The Growing Education Gap

David Brooks says:

The Education Gap, By David Brooks, NY Times: Especially in these days after Katrina, everybody laments poverty and inequality. But what are you doing about it? For example, let's say you work at a university or a college. You are a cog in the one of the great inequality  producing machines this country has known. What are you doing to change that?

Let me defend universities against the implied notion that colleges aren't doing anything to address these problems. I apologize that this post is a bit "me" oriented, but Brooks struck a nerve. First, there are whole offices devoted to this problem, e.g. see here, but that by no means exhausts the available resources. On another front, I am currently Chair of the University's Scholastic Review Committee and an elected member of The Undergraduate Council. Both committees are concerned with these issues, but let me back up to the many years I chaired the University's Scholarship Committee, the committee responsible for allocating the entire pool of University scholarship money. As Chair, I had the committee reexamine each step in our process to try and identify hidden bias in the award of scholarship money. As an example, one part of our evaluation process used the number of AP courses a student completed as a measure of academic quality. However, there is a wide disparity in the number of AP courses across high schools and it varies with both the size of the high school and its demographic characteristics. To overcome this, we changed the standard to something along the lines of "The student takes full advantage of available educational opportunities" and distributed a list identifying the number of AP courses available at each high school. Some schools offered no AP courses at all and those students were no longer penalized for not having AP courses on their transcripts. In Oregon, there are a few large cities with large, high average income high schools and lot of smaller and less affluent schools spread out across the state. Subsequent data indicated that this change was successful in, as we saw it, more fairly distributing scholarship money according to merit across high schools with such varied demographics. This is not all we did, at the evaluation orientation each year we discussed these issues with regard to the evaluation process, e.g. when looking at a student's extra-curricular activities to be sure and account for circumstance and we would cite examples of how that might work, and the committee has members to specifically represent the interests of the students Brooks is writing about. The extra-curricular expectations for a single mom or an older sibling with imposed child care responsibilities are different from those of a student without such time or resource constraints. In any case, from my experience on this and other committees, I resent the implication that we do not care, are not sensitive to, or are not taking action to address these problems. We are.

Brooks goes on:

As you doubtless know, as the information age matures, a new sort of stratification is setting in, between those with higher education and those without. College graduates earn nearly twice as much as high school graduates, and people with professional degrees earn nearly twice as much as those with college degrees. But worse, this economic stratification is translating into social stratification. ... The most damning indictment of our university system is that these poorer kids are graduating from high school in greater numbers. It's when they get to college that they begin failing and dropping out...

Why is this an indictment of the university system and not our under funded primary and secondary education systems? I have no idea when assigning grades to the 50-300 people in a course what a student's economic circumstances are. I can only assign the grade the multiple choice or essay test supports and if a student fails, I can't pass them on some other basis. They need to come to college prepared and that starts long before they get to universities. Having done the University's grade inflation study and having examined high school grades as part of that process, I have my own ideas about why high school graduation rates might be rising. Take a look at the pressures and incentives current education policy gives primary and secondary schools for a start, and I've already mentioned funding issues. In any case, that we get more under privileged students coming through our doors but many fail along the way is something we do our best to address, but students need to arrive prepared and that is a social problem that extends far beyond the reach of our universities. Finally,

...I'm going to come back to this subject and write about what some colleges are doing to help these students and how most colleges are neglecting them. But let me conclude with the thought that while we have big political debates in this country about equality of results, all those on the left and right say they believe in equality of opportunity. This is where America is failing most.

I'll agree with that, equality of opportunity is essential, but I'm guessing we will disagree about the source of and solution to this problem.

UPDATE:  Arnold Kling comments on this post and writes:

In my view, the issue is larger than universities' policies concerning admissions and financial aid. It concerns how universities are financed, and how this affects the distribution of income. First, consider state subsidies for universities. These are almost certainly regressive. Much of the subsidy goes to raise the rents earned by administrators and professors. Much of the rest goes to affluent students. The taxes that pay for the subsidies come from all economic classes. Second, consider university endowments. Again, they serve to increase rents of employees and to subsidize those students who attend the most elite institutions--a student population that is disproportionately affluent. Imagine instead what might happen if state funds and alumni donations  funded vouchers for student tuition. Compared with reforming university finances, tinkering with admissions and scholarship policies is beside the point. It may "show that you care," but has little practical significance.

A couple of quick notes.  First, I was answering the question Brooks posed, what have I done personally.  If I controlled state taxes and expenditures, my approach would be different!  Second, I disagree it is of little practical significance.  That's not what our numbers told us, that's not what the people on the committee that work with students tell us, and if you are one of the students who gets a scholarship, it is of huge significance.  Sure, we need to work on the issues Arnold identifies, but is he implying we shouldn't do this too? 

One final note, we are a state institution, but our "subsidy" is 13 cents per dollar, down from around 30 cents fifteen years ago.  The impact of this is that we have increased tuition to make up the difference at a rate far greater than the rate of inflation and this has reduced access.  A lot of our work internally has been to counter the trends in enrollment the changes in state funding have caused and scholarships are one part of that strategy. The changes have not been insignificant. Some figures:

1990:  Tuition was 23% of budget, state funded 32% of budget
2004:  Tuition was 33% of budget, state funded 13% of budget

That's a big change in funding over the last 15 years and this is common across universities.  The disinvestment you hear about is real and it has harmed educational access.

Comments

[eurocent]

For decades the American economy has been fed with scientists produced by other countries' public and universal educational systems.
These scientists and engineers got interesting jobs with very good salaries, but their countries didn't get much in return for the educational investment.
Now it seems globalisation finally starts compensating countries like India or China. Russia and Europe are not that lucky.

[Emmanuel]

I too don't agree with Brooks' belief that universities are hotbeds of inequality. As MT properly points out, a lot of the inequality starts at lower levels; that is, primary and secondary education is notably better in wealthier (read: typically white, Republican-leaning) districts than in poorer districts.

Things get exacerbated as you go down the line. Those from poorer school districts often lack the tools necessary for college, don't dedicate much time preparing for the SAT, etc. Like MT, most academics I've met are genuinely concerned about how lopsided the educational playing field has become. But, there are limits to what they can do. Unlike Brooks, I think that the problem and its solutions are not for the most part concentrated at the college level. Rather, inequities that exist throughout the educational system, K-12, are further magnified once these students reach college age.

[ken melvin]

Does David know about the cuts in Pell Grants. Think he'll support increased funding for public schools and tuition free colleges?

[Ari]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/books/review/25glazer.html

September 25, 2005

'The Shame of the Nation': Separate and Unequal
By NATHAN GLAZER

Jonathan Kozol has been writing books rather similar to this one since "Death at an Early Age" in 1968. He is persistent, it is true, but so is the problem that has aroused his passions since he began teaching in a Boston school more than 40 years ago, when he was a young civil rights activist. That problem is the conditions under which we educate the children of the poor and minorities. In his account, they are trapped, almost uniformly, in old schools that are overcrowded, in poor repair, with scanty teaching materials and disgraceful toilets, and staffed by generally underqualified teachers.

In the five years up to the writing of "The Shame of the Nation," Kozol visited approximately 60 schools, in 30 school districts, in 11 states. Some of these schools are in the South Bronx, and he became familiar with their principals, their teachers and many of their students. (He dedicates the book to a teacher in one such school.)

But along with his familiar theme of the inadequacy of the education we provide the children of the poor and minorities, he has a new focus in this book - the return of a substantial degree of segregation in our urban schools. Black and Hispanic students, he writes, are concentrated in schools where they make up almost the entire student body. (I should say that I once opposed the use of the word "segregation" to cover both the state-imposed separation of the races in the South and the concentration of minority students in schools outside the South, which arises for a number of reasons, but that is a lost cause - today we use "segregation" for both.)

The chief academic authority on this issue, whom Kozol interviews and quotes, is Gary Orfield of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who has been as persistent in documenting the scale of segregation, and attacking its presumed educational effects, as Kozol has been in describing it. According to Orfield and his colleagues, writing in 2004, and quoted by Kozol, "American public schools are now 12 years into the process of continuous resegregation. . . . During the 1990's, the proportion of black students in majority white schools has decreased . . . to a level lower than in any year since 1968." ...

[cl]

Inequality in access to higher ed all has to do with funding and the lack of it. States have consistently lowered their support of state schools, and access to financial aide has diminished.

We no longer live in the higher ed hey-day of access to all that was the 1970s.

This has been the choice of taxpayers since the Jarvis tax revolution in the 1970s.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/national/nationalspecial/25college.html

September 25, 2005

Storms Stretch Safety Net for Black Colleges
By PETER APPLEBOME

NEW ORLEANS - After Hurricane Katrina hit, there was six feet of water in the library at Xavier University. There is a beached boat on a campus made that much soggier by the wind and rain from Hurricane Rita. There is a waterlogged chapel, floors as slimy and slippery as river moss, with chairs and Bibles and plants strewn willy-nilly and a statue of the Virgin Mary perched on a pedestal overlooking it all.

Three miles away, there is a pile of rubble at Dillard University where three modular student dorms used to be before a post-hurricane fire burned them to the ground. There is a soggy morass of ruined books and backpacks and notebooks in the student bookstore, a ghostly vista of shrubs turned black by the polluted water that covered the campus for two weeks, and no students, just the chug, chug, chug of trucks pumping out water and drying out buildings.

When most people think of higher education in New Orleans, they are more likely to think of Tulane or perhaps Loyola than Xavier and Dillard, two small historically black universities scrambling to get back on their feet. But in the parable of race and inequality left behind by the floodwaters, one chapter still to be written will be the fate of places like Dillard and Xavier, which suffered far worse damage than their wealthier counterparts on higher ground and have tiny endowments, limited resources and students who are almost all dependent on financial aid.

Both say they will survive and eventually recover. But that could be a long, slow process, with Dillard researching the possibility of holding some sort of a spring semester away from its home campus and Xavier saying it needs $70 million to $90 million in aid to get it back where it was before the storm.

"I don't have an endowment I can take money from," said Dr. Norman C. Francis, the president of Xavier....

[anne]

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D05E3D6123CF932A25755C0A9669C8B63&fta=y

June 11, 2000

What's Still Wrong With Kids Today?
By Ethan Bronner

ORDINARY RESURRECTIONS
Children in the Years of Hope.
By Jonathan Kozol.

IN the mid-1960's, when Jonathan Kozol, an idealistic Harvard graduate, taught fourth grade in Boston's inner city, and emerged with a devastating tale of social neglect, he helped define an era. Like its title, the book, ''Death at an Early Age,'' had the unadorned brilliance of a well-conceived slogan (''Give peace a chance''). Kozol was rightly seen as a young man of courage, a symbol of his generation.

Since that time and that book, much -- and not much -- has changed. School busing has come and largely gone, civil rights has turned into affirmative action, which has come under widespread attack. Roxbury and similar neighborhoods and the schools that serve them remain beacons of despair. Concern over continuing school segregation has waned. Now the talk is of uniforms, standards and high-stakes tests.

And while other activists of his day have shifted focus or sought different challenges, Kozol has spent the past few decades producing books, articles and lectures with the same lament, the same outrage. Most recently, in 1995, he wrote ''Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation,'' a depiction of Mott Haven in the South Bronx. Such works have seemed to some critics like yet more renditions of ''The Times They Are a-Changin', ''without the freshness and immediacy of the first version. In other words, Kozol, while a hero to some, was viewed by others as something of a pious, repetitive scold.

The title of his new book, ''Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope,'' has the same evocation of faith as ''Amazing Grace'' and the same narrative focus, Mott Haven, an area whose concentrations of pediatric and maternal AIDS are among the nation's highest. And the book has some familiarly irritating qualities. It can be pious (''The life of a child, after all, is made up not of social 'constructs' or developmental 'trends,' but of much smaller things like stomachaches or hurtful words or red Crayola crayons'') and mundane (''Even with caution, I think it is accurate to say that many of the older people in Mott Haven who have talked with me at length feel contradictory emotions -- and, at times, a roller coaster of emotions -- in regard to the conditions of their lives and prospects for their neighborhood'').

Yet over all the book is affecting, in places deeply moving....

[pgl]

Having read Mr. Brooks opine on economics, I have to confess he is doing wonders to lower the IQ of his readers.

[Betsy L. Angert]

Dear Mark and cl . . .

Education was the topic of discussion on KPFK, Pacifica radio today. One speaker offered a theory similar to that of cl. It was surmised that in the United States education is no longer valued. There is an accepted belief that the masses are needed to serve the classes. The skilled and special labor can be easily obtained from foreign countries; and it is.

The question was posed, why would Americans wish to invest in schools. They no longer need to. Let other countries spend their dollars. They can and will, willing supply the US with professionals.

Besides, I might add, if our population were truly educated, would leaders such as George W. Bush or Dick Cheney be elected, let alone survive?

Ari, Kozol is quite an author and researcher. Savage Inequalities was an excellent read.

May you live long, learn much, and feel fulfilled . . . Betsy
Betsy L. Angert Be-Think