Obama’s Imprint on Higher Ed: Responses

These pieces are in response to Michael S. Roth’s essay “Barack Obama’s Imprint on Higher Education.”

A Step in the Right Direction

By Danielle Allen

Ever since the mid-20th century, the Higher Education Act has imposed on colleges the requirement to publish a single tuition number. The goal of achieving transparency in the pricing of a college education was laudable. But because of how financial aid works, that requirement is now outdated. At elite private institutions, tuition tells us how much the well-to-do are asked to pay, while obscuring the cost for everyone else.

The Obama Issue

In this special issue of The Chronicle Review, we turn our attention to the accomplishments and disappointments of the past eight years. See the whole issue here.

• Obama’s Betrayal of HBCUs
• Free Public College: Utopian No More
• Making History

Congress, recognizing this problem, in 2008 introduced a second requirement, that colleges publish “net price” calculators. But while net price seems like a simple concept, it doesn’t add much to the conversation, because understanding it involves a set of steps too complicated for many families.

The Obama administration has pushed for greater transparency with the release of the College Scorecard, in the fall of 2015. The scorecard at last goes beyond the concept of tuition and gives families the information they need: average annual cost, presented by income quintiles. It also has other useful information: the rate at which students return to campus after their first year; six-year graduation rates; the most popular fields of study on campus; and the demographics of the student population.

There are, however, flaws. Michael Roth is right to call out the limited conception of the value of a college education implied by the scorecard. The only value proposition identified depends on earnings after college — and even those data aren’t well organized. One can’t use it to tell, for instance, when colleges are simply reinforcing the socioeconomic status of well-to-do incoming students rather than opening up opportunities for those who are less well off.

Also, the data are generally spotty; for many colleges, the Scorecard simply turns up blank results in key areas like scores of incoming students or even average cost. And the efforts to streamline can lead to strange results: A search for colleges in New Jersey where you can study the liberal arts fails to include Princeton, my alma mater. Even though there’s a liberal-arts search option, you have to search specifically for history, or English, or ethnic studies, or visual and performing arts.

All that said, the College Scorecard is a positive step in the direction of transparency about the cost of attending college. Yet it leaves colleges and universities in a bind. Although the government’s College Scorecard dispenses with the concept and terminology of “tuition,” Congress continues to require colleges and universities to publish a tuition number. Orwell, I lift my glass to you.

Danielle Allen is director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and a professor in the department of government and the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. She is the author, most recently, of Education and Equality (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Fairness for All Under Title IX

By Janet Halley

The Obama administration — and Michael Roth — get one thing right: Colleges and universities cannot punt the responsibility to respond to sexual assault and other sexual misconduct on campus over to law enforcement. Colleges have a moral, not just a legal, responsibility to protect victims, and to penalize wrongdoers and separate them from our communities when necessary.

But colleges also have a responsibility to people accused of sexual assault to handle their cases with fairness, due process, and equal treatment; to promote a robust exchange of ideas; and to respect the adult autonomy of our students.

Roth’s essay suggests that college administrators have that all figured out — that Title IX enforcement is now under control, thanks to their hard work and that of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR).

I beg to differ.

OCR’s excessive and lawless demands on colleges have led to draconian enforcement. In one case, publicly known only because the accused student was able to afford a legal challenge and allowed to sue anonymously, an investigator hired by Brandeis University concluded that he had committed “sexual violence” by kissing his sleeping lover and by gazing at his genitals when they showered together. A federal judge has ruled that the investigator’s reasoning was “absurd.” I agree. And this was no aberration. Overly broad enforcement of sexual harassment has been promoted by the OCR. In a settlement with the University of Montana, for instance, the office insisted that unwanted sexual conduct — full stop — is sexual harassment. In case after case, the complainant’s quite sincere statements that innocuous conduct was merely unwanted is leading to investigations and penalties.

Procedural unfairness also abounds. No one stops to ask whether accused students have disabilities that impede their ability to respond, or lack family support or the financial means to defend themselves. They face accusers assisted by administrative advisers and are judged by investigators and adjudicators who are expected to show strong enforcement numbers. Students are denied access to the complaints specifying the alleged wrongs, receive at most selected and cooked information gathered by investigators, and suffer distorted public shaming campaigns by complainants and their friends, but are under strict anti-retaliation rules that prevent them from replying.

At a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival last June, Roth invoked a news item that he had read that morning in The New York Times to show that rape on campus poses “an extraordinary limitation on the freedom of women to get an education.” The Times had reported that a young man accused of two campus rapes ended up with a plea-bargained misdemeanor and no jail time. Roth’s anecdote implied that impunity for Title IX violations presented a threat to women on campus.

What he omitted, though, was that prosecutors had dropped both of the rape charges because, as they said, they not only lacked sufficient evidence but had gathered exculpatory evidence as well. They sought, and got, a felony guilty plea simply because there were two separate accusations of rape — accusations which they admitted they could not substantiate. The judge reduced the plea to a nonsexual misdemeanor, almost surely because the original plea was so excessive. This young man may have committed no crimes whatsoever.

Roth’s own subordinates could reasonably conclude from his Aspen remarks that, under his watch, sketchy information is good enough to support conclusions of serious wrongdoing and outrage at impunity.

It is time for the Department of Education and higher-education leaders to walk the walk, not just talk the talk, of fairness to all students under Title IX.

Janet Halley is a professor of law at Harvard University.

Invest in Evidence

By Raynard S. Kington

Michael Roth describes the need for students to “stay awake” during college. His advice is sage, especially for traditional students at institutions like Wesleyan and my own college, Grinnell. But we diminish the impact of higher education if we don’t extend that “awakening” to potential students who don’t currently attend college. They aren’t yet “awake” to the opportunities provided by postsecondary education, and President Obama deserves credit for trying to “awaken” them.

I haven’t agreed with the approach of the president and the U.S. Department of Education to a number of higher-education issues. For example, the original proposal for a College Scorecard was deeply flawed. However, I strongly support Obama’s “North Star” goal — that by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. It was a bold proclamation that education matters and that degree attainment is necessary for the competitiveness of our nation.

As we know, the only way we can reach the “North Star” goal is if students from all backgrounds have the opportunity to attend and succeed in college. That requires their being college-ready when they hit campus, including in gateway subjects like math and science. Obama, to his credit, has put a high priority on STEM literacy and has made repeated attempts to increase research-and-development funding. But while STEM is important, we should not undervalue the role of the humanities in every domain of our society.

The White House’s commitment to higher education runs deep and personal. Michelle Obama made education attainment her primary focus, and Jill Biden has emphasized the significance of community colleges to the health of our economy. While they’ve made considerable strides, there is still a lot of work to do.

As an industry, we suffer a dearth of evidence about what works and what doesn’t work. Given the importance of higher education to our economy, our investment in research to learn more about the effectiveness and efficiency of higher education is embarrassingly small. If we had invested more in such research years ago, there would have been an evidence base to inform creation of an effective College Scorecard.

The Obama administration has built awareness of the need for a college degree. It is up to leaders in higher education to deliver on that promise — and to do so in measurable ways.

After all, if we expect our students to “stay awake,” we have to stay awake, too.

Raynard S. Kington is president of Grinnell College.

Obama’s Trojan Horse

By Anthony P. Carnevale

Much as the Greeks entered Troy concealed inside the gift of a wooden horse, the Obama administration has found its way past the ivy-covered ramparts of the academy armed with the velvet hammer of data. This time, it’s geeks, not Greeks, inside the wall, essentially unnoticed as they tinker with a national database that tracks the employment and earnings effects of particular fields of study.

The current version of the College Scorecard has gotten a lot of attention, including in Michael Roth’s essay, but it is just a temporary distraction. It measures only institutional performance, not disparities at the level of individual programs of study. Ten years from now, people will have forgotten the current scorecard and will instead be using statewide longitudinal data systems, or SLDS, the data revolution that the Obama administration has quietly been building.

The SLDS is a nationwide database that was started in 2005. Since then the states have received more than $700 million to fully build out the system. Now more than 40 states have SLDS programs in place, if not already in use. When the national SLDS is in full operation, for the first time we will be able to connect individual postsecondary programs with employment and earnings outcomes.

While all this may sound excessively bureaucratic, it is anything but. Currently we have a system of higher education in America that is built largely on institutional reputation. In terms of economic outcomes, however, institutions matter less and programs of study matter more. For instance, petroleum-engineering majors make four times as much as elementary-education majors.

Sometimes less education is more, when measured in economic terms. Because of differences in earnings among fields of study, more than 40 percent of those with bachelor’s degrees make more than the average person with a master’s degree; 28 percent of those with associate degrees make more than the average bachelor’s-degree recipient; and a substantial share of people with community-college certificates, industry-based certifications, or skill-based licenses make more than the average person with an associate degree.

In a modern republic, the mission of higher education is still to empower individual flourishing. But in our 21st-century market economy, it’s hard to be a lifelong learner if you’re not a lifelong earner. We need to aspire to strike a pragmatic balance between colleges’ growing economic role and higher education’s traditional cultural and political independence from economic and governmental forces. The Obama administration’s efforts are an attempt to find that balance without directly intervening in the operation of colleges and universities.

If higher education cannot fulfill its growing economic mission, it will also fail in its social mission to create good neighbors, good citizens, and fully realized individuals. Increasing the economic relevance of a college education should, if done properly, extend the educator’s ability to empower Americans to do work in the world rather than retreat from it.

Anthony P. Carnevale is director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

Where’s the Commitment to Public Higher Education?

By Marta Tienda

Michael Roth is correct that the United States “has seen only modest gains in educational attainment” during President Obama’s administration. Despite Obama’s vocal advocacy for higher education, restoring the United States to international educational pre-eminence will not be one of his legacies.

In the 1990s, the United States led the world in the share of 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees. By 2012, it ranked 12th among 36 industrial peers. Not only did state funding for public universities continue a downward spiral during the Obama years, but the United States was among a handful of industrialized nations that cut public spending for education during the Great Recession.

The stagnation in U.S. college-graduation rates is worrisome because the wage premium associated with higher education has risen appreciably; our international competitors are making enormous gains; and soaring tuition has coincided with rising economic inequality, which has reduced college access for low-income students.

Meanwhile, the nation’s commitment to public higher education has waned as states divert tax revenues to cover Medicare and other entitlements. To make up for budget shortfalls, public universities have adopted the twin strategies of raising tuition and recruiting out-of-state students (who pay higher tuition) — an unsustainable solution because flat or declining state spending will soon require enrollment reductions, program cuts, or both. Moreover, this dual approach stymies social mobility by favoring students from affluent families and limiting access for economically disadvantaged students, who are disproportionately black and Hispanic.

To his credit, President Obama raised spending on Pell Grants, which serve low-income students. But while the number of beneficiaries grew more than 50 percent over the past decade, the 18-percent increase in average grant size pales by comparison with the 25-percent rise in tuition and 32-percent rise in room and board at public four-year institutions. He also delivered on a promise to keep interest rates on student loans low — but saving indebted students an average of $1,500 over the life of their loans hardly qualifies as a bold action when amounts borrowed by 2010 graduates averaged $26,000.

When we needed big ideas and a formidable commitment to higher education, the Obama administration opted for incremental reforms. As baby boomers retire, it is imperative to replenish America’s human capital by investing in public higher education with the goals of raising college-completion rates and eliminating racial and ethnic gaps. An infusion of resources comparable to the National Defense Education Act of 1958 — which bolstered federal involvement in higher education in order to outshine our competitors in science and technology — would be a powerful sign that America is committed to restoring its place as the global leader in higher education.

Marta Tienda is a professor of demographic studies, sociology, and public affairs at Princeton University.

The New College Majority

By Jamie Merisotis

Michael Roth makes the case that one of the greatest accomplishments of the Obama administration is its focus on creating a more equitable, accessible higher-education system. On this point, he is correct. Obama has made access and affordability a priority. He has also recognized that there are changes necessary to build a postsecondary system that will better serve today’s college students.

Education is the great equalizer. Americans of all backgrounds deserve the chance to earn a postsecondary credential that will help them secure a spot in the middle class. But our educational system is not built for all of those it must serve.

Today’s college students look radically different from those of the past. Some 38 percent are older than 25, nearly 60 percent work while enrolled, and 25 percent are raising children. These students have needs that are different from those of most 18-year-olds who enroll straight out of high school. For many of today’s students, cost presents a significant barrier to success. Nearly two of five students with financial, work, and family obligations leave college in their first year. The prospects are especially grim for low-income students, only 11 percent of whom graduate within six years.

Many people laud Obama’s initiatives to improve college affordability by increasing financial aid, including a significant increase in the maximum Pell Grant award. Equally notable, though, are the administration’s efforts to support the institutions that serve many of today’s students: community colleges. Nearly half of students who are parents attend community colleges, as do many students who work full time. By making the success of those colleges a concern, the administration also emphasized the success of the students they serve.

Further, in creating spaces to drive innovation in higher education, the administration signaled that the system must change the way it operates. Innovations such as flexible pathways — including competency-based programs, which award degrees based on learning rather than time spent in a classroom — offer promising evidence that such changes are underway.

The next administration should build upon Obama’s efforts in important ways. To start, affordability is important for all students, especially those who represent the new college majority: students of color; low-income, first-generation, and adult students; those who work and attend part time. By putting today’s student at the center of planning for America’s future, the next White House can create a higher-education system in which all students are positioned to succeed — and to contribute to our shared success as a nation.

Jamie Merisotis is chief executive of the Lumina Foundation and author of America Needs Talent: Attracting, Educating, & Deploying the 21st-Century Workforce (RosettaBooks, 2015).