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.

Gov. Perry and Those DREAM Act Kids is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

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.

Debate: Colleges Getting Rich Off Students and Taxpayers? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

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:

On Jan. 27, 2010, Mr. [Caleb] Warner learned he was accused of sexual assault by another student at the University of North Dakota. Mr. Warner insisted that the episode, which occurred the month prior, was entirely consensual. No matter to the university: He was charged with violating the student code and suspended for three years. Three months later, state police lodged criminal charges against his accuser for filing a false police report. A warrant for her arrest remains outstanding.

Among several reasons the police gave for crediting Mr. Warner’s claim of innocence was evidence of a text message sent to him by the woman indicating that she wanted to have intercourse with him. This invitation, combined with other evidence that police believe indicates her untruthfulness, has obvious implications for her charge of rape.

Nevertheless, university officials have refused to allow Mr. Warner a re-hearing—much less a reversal of their guilty verdict. When the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a civil liberties group of which I am board chairman, wrote to University President Robert O. Kelley to protest, the school’s counsel, Julie Ann Evans, responded. She wrote that the university didn’t believe that the fact that Mr. Warner’s accuser was charged with lying to police, and has not answered her arrest warrant, represented “substantial new information.” In any event, she argued, the campus proceeding “was not a legal process but an educational one.”

In the wake of cases like the Duke lacrosse case, it is troubling that the OCR has decided that the rights of the accused on college campuses need fewer protections. Expect to see more travesties of justice in the months and years to come if these regulations stand. Thankfully, FIRE is on the front lines fighting for students’ constitutional rights.

Campus Show Trials is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

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.

Did They Learn Correlation and Causation in College? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

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?

‘Marsupial Justice’ Is a Natural Product of Federal Overreach is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

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.

The Aid’s the Thing is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

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.

‘Gainful Employment’ Regs Softened, Still a Diversionary Sideshow is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

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 20^th 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.

The Boundless Executive State: From Global Warming to Sexual Harassment is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

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.

Free Speech Belongs on Campuses Too is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

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.

Tough Breaks for the Blame-Cheap-States Crowd is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

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.

Secretly Happy Colleges Should Mean Overtly Angry Taxpayers is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

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.

For-profits Fighting Back, Harkin to Flog-on is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The United States is facing a gigantic debt problem, as we all know. Governments at all levels have simply been spending too much, which most Republicans and Democrats now seem willing to concede. But don’t expect to hear the following from many members of either party: We need to stop spending taxpayer money on sending so many people to college! Indeed, President Obama has already said he’ll support spending cuts but not to education, and few Republicans have ever shown the willingness to flatly declare student aid a costly waste. And maybe they’re right. After all, doesn’t more college education necessarily translate into more productivity and prosperity?

Nope. As I’ve pointed out repeatedly, lots of people never finish the education they start, and colleges just raise tuition to eat up aid increases. What I haven’t discussed as much is the problem of college-grad underemployment: college graduates taking jobs that don’t require college degrees. Well it’s a huge inefficiency, as the good folks at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity point out in a timely new study. And it could become an even bigger problem as President Obama pushes to have the United States lead the world in the percentage of the population with a college degree. As CCAP reports:

Evidence shows that currently more than one-third of college graduates hold jobs that governmental employment experts tell us require less than a college degree. That proportion of underemployed college graduates has tripled over the past four decades.

From an economic standpoint, that’s obviously a lot of waste. So why do our policymakers persist in simplistically asserting that more college education is always a good thing? I can’t read minds, but I’m inclined to agree with the CCAP authors:

[T]he notion of President Obama and many higher education leaders that our nation’s future depends on higher numbers of college graduates is fundamentally flawed. It is based more on assumptions, and perhaps almost an ideological attachment to colleges and universities, than on labor market realities.

Many people, it seems, do just assume that more education — without ever looking at what actually goes on in higher ed — is always a good thing, while others believe that government should constantly funnel money to our precious ivory towers no matter how little of concrete value taxpayers get for their dough. But whatever the reason, the facts almost all point in one direction: We need to spend much less taxpayer money on higher education, not much more.

Thank You Mr. Graduate, I Will Have Fries with That! is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Last night, the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team broke the college hoops consecutive win record of 88 games set by UCLA’s men in the early 1970s. In anticipation of this, UConn coach Geno Auriemma caused a bit of a stir by accusing some male sports fans of being upset because a women’s team was threatening a record set by men.

This does not compute. Somewhere there might be a man upset by this — though I haven’t heard one — but I don’t see why: The UCLA men beat men’s teams, the UConn women have beaten women’s teams. It says nothing bad about men that a women’s team has a longer win streak.

Where there might be en element of gender conflict at play is in how UConn got to this point. According to CBSSports.com columnist Gregg Doyel, UConn hasn’t just beaten other teams during its streak, it’s crushed numerous squads that at least by ranking ought to have been competitive with UConn. (It clobbered 22nd-ranked Florida State by 31 points for win number 89.) The talent pool in women’s basketball, Doyel argues, just isn’t deep enough to produce several teams of UConn’s calibre.

Assuming Doyel is correct, why isn’t there the same depth of talent in women’s hoops as has existed in men’s college basketball since at least the end of UCLA’s streak?

Quite possibly, because there aren’t nearly as many women who care about competing in sports, including basketball, at the highest levels as there are men. It’s a very real possibility supported not only by UConn’s dominance, but by what appears to be a strong tendency of other top women’s teams to win games by relatively lopsided margins, and, most tellingly, by significant athletics evidence beyond hoops. All of that, however, flies in the face of the implicit rationale of Title IX, the federal statute requiring colleges to offer equal athletic opportunities to men and women. The law assumes that colleges that fail to offer proportionate roster spots are discriminating against girls, but the reality is that women might just not want to play sports as fervently as men.

UConn’s dominance might be just one more bit of evidence that it is time to stop assuming that there is rampant,  sexist ill will when it comes to college sports, and for government to let people freely choose what interests they pursue. At the very least, it would probably make a lot of people happier than they’d be getting destroyed by the UConn women’s basketball team.

UConn’s Streak and Title IX is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today, AEI’s Rick Hess and Andrew Kelly have a piece at Inside Higher Ed highlighting serious evidence of dirty-dealing in a highly influential Government Accountability Office report on for-profit colleges. Hess and Kelly’s piece is well worth a read and I’m glad they’re on the case.

Unfortunately, theirs is about the only cry of alarm over apparent bias at the supposedly incorruptible GAO — potentially a huge story — I’ve seen since I wrote the following last week:

Now, though much needs to be determined about why the myriad changes to the report were made, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to learn that people at the GAO have actually been in on the crusade to demonize proprietary colleges. I also, unfortunately, won’t be surprised if no one pays attention to any of this, and the shameless, responsibility-dodging war on for-profits continues unabated.

Sadly, so far my fears have been realized. Other than Hess and Kelly no one, especially in the mainstream media, is giving this story any of the attention it deserves. Apparently, if someone who’s honest about trying to make a buck is being beaten in an alley, it’s easier just to look the other way.

GAO an Aggressor in War on For-Profits? At Least Someone Cares is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As I’ve pointed out repeatedly, though the sector is no doubt rife with waste and home to some dirty-dealers, attacks on for-profit colleges are almost certainly driven by politics and ideology, not educational concerns. Were it otherwise, all of higher education would be taking a beating for its bankrupting waste and widespread failure.

A recent symptom of anti-profit witch-huntery was the misrepresentation of GAO reporting on what “secret shoppers” found while visiting select for-profit institutions. At the time the findings were released I thought the main problem was that members of the media and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) — who has been leading the crusade against for-profit schools — were using the results to smear the whole proprietary sector when the GAO was clear about examining a nonrepresentative sample of schools. Unfortunately, it turns out the GAO might actually be in on the demonization.

On November 30 — without making any announcement that I could find on its website — the GAO released a modified version of its report, and according to a comparison between the old report and new one by the Coalition for Educational Success, the new version contains several changes that cast its for-profit targets in better light than they first appeared.

One vignette, for instance, originally said that a school’s admissions representative told an undercover applicant that she “should” take out maximum federal loans even if she didn’t need all the money. The change says the representative told the applicant that she “could” take maximum loans — a pretty big difference.

Another section went from only reporting that a representative told an applicant that the school has graduates making $120,000 to $130,000 in a job that, according to the GAO, typically makes less than $70,00 a year, to reporting that the representative also informed the applicant that she “could expect a job with a likely starting salary of $13-$14 per hour or $15 if the applicant was lucky.” $15 an hour translates into about $30,000 a year, and completely changes the tenor of the vignette.

According to Stephen Burd of the Center for American Progress, career colleges have been self-servingly crying – or at least whispering — foul over the GAO report for months now. Burd has been a leading for-profit basher, but I’d have been inclined to give only limited credence to concerns about dirty pool, too, until this latest revelation trickled out.

Now, though much needs to be determined about why the myriad changes to the report were made, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to learn that people at the GAO have actually been in on the crusade to demonize proprietary colleges. I also, unfortunately, won’t be surprised if no one pays attention to any of this, and the shameless, responsibility-dodging war on for-profits continues unabated.

War on For-Profit Colleges Reeks Even Worse is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A study from the American Institutes of Research finds that federal and state governments have wasted billions of dollars on subsidies for students who didn’t make it past their first year in college. The federal total for first-year college drop outs was $1.5 billion from 2003 to 2008.

Due to data limitations, the figures are only for first year, full-time students at four-year colleges and universities. Community colleges have even higher drop-out rates, and part-time students or students returning to college are more likely to drop out. Therefore, the numbers in the report are “only a fraction of the total costs of first-year attrition the nation and the states face.” Moreover, it doesn’t include the cost for students who drop out some time after their sophomore year.

Federal policymakers from both parties are fond of lavishing subsidies on college students. Proponents argue that without federal subsidies, an insufficient number of future workers will possess the skills necessary to compete in a global economy.

However, a Cato essay on federal higher education subsidies argues that students wishing to attend college already have plenty of incentive to save or borrow from private sources:

Supporters of student aid subsidies argue that higher education is a “public good” that would be underprovided in a free market. However, that is probably not the case. People have a strong incentive to invest in their own education because it will lead to higher earnings. Those with a college degree will earn, on average, 75 percent more during their lifetime than those with just high-school degrees. That is a big incentive for people to save or borrow in private markets to pay for their own college costs. There is no “market failure” here.

In fact, higher education subsidies drive up tuition prices:

It is matter of supply and demand. More and more Americans have sought a college education, which has pushed prices higher. Ordinarily, such upward pressure would be restrained by consumers’ willingness and ability to pay, but as government subsidies have helped absorb tuition increases, the public’s budget constraint has been lifted. Peter Wood, a professor at Boston University noted that federal subsidies “are seen by colleges and universities as money that is there for the taking . . . tuition is set high enough to capture those funds and whatever else we think can be extracted from parents.”

But isn’t it great that Uncle Sam is helping put more young folks in college? Not necessarily:

Many of those additional students may not have been ready, or suited, for college. As evidenced by the rising shares of college students who require remedial work. Further evidence of the problem is that institutions have lowered their standards to adapt to the rise in second-rate students. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences reported that from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s, college grade point averages grew steadily but Scholastic Aptitude Test scores declined. The share of entering college students who complete degrees has also fallen over the decades. In addition, while college attendance is up, overall adult literacy has barely budged over the last 15 years.

The essay also notes that college students devote 3.2 hours to education on an average weekday, versus 3.9 hours to “leisure and sports,” and that the six-year graduation rate for bachelor’s students is only about 56 percent, indicating that many students are not very serious about education.

Just as housing subsidies incentivized people to purchase homes that they otherwise shouldn’t have, higher education subsidies have incentivized people to go to college who weren’t ready or suited for it. In both cases, the cost to taxpayers has been substantial while the alleged benefits have proven illusory.

Higher Education Subsidies Wasted is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Yesterday, President Obama hosted the White House Summit on Community Colleges, and in-your-face love was in the air. President Obama and Second Lady Jill Biden, a community college professor, couldn’t keep their hands off their signficant other, lavishing all sorts of praise on their favorite little schools.

Swooned Dr. Biden about the dreamy things community colleges do for their students:

They are students like the mother who shared her experience with us on the White House website of working towards a degree while raising three children and straddling financial challenges.  Now employed and the holder of a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree, she wrote, “Community colleges didn’t just change my life, they gave me my life.”

Community colleges do that every day. 

Ick!

The President, too, couldn’t hide his affection:

So I think it’s clear why I asked Jill to travel the country visiting community colleges -– because, as she knows personally, these colleges are the unsung heroes of America’s education system.  They may not get the credit they deserve.  They may not get the same resources as other schools.  But they provide a gateway to millions of Americans to good jobs and a better life.

Like the guy with the locker next to Mr. and Mrs. Lovebird, all I can say is “oh, come on!”

Community colleges might be a good option for some people, but they are hardly paragons of educational success. Quite the opposite: According to the U.S. Department of Education, they have the worst graduation rates of any two-year sector of higher education. Only around 22 percent of public, two-year college students graduate within three years, versus roughly 49 percent of private, not-for-profit attendees and about 59 percent of private, for-profit students.

Wait! What’s that? Private, for-profit institutions outperform super-cute community colleges…by a lot? But they’re the ugliest, meanest, least popular kids in school!  Nobody likes them!

Oh, I know what’s going on here! For-profit schools cost a lot more than community colleges, right? That’s why they’re so disliked.

That’s true if you look at tuition prices. But community colleges get big subsidies from government, especially state and local taxpayers. So they might actually cost a lot, it’s just that they sneak the money out of your back pocket and then congratulate themselves for charging students so little.  

When you look at government expenditures per-pupil, including aid to schools and students, it becomes clear that community colleges are, in fact, just as mean and greedy as for-profits. Indeed, former Clinton administration economist Robert Shapiro has calculated that they are actually more costly to taxpayers than for-profit schools (see table 24). According to his calculations, two-year public schools cost taxpayers $6,919 per student, while private, for-profits cost just $3,628. 

No wonder the summit turned my stomach! At the same time the administration and its allies in Congress are bashing for-profit schools, the President has a love fest with community colleges that are generally much worse. Unfortunately, it leaves you concluding that for-profits could walk on water and it wouldn’t matter: As long as they’re honest about trying to make a buck, they’ll be beaten up in the parking lot and never invited to any of the cool summits.

Enough Community College PDA is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The U.S. Senate may vote in the next few days on a piece of legislation known as the DREAM Act. The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act would offer legal status to as many as 2 million students who are currently in the United States without authorization, many of them Hispanic immigrants who entered the country illegally with their parents.

The act would legalize students who entered the United States at least five years before its passage and were under the age of 16 when they entered. A practical effect would be to make many of these students eligible for in-state tuition at colleges and universities.

The DREAM Act is not a perfect call for those of us who believe in limited government, but in our less-than-perfect world, the act would make a bad situation better. As I wrote earlier this year in a post on the Cato on Campus web site:

Ideally, there would be no reason to propose the DREAM Act if there were more opportunities for legal immigration and if the government were far less involved in providing higher education. Far fewer minor children would enter the country illegally if more work visas were provided for their parents to enter the country legally. In-state tuition and government aid would cease to be a major issue if responsibility for providing higher education shifted more to a competitive private sector.

Given our current system, however, the DREAM Act would somewhat improve a bad situation. It would extend legal status to a group of people who have completed high school, typically speak English well, and are thus able to pursue higher education or better support themselves in the labor market. It would help to maintain a healthy growth rate of the U.S. labor force and provide entrepreneurial spirit associated with immigrants.

The DREAM Act would also extend more equitable treatment to students whose lack of legal status is no fault of their own. Their parents, although undocumented, have usually paid the same sales and property taxes paid by legal residents with similar incomes. The DREAM Act would lift thousands of students out of a legal netherworld and allow them to improve themselves while at the same time contribute to a more productive United States.

DREAM Act Would Improve a Bad Situation is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today, the annual U.S. News and World Report “Best Colleges” guide came out, and as always it is a slightly celebratory occasion for me. Though I agree with many people who critique the guide for its debatable methodology and implicit assumption that all schools can be cleanly ranked from best to worst, the simple fact that the issue exists makes me happy. When you spend the bulk of your time analyzing moribund, monopolistic, K-12 schooling, it’s just refreshing to dive into an education ocean where guides are abundant because consumers have plentiful, powerful choice. It also doesn’t hurt that, in stark contrast to elementary and secondary schooling, the United States seems to be the envy of the world in higher ed.

Unfortunately, my higher ed enthusiasm always ebbs fast, and aggravation quickly slips in, because there is copious, taxpayer-funded rot under America’s abundant ivy. The reality is, while being much more dynamic and consumer-driven than socialized K-12 schooling isn’t a bad thing, it’s hardly a major accomplishment. And as a new report from the Goldwater Institute reminds me, while college students are empowered to choose, they are empowered with massive taxpayer subsidies, both in the form of aid directly to students and government funding directly to schools. The result is major, painful distortions of the market, including the ever-growing administrative bloat detailed in Goldwater’s new paper:

Between 1993 and 2007, the number of full-time administrators per 100 students at America’s leading universities grew by 39 percent, while the number of employees engaged in teaching, research or service only grew by 18 percent. Inflation-adjusted spending on administration per student increased by 61 percent during the same period, while instructional spending per student rose 39 percent.

So today, celebrate that we have a major sector of education that is at least partially market based. And then, like me, get aggravated by all the government funding and control that renders so much of it a waste.

Why I Love, and Hate, American Higher Education is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog