The New York Times Room for Debate page hosted a forum last week entitled "What If College Tenure Dies?" As the preamble rightly notes, the question follows from an increasing shift in university personnel away tenure and tenure-track lines and toward adjuncts and lecturers hired on temporary contracts. The numbers are stark:

In 1975, 57 percent of all college professors had tenure or were on a tenure track. In 2007, that number had fallen to 31 percent, and a new federal report, to be released in the fall, is expected to show another decline for 2009 . . .

What will happen when the rate slides into a non-critical mass (less than 20 percent)?, the Times asks.

Continue reading "Tenure Is Fading--Is that Really So Bad?" »

If damaging evidence against affirmative action turns up in a pro-affirmative action book, the author often explains it away as misunderstood or exaggerated. This has happened once again, this time to a book that made no splash when it was published last October, but drew attention here at Minding the Campus in criticism that spread to Ross Douthat's column in The New York Times, Pat Buchanan's syndicated column and now Time magazine.

The book is No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, a careful study of admission practices at eight unnamed elite colleges by Princeton sociologist Thomas J. Espenshade and a research associate, Alexandria Walton Radford. Writing here on July 12th in an article headlined, "How Diversity Punishes Asians, Poor Whites and Lots of Others," Russell K. Nieli of Princeton wrote that the book reported an immense admissions disadvantage to Asians (because admissions officers think there are already too many in the best colleges) and poor whites, who are penalized by favoritism, not only for blacks and Hispanics, but also for whites with middle-class and upper-class backgrounds. None of the criticism that greeted Nieli's article has focused on the anti-Asian bias. All of it has dealt with the slim chances of poor whites at the most selective colleges.

Time magazine this week interviewed Espenshade about Douthat's charges that elite education seems inclined to exclude the poor of red-state America. (The book does not mention red-state America at all.) Espenshade said this:

What I think he did was take a relatively minor finding and push an interpretation that goes beyond the bounds of available evidence. We have this finding that if students held leadership positions or won awards in career-oriented extracurricular activities when they were in high school, there was a slightly negative impact on their chances of being admitted to one of these top private schools. Now, what are these career-oriented activities? Douthat mentions as possibilities, and I don't deny it, that it could be participating in a 4-H club or Future Farmers of America, but those aren't the only types of activities that might fall into that broader category. It could include Junior ROTC. It could include co-op work programs. It could include a host of things. And these aren't necessarily rural types of activities. My interpretation is that [having leadership positions or winning awards in career-oriented activities] suggests to admission deans that these folks are somewhat ambivalent about their academic future.

Espenshade is right that his critics missed the book's clear point that membership in 4-H clubs, the Future Farmers of America and high school ROTC was not enough to harm the chances of applicants to the elite colleges---the problem is holding high office in these groups (as Senator Sam Brownback did by the way in FFA) or winning group awards, because admissions officers think that such achievements might indicate a lack of seriousness about higher education. But Espenshade goes too far in saying that "there was a slightly negative impact on their chances." His book says on page 126 that "Excelling in career-oriented activities is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission," which seem more like crippling damage rather than a "slightly negative impact." As Nieli wrote: "The lower-class whites proved to be all-around losers... Having money in the family greatly improved a white applicant's admissions chances, lack of money greatly reduced it." If you read the whole book, the prejudice of the elite schools against poor whites seems clear. As a political issue, this is a sure bet to gain ground.

The Education Department's boom has finally fallen on for-profit colleges, much-criticized for their high rates of default on their students' education loans, loans that U.S. taxpayayers have to repay when graduates of proprietary schools can't find jobs either because the jobs don't exist or because the training for which the students have paid doesn't strike prospective employers as adequate.

If a set of proposed rules issued last week by Education Secretary Arne Duncan goes into binding effect; a majority of programs at for-profit colleges would be subject to restrictions on availability of federal loan funds, and about 5 percent of those schools programs would lose access to federal loan dollars altogether. Since for-profit colleges typically derive close to 90 percent of their income from government- guaranteed loans to their students, the Education Department's rules threaten to curtail their operations and even put some investor-owned schools out of business altogether.

Administrators of for-profit schools and their allies are crying foul. They argue that the government should also crack down on loan funding for programs at non-profit colleges, many of which also depend heavily on student-loan proceeds for income and many of whose graduates--say, art-history or women's-studies majors--find themselves unemployed and perhaps unemployable after graduation. The current proposed rules, for-profit advocates contend, discriminate against low-income students who choose career colleges instead of the liberal-arts schools that middle-class young people tend to select. The advocates may have a point--but isn't there a larger point? Should the government be in the business of providing money to everyone who wants to go to college in the first place? And if so, to what extent? If a $100,000 bachelor's degree in English literature from a liberal-arts college and a $14,000 career-college certificate as a medical assistant--training that many medical assistants obtain for free on the job--don't do much to improve their recipients' employment prospects, why are taxpayers underwriting the cost of supplying either? What public good is served?

Continue reading "Government Meddling and For-Profit Colleges" »

Russell K. Nieli's recent article, "How Diversity Punishes Asians, Poor Whites and Lots of Others," drew a lot of attention, including a mention in Ross Douthat's New York Times column. Referring to the book, No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, a 2009 study of elite college admissions, Nieli wrote that the authors, Thomas J. Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, found that a student's chances of gaining admission to an elite college dropped by 60 to 65 percent if they were involved in ROTC, 4H Clubs, Future Farmers of America "and other activities that suggest that students are somewhat undecided about their academic futures." Several readers, irritated by the implication that future farmers are Red State rubes, sent in lists of important people who have been FFA members. The noted members included Jimmy Carter, Sam Brownback, Nicholas Kristof, Willie Nelson, Taylor Swift, Tim McGraw, Lyle Lovett, Don Henley of the Eagles and Jim Davis, creator of Garfield.

Jennifer Keeton, age 24, is a student in the graduate counselor education program at Augusta State University, Georgia. Faculty members at ASU have informed Ms. Keeton that she will be dismissed if she does not rid herself of beliefs that the school opposes. She holds traditional Christian views about sexuality and gender, and believes homosexuality is a "lifestyle," not a "state of being," as her school teaches. She agrees with her faculty that counselors should never impose their views on clients, and is not accused of saying or believing that she should. She also says she affirms the inherent dignity of all persons, regardless of their views or sexual behavior.

That wasn't good enough for ASU. The school ordered Keeton to attend a "remediation program" in multicultural re-education and sensitivity training. An assistant professor suggested she attend the Gay Pride parade in Augusta, and she was told to file written reports on how she is moving toward the sexual belief system her school requires. She reluctantly agreed to accept the remediation, then backed out, saying in an email to faculty members, "I understand the need to reflect client's goals and to allow them to work toward their own solutions, and I know I can do that... (but) I can't alter my biblical beliefs, and I will not affirm the morality of those behaviors in a counseling situation." She says she was told by two assistant professors that "it was a life and death matter to not affirm a client's sexual decision, and that failure to do so has led and could lead to suicides by clients who are not affirmed in their sexual preferences."

On Keeton's behalf, the Alliance Defense Fund filed suit yesterday against teachers, deans and regents of ASU, charging violations of freedom of speech and religion.

Fiscally beleaguered presidents of public universities around the country like to wisecrack: "public universities used to be publicly funded, then they were publicly assisted, now they are publicly named." While easy to dismiss as a self-serving whine, there is something to their complaint, at least as it applies to the two public university systems in New York, CUNY, the City University of New York, and SUNY, the State University of New York. Looking just at SUNY's budget, for instance, out of a total annual system-wide expenditure of $11 billion, only $3.5 billion - or 32 percent - actually comes from New York State's taxpayers. The other 68 percent comes from students, research foundations, users of SUNY facilities, and generous donors. The CUNY proportions are roughly comparable. In other words, to quote a top SUNY financial official, New York State today "is only a minority shareholder" in its public universities.

The problem is that New York's legislators treat all of this non-taxpayer money as if it were actually theirs to collect and to disburse. They not only insist on setting the level of university tuition and then "appropriating" it so that it can be spent, they even want to control the disposition of externally provided research and philanthropy dollars. To add insult to injury, as external funding has gone up, legislators have reduced the state's tax levy allocation - often by an even greater amount. Understandably, this infuriates the public universities' primary financial backers - students, research grantors and philanthropists - who see their contributions being used not to enhance the state's colleges but to indirectly underwrite other state expenditures.

This travesty might finally end (or at least be curtailed) under a proposal now being debated in Albany that is so controversial that its resolution is holding up approval of the 2011 state budget. Called The Public Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act (PHEEIA, pronounced "fee-ah") - supported by Governor David Paterson and the state senate but strenuously resisted by the assembly - this legislation would allow both CUNY and SUNY to set their tuition levels without the legislature's prior approval and keep all the resulting tuition revenue, accept and retain all funds from research grants and philanthropic gifts, more easily enter into contracts with private vendors and enterprise partners, streamline hospital operations (mainly an issue concerning SUNY's three hospitals), fast-track campus facility construction, and lease portions of their campuses to other parties for purposes consistent with their academic mission. Naturally, all of these new operational freedoms are hemmed in by myriad restrictions: tuition increases would kept under the higher education price index, all expenditures and contracts would still be subject to state financial accounting rules, land leases and contracts would be tightly overseen by newly established state boards, just to mention a few of the bill's many constraints.

Continue reading "Unfettering New York's Public Universities" »

Speaking to the NAACP convention in Kansas City on Monday (July 12), Michelle Obama said that because of "stubborn inequalities" that "still persist --- in education and health, in income and wealth --- "the NAACP's founders "would urge us to increase our intensity."

The White House, for some reason, appears to have heard her call, for on Tuesday, reported the Chronicle of Higher Education, "White House Official Says Civil-Rights Office Will Enforce Fair State Spending for Black Colleges."

John S. Wilson Jr., executive director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities, said on Tuesday that the Education Department was looking into which states continue to shortchange public black colleges and how the federal government can make sure appropriations are more equitable among public institutions.

Continue reading "White House to Impose "Fairness" on Education Spending" »