Gov. Perry and Those DREAM Act Kids
Texas Gov. Rick Perry has been beaten up in recent GOP presidential primary debates over his signing of a bill in 2001 giving in-state tuition to illegal immigrant kids in Texas. Look for the issue to come up again at tonight’s debate in New Hampshire.
In a free society, so-called DREAM Act legislation would be unnecessary. Opportunities for legal immigration would be open wide enough that illegal immigration would decline dramatically. And higher education would be provided in a competitive market without state and federal subsidies. But that is not yet the world we live in.
On the federal level, the proposed Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act would offer permanent legal status to illegal immigrant children who graduate from high school and then complete at least two years of college or serve in the U.S. military. Legal status would allow them to qualify for in-state tuition in the states where they reside, and would eventually lead to citizenship.
Those who respond that such a law would amount to “amnesty” for illegal immigrants should keep a couple of points in mind.
First, kids eligible under the DREAM Act came to the United States when they were still minors, many of them at a very young age. They were only obeying their parents, something we should generally encourage young children to do.
Second, these kids are a low-risk, high-return bet for legalization. Because they came of age in the United States, they are almost all fluent in English and identify with America as their home (for many the only one they have ever known). “Assimilation” will not be an issue.
They also represent future workers and taxpayers. The definitive 1997 study on immigration by the National Research Council, The New Americans, determined that an immigrant with some college education represents a large fiscal gain for government at all levels. Over his or her lifetime, such an immigrant will pay $105,000 more in taxes than he or she consumes in government services, on average and expressed in net present value (see p. 334). In other words, legalizing an immigrant with post-secondary education is equivalent to paying off $105,000 in government debt.
According to estimates by the Immigration Policy Center, the DREAM Act as introduced in 2009 would offer immediate legalization to 114,000 young illegal immigrants who have already earned the equivalent of an associate’s degree. Another 612,000 who have already graduated from high school would be eligible for provisional status and would then have a strong incentive to further their education at the college level to gain permanent status. If all 726,000 of them studied at college and became legal permanent residents, it would be equivalent to retiring $76 billion of government debt.
In all, a potential 2.1 million kids could eventually be eligible for permanent legal residency under terms of the DREAM Act, representing a potential fiscal windfall to the government of more than $200 billion. Not to mention their potential contributions to our culture and economy.
Debate: Colleges Getting Rich Off Students and Taxpayers?
On Tuesday, Cato held a forum on the big profits made by putatively “nonprofit” colleges, the subject of a new Cato Policy Analysis. Not surprisingly, Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, objected to the use of the term “profits” to categorize the excess money colleges take in through undergraduate students, but all the panelists seemed to agree that there is both significant waste in higher ed, and that the Capitol Hill obsession with unabashedly for-profit institutions misses big cracks all over the Ivory Tower.
Unfortunately, of course, many of you couldn’t join us on Tuesday. Thankfully, you can now take in the entire bit of illuminating infotainment right here:
On a related note, give George Leef’s latest commentary a read. He does a nice job of pointing out all the major flaws in perhaps the most politically powerful argument for ever-greater government spending on higher education: because degree-holders tend to earn more, we need oodles more people with degrees. I’ve taken a whack at that dubious argument recently, but George gives it a far more comprehensive treatment.
Campus Show Trials
Harvey Silverglate, co-founder and chairman of the board of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and a Cato adjunct scholar, has an excellent op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal highlighting the emerging problem of due process violations on college campuses. As Ilya Shapiro has written about previously, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights recently sent out a letter outlining new procedural requirements for dealing with claims of sexual harassment and assault. Despite its cordial opening — it begins with the words “Dear Colleague” — the letter carries the de facto force of law: universities that receive public funds (nearly all of them) may have their funding stripped if they don’t follow the new guidelines.
The new guidelines threaten to turn the campus courts at some of our most august institutions into “kangaroo courts” that ignore basic rights of the accused, such as the right to confront accusers. Most disturbingly, universities are now commanded to use a “preponderance of the evidence” standard in adjudicating claims of sexual assault, including rape. The preponderance of the evidence standard is little more than a hunch, and is often described as a simple 50.01% probability of guilt.
In 1970, in the case of In re Winshop, the Supreme Court ruled that a standard of proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” is constitutionally required in criminal cases. The Court wrote:
The requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt has this vital role in our criminal procedure for cogent reasons. The accused, during a criminal prosecution, has at stake interests of immense importance, both because of the possibility that he may lose his liberty upon conviction and because of the certainty that he would be stigmatized by the conviction. Accordingly, a society that values the good name and freedom of every individual should not condemn a man for commission of a crime when there is reasonable doubt about his guilt.
Moreover, use of the reasonable doubt standard is indispensable to command the respect and confidence of the community in applications of the criminal law. It is critical that the moral force of the criminal law not be diluted by a standard of proof that leaves people in doubt whether innocent men are being condemned. It is also important in our free society that every individual going about his ordinary affairs have confidence that his government cannot adjudge him guilty of a criminal offense without convincing a proper factfinder of his guilt with utmost certainty.
While universities are not putting anyone in jail, merely being accused of a rape, much less being convicted by your university, has many of the same concerns as a criminal trial. As if to supply an object lesson that illustrates the Supreme Court’s well-articulated concerns, Silverglate opens his op-ed with the following harrowing story:
Did They Learn Correlation and Causation in College?
It looks like Peter Thiel won’t be unopposed advising kids to stay out of college
Thanks to a new report from Georgetown University economist Anthony Carnevale, and a David Leonhardt column based on Carnevale’s study, over the last few days the college-for-all crowd has been striking back. But they seem to have missed something in their own college training: correlation does not equal causation.
Carnevale, Leonhardt, and others’ argument is basically that there are big, positive returns on a college degree. It’s something, frankly, that’s not generally in dispute. I say “generally,” because while on average college grads make a lot more than people without a degree, there’s a lot more to the story than averages. Indeed, there are at least three major problems with making averages the basis for a universal-college offensive, problems that Andrew Gillen recently laid out in a terrific blog post. I won’t reinvent the wheel by going into them all (read Andrew’s post) but I’ll summarize them: (1) There are huge throngs of people who attempt college and never finish, a giant population ignored when you just look at completers; (2) at least part of the college wage premium is simply a function of a degree signaling something about the intelligence, work habits, etc. that graduates already possessed; and (3) there are some majors and degrees that confer no great wage premium and are in about as much demand as Betamax or gangrene.
What is most concerning about the Carnevale report, however, is how the report and its fans make the very basic mistake of conflating correlation with causation in implying that the roughly one-third of bachelor’s holders in jobs not requiring degrees are much better workers thanks to their BAs. They base that conclusion on degree-holders in non-degree jobs earning appreciably more than workers with only high-school diplomas. Heck, a graphic to go with Leanohardt’s column trumpets that dishwashers with college degrees make a lot more than dishwashers without them, a data point seized on by the Fordham Institute’s Peter Meyer to attack anyone who dares say college isn’t the best option for everyone.
Once the dishwasher example comes up, is there any way to escape the causation/correlation problem? Any way to not at least seriously contemplate that it isn’t what someone learned in college that makes him or her a better dishwasher, but that someone able to graduate college will tend to be more punctual and reliable? Heck, even if you believed that the proverbial underwater basket weaving major existed, it would be very hard to conclude that the skills one would need to make the finest submerged wickerwork would be useful for getting dinner plates spotless, even though that often occurs underwater.
And many of the public service jobs cited in the graphic, such as firefighters? At least from what we know about teachers, government employee pay scales often give salary bumps for degrees, but degrees don’t necessarily have any bearing on job effectiveness.
People like Carnevale and Leonhardt are right to guard against efforts, especially by public-school employees, to actively push kids away from college, in particular if that’s driven by students’ class or race. But shoving everyone into ivy walls? Based on what we know, that’s equally unjustifiable.
‘Marsupial Justice’ Is a Natural Product of Federal Overreach
Earlier this month I blogged about the U.S. Department of Education’s recent push to eliminate free speech and due process on campus. More and more people are starting to notice this attempt by the department’s Office of Civil Rights to force colleges — by threatening an investigation and loss of federal funds — to redefine sexual harrassment to include unwelcome flirting and sex jokes and then lower the burden of proof they use when determining whether students or staff are guilty of violating the new code of behavior.
And now we have a characteristically astute article by the Washington Examiner‘s Michael Barone. Money quote:
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has shown an admirable openness to argument and intellectual debate. Perhaps someone will ask him whether he wants his department to be encouraging kangaroo courts and marsupial justice on campuses across the country.
Unfortunately, this sort of thing doesn’t just take care of itself. Greg Lukianoff and his team at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education have been doing a workmanlike job protecting student and academic freedoms, but at base this policy exposes the sorts of pathologies that emerge from a federal government that has too many tentacles in too many places.
What is the Department of Education doing setting any sort of standards for speech, conduct, and adjudication of campus disputes — good or bad, strict or lax? Why do we even have a federal Department of Education in the first place?
The Aid’s the Thing
The following is cross-posted from the National Journal’s Education Experts blog. This week’s topic: Whether new ”gainful employment” regulations for higher education are too little, too much, or just right:
I agree largely with Steve Peha — our policies and mindsets have made “college” synonymous with “job training,” and that has led to huge inefficiencies. But there is an even deeper problem: government aid, both to students and schools.
The most aggressive opponents of for-profit schooling to have posted thus far appear to agree that taxpayer-funded student aid is what for-profit institutions are after. No doubt the critics are, for the most part, right. But there is another side to this equation: The aid also enables students to choose proprietary schools, choices many aid recipients likely would not have made had they been using only their own money, or money they borrowed from people who willing lent it to them. So aid helps enrich proprietary schools, but it also hugely degrades the incentives of students to economize or fully scrutinize the choices before them.
College is a two-way street, and student aid has fueled out-of-control traffic going in both directions
But it gets worse. What has been perpetually ignored by far too many people who’ve been involved in the assault of for-profit institutions is that all sectors of higher education get massive subsidies, and all are performing very poorly.
Public colleges get huge subsidies directly from state and local governments, yet still saddle students — and aid-supplying taxpayers — with big bills. And how do they perform? Only about 55 percent of students at four-year public colleges finish their degrees within six years, while only about 21 percent — one-fifth! — of community college students complete their programs within 150 percent of expected time. And yes, there is a lot that these figures do not capture, but there is no way to look at these outcomes of public schools as anything other than atrocious.
And nonprofit private institutions? They get big tax benefits by virtue of being putatively nonprofit, and often accumulate major wealth as a result. But their six-year grad rates? Only 64 percent.
Once again, the root problem is that massive government subsidies induce students to spend far more — and think about their priorities far less — than they would were they using their own dough, or money someone voluntarily gave them. Moreover, all of our higher ed subsidies enable colleges to raise prices with near impunity, and expend cash on all sorts of things that make them hugely inefficient.
In light of all this, “gainful employment” is clearly no solution to our higher ed troubles. It is, at best, an over-hyped distraction.
‘Gainful Employment’ Regs Softened, Still a Diversionary Sideshow
The hotly anticipated — and dreaded — “gainful employment” regulations aimed at for-profit colleges were released this morning, and based on media reports the big news is that they are a little more lenient than originally expected. Most importantly, schools that fail to meet debt-to-income and debt-repayment requirements will not be cut off from federal student aid — the financial crack on which almost every college and university depends — until 2015.
That’s the big news, at least as reported. But it isn’t the important story.
The real story remains that the Obama administration, and at least the education leadership in the Senate, continues to divert the public’s eye towards for-profit schools when the entire higher education system is a waste-engorged, parasitic mess.
Yes, for-profit schools have low program completion rates, but the overall six-year completion rate for four-year programs is just around 57 percent. And yes, for-profit schools leave many students with big debt, but the average debt for all four-year undergraduate students who have taken loans is around $24,000. And yes, students at for-profit institutions draw heavily on the public treasury to pay for the studies they don’t complete, but higher education overall is a gigantic leech feeding off taxpayers, taking in hundreds of billions of dollars every year from all levels of government. And it is ever-growing aid to students from vote-hungry federal politicians that is likely the most potent force enabling rampant price inflation and massive college overconsumption. After all, the price becomes a lot less important – and extravagances more enticing – when someone else is footing much of the bill.
Now that these rules have been published, let’s move on to what really needs to happen: Phasing out government subsidies for the entire draining Ivory Tower.
The Boundless Executive State: From Global Warming to Sexual Harassment
Two days ago Cato held a book forum to mark the publication of an excellent new book, Climate Coup: Global Warming’s Invasion of Our Government and Our Lives, edited by Pat Michaels. I coauthored chapter one, which shows how the modern executive state arose over the 20th century such that today the Environmental Protection Agency is able to regulate vast areas of life without ever having to go to Congress for authority to do so. It’s a remarkable inversion of the Founders’ vision. With emphasis added, the very first sentence of the Constitution, after the Preamble, reads as follows: “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress …” — not in the executive branch, not in the courts, but in Congress. Yet today we are governed mainly by over 300 executive branch agencies that themselves exercise legislative, executive, and judicial powers, leaving the separation-of-powers principle in tatters.
And the executive’s reach extends, of course, far beyond environmental regulations. Thus we now learn from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) — a fine organization dedicated to defending students and faculty caught in the jaws of higher education’s obsession with political correctness — that just last month the United States Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), all on its own, issued regulations requiring that colleges and universities receiving federal funding must employ not the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard, nor even the clear-and-convincing-evidence standard, but the low preponderance-of-the-evidence standard (a 50.01 percent, “more likely than not,” evidentiary burden) when adjudicating student complaints concerning sexual harassment or sexual violence. Institutions that fail to comply face federal investigation and the loss of federal funding.
It’s well understood, of course, that allegations of sexual crime involve difficult proof issues. Given that, FIRE’s open letter to OCR’s assistant secretary points out that Supreme Court precedent argues strongly against using the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard in campus hearings concerning allegations of sexual harassment and sexual violence. Lowering the burden of proof, FIRE notes in its press release,
will reduce confidence in campus judiciary systems and inevitably result in more incorrect guilty verdicts. Rather than provide for the “prompt and equitable” resolution of student allegations, FIRE contends that OCR’s new requirement “serves to undermine the integrity, accuracy, reliability, and basic fairness of the judicial process.” Further, relying on the preponderance of the evidence standard in sexual violence claims “turns the fundamental tenet of due process on its head, requiring that those accused of society’s vilest crimes be afforded the scant protection of our judiciary’s least certain standard.”
Yet already, FIRE adds, OCR’s new regulations have prompted colleges and universities across the country
to abandon their commitment to due process protections for students accused of sexual harassment and sexual violence. Brandeis University, Stanford University, Yale University, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst all have announced revisions, either already instituted or forthcoming. Given the threat of federal investigation and the loss of federal funding for failing to comply with OCR’s directives, hundreds of institutions will follow.
Thus, the modern executive state is at work, in this and a thousand and one other ways, writing and enforcing rules that Congress alone has the authority to write. But Congress long ago abdicated that responsibility, delegating it to politically non-responsible bureaucracies and bureaucrats. And that is where power rests today.
Free Speech Belongs on Campuses Too
Speaking of free speech, last night I had an Obamacare panel at Widener University, which is currently having its own little speech-related brouhaha. (Getting there was a bit of a hassle because I was held up at the Wilmington Amtrak station by Vice President Biden’s entourage — but I didn’t end up in a closet, so I guess it could have been worse.)
There are strange things afoot at the tiny Delaware law school, specifically to tenured professor Lawrence Connell, who also happens to be the adviser to the school’s Federalist Society chapter. From the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education:
Widener University School of Law is attempting to fire longtime criminal law professor Lawrence Connell by charging him with dubious violations of the school’s harassment code, such as using the term “black folks” in class and using the names of law school Dean Linda L. Ammons and other law school colleagues as characters in class hypotheticals. Although a faculty panel has already recommended that Widener drop its “dismissal for cause” proceedings against Connell, administrators have reportedly induced students to issue further complaints under a new process that forces Connell to keep the details of the proceedings secret. Connell, who is represented by attorney Thomas S. Neuberger, also requested help from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).
“Not only do the charges against Professor Connell appear to be either unsubstantiated or totally meritless, but even after the faculty refused to assent to his firing Widener has found a new, ‘confidential’ procedure to use against him,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. “Professor Connell has already addressed the charges, but now he cannot publicly discuss the details of his prosecution out of fear of punishment for ‘retaliatory action’ if he reveals them.”
Although Widener is a private university, a faculty member receiving such treatment on dubious charges should raise some eyebrows in legal academia. If there is something to the charges, let them be aired in public. While this is not a constitutional issue, I’m sure the law school administration is well aware of the importance of both due process and intellectual freedom. To that end, either the professor should be afforded the dignity of defending himself to his accusers or this nonsense should be put to bed.
You can read more about the case here. Also, if the state of today’s law schools interests you, I cannot recommend strongly enough my colleague Walter Olson’s new book, Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America.
Thanks to Jonathan Blanks for his help with this blogpost.
Tough Breaks for the Blame-Cheap-States Crowd
An explanation for explosive college prices that’s very popular with ivory-tower apologists is that state governments have been ruthlessly “defunding” higher ed for years, forcing schools to raise prices. Two new reports help to make clear — as I have argued many times in the past — that this simply doesn’t hold water.
The first report is the annual State Higher Education Executive Officers’ State Higher Education Finance Report. While it shows that on a per-pupil basis state and local funding has declined over the last few years, total amounts have risen pretty steadily since 2000. Adjusted for inflation, total state and local support dipped from $81.3 billion in 2000 to $78.0 billion in 2005, ballooned to $87.1 billion in 2009, then dropped just a bit to $85.5 billion in 2010. Helping to put it all in perspective, SHEEO reports that in 1985 state and local funding totalled just $65.5 billion. In other words, the general trend line has gone steeply up. But don’t believe me? Take it right from the report:
Some observers have suggested that states are abandoning their historical commitment to public higher education. National data and more careful attention to variable state conditions strongly suggest that such a broad observation is not justified by the available data.
Of course, if total taxpayer funding is generally up but per-student funding is down, increases in enrollment must be significant. And indeed they are. Unfortunately, evidence suggests that that’s very likely not a good thing.
The other bad news for the blame-the-taxpayers crowd is a new report from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity that illustrates that external factors such as decreasing state subsidies are not the main culprit behind skyrocketing prices. Student aid is, because it allows colleges to increase their prices with impunity. Evidence of this includes college prices considerably outpacing overall inflation; hugely declining faculty productivity; tuition growing far beyond instructional costs; and ballooning financial aid that hasn’t been accompanied by decreasing net costs.
Unfortunately, much of this will likely either be dismissed out of hand or just ignored. But the evidence, when you examine it, is awfully compelling: Subsidies, not pennypinchers, are the big problem in higher ed.
Secretly Happy Colleges Should Mean Overtly Angry Taxpayers
Yesterday, House Republicans introduced their preliminary list of spending cuts, cuts that were, they declared, ”to go deep.” Unfortunately, coming in at just $74 billion, they were about as deep as onion skin. After all, the total federal budget is well over $3 trillion, and the national debt now exceeds $14 trillion.
The relatively lilliputian size of the proposed cuts should give any taxpayer major queasiness over Republicans’ desire to truly rein in government. But if that doesn’t scare you, this report from Inside Higher Ed absolutely should:
Shhh. Don’t tell, and they’ll never admit it publicly. But college officials are (very quietly) feeling okay — at least for now — about how Congressional Republicans would treat the programs that matter most to higher education in their first whack at the federal budget.
Why should ivory tower denizens be secretly peppy, and taxpayers openly upset? Because the House GOP pretty much left higher ed funding untouched, despite the fact that the ivory tower is soaking in putrid, taxpayer-funded waste. Quite simply, the federal government pours hundreds of billions of dollars into our ivy-ensconced institutions every year, but what that has largely produced is atrociously low graduation rates; at-best dubious amounts of learning for those who do graduate; ever-fancier facilities; and rampant tuition inflation that renders a higher education no more affordable to students but keeps colleges fat and happy.
I’ve said it before and I will say it again: If federal politicians won’t significantly cut ”education” spending – spending that has done next to nothing to increase actual learning — then they are not serious about reining in the deficit or cutting government down to size. They are still, sadly, much more concerned about appearing to “care” about education than doing what needs to be done.
For-profits Fighting Back, Harkin to Flog-on
Last week, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Comittee, announced that on February 17 he will continue his obssessive attack on for-profit colleges, holding yet another hearing to determine just how evil profit-seekers are. At least, that is what will presumably be discussed — the specific subject of the hearing is yet to be identified. But the committee actually tackling, say, rampant waste throughout higher education driven by federal student aid, or just giving for-profit schools an even-handed treatment, would be too huge a turnaround to contemplate.
Despite there being no end in sight to Harkin’s seige, for-profit institutions aren’t just rolling over, and today they launched their latest counterattack. This afternoon the Coalition for Educational Success — a for-profit college advocacy group — filed a lawsuit against the Government Accountability Office. At issue: The GAO’s ”secret shopper” report on for-profit institutions that was eventually — but very stealthily — revealed by the GAO to be riddled with errors, and which could be shown to be an even bigger smear job were the GAO to allow for-profit schools to examine the evidence behind the report.
Clearly there will be more to come on this, if for no other reason than Harkin’s show-hearings have garnered a lot of coverage in the past. Hopefully, this time potentially disturbing behavior by the GAO, as well as the huge problems federal policy has created throughout higher education — you know, the really important stories — will also get a little attention.
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