Higher ed and President Obama

I caught this NPR clip (here) earlier this week discussing how President Obama might address some higher education issues. A couple of news articles covering the same topic can be found here and here and the best one is here.

Perceptions of elitism

I like to think that I’m committed to educational opportunity and equality. That everybody should have a real chance at pursuing life goals with as few barriers as possible. I like to think that I’m committed to a cause of social justice, that equality of opportunity is the heart of any successful democracy. BUT, sometimes I step back and think “what are colleges creating?” I’m committed to getting more folks to college, but for what? A picture says a thousand words. Yeah, it’ s a bit unfair because for every “elitist” college grad I’ve met, I’ve also met about 20 “non-elitist” college grads. And I can point out a lot of non-college grads who match the elitist profile. The knife cuts both ways. But the food for thought that this picture makes my mind chew on is that colleges have a lot of ground to make up in terms of redefining higher education’s role in society. Colleges could do much more in terms of preparing students to be world citizens, to be engaged citizens, and to work towards improving the human condition.

Democracy Journal

If you haven’t had a chance to check out Democracy Journal, now is a good time to do so.  It’s one of the best new places to share progressive ideas addressing social problems ranging from tax policy, foreign affairs, health care reform, and improving education. In the upcoming issue, I’ll have an editorial published in response to Theda Skocpol (bio) and Suzanne Mettler’s (bio) Fall article about improving postsecondary education access and social stratification.

Dr. Skocpol and Dr. Mettler call out several federal and state policies that

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).

Podcasts on enrollment management

Check out these podcasts by the USC Center for Enrollment Research, Policy, and Practice if you’re interested in enrollment management, college finance, or college access. They’re interviewing some of the nation’s experts on these topics, so hopefully these podcasts will have some nuggets of wisdom for folks to think about. Just passing it along.

College endowments

Some folks are familiar with college endowments and some folks aren’t, so here’s a quick post to fill you in on what you need to know. My dissertation has to do with college finance, and you can’t talk about college finance these days without talking about endowments.

College enrollment trends

Here is a handy post to show the growing demand for college. The first is the long-term historical trend by each decade since 1869. The GI Bills of the 1940’s and 1950’s caused the first spike, then the Higher Education Act of 1965 and expansion of student aid in the 1970’s explain the remainder of the growth. Of course there are other factors that explain the rising demand and mass expansion of higher education – like changes in the labor market, the role of women in the workplace, K-12 curriculum design, immigration, the Baby Boom, etc. The second graphic shows how enrollment looks by each “sector” of higher education – it may come as a surprise that more than 6.5 million of the total 17+ million students are enrolled in community colleges.

Educational attainment

The US is one of only 2 industrialized countries in the world where the younger generation (blue) is less-educated than the older generation (red). In other words, the whole idea of leaving the next generation “better off” is really at risk here. And that doesn’t bode well for international economic competitiveness…time to invest in higher education.
Source: NCHEMS, www.nchems.org

The left axis is “percent of adult with an Associate’s Degree or higher.” Data is from 2004, the most recent available from OECD.