"Evicted"

When a low-income parent gets evicted, what happens?

Matthew Desmond’s new book, Evicted, looks closely at what happens to a series of low-income people, mostly parents, in Milwaukee.  It should be required reading for anyone who works at a community college or a public school in a low-income area.

Desmond insinuated himself into the lives of dozens of people in the Milwaukee area at the onset of the Great Recession, and followed their lives closely for years.  The book is written mostly as a series of character-driven vignettes, rather than as academic sociology, though he connects the dots in passing and at the end.  

I won’t attempt to go through the whole thing; there’s just too much.  Instead, I’ll offer a few highlights that seemed particularly revealing or relevant.

• Rents in low-income areas often aren’t that much lower than in “nicer” areas.  But a combination of limited transportation, bars on tenants with previous evictions, selective enforcement of “nuisance” rules, and garden variety racism serve to confine many renters to the least desirable areas.
• Evictions in some neighborhoods have become so common that they’re routine.  That wasn’t always true.  
• Statistically, having children living with you dramatically increases the odds of eviction and homelessness.  
• Rent often takes about 90 percent of income.  When that happens, naturally, people fall behind on the rent.  Many landlords make a deal with tenants: the landlords look the other way on small shortfalls, and the tenants agree not to report the deplorable conditions of the apartments to inspectors.  The money the landlords save on repairs is far more than the lost rent.  If a tenant “causes trouble,” such as by calling in police or housing inspectors, the landlord uses the missing rent to evict her.
• “Section 8” vouchers are of limited applicability.  Many landlords don’t want to spend the money on repairs to get the units to pass inspection.  And in many places, the waitlist for vouchers is years long, when it’s open at all.
• Most of the evicted tenants are women with children.  As Desmond put it, in some neighborhoods, the men get locked up and the women get locked out.  
• Housing instability is both effect and cause of depression.  Repeated evictions, punctuated by stays in places with non-working plumbing or holes in windows, do a number on morale.  Some deal with depression by self-medicating.  Some become prone to impulsive decisions, trying to “live in color,” even if only for passing moments.  Some become so consumed that they largely give up.
• Evictions make it harder to hold a job.  In turn, job loss makes it harder to keep an apartment.
• People on the edge will take in new acquaintances, out of a sense of obligation.  Those abrupt arrangements tend to end quickly and badly.
• Eviction records are easily available to most landlords.  Prospective tenants with checkered histories are relegated to the worst units, where they’re told that they’re hanging by a thread and should not cause trouble by “getting inspectors all up in here.”
• When shelter is an open question, education can become a “second-order good.”  The harm to children is palpable.

Desmond’s book seemed much more careful than Alice Goffman’s “On the Run,” an ethnography of a low-income neighborhood in Philadelphia that focused on police-community relations.  Goffman’s book made an enormous splash, but raised some eyebrows by its methodology and the ambiguous position of the author.  (I thought the book largely successful, but upon reading Desmond’s book, some of the criticism makes more sense.)  Desmond’s book also stood in contrast to Kathryn Edin’s “$2.00 a Day,” which examined the daily lives of some of the most precariously-resourced people in the country.  In Desmond’s book, welfare payments formed the baseline for local rents.  In Edin’s, almost nobody received welfare, or even knew anybody who did; the system had become so difficult to access that it had essentially vanished.  I don’t know to what extent the difference reflects local context, or timing, but it was hard not to notice.  I’ll defer to my sociologist colleagues to sort that one out.

Still, putting the accounts together, it’s hard to come away without a sense of urgency.  The upward mobility that community colleges live for relies on a certain basic level of material security.  Maslow’s hierarchy of needs isn’t perfect, but it’s hard to study for a Bio test when you don’t know where you’ll sleep that night.  And the transience that affects so many low-income students -- and is effectively blamed on them -- is often involuntary.  

It’s a depressing read, but a necessary one.  Highly recommended.

Mobility Looks Different From Here

Apparently, the California State University system has commissioned an “exit survey” to identify why faculty leave.  The idea is to help reduce unwanted departures and the various costs of attrition.

Faculty mobility (that is, among full-time faculty) is a very different issue in community colleges than in research universities.  

Here, the idea of “poaching superstars” is relatively rare.  Community college faculty superstars are excellent teachers who work wonders for students; that skill set is less marketable than research.  It isn’t portable in the same sense that grant-funded projects are.

In my experience, full-time faculty who leave do so for one or more of the following three reasons: a better offer, family/relationship considerations, or retirement.  In (cough) years of community college administration, I can’t recall a single time that a faculty member was poached by a peer institution for the same role.  (I can recall one in which a faculty member was actively recruited for an administrative role, but that’s a different issue.)  I’ve never heard any of my counterparts mention it, either.  From what I can tell, it’s vanishingly rare.

The “better offer” category usually applies to minority candidates, who attract offers from four-year schools with lower teaching loads and higher salaries.  I haven’t seen the poaching done by a peer institution.

If too much mobility is an issue at elite institutions, too little mobility may be an issue here.

The IHE piece presents faculty mobility as a challenge for institutions, and it can be.  But it can also be a way for someone who just isn’t happy in one setting to find another in which she can thrive.  That unhappiness could stem from any number of things: personality conflicts, geographic distance from loved ones, salary, or whatever.  But an unhappy person with tenure can be unhappy in place for a very long time.  And in a sector in which “senior hires” for faculty are very much the exception, that unhappy person may be essentially stuck.  That serves neither the professor nor the institution well.

The administrative job market is very different.  At this level, mobility is assumed; in fact, it’s pretty much a given that you have to be willing to uproot and move several times.  That can be an issue for those of us with school-aged children.  But at least it offers the possibility that if the winds shift at a given place, or if family needs change, you can test the waters.  On the faculty side, that’s not usually true.

I’m not sure if there’s a ready fix for the lack of mobility.  Good teaching isn’t unique in the sense that, say, authorship of a good book is.  Given community college budgets, the idea of regularly hiring faculty at the senior level is pretty much a non-starter, though I would love at least to have the option.  In most industries, turnover is a driver of hiring.  With tenure protecting incumbents, and no mandatory retirement age, turnover is lower, which drives hiring lower.  If we were in more of a growth mode, it might be possible to have both stability for incumbents and opportunities for mobility.  But in the mode we’re in, I don’t see it.

Strikingly, I don’t recall ever seeing a study of full-time faculty mobility at the community college level.  Does anyone know of any?  I suspect it would reach very different conclusions than the ones at the university level.  In the absence of such a study, I’d just caution against solving the wrong problem.  

Becoming More Themselves

“What SXSWedu needs is probably needs is more skeptical faculty to attend.”

I’ve never been to SXSWedu, but this line from Josh Kim’s dispatch made a lot of sense to me.  Some of the most productive discussions I’ve seen happened in settings in which people with different angles on the question came together.  That’s not the default setting, most of the time.

And there are good reasons for that.  On a practical level, most of us have limited time and resources, so we’re likely to try to spend them where they make the most sense.  I’m less likely to attend, say, SXSWedu than to attend the League for Innovation in the Community College.  The former sounds sort of fun, but less directly relevant to my work than the latter.  And going to both just isn’t realistic, given the demands of the day job, the limits to travel funding, and my desire to see my family now and again.

Multiply that calculation by however many people, and you start to get gatherings that draw the same sets of people every year.  Each individual decision is rational, but the outcome at a system level is less than ideal.  If only techies go to SXSW, then reality checks from non-techies may be lacking.  If only senior administrators attend the AACC, say, then discussions from faculty perspectives may be lacking.  (On a more local level, I’ve been to department meetings at which it quickly became clear that on a given issue, the faculty had only ever talked to each other.  When I raised a point that seemed like it should have been obvious, it came as news.)  No particular group has a monopoly on truth or wisdom; if a group gets too insular for too long, it can lose touch in important ways.

The same can even hold true of individual people.  I’ve lived long enough now to notice that as people get older, they somehow become more like themselves.  They become purer expressions of whatever tendencies they had earlier.  (As Hegel put it, “there is nothing in the essence of an idea that will not become manifest in the series of its appearances.” ) That’s good and bad, but it’s consistent.  The social psychologists out there may be rolling their eyes at this, but I think it’s part of why too-young marriages are likelier to split up: until they’ve lived some more, it isn’t clear yet which traits are fleeting and which will intensify.  If the couple guesses wrong, they’re in for some unpleasant times.  Older couples are likelier to know what they’re getting, since what they’re getting is more fully formed.

The people I’ve known who grew old gracefully usually made a point of remaining open to new things.  With age, it’s actually easier to do that, since it doesn’t seem so much like your own identity is at stake.  If you’re busily trying to pin down a sense of yourself, then too much external information can be overwhelming or threatening.  But if you know basically who you are, you’re able to try new things without the same existential anxiety.  Somehow, though, that sense of safety too often becomes complacency.  Continuing to seek challenges requires a conscious choice.

In the context of gatherings like AACC or SXSW, that conscious choice has to happen at the organizational level.  They need to decide to bring in people who aren’t the usual suspects.  They can highlight blind spots, and provide a sort of quality control.  Sebastian Thrun could have avoided the humiliating failure he endured at San Jose State if he had bothered to listen earlier to people who teach outside of Stanford and MIT.  In the best cases, the new perspectives don’t just exercise a sort of skeptic’s veto; they actually strengthen new ideas by making sure they reflect realities more complicated than their originators saw.  

So yes, I fully agree with Josh Kim.  The benefits of diverse perspectives aren’t limited to the diversity of race and gender, as important as those are.  And cultivating the exchange of those perspectives requires more than just passive acceptance.  It requires a conscious effort.  Without that, groups (and people) just become more and more themselves until nobody outside the group listens anymore.

Friday Fragments

Although the data uses sticker prices, and refers only to public four-year colleges, Jeff Selingo’s chart showing tuition as a percentage of family income is striking.  Check it out, if you haven’t already.

It’s largely a product of quiet, unpublicized disinvestment.  Since most people don’t see the disinvestment, but do see the sticker price, they assume that it’s about a lack of budgetary discipline.  That may contribute, in some cases, but it wouldn’t explain an entire sector.  

I’d expect to see publics -- both two-year and four-year -- start to get more discreet about price increases in the next few years.  To the extent that people only notice the sticker price, it’s relatively easy to game that.  Just do as the airlines do: keep the sticker price artificially low, but layer on top of it fees for every little thing.  I’m old enough to remember when “bag fees” would have been considered offensive; now they’re so expected that airlines that don’t charge them make a point of advertising the fact.  

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Perhaps in reaction to the trend Selingo noted, the Community College of Philadelphia is establishing last-dollar scholarships for students with decent GPA’s to fill in the gap between available grants and the cost of tuition.

It’s easy to nitpick a program like that -- GPA’s often correlate to better high school preparation, living expenses are still uncovered, and so on -- but it strikes me as a great, if partial, move in the right direction.

People notice headline numbers.  If the story that reaches low-income folks in Philadelphia is that they really can afford to attend college, and they shouldn’t work too many hours for pay for fear of losing the GPA that makes it affordable, then I foresee good things happening.  A tip o’the cap to my neighbor to the South.

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According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, the number of undergraduate degrees awarded to students who don’t already have one has been dropping for the last several years.  But the number of undergraduate degrees awarded to students who do already have one has been climbing for the last several years.

Our growth demographic is college graduates.

It’s a fascinating finding.  I’d guess that it’s a function of several things.  At a really basic level, colleges in regions with declining numbers of 18 year olds -- not naming any names -- have tried to cushion the blow by recruiting more adult students.  With the for-profit sector having fallen on hard times of late, many adults who might once have gone to for-profits have turned instead to public colleges.  And since the measure is completions, rather than enrollments, it’s capturing adults who returned when the recession was at its worst.

If I’m reading table 5 correctly, the shift has been more pronounced among women than among men.  That fits with what I’ve seen at both Holyoke and Brookdale.  In both places, the gender divide among 18 year old students is close to even, but among students over 23 it tilts heavily female.  Men are equally likely to attend right out of high school, but less likely to come back once they’ve been out.  Some enterprising Ed.D. student could probably do something with that.  Hint, hint.

Still, the shift has been little noted in public, and it really calls into question the “13th grade” stereotype.  And it suggests that folks doing, say, financial aid policy should be aware that the students we have may not be the students they’ve historically thought we’ve had.

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Any wise and worldly readers who will be at the League for Innovation conference in Chicago next week and would like to meet up, drop me a line!

True in Both Directions

I wasn't surprised to read that a majority of college presidents say that people from outside of higher education are less likely to be successful at leading colleges.  Flip the question around and nobody would argue.  Would a lifetime academic be likely to be better at running a Fortune 500 company than someone from within the industry?  

Of course not. The rules of engagement are different.  But for some reason, recognition of that seems to run mostly in one direction.

Part of it, I think, is that most people don't give much thought to the difference between running a public college and running a public company.  Their goals are different, their cultures are different, and their accountabilities are different.  I saw the clash firsthand when I worked at DeVry, which tried to be both a college and a company.  At the time -- and I don't know if this is still true -- it finessed the clash by having different reporting lines: the admissions office on campus didn't report to the campus president.  It reported directly to Home Office.  "Sales" (meaning admissions) and "operations" (meaning academics) had different bosses, even on the same campus.  

When enrollments were climbing, it sort of worked.  Yes, there were clashes around allowing students who had flunked out to re-enroll, but those were mostly on the margins.  But when enrollments started to drop, and the two sides clashed over which way to go, "sales" always won.  Growth papered over all sorts of conflicts, but when the growth reversed itself, the conflicts came roaring back, and the “sales” side always won.

Colleges are less like most businesses than they are like local governments.  They can’t just pursue money, or any one good.  They have to balance multiple and conflicting goods in the service of a mission that’s both inspiring and hard to measure.  Shared governance carries a weight in higher education that it doesn’t in most corporations.  (Political scientists will recognize interest-group politics in the context of many curricular battles.)  The stakeholders in higher education are far more numerous, and hard to isolate, than shareholders in a corporation.  And in public higher ed, the tension between “shared governance” as shared among members of a campus community and “shared governance” as in sharing with state and local governments raises issues very different from those typically faced in corporate America.

And that’s before addressing, say, tenure and unions.  In the private sector, unions are the exception at this point, and tenure is simply unheard of.  In public higher ed, they’re both common.  From a management perspective, they change the game fundamentally.

Corporate and collegiate cultures have their own logics and their own virtues.  At their best, corporations are insanely productive; at their worst, they’re predatory.  Their wealth comes at the expense of stability.  At their best, colleges provide spaces for reflection, experimentation, and learning.  At their worst, they’re insular and sclerotic.  Their stability comes at the expense of speed.  Each sector has its place, but they’re different -- and rightly so -- because they serve different purposes.

Trustees more often come from the business world than from the education world.  In an unfamiliar setting, it can be tempting to go with what they know.  Presidents who speak “business” can “sound right” to trustees who haven’t taken the time to think through what makes the sector different.  That works until it very much doesn’t, as in the case of Simon Newman.  Applying the logic of one sector to the innards of the other tends to end in tears.  Worse, the people doing the damage honestly think they’re right.  That’s why they keep going until forced to stop.  

Leaders in higher ed -- and especially public higher ed -- have to be fluent in both idioms.  If they can help trustees, politicians, and other stakeholders understand education’s needs in terms that make sense to them, everyone can win.  But pretending that a college is a car dealership does justice to neither.  And that’s true in both directions.

Ask the Administrator: Returning Under a Cloud?

A new correspondent writes:

My question is, do I want my job back?

    I’m a retired academic, and have spent the last 15 years doing adjunct teaching at my local community college, where I have my colleagues and am well adapted, having circulated surveys for the adjunct faculty union and served on the bargaining team.  The past year and a half has been difficult for all of us, full-time faculty and administration included, as a new law in Illinois requires public employers to pay into the state university retirement system the equivalent of the entire pension for the year if retirees are paid more than 40 percent of their base salary before retirement.  At adjunct wages, it is unlikely that more than a handful would become “affected annuitants” under the law.  However, the administration announced that 80 part-time annuitants would be let go as of last July because they might be “affected” in the future.

To make a long story short, I am unusual in the light of the law because my pension is below the minimum for the law to apply, thus I am excluded from being any threat to the finances of the College.  Even so, I was included among the 80 released, and I appealed.  My case is currently being considered by an arbitrator.  There is a reasonable chance that I will win, and I would be happy to return to teaching.  However, I am concerned that I would return under a cloud, forced upon my administrators rather than freely accepted.  A negative atmosphere would affect me, my teaching, and my students.  I bear no ill will towards the administrators involved, but I can’t say the same for their attitude towards me.  At my life stage (79 years old), going elsewhere anew is not in the cards, and it looks like an all or none case.  Let’s say that the additional income would not be a factor.  Is this wishful thinking that I can return, or is it possible somehow?  What factors should I be considering in making my choice?

A few thoughts.

First, I didn’t know “annuitants” was a word.  Learned something new.

Second, I don’t know the personalities involved.  Context matters; the local microclimate may be relatively warm, or it may be toxic.  I’ll assume that it isn’t forbidding, or you wouldn’t be asking to return.

Third, I won’t pretend to understand Illinois state pension funding.  I know that the colleges haven’t received any operating aid for this fiscal year yet, and they may not.  They’re doing layoffs, furloughs, and all sorts of cost-reduction exercises that do real harm to people on the receiving end.  I can absolutely see why, in that scenario, administrators would harbor resentment towards retirees deciding to return and imposing significant new costs.  When you’re trying to decide who to lay off, having someone waltz in off the street demanding meaningful amounts of money feels like insult being added to injury.  I get that.

Having said that, though, “it’s not about you” cuts two ways.  I often implore my wise and worldly readers on the faculty side not to personalize it when administrators have to manage austerity.  It’s part of the job.  Fair is fair; I have to implore my fellow administrators not to personalize it when retirees assert their legal rights.  In both cases, it’s really nothing personal.  

Assuming that the personalities involved are reasonably mature adults, I think the key will be managing expectations.  If you come in expecting to restore the status quo ante, you are likely to be disappointed.  But if you come in just wanting to work with students, teach well, and be a good colleague, that should be manageable.  

In the standoff between the governor and the legislature, colleges are basically caught between the dog and the fire hydrant.  (I’ll let readers decide which is which.)  I’d guess that most people aren’t at their best right now.  This is not the time to Make A Point.  But if you’re willing and able to get past the drama of the last year or so and just contribute by helping students, I’d guess that any administrator worth her salt would be able to reciprocate.

Of course, all politics is local.

Good luck!  I hope you’re able to return to the classroom and make a contribution there.  And I hope the governor and the legislature decide, at some point, to act like grownups.

Wise and worldly readers, what do you think?  If he returned, would he be forever marked?  Is there so much drama going on that it really wouldn’t matter?  Or is there a third angle I’ve missed?

Have a question?  Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.

Dissertations

Katie Shives’ piece in IHE on dissertations is well worth the read.  It’s an attempt to bring the dissertation down to earth, so folks in the midst of writing them don’t lose perspective.

From a hiring perspective, I can attest that there are exactly two kinds of dissertations: done, and not done.  I’ve heard all sorts of variations on “not done,” but they all boil down to “not done.”  Not every job requires a doctorate, of course, and that’s fine.  But for the ones that do, or for the ones for which it’s strongly preferred and the field is strong, “not done” is just not the same as “done.”

That sounds simplistic, and in a sense, it is.  But dissertations have ways of expanding to overfill available time.  I’ve seen too many people distracted for years on end as they try to slay the dragon that they swore would be done in a semester.    

The catch, of course, is that graduate student funding is often predicated on still being enrolled.  When graduate funding expires with the dissertation, but the real job requires that it be done, the strike zone gets forbiddingly narrow.  And a gap year (or more) is not a pleasant prospect, given typical adjunct wages.  That’s one of many design flaws in the academic job market.

In grad school, I remember being initially terrified of the prospect of writing a dissertation.  It just seemed too big a task.  The idea loomed large for several years -- a cause of no small number of sleepless nights -- until I got the bright idea to go to the library and actually look at a dissertation that a colleague had written a few years before.  He had done quite well, the dissertation had won awards, and people spoke of him in an “I knew him when” sort of way.  It seemed like a good place to start.  I found it and took a look.

And it was...fine.

It was a long, perfectly competent, humanly-produced piece of work.  That’s all.  

Suddenly it seemed possible.

Still, for my money, the wisest words on dissertations belong to The Girl.  This exchange happened in 2012, when she had just turned eight.

The Girl brought a hardcover copy of my dissertation to me as I was typing.

TG:  Daddy, did you write this?

Me:  Yes.

TG:  So you just wrote your second book?

Me:  Well, no.  That’s my dissertation, not a book.

TG:  What’s a dissertation?

Me;  It’s like a really, really long paper that you have to write to get your Ph.D.

TG:  Who are the characters?

Me:  It doesn’t really have characters.  It’s more like an article.

TG:  That’s a long article.  It has a cover like a book.

Me:  Yes, it does.

TG:  But it’s not a book?

Me:  No.

TG:  That’s silly.

She wasn’t entirely wrong...

When Success Gets Scarce

I remember high school, college, and grad school as being academically competitive.  Students tried to outshine each other to stand out when the time came for selection to the next level.  It felt like a “pyramid” model, and a process of weeding out.  Each level was more selective than the one before it.  By the end of the sequence, we had a bunch of people who were very good at school, and who were pretty intensely nervous about it.

The “bracket tournament” model, like March Madness, has a distinctly familiar feel to it.  Some of us probably heard the story of the college president saying at freshman orientation “Look to your left.  Now look to your right.  One of you will make it.”  It’s a sort of secular Calvinist model - any failings are taken as signs of deeper, underlying flaws in the student.  With each level the scrutiny gets finer until only a select few are left standing.  We lived in fear of being found out.  Rampant “impostor syndrome” was pretty much inevitable.

The model had plenty of issues.  Its methods of measurement were narrow, game-able, and often obscure.  It left out a lot.  It tended to give the winners an unhealthy sense of entitlement.  And it hid systemic or structural issues -- race, wealth, the availability of “extra” opportunities -- under a curtain of “meritocracy.”  But it was the way things were, and at that age, it seemed inevitable.

Moving from that to institutions that prized “student success” was a culture shock.  Suddenly, the onus for student failure was on the professor or the institution, rather than the student.  (I should say “in addition to,” but that wasn’t how it felt at the time.)  At first, it felt like a betrayal.  But over time, the upside became apparent.  The world is a much bigger place than grad school, and a good thing, too.

The Boy is a freshman in high school now, and he’s suddenly making the opposite move.  He’s going from the “everyone can succeed!” model of elementary and middle schools to the more competitive high school model.  Suddenly, teams have “tryouts” and “cuts.”  Not everybody gets to be in the Honors class.  Strata are starting to take definable shape.

Both models have truth in them.  Yes, the world is a big place with lots of different ways to succeed, including many we haven’t thought of yet.  (When I was TB’s age, “google” was just a cute name for a big number.)  And to the extent that we’re talking about relatively basic skills, I don’t see the point of a zero-sum model.  The more people who can write clearly, use mathematical reasoning, and know something about the history of the world, the better.  I see no point at all in hoarding those skills, or confining them to a select few.  

But it’s also true that the world is a competitive place.  Most kids who play baseball will never play in the majors.  Skills that everyone has aren’t worth a lot in the marketplace, precisely because everybody has them.  You make your mark by being better at something than most other people.  That involves accepting that other people will be better than you at many things.  It’s a hard lesson, but a necessary one.  Finding that niche takes time, and a frustrating process of trial and error; in the absence of “error,” you’ll never find it.  

TB is making the adjustment as well as I could ask.  But it’s still hard to watch.  Until recently, in his world, success was there for everybody.  Now, and abruptly, it has become scarce.

American culture loves to create winners and losers.  (I suspect that his, well, liberal use of the term “losers” is part of Donald Trump’s appeal.)  We consider the division “realistic,” even when it has to be contrived with great effort.  As Jim Gaffigan noted, we live in a culture in which people compete on television to see who makes the best cupcakes, missing the point that when someone makes cupcakes, everyone wins.

Community colleges fight an uphill cultural battle, because they lean more in the direction of success for all.  To the rest of the culture, that seems suspect.  At one point, it did to me, too.  

Success in any given realm may have to be scarce.  But I’m happy to contribute, however indirectly, to developing realms nobody has thought of yet.

Friday Fragments

I was sorry to hear that the budget standoff in Illinois, which has already kneecapped state universities, is starting to hit community colleges.  Apparently John A. Logan college just approved laying off 55 people, including 38 percent of the college’s instructors.

Folks in the community college world are suffering pretty severe cognitive dissonance these days.  We hear about economic recovery, which should be good, but our enrollments are counter-cyclical.  We hear calls for free community college, and plenty of praise from the Feds, but state and local funding have not recovered from the recession.  

My condolences to everyone at John A. Logan.  Until the governor and legislature there start acting like adults, there’s really no elegant short-term solution.

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Neal McCluskey and I have been having a colloquy online this week about his proposal for replacing universally available student loans with student loans provided by banks, using whatever screens for likely success make sense to them.  His response to my response to his response (I think) is here.

While we disagree on some pretty fundamental points, I’m glad to see that we agree that it would be silly and irresponsible either to deny adults education, or to use high school GPA’s as screens for people in their 30’s.  Even if every high school in America achieved perfection today -- never mind how much that would involve -- the average age of a community college student is well into the 20’s.  They can’t just be written off.  Adult education can’t be squeezed into policies built on the assumption that students are coming right out of high school.  

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Which raises an empirical question.  Is there any good data on the predictive value of high school GPA for new college students for whom high school is, say, ten or more years ago?  I haven’t seen any, but I’m hoping some of my wise and worldly readers have.

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Dogs are great excuses to do things you really should do anyway.

Last weekend was the first glimpse of Spring for the year, so we took The Dog to Asbury Park and walked the beach with her.

Along with most of the state, apparently.  I had no idea so many people had dogs.

We kept The Dog on a leash, because as longtime readers know, she has gone on walkabout before.  But plenty of canine Americans roamed free that day, which made for quite a sight.  Our favorites were two pugs who loved to chase bubbles.  It was a windy day, and their human brought a bubble wand.  She’d loose bubbles into the wind, and the pugs would give chase, higgledy-piggledy.  (I don’t often get to say “higgledy-piggledy,” but nothing else quite captures it.)  They’d return at breakneck speed and wait urgently for her to do it again.  Meanwhile, TD kept watch with a question mark on her forehead.

We went for TD, but we enjoyed it more than she did.  Admittedly, she couldn’t be expected to know the significance of the Stone Pony, what with being a dog and all.  But still.  Policy and reflection and routine are all great, but sometimes, you just need to watch pugs chase bubbles, higgledy-piggledy.

“Figuring Out What I Want to Be”

How did you figure out what you wanted to be when you grew up?

And yes, I know, “I haven’t yet.”  That’s cute.  But honestly, how did you?

I’m asking because so many students struggle with trying to figure out a career goal.  A fair number of them, when asked, will say that identifying a career goal was a primary motivation for going to college at all.  

Career counseling helps, especially early.  But I’m guessing relatively few adults identified their career goals that way.  

Having a goal makes it easier to stick around when things get difficult.  Struggling towards a definable and desired goal feels productive; struggling towards nothing in particular just feels pointless.  We know that students who don’t know why they’re in college tend to persist at lower rates than those who are working towards something.

For me, a general sense came early, with fine-tuning taking longer.  I think that’s probably pretty standard.  And that’s okay - the kinds of jobs that are out there change over time, and some of the hot jobs of ten years from now probably don’t exist yet.  (Ten years ago, was “social media consultant” even a thing?)  I had a general sense of my strengths, weaknesses, and tastes, and I gravitated towards fields that seemed to fit.  That involved some trial and error, naturally, but that’s to be expected.

Weber makes a great distinction between making accidents happen -- which is impossible by definition -- and making yourself accident-prone.  Given that there’s some level of accident in discovering career goals, are there scalable ways to make more students accident-prone?  

Getting the Question Right

Quick quiz: among which group is the student loan default rate the highest?

1. college dropouts
2. associate degree graduates
3. bachelor’s degree graduates
4. they’re the same

The answer is a.  Even though they have the lowest balances -- having spent the fewest semesters in college -- dropouts have the highest default rates.  

That’s worth emphasizing.  The people with the lowest outstanding balances have the highest default rates.  It’s counterintuitive, but fundamental.  

The issue of defaults is separate from the issue of “loan burdens.”  Above zero, they’re almost inversely related.  When we hear talk of “saddling” students with debt, we need to be very careful to note exactly what we’re talking about.

The key issues here are completion and starting salaries.  Students who complete degrees have higher debt burdens, yes, but they’re much more capable of paying them off, because they make so much more.  

It’s possible to find the occasional loquacious SLAC grad with six figures of debt working at a Starbucks, but those aren’t representative.  They’re outliers.  The real story of student loan struggles is the student who dropped out of community college after a semester owing $1,500.  

Yesterday’s post was a response to a proposal by Neal McCluskey, in the Wall Street Journal, to move student lending to banks and allow them to judge the academic fitness of prospective students.  I took offense at the prospect of replacing universal access to higher education with screening done by the same people who caused the mortgage crisis.  McCluskey responded, in part:

Reed next argues that many debts are hard to repay because “entry-level jobs don’t pay very well,” and he laments that “McCluskey never addresses either the supply of entry-level jobs, or the minimum wage.”  Again, you only get so many words in an op-ed, so you simply can’t tackle everything. But Reed’s argument shines a negative light not on me, but what he apparently thinks college prepares many people for: entry-level jobs often paying, he implies, minimum wage. If that’s the case, what is the point, at least economically, of getting a degree? And if it is the case that you now need a degree to get a minimum-wage, entry-level job, does that not at least suggest – even to a non-heartless person – that we are suffering from massive credential inflation spurred by too many people going to college? And is allowing someone to take on substantial debt not a very dangerous proposition if their likely destination is minimum-wage employment?

No, that’s not it at all.  He’s conflating graduates with defaulters.  The default problem is a dropout problem, not a graduate problem.  The minimum wage is relevant for dropouts, not graduates.  Graduates do quite well on paying back loans.  That’s a key difference between community colleges (as a sector) and for-profit colleges (as a sector).  

If the great fear is saddling people with debts they can’t pay -- an outcome I don’t desire any more than McCluskey does -- then a one-two punch of free (or much less expensive) community college and a higher minimum wage should do the trick quite nicely.  And that combination would retain universal access, which is both an ethical and a political imperative.  

In the meantime, let’s go about solving the right problems.  That begins with noting where the problems are.