Re: TAKE ON EDUCATION INCENTIVES
- From: Aviroce <dudaraster@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2008 11:17:23 -0800 (PST)
"Spending wisely. The key to making sense of these examples is that
it
is not how much is invested in a given collegiate experience that is
important; it is instead how intentionally (Underlined) these
resources are
directed. "
I underlined your "intentionally" as the most effective way to
increase graduation, or completion of a program, versus the money
spent. If you remember those grants the National Science Foundation
sponsored in the nineteen sixties and early seventies, you will notice
that the Academic Year Institutes were highly effective in graduating
a high percentage of participants with a Master's Degree say in
Mathematics within one calender year (about 11 months.) The program
was intentional, directed towards student success along with the
selection of coursework associated with the program. The National
Science Foundation along with "directed programs in colleges" changed
lack of doctorates in Mathematics across the United States of America
to surplus doctorates with no suitable jobs. In fact, instead of
having to read a variety of Mathematical magazines to get the content
of doctoral program lecture in the 1964 to having many texts produced
within seven years. Mathematics more than doubled during the first
five years (1964-1969.) All this is due to "intentional" research.
As for selectivity, your study is more true. When a college selects
the cream of the cream of the cop, say top one-half of one percent of
the USA population, you expect great success in graduation and
application in the job market. Even the degree itself from the
specific college designates the degree of success. My son who is A+
student graduating next year from the best state college, wants to
enter Harvard University because such a degree is more valuable in the
market. Thus more advanced students would compete to get in. The
college ends up as selecting the most predestined, most intelligent,
members of society. One example to affirm your finding in terms of
"selectivity" is the American University of Beirut in the 1950s. It
was more exclusive than Harvard University and MIT. They had a
Chemistry course in Qualitative Analysis in which you could earn a
grade below Zero, absolute failure. If the unknown is found
correctly, you get a 100 and it it is not correct you get negative
100. An abusive system geared to attrition and failure. The
professors could not do that in the United States. But they could do
that in Beirut, Lebanon. Students had just about one book per course
and the library was mediocre. But look at the success of the
graduates. They are among the most successful people on the planet.
That is because they are highly selected. It is like the Spartan
placing their newborn in the cold. If they lived, they raised them.
Colleges need to be geared to student success in fact. Expenditure
does not necessarily guarantee success. Look at the Atlanta Public
Schools. They spend too much of taxpayers' money. They are afraid to
show the real result. When a school scores 26% on SAT, one must
wonder what quality of education has been gained.
On Dec 4, 1:15 pm, Me <agnesche...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
CURTESY OF CARNEGIE FOUNDATION IN WASHINGTON DC
No Correlation: Musings on Some Myths About Quality
by Peter Ewell
For an enterprise dedicated to truth, American higher education
harbors a lot of myths. Frequently advanced as unexamined propositions
about “the way things work,” these deeply held articles of faith
within the academy unwittingly mark its core values and priorities and
shape public perceptions about what is important in higher education.
Meanwhile, they tend to obscure things that really are important and
that we continue to ignore at our peril.
Many of the cause-and-effect relationships that we and the public
believe in but are not true, as well as some that that we tend to
forget about but that actually are, have to do with quality and
effectiveness.
Resources and Outcomes
One of the most pervasive and unassailable myths about higher
education has to do with the relationship between outcomes and money.
Doesn’t it stand to reason that if you want to improve performance,
you need to spend more? Well, there is a good deal of evidence that
variations in spending have little to no effect on institutional or
state higher education performance.
We at the (NCHEMS) got interested in the resources/outcomes
relationship through a project funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts a
couple of years ago (see Kelly and Jones in Resources). Our motivation
to do this work was that policy discussions about higher education
funding in most states don’t ever seem to address the overall adequacy
of public institutional funding. Of course, it takes a certain level
of resources to produce any outcomes at all. But the standard
institutional answer to the question of “how much funding is really
needed?” is typically “more” or “as much as our peers.” This dodges
the question of how much funding is enough to underwrite the kinds and
levels of performance that a state wants from its institutions.
Resources relative to performance. We looked at the funding that
public institutions get in the form of state and local appropriations
plus tuition and fees in relation to various measures of institutional
effectiveness that might interest a state. Among the latter were
undergraduate enrollments relative to the population of young high
school graduates in the state (a measure of service volume),
undergraduate degree productivity (the ratio between enrollments and
degrees granted each year), graduate degree productivity, six-year
graduation rates, and success in acquiring competitive research
grants. We examined the relationship between different combinations of
these effectiveness measures and funding levels for different sectors
of public higher education, including research universities, four-year
baccalaureate and master’s institutions, and community colleges.
What we found surprised us. Across both states and institutions,
performance relative to funding varied substantially. At equivalent
levels of funding, institutions or sectors frequently performed very
differently. And given equivalent levels of performance, institutions
or sectors frequently spent quite different amounts to get them.
(...)
Try this exercise for yourself by accessing the graduation-rate
reporting tool at the College Results Online web page maintained by
the Education Trust (www.collegeresults.org). This site contains
baccalaureate degree completion rates for most of the nation’s four-
year institutions, drawn from the Graduation Rate Survey (GRS)
conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) each
year (computed for first-time full-time students after six years of
enrollment). Select a group of roughly similar colleges and
universities that spend about the same amount per student on
instruction-related activities, and look at the differences in
performance.
I did just this for public colleges and universities spending between
$10,000 and $11,000 per student, which returned thirty institutions.
Four of them had six-year graduation rates of over 70 percent for the
class beginning in 1997. But four had rates of less than 35 percent.
Again, scanning the lists reveals some expected differences between
the two groups—principally with respect to urban/rural location and
the racial/ethnic composition of their student bodies. But these
differences don’t seem sufficient to explain why one group did twice
as well as the other on an important performance measure at the same
level of per-student expenditure.
At a different level of analysis, Carol Twigg’s work through the
National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) makes the same
point (seewww.thencat.org). The Center has now worked with scores of
institutions across many disciplines to redesign large-enrollment
freshman courses—typically large lecture courses in general education
subjects such as psychology, American government, and art history, or
multi-section courses such as English composition or college algebra.
The redesigns have been quite varied, but they usually involve
reducing faculty contact time by replacing some of it with technology
and peer mentorships and allowing students varied opportunities to
actively practice their skills.
Spending wisely. The key to making sense of these examples is that it
is not how much is invested in a given collegiate experience that is
important; it is instead how intentionally these resources are
directed. This point was underlined most forcefully when George Kuh of
the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) asked NCHEMS to look
at whether the spending levels and patterns of the 20 unusually
effective institutions he selected for study in Indiana University’s
Documenting Effective Educational Practices (DEEP) project—an
initiative that resulted in a widely acclaimed book, Student Success
in College (see Resources)—were any different from those at similar
institutions across the country. The DEEP institutions were originally
selected for study by Kuh and his team because they significantly
outperformed their peers with respect to both retention and levels of
student engagement as measured by the NSSE.
For each of the 20 institutions—which ranged from small private
liberal arts colleges to large public research universities—we
constructed a peer group of similar institutions using such factors as
total enrollment, the proportion of graduate and part-time enrollment,
degree mix, Carnegie classification, research expenditures, and
admissions selectivity. We then compared instruction-related
expenditures for each DEEP institution with those of its peers, as
documented by the Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary
Education Data System (IPEDS).
We found that DEEP institutions did not spend more money per student
than their peers, but they did spend it differently. Most
intriguingly, they spent a noticeably higher proportion of their
available dollars on “academic support,” a category in IPEDS under
which most institutions report resources dedicated to such things as
faculty development, teaching and learning centers, and academic
support staff such as tutors and counselors. These were precisely the
activities that the DEEP research team noted as key contributors to a
campus ethos devoted to student success when they visited these
institutions. A year or so later, another research team replicated our
study using a somewhat more statistically sophisticated methodology
and found exactly the same thing (see Gansemer-Topf, Saunders, Schuh,
and Shelley in Resources).
Selectivity and Learning
Another enduring myth for both academicians and the public is the
presumed connection between how difficult a college is to get into and
how much learning goes on inside it. Presumably parents and
prospective students assume this connection when they battle for
admission to one of “America’s Best Colleges” as ranked on such
factors as selectivity, resources, and reputation by U.S. News and
World Report. But faculty believe in it too, as is revealed by their
demand, on virtually every college campus, to “give us better
students.”
In this case, the presumed relationship is partially true: Higher
levels of admissions selectivity are in fact associated with important
college outcomes. More selective institutions tend to have higher
graduation rates, and their graduates end up richer than those of
their less selective counterparts. But these outcomes are
overwhelmingly due to the fact that their entering students are more
able and well-off in the first place. In contrast, when it comes to
educational good practice or learning gain, there is very little
relation.
George Kuh and Ernest Pascarella made this case convincingly in a
Change article several years ago (September/October 2004). Pascarella
used data from the National Study of Student Learning (NSSL), a
federally funded longitudinal study involving eighteen diverse
institutions and about 3300 students. Participants completed a variety
of surveys about academic behaviors and also took the ACT Collegiate
Assessment of Academic Proficiency (CAAP) examination, a test of
general intellectual skills. Kuh used information from more than
76,000 freshman and seniors who completed the NSSE at 271 four-year
institutions in the spring of 2002. The NSSE asks students to report
on their educational experiences, such as active and collaborative
learning or student-faculty contact, that previous research has
demonstrated to be related to learning.
Both datasets revealed extraordinarily little relationship between
institutional selectivity and educational good practices. Selectivity
did appear to be modestly related to a few good practices, such as
high expectations for student work. But after controlling for a range
of other factors, it accounted for only about two percent of the
variance in those few effective educational practices where a
significant relationship emerged. And Kuh and Pascarella found that
selectivity was negatively associated with other good practices,
including the number of essay examinations given, instructor feedback
to students, and having a supportive campus environment. As Pascarella
put it, “If a selective institution makes some of those [educationally
effective] practices more likely, it does so in rather minimal
ways... . The student body selectivity of an institution may bear too
great a burden as a signal for the impact or quality of the
undergraduate education actually received” (p. 279).
As might be expected, given the high correlation between selectivity
and per-student expenditures, similar findings emerge when the latter
is used as a sorting criterion (see Gasemer-Topf, Saunders, Schuh, and
Shelley in Resources). And the same is true of the relationship
between good practices and institutional rankings by U.S. News and
World Report (see Pike in Resources). There is very little likelihood
that an institution placed in the U.S. News top 100 is doing more of
the things that research has shown to be educationally effective than
one ranked toward the middle.
Given these findings, it is not surprising that relationships between
institutional characteristics such as overall spending and selectivity
and how much students learn are also not very strong. In the NSSL, for
example, Pascarella and his colleagues found an anticipated
relationship between incoming student ability as measured by SAT and
ACT and performance on the ACT CAAP. But these relationships almost
completely disappeared after statistical controls on entering student
ability were applied. Indeed, students at open-access community
colleges frequently experienced more “value added” in terms of
cognitive gain than students at far more prestigious places.
One of the reasons for these results is the fact that the experiences
of individual students at any given institution vary so much. Within
both the NSSE and the NSSL datasets, and indeed throughout the
literature on college student learning and engagement, “within-
institution” variation far exceeds the variation in experiences that
occurs “between institutions.” This suggests a parallel conclusion to
the studies about the relationship between spending and good practice
noted earlier. Just as what institutions choose to invest in matters
more for outcomes than how much they invest, what students choose to
do with the learning opportunities provided to them in a given campus
environment matters far more than differences between campus
environments themselves. These are the relationships that really
matter for improved learning. But they remain largely obscured by the
prior beliefs that most people hold about collegiate quality.
Some Other Relationships That Do Matter
Balancing the myths about cause-and-effect relationships that are
widely believed but do not turn out to be true are important
additional cause-and-effect relationships about higher education’s
effectiveness that are true but are not widely publicized. For
example, much has been made recently about the shortfalls in
baccalaureate degree production in the U.S. compared to other nations.
In 2005, the U.S. ranked tenth among OECD countries in the proportion
of young adults (aged 25-34) with a college degree, down from seventh
only a year earlier and first in the world a decade ago. As some have
rightly observed, this was not the result of a decline in U.S.
performance but was instead a product of a rapid increase in college
credentialing on the part of these other countries while U.S. rates
remained flat.
Lying behind these statistics, however, are some disturbing findings
about why the U.S. has not made more relative progress. Overall, U.S.
baccalaureate attainment levels in 2005 were 86 percent of Norway’s—
the best-performing OECD country. But U.S. attainment rates were only
40 percent and 60 percent of this “best-practice” rate for
African-American men and women and only 30 percent and 40 percent for
Hispanic men and women. Attainment rates among white men, on the other
hand, were nearly as high as Norway’s and for white women they were
identical. These differences are massive and chilling. Although we all
subliminally know that this is happening, the size of the gaps is mind-
boggling, and public policy outcry about it is surprisingly rare.
Similar eye-opening numbers document the relationship between family
income and access to college. Statistics quoted in Access Denied—a
2001 report of the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance—
show that 78 percent of students in the lowest family income quartile
and the highest achievement quartile as measured on college admissions
examinations had enrolled in postsecondary education within two years
of high school graduation (p.13). An essentially equivalent 77
percent of students drawn from the highest income quartile but the
lowest achievement quartile had done the same, while only 36 percent
of their low-achievement counterparts in the lowest income quartile
enrolled in college. Once again, one would think that the sheer size
of these discrepancies would demand public and policy attention.
To be sure, some of these substantial cause-and-effect relationships
have been explicitly cited and considered. The latter, for instance,
provided prominent support for the major increases in need-based
student financial assistance called for by the Spellings Commission in
2006 and partly enacted by Congress last year. And the majority of
student financial assistance allocated by states and the federal
government continues to be awarded on the basis of need. But a study
by Don Heller at Penn State indicated that the amount of
institutionally awarded merit-based aid increased 212 percent between
1995-96 and 2003-04 compared to an increase of only 47 percent for
need-based aid. [Editor’s note: see Will Doyle’s “Playing the Numbers”
feature in the September/October 2008 Change for a similar analysis.]
Although there are recent signals from elite institutions that
opinions are beginning to change, most institutional leaders continue
to pursue a mythical vision of quality that rests on a presumed
relationship between outcomes and selectivity plus money. Prospective
students and their parents share this vision and behave accordingly.
But there is no such correlation.
Resources
Gansemer-Topf, Ann; Saunders, Kevin; Schuh, John; and Shelley, Mack
(2004). A Study of Resource Expenditures and Allocation at DEEP
Colleges. Ames, IA: Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Iowa
State University.
Kelly, Patrick J. and Jones, Dennis P. (2006). A new look at the
institutional component of higher education finance: A guide for
evaluating performance relative to financial resources. NCHEMS
Newsletter, Volume 23, January 2006, pp. 2-7.
Kuh, George D.; Kinzie, Jillian; Schuh, John H.; Whitt, Elizabeth J.;
and Associates (2005). Student Success in College: Creating Conditions
that Matter. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Kuh, George D. and Pascarella, Ernest T. (2004). What does
institutional selectivity tell us about educational quality? Change,
September/October 2004, pp. 52-58.
NCHEMS (2003). Do DEEP Institutions Spend More or Differently than
Their Peers? Boulder, CO: National Center for Higher Education
Management Systems (NCHEMS).
Pascarella, Ernest T.; Cruce, Ty; Umbach, Paul D.; Wolniak, Gregory
C.; Kuh, George D.; Carini, Robert M.; Hayek, John C.; Gonyea, Robert
M.; and Zhao, Chen-Mei (2006). Institutional selectivity and good
practices: How strong is the link? Journal of Higher Education, March/
April 2006, pp. 251-285.
Pascarella, Ernest T. and Terenzini, Patrick T. (2007). How College
Affects Students (Volume 2): A Third Decade of Research. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Pike, Gary (2003, May). Measuring quality: A comparison of U.S. News
rankings and NSSE benchmarks. Paper presented at the annual meeting of
the Association for Institutional Research, Tampa, FL.
Peter Ewell is vice president of the National Center for Higher
Education Management Systems (NCHEMS),
.
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