Boosts for students’ basic needs and for the teaching pipeline.
Three actions tied to the federal government caught my attention in the past few weeks. One may ease burdens for low-income students. Another could help surface new models for teacher preparation. Both of those goals are crucial right now. The third development, however, made me wince a little as it reminded me how the pause on student-loan payments has undermined one of the government’s only college-accountability measures.
1. In conjunction with last week’s White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, an organization that helps connect people to government resources announced it would release a tool kit in early 2023 specifically for higher-education institutions to identify students who are likely to be eligible for food assistance, Medicaid, and the new Affordable Connectivity Program, which provides $30 a month toward internet service. The organization, Benefits Data Trust, says its tool kit could be useful in helping colleges guide students through the complexities of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Pre-pandemic, an estimated two million college students were eligible for but not participating in SNAP — a gap the group attributes to confusion about eligibility on the part of students and their institutions The conference also prompted several calls for reform, including a proposal from New America to scrap altogether the SNAP provisions that create so many hurdles for college students to qualify.
2. With so much attention lately on the teacher shortage in the United States (also on the myth of the teacher shortage), I’ve been eager to learn more about approaches like apprenticeships and residencies to expand the pipeline into the field. So I was excited to see last week’s announcement by the U.S. Department of Education of $60-million in grants to more than a dozen colleges and organizations developing alternative pathways into teaching. I’m interested in programs like these because the traditional pathway — majoring in education — has narrowed. Education was once the most popular college major (OK, that was in the early 1970s), but in the 2020 academic year, only about 85,000 (or 4 percent) of two million undergrads finished college with that major. That means a nearly 20-percent decline over two decades, according to the Pew Research Center.
3. The first week in October is usually when the Education Department releases its official calculations on student-loan default rates, the proportion of borrowers who have defaulted on their loans in the previous three years. This year was no exception, but the latest figures are especially misleading. Nationally, the official default rate is 2.3 percent, a huge decrease from 7.3 percent a year ago, which was itself a decline from the year before. But of course, since March 2020, no borrowers have been required to make a payment, so the metric doesn’t really tell us anything about borrowers’ ability to repay their loans. I wrote in April how this pause — however welcome for borrowers — was undermining one of the few (if imperfect) tools the government has to assess how colleges have served students. We (still) need alternatives. Maybe the publication of this asterisked data will stimulate further discussion.
Check these out.
Here are some education-related items from other outlets that recently caught my eye. Did I miss a good one? Let me know.
- New college models are needed but they also necessitate new approaches to accreditation, the entrepreneur and education-reform advocate Stig Leschly argues in this essay published by the American Enterprise Institute. “New accreditors should operate with a steely insistence on economic-mobility outcomes,” he writes. “They should hold startup colleges clearly accountable for producing high graduation rates, strong short-term earnings outcomes, and low net costs.”
- President Biden’s student-loan forgiveness “created a ticking time bomb for fundamental reform” of higher education, Kevin Carey, of New America, writes in Slate. The first step should be for the federal government to “ditch its one-size-fits-all grant and loan system,” he says, “and split the program in three: one for short-term, job-focused credentials; one for traditional undergraduate degrees; and one for graduate and professional school.”
- The number of youth apprentices nationally more than doubled in the past decade, but racial and gender disparities persist, according to data analyzed by Jobs for the Future and reported by Work Shift. The analysis found disparities in both participation and wage benefits once apprenticeships end. While men more than doubled their wages after completing apprenticeships, women didn’t come close to that — in part because they disproportionately entered fields like pharmacy tech and early childhood education that pay much less than male-dominated fields like construction.
- New and pre-existing state requirements could undermine students’ access to the polls this fall, so the American Council on Education’s updated issue brief, “How Colleges Can (and Can’t) Support 2022 Campaign Activities on Campus and Help Students Vote,” should be a welcome guide. For example, a number of states do not accept student IDs at polling places, or have restrictions such as requiring student ID cards to be signed or issued within the past two years. The brief highlights colleges’ responsibilities to promote voting and voter education, as well as the limitations they face on partisan political activity.
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