ASHE presentation

Just a quick post to attach a copy of the presentation I will be giving at the upcoming Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) conference in Vancouver this November. Here is a copy of the paper and below is an abstract of the piece.

“Meeting need and buying prestige: an analysis of institutional aid among public colleges and universities”

Abstract:
Institutionally-funded financial aid has been the fastest-growing item in most public colleges and university budgets during the past decade, yet little is known about what factors contribute to these expenditures or how aid is being distributed between need and no-need criteria. This study utilizes panel data analysis to conclude that increases in SAT scores and state merit-based aid significantly reduce the amount of institutional need-based aid, while greater shares of non-resident students result in greater expenditures on non-need-based aid. The share of low-income students and state/federal need-based grant programs do not appear to influence the provision of institutional aid among public institutions.

I am still teaching myself panel data analysis and how to implement two-stage least squares models. If you happen to read this paper, please forgive me in advance if my description of methods is less than par. To me, econometrics is attrition warfare; a never-ending battle with myself provides a humbling reminder that I don’t know as much as I think I know. Ah, the story of my life.

Merit aid’s bait and switch

Penn State University is asking its honors college students to return, I mean “donate,” their $3,500 merit-based grants back to the university. The university is only asking those students who have no unmet financial need to donate and so far the appeal has brought more than a quarter of a million dollars back to the university.

Evidently, the university failed to provide enough need-based aid to its low-income students and is now trying to backtrack. According to the Associated Press strory, last year students attending Penn State had more than one million dollars in “unmet” financial need so it’s hard to think that the university never saw this coming! Sure, this happened at Penn State, but the story could easily happen at any one of the 650 public four-year college in the U.S. because they all operate in similar environments and follow similar administrative styles.

This over-spending on merit aid doesn’t surprise me one bit because the higher education marketplace has become a “positional arms race” (pdf) where colleges are aggressively competing for the best and brightest, often at the expense of providing adequate aid to lower-income students. This is all happening during a time that the federal Pell Grant is losing its purchasing power and states are having a tough time to fund students as they once did. So, colleges have become the last place poor kids look for aid…only to find it’s not available.

This is a perfect example of how colleges are playing the student aid game, and it is perfectly in line with my dissertation research concerning the way public colleges offer need-based and non-need-based subsidies.

Dissertation prospectus

I’ve attached a copy of my dissertation prospectus, which is a general overview of my dissertation proposal. It’s just a quick two-page overview of my dissertation topic. I haven’t spent much time on this blog describing what my research questions are, data sources, methods, or policy relevance of my study.

So, in the next few posts I’ll try making more of an effort of describing why this research interests me, why it matters in the “big picture,” and how it can potentially add value to what we know within this small little world of higher ed policy.

Download file Hillman_Prospectus (pdf). Click again on next page.

Europe bound…

At the end of August, Ashley and I are going to travel to Lithuania where I’m going to present some of my dissertation research at an academic conference.

The conference is sponsored by the European Association of Institutional Research, where professors, researchers, and policy analysts from all over Europe get together to discuss higher ed issues. The conference focuses on European topics, but there is always a handful of US professors and researchers who attend to share their work.

I thought my dissertation work might be really relevant to this crowd because many EU countries are moving towards higher ed funding models that are similar to what we have in the US. So, here’s an abstract to my paper that I will be presenting:

“This study examines “tuition discounting” trends at public colleges in the U.S. It utilizes multilevel modeling to identify the effect state-level factors have on institutional spending on need-based and merit-based tuition discounts. It also examines the underlying micro-economic concepts of tuition discounting and provides empirical evidence of the cost drivers associated with discounting. As colleges become more reliant on tuition as a primary source of revenue, these findings will hold important policy implications related to college access, affordability, and enrollment management.”

The EAIR committee chair wants me to focus more on the ethics behind tuition discounting, which is something that I could probably talk about for hours! But I only have 30 minutes, so I better keep it brief!
Ash and I will get to do some exploring while we’re there, and we’re really excited about meeting new people on our trip. So, where the heck is Lithuania anyways?

Conference presentation

Next week, I’ll be down in Florida for the annual Association for the Study of Higher Education (here) research conference.  I’ve only been to the ASHE conference one other time, so I’m looking forward to round two and seeing some interesting presentations.  Last year, I presented some preliminary research I’ve done on tuition discouting practices at public colleges. After getting some positive feedback from folks at the conference, I decided to pursue this line of research for my dissertation. If you want to check out that 2007 presentation, you can click here (it’s a powerpoint file).

This year…

Educational attainment in a global society

The Education Trust released a report this week showing that the U.S. is falling behind other industrialized countries when measuring high school graduation rates.  What makes this even scarrier (Happy Halloween, by the way) is the fact that my generation of 20-something year olds is actually worse off than our parents’ generation in terms of educational attainment.  Wait.  Let me say that again. My entire generation, the “Baby Boom Echo,” is actually LESS educated than our parent’s generation.  It’s true, you gotta see it to believe it (here).

Surviving it…thanks to saws and fantasy football

I’m surviving these qualifying exams….they’re definitely tough, but I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Last week was rough but I eventually got to the point where I said “that’s as good as it’s gonna get!” and so I just turned it in and moved on to this week’s part of the exam. I can’t wait to get to that point for this week’s question….but I’m definitely not there yet. This week’s question is all about my dissertation topic, so it’s actually helpful to think through all these things now and to be working on something that I’ll actually be able to use later down the road. My faculty adviser who wrote this question is awesome, that’s all I’ve got to say. Awesome guy.

But what I’ve learned over these past two weeks is

Qualifying exams = 2 weeks of hell

Well, maybe it’s not going to be “hell,” but it’s going to be rough. When students in my department are almost done with their coursework, but before they officially begin their dissertation, they have to take “qualifying exams.” Everybody’s got to do it…it’s one of those rites of passage. Or maybe it’s more like a hazing ritual. Whatever it is, it doesn’t have the reputation of being fun!

Here’s what goes down. Faculty members get together and come up with two questions that the student has to answer in the first week. We pick up those questions on Friday morning and return them the next Friday – 20 page response or less. When we drop off our paper, we pick up another envelope with yet more questions and do it all over again. Evidently there’s a method to this madness, but all I know is that I’ve been dreading this all summer. I don’t like these kinds of surprises — I like fun surprises like “what’s behind door number three?” or “surprise, there’s a $5 bill in your jeans pocket.” Those are the good surprises. Opening up the envelope with qualifying exam questions isn’t!

But anyway, I’ll be plugging away at the first week’s question – which, in a round-about way, asks me to analyze the challenges of policy planning and discuss how to project policy outcomes. Another part of the exam asks me to write an implementation plan for a new policy proposal. It’s a lot of “hypotheticals,” but it’s actually kinda fun to reflect on all the stuff they’ve crammed into our brains over the past few years and show that I’ve actually learned stuff while I’ve been sitting in the back of the classroom. Anyway, I should probably get to work on these questions! Oh, here’s a diagram of what the policy process looks like (in theory), in case you’re curious. It’s over-simplified in a lot of ways, but still helps see that there’s a logical framework behind policy decisions. That is, until politicians get involved!

Educational inequality

This chart, from Postsecondary Education Opportunity, is one of the many pieces of data that I look to for inspiration and to help me keep things in perspective. This income inequality follows the same pattern as the class polarization we see in our labor market where there is a wide (and growing) gap between the rich and the poor. Since the late 1970’s and early 80’s, poor kids have been making the slowest gains in college participation.

But what I find to be more compelling (and more worrisome) is found in the chart below from the Education Trust. It comes as no surprise — Kati Haycock shows us that the nation’s “dumbest” rich kids go to college at the same rate as the nation’s “smartest” poor kids. Goes to show how colleges are serving as agents of social stratification and keeping class barriers neatly in tact, rather than acting as agents of social change…something ain’t right here.

Studying with the dog

Louie is my little buddy — I let him get away with a lot of stuff that I probably shouldn’t. Today was a perfect example of how our little pooch really runs the show. I was sitting in the living room, sprawled out with books and papers at either side of me. My whole goal was to clean up the mess of thoughts that I had scribbled on note pads and written in my draft of chapter one. Well, I got up to grab something to drink and came back only to find that Louie clearly wanted to play. He’s not very subtle, is he?

Note the stuffed duck under the table…