Letters from Academia

During the last few years, media have inundated us with bad news about higher education. Whether it is student debt, sexual assaults, or decreased enrollments, colleges and universities seem to be under siege. Add to that the bad press from op-ed writers about political correctness, uselessness of certain degrees, and the fascination with technological fads such as MOOCs, and one can see how controversial higher education has become.

Apparently, someone forgot to ask students what they think.

Now a new national study seems to take care of that. According to a survey conducted with Gallup and Strada Educational Network that drew nearly 90,000 respondents, the quality of the education former students received is not a major concern for most American college goers. This survey shows that four of five respondents who completed a credential or degree program said they received a high-quality education, ranging from 81 percent of vocational or technical credential holders, as well as associate degree holders, to 95 percent among graduate degree holders. Not only that, but 70 percent of respondents who attended college but did not complete said they received a high-quality education.During the last few years, media have inundated us with bad news about higher education. Whether it is student debt, sexual assaults, or decreased enrollments, colleges and universities seem to be under siege. Add to that the bad press from op-ed writers about political correctness, uselessness of certain degrees, and the fascination with technological fads such as MOOCs, and one can see how controversial higher education has become. Apparently, someone forgot to ask students what they think. Now a new national study seems to take care of that. According to a survey conducted with Gallup and Strada Educational Network that drew nearly 90,000 respondents, the quality of the education former students received is not a major concern for most American college goers. This survey shows that four of five respondents who completed a credential or degree program said they received a high-quality education, ranging from 81 percent of vocational or technical credential holders, as well as associate degree holders, to 95 percent among graduate degree holders. Not only that, but 70 percent of respondents who attended college but did not complete said they received a high-quality education.

This is important for several reasons. To begin with, this is the first time that the most fundamental question – student satisfaction – has been asked at the national level for all disciplines, including people who, for whatever reason, did not graduate. Interestingly, this is a question never scientifically explored by the plethora of rankings that are published every year and whose meanings are doubtful at best.

The other important aspect is that although the general level of satisfaction is high, there is obviously room for improvement. So, we need to look at what can be done to achieve higher levels of satisfaction, and that is up to colleges and universities to do through better analysis of exit interviews of their graduates.

There are other aspects of this Gallup-Strada Educational Network survey that need to be looked into. For example, more than half of respondents said that they would have changed at least one of these three decisions if they could do it all over again: their major, college attended or credential pursued. The most common regret was their choice of major, with 36 percent saying they wish they would have chosen differently. Twenty-eight percent of respondents said they would have chosen a different institution, while 12 percent said they would pursue a different degree.

Regarding their choice of major, 40 percent who pursued or completed a bachelor’s degree would pick a different field of study compared to 31 percent of those who hold a technical or vocational certificate. These results suggest that people pursuing a higher education degree made the decisions about a major, institution or level of degree without appropriate information that included, but was not limited to, “an understanding of employment opportunities, earning potential or the implications of long-term student debt,” according to the report. Also, it seems that many had a faulty understanding of what the major they chose was really all about or what skills they really learned while mastering those subjects.

Not surprisingly, respondents who attended graduate or vocational programs were the least regretful, since both are narrower in scope and students are more clear about what they want.

Thus, we need to make sure that we provide as ample and accurate information to incoming students as possible. To that end, we need to go beyond posting facts and figures on a website to a more personalized approach. Many institutions will hesitate to do that because of the cost.

In any case, although there is room for improvement, we should not fool ourselves about trying to achieve perfection. Most students make institutional choices based on location and cost, so for many the choices are limited. Another factor that we should not forget is that, according to this survey, respondents who attended college but did not receive a degree were the most likely to say they would change at least one of the three educational decisions mentioned earlier. After all, according to federal statistics, students who take out loans for college but never graduate are three times more likely to default. Not surprisingly, respondents with more student loan debt said they would make different decisions.

However, there was very little variation by debt level among respondents on whether they would pursue a different major, with an overall 3 percentage point range across all five quintiles of debt level. But large debt holders were more likely to say they would attend a different institution or pursue a different type of degree.

This is also an incentive for academic departments to come up with better marketing approaches in order to make sure that they attract the students that are more likely to succeed in their disciplines. This approach would serve to increase retention and graduation rates, which have become a benchmark for funding of public institutions.

This survey is expected to be carried out on an annual basis from now on, so it will provide a timeline perspective of how things are (or are not) changing through time. Gallup and Strada have said that the report would be the first of many from a three-year survey, dubbed as the “Education Consumer Pulse.” The survey will be conducted daily, with a goal of asking 360,000 current, past and prospective college students about their experiences in higher education.

This “Education Consumer Pulse” should certainly help to provide a much better picture of what we need to improve higher education nationwide, certainly a more useful tool than meaningless rankings. The current survey can be read in full here.

PDF Version:

Quality of General Education Generally Satisfactory

One of the most contentious issues in politics in general – and in higher education in particular – is political correctness.

Usually defined as the avoidance of language or actions that are seen as excluding, marginalizing, or insulting groups of people that have been discriminated against because of their gender, race, or other identifying factors.

The term is now oftentimes used in a pejorative sense, particularly in conservative circles.

Higher education, more than any other setting, has been pointed out as the main generator of political correctness. Yet, academia continues to be one of the major offenders when it comes to real actions towards equality.

According to the American Association of University Professors, despite the fact that 60 percent of all doctoral students in the U.S. are women, only 46 percent of assistant professors, 38 percent of associate professors, and 23 percent of full professors are female.

In Europe, the numbers are similar. On top of that, women faculty members at colleges and universities in the United States earn on average 10 percent less than their male counterparts. A

nd women higher education administrators earn, on average, 20 percent less than their male counterparts, about the same difference as in corporate America.

When it comes to ethnicity, the statistics are no better.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, nearly 35 percent of assistant professors are minorities, but only 18 percent of them reach the top level of the academic echelon, full professorship.

To remedy this situation of inequality, many colleges and universities try to include (or increase) the number of women and minorities on search and promotion committees. One of the unintended consequences of this policy is that in institutions with a low percentage of minorities and women, they can get overworked by disproportionate participation in those committees with the expectations that any bias by white males will be excluded.

Now new research is providing data showing that such efforts can be counterproductive. In a study published just a few weeks ago in the journal “American Economic Review,” the authors found that a larger number of women in evaluation committees does not increase either the quantity or the quality of female candidates. Further, the researchers found that female evaluators are not significantly more favorable toward female candidates, and that, at the same time, male evaluators become less favorable toward female candidates as soon as a female evaluator joins the committee.

These results seem counterintuitive. Yet, the methodology behind this research is robust. They analyzed how a larger presence of female evaluators affects committee decision-making using information on 100,000 applications to associate and full professorships in Italy and Spain and these applications were assessed by 8,000 randomly selected evaluators. So, there is no question that they used large enough sample sizes to generate their outcomes.

But how can we explain these results? For years there has been the belief that once women entered the lower ranks of the academic career, it was only a matter of time that they would move their way through the pipeline to reach high-level jobs. This is known as the “pipeline theory.” Yet, after decades of making sure that women are included in search and promotion committees, the share of women among faculty members remains low. That is particularly true in disciplines such as philosophy, mathematics, and physics.

Another explanation that has been advanced is that due to biological (pregnancy, maternal care) and social constraints (lack of sensible maternity leave policies, expectations for gendered roles at the household level, lack of female role models), women are less productive in the number of publications they write, the main measure used to evaluate scholarly performance. Further, several studies have shown that there is a bias against females who coauthor publications with males in the belief that the males were the ones who really did the work.

Other explanations have been advanced. One is that because of social pressures some women may dedicate more time to “socially desirable” tasks. Another is that women are less likely to apply for promotions because they feel they will be discriminated against anyway.

These results remind me of a study by Robert Putnam, a Harvard professor, that was published 10 years ago that showed that in ethnically diverse neighborhoods trust (even of one’ own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.

What this means is that we humans have an issue with diversity. When we make groups (in this case committees) more diverse, what happens is that people respond negatively to such mixes. That is why many colleges and universities have been implementing in the last few years surveys that help to identify our own biases. We in academia don’t like to think that we are racists or misogynists, but the reality is quite different.

A colleague of mine, psychologist Kristin Sommer of Baruch College, pointed out that there is research that shows that training people with counter-stereotypical exemplars causes a decrease in implicit measures of racism, with results lasting at least 24 hours.

The same can be said regarding gender. What these studies imply is that if we want to “re-program” or condition ourselves to think less stereotypically, we need to be more attentive to counter-stereotypical exemplars in everyday life.

Therefore, although the idea of making search and promotion committees more diverse seems to be the right thing to do to advance the cause of social justice, in the final analysis we have to look to ourselves and make sure we do not carry the biases that seem to be part of human nature.

PDF Version:

For Social Justice, We Need to Look in the Mirror

The proposed 2018 budget by the Trump administration has been presented and now we have a clear picture of the list of programs related to higher education that will be either severely cut or totally eliminated.

Among the programs to be eliminated are the Public-Service Loan-Forgiveness program (which currently helps more than 550,000 students), Stafford Loans (offered to eligible students enrolled in accredited American institutions of higher education to help with their education) and the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants (a federal assistance grant for college students with the greatest need for financial aid). It also includes plans to allow the Perkins Loan program to expire. This is a program based on financial need that assists American college students in funding their post-secondary education. The proposed budget will also cut spending in half on Federal Work-Study programs and will eliminate programs that foster foreign-language study, while reducing spending that supports international-education programs and exchanges, such as the Fulbright Scholar program, by 55 percent.

The direct consequences of these cuts will be a significant increase in student debt and the elimination of access to higher education for many low-income, first-generation and minority students.

The budget proposal also includes plans to phase out support for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the two major sources of funding for projects in those areas.

Cuts to spending on scientific and medical research will also be unprecedented. The budget for the National Institutes of Health, the major source of funding in the health sciences, and known for their economic and health benefits, will be slashed by 22 percent. The budget for the National Science Foundation, the major engine behind scientific research in this country, will see its budget cut by 11 percent.

The Department of Energy will see its Office of Science budget cut by 17 percent. Its budget for research on energy efficiency and renewable energy will be cut by 70 percent. The Environmental Protection Agency will see its budget in science and technology cut by 44 percent, while the ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy), the federal agency in charge of promoting and funding research and development of advanced energy technologies, will be eliminated.

As extreme as these budget cuts appear, they actually highlight a national trend. During the 1960s, after the threat represented by the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, the United States decided to invest in scientific and technological research in particular, and in higher education in general. Not investing in science and technology was then seen to represent a threat to national security, and the federal government’s share in supporting basic research was about 70 percent. Even before the proposed budget by the White House, that support had been reduced to only 44 percent by 2015, according to data released last year by the National Science Foundation.

This budget proposal will most likely not be approved by Congress. It has been criticized by members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, with many Republicans calling it “Dead on Arrival.” Many independent analysts have stated that this budget proposal will undermine our economic growth, public health, and national security by stalling U.S. technological innovation and scientific research, and the country’s capabilities to respond to extreme weather and national security threats.

Budgets can be viewed as political statements. So just what is the Trump administration saying through this budget? It is not just to cut taxes for the rich in a country where overall taxation is already the lowest of any industrialized nation. Tax revenue in this country represents 26 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) – well below the 34 percent average for all developed countries.

Nor it is just to allow for an unprecedented and unnecessary increase in the defense budget. The U.S. defense budget is already greater than the next eight industrialized countries combined (most of which are our friends and allies). In fact, the U.S. defense budget represents about a third of all of the defense budgets of all of the countries of the world.

And it is not that we need to take money from our colleges, universities, and research centers to pay for a wall that we don’t need.

So, why would anyone want this budget?

Science and technology centers in particular, and colleges and universities in general, generate facts that contradict certain political ideologies, whether about global warming, other environmental issues, or economic policies. So, what is the best way to get rid of them? By defunding them the same way many conservatives want to end abortion by defunding Planned Parenthood, even though abortions represent a minuscule portion of the overall health services that it provides to women.

This strategy is very similar to what is known in the military as a scorched-earth policy, targeting anything that might be useful to the enemy while advancing through, or withdrawing from, occupied territory. Any asset that can be used by “the enemy” becomes a target. For the Trump White House, this includes colleges and universities that they believe “teach liberal ideas,” or research centers that generate data that prove that global warming is real and is caused by humans, that unregulated industry is a threat to human and environmental health, or that “supply-side economics” (the macroeconomic theory that by cutting taxes to the rich and eliminating regulation stimulates the economy) does not work.

These are the real objectives of these cuts, and the ideology behind this strategy is not new. It has been planned out by some conservative think tanks for decades – only now they have found the way to make it a reality. And it will benefit the few, regardless of the pain caused to the many.

PDF Version:

What the Proposed Federal Budget Really Means

The Nobel Prize is one measure of a country’s intellectual prowess. Whether it is in the sciences, literature or economics, to win one is always a point of pride, not only for the winners but also for their country of citizenship. Since the first Nobel Prize was awarded in 1901, 860 individuals from 76 countries have won it. Of these, 363 have been from the United States. More Nobel Prize winners have been American than any other nationality.

And of the 363 American awardees, 98 were born in other countries. Of the six Americans awarded Nobel Prizes last year in chemistry, physics and economics, all are immigrants. They are Americans by choice, but not by birth. Other past notable winners – including Albert Einstein – became American citizens after winning their awards.

Besides Nobel winners, American colleges and universities count on thousands of immigrants to do the job of teaching and research. There is no question that foreign-born nationals have contributed in making the U.S. the intellectual leader of the world, which is why this country has always been generous in accepting immigrants who can contribute to maintaining and enhancing that leadership. They work to strengthen our economy and our national security. Colleges and universities in some states have also become increasingly dependent on international students to fill the shrinking numbers of high school graduates. Many of these students stay in the U.S. and contribute to the nation’s intellectual and economic success.

But now all that can change.

On March 3 the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced on its website that starting April 3 the agency would temporarily suspend premium processing for all H-1B visa petitions until further notice.

This is the type of visa that allows U.S. employers to temporarily employ foreign-born, highly skilled workers. This type of visa has been the most common way colleges, universities, research institutes and American corporations hire international talent.

Just to give you an idea of the effect that this suspension can have on U.S. higher education and industry, each year more than 85,000 high-skill foreign workers obtain three-year permits to work for companies and universities in this country. In fact, higher education institutions rank as the third largest sponsors of H-1B visa recipients, just behind technology firms.

On April 18, President Trump signed a “Buy American, Hire American” executive order, which sets broad policies directing federal agencies to propose reforms to the H-1B visa system and making them much more difficult to obtain. The reasons behind these moves were vaguely stated in a speech at a Wisconsin toolmaker factory in which the president said that these measures were needed to “restore the American dream” and to prevent the “theft of American prosperity.”

This order could also have an impact on American colleges’ recruitment of students from abroad. Many international students who come to U.S. colleges and universities seek the opportunity to stay in the United States, even temporarily, after graduation and gain work experience, which they see as almost as valuable as an American degree itself. Many of them will stay in this country and become American citizens.

What these new immigration policies mean is that it will become very difficult for these students to stay in the U.S., where there is a great need for high-tech workers. By doing so, fewer and fewer international students will come to the U.S., severely impacting enrollments at many colleges and universities (to which they usually pay full tuition) and bottlenecking the flow of talent to this country.

To add to this potential problem, earlier this year the president signed a pair of executive orders that would temporarily bar the issuance of U.S. visas to travelers – including students and scholars – from six Muslim-majority countries. Although these orders have been challenged by federal courts, the message is clear: If you are a foreign national who wants to come to study to the U.S., chances are that you will be less welcomed or not welcomed at all.

As a result, many U.S. institutions of higher education are already reporting a decrease of up to 40 percent in the number of applications by international students, while countries such as Canada and Australia are seeing dramatic increases in international student applications. This decrease is referred to in higher education circles as the “Trump effect.”

In fact, a recent global survey of prospective students found that one in three potential applicants was less likely to want to study in the United States because of the political climate here. In a meeting that I had earlier this year with students in China (the country that sends the most students to the U.S.), many showed great concern about their opportunities to come to the United States.

For years, American colleges have advocated broader reforms of the immigration system, saying that the government should make it easier for the brightest foreign-born graduates to stay and work in the United States, particularly in high-demand science and engineering fields.

I myself was fortunate enough to graduate from an American university, obtain an H-1B visa, legally stay in this country, create a family, become a proud U.S. citizen, pay my taxes, and modestly contribute to science and education. I always saw my story as part of the American story.

After all, immigration is a large part of what built this country and made it great.

PDF Version:

Immigration Barriers Will Affect U.S. Academia

In the last few weeks a number of news events have taken place that may not have been very noticeable, but which can seriously affect higher education in a very detrimental way.

The first event was the publication of the results of a survey conducted by New America, a non-partisan think-tank based in Washington, D.C. The poll surveyed 1,600 people and found that the American public is becoming more and more ambivalent about the value of higher education. Three-quarters of the respondents agreed that it is easier to be successful with a college degree, but one-quarter said higher education is “fine just the way it is.”

Although more than 60 percent of respondents said higher education was good for society, about 26 percent said it was primarily a benefit for individuals, a belief that was shared by those who describe themselves as conservatives, as well as those who identify as liberals. These findings may not seem like such bad news, but the level of dissatisfaction with higher education has continued to increase ever since polls about this issue began being conducted.

In a poll published just two weeks ago and conducted by Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), an American nonprofit, nonpartisan research and educational group, more than half of respondents who identified as white and working class agreed that college was a “gamble that might not pay off,” instead of a smart investment.

If you combine all these numbers the political landscape for higher education looks far from promising. With the majority of state legislatures and governorships in the hands of Republicans, they are seeing that their base is largely skeptical about higher education and not overwhelmingly supportive of it as a public good. That means that they will get no pressure to maintain – much less increase – support for public higher education.

In the New America poll, for example, 80 percent of those who answered the survey said that community colleges contribute to a strong work force, are worth their cost, and prepare people to succeed – more positive perceptions than for any other sector of higher education. Interestingly, the demographic in the poll that corresponds to Generation Z (those born in the late 1990s to 2000), had the highest estimation of public two-year colleges. But most politicians see those colleges as the real engines for more work-force preparation, not full-fledged universities, which are viewed as “elitist.”

Other news that has received little publicity among in the current swirl of political scandals has to do with student debt. Already acknowledged as the main source of dissatisfaction about higher education in this country, some political decisions at the federal level are going to make things worse.

What has happened in the last few weeks is that the Trump administration has taken action on three important areas: The first is that the federal government has weakened accountability for the companies that administer student loans. For years, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has documented thousands of cases in which loan companies have misdirected payments, lost paperwork, and charged the wrong interest rate on loans. This move means that these companies will no longer be facing regulatory and legal challenges for its dealings with borrowers, meaning that abuses as well as college student debt will continue to increase.

Second, the Department of Education is making it more difficult for borrowers to apply for, and stay enrolled in, income-based payment plans. In order to enroll and stay in those programs, you need to demonstrate that your income qualifies you for the programs.

To do that, borrowers need access to data from the Internal Revenue Service through its Data Retrieval Tool. Yet, on March 3 the Trump administration took down the online Data Retrieval Tool until at least October, making applicants’ lives much more difficult because now they have no way of applying for these programs online.

The third important move was made to give banks more latitude to charge borrowers higher fees (as much as 16 percent of the balance owed) if they fall behind in the repayment of their loans. This means more profits for the banks and higher student debt in general, particular for those individuals with really low incomes since they are the ones with diminished capabilities to pay on time. This is not just greed; this is being mean to the poor.

The only appeal that the victims of lending agencies have is the U.S. Consumer Bureau, an agency that is also in the crosshairs of the current administration and Congress.

Given that together Americans owe more than a trillion dollars in student debt, these new measures will make a bad problem worse. And who will the politicians blame for that? Not the government (federal or state), but the universities themselves. This has been the approach they have been taking for many years, that student debt is a direct consequence of rising tuition and fees, of uncontrolled spending, and in the maintenance of academic programs areas they consider unnecessary, meaning those that they don’t see directly leading to a job.

How do public universities respond to this challenge? So far, it’s not been very intelligently nor particularly courageously. First, the public university leaders whose jobs depend mostly on the good will of politically appointed boards will avoid to point the finger towards the real culprits – politicians who continue to defund public education. After all, they don’t want to lose their jobs. Second, they will continue to market their institutions on the parts that have nothing to do with academic achievement or professional preparation: athletics and campus amenities, or on meaningless rankings.

As one politician often tweets: “Sad!”

PDF Version:

Colleges May Take Blame for Government Actions

One of the discussions around accessibility, cost, and quality in higher education revolves about private colleges and universities. Are they for rich kids only? Do they graduate students at a higher rate than do public institutions? Are they more efficient at managing their money? Can they save taxpayers money? And, more importantly, is there a place for them in the future of higher education? These and other questions have been around for a while and a study recently published on these issues provides us with some of the answers.

These and other questions are particularly relevant, especially in states that face significant expected enrollment growth, such as those in the southwest U.S., or in states like New York where the issue of the private colleges and universities accommodating increasing enrollments is an important one.

According to this new study, private non-doctoral (PND) non-profit colleges and universities (providing mostly bachelor’s degrees) deliver benefits at a far lower per-degree cost to states (mainly costs for state grant aid provided to their students) than the cost of supporting students and institutions in the public sector. States, the report concludes, should consider a better use of these institutions in their quest to increase bachelor degree production.

The study, titled “Utilizing Independent Colleges and Universities to Fulfill States’ College Degree Attainment Goals,” was authored by William Zumeta, professor of public policy and higher education at the University of Washington in Seattle and Nick Huntington-Klein, an assistant professor of economics at California State University, Fullerton. The report was published by the Council of Independent Colleges, an association of 765 nonprofit independent colleges and universities and higher education affiliates and organizations that has worked since 1956 to support college and university leadership, advance institutional excellence, and enhance public understanding of private higher education’s contributions to society.

To put things in context, there are more than 7,000 four-year nonprofit PNDs in the United States, serving about 1.6 million students and awarding nearly 150,000 degrees annually, mostly bachelor’s degrees. Their impact is significant.

The report shows that PNDs graduate students at higher rates – and significantly earlier – than do public institutions that enroll similar types of students. These advantages apply to students from all demographic groups. The study reported that “PND colleges and universities are significantly more successful in retaining students who indicate in their first year that they are interested in a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) or health major and progress to completion of a bachelor’s degree in one of those fields.” These authors call this “The PND Advantage.”

The study found that “private colleges and universities outperformed their public-sector comparison group by substantial margins in both four-year and six-year graduation rates. The PND advantage was large and statistically significant for all students combined, for each gender, and for the four racial/ethnic groups.”

The study also reported that PND colleges and universities outperformed the comparison group in the number of enrolled student years required to produce degrees, “which reflects dropout rates and time-to-degree among graduates.”

And because of the increasing importance of the cost of college to students, parents, and policymakers, the study also compared the private and public sectors on various dimensions of cost and found that PND colleges and universities collect substantially more tuition revenue per degree awarded than public institutions, after taking account of tuition discounts and institutionally provided aid. “This is because the private colleges and universities do not receive significant appropriations of state tax funds, although federal funding (mostly student aid) to the two sectors is similar,” the study’s authors wrote.

Further, once all the real resource costs were calculated per degree and the “opportunity costs” of additional time out of the labor market for public sector students (who average a longer time in college) were included, the study concluded that each bachelor’s degree in the PND sector costs society about $89,000, compared with more than $115,000 at similar public institutions. Without the opportunity costs included, greater degree production efficiency gives the PND colleges and universities an edge in societal costs per degree of $63,231, compared with $68,963 for public ones.

The PND colleges and universities were also found to have a substantial advantage over their matched public counterparts in terms of costs borne by state and federal taxpayers. They also outperformed their public-sector comparison group by substantial margins in both four-year and six-year graduation rates. PNDs also have a cost advantage in both student aid and institutional appropriations provided by states. As the study asserts, “nearly all states already have on the books one or more student aid (or “state scholarship”) programs for which state resident students enrolling in accredited, private nonprofit colleges and universities are eligible.” Thus, state policy has already institutionalized the idea of subsidizing some student choice through student aid.

Does all this mean that we should stop funding public higher education and give the taxpayer’s money to private colleges and universities? Not at all. Public education provides opportunities to lower-income students and those living in more rural areas. What this report means is that when developing state and federal policies for state and federally funded institutions, the role of private colleges and universities should not be ignored, and that with appropriate funding public institutions will be able to follow the example of private ones by providing smaller class sizes and increased opportunities to students.

Higher education suffers from many problems. PNDs can be part of the solution as long as we never forget that the major problem facing public colleges and universities is the lack of appropriate financial state support.

PDF Version:

Private Colleges Can Partner to Solve Issues

One of the best novels by Ernest Hemingway was “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” That title was taken from the metaphysical poet John Donne’s series of meditations and prayers on health, pain, and sickness published in 1624 when we wrote, in the original version, “No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine (…) any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”

Hemingway’s 1940 novel is set during the 1936- 1939 Spanish Civil War. The reason he used that title was because of the discussion taking place at that time on whether anybody outside Spain should care about that war. Obviously foreign powers from the right and left were intervening and many saw that war as a prelude of what months later would become World War II.

Last Saturday hundreds of thousands of people – not only scientists – took to the streets of cities around the world to show their support for science. Public demonstrations took place not only in the major capitals of the western hemisphere but in places as distant and surprising as the Fiji Islands in the South Pacific and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam.

But why the marches? And why now?

We are witnessing a worldwide political phenomenon of dismissing intellectual enquiry in general, and science in particular, in favor of an ideology based in populist politics and economic interests. From the right and from the left we hear voices spewing any inconvenient fact for political purposes.

Despite many efforts by scientists and others to make scientific knowledge more accessible through TV shows, documentaries, podcasts and the like, science literacy among the general population is at a disturbingly low level. According to the periodic surveys conducted by the National Science Foundation, this country leads the world in the number of people who believe that witches are real. And half of our population thinks that the sun orbits the earth, and not the other way around.

These figures, which could be dismissed as simple curiosities or grounds for late night talk show jokes, are not so funny when we realize that they belong to the same category of thought as the pervasive campaign against the use of vaccines and the denial of human responsibility for climate change, both of which we will pay a heavy toll for in the years to come.

Science has been fundamental for human progress in every aspect of our lives, from medicine to transportation, from communications to food production. But you all know that.

What not everybody knows is that there has been a concerted movement in some circles for years to either dismiss scientific facts or misinform about them. The tobacco, chemical, food, oil, and pharmaceutical industries, for example, have consistently manipulated and even attacked scientific facts to serve their own financial interests, regardless of the consequences for our health and that of the planet.

So why are we marching for science?

The reason is very simple. We want, no, we need the people in general and the political class in particular to be well informed before making any decisions that affect all of us. Given the dissatisfaction with the political class, peoples around the world are electing – or permitting to remain in power – politicians who are exploiting the worst of human instincts: racism, xenophobia, intolerance, and vulgarity. We live in an era of the cult of celebrity, rather one grounded in the respect for the thousands who work every day around the world in universities and research institutions expanding our knowledge about ourselves and about the world that surrounds us.

Some have criticized the marches for science for being too political and even “anti-Trump,” given the deep budget cuts his administration has proposed for science, medical research, humanities, and the arts. But the reality is that any big issue for humanity is political because it implies resource allocations, policy choices, and even life-and-death decisions.

In order to discredit the movement these marchers represent, some have labeled them “liberal.” The “L” word has had a deep resonance in the conservative movement since it was used in the 1950s and 60s as a stand-in for being soft on communism. Some have even editorialized it as, “A grandstand play, put on by people who don’t like Trump or the GOP, regardless, that has nothing to do with climate change, alternative fuels or any other science. These folks ought to put their pocket protectors back in their short-sleeved dress shirts and get back into the labs where they belong.” This statement belonged to Ted Diadiun, an editorial board member of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

If this somehow reminds you of the phrase, “Women belong in the kitchen” that became popular in some conservative circles more than 30 years ago while women were fighting for equal rights, it is not purely coincidental. The intention of silencing dissenting voices is nothing new and is a common feature of totalitarian regimes, left or right. It is just that we are now re-living them via political populism and an exaltation of public ignorance.

But knowledge in general – and scientific knowledge in particular – is not a partisan issue. It is just that special interests have taken over political parties and movements in order to reassert what really matter to them: the bottom line of either ideologies or financial statements. That is why science will always be a problem for those who look at their own interest and not the general wellbeing of the world.

And that is why so many of us were marching Saturday.

PDF Version:

For Whom the Scientists Marched Last Saturday

In the last few weeks we have heard about an increasing number of incidents on campuses across the nation where politically conservative speakers have been prevented from talking. From Middlebury College in Vermont to the University of California at Berkeley, these cases have something in common: They are giving higher education a bad name.

Some op-ed pieces by liberal authors have criticized these incidents on the basis that they represent a violation of the basic principle of free speech, which is seen as a liberal principle.

Conservative editorialists have used them to attack higher education for being out of control, being a nest of liberalism, and for hypocrisy. They maintain that the freedom of speech, so proclaimed by liberals, is only valid when serving to state liberal values.

Some on the far left say that this is the only weapon the underserved and oppressed have to get back to people in power.

Those on the far right are mobilizing their forces to introduce legislation that will severely curtail the ability of colleges and university to manage their own affairs.

They are all missing the main point. These controversies are being to the larger political arena for the advantage of conservatives and the disadvantage of liberals.

Some liberals forget that not long ago marginalized groups such as lesbians, gays, feminists, people of color, and others were prevented from speaking on campuses.

By now doing the same to conservative speakers, these liberals are becoming equal to what they have abhorred so much in the past. Suppression of free speech – from any side – is a signature characteristic of totalitarian ideologies.

Conservatives, who feel emboldened from last year ’s presidential elections, are using the current political climate to advance their agenda, and that is to demonstrate that institutions of higher education need to be “controlled” and that they do not deserve the support of the general public and taxpayers.

One the tactics being employed by campus conservative groups is to invite their ideological allies onto campus as welcomed speakers. In some cases, they have created shadow groups with unsuspecting names to rent spaces and then have used those spaces for hosting events that will be sure to provoke a liberal backlash.

And then, when the backlash takes place, they use the bad publicity to their own advantage. What has been happening is that many campuses are taking the bait.

This is similar to what neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups do when they organize marches.

What they are doing is trying to provoke confrontation so that their profiles can be raised from obscurity to prominence.

One of the basic principles of higher education since its founding period in medieval Europe was that educators were not to be punished for their ideas.

After all, many of those ideas were inconvenient to both the church and the feudal states. That is where the very concept of tenure originated. It was to protect teachers against reprisals for their sometimes unorthodox ideas. Unfortunately, tenure has lost much of its original meaning, and has become more of a labor issue than a protection of freedom of speech.

It’s no wonder that conservative groups in Iowa and Missouri have introduced legislation to eliminate tenure in public institutions in those states. They claim that tenure is “un-American,” gives faculty rights that almost no other professions have, and sets them apart as a privileged group that they call the “elites.”

These attempts to ban tenure are actually the result of a self-inflicted wound caused by academics themselves.

Another self-inflicted wound is what is now happening on many campuses when it comes to freedom of speech. Liberals have appeared as intolerant and obsessed with ideological purity (two of the trademarks of anti-intellectuals) as those they have fought for years, and they are making fools of themselves in the process.

What many of these liberals do not realize is that actions like these are seriously damaging the future of higher education and making colleges and universities a perfect target for anti-intellectual ideals. A new tactic being employed by some politicians is that of using their power over budgets to de-fund public higher education.

Take, for example, the case of New Mexico, where Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican, removed all higher-education funding from the state budget. She recently vetoed nearly $745 million for New Mexico’s public colleges and universities, mostly for ideological reasons.

Of course, the situation we are witnessing regarding free speech on campuses is not all the fault of liberal groups.

The leadership of colleges and universities are also to blame.

They feel pressure from both sides and do not know how to react beyond lame apologies for violent incidents.

What they should have realized by now is that the best way to deal with these incidents is by debating ideas in a public forum where civility should be maintained – not by trying to silence specific voices.

By doing so, we are protecting freedom of speech, encouraging critical thinking (a much-needed skill these days), and showing that we are fair. After all, in this new scary world of fake news and “alternative facts,” real facts should speak for themselves.

PDF Version:

Campuses and the Freedom of Speech Trap

In past columns, I have reported on more than one study that shows that expectations for “brilliance” for women in higher education were much higher than that for males. For example, when a research paper is co-authored by a male and a female the assumption by many is that the male did “the real work.”

Now comes a study showing that there is a similar bias when it comes to students – only this time the differences are based on race.

In a study published in “Economics and Education Review,” it was found that when evaluating the same black student, white teachers expect significantly less academic success than black teachers, particularly when it comes to black males.

According to the study, carried out by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, when a black teacher and a white teacher evaluated the same black student, the white teacher was about 30 percent less likely to predict that the student would complete a four-year college degree than was the black teacher. By the same token, white teachers were also almost 40 percent less likely to expect their black students to graduate high school.

According to one of the authors, Nicholas Papageorge, an economist at Johns Hopkins, “What we find is that white teachers and black teachers systematically disagree about the exact same student. One of them has to be wrong.”

But the problem pointed out by this article are not just a matter of bias (conscious or unconscious) but, more importantly, the effects that such attitudes have on the students themselves. The same study reports that low expectations could affect the performance of students, particularly disadvantaged ones who lack access to role models who could counteract a teacher’s low expectations.

Teachers may not disparage students directly, but students are very perceptive and can sense what the teacher thinks of them by the way others are treated in the same classroom.

One of the immediate effects of such perceptions is that students come to believe that the teacher is right, that they are indeed not smart enough and that there is no future for them in education. As a consequence, they may dismiss any hopes for advancement and, eventually, drop out of school.

The authors of the study analyzed data from the Educational Longitudinal Study. Begun in 2002, it is an ongoing study following 8,400 10th grade public school students and their interactions with teachers. That survey asked two different teachers, who each taught a particular student in either math or reading, to predict how far that student would go in school. With white students, the ratings from both teachers tended to be the same. But with black students, boys in particular, there were big differences. The white teachers had much lower expectations than black teachers about how far the black students would go in school.

Among the many results of this insightful work are that white and other non-black teachers were 12 percentage points more likely than black teachers to predict black students wouldn’t finish high school, and that non-black teachers were 5 percent more likely to predict that their black male students wouldn’t graduate high school when compared to their black female students.

Another interesting fact the researchers found was that black female teachers were significantly more optimistic about the ability of black males to complete high school than were teachers of any other demographic group. They were 20 percent less likely than white teachers to predict that their students would not graduate from high school, and 30 percent less likely to say that when compared with black male teachers. White male teachers were 10 to 20 percent more likely to have low expectations for black female students.

There were also differences based on subjects of study. Math teachers were significantly more likely to have low expectations for female students. For black students, particularly black males, having a non-black teacher in a 10th grade subject made them much less likely to pursue that subject by enrolling in similar classes. This finding suggests that biased expectations by teachers have long-term effects on student outcomes.

This research, supported by the American Educational Research Association, has implications beyond high school. We can envision similar situations in college, the workplace, and even in the criminal justice system.

For years, a number of studies have shown that when it comes to hiring, names that may indicate the ethnicity of the applicant influence not only who will be hired, but also who will be interviewed for the job.

We all know that when it comes to selecting who is going to be the “face” of a corporation or an institution, appearances matter. We are also all aware of the fate that minorities have to confront when dealing with the criminal justice system. No matter how many laws have been passed to alleviate those issues, they still persist in our society.

Another of the study’s authors, Seth Gershenson, an assistant professor of public policy at American University in Washington, D.C., said, “While the evidence of systematic racial bias in teachers’ expectations uncovered in the current study are certainly troubling and provocative, they also raise a host of related, policy-relevant questions that our research team plans to address in the near future. For example, we are currently studying the impact of these biased expectations on students’ long-run outcomes such as educational attainment, labor market success, and interaction with the criminal justice system.”

It is time for us to analyze our attitudes toward people who are different from us, whose experiences and backgrounds also diverge from ours. It is not just a matter of social justice, but also about our own character and our ability to deal with others.

Despite constant accusations of “political correctness,” the fact of the matter is that we are failing at one the most important experiences we offer: education. And if we fail at that stage we are failing all of society.

PDF Version:

Study: Students Often Perceived Differently by Race

Predicting one’s own future is an uncertain business. But when institutions known for their prognosticating skills predict your future, you might want to listen. This lesson is one that America’s institutions of higher education seem to be failing.

After looking at the budget proposal by the Trump administration, Moody’s Investors Service painted a grim financial future for the nation’s colleges and universities. According to their analysis, Trump’s budget proposal to slash federal research funding and end financial support for the arts and humanities would irreparably harm institutions that rely on those government dollars.

But let’s first put things into perspective. Moody’s is one of the big three credit rating agencies (together with Standard & Poor ’s and Fitch Ratings) that rate the bond credit of businesses, governments and other institutions.

They rank the creditworthiness of borrowers based on expected investor loss in the event of a default.

The other thing that we must remember is that colleges and universities – both public and private – borrow money in order to pay for many projects, which, in turn, affects directly the cash flow of these institutions.

Based on the initial proposal by the White House, higher education would lose $4 billion in discretionary funding.

This money not only covers direct expenses for research projects, but also what is called “indirects,” which are paid directly to colleges and universities to help them maintain their research infrastructures. Further, some of that money is used to provide what is called “start-up packages” that give new faculty the financial assistance necessary to kick-start their research agendas. Additionally, the president’s “America First” budget proposes nearly $6 billion in cuts to the National Institutes of Health.

The vast majority of biomedical research in this country is funded by the NIH, and cuts of this magnitude would have serious consequences in our constant search for better medicines and medical treatments.

In fact, because of its importance, the NIH budget in the past has had solid bipartisan support in Congress.

While some of the wealthiest universities, like the Ivy League (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc.), with their large endowments and large fundraising capabilities from private sources can probably weather the cuts to some extent, most others will not. This will be particularly the case for public institutions, which are the ones that usually serve people in rural areas and those with less financial means. Still, according to Moody’s, even for the Ivy League types, it will take years to adjust to the new realities that would be brought about by such cuts.

And Moody’s projections for higher education are not alone, but accompany dire predictions for the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. The administration’s proposed budget eliminates totally funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Although the last two have rather small budgets ($140 million each), according to Moody’s their disappearance will have a ripple effect on higher education. One of the projections by this credit agency is that by being unable to fund arts and humanities projects, colleges and universities will have fewer programs with which to attract private donors, sending them into a death spiral.

The same can be said of other federal agencies that support research across academia. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) budget will be slashed by 31 percent, the Agriculture Department by 21 percent and the Interior Department (where the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Parks Service reside) will be cut by 12 percent.

Reductions to the Department of Education’s budget through the elimination of the Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant and reduction in Federal Work Study funding would also affect about 550 schools rated by Moody’s.

Although there will be a huge increase in defense spending (a $54 billion increase), which would provide some research-related funding to higher education, that kind of research is usually concentrated in a rather small number of institutions. And if we decode some of the rhetoric of the current administration, a lot of that money will probably go to private companies rather than to colleges and universities.

And to these cuts the already relentless cuts to public higher education budgets by state legislatures and you have a “perfect storm” that will obliterate higher education as we know it, particularly when it comes to accessibility by students of lesser means.

There was a time when the U.S. was considered the greatest country in the world for, among other things, its system of higher education and its support in the broadest sense for intellectual inquiry.

This support helped to attract the most talented people in the world to come to this nation and use their abilities in science, the arts and humanities in service to the United States. Institutions of higher education have played a major role in the nation’s ability to respond to threats to our national security, whether from Sputnik, the arms race, pandemic disease, or climate change. Those times of greatness may be over sooner rather than later.

PDF Version:

Moody’s Paints Grim Picture for Higher Education