students take an AP course, said Trevor Packer of the College Board.
“It is very much the norm for students going to selective or highly selective institutions to have taken at least one college-level course,” Packer said.
John Chopka, vice president of enrollment at Messiah College in Upper Allen Township, said AP courses on a resume show a drive to succeed that can be hard to determine from college essays or other parts of an application.
“There’s just a little extra dose of motivation that comes with deciding to take an AP course,” he said.
But can there be too much?
Parents expressed concern at a November Cumberland Valley School Board meeting that the district encouraging AP courses even for freshmen could be stressful for students. The district was looking to cut an honors freshman social studies course so students would be more inclined to take the AP equivalent. There would be an advanced course beyond the college prep track, but it wouldn’t have an honors weight.
Administrators responded to parents’ worries at the meeting by saying that if students are motivated to take the honors course, why not take it a step further with AP?
“The demand of an AP class is similar to a 100-level college class,” said parent Nancy McKinley of Hampden Township. “Developmentally, ninth- and 10th-graders are in a very different place, and it can be very stressful for them.”
McKinley, whose daughter is taking the freshman AP social studies course, said she’s thrilled with the school’s AP program but wants to see other good options for those who aren’t ready to tackle the college-level work.
Kim Clements, a guidance counselor at Cumberland Valley, said most AP courses are offered in the junior and senior years. The honors courses the first two years are designed to prepare students to go into them.
There are students who can take only AP courses, but most of us are not that superhuman, Clements said. It’s important for students to balance their schedules to be rigorous while keeping in mind that college-level courses come with a college-level workload, she said.
“You also don’t want a student to be a basket case of nerves because they’ve overdone it,” Clements said.
The increase in AP programs has brought with it an increase in students overloading and having stress-related issues, she said.
Clements tells her students to home in on their passions. Students should take AP courses in which they’re interested and excel, she said. And when there’s a student doing well in less-difficult courses, she’ll often encourage him to challenge himself and make the jump to AP.
Students say they are happy about AP options but add the classes could be difficult.
“It’s good the school’s really pushing us to take them,” said Cumberland Valley junior Katie Kaplewicz, 16, of Hampden Township. “But sometimes kids take them because they feel they have to, and they don’t really belong in the class.”
Kaplewicz is taking AP English and psychology courses. Her classmate, junior Alison Hellman, said the classes are a few notches above the honors classes she’s taken.
“You definitely have to put more time into the courses,” said Hellman, 17, of Hampden Township.
AP courses carry weight over honors classes on applications because they’re standardized across the board, said Dan Tredinnick, a spokesman for the Derry Township School District. College admissions officers know what’s in an AP course because it’s set by the College Board, versus an honors course that varies from school to school.
“They know they’re looking at apples to apples when they’re comparing different students from different schools,” Tredinnick said.
College admissions officers agree. But they look at the rigor of a student’s schedule as a whole, they added, so it’s fine to have a mix of AP and honors classes.
“I’d rather see a student take a balanced curriculum with some AP courses,” said Brown of Lebanon Valley College.
High School to College: The New Alignment
By Jordan E. Horowitz | Ed Week Editorial
January 3, 2011
For a number of years now, we have been hearing how high schools are not doing the job they need to do and that students remain woefully unprepared for college and careers. In fact, high schools have been doing exactly what we ask of them, but it is time to reassess what we ask of our secondary educational institutions and how we judge the job they do.
To be fair, high schools have been doing just what we have charged them to do for years. They are graduating students who have mastered state content standards in a number of subjects or disciplines, as measured by state standardized tests. We know this is our expectation because this is how we determine success. Passing end-of-course exams, high school exit examinations, or comprehensive single-subject tests is the way we assess students’ knowledge. These tests are linked to state standards in identified subjects, and all are created by educators, content experts, and others in various combinations. Recently, we’ve seen movement from purely academic standards to college- and career-readiness standards, with postsecondary faculty and business leaders joining the panels. Often, these are accompanied by a complete revamping of the assessments linked to the standards. However, this will do little to improve college readiness. This is alignment redux—we continue to align high school curricula and work to state standards and assessments.
If we really are going to improve secondary education outcomes, we need a new alignment. My work with the California Partnership for Achieving Student Success (Cal-PASS) has made me a believer in this new strategy. We must link high school exit expectations with college-entrance expectations. That said, this new configuration requires some courageous conversations.
Read on...
January 3, 2011
For a number of years now, we have been hearing how high schools are not doing the job they need to do and that students remain woefully unprepared for college and careers. In fact, high schools have been doing exactly what we ask of them, but it is time to reassess what we ask of our secondary educational institutions and how we judge the job they do.
To be fair, high schools have been doing just what we have charged them to do for years. They are graduating students who have mastered state content standards in a number of subjects or disciplines, as measured by state standardized tests. We know this is our expectation because this is how we determine success. Passing end-of-course exams, high school exit examinations, or comprehensive single-subject tests is the way we assess students’ knowledge. These tests are linked to state standards in identified subjects, and all are created by educators, content experts, and others in various combinations. Recently, we’ve seen movement from purely academic standards to college- and career-readiness standards, with postsecondary faculty and business leaders joining the panels. Often, these are accompanied by a complete revamping of the assessments linked to the standards. However, this will do little to improve college readiness. This is alignment redux—we continue to align high school curricula and work to state standards and assessments.
If we really are going to improve secondary education outcomes, we need a new alignment. My work with the California Partnership for Achieving Student Success (Cal-PASS) has made me a believer in this new strategy. We must link high school exit expectations with college-entrance expectations. That said, this new configuration requires some courageous conversations.
Read on...
Early-College High Schools: 'Why Not Do It for All the Kids?'
Great piece on South Texas' Hidalgo ISD.
-Patricia
By Joel Vargas | Ed Week Editorial
January 7, 2011
Hidalgo, Texas, has one of the most successful school systems in the United States. The dropout rate is nearly zero, and the high school regularly lands on a top-school list published by U.S. News & World Report. Last June, when members of the high school graduating class crossed the stage to receive their diplomas, 95 percent of them could proudly point to their college credits as well. Two-thirds of the graduating seniors had earned at least a full semester of credits toward a college degree.
It’s time for the nation to pay attention when any community boasts results like these. These are especially remarkable in one of the most economically depressed areas of the United States, just across the Rio Grande River from Mexico, with one of the lowest number of college-educated adults. Nine out of 10 students in the high school are considered economically disadvantaged, 99.5 percent are Hispanic, and 53 percent entered with limited proficiency in English.
The story of Hidalgo is not only one of success, but of turning around an entire school district. In the late 1980s, student achievement in Hidalgo ranked in the bottom 10 percent in Texas. But local leaders took giant steps to improve student performance, and they gained support from every segment of the surrounding community. Over the next two decades, everyone—from bus drivers to principals, from teachers to school board members—began to focus on doing what it takes to raise the achievement levels of all 3,500 young people in the Hidalgo schools.
Read on...
-Patricia
By Joel Vargas | Ed Week Editorial
January 7, 2011
Hidalgo, Texas, has one of the most successful school systems in the United States. The dropout rate is nearly zero, and the high school regularly lands on a top-school list published by U.S. News & World Report. Last June, when members of the high school graduating class crossed the stage to receive their diplomas, 95 percent of them could proudly point to their college credits as well. Two-thirds of the graduating seniors had earned at least a full semester of credits toward a college degree.
It’s time for the nation to pay attention when any community boasts results like these. These are especially remarkable in one of the most economically depressed areas of the United States, just across the Rio Grande River from Mexico, with one of the lowest number of college-educated adults. Nine out of 10 students in the high school are considered economically disadvantaged, 99.5 percent are Hispanic, and 53 percent entered with limited proficiency in English.
The story of Hidalgo is not only one of success, but of turning around an entire school district. In the late 1980s, student achievement in Hidalgo ranked in the bottom 10 percent in Texas. But local leaders took giant steps to improve student performance, and they gained support from every segment of the surrounding community. Over the next two decades, everyone—from bus drivers to principals, from teachers to school board members—began to focus on doing what it takes to raise the achievement levels of all 3,500 young people in the Hidalgo schools.
Read on...
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Education study ranks Hidalgo County near the bottom among large metro areas
Neal Morton | The Monitor
July 21, 2010
McALLEN — McAllen remains among the nation’s worst cities for educational success, a think tank reported this week, but some business and education leaders gleaned hope from the area’s third-to-last ranking for bachelor’s degree achievement.
Releasing its “State of Metropolitan America” study on Monday, the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institute ranked the McAllen-Edinburg-Mission area — which comprises all of Hidalgo County — 98th among the country’s 100 largest metro areas based on the proportion of residents age 25 and older with a bachelor’s degree.
Only 15.1 percent of that age group, or 58,811 people, had a bachelor’s degree in 2008.
In 1990 and 2000, Greater McAllen stood at dead last on the list.
University of Texas-Pan American President Robert Nelsen hailed the movement up the ranking since then as good news for the area.
“We only came up by two, but my optimism is large,” Nelsen said. “Sometimes I’m asked if we need to recruit in Houston or in Dallas. No, we don’t.
“There are so many students here available,” he said. “We just need to make certain they know they have the opportunity.”
Nelsen said many hurdles stand between metro McAllen and the 35 percent national average for degree attainment.
One key factor in the area’s low education rates represented what Nelsen called a vicious circle.
“We have a lot of poverty in the (Rio Grande) Valley,” he said. “I think of lot of that is because of the low number of bachelor’s (degrees) we have here. An educated populace is what will turn around that trend.”
Demonstrating the vicious circle, the metro report illuminated tough prospects for individuals without post-secondary educations.
In 2008, less than 60 percent of residents with only a high school diploma or less had a job, compared to over 86 percent employment for residents with a bachelor’s degree.
Joe Brown, president and CEO of Border Capital Bank and board chairman of the McAllen Chamber of Commerce, said the low numbers of bachelor’s degrees in the area reflected a student mindset that hurts the area.
“We’ve lost some of that mental capital to other areas of the state,” Brown said. “We have a lot of our kids leaving the Valley to go to school. … They get enamored with life in the big city and we lose them.”
Brown’s own daughter received a master’s degree in Austin and has yet to return.
He said the dislocation of education-oriented students might change as more institutions of higher learning like South Texas College establish themselves in South Texas.
STC’s vice president of academic affairs, Juan Mejia, agreed.
“We are playing catch-up more than anything,” Mejia said.
“Here, our focus is to prepare a workforce for jobs that exist in our area,” he said. “We do environmental scans on what potential new jobs are coming so we can be ready to roll out a program as soon as possible.”
As their schools renovate engineering, health care and information technology programs, Mejia and Nelsen said they were coordinating efforts to provide training for jobs specific to the region.
Their optimism was supported by some increases reported in the metro study.
The McAllen area’s enrollment in college or graduate schools beat the national trend as it jumped 7.8 points from 23.5 percent of the age 18-24 population in 2000 to 31.3 percent in 2008.
Bachelor’s degree attainment among residents age 25 and older also went up — 12.9 percent in 2000 versus 15.1 percent in 2008. Meanwhile, associate degree attainment in that age group increased half a percentage point to 3.4 percent.
Even high school graduation rates for the age 25-and-up crowd increased, from 50.5 percent in 2000 to 58.3 percent in 2008.
High school was the place Nelsen saw the most potential for change in the Valley’s college-ready culture.
“You have to get these kids early on,” he said. “You have to be moving as quickly and early as you can to introduce them to the idea of college.”
He referenced a San Juan school district program that helps parents get their general equivalency diplomas and noted the community aspect to such efforts.
“If the parents get the GED, then their kids are more likely to go to college,” Nelsen said. “It has to be multi-pronged. Just the university or STC can’t do it alone. We all have to do it together.”
July 21, 2010
McALLEN — McAllen remains among the nation’s worst cities for educational success, a think tank reported this week, but some business and education leaders gleaned hope from the area’s third-to-last ranking for bachelor’s degree achievement.
Releasing its “State of Metropolitan America” study on Monday, the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institute ranked the McAllen-Edinburg-Mission area — which comprises all of Hidalgo County — 98th among the country’s 100 largest metro areas based on the proportion of residents age 25 and older with a bachelor’s degree.
Only 15.1 percent of that age group, or 58,811 people, had a bachelor’s degree in 2008.
In 1990 and 2000, Greater McAllen stood at dead last on the list.
University of Texas-Pan American President Robert Nelsen hailed the movement up the ranking since then as good news for the area.
“We only came up by two, but my optimism is large,” Nelsen said. “Sometimes I’m asked if we need to recruit in Houston or in Dallas. No, we don’t.
“There are so many students here available,” he said. “We just need to make certain they know they have the opportunity.”
Nelsen said many hurdles stand between metro McAllen and the 35 percent national average for degree attainment.
One key factor in the area’s low education rates represented what Nelsen called a vicious circle.
“We have a lot of poverty in the (Rio Grande) Valley,” he said. “I think of lot of that is because of the low number of bachelor’s (degrees) we have here. An educated populace is what will turn around that trend.”
Demonstrating the vicious circle, the metro report illuminated tough prospects for individuals without post-secondary educations.
In 2008, less than 60 percent of residents with only a high school diploma or less had a job, compared to over 86 percent employment for residents with a bachelor’s degree.
Joe Brown, president and CEO of Border Capital Bank and board chairman of the McAllen Chamber of Commerce, said the low numbers of bachelor’s degrees in the area reflected a student mindset that hurts the area.
“We’ve lost some of that mental capital to other areas of the state,” Brown said. “We have a lot of our kids leaving the Valley to go to school. … They get enamored with life in the big city and we lose them.”
Brown’s own daughter received a master’s degree in Austin and has yet to return.
He said the dislocation of education-oriented students might change as more institutions of higher learning like South Texas College establish themselves in South Texas.
STC’s vice president of academic affairs, Juan Mejia, agreed.
“We are playing catch-up more than anything,” Mejia said.
“Here, our focus is to prepare a workforce for jobs that exist in our area,” he said. “We do environmental scans on what potential new jobs are coming so we can be ready to roll out a program as soon as possible.”
As their schools renovate engineering, health care and information technology programs, Mejia and Nelsen said they were coordinating efforts to provide training for jobs specific to the region.
Their optimism was supported by some increases reported in the metro study.
The McAllen area’s enrollment in college or graduate schools beat the national trend as it jumped 7.8 points from 23.5 percent of the age 18-24 population in 2000 to 31.3 percent in 2008.
Bachelor’s degree attainment among residents age 25 and older also went up — 12.9 percent in 2000 versus 15.1 percent in 2008. Meanwhile, associate degree attainment in that age group increased half a percentage point to 3.4 percent.
Even high school graduation rates for the age 25-and-up crowd increased, from 50.5 percent in 2000 to 58.3 percent in 2008.
High school was the place Nelsen saw the most potential for change in the Valley’s college-ready culture.
“You have to get these kids early on,” he said. “You have to be moving as quickly and early as you can to introduce them to the idea of college.”
He referenced a San Juan school district program that helps parents get their general equivalency diplomas and noted the community aspect to such efforts.
“If the parents get the GED, then their kids are more likely to go to college,” Nelsen said. “It has to be multi-pronged. Just the university or STC can’t do it alone. We all have to do it together.”
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