Another Not So Bright Texas Republican

Academic prowess is clearly not an asset in the task of becoming Governor of Texas or to becoming a GOP Presidential nominee.

First, we had George W. Bush (the GOP Presidential nominee in 2000 and 2004) who was a mediocre student at Yale in the era before admissions we are merit based as they are today (although his father, George H.W. Bush, was a quite intelligent man with real academic talent and senior civil service experience as C.I.A. director), who went on from the Texas Governorship to become President.

Arizona Senator and 2008 GOP Presidential nominee John McCain was also a mediocre college student at the U.S. Naval Academy:

McCain came into conflict with higher-ranking personnel, and he did not always obey the rules, which contributed to a low class rank (894 of 899), despite a high IQ. He did well in academic subjects that interested him, such as literature and history, but studied only enough to pass subjects he struggled with, such as mathematics.

Sarah Palin, McCain's Vice Presidential nominee was also a pretty mediocre college student and known for her lack of a command of policy issues on the campaign trail as well.

Now, Rick Perry, a 2012 Presidential candidate with the same political credentials as George W. Bush, however, makes George W. Bush look like a genius by comparison to any of these other candidates, given is truly dismal performance at Texas A&M. 

…In his freshman and sophomore year, Perry struggled with core science classes, earning D’s in several organic chemistry classes and C’s in general chemistry and physics.
But after Perry switched his major at the beginning of his fall semester in 1970, his grades didn’t improve. Perry got a C in Reproduction in Farm Animals, a C in genetics, a D in Feeds & Feeding, a C in Sheep & Angora Goat Production and two C’s in animal breeding classes.
Many of Perry’s other classes involved military education. Perry has previously credited his time in the A&M Corps of Cadets with giving him the necessary discipline to complete school.
Perry got two C’s in Development of Air Power and took four levels of World Military Systems, earning two C’s, a B and an A. The A was one of only two Perry earned at college — the other was for a class called Improv. of Learning.
The future governor only took one political science class while he was in school — American National Government, for which he earned a B. Other classes outside of Perry’s major included Shakespeare and Writing for Professional Men, which earned him two D’s.
Perry took two summer sessions before his senior year but still needed two more after the rest of his class graduated to complete a degree. He graduated in August of 1972.

Like George W. Bush, Rick Perry was a cheerleader in college.

While college grades are not the be all and end all of life, I'd think we could expect a bit more of people who want to rule the free world.

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Higher Education Overmanaged

John Hawks notes that the number of full time faculty per college administrators has gone from 3 to 1 in the time period from 1975 to 2008 in the California State University system. "[T]he number of full-time faculty in the whole CSU system rose from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, an increase of only 3.5 percent. In the same time period the total number of administrators rose 221 percent, from 3,800 to 12,183." In the same time period, within the category of college administrators, the "managerial and professional" category "has bloated extremely," while "clerical, service/maintenance, and technical jobs . . . have actually declined significantly over the same period."

I suspect that one missing piece of information that clarifies the picture is that the number of part-time faculty, and the number of graduate student instructors not counted as faculty, has ballooned, but I can't confirm that fact.

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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.

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What Is Your College Major Worth?

A new study from Georgetown University assembles data on the earnings experience of college graduates with various undergraduate college majors. Unsurprisingly, there is great variation in earnings prospects between different college majors, with the highest earning majors dominated by engineers, and the lowest earning majors predominantly centered in the caring professions.

The data are parsed by race and ethnicity, gender, and industry. It helpfully includes not just median earnings, but also 25th and 75th percentile earnings, percentage employed, the extent to which people with particular college majors end up in particular industries and occupations, and the likelihood that individuals with particular college majors will go on to earn graduate degrees and the economic premium that they receive from doing so.

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Merit v. Money In College Attendance

At the University of Michigan, more entering freshmen in 2003 came from families earning at least $200,000 a year than came from the entire bottom half of the income distribution. At some private colleges, the numbers were even more extreme. . . . [A]t Amherst. . . 22 percent of students now receive federal Pell Grants (a rough approximation of how many are in the bottom half of the nation’s income distribution). In 2005, only 13 percent did. Over the same period, other elite colleges have also been doing more to recruit low- and middle-income students, and they have made some progress. . . . [But] a Georgetown University study of the class of 2010 at the country’s 193 most selective colleges. As entering freshmen, only 15 percent of students came from the bottom half of the income distribution. Sixty-seven percent came from the highest-earning fourth of the distribution. These statistics mean that on many campuses affluent students outnumber middle-class students. . . .

[M]any of the most capable low- and middle-income students attend community colleges or less selective four-year colleges close to their home. Doing so makes them less likely to graduate from college at all. . . only 44 percent of low-income high school seniors with high standardized test scores enroll in a four-year college, according to a Century Foundation report — compared with about 50 percent of high-income seniors who have average test scores. . . .

[T]op colleges gave no admissions advantage to low-income students, despite claims to the contrary. Children of alumni received an advantage. Minorities (except Asians) and athletes received an even bigger advantage. But all else equal, a low-income applicant was no more likely to get in than a high-income applicant with the same SAT score. . . .

The United States no longer leads the world in educational attainment, partly because so few low-income students — and surprisingly few middle-income students — graduate from four-year colleges.

From the New York Times.

Amherst's efforts (which increased financial aid and replaced loans with grants for working class and middle class students) and the fact that even low and middle income students with good grades and standardized test scores have greatly reduced college attendance suggest that the gap in selective college attendance and in college attendance generally is driven to a great extent by financial need, not just the fact that children of smart successful people tend themselves to be smarter than their peers on average.

College campuses would still have student bodies from families that are far more affluent than the population at large even in the absence of alumni preferences in admission and financial need barriers. But, the low rate at which low and medium income families who are academically strongest attend college makes clear that we do not have a meritocracy and are wasting much of our nation's precious academic potential.

These facts drive my inclination to favor heavy funding of scholarships that are based on a mix of financial need and merit, rather than across the board per student subsidies, as an approach for public support of higher education at the state level.

A large share of the benefit of state funding for higher education benefits families that are already very affluent and can afford high tuitions without support from state taxapayers. Also, another large share of state funding for higher education in the form of tuition subsidies is devoted to students whose weak academic preparation for college leaves them unlikely to succeed, and a very large share of these students either swiftly drop out, or have mediocre academic performance and learn little they didn't come into school knowing.

In contrast, working class and middle class students who have the academic ability to prosper in selective institutions of higher education are often pressured by short term financial pressures to forego educations that would help them prosper and improve their socio-economic status, and would help the state and the nation make better use of its available supply of human capital. The evidence that these students would have a high likelihood of graduating, have good academic performance while in school and acquire a lot of genuine increased knowledge in the process, while enhancing their life chances and economic productivity is overwhelming. The evidence that it is financial need that is the main barrier to higher education for these students, much of which is recited above, is also solid. The current system does not provide these students with the level of financial support necessary to be meritocratic.

One of the least painful ways to change this lack of meritocracy would be to concentrate funds currently handed out indiscriminately to lower in state tuition for all at public institutions of higher education to provide grant aid to students with strong academic ability and financial need, rather than using those scarce public funds less efficiency to subsidize students from high income families and students whose marginal academic performance and standardized test scores to date indicate that they are likely to benefit less from higher education.

For example, if subsidies were denied to in state students from the top 25% in affluence in the current student body and from students in the bottom 25% in academic ability (two groups with not all that much overlap in raw number terms), the per student state subsidy for the remaining students could be roughly doubled, greatly increasing the affordability of higher education for academically able students, with no change in overall higher education spending.

This change in policy would probably actually increase the number of degrees awarded by public institutions of higher education, because increased enrollment and graduation rates for academically able students with financial need would probably have more of an effect than the decline in the number of academically marginal students who still manage to graduate and in the number of affluent students who decide not to go to college due to the absence of a state subsidy.

Of course, more funding for higher education may still be necessary. But it may be easier to secure public support for this spending when it is clear that it is being spent only to help those students who have both financial need and strong academic ability, and hence is more likely to produce economic benefits for the society at large.

Also, rather than assuaging our collective consciences by believing that we are doing a favor to academically marginal high school graduates admitted to open enrollment college and community colleges with state subsidies knowing full well that they are very likely to drop out in a year or two, possibly with student loans to pay and no degree to help them pay for those loans, we need to look harder at what kinds of programs and assistance for these kids would be more likely to produce results for them, particularly for those students who aren't inclined to enter military service, which has historically been one of the main American institutions providing a structured start in life to kids who aren't college bound.

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College Graduates Usually Live With Parents After Graduating

When I graduated from college, I went straight to law school, and from law school, straight to a home that my wife and I shared with no one else but our cat.  I've never moved back in with my parents and neither did my brother after he graduated from college, nor did either of our spouses.  But, this pattern is increasingly rare. 

A new survey discussed by Time Magazine finds that 85% of college graduates move back in with their parents after graduating from college.  The iconic modern American twentysomething is comic strip character Dustin, who spends days looking for jobs and nights at home with his parents, and his undead television comedy counterpart "George" (played by Ellen Muth) in the series "Dead Like Me," both of which presciently debuted before the current economy made their protagonists' experiences so routine.  What is driving the trend?

Times are undeniably tough. Reports have placed the unemployment rate for the under-25 group as high as 54%. Many of these unemployed graduates are choosing to go into higher education in an attempt to wait out the job market, while others are going anywhere — and doing anything — for work. Meanwhile, moving back home helps with expenses and paying off student loans.

Failure to launch, is no longer the exception.  It is the norm in the current economy.  This also helps to explain why more and more young twenty-somethings are deferring getting married and having kids.  Household formation rates are at record lows.  We are experience the baby boom in reverse.

The particularly troubling part is that missteps at the beginning of a career often have a disproportionate impact on a person's entire work life.  If this is really just a temporary bump in the road, it isn't that big a deal in the greater scheme of things, but this may be a far more serious case of a nascent lost generation.  When the economy picks up again, that big businesses and professional firms that would have hired people from the last few crops of college graduates to entry level jobs that put those hires on a path to high end careers are likely to hire almost entirely from the most recent crop of new graduates, rather than trying to locate promising talent that was missed in the prior years when hiring was stopped or slowed.  Even for those new graduates who wash out of their plum first jobs a few years later as firms winow out all but the most talented prospects whom they promote, not starting off at a plum job may make the difference between being able to pay off students loans in five years and being able to pay off student loans in twenty years.

For bright new college graduates, their prospects are not totally crushed.  The current bought of unemployment is probably cyclic.  When the economy comes back, there will be jobs and it is always better to be in the job market with a college degree than to be without one.  But, jobless new graduates are left in a particularly frustrating position.  While commentators like David Brooks wants to call them lazy, what can they do?

It’s difficult to argue that they need to go to college, because they did. It’s difficult to argue that they can’t move to new jobs (unlikely to be homeowners) or suffer high health care costs (doesn’t health care reform allow employers to push their health costs onto their parents’ employer?). Unless we think that the graduating class of 2008 is fundamentally worse than the graduate class of 2006 I don’t see a technology problem.

Also for fun, the graduating classes post-Recession have increasingly large student debt loans, which should lower the reservation wage they’ll accept due to liquidity pressures. So the idea that everyone 20-24 is on vacation is harder to accept compared to earlier years.

New college graduates emerging out into the world this year are no more, and no less than unlucky.  They should have been born a few years earlier or later than the year that I graduated from high school, but they weren't.

We can hope, at least, that this will be merely a temporary circumstance.  But, it isn't impossible that this trend will endure.  For example, one of the major forces driving Islamic terrorism in the world is the existence of an immense class of unemployed college graduates across the oil rich states of the Middle East and North Africa.  Indeed, the suicide of a once too often discouraged college graduate in Tunisia was the spark the set off the wave of revolutions that have dislodged or tried to remove authoritarian regimes across tthe regime.  Similarly, this phenomena has been the norm in Japan ever since it experienced its housing bubble collapse triggered lost decade, long before the financial crisis, and it has defined a whole generation since then.  There is not obvious end to that trend on the horizon in Japan.

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The New American Work Force

[I]n 1954, about 96 percent of American men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked. Today that number is around 80 percent. One-fifth of all men in their prime working ages are not getting up and going to work. According to figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States has a smaller share of prime age men in the work force than any other G-7 nation. The number of Americans on the permanent disability rolls, meanwhile, has steadily increased. Ten years ago, 5 million Americans collected a federal disability benefit. Now 8.2 million do.…There are probably more idle men now than at any time since the Great Depression, and this time the problem is mostly structural, not cyclical.

From Tyler Cohen at the Marginal Revolution citing David Brooks at the New York Times.

In parallel with the shift Cohen notes, the percentage of adult women in the work force has almost doubled from about 32% to about 65%.  About one in five American women will never have children, and the vast majority of those who do have children will also work for many years while they have children, sometimes even when the children are infants.  Also, both men and women are entering the work force later because they are more likely to finish high school and attend college, and a much larger number of working age adults are incarcerated now than were in 1954.

Finally, of course, unemployment rates are just under the double digits as we creep out of the recession caused by the financial crisis, and men have taken more of a hit in the current recession than women.  In contrast, 1954 was a point of relatively low unemployment, driven by a manufacturing economy that was serving a world market whose own capacity had not yet recovered from the capital destruction of World War II and the millions of men permanently removed from the work force by that war.

I'm not ready to jump to the "loser men" interpretation  that Cohen, citing David Brooks, does.  An increased number of permanent disability claims is to be expected as a generation of blue collar baby boomers ages.  Total labor force participation relative to the working aged population as a whole is at all time highs, unrivaled anywhere else in the world, and Americans work longer hours that workers in any other country.

The working aged men who are withdrawing from the labor force, in addition to growing ranks of graduate students and inmates and disabled blue collar workers, are mostly early retirees who have played by the rules, worked hard, saved money, raised children, sent them to college and are retiring early because they are prosperous, not because they are lazy.  Many young retirees use their years of early retirement to give back to the community and their families, contributions that were often slighted during the hectic years when they built up their nest eggs.  Early retirement is the American answer to the fact that we have so much less work-life balance, longer work weeks, and less vacation time than our developed world counterparts.  For my druthers, I'd prefer an economy where the average American works fewer hours per year, unemployment is lower, early retirement is rare because most people love their jobs, and men and women balance work and family in more similar ways to each other than we do today.  But, until we reach that day, I am not going to grudge the time that working age men who toiled intensely for a few decades and accrued a nest eggs take to retire early and smell the roses.

My father was anything but an early retiree, but what he spends his time doing in retirement is typical of retirees in reasonably good health of all ages.  He visits grandchildren and stepgrandchildren.  He helps an urban Cincinnati church reimagine itself and develop a plan for raising funds and turning itself around.  He directs a youth choir, commissioned the composition of one hymn and wrote another hymn himself.  He is civically active, writing letters to the editor and op-ed columns relevant to his professional experience.  He participates in a gourmet group and a community choir.  He keeps his home in good repair.  He keeps a watchful eye on the good health and well being of his neighbors and the neighborhood's esprit de corps.  He takes steps to move forward efforts to convert smelly feedlot manure into a renewable energy source.  He set up a volunteer training program for people in his small town and established a lecture series in his old department.  He stays connected to the people he has spent a lifetime building ties to across the nation and the world.  Of necessity, he spends a lot more time than he once did tending to his own good health, and as a consequence of his age, spends more time reading obituaries and attending funerals than he once did.  He spends more time on vacation travel than he once did, but no more than a typical French or German bureaucrat in the prime of his career does.  Just as we strive to find meaningful work in our lives working for pay, and some of us achieve that, we strive to find meaningful leisure in our lives when we are not working for pay and some of us achieve that as well.

What my father does in his retirement is not the same as work, admittedly.  He no longer has to fight pitched bureaucratic battles with the university facilities department over furniture acquisitions for his department.  He longer spends hours grading papers from students in his classes.  He no longer bears primary responsibility for finding internship opportunities for three dozen graduate students a year.  He doesn't have to deal with office politics or admissions decisions.  His days of pouring over long technical reports and attending endless meetings while serving as an advisor to a federal nuclear waste disposal project have come to an end.  But, like most retirees, early and late, he is not an "idle man."  The kind of person who works hard enough to retire early, even more so than the usual retiree, usually is constitutionally incapable of being idle even if they tried.  Early retirement may leave our nation with more really good golfers than we really need, but if one takes it as a given that economic production is a means to an end, rather than an end in and of itself, something economists sometimes forget, this shouldn't be terribly troubling.

One can argue that an economic system that compensates some of our most skilled physicians, executives, lawyers and engineers so well that a large fraction of them withdraw their valuable skills from the monetary economy early is out of kilter.  Surely, my inlaws, who are both medical doctors and both retired early, would have probably done so a little bit later if medical doctors were paid less than they are in our economy and they needs to work longer to be economically self-sufficient.  In that world, they would have spend a few more years treating patients and a little less time playing golf in their golden years.

But, I can hardly fault them. They were cogs in the machine and did what made sense at the time.  The way that the profession was designed when they were actively participating in it, medical doctors had to work exceedingly long hours and carry pagers whereever they went missing children's birthday parties and family time after school, foregoing extended vacations, and generally giving extremely intensely of themselves to serve large numbers of people in medical need with cutting edge skills and technology that provided great benefit to those patients.  They didn't have the option of living more balanced lives while they were working, and that system had built into it the incentive of an early retirement as a reward for that very intense work using skills so scarce that the United States established an immigration visa to secure people with these skills that it was unable to produce in sufficient numbers at home.  If the hope of early retirement hadn't been available in the long run, lots of doctors in their generation would probably have decided that their toil simply wasn't worth it and would have deprived the health care system of their skills far sooner.

The economy at large is experiencing basically the opposite of what most of academia is experiencing.  While old academics are lingering in their tenure track positions long past the traditional retirement age, leaving little room for the ranks of new professors seeking to fill their shoes, in hot parts of the private sector, the millionaire entrepreneurs and executives and physicians of the last long economic boom are making way for their ambitious, young, tech savvy successors.

Indeed, one of the many reasons that upper middle class managerial and professional workers experience low rates of structural unemployment than less skilled workers is that upper middle class workers can afford to retire early and free up jobs for younger workers.  In contrast, many blue collar workers often can't hope to save enough too retire early and continue to fill jobs that reduce the opportunities available for their younger successors.  Still, many middle class, as opposed to upper middle class retirees are workers who have been laid off from long, physically demanding careers as soldiers, as cops, as firemen, and factory workers whose unions, aware that large numbers of them would experience permanent disabilities anyway if they didn't retire early, worked with management to desire jobs that allow for early retirement.

Getting up and going to a paying job is something that people do because they need to support themselves and their families, and because the economy needs certain jobs to get done.  There is no shame in working and no one wants to be unable to support themselves.  But, it is a mistake to assume that getting up and going to a paying job has intrinsic moral value.  There is nothing morally wrong with an early retiree in his early 50s lingering over the newspaper while having breakfast, and spending the rest of his day doing what he thinks is the most valuable use of his time when money is not an object.

Economists tend to think that rational actors want nothing more than more money.  But, most people simply want to have enough money to allow them to be secure in their ability to meet their comfortable but modest economic needs.  Once that goal is accomplished, increasingly sooner for much of the nation's upper middle class in this more prosperous age, earning more money becomes a much lower priority goal.  Sometimes these activities will produce money anyway, but money is no longer the point.

I'm sure that a reporter with a little gumption could find men who don't fit the narrative that I've outlined and fall into the stereotype that David Brooks is trying to conjure. 

I know of several men with good educations and/or professional experience in Denver who spent time as homemaker husbands and/or returned to school for more education, when their own careers hit bumps during bad job markets and their wives had jobs.  Yet, isn't this something that the feminist revolution has been bracing us for, and encourging us to welcome, over the last several decades?  And, at any rate, this remains a statistically minor blip that only accentuates a larger trend of more people seeking graduate educations, blue collar boomers wearing their bodies out, more people spending long years in prison, more people retiring early, and a bad economy driving up unemployment rates.

I'm sure that a not insignificant number of working aged men, particularly men with criminal records or substance abuse problems have simply given up after long, fruitless job hunts, are dependent upon family or friends or lovers, and do little but drink too much and watch television.  In earlier days, when our economy needed lots of unskilled labor for mindless jobs because we hadn't yet mastered automation, people like that would have worked at abundant assembly lines all work and gotten drunk and wasted time after hours and on the weekends.  Now, a lot of that work has been offshored or automated.  There are still unskilled mindless jobs in our economy, but there aren't nearly as many as their used to be, while there are almost as many people chasing after them.

But, for the most part, America's meager safety net doesn't afford men who are not financially secure early retirees the option of leaving the labor force whether they want to or not.  More so than any other developed nation in the world, Americans must work or starve and die.  Leaving the work force is a very expensive luxury purchase for most Americans not to be made lightly, and men and women alike do so in our economy at their peril.

Like any other nation, we have "loser men."  We also have "loser women," "loser children" and "loser seniors."  But, for the most part, those loser men are the men who have no choice but to continue working at unfulfilling, dead end, low paying jobs because they have no other choice and didn't manage to save anything for their futures, not the early retirees who have left the work force entirely.

READ MORE - The New American Work Force

Scott Adams On College Curriculums

I understand why the top students in America study physics, chemistry, calculus and classic literature. The kids in this brainy group are the future professors, scientists, thinkers and engineers who will propel civilization forward. But why do we make B students sit through these same classes? That's like trying to train your cat to do your taxes—a waste of time and money. Wouldn't it make more sense to teach B students something useful, like entrepreneurship?

From here, by Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame.

FWIW, business majors at Miami University of Oxford, Ohio have to take a semester of calculus, or at least they did when I was a part-time student there, and I had something of Adams' view of that requirement for them.

The theory was that calculus was necessary for them to understand economics, but, in practice, it was simply a hurdle to keep out lots of people who probably could have been very successful in business but were weak in high level quantitative skills, or simply intimidated by the requirement.

The reality is that nobody in the business world ever does calculus (or for that matter trig, which is often considered a pre-requisite for calculus), and that even key calculus concepts in economics, which can be taught in a non-mathematical way, aren't used outside a very narrow group of people who also need advanced economics, in the business world. Plenty of business lawyers have trouble doing compound interest calculations (although they sometimes resort to algebra), and tend to get uncomfortable when non-linear equations come into play.

Also, FWIW, my cats always filed their tax returns when required to do so as a result of their taxable income (which just happened to be never).

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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

Metro State To Become Denver State University

Whatever. The Denver Urbanism blog has the story.

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The Japanese Business Model For Teacher Pay

There are lots of differences between the prevailing American model and the Japanese model for K-12 education. One of those differences is that Japanese schools often have class sizes that many U.S. schools would consider unacceptably large, but use these larger class sizes to make it feasible to pay teachers higher salaries and generally, to build up the prestige of teaching as a profession. Also, many tasks that would be done by paid staff in American schools, like a significant share of the janitorial work and photocopying, is done by students in Japan, again, freeing up resources for higher teacher salaries. American law professors routinely teach classes of ninety students. Almost no high school teachers in the United States do that, although such large class sizes are unheard of in Japan.

Nicholas Kristoff argues, reasonably, that teachers are underpaid:

Until a few decades ago, employment discrimination perversely strengthened our teaching force. Brilliant women became elementary school teachers, because better jobs weren’t open to them. It was profoundly unfair, but the discrimination did benefit America’s children.

These days, brilliant women become surgeons and investment bankers — and 47 percent of America’s kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes (as measured by SAT scores). The figure is from a study by McKinsey & Company, “Closing the Talent Gap.”

Changes in relative pay have reinforced the problem. In 1970, in New York City, a newly minted teacher at a public school earned about $2,000 less in salary than a starting lawyer at a prominent law firm. These days the lawyer takes home, including bonus, $115,000 more than the teacher, the McKinsey study found.

He also cites some studies that argue that good teachers produce good student results, although the general trend is that instructional inputs are related only dimly as second or third order effects to student academic performance and life success.

But, part of the reason that demonstrated results from instructional inputs are so equivocal, is because almost everybody is using the same basic model: 180 days a year of school for days of less than eight hours, modest amounts of homework, teachers mostly drawn from conventional teacher certification programs in public schools with reasonably similar class sizes, and low career long pay prospects for someone with a college degree. Private religious schools don't pay teachers very well either. There are differences, but those differences are mostly modest.

A few elite secular private schools pay teachers very well, but given the elite character of the incoming student body which is overwhelmingly either upper middle class, rich, or extremely academically talented, it is hard to tell if good teachers or good students are driving the results. Also, these schools typically have not only highly paid teachers but very modest class sizes, which make their model unattainable without immensely larger K-12 budgets.

The public will simply does not exist to pay for a system of public schools where the average student-teacher ratio is 8:1 and the average teacher makes $90,000 a year. The more typical story is like this one from today:

The fifth-largest school district in Colorado this afternoon expects to announce $30 million in cuts — including jobs and student activities, as well as increased class sizes — to meet its 2011-12 budget.

Today at 3:30 p.m., Adams 12 Five Star Superintendent Chris Gdowski will announce the proposed cuts, including an anticipated 185 job cuts. Last year, the district cut 188 full-time positions. Over the past five years, the district has cut $38 million from its budget.

For the 2010-11 school year, the operating budget was $268.8 million, about 88 percent of which was devoted to employee salaries and benefits.

Even if we did, we wouldn't get the results you see at Groton in classes full of kids who are two grade levels behind by the third grade, may not get a square meal on the weekends, have an older sibling in a gang, live in a single parent home with a parent who dropped out of high school, and are intermittently homeless. Government stinginess towards children in the United States is not limited to education spending.

On the other hand, the Detroit model: dramatically increasing class sizes while paying their teachers 30% below the going rate for teachers in the state, despite the fact that they are teaching students with the greatest educational needs, and simultaneously increasing commuting time for students on their way to and from school, is pretty surely not a good way to improve educational quality either. To some extent, you get what you pay for.

Nobody has ever tried in recent history for a sustained period to set up a K-12 education system in which entry level teachers teaching ordinary average neighborhood kids are paid as much as entry large law firm lawyers in the same area, and can expect to receive that kind of compensation for their entire careers, but teach very large classes by American standards with very little staff assistance.

Of course, it isn't at all easy to break out the impacts of particular parts of the Japanese or American models. The Japanese spend more days in school. A larger share of American kids are college bound than in Japan. Cram school for college entrance exams to supplement ordinary high school education are the norm. Japanese educators are less reluctant to use drill and kill instruction methods, and more liberal in putting social pressure on kids to perform though public disclosure of academic performance. Extra-curricular activity participation is more of an expectation in Japan. Many American kids have more educational choices that comparable Japanese kids. American higher education, particularly at the graduate level, has a better reputation for rigor than Japanese higher education. American teachers have a much larger proportion of very low income students and far more students who are non-native speakers of the language of instruction. Japan starts foreign language instruction sooner and has very little sex education.

Also, somewhat surprisingly, given the tendency of K-12 education systems to pay teachers of older students more than teachers of younger students, the evidence on educational performance and education seems to indicate that the importance of educational quality is greatest when kids are youngest and lower when kids are older. Kids who need remedial work upon entering college were mostly behind already by the time they were in the 6th grade.

If we are to set compensation based on potential lifetime educational performance impact (and no school system in the world does this, to the best of my knowledge, although many do mandate smaller class sizes for younger students), we should be paying the highest salaries to pre-school and kindergarten teachers, the next highest salaries to elementary school teachers, the next highest salaries to middle school teachers, and the lowest salaries to high school teachers. Instead, the pay of teachers seems more closely related to the proportion of the teachers who are men, which is greatest for the older ages. As usual in the American labor market, the supply of similarly skilled labor is more important in setting compensation levels than the value of what workers produce.

But, moving in the direction of the Japanese business model for teacher pay, and paying early education teachers much more than we do, is certainly something worth considering.

READ MORE - The Japanese Business Model For Teacher Pay

Did Unions Create The Middle Class?

Many people . . . believe there would be no middle class in America if unions did not organize a third of the workforce after World War II. That post-war era, the sixties, still represents one of the most prosperous eras in the nation's history. But that lesson has been lost on most people who oppose unions.

From here.

Krugman agrees.

I don't oppose unions. But, I am also deeply skeptical of the claim by union supporters, and of liberal economists like Krugman, that they were as important an ingredient in creating the American middle class as claimed.

The Comparative View

Consider, for example, Japan and Western Europe. Both societies are far more economically egalitarian than the United States. They pay their executives less, and have a far more even distribution of wealth. But, they do it in two radically different ways.

Japan's big businesses are formally unionized, but their unions are company sponsored affairs that are actually forbidden by law in the United States on the grounds that they would be too management controlled. Japan also has a fairly small public sector, a very paternalistic government, a fairly weak public sector welfare state, and role for married women that is anything but equal even though unmarried women have substantial economic equality with their married peers.

Western Europe is heavily unionized (compared to the United States) with unions that are much more vigorous in asserting their rights than American unions, and those nations also uniformly have a much more comprehensive public sector social welfare state than either the United States or Japan. Germany gives workers at public corporations seats on the Board of Directors of their companies. France tolerates the kidnapping of executives in the course of union-management negotiations and gives public sector workers a frequently exercised right to strike. Sweden has very high taxes that finance a public sector welfare state that makes marriage an economically unnecessary part of being a parent.

The United States has a union movement that was almost as powerful as that of Europe through the 1960s, but that has declined in the four decades since then. It has a public sector welfare state, but it is anemic. We work more hours per year than workers in any other country in the world, and have the most unequal distribution of wealth in the developed world, together with low taxes by developed world standards overall, as measured by tax revenues collected relative to GDP. We have arguably the weakest private sector union movement in the developed world, but have a large, but timid public sector union movement.

The Weak Chain of Cause and Effect

The weakening of private sector unions has not had some of the results that you would expect. Workplace safety is profoundly improved from the standards that prevailed four decades ago when unions were much stronger. The workers whose wages have stagnated have been in industries where unions were strong, not in industries where unions have never had much of a foothold, although, in those industries, union workers tend to be paid more than non-union workers. Disgruntled workers in an American workplace are more likely to call a trial lawyer than a union organizer. American workers have less job security than their peers in either Japan or Europe, although in Japan this is mostly due to a private sector understanding of fairness, while in Europe it is mandated by law.

Income inequality in the United States has risen more or less steadily since 1947. Changing rates of unionization have done very little to alter the trend line, which has arguably flattened a little for families in the bottom 95% of the income distribution in the last decade. Earned income inequality is risen in Europe as well, but has been mitigated by their tax codes and social welfare state, rather than fundamental differences in the structure of economic relationships between people within businesses.

Public sector workers in the United States got job security and good benefits first, and unionized second, many decades after the prevailing accommodation on the shape of public sector employment terms, conditions and compensation were well established.

Did Ethnic Diversity Play A Role?

Some people would argue that American tolerance for inequality has roots in a lack of shared ethnic identity found in both Europe and Japan. I can't rule that out. There is circumstantial evidence that heavy immigration in the late twentieth century has frayed the European consensus on the social safety net and management-labor relations.

Then again, the union movement in the United States has historically been strongest in places where massive immigration has been attracted by job creation, not economically stable places, or places with homogeneous populations. The only place in the agriculture sector that there has ever been any meaningful effort at unionization, for example, has been among immigrant farm laborers. To my knowledge, there are not now, and never have been any unionized plantations. Rural America has produced a great many co-operatives but very few unions.

The deepest economic inequalities in the United States are not in the South where there is the greatest ideological and historical tolerance of inequality in the form of slavery and then, in post-slavery racism, and where opposition to unions has historically been strongest. The plutocrats who have captured such an immense share of the national wealth tend to be based in places like San Francisco and New York City where the financial sectors are strongest, despite the high and progressive taxes that they face there and the strongly liberal local politics. The strongly anti-union Deep South is the home not just of pervasive black rural poverty, but of pervasive white rural poverty.

Southern anti-unionism at the grassroots level may be a product of discontent, in the context of Southern efforts to a great extent successful, to create the "New Rust Belt" in the American South, with existing union efforts to keep new manufacturing investment in the "Old Rust Belt" where their members held jobs in manufacturing companies. From their perspective, Northern manufacturing unions most important position was their opposition to relocating jobs to the South where they lived, rather than any deep felt concern about what it was like to work in a union shop, something few Southerners have experienced.

The current hotbed of union busting sentiment, Midwest states like Wisconsin and Ohio, have historically been relatively homogeneous and inclined to have politics that focused on the collective good. Wisconsin was the epicenter of Garrison Keillor's somewhat idealized middle class heartland where petty village quibbles and small town values prevailed over deep ethnic strife. Where Swedish Lutherans and German Lutherans considered their unions to be mixed marriages. Ohio was one of the first states to proudly embrace a land grant funded system of public education.

Working Class v. Middle Class

Another part of the conundrum of identifying the union movement with the middle class, is that until the relatively recent rise of public sector unionization, unions have been largely the province of the blue collar working class (aka lower middle class). The history of the American union movement is full a smudge faced miners, rank and file factory workers, postal workers trudging through rain, sleet and snow, firemen stinking of smoke, truck drivers and skilled tradesmen.

Today's union movement is more middle class than it used to be because the working class jobs that used to be its core constituency are gone or no longer unionized, while the relatively few middle class unionized jobs have survived and grown relatively more important to the movement as a whole.

The minimum wage and hour laws that unions worked to enact were all but irrelevant to middle class workers who were paid salaries and often exempted from their application. The workplace safety protections and worker's compensation regimes that unions pushed to enact didn't mean much to people who sat behind desks and cash registers all day. The fact that employers started to offer health insurance was as much a product of World War II era wage controls as it was a product of a healthy union movement and benefited non-union workers in factory offices as much as it did union workers on the factory floor.

The entire social class that was at the heart of the union movement has contracted, and the middle class that it now claims used to identify itself with management. Bank tellers have a great deal in common with factory floor workers. They aren't paid much. They are micromanaged. They are rank and file employees of large enterprises that thrive on coordinated mass production. But, factory workers who identified as working class unionized, while bank tellers who identified as middle class, didn't.

A college education and a union card used to be considered contradictions in terms; alternative directions in life. Union leadership is how smart young working class men who couldn't dream of securing a college education or the management jobs that came with it found a way to exercise power in the large institutions where they worked, just as they did as non-commissioned officers did in the military. Yet, a college education is now often considered the defining element of the middle class.

How did access to the college educations that were the thresholds to membership in the middle class open? Mostly through the GI Bill, and after that through the shift of selective institutions of higher education to merit based admissions in the 1960s and the parallel expansion of of state institutions of higher education to accommodate the needs of former soldiers entitled to it as a result of the GI Bill. The political resistance of the civil service that was created to meet this need to being downsized (at a time when higher education employees largely weren't unionized) and student radicalism, rather than labor union efforts, does more to explain why the gates to higher education remained open.

Conclusion

Does all of this mean that unions can't play an important role in strengthening the American middle class? No. They are eager to step up to the challenge and remake themselves as a movement, and it is a task worth taking on.

But, as a matter of history, it is not at all clear that unions played an important part in creating the middle class, which was instead apparently driven by the widening availability of higher education. Instead, unions actually worked hard to secure justice for the American working class and seemed to be making good headway in doing so until sometime around 1970, when that social class in American life entered a period of seemingly permanent economic stagnation.

READ MORE - Did Unions Create The Middle Class?

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

Hick's Budget

Governor Hickenlooper has released his first state budget proposal. Some notable points:

* "Sixty-three percent of this budget is handled by less than 900 [state] employees." (For example K-12 and Medicaid.)

* K-12 is cut $375 million through $257 million in reduced general fund support and a decision not to backfill $117 million of local funding declines due to falling property values. The impact is $497 per student. It isn't clear what loophole in school finance laws in Colorado, which generally mandate no K-12 categorial spending cuts, is involved to authorize this step. It may be that there is a negative inflation adjustment and that some K-12 education funding is not "categorial."

* State funding of higher ed is reduced by $36 million from $555 million to $519 million. Higher education is also losing $89 million of federal stimulus funds for a total cut of $125 million, which is $877 per college student.

* Closing Fort Lyon Correctional Facility with 485 elderly prisoners who will be relocated that cuts 149 jobs and $3 million a year.

* Closing Closing Bonny Lake State Park near Burlington, Sweitzer Lake State Park near Delta, Harvey Gap State Park near Rifle and Paonia State Park near Paonia.

* The budget increases payroll deductions for PERA (public employees retirement) by 2.5 percentage points of take home pay saving $15.7 million on top of prior COLA-less years with prior increases in PERA contributions. Furloughs, which saved little general fund money, will not be repeated this year.

* Other general fund cuts of $376 million and 114 jobs are made.

* $42.3 million in revenues and cash fund transfers are used.

Colorado is in a very hard spot, with a $1 billion shortfall in a $7 billion general fund budget. It isn't even obvious that this round of cuts is big enough to balance the budget and this is on top of multiple rounds of past deep budget cuts in the Great Recession.

TABOR limits the availablity of tax increases to make up the shortfall without a vote of the people which is always too late for the current year's budget.

Much of state government is financed with users fees or other dedictated funds so cuts to those programs don't solve the state's general fund deficit.

Prison sentences already imposed make it hard to cut the corrections budget in the short term.

Medicaid already pays providers considerably less than market rates or the cost of the services provided and Medicaid beneficiaries have great difficulty finding providers willing to take new patients.

Colorado's funding for both K-12 and higher education is very near the bottom nationally. The state constitution puts limits on K-12 education cuts.

Medicaid, higher education, K-12 education and the corrections budget are the dominant components of the state general fund budget.

READ MORE - Hick's Budget

Graduation Rate And Remedial Education Data

Last week, the Colorado Department of Education released the latest detailed data on high school graduation rates in Colorado, and the Colorado Commission on Higher Education released reports on Remedial Education and Enrollments of high school graduates at Colorado colleges and universities that receive state funding (including three private institutions of higher education: Regis, DU and Colorado Christian University).

Executive Summary of Denver Public Schools Analysis

I look at the detailed data for the Denver Public Schools below. About 9.6%* of students who start high school in DPS graduate from high school and start college without needing remedial work, and about 6% of DPS students who start college will eventually earn a two or four year college degree (the percentage of DPS students who start high school who earn a four year college degree within six year of starting college is between 4% and 5%).

DPS greatly underperforms the rest of the state mostly because it has a student body that is dealing with an immense load of problems from poverty, to homelessness, to lack of English language proficiency, to disabilities. In part, this is because Denver is a central city where these issues are concentrated. In part, this is because affluent students who grow up in Denver choose private school, have families that move to the suburbs, or exercise rights in the state school choice system to leave the District and this happens disproportionately at the high school level, where DPS performance by absolute measures is worst. The Denver Public Schools fails to enroll more than one in four of the students who live in the District and that measure itself fails to capture the continuing tendency of families with older school aged children to move to the suburbs. DPS has made great gains in the post-desegregation order era, first at the elementary school level, and in the past few years, at the middle school level, at increasing the share of resident children who attend DPS. But, progress at the high school level in increasing the share of resident children who attend DPS continues to be quite low. (Note, much of the factual support for this paragraph is in prior posts at this blog.)

In many of Denver's high schools, the collection of personal stresses and schools where academically well prepared students coming into high school are too rare for the school to be sufficiently geared towards meeting their needs, combine to pose very poor odds of earning college degrees even for students who have been identified as gifted and talented and do well in other districts in the state. The very low college attendance rate of students at Lincoln High School and West High School, relative to the number of gifted and talented students at those schools is particularly distressing.

Meanwhile, the District is failing the roughly half of its students who drop out, and we have few good ways of measuring how well the District is meeting the needs of the students, who make up a larger share of its student body than all but one or two other districts in the state, for whom graduating from college is an unrealistic goal by the time that they enter high school.

This isn't all the high school's fault. Overwhelmingly, students who are well below grade level in elementary school academic performance stay there, having academic troubles in middle school, often flunking classes there, and then drop out of high school only after the public schools have shown them one profound academic failure after another for a decade. It is rare for a students whose "at risk" status has not been obvious for many years to suddenly drop out of high school. But, high schools, despite a wide variety of non-traditional programs, are still failing to show students that they have something to offer them as they are now about half of the time.

Graduation Rates

The statewide high school graduation rate in Colorado is 72.4%.

In the Denver Public Schools the high school graduation rate is 51.8% (2,623/5,083). This isn't necessarily a product of the Denver Public Schools doing a poor job. Its students come to school with lots of problems. Of the 5,083 students who start high school in Denver, 655 have disabilities, 633 have limited English language proficiency, 3,488 are "economically disadvantaged," 188 are "migrant" students, 3,171 are in Title 1 programs, and 209 are homeless. On the other hand, 699 have been identified as gifted and talented. More than one category can apply to a single students - a gifted and talented student can be economically disadvantaged and homeless for example.

There is great variation in high school graduation rates from school to school.

Denver has twenty dropouts from its incoming cohort before they start their freshman year.

Graduation rates by high school in the Denver Public Schools are as follows;

Abraham Lincoln High School 51.7% (208/402)
Ridge View Academy Charter School 5.1% (13/255)
Academy Of Urban Learning 31.0% (13/42)
Amandla Charter Academy 0.0% (0/6)
Emerson Street School 0.0% (0/13)
Fred N Thomas Career Education Center 85.7% (72/84)
Challenges, Choices & Images Charter School 0.0% (0/2)
Colorado High School 19.5% (22/113)
Ace Community Challenge Charter School 0.0% (0/29)
Connections Academy 28.6% (16/56)
Denver Center For International Studies 92.5% (37/40)
Denver School Of The Arts (96.8% (120/124)
Denver School Of Science And Technology 80.7% (67/83)
Denver Venture Charter School 0.0% (0/1)
East High School 80.7% (405/502)
Emily Griffith Opportunity School 3.2% (9/277)
D P S Night High School 0.0% (0/1)
Escuela Tlatelolco School 33.3% (4/12)
Florence Crittenton High School 2.6% (2/77)
George Washington High School 80.9% (313/387)
John F Kennedy High School 77.0% (207/269)
Justice High School Denver 26.9% (7/26)
Life Skills Center Of Denver 0.5% (1/216)
Manual High School 0.0% (0/2)
Martin Luther King Middle College 89.6% (69/77)
Contemporary Learning Academy High School 0.0% (0/106)
Montbello High School 56.2% (221/393)
North High School 63.8% (155/243)
Bruce Randolph School 85.9% (73/85)
Online High School 42.6% (20/47)
Prep Assessment Center 0.0% (0/40)
P.S.1 Charter School 10.5% (8/76)
Skyland Community High School 29.4% (10/34)
South High School 61.8% (215/348)
Southwest Early College Charter School 32.2% (29/90)
Thomas Jefferson High School 78.0% (199/255)
West High School 47.6% (119/250)

Remediation In Higher Education

At the two-year institutions the overall remediation rate in FY2010 was 52.8%. . . . At the four-year institutions the overall remediation rate was 18.3%. . . . When examining remediation by discipline, most Colorado students required remediation in mathematics, followed by writing and then reading. At both two-year and four institutions, mathematics is by far the subject with the highest number of students assigned to remedial study (Figures 1 & 2). Approximately 41% of total two-year students and 14.5% of total four-year students were assessed math remediation.

The remediation report notes that about $19 million a year of Colorado General Fund dollars are devoted to remedial education for public college matriculants. Of this, $18.1 million is spent at the community college level, while $1 million is spent at Adams State and Mesa State Colleges (several other four year colleges failed to produce detailed cost estimates). About 60% of students taking remedial education courts at higher education institutions passed those courses, about a quarter failed, and most of the rest withdrew.

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). Half of students (49.9%) at two year colleges assigned to remedial classes were retained a year later.

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. Six out of ten students (60.1%) at four years colleges assigned to remedial classes were retained a year later.

Within the Denver Public Schools, many non-traditional high school programs sent no students to public college at all in the Fall 2010 year covered by the study (Challenges, Choices and Images; Colorado High School; Contemporary Learning Academy; Emily Griffth Opportunity School; Florence Crittendon High School; Fred N. Thomas Career Education; Life Skills Center of Denver, P.S. 1). Those schools that did have student starting public colleges in the fall of 2010 had remediation rates as follows:

Lincoln 78.6% (55/70) Prepared Graduates Starting College: 15
Denver School of the Arts 19.0% (8/42) Prepared Graduates Starting College: 34
East 38.5% (79/205) Prepared Graduates Starting College: 126
George Washington 60.0% (84/140) Prepared Graduates Starting College: 56
John F. Kennedy 62.7% (74/118) Prepared Graduates Starting College: 44
Montbello 71.8% (61/85) Prepared Graduates Starting College: 24
North 72.1% (44/61) Prepared Graduates Starting College: 17
South 68.8% (66/96) Prepared Graduates Starting College: 30
Thomas Jefferson 57.3% (71/124) Prepared Graduates Starting College: 53
West 90.7% (39/43) Prepared Graduates Starting College: 4

DPS Total 59.0% (581/984) Prepared Graduates Starting College: 403

Matriculation

The last report shows, for example, that in the fall of 2009, a total of 1,196 students from the Denver Public Schools (about 46% of its high school graduates) enrolled at the following institutions of higher education in Colorado:

Community College of Denver 313
Metropolitan State College 169
University of Colorado Boulder 159
University of Colorado Denver 106
University of Northern Colorado 85
Colorado State University 65
University of Denver 44
Community College of Aurora 42
Arapahoe Community College 33
Red Rocks Community College 28
Colorado State University Pueblo 26
Mesa State College 26
Northeatern Junior College 26
Adams State College 15
Fort Lewis College 13
Colorado School of Mines 9
University of Colorado Colorado Springs 6
Front Range Community College 6
Western State College 5
Colorado Northwestern Community College 4
Regis University 3
Trinidad State Junior College 3
Pikes Peak Community College 3
Colorado Christian University 2
Colorado Mountain College 2
Aims Community College 1
Otero Junior College 1
Pueblo Community College 1
Lamar Community College 0
Morgan Community College 0

Thus, 733 DPS graduates went on to publicly funded four year colleges in Colorado and 463 DPS graduates went to publicly funded two year colleges in Colorado.

The data are also broken out by individual high schools. For example, the University of Colorado Boulder matriculants from the Denver Public Schools were graduates of East High School (69), George Washington (31), South (16), Thomas Jefferson (13), Denver School of the Arts (12), Denver School of Science and Technology (10), Montebello (3), North (2), P.S. 1 (2), and Lincoln (1).

Rate of Prepared College Student Production

What percentage of students do DPS high schools graduate who enter college and don't need remedial work when they get there?

The numbers are approximate, because two new turnaround schools (Martin Luther King Jr. Early College and Bruce Randolph) are excluded from the data which precedes their first graduating classes. The understatements are likely to be greatest at high schools like East, George Washington, South, Thomas Jefferson, DSA and DSST that send significant numbers of students to the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Also, keep in mind that these numbers also understate the number of prepared college students by omitting students who go to college outside of Colorado or to private colleges that receive no state support (e.g. Harvard, the University of Colorado, or Colorado College).

But, for older schools the numbers (in rank order) are as follows:

Denver School of the Arts 27.4% (34/124)
East 25.1% (126/502)
Thomas Jefferson 20.8% (53/255)
John F. Kennedy 16.4% (44/269)
George Washington 14.5% (56/387)
South 7.8% (30/384)
North 7.0% (17/243)
Montbello 6.1% (24/393)
Lincoln 3.7% (15/402)
West 1.6% (4/250)

DPS Total 7.9% (403/5,083)*

* The 9.6% figure cited above in this post is more accurate for DPS as a whole as this 7.9% figure and the per high school figures use data from inconsistent years which is adjusted for in the estimate earlier in this post, but for comparative purposes between high schools this adjustment has not been made; the absolute numbers for high schools understate the total but are still comparable relative to each other).

Even these school by school figures fail to tell the whole story. George Washington's numbers would look very different if they were broken out between a high performing IB program and a lower performing traditional program. East High School is very strongly tracked into what amounts to separate high and low achieving programs (academically). Other schools may make similar divisions.

One interesting comparison in the number of prepared college students a high school produces and the number of students identified as gifted and talented that it has in the cohort used for the high school graduation rate numbers above.

But, for older schools the numbers (in rank order) are as follows:

Denver School of the Arts 68.0% (34/50)
East 88.7% (126/142)
Thomas Jefferson 110.4% (53/48)
John F. Kennedy 93.6% (44/47)
George Washington 56.0% (56/100)
South 75.0% (30/40)
North 77.3% (17/22)
Montbello 80.0% (24/30)
Lincoln 36.6% (15/41)
West 18.2% (4/22)

DPS Total 57.7% (403/699)*

At DSA, East, GW and South there may be meaningful distortion in the numbers due to significant numbers of graduates attending private colleges, while a larger share of talented students from Thomas Jefferson, JFK and North are probably attending public colleges in Colorado, as they have less affluent student bodies.

But, by any measure, it is clear that the most talented students at Lincoln High School and West High School are disproportionately not graduating from high school and then going to college, presumably due to some combination of financial stress and inadequate college advising and peer support. This may also be happening a GW and DSA where financial stress along may be at work.

Implications

There are several big picture points that the data drive home for me:

1. The detailed high school data in Denver confirms that national data on a key point. A large number of low income kids in poor neighborhoods who are very talented academically are not going on to college, despite the fact that they have what it takes to succeed there. To recap the slogan of the United Negro College Fund, "a mind is a terrible thing to waste." This reaches a particularly distressing level at West High School and Lincoln High School in Denver. It is imperative that our society do more to help these kids achieve their potential. We have to overcome the financial barriers to meritocracy which are demonstrably still very present today.

2. 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.

3. Graduation rates, college matriculation rates, remedial education rates, and college retention rates are exceedingly sticky and are decades in the making. There is room for improvement. The performance of the Denver Public Schools as measures by factors like graduation rates is poor even when factors like poverty, lack of English proficiency and other concerns are taken into account. DPS has poor graduation rates not just overall, but for specific demographic and individualized need based subgroups. But, the realistic goal for DPS should be to bring its performance up to or above par for the course considering its student body's needs, which even if it overperforms state averages somewhat for every category of student will still be far below the state averages.

4. The Denver Public Schools has not yet succeeded in making itself attractive enough for affluent families with academically talented kids to keep them in its high schools. Previous successes at the elementary and middle school level have shown that making attractive options available can bring these students back into the system, but the crunch time is approaching as a cohort of families who have stuck with DPS for elementary school and middle school when a few years ago similar families were not doing so have to decided if they will stay in DPS for high school. DPS needs those students to have the critical mass of students that it needs for academically rigorous programs that can be made available to all students, and to make economical use of its ample excess of infrastructure resources like empty schools.

5. Half of students who begin high school at the Denver Public Schools won't graduate from high school, half of those who graduate from high school will never go to college, and well over half of those graduates who go to college will never earn a degree with many dropping out of college in the first year or two. Only about five percent of students who start high school at DPS will ever earn a four year college degree. By the time they enter high school it is possible to predict with considerable accuracy how likely it is for a particular student to graduate from high school and to earn a college degree.

The only high profile measure of how successful DPS high schools are at equipping non-college bound students for life after high school is the dropout rate, and that is a crude measure indeed. DPS has many non-traditional programs for non-college bound students. Some, like the Fred N Thomas Career Education Center, appear at least to be doing a successful job of convincing students who are not college bound that it is worth their while to stay in school and graduate. Others may or may not be making a difference, but there is no way for the public to know if these programs fit that bill - dismal graduation rates in many of these programs aren't encouraging.

DPS needs to have something to offer its non-college bound students besides a watered down college prepatory curriculum that makes it worth student's time and effort to stay in school and graduate. It may as well have these students out pounding rocks all day for all the benefit they will get from that approach - that might at least do something about obesity and improve their lifetime fitness. Indeed, many teachers and counselors encourage these students to sign up for the Army and enter basic training if they can graduate, which has a certain amount of similarity to it. These students have spent more than eight years trying traditional academic classroom instruction aimed at getting them ready for a college prepatory high school curriculum and that approach crashed and burned. Four more years of the same won't make a difference for them. We need to find something more fruitful to offer the students who have failed with this approach.

Since students are the consumers here and are voting with their feet, figuring out which programs matter to them is more important than what college admissions officers or state politicians think that these students should be learning. What kind of educational opportunties would these students have purchased with the $6,000+ per year per head that the district is given to spend on them if they had more of a say in devising it? My intuition is that what most of these students want is to be ready for a career that will support them in life, while having the same high school experiences extracurricularly that their college bound peers do. Vocational education is an attractive possibility for a lot of students that has been neglected for too long.

DPS also needs to devote resources to develop useful, high profile measures of its success with non-college bound students that go beyond graduation rates, college matriculation rates and remedial education rates. It needs these measures much more than most districts in the state. For example, there should be good individual high school and individual high school program data on unemployment rates, criminal conviction rates, earnings, voter registration, poverty, and teen/out of wedlock parenting rates for non-college bound DPS graduates and dropouts. Schools that produce good results on these measures with students who have little realistic chance of graduating from college should be recognized for their achievements.

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