Class Action Suit v. Westwood College By Students Derailed

The United States District Court for the District of Colorado has denied class action status to a class of students suing Colorado's for profit Westwood College, who allege misrepresentations in its marketing materials. The court ruled on the basis of an arbitration clause with a class action waiver in its enrollment documents, which recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings have established is enforceable, despite the fact that absent the ruling that the judge would have found the provision to be unconscionable. The named parties were ordered to arbitrate pursuant to the agreement. The ruling was made on June 6, but apparently didn't receive much press at the time. The ruling was Bernal v. Burnett (D. Colo., June 06, 2011) 2011 WL 2182903. This class action suit was filed in August, 2010.

Another class action lawsuit brought by students in Texas against Westwood was dismissed in January, 2011 on the ground that the class representative was inadequate.

This doesn't mean that Westwood College has escaped any legal repercussions for its conduct. It settled a federal government lawsuit in May of 2009 for $7 million, in which " the government charged Westwood was not the college it said it was, and that it did not provide careers for its students. The lawsuit covers a period from 2002 to 2005[.]"

The college was placed on probation by its accrediting agency and the State of Colorado in late 2010:

The Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges put Westwood College on probation in September and issued an order of continued probation Dec. 9, state officials said. "Under the spirit of consumer protection, the Colorado Commission on Higher Education decided to put Westwood College under probation," commission spokesman Chad Marturano told 7NEWS.

Westwood's Colorado accreditation was restored in March of 2011 and it was licensed in Wisconsin in February of 2011.

It also faced regulatory action from the State of Texas for failing to make refunds to students there in September 2010 that could cost the college its accreditation there. Around the same time, Wisconsin ordered it to stop enrolling students because it was not accredited under that state's laws.

Texas officials fined its local affiliates of Westword College $41,000 and put its license on probation in January of 2011.

As Wikipedia notes (and confirmed here):

"In March of 2011, the Veterans Administration disqualified three Westwood College Campuses from the GI Bill Program. The VA took this step after finding, "erroneous, deceptive, and misleading advertising and enrollment practices at these institutions."

Westwood College laid off 100 online admissions office employees based in Colorado Springs, Colorado in January of this year, effective March 23, 2011.

Earlier this month, (more here) Westwood College announced that it would provide what amounts to an unemployment payment for graduates who had decent grades and are looking for work, but have not found it, up to $500 a month for six months (less for some students).

The Internet is also awash with personal rants and testimonials from former students denouncing the Westwood College. Probably no other for profit college system has a more tarnished brand.

Thus, while Westwood College has won some battles, with the end of the class action lawsuit against it in Colorado being the most recent, it remains to be seen if the institution can survive.

READ MORE - Class Action Suit v. Westwood College By Students Derailed

Boulder, Colorado Is America's Happiest City

and Fort Collins is number three, per Richard Florida's blog. Provo, Utah also comes out at the top of the pack.

Boulder also came out on top in the subcategory of physical health, which is unsurprising as Colorado as the least obese state in the nation.

Ohio is home to two of the least happy cities in the nation, Ashland and Youngstown. Shreveport, Louisiana; Myrtle Beach, North Carolina; and McAllen, Texas were also dismal in the happiness index.

College towns dominate the top of the list; the Rust Belt fills the bottom.

READ MORE - Boulder, Colorado Is America's Happiest City

Selectivity Matters Only Some Of The Time

Does attending an elite college increase your lifetime earnings?

No, says a new study, but applying to one does, whether or not you are accepted.

The implication is that the sorting process that causes rational students to choose to apply to particular colleges, rather than the quality of the educational experiences that take place in an educational institution, is what drives lifetime success, and that implications that flow from a belief held by students that admissions officers can sort the wheat from the chaff is more accurate than the actual accuracy of admissions officers in choosing the students most likely to succeed.

Methods:

The study by Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger used looked at 19,000 students, entering college in either 1976 or 1989, controlling for SAT scores, high school grades, college applied to, college accepted by, college attended, and looking at their incomes after college based on Social Security administration records, for the graduates, some of whom were in their 40s or 50s when the study was conducted. I may even be in the study as all of the colleges and universities that I have attended are included in the study. In short, this is a very large study with very accurate data, and as explained below, a quite clever research design.

Results:

It turns out that attending an elite college (measured by selectivity) does not increase lifetime earnings for middle class second or later generation college students (who make up the bulk of all college students).

The starting point is the obvious fact that graduates of elite colleges make more money than graduates of less elite colleges. This pattern holds even when you control for the SAT scores and grades of graduates. By themselves, these patterns seem to suggest that the college is a major reason for the earnings difference. . . . They also controlled for the colleges that students applied to and were accepted by. . . . Someone who applies to Duke, Williams or Yale may be signaling that he or she is more confident and ambitious than someone with similar scores and grades who does not apply. Someone who is accepted by a highly selective school may have other skills that their scores didn’t pick up, but that the admissions officers noticed.

Once the two economists added these new variables, the earnings difference disappeared. In fact, it went away merely by including the colleges that students had applied to — and not taking into account whether they were accepted. A student with a 1,400 SAT score who went to Penn State but applied to Penn earned as much, on average, as a student with a 1,400 who went to Penn. . . .

[A] few major groups did not fit the pattern: black students, Latino students, low-income students and students whose parents did not graduate from college. “For them, attending a more selective school increased earnings significantly,” Mr. Krueger has written. Why? Perhaps they benefit from professional connections they would not otherwise have. Perhaps they acquire habits or skills that middle-class and affluent students have already acquired in high school or at home.

This finding is especially noteworthy because the new study included several historically black colleges, like Howard, Morehouse and Spelman, which are not as selective as Penn, Williams or other elite colleges. Students who choose a historically black college over an elite college may be hurting their future earnings potential.

Put another way, this study demonstrates that affirmative action in college admission benefits the intended beneficiaries without harming the individuals who end up at less selective institutions of higher education as a result.

I've seen similar results of this kind of study applied to law school admissions and career success with similar results.

Selectivity and Graduation Rates In General

Then again, these findings may only have validity among middle class, second generation or later college students at colleges that are at least somewhat selective who are basically playing the game of trying to go to a college that is close to the most selective one they can attend, even if this goal isn't the only factor in their decisions. At less selective institutions, where financial limitations and genuinely negative campus cultures can intervene, a college environment can drag a student down, even though any acceptable environment seems to allow students to reach their full potentials.

A "large study . . . has found that students who attend colleges with lower graduation rates are less likely to graduate — which does indeed have a huge effect on their earnings." The results of that study, set forth in “Crossing the Finish Line” by William Bowen (an economist and former Princeton president), Michael McPherson (an economist and former Macalester College president), and Matthew Chingos, a doctoral candidate, looked at records of 200,000 students at 68 colleges, including a much richer selection of less selective schools than the ones studied by Dale and Krueger show selectivity does matter. The study notes that "Among rich countries, only Italy is worse" in terms of graduation rates for enrolled college students, although in fairness, this is in part because the United States has one of the highest rate of college attendance and one of the largest share of adults earning degrees of any country in the world.

The first problem that . . . [they] diagnose is something they call under-matching. It refers to students who choose not to attend the best college they can get into. They instead go to a less selective one, perhaps one that’s closer to home or, given the torturous financial aid process, less expensive.

About half of low-income students with a high school grade-point average of at least 3.5 and an SAT score of at least 1,200 do not attend the best college they could have. Many don’t even apply. Some apply but don’t enroll. “I was really astonished by the degree to which presumptively well-qualified students from poor families under-matched,” . . . They could have been admitted to Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus (graduation rate: 88 percent, according to College Results Online) or Michigan State (74 percent), but they went, say, to Eastern Michigan (39 percent) or Western Michigan (54 percent). If they graduate, it would be hard to get upset about their choice. But large numbers do not. . . .

In effect, well-off students — many of whom will graduate no matter where they go — attend the colleges that do the best job of producing graduates. These are the places where many students live on campus (which raises graduation rates) and graduation is the norm. Meanwhile, lower-income students — even when they are better qualified — often go to colleges that excel in producing dropouts. . . .

[T]he only way to lift the college graduation rate significantly is to lift it among poor and working-class students. . . . it appears to have fallen somewhat since the 1970s. . . . Money is clearly part of the answer. Tellingly, net tuition has no impact on the graduation rates of high-income students. Yet it does affect low-income students. All else equal, they are less likely to make it through a more expensive state college than a less expensive one, the book shows.

The data are illustrated in the following chart:



Students with better grades and GPAs are far more likely to graduate at schools that are more selective than at those with high dropout rates.

A culture that accepts failure at less selective institutions may also be part of the problem, conveying the impression that dropping out is normal, rather than an outcome to be strenuously avoided.

A few colleges, like the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, have intensive programs that have raised graduation rates. The State of West Virginia has begun tying student aid to academic progress, and graduation rates there have risen. . . . When students fill out an online form for federal financial aid, the Obama Education Department now informs them of the graduation rate at any college in which they express interest.

Graduation Rates And Selectivity In Colorado

Colorado specific data are consistent with this general conclusion. As I noted in a blog post that I made a week ago:

For the 2003 cohort at 4 year Colorado institutions, 62.9% of students who did not need remediation graduates in six years, while 29.5% who did need remediation graduated in six years. Students requiring remedial instruction at schools with higher overall graduation rates were more likely to graduate that students requiring remedial instruction at schools with lower graduation rates. For example, 65.0% of students at the Colorado School of Mines who needed remedial classes graduated in six years, while only 19.6% of students at Metro State who needed remedial classes graduated in six years.

The question is begs, of course, is how much of the difference is due to sorting and how much of it is due to the culture of the institutions themselves. It could be that students at the Colorado School of Mines who need remedial classes are more affluent than those at Metro State, and are thus less prone to worry about whether their family's hard earned money should be spent on them when they seem themselves a marginal students who need remedial study. Or, it could be that Colorado School of Mines students need remedial work because the courses they needed to get them on track weren't available despite their strong talent for the material that they didn't study, or that many students who need remedial work there are academically talented students who lag in reading or writing because English is not their native language, who quickly recover from gaps in instruction, while remedial students at Metro State may generally lack academic moxie.

There are indications that this is happening at the high school level, as well as the higher educational level. Students who have been identified as gifted and talented who attend West High School or Lincoln High School in Denver, for example, both of which a high poverty, predominantly minority traditional high school programs are much less likely to attend college and not require remedial education than gifted and talented students who attend North High School in Denver, about a mile away from West, despite the fact that it is also a high poverty, predominantly minority traditional high school with a similar sized pool of gifted and talented students. North is doing something right, while West and Lincoln are doing something wrong. It may not be the fault of the principals and teachers involved who are simply dealing with the situation that has been created for them as well as they can. It may simply be that students at West and Lincoln are even more financially pressed than those at North, something that a simple free and reduced lunch program eligibility rate may not reveal. But, whatever the reason, high school environments do seem to have an impact on outcomes for comparable students in Denver.

Implications

Taken together, and in light of previous blogging of educational research that I've done here, these findings suggest the kind of priorities that we should have in public higher education.

* Subsidizing middle class students who want to attend highly selective private colleges and universities rather than the most selective public colleges and universities doesn't provide much value. Yet, a large share of college students are from affluent families.

* Tuition rates have little impact on the likelihood the children in affluent families will attend college or graduate from college.

* Affirmative action in higher education creates significant benefits without causing significant harm for African-American students, Hispanic students, low income students and first generation college students. These students benefit the most from attending more selective colleges and universities in lifetime earnings and in likelihood of graduation.

* The easiest way to increase the number of students who graduate from college in the short term is to increase financial aid support to academically qualified low and medium income students.

* Non-selective admissions policies that produce high college dropout rates undermine the likelihood that academically qualified students at those colleges will fail, and students who would otherwise be admitted by some level of selectivity in admissions have very high rates of academic failure and are more prone to not learn very much while they are in college even if they do graduate.

* Students who are not academically ready for college are more likely to fail at all levels. For example, the standards to determine that a student needs remedial education are basically the same at two year and four year institutions. For the 2006 cohort at 2 year Colorado institutions, 52.7% of students who did not need remediation graduated, while 19.3% of those who did need remediation graduated (from a two year program or with a certificate or after transferring to a new institution). For the 2003 cohort at 4 year Colorado institutions, 62.9% of students who did not need remediation graduates in six years, while 29.5% who did need remediation graduated in six years. But, at four year institutions with some level of selectivity, there is a graduation rate effect on the effectiveness of remedial education.

* Colorado has a system in which every high school graduate or high school dropout with a GED, no matter how academically unprepared will be admitted to some open admissions institution of higher education, and every student attending a public college or university (or one of three private colleges or universities in the state) receives an equal per student state subsidy simply for being from Colorado. This isn't unusual. Almost every state in the United States has this system.

The open admissions, universal equal subsidy system of Colorado and most state's higher education system has expensive flaws. This is a poor model despite it universality.

1. It subsidizes the very large share of college students, particularly at more selective colleges and universities, who are affluent and can afford to pay the full cost of their college education without a state subsidy. Reducing this subsidy would not significant reduce college graduation rates for upper middle class high school graduates students who are not first generation college students.

2. It admits large numbers of unqualified students who have little chance of earning a degree, who also tend to benefit least academically from their experience on average. About half of two year college students and about one in five four year college students at public colleges and universities need remedial education, and significant numbers of students who don't need remedial classes are still marginally qualified academically and likely to not graduate as a result.

3. Admitting large numbers of unqualified students devotes significant state funds to sending students who won't benefit much on average from their education (usually because they don't graduate), this also means that the state helping to create non-discharagable student loan debts for large numbers of students who won't even have the assistance of a degree earned to help pay for those debts making those students worse off than they were when they started. And, this means that a culture of failure is created that reduces the likelihood that academically qualified students will graduate.

4. This system under funds working class and middle class students who are academically ready for college. As a result, these students are much more likely to drop out for financial reasons and are much more likely to attend a college with a high dropout rate where the institutional culture makes it more likely for them to drop out.

Action Items

First, to restate a couple of conclusions from my post last week:

1. We need to change the culture at high school that are doing a poor job of sending a large share of well prepared entering high school students (such as students identified as gifted and talented), or simply to remove students with reasonable prospects of going to college from these high schools all together and remake these schools as non-traditional programs. We are doing these students a grave disservice by sending them to high schools like West High School and Lincoln High School as they exist today in Denver where their opportunities are greatly diminished.

2. We need to have something to offer its non-college bound students besides a watered down college preparatory curriculum that makes it worth the student's time and effort to stay in school and graduate, because the expectation that all students will go to and graduate from college is profoundly unrealistic for a large share of all students by the time that they enter high school, whatever prospects there may have been for this to happen earlier in the educational process. This should probably be focused on vocational programs, but this is a place where school choice among non-traditional programs may be particularly appropriate until there is consensus on what kinds of programs are most beneficial for non-college bound students. Realistically, students who enter high school well below grade level in multiple subjects or with a history of poor academic performance in middle school and earlier will not miraculously catch up in high school.

3. The dominant reason that students need remedial courses when they show up at colleges and universities in the state is weak preparation in math. The good news is that math is much more self-contained as a subject than reading and writing, and much more a product of the educational process than reading and writing which are part of language skills developed every waking hour (and many dreaming hours) for a student's entire lifetime. Beefing up the curriculum and our expectations of our students in math can reasonably be expected to make a dent in this problem.

To these I add these action items for public higher education in Colorado:

4. The best way to serve the goal of increasing access to higher education is to devote most scarce public higher education funds to scholarships that are based on both financial need and academic merit.

5. The state should greatly reduce subsidies for college students who are not in financial need, although perhaps a token subsidy (e.g. $2,000 per year) could be made as a reward to the academically highest achieving students (e.g. students whose grades and test scores put them in the top 10% of high school students) without regard to financial need.

6. The state should set a minimum floor of academic achievement that should apply as a prerequisite to admission for a large share (perhaps 90%) of students at any institution of higher education in the state (e.g. a student has graduated from high school, does not require remedial education, had at combined GPA/test score performance comparable to least a 2.7 GPA in high school/900 SAT/19 ACT, the standard at Mesa State College where about a third of students graduate). While there may be some room for exceptions in exceptional cases, the general rule should be that students who need remedial coursework, or who had a high school GPA and test score combination below the threshold level should not be admitted to any public colleges and universities, even two year programs at community colleges.

7. The state should set a standard of academic achievement significantly higher than the standard that applies to admission to any institution of higher education to achieve a scholarship covering 100% of financial need in grant form to those students whose academic preparation suggests that apart from financial need they have a very high likelihood of graduating roughly similar to the standard for admission to a selective institution of higher education (for example, a high school GPA of 3.3 and combined SAT score of 1100 equivalent). Students eligible for admission but not meeting the higher standard might receive only 50% of their financial need in grant form and the remainder in student loan form.

8. The state should fund, from its K-12 education budget, separate remedial programs for former high school students at little or minimal cost that could make them eligible for admission to a higher educational institution.

9. The state should support, perhaps through community recreation centers, educational and vocational programs designed for former high school students who aren't academically prepared for a college education and for whom going to college is not their goal.

10. The state should stop subsidizing private college and university educations.

Meanwhile at the federal level:

11. We should cease to make non-dischargable federal subsidized higher educational funds available to for profit colleges in programs with low graduation rates. One way to address that would be to set minimum academic standards for odinary student loans and Pell Grants similar to those proposed for public colleges and universities - with eligibility reopened for those who manage to show satisfactory academic performance for a year or two without dropping out. A much more closely monitored program serving a much smaller number of students might be developed for perhaps 10% of all student loan and grant recipients, which would be rationed so that they would remain a small share of all federal higher education assistance at any given institution.

Alternately, some portion of federal student aid held might be held in trust for for profit colleges, and for any institution with a low graduation rate, until a student graduated, with colleges forfeiting and not allowed to charge students for any amounts incurred for students who don't graduate.

READ MORE - Selectivity Matters Only Some Of The Time

Illegal immigrant population shrinking (updated)

The Great Recession has greatly reduced employment in industries that employ large numbers of undocumented workers (e.g. construction). The result has been a decline in the undocumented population of the United States and in particular Colorado, where the number of undocumented individuals has fallen about 25% (from 240,000 to 180,000) in the three years since 2007.

About 28% of foreign nationals in the United States are undocumented, and about half of undocumented foreign nationals in the United States are Mexican nationals.

Updated February 3, 2011:

In Colorado, the undocumented immigrant population is about 3.6% of the total population.

Nationally, about two-thirds of undocumented immigrants are in the labor force, which would imply about 120,000 people in Colorado. There are 2,665,200 people in Colorado's civilian labor force. So, undocumented immigrants make up about 4.5% of Colorado's labor force.

A crude estimate that assumes that reducing the undocumented immigrant labor force percentage by one percentage point would reduce Colorado's unemployment rate of 8.8% is almost surely wrong, however. In part, this is because undocumented workers generate jobs, both by creating firms and by consuming goods and services and paying taxes that generate jobs, as well as filling jobs. In part, this is because undocumented workers have skill and abilities that aren't present in the general labor force to the same degree, and because employers won't necessarily be able to connect their jobs to unemployed people in Colorado generally. In part, this is because some undocumented workers are themselves unemployed. In part, this is because some jobs done by undocumented immigrants are done at below market rates that are a result of their undocumented status (e.g. getting paid "under the table"), and some of those jobs wouldn't be economically viable at legal labor market rates.

It is quite probable that reducing the undocumented immigrant labor force would reduce unemployment somewhat for other workers in the labor force, but it is hard to estimate what magnitude that effect would have on the unemployment rate.

Probably the best way to estimate that effect would be to do a regression analysis that compared unemployment rates to the percentage of the labor force in each state or region that was comprised of undocumented immigrants. Given the high rate of unemployment across the nation in states with very different rates of undocumented immigrant participation in the labor force, the impact must be fairly modest.

A more sophisticated and more accurate analysis might look instead at undocumented immigrant participatioon in the labor force by both industry and region and do a regression that way (since the mix of industries in a region strongly influences its unemploymenmt rate and the involvement of undocumented immigrants in the labor force varies greatly by industry).

I suspect that this kind of analysis would reveal that undocumented immigration makes a pretty modest contribution to unemployment in the Rust Belt, where manufacturing is dominant, or in the farming states, but makes an appreciable difference in states where the construction industry and hospitality industries are a larger share of the economy, like Nevada.

READ MORE - Illegal immigrant population shrinking (updated)

Colorado's Top High School Aged Scientist

Tanya Nicole Petach

Colorado had one semi-finalist in the Intel Science Talent Search for 2010 (whose finalists were announced yesterday).

Sixteen year old Tanya Nicole Petach who is junior at Fairview High School, a public high school in the Boulder Valley School District known for its International Baccalaureate® program, completed a project titled: "Colorado River Salinity: Correlation to Geostrata and Mitigation with Carbon Fiber Capacitors." What did this involve?

Fairview High School student Tanya Petach‟s experiment centered on measuring salinity in the Colorado River at various points in a series of raft trips through the Grand Canyon. She then extended the analysis to include an estimate for the most efficient way to remove excess salts, computing the cubic volume of various filters necessary to mitigate the run-off. What was most surprising about the results? She commented, “I had expected that human contributions to the run-off from the South Rim to be the largest source of excess salinity. In fact, the geologic strata had the largest impact in each tributary.”

Tanya is the most outstanding high school scientist in the entire state of Colorado this year, and was one of just 11 sixteen year olds out of 300 semi-finalists (the remainder being 17 or 18 years old), in the entire nation, so she has another shot at a semifinalist or finalist finish in this year's competition, if she chooses to participate, as she did in her freshman, sophmore and junior years, and as her sister did before her for at least two years. NASA, which has a partnership with Fairview, did a profile of our hometown hero last fall, and the Daily Camera profiled her last winter.

As a semi-finalist, she will receive a $1,000 award for her outstanding research, and Fairview High School will receive an award of $1,000 to further excellence in science, math and engineering education at Fairview, each from Intel, although for both her and for Fairview, the reputational benefits of winning far outweigh the money. She also won a first prize worth $1,500 from the Association of Women Geoscientists, a third place award from the American Geological Institute (worth $250) for her project, a $1,500 award for the second best project in the Earth and Planetary Sciences category which brough in an additional $1,000 for Fairview as well.

In her sophmore year, at age fifteen, Tanya won an $8,000 tuition scholarship from the Office of Naval Research in the Department of the Navy for her project: "Mitigation of Soil Liquefaction with Magnetic Fields." and a Shell Oil Planetary and Earth Sciences Fourth Place Award garnered another $500 prize for the project. She was interviewed about the project here.

As a freshman at Fairview, Tanya and her older sister, Anika Rose Petach (two years older than Tanya), did a team project entitled "Pine Beetle Outbreaks: Spatial Analysis and Pheromone Population Control" which shared a fourth place prize for team projects (worth $500). The project was a Grand Award Winner in the 2008 Colorado State Science Fair.

These kind of successes are a "when it rains, it pours" situation, and no doubt there are other awards in connection with these projects that I have omitted.

Past Semi-Finalists From Colorado

In 2010, Colorado had two semi-finalists in the competition, both from Colorado Springs, Caleb Lloyd Kruse (17) who was home schooled and had a project entitled "Addressing Coral Tissue Regeneration, Bleaching, and Calcification Using Ascorbic Acid Supplementation" and Aarthi Shankar (17) of Rampart High School whose project was "Proteomic Characterization of Extracellular Matrix (ECM) to Identify Tumor Associated Biomolecules."

In 2009, Colorado also had two semi-finalists in the competition. One was Tanya's older sister, Anika Rose Petach, and the other semi-finalist was David Junzi (17) of Cherry Creek High School whose project was entitled "Charcoal and Methanol Synthesis by the Destructive Distillation of Cellulosic Waste—Chemical Processing and Environmental Implications."

A Talented Family

The Petach family has no shortage of talent. Tanya's older sister, Anika Rose Petach at age 17 in 2009, was a semi-finalist in the competition, with a project titled "Pine Beetle Outbreaks: Remote Sensing Analysis and Symbiotic Fungus Control," one of two from Colorado. Anika went on the Harvard University. She was profiled by the Daily Camera in 2009.

Their mom, Helen Petach, who earned her PhD at Cornell in chemistry, has co-authored several scholarly articles in the biotechnology field, is the founder of Abelian Energy, Inc., a Boulder Fuel Cell company, is the principal of single employee computer company Petach Technologies, Inc. and teaches physics at Fairview High School.

Their father, Marty Petach, has a Master's degree from Cornell in Soil Physics and is a GIS analyst.

Tanya and Anika's older brother, Trevor Petach, is also no slouch. He earned his bachelor's degree in Physics, Earth and Planetary Science last spring from Harvard University, and is spending a gap year teaching mathematics at Fairview High School this year. His successes were summarized when he won a $16,500 Micron Technology scholarhip:

Trevor Petach is an outstanding student with a perfect SAT Math score of 800. Petach has been involved in the Colorado State University Math Day Competitions, and as captain lead his team to a state championship while personally placing in the top 10 in the state of Colorado. He also participated in Math Club/Math League, Science Bowl, math and science tutoring, and is an International Baccalaureate student. Outside of school, Petach is an avid outdoorsman and athlete participating in cross country, Nordic racing, Boys Scouts (Eagle Scout), and the Colorado Mountain Club.

All three of the Petach siblings are notable athletes in cross country and Nordic skiing, as well as being talented scientists. And, it certainly wouldn't be surprising if Tanya followed the path of her two older siblings to Cambridge. Surely, her parents would quite proud, although two Harvard educations with another expensive college tuition bill around the corner can't be cheap.

READ MORE - Colorado's Top High School Aged Scientist

Learning v. Sorting in Higher Education

No one denies that people who go to college do far better socio-economically than people who do not. The hard question is why that is the case. Is it because what you learn adds value? Or, is it because the people who go to college are smarter and more together than their non-college bound peers on average, and hence more desirable in the world of work?

Prior Indications That Higher Education May Not Be Adding Much Value For Marginal Students

One little factoid that has favored the sorting theory over the learning theory is that the socio-economic benefits of being admitted to college and dropping out are almost indistinguishable from the socio-economic benefits of obtaining an associates degree (i.e. a two year college degree, typically in skill heavy pre-professional field like nursing or engineering technology). An associates degree provides some benefit relative to merely attending and dropping out of college without earning a degree (and interestingly, a huge advantage as measured through likelihood of ending up in prison), but the benefit is stunningly modest.

Another suggestive nugget of data is that the socio-economic benefits of college appear to arise despite the fact that many college graduates work in jobs that don't actually require a college education to perform: "More than one-third of current working graduates are in jobs that do not require a degree, and the proportion appears to be rising rapidly."

The push to increase enrollments has led to a majority of the increment of our stock of college graduates finding employment in relatively low skilled jobs, most of which are not particularly high paying (although there are exceptions). We added roughly 20 million college graduates to the population between 1992 and 2008, for example, but the number of graduates holding jobs requiring less-than-college education skill sets rose during that same period by about 12 million; in other words, 60 percent of the total increase in graduates over the past two decades was underemployed. . . . [This raises] real questions about the desirability of pushing to increase the proportion of Americans attending and graduating from four year colleges and universities.

From a study by Richard Vedder and co-authors on the topic.

A Large Share of College Students Aren't Learning Much In College

A new study adds more direct evidence to the case that a large share of the benefits of a college education for a large share of people who go to college comes from its sorting role, rather than as a result of what is learned while one is in college.

[A study] of more than 2,300 undergraduates . . . [from a representative sample of 24 colleges and universities described in] the book, "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses." . . . found an average-scoring student in fall 2005 scored 7 percentage points higher in the spring of 2007 on the [College Learning] assessment [which measures critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing]. In other words, those who entered college in the 50th percentile would rise to the equivalent of the 57th after their sophomore years. . . . After four years, 36 percent of students did not demonstrate significant improvement, compared with 45 percent after two [years].

Students who studied alone, read and wrote more, attended more selective schools and majored in traditional arts and sciences majors posted greater learning gains. . . .

Students who spent more time studying with peers showed diminishing growth, and students who spent more time in the Greek system had decreased rates of learning . . .

[A]ctivities such as working off campus, participating in campus clubs and volunteering did not affect learning.

Students from families with different levels of parental education enter college with different learning levels but learn at about the same rates while attending college. . . .

Black students improve their assessment scores at lower levels than whites.

The extent to which colleges add value or merely sort students matters a lot from a public policy perspective, because it is far cheaper to establish a system that ranks people by ability (for all involved) than it is to go through the motions of having people go to college for many years if they aren't going to learn much in the process.

Has Higher Education Expanded Too Much?

Put another way, the higher education system does seem to be imparting considerable value to the traditional students at selective institutions in arts and science majors taking rigorous courses and studying a lot who were the only people that higher education served in the pre-World War II era, and is doing so on a far more meritocratic and democratic basis than it did then when wealth, rather than academic ability, was the key to admission.

Since then, there has been a dramatic expansion of higher education: "in 1960, only 7.7% of American adults over the age of 25 possessed college degrees. This proportion has increased in every year since 1960 for which data is available, with the exception of both 1992 and 2005, and by 2008, 29.4% of Americans 25 years of age and older held college degrees." This has happened mostly in dramatically expanding state college systems with less selective admissions, much larger enrollments, and a large share of students taking pre-professional majors like marketing and communication seems to have added less value than one might of hoped, in terms of actual increasing ability as a result of the experience.

The Least Academically Able Students Who Dropping Out Most Learn The Least

The fact that learning is weakest in the least rigorous programs at the least selective institutions suggests that there is a heavy overlap between the students who are learning the least and those who are most likely to drop out of college.

The Associated Press report quoted above doesn't make clear (although perhaps the book it relies upon does), how the change in learning data relate to retention. All but the most selective institutions of higher education have high drop out rates. The most selective public colleges and universities in Colorado graduate two-thirds of their entering students, the least selective four year public colleges and universities graduate one-third of their entering students, and community colleges lose half to 70% of their entering students in the first year. In general, the less selective the institution, the higher the dropout rate. Retention rates are generally even worse for African-American students.

The odds that a study will drop out is very strongly correlated to the quality of that student's academic preparation and academic ability, and with traditional v. non-traditional student status. Students who drop out are very disproportionately those who are least academically able:

[F]ewer than 38 percent of high school students who plan to get a college degree actually do so within 10 years of graduating. Of those with poor high school grades, less than 14 percent achieve their college plans. . . . 92 percent of students with low grades planning to earn an A.A. failed to do so—even higher than the 86 percent of those who abandoned their plans to earn a BA.

Many students starting college these days are not very well qualified to do so. Many Colorado students who started college in the fall of 2008 need remedial work, especially at the community college level, and in math:

Of those starting two year college:
52.7% needed remedial help in math, reading or writing.
40% needed remedial help in math.
17% needed remedial help in math, reading and writing.

Of those starting four year college:
19% needed help in math, reading, or writing.
16% needed help in math

I don't think anyone would be surprised by a study showing that students who need remedial work going into college are less likely to graduate and less likely to learn much while they are in college.

Implications For Admissions

If the students who are prevented from going to college by more selective admissions requirements are students who are at extremely elevated risk of dropping out, and show a high likelihood of achieving no significant learning even if they do manage to graduate, then the social costs of tightening admissions standards (and thereby reducing higher education spending or making the package more generous for those who do attend) may not be as great as they seem.

But, people are not statistics. Selectivity is a good option only to the extent that we can accurately predict in the case of an individual who will learn and graudate, and who will not learn and not graduate. The fact that the retention rate at the most selective institutions in Colorado is still only two-thirds, while a third of students at the least selective institutions graduate suggest that the clear statistical trend may be far less clear at the level of the individual students. Even pretty decent students may have a pretty good chance of learning little and of dropping out, while pretty marginal students may have a not insubstantial change of learning a lot and graduating.

Certainly, there are a lot of students who start college who are doomed from the start. Their need for remedial work in multiple subjects, low high school grades, and poor college admissions test scores make clear that they have an extremely low chance of graduating with any kind of degree.

Mostly, the system does a pretty good job of steering these students to community colleges, where the per student cost of education is the lowest, and overwhelmingly, these students decide for themselves to drop out of college after one or two semesters of trying. Students who are clearly not academically ready and go to less selective four year colleges (which are the least expensive per student in the system), likewise overwhelmingly drop out in the first one or two years.

Indeed, these students may even be subsidizing the educations of students who go to college and do take their studies seriously. At the very least, they are imposing financial burden on the system that is far less than the raw number of unprepared students who enter college each year might imply.

The fact that transfer students from community colleges do just as well in four year colleges as their peers who started there suggests that the quality of the instruction at community colleges isn't materially different for those who can hack it.

Caveats

The new value added learning report is also notable for being in tension with some prior findings in the field. Group studying has been linked to better academic performance in other studies. Also, social engagement has been fairly strongly linked to retention (i.e. socially unattached students are more likely to drop out), and Greek system participants have had grades comparable, if not better, to their non-Greek system peers.

These findings are suspect unless the contradictions in the findings can be better resolved.

Higher Ed Does Make A Difference For Millions And Can Be Improved

There is also a glass half-empty, or half-full element to these results. Significant contributions to learning in a majority of students after two years -- by seven percentiles of entering student performance -- and two-thirds of students after four years, is nothing to sniff at. The study states that for most students, and in particular, for two-thirds of students who manage to stick it out for four years and graduate, that college really is adding significant value in the form of increased learning. I suspect that by that measure, U.S. institutions of higher education would compare favorably to their peers in Europe and Japan, which are notorious for having rigorous college examinations at the end of high school, but mediocre teaching and a lack of rigor for undergraduates.

The link between rigorous academic classes and learning made by the study makes the case for more stringent curricular requirements at colleges and universities.

If we can predict in advance that curricular changes, like more rigorous expectations from professors in college courses, and admissions changes that make higher education as a whole more selective, can make the proportion of students who are learning and increasing their academic abilities in college greater, then we can take a system that is adding considerable value in a pretty wasteful way into one that is more consistently adding value.

Means Based Financial Support Is Worthwhile

This doesn't mean that there isn't a strong case for government funding of higher education. There is one. Students who can start college right after high school and are academically prepared learn the most and are most likely to graduate. But, a large share of lower income kids who are academically able aren't going to college and aren't graduating because they can't afford it. About one in five low income kids in the top quartile of academic ability don't go to college because they can't afford it. In the next quartile of academic ability, about a quarter of low income kids are prevented from going to college for financial reasons.

Ability to pay is a major barrier to the ability of academically talented low and medium income students to start or finish college:

High academic achievement kids in high income families have a 97% chance of going to college, while it is 78% for low income kids. For those in the second quartile of academic achievement kids in high income families have a 90% chance of going to college, while it is 63% for low income kids. For those in the third quartile of academic achievement 85% chance of going to college, while it is 50% for low income kids. For those in the bottom quartile of academic achievement kids in high income families have a 77% chance of going to college, while it is 36% for low income kids.

Similarly and unsurprisingly, more generous financial aid packages for low income students have been empirically demonstrated to significantly improve retention rates.

Footnote: Are Some Majors Bad Choices?

The study seems to indicate that there is less learning in majors outside the traditional arts and sciences.

I'd be curious to see how the learning rates differ in particular college majors, and also to see information beyond starting salary at graduation to validate the concept that some majors may add considerable value, while others may be a waste of time for their students.

There have been studies looking at the return on investment from different college majors such as this rather ill designed one, and those usually show great benefits from a college education (with the exception of culinary school). But, few of those studies are designed to capture the distinction between value added from the material studies and benefits largely attributable to sorting people by ability.

READ MORE - Learning v. Sorting in Higher Education

Employment Trends

Colorado wages fell in 2009. Mining (-18.8%), construction (-16.4%), real estate (-8.5%) and wholesale trade (-8.5) had wages that were hit hardest; farming (+15.1%), military pay (+14.2%), hospitals (+8.0%) and the fishing/forestry industry (+6.8%) boomed. Private sector compensation fell 4.5% in 2009 in Colorado, while government compensation rose 5.4% mostly due to rising military pay. Pay per job actually rose an average of 1.8% in 2009, but overall wages in the state fell because the number of jobs well.

Unemployment in November increased from 8.2% in October to 8.7% in the Denver-Aurora-Broomfield metro area, from 6.3% in 6.8% in the Boulder metro area, and from 9.3% to 10.3% in the Pueblo metro area according to the Labor Department.

Despite the gloomy news, the net migration to Colorado as shown by moves in v. moves out of Allied Van Lines showed Colorado second only to Texas.

The national news leaves a little more room for optimism, but only a little:

[N]onfarm private employment grew . . . in December, at a pace well above what is usually associated with a declining unemployment rate. . . . September’s employment gain of 29,000, October’s gain of 79,000, November’s gain of 92,000 and December’s gain of 297,000 [show a positive trend]. Strength was also evident within all major industries and every size business tracked in the ADP Report. . . Construction employment was unchanged in December, ending continuous monthly declines since June 2007. The decline in Construction employment, since its peak in January 2007, is 2,306,000.

From here and here both quoting consultancy ADP.

Note that, due to population growth, it takes about 125,000 new jobs a month to keep the unemployment rate constant.

The public sector took its job hit in September 2010. "A net total of 159,000 government jobs were lost in September. Local governments cut 76,000 jobs . . . most of them teachers. That's the largest cut by local governments in 28 years. About 77,000 temporary federal census jobs ended and state governments shed 7,000 jobs."

The move to trim public sector workforces in the face of weak state and local tax revenues and Republican claims that there are too many public employees who make too much money could easily confound all the job gains being made in the private sector.

Updated: 1-6-2011

READ MORE - Employment Trends

Teen Births at Record Lows In U.S.

The birth rate for [U.S.] teenagers fell to 39 births per 1,000 girls ages 15-19. . . . It was a 6 percent decline from the previous year and the lowest since health officials started tracking the rate in 1940. . . . The total number of births also has been dropping, as have birth rates among all women except those 40 and older.

For comparison, look to the peak year of teen births — 1957. There were about 96 births per 1,000 teen girls that year, but it was a different era, when women married younger . . . Overall, about 4.1 million babies were born in 2009, down almost 3 percent from 2008.

It's the second consecutive drop in births, which had been on the rise since 2000. . . . A preliminary count of U.S. births through the first six months of this year suggests a continuing drop.

From here citing data from the Center for Disease Control (a federal government agency).

Colorado's teen birth rate followed national trends in declining, and is about 9% less than the national average.

In Colorado, 24.9% of all births are to unmarried mothers, compared to 41.0% of all births nationally. Utah is the only state in the United States with a lower proportion of births to ummarried mothers (19.4%). In, Idaho, which like Utah and unlike Colorado, has a prevasive Mormon cultural influence, 25.6% of births are to unmarried mothers (the lowest in the United States after Utah and Colorado). There is no obvious reason that Colorado is such an outlier in this regard, but this number is consistent from 2008 to 2009. Unlike Utah and Idaho where first marriage ages are far lower than the rest of the nation, Colorado is not particularly atypical in its average ages at first marriage and Colorado is far more ethnically diverse than many states with higher rates of unmarried motherhood. This number is so unexpected that I am suspicious that it might be a mistake, as it does not seem to be a good fit to unmarried motherhood rates in Denver, although Colorado's retention of the institution of common law marriage could also be factor and births in Denver are almost certainly atypical of the state as a whole.

According to the CDC report: "The [birth] rate for the youngest teenagers, 10-14 years, fell from 0.6 to 0.5 per 1,000, the lowest level ever reported. . . . The birth rate for teenagers 15-17 years declined 7 percent to 20.1 per 1,000. This rate dropped 9 percent from 2007 (22.1) to 2009, and was 48 percent lower than the rate reported in 1991 (38.6 per 1,000)."

Teen births are down 59% from their 1957 modern peak, about 33% from their most recent peak in the late 1980s (when I was 15-19 years old), and significantly below the depressed levels of World War II which rebounded from a long period of muted fertility with the baby boom. With the exception of a surge in teen birth rates in the late 1980s and some small, short term statistical blips, teen birth rates have declined steadily from the 1957 peak of the baby boom to the present.

While accurate national teen birth rate statistics go back only to 1940, it is unlikely that there is any time in the history of the United States when teen birth rates have been as low as they are now, because women tended to marry younger, have children immediately upon getting married, end their formal educations sooner, had higher birth rates in generally (in part because fewer children were likely to survive to adulthood), and contraception and abortion were both far less available then. Ages at first marriage are currently at or near near record highs.

We care about teen birth rates as a social indicator, of course, mostly because teen pregnancy creates an acute risk of poverty and reduced socio-economic expectations for both the mother and the children, and because, particularly for the youngest mothers, it is often an indicator of coerced sexual relationships, usually outside marriage or in forced marriages. Low teen birth rates are expected to translate into lower long term poverty rates.

I haven't seen the parallel abortion statistics for 2009 yet, but if the trend of births and abortions the last couple of decades is any indication, the decline in births generally, and in teen births in particular, is almost entirely due to fewer pregnancies, rather than due to a smaller share of pregnancies ending in live births. Abortion rates have fallen at least as fast as teen birth rates.

Births to married mothers fell faster than births to unmarried mothers in 2009, so the share of all births to unmarried mothers rose, reaching 41.0% in 2009.

The 2009 trends were widespread amongst almost all age and ethnic categories, but the actual teen birth rates differed greatly by ethnicity.

The birth rate per 1,000 girls aged 10 to 14 in 2009 by ethnicity was:
Asian or Pacific Islander 0.2
Non-Hispanic White 0.2
American Indian or Native American 0.8
Non-Hispanic Black 1.2
Hispanic 1.0

The birth rate per 1,000 women aged 15 to 17 in 2009 by ethnicity was:
Asian or Pacific Islander 7.1
Non-Hispanic White 11.0
American Indian or Native American 30.6
Non-Hispanic Black 32.6
Hispanic 41.0

The birth rate per 1,000 women aged 18 to 19 in 2009 by ethnicity was:
Asian or Pacific Islander 25.7
Non-Hispanic White 46.1
American Indian or Native American 90.5
Non-Hispanic Black 97.5
Hispanic 114.0

The recession, a weak job market, and declining immigrant populations have been cited as possible factors in the declining birth dates.

The "total fertility rate" in the United States has been below the "replacement rate" at which births match deaths as it has in every year from 1972 to 2009 except 2006 and 2007.

This year's data continues to support the very recent trend (i.e. of the last decade or so), in which poverty has tended to reduce, rather than increase fertility. It is safe to assume that in the one group of women in whom birth rates have risen, women 40 and over, that this is driven almost entirely by affluent women who are getting pregnant with the help of fertility treatments.

To the extent that lower teen birth rates, and indeed lower birth rates generally, are an indicator of a weaker economy, 2010 may very well be the year with the lowest teen birth rate for a very long time, as teen birth rates in the U.S. may rise modestly when the economy recovers, although the fact that teen birth rates remain higher in the U.S. than in much of the rest of the developed world leaves open the possibility that there is more room for a secular decline in teen birth rates in the United States.

READ MORE - Teen Births at Record Lows In U.S.