In this office, data really does drive policy thinking
In the 18 months since being named as the first chief economist for the U.S. Department of Education, Jordan Matsudaira and his 11-person team have been exploring problems in higher education by digging through vast sets of data. While much of that work is still in the early stage — getting their arms around the research potential of data on 150 million students over 50 years is a task in itself — the office has already produced some important findings, including a recent report on the most efficient transfer pathways between community colleges and four-year institutions.
Matsudaira, currently on leave from his post as an associate professor of economics and education policy at Columbia University’s Teachers College, knows this terrain well. His research has focused on the connections between education and the labor market, and during the Obama administration he was chief economist of the Council of Economic Advisers and helped facilitate creation of the College Scorecard. Before the holidays, I sat down with Matsudaira in his Education Department office overlooking the National Mall, to get a better feel for how the office is looking to reshape education.
Here’s some of what stood out to me.
The stat that he still finds the most startling? More than one-third of the 45 million people now carrying student-loan debt don’t have a degree: It’s also, he said, one of the hardest for people on the outside to wrap their minds around. “People tend to think of folks who have been to college at all as being more privileged in general and more on the affluent end of the spectrum,” Matsudaira told me. It also has an effect on the policy and political debates over student-loan forgiveness. The lack of understanding about this “paints a less sympathetic picture of student-loan borrowers than is warranted by the facts.”
The noncompletion problem is also surprisingly prevalent among those who’ve borrowed for graduate-level education: And because there are no caps on federal Grad Plus loans, he said, “you can see people acquiring pretty high levels of graduate-loan debt without earning a graduate degree.” His office is planning to release a report on this phenomenon soon. I can’t wait to see it, especially considering how dependent many colleges have become on income from their master’s- and professional-degree programs.
The value — and limitations — of the College Scorecard: With its data on students’ earnings outcomes by college and major, he believes the tool has empowered students and families to think about “what happens to students on the other side” of their college experience, and it’s an especially useful way to compare particular programs and institutions against others. That said, he’s also wary of putting too much stock in measuring a college’s value by “how much it allows you to earn in the labor market.” I wasn’t surprised by that nuanced assessment, but having recently written about an aspiring accreditor that aims to make students’ earnings gains the centerpiece of its approval process, I was heartened to hear it.
Data he wishes he had: Information on post-college outcomes besides salaries, because “earnings might not be the right proxy” to judge the success of students’ educational experiences. One example: how many people in an occupationally focused program actually end up holding jobs in those fields. Of course some private companies manage to assemble some of this data by scraping publicly available websites, and many colleges obtain such data through their alumni surveys, but that’s far short of a complete data set. Having that could be one more way to systematically evaluate “whether students are really getting what they hoped to from their program.”
Data can inform policy beyond the student-loan realm. To wit: that recent report on transfer from community colleges: I was frankly a little surprised to see Matsudaira’s office weigh in on transfer policy, but as he (a co-author of the report) reminded me, when transfer doesn’t go smoothly, there’s often a financial cost to students who have to take additional courses. The report looked at transfer experiences for 620,000 students over an eight-year period with the goal of identifying which ones produced the most cost-efficient pathways. The point was to use data to see “whether the access role of community colleges is really bearing fruit,” said Matsudaira, and “what the secret sauce of an effective partnership is.”
Expect more such studies in the future. Now that the department has assembled this expertise, Matsudaira said he’s excited to delve into its data: “We have all those stories to learn from.”
A new “watch list” to highlight programs “contributing to the student-debt problem” is coming soon: After the pause on student-loan payments and the push for more income-based repayment plans, the cohort default rate has become an almost irrelevant measure of college accountability. And a proposed new “gainful employment” regulation would only apply to certain career-focused programs. But the department is “concerned about unaffordable debt at all campuses,” Matsudaira said. Hence, its plan to create an annual watch list of programs of “low financial value.” The list won’t come with any legal sanctions, but Matsudaira said it would “hopefully bring some public pressure” on the institutions.
How pandemic closures of elementary and secondary schools might echo through higher ed: “A lot of lower income and racial-minority students lost more time in school than their more-affluent peers,” Matsudaira said. While many other education scholars are studying the aftermath of that learning loss, his office is now looking specifically at whether there’s any correlation between the duration that students’ schools were closed and their proclivity toward applying to college.
The risks in the current national discourse questioning the value of college: For Matsudaira, the data are clear: The economic returns for going to college “are very high and have been pretty stably quite high over a long period of time.” So to him, a lot of the public discussion discounting the value of college seems “potentially dangerous” both to individuals who might miss out and to the nation that needs a college-educated populace.
But he’s also mindful that not every college and not every program has value. During the Great Recession, he said, too many students ended up in low-value programs at for-profit and other colleges, and that fueled a lot of the student-loan borrowing that continues to burden them today. That’s a lot of what drives his work in this new job, he said: to develop the information that will “help people avoid making very bad decisions for their financial health.”
Pitch your idea to improve higher ed at SXSW EDU
Are you thinking about attending SXSW EDU? Got a venture or even just a good idea you’d like to pitch there at The Chronicle’s “Shark Tank: Edu Edition” on March 5? If so, I’d love to hear from you. While we don’t offer any investment capital, the session is always one of the highlights of the event. It’s also a great chance to get some feedback on thoughtful new approaches — commercial or nonprofit — from an education entrepreneur (Paul Freedman), a former college president and education-equity advocate (Catharine Bond Hill), and an education journalist (me). Just use this form to submit your pitch for consideration.
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