Measuring A College's Worth: The Grateful Grads Index

Originally posted on: Forbes by: Matt Schifrin

This is the time of year when high school seniors and their parents make their final decisions about which college they will attend over the next four years. It can be a gut-wrenching ordeal especially given that it now costs nearly $250,000 for four years at a private college. For many families, it’s a bigger financial decision than buying a house.

One of the perennial topics of discussion among parents and pundits is which schools provide the greatest return-on-investment (ROI)?

Economists have long debated this and a slew of Web sites and college rankers report stats (including Forbes) to help you make your decision. Given the obvious affordability issues and out-of-control student loan situation, the Obama administration recently launched an interactive College Scorecard web site to help families make smarter college planning decisions.  The problem with the White House’s new offering is that it gives you little guidance about the“return on investment” part of the college planning process. The government’s scorecard web site has yet to report any specific employment data by college.

I have an idea for an alternative measure to determine the ROI of a particular college and I call it the
Grateful Graduates Index. It’s a pretty simple formula that measures of the amount of private gifts given to a four year college over time, divided by the number of full time students it has.  After all, private donations are typically an indicator of two things: how successful an alumnus is and how grateful he or she feels toward her alma mater.

The idea for the Grateful Grads Index actually came from a friend of mine who is a graduate of Harvard, who had just returned from his 30-year college reunion.  During a barbecue, he asked me if I knew what Harvard’s core competency was. I replied “Educating super smart students?” He laughed and replied, “No, it’s getting its alumni to give donations, they are really good at it.”

My friend touched on an important point.  Private donations are also a function of how proficient a particular school’s development department is at extracting money from its graduates. But given how difficult it is to judge the merits of one fundraising department’s skills over another, my Grateful Grads Index doesn’t adjust for this fuzzy measure and just looks at the raw donations data.
In the end, the fact that my friend is a very successful surgeon at prestigious hospital and happily donates to an already well-endowed Ivy League school gives you an idea of the kind of “return” he feels he got from attending Harvard. Harvard ranks 8th on our Grateful Grads Index, right behind Dartmouth College with a median donation per student of $25,122. My surgeon friend would be the first to tell you that attending Harvard changed the course of his life and he shows his gratitude every year.

For the purposes of our Grateful Grad’s Index I used the government’s extensive online database of information about institutions offering post secondary school education. I went back ten years, looking only at private-not-for-profit colleges that offered four-year degrees and had more than 1,000 full time students. Thus, you won’t see some great schools on our list like University of California at Berkeley or University of North Carolina or University of Michigan. These public colleges file different financial forms so it’s a bit more difficult to extract the appropriate data.

I also ranked schools by median donations per student over the last decade rather than average donations to avoid the problem of the occasional outliers you get when uber-rich alums like Michael Bloomberg (Johns Hopkins ’64) donate gobs of money in a single year.  In 2007 for example, Claremont McKenna College alumnus Robert Day, founder of Trust Company of the West, donated $200 million to this elite liberal arts school in Southern California. If I had used average donation per student over the last ten years,  Claremont McKenna would rank second with $36,737 per student in donations, versus a rank of 17 with a median donation of $17,634 per full time student.
One other important caveat to our Grateful Grads Index is that colleges were only required to separate out private gifts from grants and contracts after 2009. Thus several of years of data we collected include grants and contracts in the figure and therefore give a boost to certain bigger research oriented universities like Stanford and Duke University. However, for nearly all of the colleges on our list, private gifts account for the vast majority of the “gifts, grants and contracts” revenue source. In fact for certain prominent liberal arts colleges on  the list like Vassar College, Pomona College and Amherst College, private gifts from grateful graduates account for nearly all of their income outside of tuition, fees and investment returns.

While our Grateful Grads Index contains most of the usual suspects of the best colleges lists – Caltech, MIT and Stanford top it — there are a few surprises, like tuition-free Berea College of Kentucky. Liberal arts-oriented Berea was founded in 1855 by an emancipation-minded landowner and a local scholar who attracted teachers from Ohio’s Oberlin College.   The school, whose motto is “God Has Made Of One Blood Peoples Of The Earth” has graduated such notables as Nobel Prize winning chemist John Fenn and Nascar magnate Jack Roush.

In some ways The Grateful Graduates Index is a vindication of the old fashioned idea of getting a good liberal arts education. Our Top ROI colleges list is chock full of small liberal arts colleges like Williams, Wellsley and Bard. This may provide some comfort to parents who have recently sent in deposits and are worrying about the futility of a liberal arts education versus  more practical degrees in engineering, computer science or say, nursing.

Says John Linehan, head of U.S. equities and portfolio manager at T. Rowe Price who received a bachelors degree from Amherst College in 1987 and MBA from Stanford 1998 “I am a donor to both, but I actually donate more to Amherst.” Linehan remembers fondly how other Amherst alums acted as mentors to him at his first job. “I’ll plug Amherst any chance I get. It was extraordinarily beneficial to me going into the business world.  My liberal arts background taught me how to think.”

Companies Finance University Efforts to Improve Science Education

 Originally posted on: The Chronicle of Higher Education By: Paul Basken

The Obama administration on Wednesday announced the selection of nine university groups for a $10-million initiative with corporate partners to improve the teaching of engineering to undergraduates.

Under the program, known as "Graduate 10K+," the selected public and private institutions will spend the next five years testing various strategies to raise graduation rates in the sciences. Currently only about 45 percent of undergraduates majoring in sciences complete their degrees.

"This is going to help create some replicable models for significantly improving retention and persistence and completion rates," said Thomas A. Kalil, deputy director for technology and innovation at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

It's the latest in a series of efforts by the federal government, universities, and businesses to tackle shortfalls in science education, which have led President Obama to set a goal of producing one million university graduates in the sciences over the next decade.

In another prominent initiative, the Association of American Universities plans next month to select eight of its member institutions for its own five-year evaluation of better teaching methods in the sciences.

The White House, with its announcement on Wednesday of the "Graduate 10K+" program, sought broader participation than just AAU members, which are regarded as the nation's premier research universities. The "Graduate 10K+" program also is aimed primarily at the fields of engineering and computer science, as those are the areas of science where the nation has the greatest need for workers, Mr. Kalil said.

The nine groups announced on Wednesday for the White House effort, as chosen by the National Science Foundation, will be led by California State University-Monterey Bay, Cornell University (N.Y.), Merrimack College (Mass.), Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, Syracuse University (N.Y.), the University of Portland (Ore.), the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Texas-Pan American, and a partnership of the University of Washington and Washington State University.

Many of the projects promote teaching approaches shown by research to be more effective than traditional lecture formats. Those approaches include placing greater emphasis on student-to-student collaborations, and giving students more direct exposure to real-world job situations.
The work will be financed with $10-million in donations from the Intel Corporation and the GE Foundation, and a contribution by Mark T. Gallogly, a hedge-fund manager who serves on a White House economic-advisory board.

An Example to Follow

That amount of money is relatively small given the size of the problem, said Carl E. Wieman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who until last year helped guide science-education policy at the White House. "But if it sets an example that many other companies follow, it could be quite significant," Mr. Wieman said.

Mr. Wieman, who established his own center at the University of British Columbia to test improvements in science education, has sharply criticized universities for their pace of change in introducing teaching improvements.

The new White House and AAU initiatives don't appear to tackle the fundamental structures that lead universities and their faculty members to prioritize research over teaching, Mr. Wieman said. The White House effort is admirable, however, in that it concentrates on the first and second years of college, when students are most likely to abandon the study of science, he said. It is also encouraging, he said, to see signs that companies are willing to put more money into the effort.

The initiatives are being unveiled at the same time Congress is considering a reauthorization of the America Competes Act, which sets budgetary and policy guidelines for federal spending on science. A major focus of that debate has concerned the importance of science education to the health of the American economy, and the degree to which government policy should encourage and finance certain types of science education.

Among the more aggressive recommendations for the renewal of the Competes Act has been a suggestion by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation to establish new types of science-oriented universities and to designate at least 20 "manufacturing universities."
The foundation, with a board that includes corporate and university leaders as well as politicians in both parties, also proposed replacing the NSF with a new entity that would be concerned with promoting engineering as much as basic science.

The Canadian government announced a similar move on Tuesday. Gary T. Goodyear, the minister of state for science and technology, said at a briefing in Ottawa that the country's National Research Council, a financer of basic research in Canada for nearly a century, now would emphasize industrial research and business development.

How to Brand a "Useless" Degree

Originally posted on: Harvard Business Review by: Dorie Clark

Graduation season is upon us — and that means approximately 700,000 U.S. students will be receiving master's degrees and another 150,000 or so will be getting their doctorates. For some, the path forward is clear: the math experts will be snapped up by hedge funds, the software engineers will have their pick of start-ups, and elite investment banks and consultancies will duke it out for the top MBAs. But a significant number of those students will fling off their mortarboards only to find themselves bereft of job prospects.

Fourteen years ago, that was me. I was graduating with a master's degree in theological studies; aiming for a career in academia, I had been utterly unconcerned about the practical applicability of my degree. But when I was turned down by every doctoral program I applied to, I suddenly needed a plan to earn a living. That led to a variety of professional adventures, ranging from journalism to documentary film-making to nonprofit management to serving as a presidential campaign spokesperson.

But one of the hardest parts of the journey was the initial step — entering the workforce after two years of rigorous graduate studies and explaining my degree (no, I wasn't training to become a minister) and, even more critically, its value in the marketplace. If you've earned a graduate degree that puts you on a less-than-certain professional trajectory — one that naysayers may even declare "useless" — here are a few strategies that have worked for me.

The truth is, your subject matter knowledge may be irrelevant to anything going on in the business world today. Expert in ancient Roman politics? Biblical exegesis? South American literature? Anyone will want you at their dinner party — but maybe not working at their company. That's why you need to emphasize your skills, not your content expertise. In college (studying philosophy) and in divinity school, I learned to read abstruse texts with careful comprehension, and fashion tight, logical arguments. That's an applicable business skill, even if witty badinage about the writings of Thomas Aquinas is not.

Next, you'll want to position yourself as a potential fount of innovation. How so? Check out the writings of thinkers like Frans Johansson, who argues in The Medici Effect that the best ideas arise from interdisciplinary intersections. You're never going to win the argument that you're better qualified than someone who has studied a relevant business discipline — or who has worked in the field for years. So don't even try. You're differently qualified, and your unique perspective may be just what the company needs to move to the next level.

You'll also want to cite your work experience. Many graduate students serve as research assistants, teaching fellows, or writing-center tutors — and you may even have had internships in your field. Those provide valuable "real-world" credentials that will likely be more impressive to potential employers than your degree itself. Can you lead and inspire those in your charge (i.e., a classroom full of twenty skeptical undergrads)? Bridge cultural divides by enabling non-native English speakers to better express themselves? Solve difficult research challenges and unearth crucial facts? Those are abilities that any workplace would covet.

Finally, I've found that my theology degree serves another, unexpected purpose: it allows me to make meaningful connections with the people around me. Some could care less, of course. But others have a personal interest in religion or theology; when they find out about my studies, they're eager to talk and share their own stories. I've seen personal sides of colleagues that never would have come out otherwise — their longing to find a calling, or their own faith journey. In a world where business is driven by personal connections, it's been a powerful vehicle to engage deeply with others. Many people have strong feelings about, or interest in, religion. But even if it's a shared interest in geography, or urban planning, or British literature, it can be a powerful way to cement a relationship.
In practical terms, my theology degree wasn't relevant to my subsequent professional life (though I did finally make it into academia, teaching at business schools in addition to my work as a strategy consultant). But it was very relevant to my development as a human being. Grad school may or may not be worth it, depending on your individual goals and circumstances. But if you've taken the plunge and are now entering the work world, you owe it to yourself to make the best case possible in explaining its value to others.

Faculty Backlash Grows Against Online Partnerships

Originally posted on : The Chronicle of Higher Education By: Steve Kolowich

Staff Photo, Justin Ide, Harvard News Office

Michael Sandel, a Harvard professor, taught an online course that San Jose State U. asked its philosophy professors to use in place of their own instruction. They said no.

Many professors recognize that online education is changing the landscape of academe. But faculty members at several colleges are making it clear that they will not be steamrolled.

Philosophy professors at San Jose State University last week wrote an open letter saying they refused to use material from an edX course, taught by a famous Harvard University professor, for fear that California State University administrators were angling for a way to eventually gut their department.
"Let's not kid ourselves; administrators at the CSU are beginning a process of replacing faculty with cheap online education," they wrote.

At Duke University a week earlier, an undergraduate-faculty council voted down a push by the provost's office to offer small online courses for credit through 2U, a company that sells an online platform and support services to colleges.

"While paying Duke tuition," wrote the authors of a letter to the student newspaper, signed by 75 professors, students would "watch recorded lectures and participate in sections via Web cam—enjoying neither the advantages of self-paced learning nor the responsiveness of a professor who teaches to the passions and curiosities of students."

Those rebuttals followed closely the decision by the Amherst College faculty to reject an invitation to produce massive open online courses through edX.

In each case, the professors were careful to make clear that they oppose not online technology, but rather the notion of collaborating with an outside vendor that might pose a threat, in the long term, to their principles. The professors said they had no problem climbing aboard the online train, as long as they get to help plan the route.

The philosophy professors at San Jose State, in particular, sensed a latent, existential threat in their university's collaboration with edX, a nonprofit MOOC provider formed last year by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Under Mohammad H. Qayoumi, president of San Jose State, the university has cast itself as a proving ground for MOOCs as a teaching tool in "blended" online courses. Mr. Qayoumi has advocated for allowing students to take massive open online courses for credit to decrease the time and money they spend getting a degree from San Jose State. That means, of course, denying professors on his campus the opportunity provide their own lectures.

"How different is the basic algebra course taught in Boston or California or wherever?" Mr. Qayoumi asked last month in an interview with The Chronicle.

A Brewing Debate

 

Last fall, in a pilot program supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a San Jose State professor teaching one section of an introductory course in electrical engineering drew heavily on recorded lectures and other materials from "Circuits & Electronics," a MOOC from edX.
Students in that section passed at a much higher rate than those in the traditional sections. In April, Mr. Qayoumi doubled down on the experiment, announcing that San Jose State would road-test more edX courses on its campus, including courses in the humanities.

The president's vision for the university disturbed the philosophy department. So when a dean asked the department to try using a MOOC by Michael Sandel, a Harvard government professor, as a tool to help teach a San Jose State course, the professors said no.

In an open letter addressed to Mr. Sandel, the San Jose State professors explained that they did not want to enable what they saw as a push to "replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities."

They further suggested that professors who develop MOOCs, such as Mr. Sandel, would be somewhat culpable if platform providers, like edX, and public universities, like San Jose State, use those materials to phase out local departments and professors.

"In spite of our admiration for your ability to lecture in such an engaging way to such a large audience," the philosophy professors wrote to Mr. Sandel, "we believe that having a scholar teach and engage with his or her own students is far superior to having those students watch a video of another scholar engaging his or her students."

The San Jose State letter touches on a debate about how MOOCs might deepen the divide between the wealthy universities that produce them and the less-wealthy institutions that would buy licenses to use those MOOCs from providers like edX.

The authors say they fear "that two classes of universities will be created: one, well-funded colleges and universities in which privileged students get their own real professor; the other, financially stressed private and public universities in which students watch a bunch of videotaped lectures and interact, if indeed any interaction is available on their home campuses, with a professor that this model of education has turned into a glorified teaching assistant."

A Direct Appeal

 

In a statement to The Chronicle, San Jose State said it intended to leave professors in control of their courses, even where it is encouraging experimentation with edX materials.

"In the interest of clarity, our collaboration with edX does indeed locate the responsibility for the course solely with our faculty members, who will determine how much, or how little, of the edX course materials they will incorporate into their blended courses," wrote Ellen Junn, provost and vice president for academic affairs.

"The administration would never impose or mandate these teaching methods on faculty members," Ms. Junn added. "We sought to make the new technologies available to our faculty so they might experiment and implement these methods in ways they see fit to meet our standards of high-quality learning environments; in ways that meet their course learning outcomes; and so that they may assess the impact on students."

Members of the philosophy department are nonetheless worried about what could happen in the future. Peter J. Hadreas, the department's chairman, said he believed that appealing to Mr. Sandel directly was the best way to spark a public conversation about the possible unintended consequences of superstar professors' working with edX and other MOOC providers.

"I think he will answer it in good faith," said Mr. Hadreas. "I don't know if it will change his mind, but I would be interested to hear his response, and it might bring about some reconsideration."
In a statement to The Chronicle, Mr. Sandel said that he knew little about the arrangement between edX and San Jose State, but that he hoped the university would not force professors there to use any more material from his MOOC than they wished to.

"The worry that the widespread use of online courses will damage departments in public universities facing budgetary pressures is a legitimate concern that deserves serious debate, at edX and throughout higher education," wrote Mr. Sandel. "The last thing I want is for my online lectures to be used to undermine faculty colleagues at other institutions."

"I strongly believe that online courses are no substitute for the personal engagement of teachers with students, especially in the humanities," he said.

Duke Deal Scuttled

 

Meanwhile, at Duke's undergraduate college, professors drew a line in the sand last month on online education: Massive online experiments are fine, but there will be no credit-bearing online courses at Duke in the near future.

The university's Arts & Sciences Council, governing arm of the undergraduate faculty, voted down a proposal to join a consortium of top colleges offering for-credit online courses through 2U, a company that specializes in real-time, small-format online education. The council passed an alternative resolution affirming that it intended to pursue online education—just not like this, right now.

Duke signed a contract last year with 2U pledging to develop online courses, the first of which would be offered on the 2U platform in September. But a late push by skeptical faculty members, many of whom resented the Duke administration's not consulting with them before entering into a preliminary agreement with 2U, set the stage for a close vote.

In a letter published in the student newspaper one day before the vote, 75 professors came out against the proposed partnership. The next day, their representatives on the Arts & Sciences Council killed the proposal by a 16-to-14 vote, with two abstentions.

While noncredit MOOCs have dominated headlines, 2U has been ushering top institutions into online education at a more modest pace and scale. The company, formerly called 2tor, has developed fully online graduate programs for several high-profile universities since 2008, including Georgetown University and the University of Southern California.

More recently the company has made inroads at undergraduate programs. In November it announced that it would work with undergraduate faculty members at 10 institutions, including Duke.

Colleges in the consortium would offer online courses that resembled those they were accustomed to teaching on their campuses. Students would log in to virtual classrooms at designated times, along with their professors. They would be able to see and hear one another well enough to have group discussions. Courses would be small and would be restricted to tuition-paying students enrolled at member colleges.

At Duke, after it was announced that the university would be part of 2U's consortium, several faculty committees spent months refining a proposal that would eventually have to pass a vote by the Arts & Sciences Council for the plan to proceed, said Thomas W. Robisheaux, a professor of history and chair of the council.

Limits were placed on the number of credits students could earn online. Caveats were created to ensure that Duke's on-campus offerings would not be cannibalized. Individual academic departments would be allowed to opt out of the program, and the university as a whole would commit to only three years of involvement.

In all, the proposal was reviewed and modified by three standing faculty committees in addition to the ad hoc committee appointed to draft it, said Mr. Robisheaux.
"Those of us who serve the council," he said, "were taken aback by the argument that there wasn't adequate faculty input."

But many professors had taken umbrage at the notion that Duke's provost, Peter Lange, had signed a contract with 2U with little faculty consideration.

In an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Lange said that the faculty council's vote did indeed supersede the contract, and that Duke would not be part of the 2U consortium.

Chip Paucek, 2U's chief executive, said he was not worried that the loss of Duke would imperil the future of the company's undergraduate consortium. "I do believe there is very strong interest in this level of institution to continue to experiment with online education," he said. The company still plans to offer 11 courses from other top colleges in the fall, he said.

Emma B. Rasiel, an associate professor of economics at Duke, was slated to teach a course on behavioral finance on 2U's platform. She said she was disappointed that her colleagues had scuttled the partnership. Based on her interactions with 2U so far, she said in an e-mail interview, she was confident that she and the company "would have produced just as rigorous and pedagogically valid an educational experience as those I aspire to provide in a regular classroom setting."

Congratulations, College Graduate. Now Tell Us: What Did You Learn?

It’s college commencement season. Across the country, moms and dads, grandparents, and other family members are gathering on campus quads, football fields, and in basketball arenas to celebrate a rite of passage for the Class of 2013.

The graduates are now ready for the next stage of their life—a job (hopefully), their parents’ basement (maybe), graduate school, law school, or maybe the Peace Corps or Teach for America. They’re definitely older than when they went off to college. They’re probably heavier. And with a bit of luck, they’re more mature than when they left high school.

But did these graduates actually learn anything in college to deserve that diploma?

There’s much debate these days about the return on investment of a college education. Much of that conversation is focused on what students spend on college compared to what they get in return in terms of a salary. But if the purpose of college is to get an education, why don’t we measure the return on investment in terms of what students learn in college? After all, it’s the learning that we’re actually paying for when we write tuition checks, not training for a job that might be obsolete in two years.

Here’s the problem: we don’t know for sure how much students learn in college. As much as we spend on college, no bottom-line evaluation method exists for measuring what actually happens in the classroom and how that eventually translates into the value of the degree. Sure, there are the U.S. News & World Report rankings, but they mostly measure the students on their way in the door (how many students a college rejected, SAT scores) or how much colleges spend on faculty or students.

As much as colleges say they dislike the U.S. News rankings, they prefer them to any alternative that might try to rank colleges on how much students learn. Many colleges would like to keep prospective students and parents in the dark when it comes to how much value they end up adding to a student's life.

There are now ways to measure learning, chief among them the Collegiate Learning Assessment. Known as the CLA, the essay-only test gives students a set of materials and asks them to synthesize evidence and write a persuasive argument. More than five hundred colleges use the exam to measure their curriculum and teaching, although few release the results, or even averages, publicly.

There are reasons they don’t want the public to know the truth. A few years ago, two researchers tracked a representative sample of 2,300 students at 24 colleges and universities who took the CLA three times in their college careers: at the beginning of their freshman year, at the end of their sophomore year, and finally, before graduation.

The study’s bottom line: 45 percent of students in the study made no gains in their writing, complex reasoning, or critical-thinking skills during their first two years of college. After four years, the news wasn’t much better: 36 percent failed to show any improvement.
The main reason for this, the researchers found, was a lack of rigor. Through surveys they learned that students spent about 12 hours a week studying on average, much of that time in groups. Most didn’t take courses that required them to read more than 40 pages a week or write more than 20 pages over the course of an entire semester.

Students who studied alone did better, as did students whose teachers had high expectations or assigned a significant amount of reading or writing. Those who majored in the humanities, social sciences, hard sciences, and math did the best. And the majors that did the worst? Education, social work, and the most popular major on US college campuses: business.

To determine how these students fared after college, the authors later resurveyed more than nine hundred of them after graduation. Not surprisingly, the students who scored the lowest on the CLA also struggled in life after college. They were three times more likely than those scoring at the top to be unemployed, twice as likely to be living at home with parents, more likely to have run up credit card bills, and less likely to read the news or discuss politics.

Now, many students graduating this month might think it’s fine that they skated through college. But for students and parents who paid the tuition bills thinking they were getting a rigorous and life-changing experience, they deserved better. So do potential employers who will hire this month's graduates. We need more authoritative and accurate ways of measuring the value that a college adds to a student’s life than some arbitrary rankings system created by a magazine that doesn’t even publish anymore.

Jeffrey Selingo is editor at large at The Chronicle of Higher Education and author of College (Un)Bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students.

Photo: Dorann Weber/Flickr/Getty Images

Originally Posted on: Linked In By: Jeff Selingo

2-Year Colleges Are at Risk of 'Separate and Unequal' Future, Report Says

 Originally posted on The Chronicle of Higher Education by: Goldie Blumenstyk

Community colleges "are in great danger of becoming indelibly separate and unequal institutions in the higher-education landscape," a Century Foundation task force warns in a report being released here on Thursday. To deal with what it calls "the increasing economic and racial isolation of students" at community colleges, the group also calls for major changes in how two-year colleges are financed and operated.

Among its recommendations, the group urges states and the federal government to provide additional funds to two-year colleges that serve the neediest students, much in the way the federal Title I program works for elementary and secondary schools. In states where constitutional guarantees of education might extend to higher education, the report suggests that advocates even consider filing lawsuits to require such "adequate funding" of community colleges.

To "bring greater clarity to all types of public support for higher education," the report also asks the U.S. Departments of Education and of the Treasury to jointly study how tax exemptions for donations to colleges and for institutions' endowment earnings indirectly subsidize colleges—an effort that would highlight how such policies disproportionately benefit wealthier four-year institutions.

Radical Change Needed

The report is premised on the notion that community colleges, which enroll about 44 percent of the nation's college population, are in many cases not serving students well now and will be ill equipped to handle future demands without radical change.

Along with the financial recommendations, the report, "Bridging the Higher Education Divide: Strengthening Community Colleges and Restoring the American Dream," outlines a series of educational proposals. The proposals are aimed at shifting the patterns that result in four-year colleges' enrolling disproportionably more wealthy and white students while two-year colleges enroll a higher proportion of needy and minority students.

Research undertaken for the report found that, at some community colleges, almost two-thirds of the students are black, Hispanic, or members of other groups typically considered underrepresented in higher education.

The proposals include the creation of financial incentives to four-year institutions that enroll financially needy students who transfer from community colleges, as well as a call for more two-year-college honors programs, which could raise the colleges' academic stature and create a culture of success that would attract more middle-class students.

Showering the Wealthy

Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the foundation, who in an essay published in The Chronicle questions how "we shower the most resources on the wealthiest college students and the least on the neediest," said the idea of reducing stratification by enhancing community colleges is an important focus in the report.

In policy discussions people talk a lot about the underrepresentation of minority students in four-year colleges, said Mr. Kahlenberg, executive director of the task force, in an interview. But "we tend not to talk about the flip side"—the overrepresentation of minority and needy students in community colleges, he said.

The approach outlined in the report could not only create more-affordable college pathways for middle-class families and improve educational outcomes at community colleges—the report cites a body of research on "peer effects" and the value of school cultures with high expectations. It could also give community colleges more political clout.
 
"That's Political Science 101," Mr. Kahlenberg said.

The 22-member task force was led by Anthony W. Marx, the former president of Amherst College who now heads the New York Public Library, and Eduardo Padrón, president of Miami Dade College.

One Panelist Says No

But one member, Arthur J. Rothkopf, a former president of Lafayette College and later an executive at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, did not sign the 54-page report, largely because he disagrees with the idea of a Title I-style program for community colleges.

He did endorse several of the other proposals, including policies to encourage easier transfers to public and private four-year colleges. (Mr. Rothkopf acknowledged in an interview that, when he was at Lafayette, "we didn't do very well" on that front; the report urges highly selective colleges to pledge to accept community-college transfers for 5 percent of their junior class.)

Mr. Rothkopf, a self-proclaimed "budget hawk," said he couldn't support the report's call for increased federal financing without also proposing how it would be paid for, and added that the evidence was not clear that Title I has been effective.

At the same time, he said, he wished the task force had taken an even harder line on calling for an end to the indirect tax subsidies. His targets: a tuition tax credit that benefits families with annual incomes up to $180,000, which he called "a bad idea from the start and a sop for middle-class votes," and the tax break for donations to college-athletics programs.

"Let people pay for it with hard dollars," he said.

Mr. Kahlenberg said he was sorry Mr. Rothkopf didn't sign on, but asserted that his doubts about Title I were overblown.

Recent research shows that, "when used effectively, federal and state money can have an impact," said Mr. Kahlenberg. "Careful spending can made a big difference." He cited in particular a new book on schools in Union City, N.J., by the University of California at Berkeley professor David L. Kirp, Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America's Schools (Oxford University Press).

Mr. Rothkopf said he was also uneasy about the task force's use of a "race prism" in defining the issues.

Mr. Kahlenberg said the report focuses not only on racial divides but also on socioeconomic ones, and in many cases they are intertwined and crucial pieces of "the larger structural issues that are setting community colleges up for failure."

Business Schools With The Best Campus Enviornment

Originally Posted on Linked In by: John A. Byrne

The stated mission of the Black & Scholes Surf Club at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management is simply “to have fun surfing together and make some good friends with our classmates.” For beginners, club outings generally target “mellow long boarding waves.” For experienced surfers, club excursions are scheduled on “swell arrivals” aimed at providing MBA students “a chance to surf Southern California’s most renowned waves at their best.”

It’s just one of those less than obvious but real advantages to the MBA program at UCLA which it turns out is the business school with the “best campus environment” in the world, according to the Princeton Review.

Don’t laugh. While most MBA applicants aren’t likely to pick a school on the basis of its safety, attractiveness or location–the attributes Princeton Review measures on student surveys to pick business schools with the best campus environment–it just might matter to some–especially if you want to be less than half an hour from a beach. “it can be a fun in the sun school to some extent,” an MBA student at Anderson told the Review, “but I spend a whole lot more time with formulas and (financial) models than i do with the surfboard.”

Pepperdine University's Graziadio School of Business & Management was one of six California schools to make the 'best campus environment' ranking.

Nonetheless, UCLA’s welcoming 419-acre campus, with its sculpture gardens, fountains, museums and proximity to Venice and Santa Monica beaches, has helped to give Anderson a first place ranking for the past five consecutive years. The business school complex is located on the original North Campus where many of the buildings are constructed of imported Italian brick. It’s a neighborhood where tourists are sold maps to help them discover the luxury homes of movie stars in Beverly Hills, Bel-Air, and Brentwood, the posh residential areas that border the campus. The weather doesn’t hurt, either. Just ask the students who stroll the campus in shorts and scandals during the winter and fall when their East Coast rivals are bundled up in heavy coats and gloves.

Every year, Princeton Review surveys MBA students at some 300 business schools and publishes a top ten list of the schools with the “best campus environment.” The Review ranks schools on the basis of student surveys that assess “the safety, attractiveness and location of the school,” though it does not reveal which questions on its survey are used for the ranking.

For the complete list of schools with the "best campus environment," check out PoetsandQuants.com:

A Piece of the Action

We want to thank all of the credible executives that have provided us with a wealth of trusted references over the years.  It’s been our goal to provide insight and information to anyone we work with that may be of value and our expansion could not take place without that network.  When a staff member told me recently that one of their candidates was close friends of a Sr. Level Executive that would be a person of interest for our firm, but would only provide contact information for a “piece of the action” I had to ask…are you sure they are friends?! 

When industry executives compromise their professional integrity and insist on “consulting on the side”, they in turn de-value those that they refer.  When a firm advertises this is their policy to the community at large, the chances are that their database is full of candidates looking to make the quick buck and are very likely job-hoppers.   Candidates with integrity and have a genuine interest in helping a colleague further their career will invest in looking to have a professional relationship with a search firm, not one where they can get rich quick! 

-John Assunto
President & CEO
The Hudson Group

University Presidents Are Prospering

 Originally posted in The New York Times by: TAMAR LEWIN

In the 2011-12 fiscal year, the nation’s highest paid public university president was Graham B. Spanier, the president of Pennsylvania State University, who was forced out in November 2011 over his handling of a child sex abuse scandal involving a football coach.

Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press

Graham Spanier, the former president of Pennsylvania State University, was the nation’s highest paid public university president in the 2011-12 fiscal year. 

According to the annual compensation report by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Mr. Spanier was paid $2.9 million in 2011-12, including $1.2 million in severance pay and $1.2 million in deferred compensation. 

“The fact that Graham Spanier turns out to be the highest paid president in the country says something about the nature of compensation packages for people who leave under a cloud,” said Jack Stripling, the Chronicle reporter who worked on the survey. “Severance agreements are often very lucrative.” 

Three other public university presidents also had compensation topping $1 million: Jay Gogue of Auburn University, at $2,542,865; E. Gordon Gee of Ohio State University, at $1,899,420; and Alan G. Merten of George Mason University, at $1,869,369. Mr. Merten retired from George Mason last June after 16 years as president. 

Mr. Gee, who in 2007 became the first public university president to earn more than $1 million, had a base salary last year of $830,439, the highest among the 212 chief executives included in the Chronicle report. He is known for prodigious fund-raising energy, which has brought the university more than $1.6 billion since he took the post, and for the lavish lifestyle his job supports, including a rent-free mansion with an elevator, a pool and a tennis court and flights on private jets. 

Mr. Stripling said there had been a sea change in the last few years, with the rich getting richer and some pay packages exceeding not just $1 million, but $2 million. Deferred compensation agreements can increase pay drastically, as was the case with Mr. Gogue, whose pay went from $720,000 to $2.5 million in a single year when he completed a five-year contract. 

But the biggest growth last year, Mr. Stripling said, was in the $600,000 to $700,000 range, a category that included 28 chief executives, up from only 13 the previous year. 

According to the Chronicle report, the median total compensation for the presidents of public research universities was $441,392, up 4.7 percent from the previous year’s $421,395. The median base salary, $373,800, was up 2 percent from $366,519 the previous year. 

Rounding out the top 10 earners were Jo Ann M. Gora of Ball State University ($984,647); Mary Sue Coleman of the University of Michigan system ($918,783); Charles W. Steger of Virginia Tech ($857,749); Mark G. Yudof of the University of California system ($847,149); Bernard J. Machen of the University of Florida ($834,562); and Francisco G. Cigarroa of the University of Texas system ($815,833). 

A version of this article appeared in print on May 13, 2013, on page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Public University Presidents Are Prospering, Annual Compensation Study Finds.

Has The Future of College Moved Online?

Originally posted on The New Yorker by Nathan Heller

Gregory Nagy, a professor of classical Greek literature at Harvard, is a gentle academic of the sort who, asked about the future, will begin speaking of Homer and the battles of the distant past. At seventy, he has owlish eyes, a flared Hungarian nose, and a tendency to gesture broadly with the flat palms of his hands. He wears the crisp white shirts and dark blazers that have replaced tweed as the raiment of the academic caste. His hair, also white, often looks manhandled by the Boston wind. Where some scholars are gnomic in style, Nagy piles his sentences high with thin-sliced exposition. (“There are about ten passages—and by passages I simply mean a selected text, and these passages are meant for close reading, and sometimes I’ll be referring to these passages as texts, or focus passages, but you’ll know I mean the same thing—and each one of these requires close reading!”) When he speaks outside the lecture hall, he smothers friends and students with a stew of blandishment and praise. “Thank you, Wonderful Kevin!” he might say. Or: “The Great Claudia put it so well.” Seen in the wild, he could be taken for an antique-shop proprietor: a man both brimming with solicitous enthusiasm and fretting that the customers are getting, maybe, just a bit too close to his prized Louis XVI chair.

Nagy has published no best-sellers. He is not a regular face on TV. Since 1978, though, he has taught a class called “Concepts of the Hero in Classical Greek Civilization,” and the course, a survey of poetry, tragedy, and Platonic dialogues, has made him a campus fixture. Because Nagy’s zest for Homeric texts is boundless, because his lectures reflect decades of refinement, and because the course is thought to offer a soft grading curve (its nickname on campus is Heroes for Zeroes), it has traditionally filled Room 105, in Emerson Hall, one of Harvard’s largest classroom spaces. Its enrollment has regularly climbed into the hundreds.

This spring, however, enrollment in Nagy’s course exceeds thirty-one thousand. “Concepts of the Hero,” redubbed “CB22x: The Ancient Greek Hero,” is one of Harvard’s first massive open online courses, or MOOCs—a new type of college class based on Internet lecture videos. A MOOC is “massive” because it’s designed to enroll tens of thousands of students. It’s “open” because, in theory, anybody with an Internet connection can sign up. “Online” refers not just to the delivery mode but to the style of communication: much, if not all, of it is on the Web. And “course,” of course, means that assessment is involved—assignments, tests, an ultimate credential. When you take MOOCs, you’re expected to keep pace. Your work gets regular evaluation. In the end, you’ll pass or fail or, like the vast majority of enrollees, just stop showing up.

Many people think that MOOCs are the future of higher education in America. In the past two years, Harvard, M.I.T., Caltech, and the University of Texas have together pledged tens of millions of dollars to MOOC development. Many other élite schools, from U.C. Berkeley to Princeton, have similarly climbed aboard. Their stated goal is democratic reach. “I expect that there will be lots of free, or nearly free, offerings available,” John L. Hennessy, the president of Stanford, explained in a recent editorial. “While the gold standard of small in-person classes led by great instructors will remain, online courses will be shown to be an effective learning environment, especially in comparison with large lecture-style courses.”

Some lawmakers, meanwhile, see MOOCs as a solution to overcrowding; in California, a senate bill, introduced this winter, would require the state’s public colleges to give credit for approved online courses. (Eighty-five per cent of the state’s community colleges currently have course waiting lists.) Following a trial run at San José State University which yielded higher-than-usual pass rates, eleven schools in the California State University system moved to incorporate MOOCs into their curricula. In addition to having their own professors teach, say, electrical engineering, these colleges may use videos by teachers at schools such as M.I.T.

But MOOCs are controversial, and debate has grown louder in recent weeks. In mid-April, the faculty at Amherst voted against joining a MOOC program. Two weeks ago, the philosophy department at San José State wrote an open letter of protest to Michael J. Sandel, a Harvard professor whose flagship college course, Justice, became JusticeX, a MOOC, this spring. “There is no pedagogical problem in our department that JusticeX solves,” the letter said. The philosophers worried that the course would make the San José State professor at the head of the classroom nothing more than “a glorified teaching assistant.” They wrote, “The thought of the exact same social justice course being taught in various philosophy departments across the country is downright scary.”
Nagy has been experimenting with online add-ons to his course for years. When he began planning his MOOC, his idea was to break down his lectures into twenty-four lessons of less than an hour each. He subdivided every lesson into smaller segments, because people don’t watch an hour-long discussion on their screens as they might sit through an hour of lecture. (They get distracted.) He thought about each segment as a short film, and tried to figure out how to dramatize the instruction. He says that crumbling up the course like this forced him to study his own teaching more than he had at the lectern.

“I had this real revelation—I’m not saying ‘epiphany,’ because people use that word wrong, because an epiphany should be when a really miraculous superhuman personality appears, so this is just a revelation, not an epiphany—and I thought, My God, Greg, you’ve been spoiled by the system!” he says. At Harvard, big lecture courses are generally taught with help from graduate students, who lead discussion sessions and grade papers. None of that is possible at massive scales. Instead, participants in CB22x enroll in online discussion forums (like message boards). They annotate the assigned material with responses (as if in Google Docs). Rather than writing papers, they take a series of multiple-choice quizzes. Readings for the course are available online, but students old-school enough to want a paper copy can buy a seven-hundred-and-twenty-seven-page textbook that Nagy is about to publish, “The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours.”

The World's Best Executive Education Programs

The International Institute for Management Development (IMD) has done it again. The Lausanne, Switzerland-based school held on to its 2012 lead for the top executive education program in The Financial Times’ 2013 rankings published earlier this week.

IESE Business School in Spain jumped two spots to claim second, while Harvard Business School fell two rungs to fourth, despite topping every school for the quality of teaching and for placing second in “aims achieved” by program participants. The Thunderbird School of Global Management held steady and kept its third-place ranking. The University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business rounded out the top five by moving up one place from sixth last year.

The Financial Times’ list rates the top 70 providers of non-degree business programs for executive-level professionals. Participating schools must have raked in at least $2 million in revenue last year to even be considered. The ranking puts the most weight on a participant survey, where attendees use a 10-point scale to evaluate everything from the quality of teaching to the probability of future use. At least 20 percent of a program’s participants must answer the survey for the school to make the list. The results comprise 80% of the ranking – school data is used to determine the remaining 20%.

How credible is this ranking? Any survey that puts Thunderbird ahead of such highly regarded business schools, such as Harvard, Stanford, Wharton and Chicago Booth justifiably raises eyebrows. After all, most participants would cherish a program certificate on their resume from Harvard or Wharton much more than one from Thunderbird, despite the school’s superior showing in the FT ranking. And because surveys of participants are very much based on how a school measured up to expectations, the ranking is largely a reflection of how a group of graduates felt expectations were met or exceeded by their school. It’s not a stretch to believe that Thunderbird participants had expectations that were not quite as high as those as Harvard or Wharton.

Whatever one thinks of the authority of this ranking, it does yield some interesting data. Which schools serve up the best food to their executive education participants? According to the FT, it’s the Stanford Graduate School of Business, followed by Chicago Booth, Wharton, the University of Virginia’s Darden School, and No. 5 Harvard. So much for superior European cuisine. And when it came to facilities, IMD took top honors for the best learning environment, just ahead of some very surprising winners including No. 2 Washington University’s Olin School, No. 3 Darden, No. 4 European School of Management and Technology, and No. 5 IESE Business School in Spain.

More substantively, depending on your point of view, the best teaching faculty in executive education after Harvard is No. 2 INSEAD, followed by No. 3. Chicago Booth, No. 4 IMD, and No. 5 University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Darden, generally known as having the best teaching faculty in MBA education, was sixth, according to the FT survey data. And when it came to judging the caliber of one’s classmates, survey respondents were most pleased with the quality of their fellow students at Stanford, Harvard, IMD, INSEAD and Wharton.

To see the list of the world's top providers of executive education, according to the FT, check out PoetsandQuantsforExecs.com:

Originally posted on: Linked In by John A. Byrne

Level of Services vs. Discount, Discount, Discount!!!

     

I was recently on a family vacation in Florida recently and there was a car dealer ad that kept coming up over and over again pushing how deep their discounts were. They were by far the most annoying over the top commercials my wife and I had ever heard and I could not for the life of me think who in their right mind would seek to do business with this dealership. After speaking with my father (local to the area), he noted that very few of his friends and colleagues go there and that the company was continually in the news for one kind of violation or another.  

I had to look them up online and found out that 90% of the complaints revolved around service.  Oddly enough, the very next day I was forwarded an “email blast” from a search consulting firm that operates in the education space opening right up with the offer of a discount…when looking for a high level of service, if a firms going to start off on this level with you – that will trickle down on the candidate pool they will attempt to reach on your behalf. So, prepare for them to balk, hesitate and give in, give up and not reach the premier talent you’re truly looking to hire.

-John Assunto

President & CEO

The Hudson Group

How Colleges Are Selling Out the Poor to Court the Rich

(Reuters)

Neat fact: If the federal government were to take all of the money it pours into various forms of financial aid each year, it could go ahead and make tuition free, or close to it, for every student at every public college in the country.

Will it ever happen? Ha. Not unless Bernie Sanders somehow leads a Latin American-style coup down Pennsylvania Avenue. But one of the reasons I argued for the idea a couple of months back was that it would allow us to finally stop burning money subsidizing obscenely expensive tuition at dubiously worthwhile private institutions. At the time, I singled out the for-profit college industry, which has been rightfully savaged for devouring federal aid dollars while charging poor students backbreaking prices.

Today, though, I'd like to apologize to the University of Phoenix and its kin. It seems there are plenty of traditional, non-profit colleges leeching off the system as well.

For proof, see the demoralizing report released this week by Stephen Burd of the New America Foundation on the state of financial aid in higher ed. It documents the obscene prices some of the poorest undergraduates are asked to pay at hundreds of educational institutions across the country, even as these same schools lavish discounts on the children of wealthier families in order to lure them onto campus.

And here's the key bit: Many colleges, he argues, appear to be playing an "elaborate shell game," relying on federal grants to cover the costs of needy students while using their own resources to furnish aid to richer undergrads. 

"With their relentless pursuit of prestige and revenue," Burd writes, "the nation's public and private four-year colleges and universities are in danger of shutting down what has long been a pathway to the middle class for low-income and working-class students."

Give to the Rich, Overcharge the Poor
Burd's paper isn't an indictment of the entire higher ed establishment -- just a startlingly large portion of it. Many of the worst offenders he identifies are small, private colleges with meager financial resources, or public schools concentrated in a handful of states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina that have moved to what's called a "high tuition, high aid," model. The theory was that, in a time of tight state budgets, charging wealthy students exorbitantly would allow them to charge poorer students reasonably. 

It hasn't worked out that way. Unlike twenty years ago, Burd explains, it is now more common for colleges to hand out aid packages based on "merit" rather than financial need. And "merit" is often a rather nebulous concept.



Sometimes, colleges (and states) really are just competing to outbid each other on star students. But there are also economic incentives at play, particularly for small, endowment-poor institutions. "After all," Burd writes, "it's more profitable for schools to provide four scholarships of $5,000 each to induce affluent students who will be able to pay the balance than it is to provide a single $20,000 grant to one low-income student." The study notes that, according to the Department of Education's most recent study, 19 percent of undergrads at four-year colleges received merit aid despite scoring under 700 on the SAT. Their only merit, in some cases, might well have been mom and dad's bank account.

There's nothing inherently wrong with handing out tuition breaks to the middle class, or even the rich. The problem is that it seems to be happening at the expense of the poor. At 89 percent of the 479 private colleges Burd examined, students from families earning less than $30,000 a year were charged an average "net price" of more than $10,000 annually -- "net price" being the full annual cost of attendance minus all institutional and government aid. Less technically, it's what students can actually expect to pay. At 60 percent of private colleges, that net price was more than $15,000.
In other words, low-income families are routinely being asked to fork over more than half of their annual income for the privilege of sending their child off to campus for a year.

Feeding Off the Government
Many these institutions didn't just soak poor students; they also enrolled them in droves, collecting taxpayer dollars in the process. Burd identified 287 private colleges where more than a quarter of the student body received federal Pell Grants, which go to undergrads from low-income and working class families. These schools charged families earning under $30,000 a median net price, again, of more than $15,000. 

This scatterplot graph of private colleges (interactive version here) reveals the extent of the problem. The dots in blue show schools where more than 15 percent of students received Pell Grants, and students from low-income families were charged a net price of more than $10,000 a year. In total, these troublesome institutions make up 80 percent of the private colleges Burd analyzed.



A quick perusal of this list from The New York Times shows that many of these "high-Pell, high-net-price" schools, as Burd calls them, do in fact hand out generous amounts of merit aid to undergrads. For example:

• At Georgia's Berry College, 30 percent of students receive Pell Grants, and low-income students pay an average net price of $16,174. Yet 25 percent of its freshmen also receive merit aid, averaging more than $10,000 a piece.
• At Wabash College in Indiana, 28 percent of students receive Pell Grants, and low-income students pay an average of $15,480. Yet 12 percent of its freshmen get merit aid, averaging $15,393 each.
• At Case Western Reserve, one of the better known institutions among the high-pell, high-net-price schools, 23 percent of students receive Pell Grants grants, and low-income undergrads pay $18,381 on average. And yet 19 percent of freshmen also receive merit aid, averaging $18,359 each. 

These schools are accepting government money meant to make college accessible for low-income Americans, yet still charge them extravagantly. Meanwhile, they continue to hand aid off to wealthier students, either because they score higher on the SAT or bring in extra revenue. It's hard to imagine a more surefire way that colleges could undermine the public trust. 

Hard to Justify
It is possible that some of these institutions are charging their low-income students less than the data suggests. Net-price takes into account the cost of room and board, and at some schools, needier undergrads may be choosing to commute to campus. A survey by student lender Sallie Mae suggested that 40 percent of four-year private college students lived at home. But if the theoretical cost of housing really is artificially inflating their net cost data, it's up to college presidents to make that case persuasively.

Otherwise, it's hard to think of a justification for their behavior. Could it be that their prices are worth it, that the educations they provide justify the eye-popping cost? It's hard to say definitively. But I'm hoping to put that possibility to the test in the coming week by matching Burd's data against graduation and student loan default rates. In the meantime, the preponderance of evidence seems to suggest that many private colleges are either undercutting the intent of the Pell program, if not abusing it outright.

As a general rule, this problem seems to be much less severe at public colleges. At roughly three-quarters of the state schools Burd examined, low-income students paid a net price of under $10,000. Almost half of those where they paid more were located in just eight states, where the experiments with the "high tuition, high aid" model seem to have gone awry.

When we sufficiently fund our public institutions of higher ed, in other words, it really does keep prices low for the students who need it. Something to consider.

Originally posted on Linked In by: Jordan Weissmann