You’ve probably heard of “food deserts"—those low-income communities with limited access to affordable and nutritious groceries. But what about education deserts?
According to research that will be discussed Tuesday on Capitol Hill, there are hundreds of them: More than 34 million Americans—over 10 percent of the nation’s population—live in communities where public colleges are either scarce or nonexistent.
Compared to communities with more learning options, education deserts are more likely to have growing Hispanic populations, lower educational-attainment rates, and a larger share of the work force employed in manufacturing. Many have only one public institution, typically a community college.
Those findings, argues Nicholas W. Hillman, an assistant professor of education leadership and policy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, have important implications for President Obama’s college-rating system, due out this fall.
After all, if the sole public college in a community receives a poor rating and becomes ineligible to award federal student aid, residents could be left with no affordable options.
“Federal officials may operate with the belief that a rating system is a tool for improving college ‘choices’ and to help students seek out ‘better’ institutions,” he writes. “In many communities, these can be false alternatives.”
He urges the Obama administration to consider geographic factors, such as the availability of public education, when rating colleges, and suggests waivers for places with long histories of low educational attainment. Failing to account for the “geography of opportunity” could “disproportionately burden minority and working-class communities that have a long history of educational inequality,” he warns.
Mr. Hillman’s paper is one of seven that researchers will present at the Congressional briefing, organized by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California at Los Angeles. The briefing’s title poses a question—"Do Higher Ed Accountability Proposals Narrow Opportunity for Minority Students and Minority-Serving Institutions?"—and the answer from researchers presenting there is, generally, “yes.”
Many of the arguments raised at the briefing will be familiar to veterans of the ratings debate. In addition to Mr. Hillman’s access concerns, a few other themes will probably emerge:
College completion starts in high school, if not earlier.
One paper, written by Stella M. Flores, an associate professor of public policy and higher education at Vanderbilt University, and two colleagues, examines the college-completion gap between minority and white students in Texas. Using a “variance decomposition” analysis, the researchers find that more than half of the gap can be explained by “pre-college” characteristics of students and their high schools. The study concludes that it would be “unfair and perhaps even inefficient” for the Obama administration to judge colleges based on student outcomes without accounting for factors beyond the colleges’ control.
“Even if such an approach led to a higher completion rate, the obvious casualties, without significant interventions, will be students who entered college with less resources and academic preparation than their nondisadvantaged student counterparts,” they write.
Ratings don’t account for risk …
A third paper, by Sylvia Hurtado and colleagues at UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, adjusts raw graduation rates to account for either student characteristics or institutional resources, and identifies 108 less-selective institutions that do a better-than-expected job of graduating low-income, first-generation, and minority students. The researchers dub them “engines of economic opportunity.”
They recommend that the president identify and reward such universities and warn that if the administration doesn’t adjust its metrics for risk, many broad-access institutions will be compelled to tighten their admissions standards.
… but risk adjustment is risky, too.
Other research suggests that risk adjustment comes with its own set of risks. Anne-Marie Nuñez, an associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and Awilda Rodriguez, an assistant professor at the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, examined how Hispanic-serving institutions—colleges that have a Hispanic enrollment of at least 25 percent—would fare under a regression-adjusted approach.
They found that the adjustments can be “volatile” at the institutional level, varying widely depending on the variables used. They suggest that federal officials collect more data to evaluate institutional performance, including selectivity and preparedness measures, and “resist the temptation to implement high-stakes financial-aid policies” that could penalize underrepresented students and the colleges that serve them.
