The Romero Report: episode 027 Transfers
Does transferring between colleges actually help students, and how can administrators better streamline the transfer process?
Aldemaro Romero Jr. The Romero Report
Does transferring between colleges actually help students, and how can administrators better streamline the transfer process?
Aldemaro Romero Jr. Letters from Academia
The issue of student debt has become a hot topic of discussion since April 2012 when it was made public that the total student debt in this country had reached $1 trillion. From then on it has developed into of conversation in both the political arena and about its cost in human terms. Fingers have pointed in every direction, including the real culprit – significant decreases in public financing of higher education.
From the U.S. presidential campaign of 2012 to the “occupy” movement that exploded the year before, student debt became a major source of debate not only in the U.S. but also abroad. In the case of the U.S., a number of proposals have been made, from offering free community college education to lowering the cost of higher education in general.
Although we have yet to come up with a comprehensive solution to this issue, emphasis has been placed on the human consequences of this financial burden and its impact on the lives of students and their families.
Now a new study provides a different angle on how this problem affects not only the common citizen but also the economy as a whole. In a peer-reviewed article in the journal Economic Modeling, a team of researchers from Italian and British universities writes that the effect of student debt among biomedical students represents a serious threat to the future prosperity of advanced economies.
The study, “Economic growth and the harmful effects of student loan debt on biomedical research,” confirms an earlier hypothesis by the 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Joseph E. Stiglitz. According to him the costs of higher education and graduates’ level of indebtedness represent not only a problem of equality of opportunity, but also a serious threat to future prosperity.
The premise is that modern economies are increasingly reliant on knowledge-based economic activities. In other words, the economies of developed countries depend more and more on a workforce that is highly educated and the economic condition of that population will, thus, have a direct effect on economic activity.
These researchers show that the high level of indebtedness of biomedical professionals may have severe negative effects on economic growth from the standpoint of society as a whole. This happens because of a number of factors. One is that there is a sort of “brain drain” of people who prepared academically for a career in research but move into private business where they are better paid and have more opportunities for employment in the biomedical area. This is the direct result of decreasing government support to research activities in the public sector. Although this means that more researchers will work in the applied areas, such areas cannot advance without appropriate research efforts in what is called basic research, an activity that takes place, for the most part, at universities.
According to this study, another factor impacting this shift in emphasis is the fact that researchers with a strong inclination toward purely speculative research are less productive if they force their talents to conform to the demands of applied research in business organizations. What this means is that their efforts are concentrated in generating the kind of commercial products private industry expects instead of more pure research-oriented activities. This is in part because private industry is interested more in practical results than in research whose results are basically showcased in academic journals. At the end of the day it is all about who can pay better and get the students out of debt faster.
This is a mirror situation to that of lawyers who also incur high levels of student debt. They oftentimes try to get jobs in the private sector rather than in public service so they can pay off their own student loans, loans that can easily exceed $100,000.
As a consequence of these trends, we will see an increasing imbalance in the availability of medical doctors and researchers in different areas of the health professions. The authors of this research found evidence that in the U.S. there is the potential for an even greater increase in the difference between the average growth rates of real family income and the average costs of higher education.
The level of indebtedness among young medical professionals is actually pressuring them into the higher-paying specializations. In other words, these graduates will choose more and more highly profitable specialties such as neurosurgery, urology or plastic surgery, while areas such as primary care specialists, pediatrics or medics in rural areas will attract fewer and fewer practitioners. It is interesting that many developing countries where they have a larger proportion of rural populations have developed strict rules by which doctors have to reside in rural areas for some minimum number of years right after graduation and before being free to establish themselves in larger, urban centers. Of course, they can do that because college education in those countries tend to be highly subsidized and the financial pressure for practicing medicine in urban areas is more a matter of social choice than a financial one.
Obviously, the bottom line for medical graduates with large levels of indebtedness in countries like the U.S. is that they will sub-specialize in those fields that promise higher earnings to offset their higher loan repayments.
In the larger picture what we will see is a greater imbalance in the healthcare system that at the end of the day will affect all of us, not only in terms of availability of specialists in all areas but also in terms of the cost of health care in general.
If we want to avoid this from happening we need a better-funded higher education for all.
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Student Debt Could Impact Future Health Care
Aldemaro Romero Jr. The Romero Report
What do college rankings actually mean and are they the metric we should be using for judging the value of an education?
Aldemaro Romero Jr. Letters from Academia
In time past the vast majority of college students stayed in the school they initially entered. However, that trend is changing rapidly and that may prove a disruptive force for colleges and universities – as well as a challenge for students both academically and financially.
According to a study titled “Transfer and Mobility,” just published by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, the research arm of the National Student Clearinghouse, about 3.6 million students entered college for the first time in the fall of 2008. During the following six years they transferred 2.4 million times. These and other data by this not-for-profit organization that partners with academic institutions to provide valuable statistics, is more than trivial and has many implications.
The first and most obvious effect is on public colleges and universities. With states funding those institutions based on how well they perform when it comes to graduation rates, the consequences can be damaging. In other words, some of those institutions may be doing well from a pedagogical viewpoint but the retention rate, lowered by students transferring, may, misleadingly, cast them in a bad light.
In the past we used to see transfers only from community and technical colleges to four-year colleges after obtaining an associate’s degree. Now we see more fluidity with people transferring not only earlier, but even from public to private institutions, something almost unheard of 20 years ago. To make things even more complicated, about half of transfer students who started college in the fall of 2008 switched colleges more than once. And more than one third of them transferred during the summer
This behavior represents a challenge for the students, as well as the institutions. To begin with, most institutions (particularly private ones) decide which credits are transferable and which ones are not, sometimes through previous arrangements between the institutions concerned or statewide agreements or mandates. When those agreements do not exist those students make take much longer to graduate and in potentially greater financial debt.
About 20 percent of the students who begin their careers at community and technical colleges (that represents more than half of the college student population in this country) transfer to a four-year public institution. In many cases those students are not well prepared for that transition. Although some community colleges do a good job teaching students, that is not always the case. In fact, many students who expect to eventually get a baccalaureate degree often begin at a community college under the impression that those colleges are cheaper (which is true most of the time) and easier academically (which is sometimes true).
Of the more surprising data in the center’s report is that about 50 percent of transfers do so from public, four year institutions, while more than 40 percent of transfer students move from four-year private institutions to a community college, which again emphasizes the perception than the community colleges are cheaper and easier.
Further, many students in four-year institutions (whether public or private) take summer courses in community colleges just trying to graduate faster, in a phenomenon now known as “summer swirl.” This a big headache not only for academic advisers trying to keep track of students and their requirements to graduate, but also for college administrators who are trying to increase retention rates for the “all important” national rankings.
A sizable number of transfers from community colleges fail at four-year institutions, decreasing the retention and graduation rates even further. To make things even more complicated, nearly a quarter of those transfer students make it across state lines, which means that the differential curricula are more likely to be more pronounced which, in turn, means that these students will spend more time and money graduating from college.
These problems not only affect four-year institutions, but also community colleges themselves. According to the report nearly a quarter of the students who started at a community college transferred to a four-year institution within six years (which is the time yardstick usually applied to measure whether or not students are graduating). Yet, only one in eight of those transfer students earned a certificate or an associate’s degree first, down from one in five three years ago. What that means is that regardless of the quality of instruction, this bigger dropout rate also penalizes community colleges.
One proposal made by the National Student Clearinghouse to streamline these transfer processes is developing an automated data-transfer system. Something that some colleges and universities are doing to improve their graduation rates is to actively pursue those students who are shy just a few courses to graduate and offer them the possibility to do so. Although this approach has met with some success, most postsecondary institutions have yet to try it, in part because of the lack of vision, in part because they have not figured out how to develop a follow-up process that allows finding and convincing those students to attend their schools.
What is more concerning from a global perspective is the fact that last year only 55 percent of all college students had earned degrees or certificates within six years, a small decline from the previous year. Again, more people who enter college not only do not graduate but also carry a bigger debt without a tangible result to show for it.
Therefore, this is not only a statistical or political problem for colleges and universities, but also a societal problem that requires a more creative and innovative approach to increasing retention and graduation rates. We owe this to all parties involved.
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Transfers A Game Changer In Higher Education
Aldemaro Romero Jr. The Romero Report
As we inch closer to the next presidential election how are we starting to see issues of higher education enter political rhetoric?
Aldemaro Romero Jr. Letters from Academia
Soon we will be bombarded by press reports about the latest U.S. News and World Report college rankings. The media will concentrate on who is up and who is down in those rankings. All colleges and universities will highlight whatever they think will help them increase their prestige, while those getting bad rankings will try to bury them among other, more positive ones. So, I think it is time to explain the real value of those and other rankings.
The U.S. News and World Report is a weekly magazine founded in 1933 that has become mostly famous for publishing annual rankings of colleges. It has been a digital-only publication since 2010, although the annual “best colleges” guide can be found in print in bookstores and newsstands. This magazine has been publishing their rankings since the 1980s. Since 2014 it entered into the business of ranking postsecondary institutions outside the U.S., an area already dealt with by other publications.
These rankings have become so popular that many other publications such as Washington Monthly and a bunch more have joined the fray of ranking higher education institutions for both general and/or special areas. There have even been moves to create non-commercial, alternate sources of information for prospective students and their families using data from institutions such as the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities and the Council of Independent Colleges.
To really understand how those rankings work we need to consider two things: how data is collected and what it is being measured.
Colleges and universities voluntarily submit their data after receiving an annual survey. That is where the problems start. To begin with there have been instances in which some colleges and universities have submitted false data just to improve their rankings. In addition to that, and despite its fame and propaganda value, since the 1990s several institutions have boycotted U.S. News and World Report ranking efforts by refusing to submit data. And that is not because those institutions fear looking bad. Among the institutions boycotting this process are both prestigious liberal arts colleges as well as prominent research institutions, such as Stanford University. What they say is that those rankings are misleading.
The rankings are also based upon opinion surveys of university faculty members and administrators who do not belong to the schools being ranked. There has also been a move among many institutions not to participate in this “reputation survey” which weighs 25 percent in the rankings because they are seen as “beauty contests” and highly subjective.
Although the editors of this magazine have forcefully defended their methodology and results, the question is, how accurate – and useful – are these rankings for prospective students and their families?
First, we all know that the choice of college is a very personal one that does not necessarily relate to the quality of the education being offered. Factors such as cost, name recognition, size, location and the like play a major role in those decisions and they have very little to do with those rankings. That is why many high school counselors I have spoken to rarely use these rankings to advise students where to go for college. They understand that a lot of personal factors are the ones that will determine what will be the best fit to a particular student.
Another fundamental problem with those rankings is that they create the illusion that they are a fair measure of educational quality. In fact, colleges and universities struggle themselves in measuring the quality of instruction they provide. Web sites of postsecondary institutions are filled with news regarding major (or minor) athletic triumphs, scholarly achievements by the faculty, fundraising successes and construction of new facilities. But they provide little if any hard-data information of how they are doing from a pedagogical viewpoint.
Another issue is that one way to move up in those ranking is by just spending more money in areas that have little to do with the academic activities of the institution, such as improving athletic facilities or offering more athletic scholarships. In other words, you can “buy” your way up into the rankings without effectively improving the quality of education being provided.
provided. Other figures used to rank these institutions, such as the size of endowments or faculty research productivity, are also mostly irrelevant to the quality of instruction, being, therefore, overestimations of their real pedagogical value. Although these rankings measure reputation and average SAT scores of entering students, which says little about the quality of instruction or how much students will learn when compared with other schools. Also, we are seeing more and more public institutions being measured by factors important to politicians, such as enrollment and graduation rates, which can be very sensitive to factors beyond the control of those institutions, such as demographics and the local or regional economy.
When it comes to the federal agencies there seems to be an overemphasis on factors such as scholarly productivity, mostly because the major funders of those activities are themselves federal agencies.
So why, despite all these shortcomings, is there so much notoriety for these rankings? Many university presidents will say publicly that they believe in them in part due to pressure from trustees, alumni and faculty members. Some boards of trustees even offer bonuses to presidents if they increase the institution’s rankings. It seems that for many of them to go with the flow is easier than to try to educate their constituencies about the realities detailed in this article.
The fundamental question is how well these institutions of higher education will prepare students to be successful as a person and as professionals after college. To that end, students and their parents should ask those potential college destinations questions along those lines and the answers they will receive should be a good indication whether or not those institutions know what they are doing beyond publicity stuns.
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How Important Are Those College Rankings?
Aldemaro Romero Jr. The Romero Report
How do criticisms of university policies from eighty five years ago compare to the reality today?
Aldemaro Romero Jr. Book Reviews
You can find a book review I just published on Olivas’ opus on academia and the U.S. Supreme Court at:
Suing Alma Mater: Higher Education and the Courts Book Review
Aldemaro Romero Jr. Letters from Academia
A few columns ago I predicted that higher education was to become a political issue in the upcoming presidential campaign and the facts have confirmed my suspicions. We have already heard some discussion about the cost of college and how to make higher education free. The latest topic that we are starting to hear about is the issue of tenure.
This issue has just been introduced into the political fray by Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who not only has proposed severe budget cuts to higher education in his state, but also called for legislative changes that would give a board largely picked by the governor far more control over tenure and curriculum in the University of Wisconsin system. After his successes in limiting collective bargaining rights for public-sector unions, he now has turned his attention to higher education in a move that many see as a way for him to burnish his conservative credentials. Given that primaries in the Republican Party are dominated by the most conservative voters, we might expect to see a competition among candidates for bragging rights as to who looks “tougher” on higher education, just as both Republicans and Democrats did decades ago regarding communism.
The excuse to modify the concept of tenure and curriculum control is that the leadership of colleges and universities needs to encourage savings and efficiency at a moment when the state is aiming to cut spending to balance its budget.
Conservatives, for the most part, have never been sympathetic toward the institution of tenure, particularly in higher education. In part it is because they see colleges and universities as strongholds of political liberalism. When it comes to the excuse of saving money, we must remember that the very reason why there is a shortfall in budgets for higher education in many states is not because of a recession (that is now a thing of the past), but because of irresponsible tax cuts that have affected not only education in general but all kinds of public services including essential ones such as infrastructure.
As we might have expected, the professorate has already sounded the alarm despite the fact that the number of faculty who are tenured or in tenure track positions is decreasing because of the growth in the number of adjuncts, that is, professors without tenure or the possibility to enter the tenure system. Currently only about 20 percent of college professors are part of the tenure system, down from 45 percent in 1975.
But tenure is not the only provision under threat. The concept of “shared governance,” basically the ability for faculty to have direct influence in areas such as what to teach, how to teach it and on other aspects of university life, is also in peril. The new Wisconsin legislation will debase those faculty prerogatives to a “subordinate” status. In other words, no matter what they think the final decisions will always be in the hands of boards and top administrators.
Many have pointed out that a governor who is a college dropout and has little understanding of how higher education works is the one proposing these higher education reforms. But let’s face it. That is not the crux of the problem. Institutions of higher education in general – and their faculty in particular – have done a poor job of explaining and defending how postsecondary institutions work and why it matters to maintain certain traditions that have been in place since universities were created centuries ago. And beyond rhetoric, they have not been very effective in countering the movement of running those universities as if they were simply businesses.
To begin with, tenure is usually portrayed as a labor issue, i.e., a job for life, when the real reason why the concept of tenure has existed in universities since medieval times is that in order to advance ideas, promote innovation and protect against reprisals for proposing new approaches to scholarship, faculty need some sort of institutional protection. Think of it as a sort of “first amendment” right to those faculty members who, after years of demonstrated excellence in teaching, scholarship and service, and after a review process by their peers, are granted that protection.
That is why the consequences for Wisconsin and any other state that would adopt these policies can be very detrimental from many viewpoints. The reason why so many students from other countries choose to come to the U.S. for their studies is because we developed a system that offers a high quality, open and innovative education. If the above-referenced measures are established, states like Wisconsin will see a migration of their best minds to other states, weakening their possibilities for increased economic development.
What has kept the U.S. a main force for innovation has been the ability to create an environment where challenging conventional wisdom is the norm, and that is just the first step towards advancement in any field.
This situation has also exposed the beliefs of administrators in public colleges and universities when it comes to defending values in the face of political winds. We have seen the president of the Louisiana State University system, F. King Alexander, holding a very public fight on behalf of university values and the funding to maintain them.
Alexander, testifying before the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing, said that the budget cuts to higher education at the state level would mean states, “getting out of the higher education funding business. Colorado will become the first state not to spend a single penny on public higher education in 2025, and Louisiana will follow two years later,” Alexander said.
The problem is that if other political leaders see the proposed Wisconsin model as a blueprint to follow, public higher education in other states will spiral down with a negative cumulative effect on higher education in the U.S. as a whole.
Higher Education Becoming A Political Issue
Aldemaro Romero Jr. The Romero Report
This week’s Romero report looks at the real cost of college. Is it too expensive and how is the real cost different from the perceived cost?