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On Labor Day, the Chicago Tribune reported on a news item that is akin to pigs taking flight: an institution of higher education had taken the unprecedented step of lowering the sticker price of one of its courses. National Louis University, a private non-profit university in Chicago, has offered its masters-level “Introduction to Teaching” course on Groupon, the site that offers discounts at local retailers to savvy shoppers. Groupon prices the course for $950—less than half the usual tuition of $2,232—though it only counts for 3 of the 36 credits needed for the master’s in teaching and the discount will be limited to 25 students.

Putting aside debates about the value of a master’s in teaching programs—and the evidence is pretty good that these paper credentials don’t make much difference—let’s congratulate National Louis for being so bold as to <gasp> cut the price of anything on a college campus. When was the last time a college did anything but jack its tuition at twice the rate of inflation?

The problem is, in the strange world that is higher education, making any facet of “college” cheaper leads people to question its quality rather than consider why college courses are priced so outrageously in the first place.

Gawker’s coverage of the National Louis experiment is a case in point. The blog describes National Louis as “an actual real college created to commemorate the moment that the St. Louis Browns joined the National League in 1934” rather than what it really is: a teachers college with more than 100 years of experience in training educators, and the birthplace of the kindergarten movement. And the poor dupes who choose to take up the offer? “Think of what a great story you’ll have to tell your students at your failing school one day: ‘Your teacher comes from Groupon.’”

The right question to ask in response to the Groupon deal is not whether National Louis is some fly-by-night diploma mill, but how it is that the school can offer this course for less than half of what they normally charge and pass those savings onto students. Maybe the high cost of providing a college course isn’t completely “fixed,” and other courses—even entire degree programs—could be provided at a lower price tag. More generally, why couldn’t we have a system where colleges price-compete for students?

Alas, Groupon is not the way forward in higher education reform. But this kind of competitive pricing would be a welcome change from the high-cost, high-price model we have today.

After months of speculation and rancor, the Department of Education released its final “gainful employment” regulation yesterday. For those who haven’t been as riveted to this drama as I have, here’s a quick refresher.

In response to concerns that for-profit colleges were duping their students into taking on huge amounts of debt in return for a low-quality education, Department of Education officials set out to define gainful employment (GE) standards that will determine which programs are eligible for federal student aid. The standards are based on two measures—the repayment rate for a given program (the proportion of students who are actively paying back their loans) and the debt-to-income ratio of the typical graduate (the proportion of total or discretionary income that goes to annual loan payments). Though the regulations apply to occupational programs at community colleges, all programs at for-profit colleges fall under the regulation.

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In June 2009, my colleagues and I published a report on six-year graduation rates at American colleges and universities (“Diplomas and Dropouts“). We found that colleges and universities that admitted similar students often had widely different graduation rates, sometimes on the order of 30 or 40 percentage points different. We argued that students, parents, and important intermediaries like guidance counselors must have comparable information about college performance at their fingertips so that students could avoid making bad investment decisions and put pressure on poor performing schools to improve.

We were not alone in sounding the call for better consumer information, and in the 18 months since then the calls have gotten even louder. But the argument for providing parents with better information is based on an underexplored issue: if parents are given better information, will they use it? In the skeptical words of a former college president commenting on “Diplomas and Dropouts” (and I’m paraphrasing), “giving parents graduation rates won’t make a lick of difference.”

In a study released today, my colleague Mark Schneider and I set out to test that hypothesis using an experimental survey of parents in the five most populous states.  We asked parents to choose between two public, four-year colleges in their state, and all parents received some basic facts about each college. But we randomly assigned some parents to a treatment group that would receive all of this basic information plus each college’s six-year graduation rate.

We found that providing parents with graduation rates increased the chances that they would choose the college with the higher rate by about 15 percentage points. What’s more, we found that the information had large and statistically significant effects on parents with less education, lower incomes, and those who reported feeling less informed about the college application process. In contrast, more-advantaged and more-informed parents did not exhibit significant information effects.

The results show that comparable, easy-to-understand measures of college performance can help parents make better college investment decisions. As such, the Department of Education should require colleges and universities to share their graduation and retention rates with students and parents on all admissions and financial aid correspondence. The findings also reveal why policy makers should work to collect and convey a broader array of institutional quality measures that consumers can use to distinguish colleges from one another. Providing such information to enhance consumer choice in higher education is a governmental objective that policy makers on the right and the left should agree on.

Rick Hess and I recently wrote an op-ed for Inside Higher Education that bemoaned the discouraging higher education news coming out of the General Accountability Office (GAO). The GAO’s high-profile (and inflammatory) secret-shopper study issued in August (and showcased in Senator Tom Harkin’s hearings on August 4) included a slew of significant errors in it, the vast majority of which served to cast for-profit colleges and universities in the worst possible light. I won’t go through the changes here, you can see a sampling in the op-ed. Suffice it to say that the revisions, which were quietly posted on November 30 (so quietly that the story didn’t break until a week later), are substantial and certainly raise questions about what kind of vetting process the report received before being released.

On Monday, Senator Harkin responded directly in those very same pages. Harkin, who commissioned the report and led a high-profile series of hearings investigating for-profit colleges, defended the report, arguing that the GAO issues revisions of this kind all the time, and that the revisions do not change the findings of the report in any way.

In response to the flap over the GAO report, just yesterday a bipartisan group of six members of Congress sent a letter to the acting comptroller general demanding answers to some of the questions surrounding GAO’s handling of the report (you can see the letter here). The letter is signed by Darrel Issa, presumptive chair of the committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and John Kline, who will chair the Education and Labor committee in the coming session. More surprising, Democratic Representatives Carolyn McCarthy (New York) and Alcee Hastings (Florida), not exactly conservative Blue Dog Democrats, also signed on. A much larger group of Democrats (including many minority members) have expressed concerns about the department of education’s proposed gainful employment regulations.

There are clearly some gaping holes in the way we regulate the student aid dollars that flow to for-profit colleges and universities. And it seems clear that many of the practices that the GAO documented bend even the most ardent free-marketer’s sense of propriety. The problem, as I stated in our op-ed, is that these kinds of dust-ups “[cripple] efforts to talk honestly about problems that need to be addressed. . . trampling public confidence in an esteemed federal watchdog helps no one—not the individual students that are being taken advantage of by fly-by-night providers, not the colleges that are acting in good faith, not the bureaucrats charged with regulating the sector, and not the taxpayers who wish to root out corruption in student lending.”

The gospel of American higher education policy is pretty simple: more postsecondary education is better, for those who get a degree and for the country as a whole. The ethos is backed by social science research, which suggests that the wage premium enjoyed by individuals with a college degree has expanded since the 1980s (see panel 2 here), the college-educated are less likely to be unemployed, and that a bachelor’s degree is worth an extra $500,000 to $1 million in lifetime earnings.

While the aggregate returns to postsecondary education are real, we know far less about how these returns vary across institutions. But from the perspective of a qualified high school student, whether her degree will come with a wage premium is less important than figuring out which school will produce the highest return on her investment. Economists have shown that the wage premium is related to admissions selectivity, but for students choosing among similarly selective colleges, there is far less information to go on.

In a new, thought-provoking analysis of previously unreleased data, my colleague Mark Schneider calculates an estimated “return on investment” (ROI) for more than 500 colleges and universities. Using data from Payscale.com, Schneider finds that ROI increases with admissions selectivity and that public institutions offer higher returns than private ones.  He concludes that policy makers should strive to make this kind of information available for all schools. See here to read Schneider’s piece in its entirety.

The House GOP Pledge is full of standard Republican policy goals—reducing government spending, keeping taxes low, and creating jobs—but it fails to even mention federal education policy. As Checker Finn and Mike Petrilli have already pointed out, education’s absence in the Pledge could signal “[a reversion] to weary old themes that emphasize states’ rights, local control, and parental choice . . . That won’t get [Republicans], or the country, very far.”

You can’t help but wonder whether the Republicans will miss a great opportunity here. Polling firms routinely ask the public which party they “trust more” on a given issue, including education. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the public preferred the Democrats on education by a healthy margin. By 2000, however, the candidacy of “education governor” George W. Bush had helped to narrow the gap to the point that voters trusted Bush and Al Gore equally on education. This “issue ownership” enabled Bush to pass a far-reaching, if flawed, education reform bill in No Child Left Behind.

Not surprisingly, given the controversial accountability measures in NCLB and the general dissatisfaction with the law that emerged in the years after its enactment, the trust deficit in education re-emerged. By October 2008, Democrats had a 19-point edge among survey respondents (53 percent trusted Democrats, 34 percent Republicans).

Like the classic rope-a-dope, the Republicans have rebounded again: by late August of this year, the party even held a slim lead on education (and every other issue that Rasmussen asks about), with 41 percent favoring Republicans, 40 percent Democrats. Granted, the rebound has more to do with overall dissatisfaction with the president’s party than anything the Republicans did in education reform over the past two years. Still, the trust deficit is no longer apparent.

The question is, will Republicans recognize an opportunity to take the lead in rethinking federal education policy? The response should not be a new expansion of government power or continued tinkering with NCLB’s broken accountability framework. The current anti-government, anti-Washington climate precludes a potential majority from proposing any new, costly education initiatives.

But the nice thing about “trust” is that it provides you with a chance to generate some new ideas and, if you’ve got the votes, to try them out. As the Republican forays of the early 2000s reveal (and President Obama can attest), voter trust can dissipate faster than D.C.’s summer heat. But that doesn’t mean that Republicans should shy away from an opportunity to shake up the way the feds pursue education reform.

Image by Marie.

In a high-profile hearing Wednesday, Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) blasted for-profit colleges and universities and the organizations that accredit them. The Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions (HELP) Committee hearing was a productive one; the results of an undercover “secret shopping” report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) shined an unflattering spotlight on the questionable recruiting practices that seem to be the norm at too many for-profit institutions. The for-profit schools batted 1.000: at each and every site visited, the GAO uncovered fraud and abuse.

The hearing also raised questions about how well the accreditation process functions as a quality-control mechanism. Harkin seemed shocked that the accreditation system, with its use of formal campus visits and process-oriented evaluations, would be unable to detect the fraud uncovered by the GAO. He’s onto something. One can only hope that more members of Congress learn that accreditation—not just of for-profits, but of all schools—is little more than a rubber stamp and needs reform.

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In the modern classic Animal House, Faber College’s hippest English professor (played beautifully by a younger, more mustachioed Donald Sutherland) ends his lecture with a dose of defeatism:

“Don’t write this down, but I find Milton probably as boring as you find Milton. Mrs. Milton found him boring too. He’s a little bit long-winded, he doesn’t translate very well into our generation, and his jokes are terrible.”

Bell rings, students rise to leave.

“But that doesn’t relieve you of your responsibility for this material. Now I’m waiting for reports from some of you… Listen, I’m not joking. This is my job!”

According to a new AEI Outlook from economists Philip Babcock of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Mindy Marks of the University of California, Riverside, the academic disengagement and lax policies that characterize Sutherland’s fictitious course have increasingly become the norm in American higher education. Using data that stretch from 1961 to 2003, Babcock and Marks estimate that American college students have gone from studying about 24 hours per week (about what colleges expect, given credit hour requirements) to spending about 14 hours hitting the books. Today’s students are not only failing to connect with Paradise Lost; they are failing to connect with just about every subject. The decline is seen regardless of majors, whether students’ parents went to college, or whether students are employed. For discussion of the causes and consequences of the decline, see “Leisure College, USA.”

Faber College’s motto states simply “Knowledge Is Good.” Unfortunately, Babcock and Marks reveal that our college students don’t seem to spend nearly as much time in search of that good stuff as they used to.

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Non–think tankers constantly ask me whether all this “research” that we do ever has any impact on anything. It’s not always easy to convince people of the important role that research plays in policy debates, but once in a while we’re lucky enough to get a clear signal that our work had an effect on the institutions and policies we evaluate.

About a year ago, my coauthors and I published a report on college graduation rates (“Diplomas and Dropouts“) that documented the wide variation in performance across schools with similar admissions selectivity. Coppin State University, a historically black university in Maryland, stood out as one of the lowest graduation rates in the country. Rather than criticizing our motives, claiming that the data we used were not a fair metric, or suggesting that their students were to blame, Coppin has apparently risen to our challenge in a constructive way. As Doug Lederman reported last week in Inside Higher Education, in response to our report, Coppin State has developed a six-week “summer institute” for 200 of its 600 incoming freshmen. The summer institute targets students whose placement test scores indicate a need for remedial help in one or more subjects. It will expose these students to an intense set of academic and “college survival” courses, as well as introducing them to the rhythms of campus life. Next year, program directors hope to expand the program to accommodate all incoming freshmen.

The summer institute idea is not new (indeed, Lederman points out that other Maryland colleges have adopted a similar model), and, despite its popularity, has yet to be subject to a rigorous evaluation of its effectiveness (not to mention its cost-effectiveness). However, Coppin State’s move to address its retention and completion challenge head-on indicates a willingness to reflect on how its policies and practices may fall short of the mark that is often severely lacking in higher education. Rather than shooting the messenger, as many schools tended to do in the aftermath of our report, more schools should follow Coppin’s lead and make an effort to serve their students better.

I recently called on federal policy makers to rethink and augment the definition that identifies colleges and universities as “Hispanic-Serving Institutions” (HSIs). The current definition hinges on enrollment; if 25 percent or more of a school’s full-time students is Hispanic, the school qualifies as an HSI. While these institutions make up a small percentage of colleges and universities nationwide, they enroll upwards of 40 percent of Latino students. Moreover, meeting the enrollment criteria makes colleges eligible to receive Title V grants under the Higher Education Act (though to receive a grant they must also meet two other, need-based criteria).

The problem, of course, is that designation as an HSI and the criteria for winning a grant are completely decoupled from any sense of how well schools actually serve their Hispanic students, and in particular the rate at which they retain and graduate these students. Schools can win grants for any number of projects, but they need not address concrete goals of student retention and completion in their proposals, nor must they show evidence that the funded project improves these outcomes over the course of the grant. Put simply, the definition and the grant program pay little attention to the “serving” portion of the title.

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