Really, College Isn't For Everyone

Via Joanne Jacobs I came across the article, "5 Myths of Remedial Ed", a suggestion that colleges should provide remedial education programs to students they don't believe are qualified to enroll in regular classes. I agree to a point, as I do think that students who are capable of getting up to speed but who were left underprepared by their high schools, weren't particularly motivated in high school, or have been out of school for long enough that some of their basic skills are rusty, should be able to get back on track for a degree or certification program. I become more skeptical of remedial programs at four year colleges, as it seems to me that students who aren't ready for the academic rigors of a four year degree would likely be better served by enrolling in a community college and determining if they truly want to complete a four year program. Given how few remedial students actually complete a degree or certification program, that approach should also save a lot of students a considerable amount of money.

The first myth offered is that "Remedial Education is K-12’s problem". The author's complaint is that, as there's no uniform standard for admission into a college, there's no uniform standard that high schools could set in order to guarantee that a student would not need remedial classes.

Because colleges have not clearly articulated the skills that students must possess to be college-ready, students are blindsided when they are placed into remedial courses, and high schools don’t have a clear benchmark for preparing students for success. Higher education can no longer kick the can down the road to K-12. The two must share accountability for student results.

I disagree. What it takes to be qualified for college is no big mystery. Nor is it a big mystery that some colleges are more rigorous, and thus more restrictive of which students they will admit and the academic backgrounds of those students, than others. A high school student who wants to enroll in a specific college or program should be able to get a pretty good idea of their qualification by talking to a counselor at their high school. Further, unless somebody has invented a time machine, when a college says "You're not prepared for the program in which you want to enroll," it's not "kick[ing] the can down the road to K-12" - that's what happens when the K-12 school says, "You should be able to admit that student, get him up to speed, and have him complete any program you offer without regard to what we did when he was enrolled here", which is what the author appears to advocate.

By the same token, if a student entering a college is surprised to learn that she lacks basic math or writing skills and thus must take a remedial course, that cannot be said to be the fault of the college. The author makes it sound like we're talking about calculus, when in fact we're talking about the basics. You can go to pretty much any college in the nation and pick up a first year text for composition and algebra, and you'll see similar content and expectation for what a student will be able to do. A commenter notes that "that the National Council of Teachers of English has published two volumes entitled What Is College-Level Writing". The expectations for what it means to perform at college level are anything but a secret.

The second myth described is that "Remedial Education is a Short-Term Problem", apparently based upon the notion that "new common core high school standards will" end the need for remedial programs. I have not heard anybody suggest that to be a likely outcome of reforms, so this seems like something of a hollow man. The author seems to be proposing that remedial education be expanded to provide additional support and alternative means of completing classes throughout college, rather than being designed to bring students up to speed then have them participate in regular classes:

Institutions should provide a wide range of options for students based on their competency, recognizing that many don’t have time for semesterlong courses. Self-study options that use courseware, low-cost refresher sessions, tailored curriculum and simply mainstreaming students who are just below the cut score into college-level courses are just a few of the options that will work well with the full range of students in remedial education.

I would support colleges bringing such flexibility and support to all students, but to the extent that the idea is to create a two-track system where we hand-hold unqualified students through the process until they obtain a degree, without regard to how their educational attainment compares to other graduates, we're not solving a problem - we're repeating the problem that has kids graduating from high school and expecting to attend college without basic skills.

The third myth, "Colleges Effectively Determine College Readiness", is interesting. The author criticizes placement tests as being a "general predictor of success in college-level courses" as opposed to "identify[ing] which skills students are lacking". The author suggests that this could result in a student being placed in a remedial class that "may or may not be addressing their specific skill deficiencies", and that some students placed in remedial classes "are perfectly capable of succeeding in college-level work without remediation". The author proposes considering the student's high school GPA along with placement tests, with GPA serving as "a good proxy for student motivation and academic skills." But doesn't that take us back to the first "myth"? The reason you need to have students with high GPA's take placement tests in the first place is because you don't trust that their high schools gave grades that reasonably assessed their performance. A student who received an "A" in algebra should not have to take remedial math. To the extent that he does, his GPA is not an indicator of his academic skills in the subject of math. That also raises the question of what it means to be motivated. There is something to be said for students being motivated to perform at a particular level - "A" students tend to put in the work necessary to achieve A's, and will tend to step up their effort for a more difficult class. But you can also create an atmosphere of entitlement and coasting when you hand out A's to students who attend classes and turn in assignments, but who don't achieve mastery of even the basics.

It's also not the case that every student who enrolls in college takes a battery of tests to determine whether or not they can perform at the freshman level. If a student is required to take placement tests and performs at a level that has the college assigning her to remedial classes, but has a level of motivation and actual academic achievement that should make remedial classes unnecessary, perhaps there's a mismatch between the student and her college. Frankly, if a student is placed in a remedial class but has ample skill to complete regular coursework, that should be obvious within days.

The fourth myth, "Remedial Education is Bankrupting the System", is also interesting, in that the author comes close to suggesting that remedial education is a profit center.

Remedial education is actually inexpensive for the colleges – because institutions don’t use regular faculty for the courses, and the technology required is cheap.

This raises the question, if remedial education is so cheap and easy why are we "kicking the can down the road" to colleges, rather than assuring that college-bound high school graduates have the basic skill set that will satisfy 99% of the nation's colleges. Again, while colleges do have different admissions standards, the basic skills we're discussing are no mystery. Also, this seems like a good reason to keep remedial classes in colleges that can serve students at the lowest cost to the student. When you pay four-year college tuition, you should expect to get a calibre of class and instruction commensurate with the tuition you're paying. To the extent that colleges are able to churn remedial students through their cheapest courses, watching few succeed, that's something I would rather see them end than expand. Although the author suggests the same, she proposes that we "remove incentives for institutions to use [remediation] as a cash cow, and fund institutions both on the number of students needing remediation and their rates of success" - but provides no description of how that might be accomplished.

The last myth is no myth: "Maybe Some Students are Just Not College Material". For better or worse, some students aren't college material. Some lack the aptitude, some lack the motivation, some could complete a degree program but would be far better served by being encouraged to pursue other areas of aptitude. The actual myth is the one advanced by the author: That all students are "college material", can perform at the college level and would be well-served by being encouraged to pursue a college degree or certification. The author turns reality on its head:

After all, as this myth goes, students who are not college-ready may not possess the motivation, interest and wherewithal to succeed. These students should just learn a trade and move on. This ignores the reality that some postsecondary education is the ticket to the middle class, and that many students go to college to get the knowledge and skills needed to move into a trade. They need to have the basic skills in reading, math and writing to do that, even if they don’t want to go on to get a four-year degree.

Note the false dichotomy (the only alternative to pursuing a college degree is learning a trade) and the continued effort to shift responsibility for teaching basic skills from high schools onto colleges. Yes, our society is sufficiently complex that you're not likely to do well without at least basic skills in reading, writing and math, but it's difficult to see how encouraging students to enroll in college, take some remedial classes then drop out to pursue their trades, is the best or most cost-effective means of developing basic skills. There's also no small amount of elitism in the implicit notion that you're somehow not living up to your potential if you forego college in favor of learning a trade. If a high school graduate learns a trade and excels, the student has no need for a college degree. If a high school graduate learns a trade and struggles, she may find a greater incentive to identify and work hard in a certification or degree program that could provide for a more secure future.

The author suggests that college makes students more valuable as employees:

Moreover, new research... shows that college has benefits for employers who hire people like cashiers and construction workers, plumbers and police officers. These workers make more money than their non-college educated peers, and contribute more to their organizations by innovating and solving problems. So the benefit goes to the organization and to the individual.

We should not be surprised that, on the whole, students who have the aptitude to complete a college education will be better at innovating and problem solving than those who do not. If a police department has sufficient funding to require that its recruits possess a college degree, they are apt to attract a significantly different candidate pool than a department that offers lower pay and does not require a degree. Given the study and testing that is often associated with promotion within a police department, it should also be no surprise that police officers who have completed college end up earning more money. It is no surprise that workers in various fields of skilled labor will fare better, gaining better earning specialized skills, supervisory authority or ultimately starting their own businesses, if they have the aptitude to complete college. But let's not confuse cause and effect. Although there are benefits to a college degree, if you have worked in a field such as food service you will find that some employees innovate and solve problems even while enrolled in high school, and many others who are years out of high school lack similar aptitude. It's more likely that the former group aspires to go to college, or includes college students who are working part-time. So the question is, does completing a college degree make these workers significantly better at innovation and problem-solving, or is it that people who are innovative and good at problem solving are both more apt to enroll in college and to complete their degree programs?

When I talk to college instructors and professors I hear a number of complaints about the current generation of students, notably including that the "culture of dumb" has crept up from high schools into college classes - it's not "cool" to look too smart, so some students sit on their hands in class rather than participating in discussions or activity that would reveal their intelligence - and that students expect to work less than in the past but also have an increased expectation that they should get good grades. Recent studies suggest that college students study significantly less than they did a decade or two ago. Colleges are concerned about their budgets, which plays a role in grade inflation - many colleges don't want students to "flunk out" because then they won't be paying tuition. The net effect of this has not been lost on employers. Two generations ago you could start a promising career path based upon a college degree, even one that was arguably irrelevant to your chosen profession. A generation ago you could apply for jobs within your field of study and have a good shot of finding an employer willing to hire you. Today you are much more likely, even at the entry level, to have to go through a series of interviews for any job you wish to obtain, and are much more likely to be tested (be it an actual test or through carefully designed interview questions) as part of that process. The notion that a college degree is an automatic ticket to the middle class is not aging well. To an extent the problem is driven by a larger pool of qualified candidates - you can impose higher academic expectations in order to narrow the candidate pool while still having ample candidates to consider for pretty much any job. But it's also driven by the fact that as you diminish what it means to complete a degree program, employers must apply other measures to assess whether a candidate possesses knowledge and skills that might once have been presumed.

Meanwhile the most significant job growth is in lower-paying fields that do not require college degrees. The author is advancing another myth, that good jobs are waiting for most or all college graduates, even those near the bottom of their classes. I wish that were the case, but it is not. What does the author propose for the students she would like to see hand-held all the way through an undergraduate program, if they cannot find jobs when they finish? Graduate school?

In sorting through the comments to the article, I find some well-meaning souls, but... from a professor who has taught remedial classes:

I have developed a remidiation [sic] program in English that Rigoress [sic], Relevent [sic] and Relational 4 years ago.

I'm reminded of a story an English professor shared with me, about how a student had complained to him that she had received A's in high school, had received A's on all of her compositions while in community college, but was struggling to pass her English classes at his college and couldn't understand why. He asked that she bring in some of her work from community college and found that, although they were poorly composed and full of errors, not one had been marked with anything but the grade (consistently an "A") - no comments or corrections. His inference was that the community college instructor hadn't even bothered to read the papers before assigning the grades. But perhaps at some colleges even the instructors lack basic skills.

At the end of this, it seems reasonable to question the four year degree in and of itself. Is an undergraduate degree itself becoming an anachronism. With the evolution of student bodies and the rise of distance learning, should we still be looking at a four year residential degree as the gold standard? Even when the decreasing number of students who live on campus are apt to take at least one Internet-based course each semester from their dorm rooms? Perhaps the solution is less one trying to hammer square pegs through round holes, and more of trying to find ways to make meaningful, affordable, and suitable educational opportunities available to those who want to advance their knowledge and skills, even if that means moving away from the four-year model or away from the traditional concept of a college campus.

Tying Student Loans to Graduates' Employment Records

Sam Petula suggests that if you explicitly tie student loans to how college graduates do in the employment market, you can put pressure on colleges to scale back or even eliminate certain academic programs:

Last week’s announcement of new rules to bear down on career colleges like the University of Phoenix, which offer degrees in programs like Health Administration and Criminal Justice Administration, weren’t designed to force those questions. These programs come under a different section in the Higher Education Act, excluding them from regulations for how much money their graduates make. But the new rules—the gainful employment rules, as they’re called—could push federal regulators to start peering under the hood of more traditional colleges majors, according to reporting by Inside Higher Ed.

I'm reminded of recent reports about the college degrees that pay the least, with the psychology major being held out as a prime example of a popular but low-paying major. I majored in psychology (although principally because I wanted to graduate - I could have graduated a semester later with a major in chemistry, general science or political science), so I can attest both that you won't find job ads seeking candidates with bachelor's degrees in psychology and that it doesn't matter, because a bachelor's degree in psychology is not designed to be a terminal degree. If you want to be a psychologist, you continue toward a Ph.D., and if you don't you get a graduate degree in whatever field you intend to pursue. The knowledge you gain from the study of psychology can be helpful in other fields, but does not qualify you to be a mental health professional.

To the extent that students entering college believe that "Chinese literature", "religious studies" or "women's studies" are terminal degrees, colleges should be educating them to the contrary. If a traditional college is being anywhere near as misleading toward people majoring in those fields as the for-profits often are in relation to the job opportunities and incomes they suggest can be achieved through their programs, those colleges deserve a similar consequence.

There's a degree of difficulty in comparing a two year certificate program from a private university, that does little to nothing for a graduate's job prospects, with a four year degree that is meant to be followed by a graduate education. The better comparison is to community colleges which typically offer similar degree or certification programs at a significantly lower cost, and without the false promises or exploitation of the federal student loans. It would have made no sense to tell me that I would not qualify for student loans based upon my major... well, first because I went to a then-inexpensive state college, worked a ridiculous number of hours, lived on a shoestring, and graduated from my undergraduate program with no student loan debt, but ignoring that for a moment... because I could have simply and very plausibly declared a different major in order to qualify for loans, and also because my plan was to continue to graduate school such that my nominal major didn't matter.

To the extent that the government's hand appears too heavy, it's not because the government is cracking down on private colleges to the extent truly necessary to correct abuses - most of the teeth have been pulled from the final regulations. I would rather the concept of colleges acquiring insurance for the student loan moneys that they distribute, such that they could do what they wanted but in the event that their graduates didn't find jobs would find the insurance coverage for their students' loans to become unavailable (or, if you prefer, increasingly expensive and, with no corrections, ultimately unaffordable). The "lack of value" in a particular non-terminal four-year degree would be mitigated by the fact that the majority of recipients would continue through graduate school, and thus should not play a significant role in a college's insurance premiums.

Not Everybody Belongs in College

In "Why Do I Have an F?", Eliana Osborn asks,

I got one of those e-mails I dread, the ones that come a few times a semester. “I thought I was doing great,” a student wrote, “but I see that I have an F. Can you explain?”

Sure I can explain, but students don’t seem to listen. Grades in my course, according to the nonnegotiable syllabus from the college, are made up of tests and essays. That’s it. All of the other things a student may be doing right will help them to get good grades on their tests and essays, but not always. A diligent student who reads the texts but refuses to turn in a full essay is out of luck.

That, of course, is not the end of things:

After midterm grades I hear from another batch of students. Those who feel like giving up. “Is there any way I can get my grade higher?” comes the plaintive e-mailed complaint. Yes, I reply. Come to class every week and do every assignment.

That is not the answer many of them want to hear. They want extra credit, chances to make up tests, magic points that appear out of nowhere just because they asked.

This from an instructor who gives lots of extra chances to students who simply make an effort:

I generally let students correct and improve their essays. I teach mainly low-level developmental English courses and the point is to get students’ skills to a place where they are able to complete regular college coursework. Students who don’t take advantage of the opportunity I offer to improve their essays, and thus their grade, have a hard time gaining my sympathy. I just gave a grade to a paper after the fourth set of revisions. I am sick to death of reading it. But the student was willing to keep trying so I figured I could only do the same.

I will grant, sure, there are some students who need that level of support due to extenuating circumstances - a limited understanding of the English language, or perhaps an atrocious high school experience that masks their potential - but in most cases I suspect we're trying to prepare kids for college who would be better served by either getting a different form of training or entering the workforce. A student who makes a sincere effort to revise and improve an essay, whatever it takes to pass the class, likely has a work ethic that will carry over more profitably to other areas.

But those students who lack the basic work ethic, whether or not they would be able to adequately complete their course work if they tried, simply don't belong in college. They contribute to a creeping "culture of dumb", the high school insecurity that keeps kids from correctly answering questions or participating in class lest they bee deemed "nerds", "eggheads", "brown nosers", etc., into college classrooms. And they waste everybody's time, including their own. Odds are they're not going to graduate, anyway, so (aside from the cynical view that the college is happy to take their tuition checks for as long as they're enrolled, and thus wants to stretch out the process, or that the student is happy to live a taxpayer subsidized life of partying as long as the student loan checks keep coming in) do everybody a favor and guide them toward options to which they're more suited - or simply kick 'em out.

One response might be to harken back to the era of the "gentleman's C", the college era in which a suitably pedigreed and connected student could coast through a college program and end up with a degree, albeit with an unimpressive GPA. But historically colleges were a lot cheaper, that sort of person was probably funding his college years principally or exclusively through a parental subsidy, and pretty much anybody with a college degree would find employment. Perhaps times haven't changed that much for the wealthy - the lowest performing children of the wealthy, after all, tend to earn more money than the highest performing children from poor families - but I don't think that anybody needs to be reminded that in the present world a college degree is anything but a guaranty of employment.

What's Wrong With Higher Education

I have a lot of sympathy for the arguments raised in this editorial by a recent Oxbridge¹ graduate:

Far too many young people are wasting precious years in a university system taken hostage by the cult of egalitarianism, when in fact they could be doing something useful with their brains. In so doing, they are draining increasingly scarce resources from those who genuinely should be in the academy. And the effect of targets such as that set by New Labour – 50 per cent of students to enter higher education – has been to push ever-more young people down a dead-end route, while stigmatising other wholly legitimate routes into employment, such as apprenticeships.

It necessarily follows that the wrong sort of people are going to university, and that the whole purpose of university has been bastardised to accommodate them. That line of argument doesn't go down well in metropolitan circles. Yet the failure to say it is causing a social catastrophe, and although it is the very height of political incorrectness to express it, the case for a drastic reduction in university numbers has to be made clear.

What is that case? The first half is practical. Although most middle-class parents are loath to admit it, for a growing number of undergraduates, university is a phenomenally expensive waste of time. Unless their parents are upper-middle class, the average student can expect to come out of university with a debt of £27,000. That is disregarding, of course, the earnings that they might have made in those years when they were rolling spliffs and pursuing freshers in the student union. Even if they didn't earn the national median income of £26,000, had they worked for three years they might still have earned a solid, say, £45,000. Add that to the £27,000 debt, and you're talking about a big investment.

The editorial does a good job of exploring how a shift from universities as a source of gains that cannot be quantified in economic turns to the concept of higher education translating into higher incomes, and thus creating the idea that there should be a return on your tuition 'investment', has distorted higher education and expanded the student population of "immature adults who want to delay their entry into the world of adult responsibility, either because they are lazy or because they are scared of it".

We have gone from a system founded on the principle that university is for the brightest, regardless of background, to one in which university is for all, regardless of ability.

This means that, each year, thousands of non-academic students are packed off to do three or four years of... nothing much.

The author falls into the trap of "the degree has a funny name, so it can't be serious", singling out the boutique study of "pig enterprise management" as an example of a non-serious degree. Those highly specialized degrees can sometimes be considerably more rigorous, and considerably more marketable, than a more conventional degree. It seems to me like the degree you would pursue because you intend to actually manage a pig farm, without much appeal to anybody who lacked either the inclination to or prospect for obtaining such a position.

As university costs rise, and alternative approaches to obtaining job skills are discounted in the popular consciousness, you can worsen the social inequality that you're trying to remedy:

The conflation of schooling and skilling, so aggressively promoted in the past two decades, is unforgivable, because it pushes skills on the poor while preserving schools for the rich. But universities cannot remedy that more foundational problem. And it's the poor who have most to lose from three years spent acquiring debt for a degree they don't need and won't use. It's the poor against whom the biggest fraud is being perpetrated: told that a degree course from a university will help to emancipate them from poverty, they are finding in ever-increasing numbers that said degree is leaving them trapped in it.

With the manner of funding offered in the U.S., we have created a system of schools (including low-quality, for-profit institutions) that offer very little for the money. And yes, a lot of students graduate with a solid grounding in a field in which there is no direct market - it's graduate school, or finding a job outside of their college focus. That's fine, if you can afford the luxury. It's not fine if you end up defaulting on student loans, passing the cost of your education onto the taxpayer while being indefinitely dogged by bill collectors over guaranteed student loans that have no statute of limitations and cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

The fact that most people cannot discharge their student loans in bankruptcy should tell you something about the value of a college degree. If the experience of default were rare, or the amount of money small, Congress would not have felt the need to preempt state statutes of limitations for enforcement of federally backed student loans and make student loans largely nondischargeablhe. We can look at ways to diminish the distortion, and to shift the cost of default onto those who accept students unsuited to their programs or offer worthless degrees. We can also do a better job making clear what a college degree (and what specific college degrees) can and cannot do, and encourage students to also consider trade schools, community colleges, apprenticeships, or other methods of entering the workforce without the time and money required by a traditional four-year degree.

If I haven't convinced you, Paul Krugman offers some sobering statistics:

Here’s the question: of college graduates with a bachelor’s degree who aren’t enrolled in further schooling, how many have full-time jobs?

In December 2007, on the eve of recession, the answer was 83 percent.

By December 2009, it was down to 72 percent.

As of December 2010, it had recovered only slightly, to 74 percent.

Even when times are good, for close to one in five college graduates they're not so good.
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1. As I've used that term twice in the past day, perhaps I should define it. "Oxbridge" refers to the most elite institutions of higher learning; and in the most narrow definition, to Oxford and Cambridge.

Colleges Are Not Equal

In the Washington Post's latest unsurprising effort to keep taxpayer money rolling into Kaplan (okay... maybe they truly believe it's for the good of the country, not just the company), they offer another defense of the high student loan default rate at private... no, let's use the word "career" colleges.

Although isn't "private" far more accurate, given that they're not including community colleges within that new conceit? And for many of the "careers" at issue, there's no degree requirement for entry to the field? And community college classes to get a certification or to build an equivalent body of knowledge come at a significantly lower price? And many graduates don't in fact find the degree earned helpful when starting a career? But I digress.

Minority students attend career colleges in much higher proportions than do other students, and these are the only schools targeted by the proposal.

I've addressed this before:

[I]f privatizing education is supposed to be a miracle cure for K-12 education, why is "our students are harder to teach" supposed to be an acceptable excuse for the performance of for-profit institutions of higher education? Their students want to go to school and, either with cash or student loan money, are paying for the privilege - you can assume some degree of motivation. Why is it only appropriate to blame schools and teachers for poor outcomes, and insist that the composition of the student body should be irrelevant, when they're part of the public sector?

Also, as previously suggested, the alternative to full-time enrollment at a "career college" that doesn't provide a career - hence the high default rate - is community college. Why is part-time enrollment at a significantly lower cost per credit, or even full-time enrollment if an equivalent community college program is available, a bad thing?

Many career colleges receive their accreditations through the same agencies as the nation's top private and nonprofit universities, which would be spared from the effects of the rule (though 93 percent of historically black colleges would fail the rule's repayment rate test if it were applied to them).

You only need a rudimentary knowledge of the difference between four year colleges and private "career colleges" to understand why you can't compare apples to oranges. And frankly, if a four year college is performing so badly that it can be fairly compared to a "career college" diploma mill, the solution is to apply the new rule to that college as well, not to keep throwing away public money to subsidize private "career colleges" that offer useless degrees.

Career colleges are different only in that they are the schools of choice for many at-risk students, including minorities, parents and full-time workers who believe these schools offer them the best shot at a good job in a field they will enjoy.

If we assume that true, shouldn't the solution be to better educate them such that they recognize that many "career colleges" are a waste of time and money? Believe it or not, if you end up with $40K or more in debt for a "career college" degree that turns out to be worthless in the job market, and you also incur two years of opportunity loss association with your time off of the job market while attending the program or working part-time, you're not better off for the experience. And if you can't make enough money to pay back your government-backed student loans, that's horrible for you - you are stuck with debts that will hound you for decades - and for the taxpayers who pick up the tab. When students default, the only people making out like bandits are the proprietors of the colleges. Talk about moral hazard....

I personally believe we would be better off taking a look at student loans across the board, and putting more responsibility on all colleges to ensure that the loans they convince their students to take are ultimately paid back. Such as by insuring student loans rather than guaranteeing them. That would create a nice, equal playing field for "career colleges" - but I can already hear the squawking.