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    Rebuilding the American Economy

    Part 4: Is higher education fulfilling its purpose?

    Two quick data points: In comparison to the adult population of Rhode Island, Massachusetts adults are 27 percent more likely to have earned a four-year degree — and the median family income in Massachusetts is 20 percent higher than in Rhode Island. I submit that these are related data: The higher level of education is responsible for greater economic success. So if, as I have postulated, the key to rebuilding the American economy is increasing the attainment of post-secondary education, then it is essential we have an academically effective and economically efficient system of higher education. But to assess how well colleges and universities are doing, we must first agree on the purpose they are intended to serve. Is their purpose to meet the needs and expectations of students? Is it to meet the needs of the individual colleges? Or is it to meet the needs of society? Let’s consider some alternatives.

    Purpose from the Standpoint of the Student

    1. The purpose of college is to allow young people to find their passion and role in society.

    This was the primary purpose consistently identified by freshmen students until about a decade ago. College was a place to learn facts and knowledge and, in so doing, to hope to gain wisdom; to understand something about the depth and breadth of human experience across the ages; to test one’s beliefs and moral tenets against those of others; in short, to grow and develop as an individual. This purpose is still identified as important by entering freshmen, but only secondarily to their current most important reason for going to college — preparing for a job.

    1. The purpose of college is to acquire the skills necessary to qualify for a well-paying job.

    This purpose is the one most endorsed by today’s generation of college students (and their parents). With the labor market continuing to undergo profound changes, and, following several decades during which growth in median family income has not kept pace with increases in the cost of living, students see a college education as an essential prerequisite for having the comfortable middle-class life enjoyed by many of their parents.

    But we know that the market value of different majors varies enormously. Students graduating in engineering can expect a starting salary in excess of $60,000, and finance majors may start for even higher sums, but arts and humanities majors might earn less than half that amount. If college is all about securing a well-paying job, shouldn’t students with a burning desire to study music or English literature ignore their passion and choose instead to become accountants or computer scientists? Yet if they do, will they be successful? Will they enjoy their work and their life?

    Studies have repeatedly shown that the most important factor in living a great life is to have a purpose (typically in the form of a job) that the individual finds emotionally and intellectually rewarding. Some level of financial success is also very important — but not if it comes at the expense of having to do a job that one hates. As it happens, students most often select majors that interest them, rather than choosing a major on the basis of the level of starting salary. Their stated reason for going to college — preparing for a well-paying job — is belied by their choice of a major based on their personal interest in their selected academic field, not on financial return. Perhaps this generation of college students is not so different from past generations after all.

    From the standpoint of many students, the purpose of attending college is being met, whether that purpose is learning more about one’s interests and direction in life or acquiring job skills. But a great many prospective students never have the chance to attend college. Young people from lower socioeconomic levels often find college too expensive and too risky. The national six-year completion rate at public colleges and universities is less than 60 percent, and just 16 percent for those who start at a community college and then transfer to a four-year institution, as many low-income students do. A one-in-six likelihood of graduating — especially if a student must take out a student loan — is unacceptably risky, but there are precious few alternatives for ambitious low-income young people to assure their economic futures.

    Viewed in this light, we are forced to conclude that college is only serving the purpose of some students.

    Purpose from the standpoint of the college

    1. The purpose of college is to fulfill the campus mission statement.

    The individual college or university also has a perspective regarding its purpose, and that purpose may have been amended or rewritten several times since the college was established. Thus, even colleges founded by religious denominations for the express purpose of educating clergy generally have become far more ecumenical — even secular — in the years subsequent to their founding, and today’s mission statement may bear little resemblance to their original mission statement.

    Unfortunately, too many colleges have ended up all trying to do the same thing: Recruit outstanding high school students in order to enhance their own reputations. The fallout from this strategy is that too little attention is paid to the educational needs of high school students who are merely “good,” or even “adequate,” but are not “outstanding.” That is, there are very few high quality colleges willing to admit high school students who are in the bottom half of their graduating class. As a consequence, the educational interests of many students are in conflict with the ambitions of individual colleges and universities.

    Let me provide a specific example.  Last year, the 20 private colleges and universities having the greatest success in fund-raising (new money, not endowment earnings) all raised more than $200 million each (one raised more than $1 billion). Put another way, the least successful of these 20 institutions raised 2-½ times more money in one year than the entire endowment of my own campus, Roger Williams University.

    And in response to this remarkable success in fund-raising, they also all raised their prices — not because they needed the revenue but because they felt the need to keep pace with the price increases of their institutional peers. The list price of tuition, fees, room and board at 19 of these 20 institutions is now well over $60,000 per year — and the 20th institution costs more than $70,000 per year. Although all of these campuses are generous to the students they admit who have financial need, the number of low-income students on these campuses is not large, and about half of their students are paying the full price, meaning that they come from exceptionally wealthy families.

    So why, in the face of great fund-raising success, don’t they lower their prices, encouraging more students to apply? The answer is that they don’t need to: They are attracting record numbers of applicants, and currently only accept between one in five and one in 20 applicants, depending on the particular institution. They are answerable only to themselves, and they compete with each other not for the best students (they all have “best” students), but on measures such as which institution raised the most money, or which had the greatest return on its endowment investments, or which has the largest endowment. Aren’t these criteria more suited to a Fortune 500 company than for institutions of higher education? Some commentators have, unkindly but perhaps accurately, described these universities as “hedge funds that do some teaching on the side.” When our most prestigious universities are mocked in this manner, is it any wonder that the American public has become increasingly more cynical about the value of college in general?

    So as measured by the need every college has to meet its enrollment and net revenue targets, the very wealthy institutions are doing exceptionally well. The colleges and universities with endowments in excess of $1 billion, and with acceptance rates below 20 percent, are more successful today than at any time in their history.

    Institutions (both public and private) in a second group are surviving, but not prospering. They are faced with a shrinking pool of high school graduates and a decades-long period of flat or declining median family income. The choice these institutions face is to increase financial aid to bring in the class (but risk not meeting their net revenue needs), or to meet their net revenue needs by holding the line on financial aid (and risk not bringing in a full class of freshmen). The institutions in this group are getting by, but each year brings new challenges.

    Finally, there is a group of institutions that is struggling. A growing number of both private and public colleges are not consistently meeting their enrollment and/or revenue targets. In many parts of the country, the supply of college seats currently exceeds demand, and unless these struggling colleges can find a way to increase demand (such as by expanding educational opportunities to groups historically denied access to higher education), they will be forced to close.

    Collectively, colleges and universities are finding that the economic opportunities and threats they face today are moving them away from their mission statements, and toward much greater attention to their business model. Wealthy universities are highly focused on accumulating more wealth, if only to keep pace with their institutional peers that are equally focused on wealth accumulation. “Surviving” and “struggling” campuses are doing whatever they feel they must in order to make it through another academic year (see, for example, “Cut to the Core,” an analysis of pending—and highly controversial—reductions in the core curriculum at Long Island University, Inside Higher Ed, 3 March 2017).  In many instances, the campus mission is in direct conflict with today’s economic realities, and, when that happens, economic realities win every time.

    In light of what is actually happening at the moment, we may reasonably conclude:

    1. The purpose of college is to create a business plan that sustains the institution.

    Purpose from the standpoint of society

    1. The purpose of college is to facilitate the transfer of knowledge from one generation to another; to generate new knowledge; and to prepare future leaders.

    As colleges that were established in the Colonial era to educate ministers in the faith of the founders later became secular, they nevertheless retained a strong sense of serving the public good, and not the whims of individual students. Additionally, public universities, most notably the land grant institutions, were formed to educate engineers and agriculturalists, professions that would enhance the economic competitiveness of the state and nation. Later, with the advent of graduate education and the professions, public and many private universities have become places where funded research is undertaken, and where doctors, lawyers and other professionals are educated, all with an eye to building a stronger and more competent society.

    So, from the perspective of society, the purpose of college is much less about conferring a benefit to an individual, and much more about creating a well-educated citizenry, invested in the continuing success of American society and democracy. Over the past 40 years, however, the American public, through its elected leaders, has significantly reduced funds supporting public higher education, implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) accepting the notion that the benefit (and therefore the purpose) of higher education accrues to the individual, and only secondarily (if at all) to society.

    This is a critically important point, because, as I noted earlier, it is imperative that we agree on the purpose of college if we are to measure its effectiveness. If our collective view today is that colleges exist primarily to serve the individual, then clearly we have no obligation to invest public funds in the process: The individual and his or her family should personally cover the costs of a college education. Of course, reciprocally, college graduates, having paid for the cost of college themselves, have no obligation to “give back” to society, beyond paying more taxes as a consequence of the fact that their college degrees assure them salaries that are almost always higher than those of non-graduates.

    The problem with this view is that it ignores those who lack the financial capacity to pay for a college education, meaning that this model minimizes social mobility of talented individuals from families with modest incomes. Yet, interestingly, even as the states have reduced their per-student support at public universities, the federal government has — through the Pell Grant program, federal work study and subsidized federal loans — created opportunity for at least some low-income students to attend college.

    So, too, have the private colleges, especially those with sizeable endowments. The federal programs and the efforts of private colleges, however, are together far short of meeting full need of all prospective students, and do not begin to make up for reductions by the states in the level of financial support of public institutions.

    What does it all mean? By now, it should be clear that there is no consensus on whether the purpose of college is for the individual, for the college itself or for society at large. Consequently, it is very difficult to measure the effectiveness of the current model because it is trying to achieve three very different outcomes simultaneously. As long as we cling to this multipurpose expectation of college, we will continue to have sub-optimal results. College is too expensive for low-income students and is therefore inaccessible for most of them. Collectively, even as a relative handful of institutions has become fabulously wealthy, most colleges are having mixed success surviving as they continue to rely on a business model that no longer meets the needs of America today. Society is not being well-served by an insufficient supply of new college graduates to fill the jobs needed by a knowledge-based economy, in which a significant majority of the jobs require a college degree.

    Purpose Based on Today’s Reality:  Choosing Winners and Losers

    1. The purpose of college is to select those exceptionally talented individuals who will make their mark and improve the world around them.

    We could certainly make the case that, if only by default, this is the true purpose of college in 21st century America. Today’s college students are disproportionately from families of at least some wealth, where typically one or both parents are themselves college graduates. They come from affluent neighborhoods and have attended very good K-12 schools. Indeed, well over 70 percent of the children of families in the top quarter of family income will become college graduates.

    If the purpose of college has degenerated to a process of predetermining winners and losers, we are playing a high-risk game. The students who attend the top 100 private colleges and universities represent less than 3 percent of all the students enrolled in college, and that figure does not include those high school graduates who were unable to continue their education, often for financial reasons. We are gambling that offering a superb college education to a tiny fraction of college-age individuals (and letting the rest struggle to get by under sub-optimal circumstances) will ensure a talent pool for the next generation of sufficient size to allow America’s economic hegemony to continue in a world where many countries are investing heavily in their systems of higher education in an effort to overtake us economically.

    Such a system is not just dangerous; it is also spectacularly unfair because it largely preordains the outcome (who gets to attend top colleges and who doesn’t) not on the basis of innate abilities or personal drive, but on the basis of one’s zip code. It does not foster social mobility, as evidenced by the fact that young people in families in the top quarter of family income are seven times more likely to earn a college degree than are the children of families in the bottom quarter of family income — and that ratio has not improved in the last 40 years.

    So where are we? What is the purpose of college?

    We are forced to conclude that the purpose of college is to preserve the status quo at a time when we desperately need to change the status quo. The educational playing field is sharply tilted in favor of young people from higher socioeconomic levels. We pretend everyone has an equal chance, that everyone can choose a major based on their passion or on their desire to make a good living, but we know the system is rigged: The likelihood of success is directly linked to the quality of the college at which the student is enrolled, and top schools preferentially choose students who have already proven themselves in high-quality K-12 schools.

    Is there no hope of reform, or even of better outcomes? To the contrary, the fact that our current model of higher education serves so few interests well creates the opportunity to make major changes in the model. But before we start considering solutions, we will return to the problem of the leaky pipeline in Part 5: Can We Reduce the Number of Students Who Leak from the Pipeline?

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    Rebuilding the American Economy

    Part 3: Focusing on success

     

    Let me start by saying something that will probably infuriate many readers: All too often, we see evidence that our educational system still presents itself as an obstacle course that students must individually survive, rather than as a well-lit path with guides to assist along the way. Education in America seems to have been designed as a rite of passage, with success by no means assured. To the contrary, it serves to winnow and separate at every level, such that only the most talented and resolute may expect to succeed — and the higher the level of education that one seeks to attain, the more rigorous is the winnowing process. The extreme example is the Ph.D., a degree awarded last year to only about 50,000 people. This is the pinnacle of educational attainment, aspired to by only the finest minds — yet about half of those who begin doctoral programs fail to reach the summit.

    (I am struck by language that seems more properly descriptive of an assault on Mount Everest by the world’s greatest mountaineers than it is of the American system of education, but perhaps that’s the point: Education is a series of increasingly higher hurdles, designed to weed out those deemed unworthy. It serves to exclude, not include.)

    Before I reach the point where readers have smoke coming out of their ears, let me say that I readily acknowledge the millions of enormously dedicated and talented teachers and professors who devote their lives to the education of our young people. I do not intend to castigate the teaching profession. Rather, it is the system in which they work that is the problem (but it is also the case that not every teacher or professor deserves the accolades I just handed out).

    Let’s think a bit more about how our educational system is structured.

    First, at every level, it is staffed by people who were themselves successful in completing the obstacle course. The educational system worked for them. Why would they be motivated to change something in which they were successful?

    Second, it is rigorously hierarchical, at least in K-12. Students begin kindergarten or first grade based on their age and birth date — the implication being that students of like age are at the same stage of intellectual and social development, although we know this not to be true. That said, it works well enough for most children, and, to date, there has been insufficient premium in increasing the number of children for whom it is reasonably successful to warrant changing anything.

    Third, there is a constant battle in K-12 education about the decision whether or not to promote a student to the next grade, based on the contrary metrics of academic achievement versus age.  Holding a student back — failing them — imparts an enormous social stigma, and, apart from unwelcome battles with parents, the fact that being held back may cause a student to lose heart, and literally or figuratively to drop out, provides a rationale for a teacher to promote a student who hasn’t mastered grade-appropriate skills. The ultimate consequence of these “social promotions” is the paradox of a lofty graduation percentage coupled with a low level of ability by these graduates to do college-level work — which is why so many first-year college students are required to take remedial classes in English or mathematics before they can enroll for courses in these disciplines that grant college credit. (Moreover, students who must take remedial courses in college are at a much higher risk of never graduating than are students who are academically prepared to take college-level courses in their first semester of college.)

    Fourth, although we now understand far more today about the variable ways (“multiple intelligences”) by which different individuals learn best than we did in the past, we continue to rely very heavily on aural learning, mostly because we always have (and, again, it worked for the teachers themselves when they were students, so why not stick with a proven thing?) This over-reliance on requiring students to be attentive and to learn by listening is starting to change, as teachers at every level experiment with group work and active learning, but these changes are occurring far too slowly, and are far too dependent on the willingness of the individual teacher to try new methodologies, rather than on a concerted and systemic effort to improve overall learning success.

    Fifth, at the college level, two theories continue to do battle.  Some faculty see as their task as the separation of students into wheat and chaff. They are the guardians of the sacred sheepskin, an honor to be awarded only to the most able and hard-working of their students. Regardless of the overall talent level of their class, they assign grades on a curve, such that a predetermined percentage of students earn each of the five letter grades. (The slope of this curve varies from instructor to instructor, and even from class to class, since many instructors look for natural “break points” in the curve, clustering groups of students of various sizes within a particular letter grade category. But the fundamental principle is still to separate the more worthy from the less worthy, and both groups from the unworthy.)

    Other faculty have a completely different philosophy.  These faculty focus on content mastery, and although they generally expect that not every student will attain an equal level of mastery, in principle they would be amenable to assigning an “A” to every student in the class — heresy to the faculty in the first group, who accuse those in the second group of “grade inflation,” a designation they equate with being assigned to Dante’s ninth circle of hell.

    It remains one of life’s small mysteries that two such opposing views can exist on the same campus, yet it is far more common than one might imagine. Faculty in the first group tend to be in disciplines where learning can be easily measured quantitatively (mathematics, science, engineering) whereas faculty in the second group tend to be in disciplines that are focused on concepts and quality of explanation (the social sciences, humanities and education, for example). The differences between the two groups are most obviously seen in the cumulative grade point averages of the students in the various majors. The median GPA of students in the social sciences and education is almost always higher than in the sciences and engineering, and, as a consequence, a far higher percentage of those students graduate with honors than is true for students in the natural sciences and engineering, an outcome that results in no end of hard feelings and debate.

    This dichotomy of expectations regarding the nature of student performance is mirrored by another debate that is getting more animated every year. Traditionally, academic credits are earned on the basis of “seat time” — how many hours did a student spend listening to the professor? There are generally about 15 weeks in a semester, and one credit is earned for every 15 hours of seat time.  Thus, a typical three-credit course that meets three times a week for an hour generates 45 hours of seat time in a semester, resulting in (45 ÷ 15 =) 3 academic credits. The student must still demonstrate an acceptable level of content mastery, typically through periodic tests and a final exam, but this model of earning credit is fundamentally based on an input: The presence of the student in class for 45 hours.

    A quite different model of earning academic credit is the idea of achieving competency. Each academic course presumably has certain learning outcomes associated with it. A student taking an introductory science course, for example, would probably be expected to understand the scientific method and the design of an experiment, as outcomes of taking the course. But if a given student is already competent in the scientific method when she begins the course (because of outside reading she has already done or because she attended science camp while in high school), then why should she need to sit through lectures on a subject she has already mastered? Why can’t she demonstrate her mastery and move to the next section of the course? Moreover, if she can master the learning objectives of the course in, say, six weeks, why should she be forced to sit in class for 15 weeks?

    The seat time model is based on the idea that all of a student’s learning comes from instruction by the professor. In our age of technology, this is an outmoded concept. The professor certainly plays a role in guiding or even providing knowledge acquisition. But her primary role today is to evaluate how much learning has occurred, as opposed to lecturing for 45 hours to a class of students of uneven levels of intellectual capacity, interest in the subject, and the amount of individual student learning that occurred prior to the beginning of the course.

    The use of competency assessment (an outcome) rather than seat time (an input) is even more important for adult learners, with widely different experiences and for whom the ordeal of sitting through 45 hours of lecture, often regarding material with which they may be very familiar, is a huge obstacle in achieving their overall educational objective. Adult learners are not well served by our current model of higher education, which was designed to meet the needs of recent high school graduates and (at least as originally conceived) expects students to be full-time and in residence at the college.

    To recap, an educational model that is designed to weed out, using instructional methods that work for most (but certainly not all) students and that relies on inputs, not outcomes, is inadequate to meet today’s societal needs. But before we consider how the system might be reformed, we should first determine the true purpose of a college education and how effectively that purpose is currently being met.

    Those are issues we will address in Part 4: What Is the Purpose of College?

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    Rebuilding the American Economy

    Part 2: The leaky pipeline

    Imagine a viaduct that carries water from snow-capped mountains, across a broad and arid plain, finally ending in a city where it provides water for every conceivable purpose that a metropolitan area might have: drinking, washing, bathing, cooking, fire suppression, car washes, any number of manufacturing functions, plus irrigation of lawns, gardens, and golf courses. Along its journey the viaduct is tapped by many farms and a few small communities, resulting in a significant reduction in the volume of water delivered to the city. Let us further imagine that, with the growth of the city (or perhaps reduced snowfall in the mountains), there is no longer sufficient water to meet all its needs. What does the city do?

    I am describing essentially what happened in the last few years (but not this year!) in many parts of California and other southwestern states. Obviously, the first step is conservation, and that involves setting priorities. Some functions — drinking water, for example — are more important than others, such as irrigating golf courses. But it is especially important to minimize the loss of water from leaks in the system, and from evaporation, and that means examining the integrity of the viaduct itself.

    Suppose we think of the American educational system as somehow analogous to our viaduct. The analogy isn’t perfect, but it is still useful. In recent years, about 3.7 million children begin elementary school annually, and 83 percent of them (3.1 million) will receive a high school diploma. Of that 83 percent, 66 percent (2 million) enter higher education immediately: One-third attend community college, almost half go to a public four-year school, and about 20 percent enter a private, four-year, college or university.

    At each step of the way, some students drop out without a diploma or certificate in hand. They are akin to leaks in the viaduct: They, like the water, don’t reach their intended destination and fail to realize their full potential. Moreover, the expected return on the investment that society has made in constructing the pipeline (be it an educational pipeline or a water pipeline) is diminished because the planned-for result (a degree, or a high volume of water from the tap) doesn’t happen. Educational dropouts are likely to struggle economically to provide for themselves and their families, and to be forced to rely on some part of the social safety net, at additional cost to society.

    It all seems so obvious. All we need do is patch the leaks, and we get a greatly enhanced outcome (as measured by the number who complete vs. the number who drop out).  But if it were that easy, wouldn’t we have done the patching years ago? Surely this problem must have been on the radar screen for decades. Doesn’t that mean we must be doing about as well as could be expected?

    There are three lines of inquiry that we must pursue in order to answer this question.

    First, not all leaks in the pipeline have the same impact. Leaks that happen prior to high school graduation, for example, have a huge economic impact on those who drop out. Currently, it’s very difficult for dropouts to get back into the educational system, and their limited educational achievements all but guarantee devastatingly limited economic futures. Leaks later in the pipeline are less consequential, in an economic sense, because they occur after the student has achieved a greater level of educational attainment, and therefore has greater earning power. And at any given moment, some individuals whose educational progress was interrupted are renewing their studies, augmenting the number of students who enrolled directly after completing high school.

    Second, not all leaks are the same size. The 17 percent high school incompletion rate is dwarfed by the university incompletion rate of about 40 percent, and is tiny in comparison to the community college incompletion rate of almost 80 percent.  (These figures are based on the percentage of those graduating within three years of beginning community college, and six years of beginning a four-year institution. Part-time students typically take longer, and therefore these incompletion rates will fall somewhat over time, as the part-time students complete their studies.)

    Third, the students in these leaks do not represent a cross section of the entire student population. Disproportionately represented in the leaks are students of color and economically disadvantaged students. Students from families in the top quarter of family income, for example, are eight times more likely to earn a college diploma than are students from families in the bottom quarter of family income, in part because students who are poor are far less likely to enter college or even to complete high school. Moreover, this educational disparity based on family income is at least as great today as it was 40 years ago. We could make huge economic and societal gains in this country if all we did was to focus on closing the achievement gap of students of color and/or who are from impoverished families.

    So it’s not at all hard to identify the location of the leaks.  But how do we repair the leaks—or is that even possible?

    We will take up this question Part 3:  Focusing on Success.

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    Rebuilding the American Economy

    Part 1: Optimists vs. pessimists

     

    We have just weathered the most bitter and divisive presidential campaign in decades, featuring two fundamentally different views of the future of the American economy.

    To Hillary Clinton, today’s economy predicted a bright future for the large majority of Americans. After an unusually brutal recession, unemployment rates had returned to near-normal levels, and family incomes had finally begun to rise. From Secretary Clinton’s perspective, more work needed to be done, but the country was basically on the right track.

    Mr. Trump had a far more dystopian outlook. America’s best days were behind it, unless we somehow “made America great again” by pushing back against globalization, reinstating international trade barriers and recreating the well-paying blue-collar jobs that had allowed the remarkable growth of the middle class in the decades following the end of World War II. He ridiculed Secretary Clinton’s view that the country was on the right track and dwelled on the loss of manufacturing and mining jobs lost to outsourcing and unnecessary concerns regarding the environment, respectively.

    In the end, Mr. Trump won the electoral college handily (even though he lost the popular vote), and he is now the president. There has been no shortage of explanations about why the polls — the great majority of which predicted that Secretary Clinton would win — were so spectacularly wrong.

    It is fair to assume that many factors contributed to Mr. Trump’s victory. Even minor changes in one or two of these factors might have led to a different result. But the danger in such analyses is that we might miss — or at least greatly underestimate — the significance of one hugely important factor: the role that the perception of individual voters’ own economic success (or lack thereof) played in determining how they voted.

    Mr. Trump won 26 of the 30 states with the lowest average family incomes. He won more than 2,600 counties that collectively generate 36 percent of the country’s economy. Secretary Clinton, on the other hand, won higher income states but fewer than 500 counties — and yet these counties collectively generate 64 percent of the nation’s economic activity.

    An analyst from the Brookings Institution noted that “the Democratic base [was aligned] more to the more concentrated modern economy, but [with] a lot of votes and anger to be had in the rest of the country.”

    In other words, the areas of the country (and the people in those areas) that had successfully transitioned to become the workplaces and workforce of today’s economy were prospering, and therefore were more likely to support the political status quo, whereas those most affected by the loss of 5 million manufacturing jobs in the past decade were struggling economically and therefore were more inclined to vote for a new direction for the country.

    So James Carville’s famous dictum from the 1992 presidential campaign — “It’s the economy, stupid” — was true again this year.

    Or is it quite that simple? Is the economy the lowest common denominator, or is there something that is even more fundamental? I submit that the economy is just a reflection of the true core. I think that the true core is the level of educational attainment of individuals in a particular community or region. If the counties of each state were ranked by average family income, the rank order would very closely correlate to the percentage of adults in each county with a four-year degree — that is, the more educated the population, the wealthier the county.

    The earnings premium of a college degree relative to a high school diploma has long been recognized, so it should not be surprising that counties with many highly educated adults have higher family incomes than do those with relatively few college graduates. But emphasizing the link between economic prosperity and educational attainment is important for the most practical of reasons: It illuminates the easiest pathway forward for enhancing the economic well-being of families and of the country as a whole.

    During the recent presidential campaign, both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton proposed dealing with income inequality primarily by increasing taxes on the very rich. Not for the first time, this proved to be a politically unpopular solution. Many people of average means do not wish to redistribute income in this way.  They do not blame the rich for being rich. Rather, they aspire to be rich (or at least richer) themselves. They believe in growing the economic pie, not in re-slicing a pie of constant size to make the slices more even.

    Growing America’s economic pie means augmenting the average educational level of its people. As we continue to transform from a manufacturing economy to a knowledge-based economy, there will be an increasing premium on educational attainment. No amount of rejiggering the tax system can overcome that stark reality.

    So the question is: How does our country ensure that we are once again growing the middle class? Is it by trying to recreate the well-paying blue collar jobs of the past? I believe the answer is: By ensuring that the richest country on earth becomes once again the world leader in the percentage of adults with college degrees or other post-secondary certifications. But how do we achieve that outcome?

    In Part 2, we will analyze and evaluate the educational pipeline, from kindergarten to the college diploma.

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    Campus Civility in the Age of President Trump

    How should college campuses respond to the emerging political agenda of President Trump and his supporters? What role should college presidents play in orchestrating these responses?

    Almost all college campuses reflect the breadth of political opinion of the country as a whole, although not in the same proportion. It is fair to say that most college campuses are more liberal than their surrounding communities, but campuses are far from politically homogeneous. For that reason, presidents have to be careful in how they present their personal political views. To be sure, just as for the average citizen, presidents enjoy the right and privilege, under our Constitution, to speak their minds on any subject they wish. But with that freedom comes the responsibility (and the reality) to recognize that, however much they may wish to be speaking only for themselves, they nevertheless do so with the title “President” in front of their names, and their comments are therefore linked to the name of their campus.

    At the same time, the present moment presents a wonderful opportunity for presidents both to encourage the discussion of vitally important issues with their students, and to do so in a manner that reflects the civility of discourse we both honor and endeavor to instill in our students while they are part of our campus communities.

    Consider two recent events, and how presidents responded:

    1) President Trump’s executive order that suspended the immigration of refugees from seven Muslim-majority nations, followed by the revocation of tens of thousands of visas, is currently (and not surprisingly) under challenge in federal courts in various parts of the country. At the moment, an appellate court has declined to reverse the temporary injunction placed on the executive order by a federal judge, and the terms of the executive order have themselves, for the time being, been suspended.

    Reaction to the executive order by college presidents was immediate. Many of these responses were focused on reassuring the students and faculty who were the target of the executive order that they would be supported and protected by the campus to the best of the campus’s ability.

    But quite a few presidential comments were directed at the executive order itself, and, by extension, at President Trump, who, of course, promulgated the order. Some presidents used particularly strong language: Brian Rosenberg, president of Macalester College in Minnesota, called the executive order “cowardly and cruel,” and he urged other college presidents to speak with “particular force” as they responded (Inside Higher Ed, Feb. 1, 2017).

    In the interest of full disclosure, my response was in the first category: a statement of reassurance to the RWU campus that our commitment to religious freedom — the hallmark of our namesake, Roger Williams — would be unflagging. I deliberately chose not to characterize the executive order itself, for reasons I will explain momentarily.

    2) Milo Yiannopoulos, an editor at Breitbart, the alt-right news network, has been engaged in a campus speaking tour. His remarks are so provocative that many of his appearances have been:

    a. picketed (University of Minnesota, Feb. 17, 2016)

    b. interrupted (DePaul University, May 24, 2016

    c. prematurely ended (UCLA, May 31, 2016, because of a bomb threat

    d. a cause of violence (University of Washington, Jan. 20, 2017, when a protester was shot by a Yiannopoulos supporter)

    e. canceled (University of California, Berkeley, Feb. 1, 2017)

    The cancellation at Berkeley is receiving national attention, in large measure because of the irony: Berkeley was the home of the free speech movement (1964) and is famously accepting of controversial speakers. Nicholas Dirks, the Berkeley chancellor, explained his decision to cancel the Yiannopoulos speech in a letter to The New York Times (Feb. 4, 2017), saying that he did so “reluctantly” and “only after determining that both the speaker’s and the public’s safety was highly endangered.” The problem, he said, was not with the estimated 1,500 peaceful protesters but with “more than 100 armed people in masks and dark uniforms who used paramilitary tactics” and “we could not plan for the unexpected.”

    The impact of the cancellation at Berkeley continues to echo. Mr. Yiannopoulos, the Heritage Foundation and even President Trump promptly issued news releases or tweets condemning the cancellation — and President Trump threatened to end all federal funding at Berkeley (“U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view – NO FEDERAL FUNDS?”)

    How should college presidents respond to speakers whose intent is to disrupt and provoke — especially when cancellation brings threats of governmental intervention?

    I see the executive order on refugees and the canceled speech at Berkeley as events that, if managed well by college presidents, could be consequential in rebuilding community, both on campuses and nationally. But it won’t be easy.

    Most college presidents see themselves as stewards of a sacred trust: upholding the traditional values of higher education, which include protecting every individual on campus from discrimination and arbitrary abrogation of rights and privileges. Understandably, threats to abridge rights, even from the nation’s president, in the absence of a clear and present showing of need, may be met with reactions ranging from skepticism to studied opposition to outright rejection. But we have to ask ourselves, emotions aside, what should college presidents be doing? Is there a best response?

    Similarly, if faced with the possibilities of violence, how far should college presidents go in permitting highly controversial speakers from coming to their campus? Conversely, how far should they go in limiting the free expression of opinion, regardless of how objectionable it might be to some, a right enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution?

    Finally, in responding to these issues, how do college presidents balance their personal feelings with the need to be seen as modeling best practices for their students?

    I submit that this is a time for some people in this country to be moderate in their responses, and to endeavor to create bridges across the widening chasm between liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans — and if college presidents cannot, or are unwilling, to play this role, I despair for the future of our country.

    I see no advantage for college presidents to respond to initiatives such as President Trump’s executive order regarding refugees with language that has the result of raising the temperature around the issue at hand. Words like “cruel” and “cowardly” are not said with an eye toward promoting a civil conversation — and someone has to commit to civility if we are to avoid even greater polarization in our nation.

    Surely, it was apparent to everyone that the issuance of President Trump’s executive order would be met with a series of challenges in our nation’s courts: the balance of powers among the legislative, administrative and judicial arms of government exists for precisely this purpose. Statements of concern, a recommitment to core values, expressions of support for those imperiled, all strike me as expected and appropriate. Creating forums on campuses for a discussion of the need (1) to determine if the current level of protection of our citizens from terrorist attacks is sufficient, and, if not (2) to recommend additional steps that might be considered, weighing the balance between the degree to which safety would be enhanced versus the degree to which particular actions might actually increase the level of danger — even if the conversation is happening, as in this case, only after the administration has taken action — would be a way of modeling best practices for our students, and allowing them to see the democratic process in action.

    Conversely, there is a real danger should presidents, as leaders of their campuses, speak out in judgmental terms about the wisdom of an administrative action, because they will be seen as effectively endeavoring to end the debate before it begins, and, rather than creating the opportunity for students individually to listen to two sides of a matter and come to their own individual conclusions, be seen as deciding for the students and presenting the answer as a forgone conclusion.

    College presidents must be seen as leading a discussion, not overseeing an indoctrination.

    We should remember that, in the days following the issuance of the executive order, a slight plurality of the American public approved of the president’s action, even though a majority of campus presidents who took a position on the matter opposed President Trump’s executive order. Unilateral declarations by college presidents do very little to prompt a debate, let alone to change the minds of those on the other side of the matter.

    Interestingly, at a national meeting of academics in January, a much-discussed topic was the question of how higher education should act to rebuild the public’s trust in the work of our sector (Inside Higher Ed, Jan. 27, 2017). One way to start might be to recognize that most of America has not ceded to academics the right to decide unilaterally on the wisdom or folly of particular political actions — and we should stop acting as if they have.

    Moreover, the movement away from civil conversation has strengthened the hands of those who oppose the very notion of civility (The New York Times, p. 1, Feb. 3, 2017). The deliberately provocative words of alt-right spokesmen such as Milo Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer are countered by the so-called “black bloc group” — the anarchists and anti-fascists who violently disrupted the scheduled Yiannopoulos speech at Berkeley. (This group has been active in the Bay Area for some time, and one wonders why the Berkeley chancellor was surprised by their appearance — “we could not plan for the unexpected.”) The alt-right movement provokes violent dissent, the black bloc anarchists are only too happy to provide violent dissent, the alt-right then claims that government intervention is required to protect free speech, the anarchists celebrate the breakdown of civil order, and universities become the unwitting foils in an attack on democratic principles.

    If college campuses are being targeted as the battleground between extremists on the left and right, then college presidents have to find ways to reclaim the middle ground. This starts with conversations between the campus administration and campus political groups, to encourage the creation of forums for debate between representative voices from left and right. A true debate, where students are invited to witness a meaningful presentation of opposing views, is far more interesting (and useful) than one-sided diatribes where demagogues are deliberately being provocative, and encouraging demonstrations rather than attentive listening.

    And to circle back to my primary thesis: It all begins with the college presidents deciding to use controversial issues as learning moments for their students — and not soapboxes from which they can proclaim their personal opinions.

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    My Message to the RWU Community about the Executive Order on Immigration

    This university is named for Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island who helped enshrine freedom of religion as a bedrock principle for this nation. So, in the wake of the president’s executive order on immigration, we feel a special responsibility to declare our full support for all Roger Williams University faculty, students and staff — regardless of their religious beliefs, national origin or immigration status.

    I have already joined 600 college and university presidents in signing a letter supporting the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has allowed 741,000 undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children to remain in the country.

    I have also joined 200 college and university presidents in signing a letter articulating our belief in “human decency, equal rights, freedom of expression and freedom from discrimination.”

    Now, during this period of confusion and alarm, I am affirming our commitment to international and Muslim students, faculty and staff — as well as to their families.

    Now, I am affirming our commitment to the privacy of student records, consistent with state and federal laws. That means RWU will not provide information on an individual’s religion, ethnicity or immigration status to anyone except as required by law.

    Now, I am extending the full range of campus programs and services available at RWU to help support students, faculty and staff navigate this uncertain time.

    In short, I am extending to them the welcome demanded by our namesake’s legacy.

    I am making this statement today, following consultation with the RWU Faculty Senate on Wednesday.

    In the next week or so, I will be holding another “Fireside Chat” to allow members of the campus community to talk about their concerns and views regarding the executive order and related matters. I am especially interested in hearing from international students but all are welcome to attend and discuss these issues. Information on the date, place and time will be forthcoming shortly.

    In the meantime, faculty, staff and students may tap into the assistance and information available at: The RWU Intercultural Center (401) 254-3121; the Spiegel Center for Global and International Programs Abroad (401) 254-3899; and the Spiritual Life Program (401) 254-3433. Faculty and staff may also contact the Office of General Counsel at (401) 254-5379 regarding H-1B visas and related immigration issues.

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    Amid Political Polarization and Anxiety, a Message to the RWU Community

    I write today to welcome you back to campus for the spring semester of 2017, and I wish you every success in your work and studies. But, as you return, I also want to acknowledge the political polarization, tension and anxiety that exists in our country today, and ask you to recognize that universities have not just the opportunity but the responsibility to demonstrate to the broader society how differing points of view can be raised and discussed in a civil and respectful manner. Roger Williams University has a particular responsibility in this regard because of our relationship to Roger Williams, the man, for reasons that I will review later in this letter.

    Our differences, of course are not just political. The people who make up the RWU community reflect the diversity of the broader American public — not proportionately, to be sure, but diversity is present on our campus in many ways: racial, ethnic, religious, national origin, economic, geographic, gender identification, sexual orientation, and so forth. And these are not mutually exclusive categories, since many individuals identify with more than one category. Many people within these categories — or entire categories — have also historically felt (or still feel) the burden of oppression or the sting of rejection by members of other groups, although the magnitude of that bias varies widely: laws against interracial marriage or homosexual practice existed in many jurisdictions until recently, whereas bias based on economic differences results more from unequal levels of access and buying power than because of statutory or case law.

    Consider just a few of the issues now before us. For more than a year, America has seen widespread protests against the deaths of black men at the hands of police. Is there nothing we can do to address this situation? The U.S. Supreme Court has overturned state laws banning same-sex marriage — but will that position be reversed once a new justice is appointed? We have witnessed controversy over how best to deal with undocumented immigrants: should they be eligible for in-state tuition at public universities? Should they be granted driver’s licenses? Should they be offered a path to obtaining permanent status, or even citizenship — or should they be deported? And, in answering those questions, does it matter whether they arrived here as adults, or as young children?

    These issues, and many others, may soon receive reconsideration, inasmuch as one party now controls the House, the Senate and the White House. What will reconsideration mean for America? What will it mean for the RWU community?

    The quick answer is that we don’t know. But our choice, as a community, is between avoiding raising any topic that may be controversial, out of concern of offending someone, or — as I believe — exploring difficult subjects deliberately and publicly, in order to allow members of our community to hear both sides of an issue and to develop well-considered positions of their own. The caveat is that we must find ways to discuss and dispute our differences civilly and rationally.

    I want to be clear that it is not my intention to work toward developing an RWU position on these topics.  Rather, I am advocating for a process — a call for an intentional dialogue wherein the sharp differences that divide us as a nation can be explored calmly and politely on our campus, rather than allowing ourselves to fall prey to forums designed for shouting the other side down.

    The basis of my advocacy starts with our namesake, Roger Williams. Roger Williams was a man well ahead of his time. He not only opposed the idea of a state religion, but also welcomed those of any faith (or no faith) to settle in our state — an idea that was incorporated into the United States Constitution a century and a half later, yet an idea still not accepted in many countries to this day. Roger Williams opposed slavery, and he purchased, rather than appropriated, land from Native Americans. He learned the language of the local Native American tribes, and did not treat them as savages needing to be converted to Christianity, but as people with a culture worth admiring. He especially loved a good debate. I looked to Roger Williams to provide me moral guidance as I worked through my own position on various of today’s thorny issues.

    One of RWU’s six goals from our Vision Project of 2015 is to create a campus that broadly reflects the diversity of our geographic region in all respects — and implicit in this goal is not just to tolerate, but to enhance and embrace this diversity, to work to ensure that members of every group enjoy the same rights and privileges as any other group, to celebrate our collective success as a community, and not to accept, let alone promote, uneven levels of power or prestige in one group relative to another. That requires not mere passive acquiescence, but proactive commitment to fairness and equity as desired outcomes.

    So here are some steps I have taken recently:

    Over the last few weeks, I, along with many other university presidents, have signed three letters that are being transmitted to the new president and members of Congress.

    One letter supports the continuation of DACA — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — a program started by the Obama administration in 2012 that, in return for registration, and subject to a number of provisions, provides minors who were brought to this country certain rights and privileges. We have six such students on our campus now, and there are more than 750,000 registrants nationally (not all of whom are in college). In signing the letter, I wanted our DACA students to know that, absent a legal requirement to do so, Roger Williams University will not provide information about them to federal authorities.

    A second letter calls for a reaffirmation of “the core values of our democratic nation: human decency, equal rights, freedom of expression and freedom from discrimination.” By today’s standards, these values would seem noncontroversial — and yet there is already talk in Washington of an initiative to roll back certain recent and hard won victories of rights for members of the LGBTQ community. I thought it was very important that I reaffirm our institutional value of providing equal rights to members of all groups.

    Finally, a third letter addresses the need to honor our international commitments to reducing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, and “to invest in the low carbon economy” in order to minimize rising sea levels that result from climate change. Our stated campus goal of promoting “sustainability” seemed to require me to sign this letter.

    But it’s not enough merely to call attention in Washington to our principles. We also have the obligation to live out those principles on our own campus. For example, as we become more diverse, we confront the reality that not all of us have had the experience of living and working with individuals from historically underrepresented groups.  Therefore, to facilitate more comfortable classroom conversations, we are providing cultural competency workshops for our faculty and staff, beginning in late January, and continuing through the spring semester, to allow all the opportunity to attend. These workshops are in direct response to the student-led Justice in the Classroom movement on our campus, and we believe and hope that these and similar actions will create a better learning environment for all students.

    There will be other forums as well, and I urge you to attend as many of them as your schedule permits. Our year-long “Quest for Refuge” series will continue through the spring semester. Both the School of Law and the Division of Student Life are sponsoring workshops that will be announced in due course. I plan to have more “Fireside Chats” on themes that emerge from conversations with students, faculty and staff. We will continue to engage with you on themes and topics that are current and relevant to our campus, our state, and our nation.

    I look forward to hearing your views as we incorporate these matters into your educational experiences here at Roger.

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    Is Freshman Admission Only About Prestige?

    The Background

    In October 2014, Bloomberg Philanthropies announced a $10 million investment to assist talented high school students of modest means gain access to “top” colleges and universities — “top” being defined as institutions with graduation rates consistently in excess of 70 percent. (There are now 270 institutions meeting that criterion.) Research had shown that less than half of high-achieving, low-income students applied to any “top” school, and this initiative was meant to address that problem.

    In the press release, David Coleman, president of the College Board, said, “We cannot stand by while remarkable low-income students do not access the opportunities they have earned.” Mr. Bloomberg himself saw this as a worthy project because, as he said, “America is the world’s greatest meritocracy” and we need to make sure “that family income does not prevent talented and qualified students from applying to top colleges.” Both gentlemen were arguing that more high-achieving, low-income students needed to be encouraged to apply to “top” colleges. On the other hand, Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute, said, “Top universities and colleges…cannot fully succeed…if they don’t enroll American’s top talent from all socioeconomic backgrounds to maximize our nation’s potential.” He put colleges and universities on notice that it is their responsibility to admit more talented low-income students. That is, it’s not just that more such students should apply; “top” schools need to accept them.

    The press release itself, however, went beyond just arguing for fairness in the admissions process to note the economic benefit to the individual student: “Students who attend these [top] schools have earnings that are about 25 percent higher than those who attend less selective colleges.” I’ll examine the validity of that argument shortly.

    Over the succeeding two years, several actions were anticipated, including the development of a cohort of advisers who would be matched with students of low and moderate means to provide guidance; the creation of research funds to allow analysis of the impact of the initiative; and the funding and convening of a task force of college and university presidents who would, guided by the Aspen Institute, “develop actionable recommendations [to] enroll and graduate substantially more of these high-achieving, low- and moderate-income students.”

    Today

    On Dec. 13, 2016, Ithaka S+R (a nonprofit that provides advice and guidance to the academic community), in conjunction with the Aspen Institute, announced the creation of the American Talent Initiative, a program that is the outgrowth of the Bloomberg Philanthropies grant. At present, 30 “top” colleges and universities (21 private, nine public) have signed on; more are expected in the coming years, but only institutions with graduation rates above 70 percent will be eligible.

    This press release was picked up nationally the same day by, among others, Inside Higher Ed and David Leonhardt in his column in The New York Times. Mr. Leonhardt was especially effusive in his praise of the initiative.

    And why wouldn’t he be? What’s not to like about a push for greater economic inclusiveness in the makeup of the freshman classes of very good colleges and universities, many of which have historically enrolled only a handful of low-income students?

    As it happens, there are quite a few problems, both practical and theoretical, about this initiative. Consider:

    • The only good school is a “top” school. Think of the “top” schools, collectively, of representing the summit of Mount Everest. It is the highest mountain in the world! No other mountain is its equal! Only the very best mountaineers can ever expect to reach its summit, and therefore the cachet of having done so is particularly strong, because the number of successful climbers is so small. Many may aspire, but few will succeed. This is a terrible metaphor for higher education, and yet it’s how many people think about college choice: “I must climb Mount Everest, or live my life as a failure. I must be admitted to a ‘top’ school or have everyone see me as a loser.” Surely, what we most want for our children is the opportunity for them to receive a great education that prepares them for success in a career and in life, as opposed to valuing most not their college experience but the name of the school that appears on the diploma.

    • Capacity problems. American Talent Initiative’s goal is to increase the numbers of high-achieving, low-income students entering “top” colleges by 50,000 over the next 10 years—and there are currently at least 12,500 such students graduating from high school each year. These are not small numbers. How will the “top” colleges and universities accommodate the influx? The nine public universities that now each enroll an average of more than 29,000 undergraduates can presumably grow (although one wonders if a campus of such enormous size is the best learning environment for high-achieving, low-income students), but the 21 private colleges and universities (averaging 4,500 undergraduates each) do not intend to grow their enrollment — meaning that the high-achieving, low-income students will displace some of the high-achieving, higher-income students (or legacy students) these schools are now enrolling. For these schools, it is a zero sum game. In order to create more winners, there have to be more losers — and the competition for slots will be even more intense, and the pressure on high school seniors to gain admission to “top” schools will be even more intense and traumatic that it is at present. Just what high school seniors need: more stress.

    • Why not expand capacity? Surely, the solution is to create a better balance between supply and demand: there are presently too many very good students trying to gain access to a limited number of freshmen seats. Why aren’t we working harder to expand the number of “top” schools? If the criterion is a graduation rate of 70 percent, can’t we create incentives for schools to retain and graduate more of their students in order to reach the 70 percent level? At Roger Williams University, through specific programs and practices we have implemented over the past five years, we have raised our freshman-to-sophomore retention rate from 78 percent to 84 percent, and our four-year graduation rate from 58 percent to 64 percent (for the entering class of 2012). Since the 70 percent target is a measure of the six-year graduation rate, it is entirely possible that RWU’s entering class of 2012 will reach that figure by May of 2018. Moreover, since subsequent classes are being retained at even higher rates than the entering class of 2012, RWU is not far off demonstrating a consistent graduation rate above 70 percent.

    Will that make RWU a “top” school? Well, yes, in the sense that we will qualify, according to the criterion used by the American Talent Initiative. But the more important point is that a substantial number of colleges and universities could reach this figure if they tried actively to do so — and more “top” schools would reduce the anxiety of high school seniors (and their parents) seeking admission only to a “top” college or university.

    At the very least, efforts by schools to reach graduation rates of 70 percent or more would respond to those who think that American higher education currently consists of just two categories: a relative handful of truly exceptional universities, separated by a giant chasm from a huge number of institutions unworthy of a second look by any talented and ambitious student. We need to create more universities that are seen as exceptional; to return to an earlier metaphor, we need more mountains to accommodate those who aspire to climb them.

    • “Top” is not properly defined. For purposes of this study, a “top” school is one that consistently has a graduation rate over 70 percent. But this relatively high graduation rate is less a function of the quality of the educational program than it is the result of a rigorous winnowing of the applicant pool. These are schools that are designated “more selective” or “most selective,” meaning that they accept less than 30 percent of their applicant pool (in some cases, less than 10 percent), and the students who are accepted are almost invariably exceptionally well qualified, as demonstrated by high school GPA, class rank and test scores. Any college or university with large numbers of such students can expect to see high retention and graduation rates. Indeed, if one knows the academic index (test scores and GPA) of the freshman class, it is relatively easy to predict that class’s graduation rate. In other words, a “top” school is a school with many “top” students, not necessarily the best academic program.

    Surely a case can be made that a better definition of a “top” school is one that shows the greatest academic gains (using pre-tests and post-tests), or one that demonstrates the greatest transformative results, or one that shows, from surveys, the highest level of student satisfaction — all of which are more directly related to the quality of the educational experience than is the level of selectivity at the time of admission.

    • Is there an economic payoff from graduating from a “top” school? As I mentioned earlier, one argument for creating greater access to the top schools for high-achieving, low-income students is that they will have an economic benefit — perhaps as much as 25 percent greater lifetime earnings, as compared to students who graduated from “lesser” schools. Those earnings data come from surveys of graduates from many different schools, and they are intended to identify the schools with the greatest ROI — return on investment, meaning earnings relative to actual cost of their college degree.

    The problem is that, once again, one of attributing results — in this case, income — to the school itself rather than to the relative success of the individual graduates. Might we reasonably assume that some number of students currently attending “top” schools are the sons and daughters of very affluent parents? Might a higher proportion of the graduates of these schools be brought into the family business, or be encouraged to attend graduate and professional schools, or be set up for success in other ways? There is no factual proof that high-achieving, low-income students themselves will benefit financially from attending “top” schools, only that their prospective classmates have historically done quite well financially after graduation.

    • But are there any risks for high-achieving, low-income students at “top” colleges and universities? Actually, there are. Many students are painfully aware of whether or not they “fit in.” Are their classmates like them? Do they share a common philosophy and view of life? Is the college likely to be a “second home”? Some low-income students, even if academically high-achieving, do not thrive on campuses where everyone is as bright as they are — and where the other students are far more affluent, with more expensive clothes, cars and tastes. Increasing the numbers of high-achieving, low-income students at “top” schools may not be the panacea it is touted as being.

    So what should high-achieving, low-income students do? Any prospective student should certainly consider schools for which he or she is academically qualified; choosing an institution where one is well matched intellectually with one’s classmates is important to consider. But ultimately students should select a school based on their sense of how well they will fit in, whether they believe they will be happy and enjoy their college years, as opposed to forcing themselves to be something they are not, in the belief that the prestige of the college is the only criterion that matters. People are ultimately the happiest when they buy shoes that fit and are comfortable, not when they force their feet into an attractive shoe that is the wrong size and hurts their feet. Perhaps it is wrong to compare buying shoes to selecting a college, but fit matters a lot in both instances in terms of ultimate satisfaction and quality of life.

    And “fit” is the paramount issue, because the consequences of choosing the “wrong” school are profound: Nationally, only 67 percent of students return for their sophomore year to the college where they started as freshmen, and within six years of when they started as freshmen, only about half of all students graduate from the campus at which they began their studies. A student’s first priority should be select a school where they are most likely to graduate; a prestigious name on the diploma should be a secondary consideration.

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    The Specific Threats Now Facing Higher Education

    My essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 15, 2016

    Three questions: What does Donald J. Trump’s election portend for higher education? How should we respond to ill-conceived, threatening, or dangerous initiatives from Washington? Is higher education somehow complicit in President-elect Trump’s victory?

    He did not focus on higher education during the presidential campaign, beyond an occasional bombshell, but with the Republicans retaining control of both houses of Congress, many of their initiatives will now receive support from the new president.

    Some proposals will spring from basic Republican values — reducing federal power and influence; shrinking the government; spending much less (except on defense), coupled with tax cuts; reliance on the free market. Some proposals will result from President Obama’s past actions, especially executive actions. Still others represent spillover into the world of higher education from deeply held concerns in other realms.

    Here’s a quick list of things we should not be surprised to see.

    What are the threats?

    • Pressure on colleges to reduce their costs or risk having their endowments taxed.
    • Greater emphasis on career education, at the expense of study in the liberal arts.
    • Re-enfranchisement of for-profit institutions.
    • Additional pressure on regional accreditors, and a push for even more educational credentialing by corporate America rather than by traditional colleges and universities.
    • A reduction of federal support for higher education, including the budgets of the National Science Foundation and the Pell Grant program, and greater reliance on student loans through private banks.
    • Institutional risk-sharing, if a sizable percentage of students default on their loans.
    • Raising the bar for unionization.
    • A weakening of Title IX, possibly including the elimination of the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, or perhaps the department itself.
    • A rollback of pending changes in overtime eligibility.
    • Significantly fewer new international students.
    • Direct threats to the status of undocumented students.
    • As a result of one or more Supreme Court appointments, negative changes affecting the rights of members of the LGBTQ community and women.
    • Defunding of climate-change research, weakening of environmental regulations, and expanding the use of fossil fuels.

    What should we do in response?

    Those things will surely not all come to pass, but it would be dangerous to assume that our academic lives will continue as before once Trump is sworn into office. What the higher-education community does in response will depend on the specifics of any proposal. But with a large number of academic associations having their annual meetings in January through April, this would be a good time for us to consider how we might present a united front on actions that we perceive to be a direct threat to our values, our students, and our historic role in supporting the American economy and way of life.

    Has academe been complicit in the situation we face?

    Sadly, I think the answer is yes. Ernest L. Boyer warned us more than 20 years ago that higher education had lost a key and historic value: the idea that we exist primarily to serve the public good. This was a universally held position at the beginning of the 20th century, even though those then going to college were primarily young, white, relatively affluent males. Ironically, as higher education became accessible to many more people in the years following World War II, it also gradually lost its spoken commitment to serve the public good. We started representing our worth by using metrics such as research dollars and publications, endowment size, exclusivity in admissions, and national rankings.

    This would be a good time for us to consider how we might present a united front on actions that we perceive to be a direct threat to our values.

    Underlying the 2016 presidential election was a deep divide between those who were succeeding (or at least who saw a pathway to success) and those who felt disenfranchised and abandoned by a society and a government that were not paying enough attention to their needs. The disenfranchised on the left backed Bernie Sanders and lost; the disenfranchised on the right backed Donald Trump and won. The responsibility of college presidents now must be to articulate higher education’s role in creating agency for many of those who feel disenfranchised.My campus has promoted affordability by freezing tuition for the past five years and increasing financial aid 30 percent; created educational programs for such nontraditional students as prisoners on work-release, teenagers entering the juvenile justice system, and inner-city high schoolers; provided training for corporate employees; and instituted work-force-development programs for underemployed workers.

    It’s time for college presidents to make a collective pledge to America to stand for social justice and the creation of opportunities for those whom higher education has traditionally excluded. It’s time we recommitted to having as our primary mission “to serve the public good.”

    Donald J. Farish is president of Roger Williams University.

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    A message to students about the presidential election

    Nov. 9, 2016

    Dear Students:

    Last night, we witnessed American democracy in action: once again, we saw a peaceful transfer of power and the responsibility for leading our nation take place through the ballot box, and not by a violent overthrow of the government as continues to happen in many nations around the globe.

    Feelings ran high regarding this election insofar as the candidates for president from the two major parties held very different views for the future of our nation. It is understandable that some people are jubilant today, while others may feel despondent. But it is imperative that we continue to be respectful both of the views of others and of the democratic process itself. We are guaranteed the right of participation in the process, not the right of the outcome we had hoped to see.

    Any transition of a presidential administration brings with it a period of uncertainty—how will things change? Who or what will be most affected by the change? When will the change come? But it is important to stress that the values we have worked so hard to create and exemplify at Roger Williams University will not change. We will continue to expand our commitment to reflect the diversity of the state and region in the population of faculty, staff, and students on our campus. We will continue to focus on social justice. We will continue to be respectful of those with opinions and perspectives different from our own, even as we seek to learn from them, and to test our own values and beliefs as a necessary part of being a member of the learning community we call Roger Williams University.

    We should all congratulate President-elect Donald Trump, even as we extend our thanks to Secretary Hillary Clinton for a hard-fought campaign—and we should commit to doing so in a respectful and constructive manner.

    Donald J. Farish
    President