0 The Cupcake Incident

                                                                                                  

On Friday my son turned five.  And so it was that on Thursday night I found myself elbow deep in dark chocolate cake batter and made-from-scratch coconut frosting, carefully following a recipe from the very chic Boston bakey Flour.  After asking Conor to name all of the children in his kindergarten class (twice) to be sure I would make enough cupcakes, I filled 18 spaces in my two non-stick pans and stuck them in the oven. Then I collapsed—while I love to cook, I hate baking, since it requires precise measurement and careful attention to detail, for which I have little energy left in the evenings given that such effort is required at work all day long.  Normally I would have taken a shortcut and used a mix to make life easier, but I wanted Conor’s cupcakes to be exactly as he’d asked for them—very chocolate, and very coconut.

Well, what those cupcakes really were—I learned 25 minutes later—was stuck. Glued to the pan, going absolutely nowhere. So much for “non-stick;” those suckers weren’t moving.  No, I didn’t use cupcake liners; I was trying to be “green.”   All of that Penzey's dutch-processed cocoa, organic butter and eggs, for nothing.  

I went to bed distressed.  Now what?  We needed 18 cupcakes by 930 am, and they had to be great.  Yeah, I knew they were for a bunch of 4 and 5-year-olds, but still-- they really just had to be great.  I searched West Madison online for bakeries, pondering the one with the $3 organic cupcakes (really??), the good ol'stanby Costco (not open til 10), and a new place a Facebook friend recommended.  As my eyes closed, I berated myself for obsessing this way. How could I have forgotten the cardinal rules of academic motherhood, and even attempted to bake cupcakes?  My own UW colleague, Simone Schweber, once wrote a brilliant column for the Chronicle about this-- and I had neglected the wisdom of her words, also written after attempting to make perfect cupcakes:  "I was always afraid that I wouldn't be a good mother, much less a perfect one, and indeed, it's much easier to make perfect, if ridiculous, cupcakes than to be a good mother." 

The next morning, I dropped Conor off at school and set myself on a path for the grocery store.  A $5 or $10 box of cupcakes from the bakery department would be just fine for these little palates, I told myself.  I drove towards Sentry.  And then, to my astonishment, I turned left-- and instead made a beeline for Cupcakes-A-Go-Go.  It was a bit of an out-of-body experience; I got out of the car, went in and purchased 18 cupcakes, handing over my Amex and charging $54 -- all the while screaming (silently) at myself "STOP IT, this is CRAZY!" 

What in the heck had happened to me?  I knew the money was better spent elsewhere, that the kids wouldn't taste the difference, and that no one but me was demanding that I do this.  I knew that only children would be present at the celebration, no other parents, and that my kid's school (a Waldorf program) does its best to discourage conspicuous consumption. As a sociologist, I further knew that my behaviors were class-linked, and that I ought to actively resist them. I knew this, I knew that, and I simply couldn't stop.

So I brought the cupcakes back to kindergarten, and my husband and I served them. Conor smiled and enjoyed a chocolate one, and the other kids (including my 2-year-old daughter) licked their fingers happily. The eating lasted all of 10 minutes, and then it was done. $54 worth of sugar, consumed.  

What happened Friday morning is going to stay with me for a long time. Mainly because I still can't understand it.  Was I simply over-compensating for the guilt of being a working mom? I don't think so, since I really don't feel my family is anything but proud of my career.  Was I embarrassed by my baking mishap? Not really-- I know it happens. Was I competing with other moms, whom the teacher mentioned sometimes shop at another organic bakery?  Maybe a little.  But at the end of the day, for all of my intellectual abilities to classify and analyze my own actions, I can't find an explanation that resonates.  Most of all, I can't account for my intense guilt (almost disgust) over that $54. 

What I can tell you is this: I won't be found in a cupcakery again.  Just can't do it. 

0 Are you there Kevin? It's me, neoliberalism

In a recent blog Kevin Carey took on Claire Potter’s critique of Obama’s higher education proposal by chastising her for using the term neoliberalism, and calling her a college professor so out of touch with the real world that she isn’t invited to the policymaking tables where he hangs out.

Dear Kevin, as you know I like you very much—so pardon me if I take offense here.  As a fellow college professor who spends quite a bit of time in DC policy circles (including with you), I think your critique of Potter is off-base. It’s also incredibly unproductive, as you set up an “education reformer versus college professor” dichotomy that's decidedly unhelpful. You accuse Potter of thinking she’s better than the DC crew, but she said nothing of the sort—instead it’s really you who calls her the idiot, seemingly for using big words. 

At the heart of the problem with your critique, Kevin, is that you’ve really missed the meaning of neoliberalism.  Yes, I’m going to keep using the polysyllabic term, since like “stratification,” it has real meaning and is useful for describing a complex concept. 

No, neoliberalism isn’t like facism—as you point out—and no one I know ever claimed it was.  It’s not widely abhorred, primarily because the term itself challenges an ideology so dominant that people have a hard time recognizing its existence.   You reduce neoliberalism to just one of its pieces: an effort to remove market regulation in the pursuit of greater liberty. Since Obama seeks, in some regards, to regulate the action of markets, markets which you rightly note already operate in education, then his policies can’t be neoliberal.  Right?

Wrong.  Neoliberalism is staring you in the face, and in today's education policies it isn’t marked solely or even primarily by a lack of market regulation, but by the promotion of privatization, erosion of worker protections,  heavy reliance on standardized testing, and the rollback of broad community input on school decisions.  More informally, neoliberalism posits that solutions to problems such as opportunity gaps lie in competition among individuals rather than long-term planning and cooperation.  It serves the few who are “racing to the top,” rather than the many who could and should work together for a just and equal society.  Frankly, neoliberal policies take the easy way out and call it “efficient”, rather than doing what’s hard but ultimately long-lasting and ethical.

Unbelievably, without a shred of evidence that positive outcomes have been achieved with the first, President Obama has proposed yet another Race to the Top, one that will undoubtedly reward institutions for policies that promote slippery-slope private partnerships (e.g. between community colleges and business), high-stakes accountability, and top-down reforms of professorial work, all in the name of enhanced productivity.  I'm on the record as for for productivity improvements in higher education, but I would never want them to be agenda #1—first we have a long way to go toward establishing a much deeper commitment public education, we must agree on goals and metrics for both educational equity and quality, we have to develop an appropriate and socially-just financing structure, and then we can work on efficiency.  Working backwards is a surefire way to cut costs and lose what’s most valuable: talent. And it’s definitely the way to create and perpetuate a 1% in education that leaves most of us behind.

Kevin, we share a deep commitment to doing whatever it takes to improve students' education experiences.  But we disagree on what we think the path to that goal must entail.  In my view, the road must include the continuation and indeed the growth of public investments in public education—not routes around it.  It must also include enhanced respect and support for educators.  There is no evidence of such support in this proposal—the importance of adequately supporting the work of professors in order to help student is not mentioned, and yet the fingers of blame are pointed in their direction (most recently by Joe Biden) for rising costs of college attendance.   The winners of this race will likely be the private institutions, who depend far less on state support, and thus will look like winners.  The students and families equipped to benefit from choice—those with more access to information and who are accustomed to “shopping,” will reap the rewards. They're the voters, and they'll love it most of all. Others who love the idea of choosing, and believe the false hopes that discussions of choice perpetuate, will similarly fall in line. That’s the neoliberal model at work—purporting to convene a fair competition, exciting the individualistic imagination of the American Dream, without placing any particular value on the principles of collective public goods or fair labor practices.  It may get people revved up in an election year, but make no mistake about it--it isn’t a progressive vision in the least.

0 Title Your Study with Care

Today's New York Times features an article on a new study on residential segregation by Edward Glaeser of Harvard, and Jacob Vigdor of Duke University.  I'd like to draw your attention to what the study actually finds, and how it's being pitched to the national audience.

The study is produced by the Manhattan Institute's Center for State and Local Leadership. The Institute is widely recognized as a conservative research organization. 

The title of the report, as written by its authors, reads: "The End of the Segregated Century."


The NYT's headline reads: "Segregation Curtailed in U.S. Cities, Study Finds."


The NYT's tweet reads: "Nation's Cities Almost Free of Segregation"


So it seems, the study must tell us that segregation has ended, or is about to-- right?


Nope.  What it tells us, points out Doug Massey of Princeton University, a nationally recognized expert on the topic, is that segregation has declined substantially in metropolitan areas with few black residents.   I wish I could say more, but this study-- despite being covered in the New York Times-- does not currently seem to appear anywhere on the Web!


So why not title the study "Shifting Patterns of Segregation"and the headline "Segregation Declines in Some U.S. Cities, Study Finds?"


Hmmm.  Think it'd get as much attention?  Fuel as much conservative fire? Yeah, that's what I thought.


PS. Want a more nuanced take on the changing face of segregation? I recommend this study.

0 You Got Rejected from Your First Choice College. So What?

The following is a guest post from Robert Kelchen, doctoral candidate in Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The Washington Post’s Campus Overload blog recently featured a guest post, “Getting Rejected from Your Dream School(s) isn’t a Bad Thing” by Eric Harris, a junior who attended the University of Maryland after being deferred by his first choice (Duke) and rejected by six of the other eight colleges to which he applied. (He was also accepted by Emory.) Eric’s story is hardly unique, as numerous blogs and websites feature stories of students who were rejected by their first choice college. Most of the popular media accounts of students rejected by their first choice college are from students like Eric—those who applied to a large number of highly selective (and very expensive) colleges and universities and still attended a prestigious institution.

The kinds of students who are typically featured in the media are very likely to enjoy college and graduate in a timely manner, no matter where they end up attending. But the students who should be prominently featured instead are those whose first choice colleges are very different than their other options (much less selective four-year colleges, community colleges, or no college at all). Just-released data from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at UCLA shows that only 58 percent of students attending four-year universities were attending their first choice college in fall 2011; nearly one-fourth of students were rejected by their first choice. This suggests that a fair number of students fall into this category, but little is known about their college outcomes.

As a part of my dissertation, I am using data from the Wisconsin Scholars Longitudinal Study to examine the college experiences of students who attended their first choice college to those who attended another college—either because they were rejected by their first choice or because they were accepted by their first choice but did not attend. WSLS students all come from modest financial backgrounds and were Pell Grant recipients during their first year of college, so it is likely that the cost of college played a much larger role in their college choice process than for students like Eric.

It is important to note that students end up at their first choice college as the result of three decisions: applying to their first choice (not explored in my study), getting accepted, and then attending after being accepted. I model the acceptance and attendance decisions using available information on the students’ demographics and academic preparation, their high school of attendance, and their first choice college. This is an important step in establishing a causal relationship because WSLS students who attended their first choice college tend to come from different backgrounds (especially from more rural areas) than those who did not.

I use interview and survey data to explore whether students’ academic and social integration levels differed between students who attended their first choice and those who did not for either of the above reasons. The interviews suggest that most students reported being happy with their college of attendance, regardless of whether that was their first choice college. (Whether this is actually true or whether this is an example of self-affirmation bias, in which people try to portray a disappointing event in the best possible light, cannot be determined.) There are also few differences between students who attended their first choice and those who did not on survey measures of academic and social integration.

I also use academic outcomes from the University of Wisconsin System and the National Student Clearinghouse to estimate the effects of attending one’s first choice college. After modeling the selection process, I find no statistically significant differences on academic outcomes between students who attended their first choice and either group who did not. (This dissertation chapter is nearly complete, so stay tuned for the full results.)

It appears that being rejected from one’s first choice college is not the end of the world for most students. The psychic costs appear quite high in much of the popular media, but we don’t need to feel too sorry for students who are forced to attend a highly selective college that may have been their seventh choice instead of their first. I spent three years in college working in the admissions office at Truman State University, and I talked with plenty of students for whom Truman was not their first choice. After being rejected by elite, expensive universities, they came to Truman and turned out just fine. So don’t worry too much about getting rejected by your first choice college—especially if paying for college was never one of your concerns. Everything will be okay.

0 Thoughts on the Obama Blueprint for Higher Education

Today President Obama unveiled his latest blueprint for the reform of higher education at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, a public institution with relatively high tuition and relatively advantaged students, and a place in the midst of a dispute over graduate student labor practices. It's just miles from Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn, where on July 14, 2009, Obama released his American Graduation Initiative, a blueprint for transforming the nation's community colleges, which was essentially destroyed as it was caught up in political debates over the health care legislation.

The blueprint responds to the groundswell of concern about the high and ever-expanding cost of college attendance, and the corresponding growth in the costs of financial aid. It resonates with efforts by the Occupy movement, and especially with the agendas of the Lumina and Gates foundation. It's also consonant with the work of many labor economists.

On the one hand, there are many things to like here-- for example, it's about time the Administration shined a light on the fact that tuition is rising primarily because states are cutting their support to higher education. Despite some recent unfortunate remarks by Vice-President Biden, faculty salaries don't account for much of the increase in tuition. While it is the case that the salaries of SOME professors are too high, such discussions serve only to distract from the real problems-- and have the political effect of pitting educators against students. That may be convenient for administrators, or conservatives who simply want to put the predominantly liberal faculty out of work, but it isn't solving the problem of rising tuition. We shouldn't expend effort making policy based on anecdote or a few bad apples, especially when a wealth of data is staring us in the face, pointing the way.

But in many ways, what President Obama does in this blueprint is deeply problematic. First, it demonstrates his clear adherence to market-based logics of educational reform. He seems to actually believe that Race to the Top is working so well that it ought to be replicated by creating another competition in higher education. Where's the evidence to support that? Too much faith in Arne Duncan, if you ask me.

Second, the approach of tying Perkins and SEOG dollars to these new requirements has a consequence--perhaps unintended--of restricting the abilities of financial aid administrators to exercise their professional judgment in directing aid to students. These are some of the most flexible dollars at their disposal-- and some institutions have very, very few. I'm concerned that we don't yet know whether the choices aid administrators make maximize the effects of these dollars in ways that will now be minimized-- and also that these frontline workers would seem to have little control over the institutional and state actions needed to ensure the dollars keep coming in. In other words, aid officers may have fewer flexible dollars to work with now, but no additional control over how their universities set tuition.

I'm happy to see some money to promote the adoption of practices that can increase productivity in higher education, but as Doug Harris and I have pointed out, the evidence-base on which to make judgements about cost-effectiveness of programs is very, very thin. So I'm very disappointed that this program didn't begin by first endowing the Institute for Education Sciences with the resources needed to establish multiple higher education research centers, and task them (in part) with evaluating effects of this effort.

Also, given that some of these approaches to enhanced productivity have negative effects for faculty worklife, it would have been good for Obama to at minimum urge policymakers to avoid pitting students against their educators-- as they have in criticizing teachers' unions-- and instead be cognizant that students and professors have many common interests, and those should be emphasized. I predict that next up we'll be told that faculty aren't really interested in student success, and thus can and should be replaced. Of course, no one will produce hard evidence to back that up-- and yet we'll be demonized.

When it comes to specific aid programs, it is absurd for Obama to double the American Opportunity Tax Credit without any explanation, while barely mentioning the Pell Grant. As Sandy Baum and Mike McPherson recently wrote, when "will we also debate whether government expenditures targeting low-income college students deserve much stricter scrutiny in this age of attempted austerity than government expenditures through the tax code targeting more-affluent students?"

Overall, my reaction to this proposal is a simple "Meh." (HT to Sue Dynarski) Lately Obama has come out fighting, talking about the rich and poor, and about not backing the same old policies which got us into this economic crisis in the first place. What I see in this proposal is a lot of his approach to k-12 education and it's neither radical or progressive. Sure, it resonates with the desire of moderates and conservatives (as well as so-called reformers) to hold the academy's feet to the fire, and it does talk about state responsibility. But a progressive blueprint would've referred to higher education much more strongly as a right and a public good, focused on policies that could most benefit the struggling public institutions (think community colleges and state u's-- not flagships) and left all privates out of eligibility, stressed the importance of both faculty success and student success to the definition of "quality", and instead of framing change as a "race to the top" he should have called for a "war on educational inequality."


PS. After reading my take, please consider Clare Potter's. She is spot-on, and I only wish I'd made the case as well as she did!

0 Guest Post: UCR Students Promote a Bad Tuition Plan as Police Beat Protesters

The following is a guest post by Bob Samuels, President of the University Council - AFT and a lecturer at UCLA. It is cross-posted from his blog, where you should go to find all of the original hyperlinks. I highly recommend also reading his November entry in the Huffington Post on why public higher education should be free.

The UC Regents meeting had a little of everything this week: UCR students came up with a new way to fund the university, a long list of new salary increases was released, UCSF asked to quit the system, a retired professor was fired, protesters disrupted the meeting, Regents met behind closed doors, and police attacked protesters who were using books as shields.

What does it all mean? Perhaps, it all adds up to the demise of the modern Western social contract. Without being too dramatic, we are seeing an attempt to resist the destruction of the central institutions of modernity: the university, the public commons, and the welfare state. Although it was once taken for granted that everyone should sacrifice for the common public good, this social contract has been broken, and now some are fighting to maintain it, while others are pushing us forward to a more premodern mode of social organization.

A case in point is the UCR “Student Investment Proposal,” which argues that students should pay no tuition while they are in school, but once they graduate, they should pay 5% of their income for 20 years. At first, this appears to be an elegant solution, but it really represents the final privatization of the public university. Instead of relying on state and federal funds and a common tax base, the new system would rely on private citizens to fund their own education through the use of a non-progressive flat tax. Just as UCSF wants to break its ties with the state and the rest of the UC system, this new funding model would allow students to “pay for their own education,” and would get rid of messy things like financial aid and family contributions.

Under this neoliberal payment program, the students working at Starbucks would be paying the same percent of their income to the UC as the students working for hedge funds. Of course, the university would have a strong incentive to only accept wealthy students, since these students have the highest chance of earning a big paycheck in the future. Likewise, there would be no reason to support programs in the humanities and social sciences if the big earners will all go to law school, medical school, and business school. In short, the student proposal is a private solution to a public problem, and yet we are told that the Office of the President will take it seriously.

It is indeed telling that a student group has come up with such a regressive funding model. We can read this as a sign of the way the backlash against the public good has been so successful that even good-intentioned people present anti-social ideas as if they were progressive. While the program does insist that the state should spend 2% of its budget on the UC each year, it does not say how the UC should use this money. Instead, we are told that students will pay for their own education out of their own future earnings. Of course, this model assumes that these students will have a future income in a world where we no longer have any sense of the common good

0 Baking Bread Without The Yeast

Among my son's favorite books are the ones in Richard Scarry's Busytown series. In What Do People Do All Day?, Able Baker Charlie puts too much yeast in the dough, resulting in a gigantic, explosive loaf of bread that the bakers (and Lowly Worm) need to eat their way out of.

The opposite problem -- a lack of yeast -- is present in Michelle Rhee's recent op-ed in Education Week. In it, she limits her call to "rethink" teaching policy to "how we assign, retain, evaluate, and pay educators" and to "teacher-layoff and teacher-tenure policies." (And she casts the issue of retention purely as one about so-called "last-in, first-out" employment policies rather than about school leadership, collaboration or working conditions.)

The utter absence of any focus or mention of teacher development either in this op-ed or in her organization's (StudentsFirst) expansive policy agenda leaves me wondering if Rhee believes that teachers are capable of learning and improving. If Rhee indeed does believe that new teacher induction and career-long professional development have value, then why does she consistently ignore it in her public statements and in her organization's strategic priorities? The alternative, of course, is a view that teachers are static beings, incapable of improvement. They are either born effective or ineffective. "Mr. Anderson's value-added score is an 18, thus he is an ineffective teacher and should be fired because his inability to teach cannot be ameliorated." We, of course, know this not to be the case. This alternative view also involves a strategy of simply trying to hire and fire our way to success. From research and international exemplars, I think most of us understand such a narrow approach to be ineffectual, albeit politically attractive in some quarters, especially among the Republican governors that Rhee is assisting exclusively.

High-quality development opportunities for teachers are like the yeast that helps the bread to rise. Comprehensive teacher induction has been shown to accelerate new teacher effectiveness and increase their students' learning. Likewise, personalized and purposeful professional development also can strengthen teaching skills and classroom impact.

It seems to me that a stated policy goal should be to ensure that as many as teachers as possible successfully pass educator evaluations being developed across the nation. Too many advocates such as Rhee appear to be eager to fire more teachers rather than make investments and restructure schools to maximize their effectiveness. A critical role for policy then would be to re-define teacher development in a way that raises the quality bar and invests public dollars in programs and approaches shown to have the desired impact on teaching and learning. Isn't that something we all can agree with?

Teachers are tremendously influential -- and we should do everything we can to unleash their full power. On teacher effectiveness, I'm unwilling to settle for half a loaf.

0 Skipping Evidence in Favor of Conclusions

Tonight's Chronicle of Higher Education features a story of great policy relevance. Under the headline "Study Disputes Claims That Preferentially Admitted Students Catch Up," author Peter Schmidt describes the results of an unpublished paper by Duke researchers as calling "into question other studies that play down the academic difficulties initially experienced by the beneficiaries of race-conscious admissions." The paper, Schmidt says, has been marshaled by critics of affirmative action as they seek a Supreme Court ruling knocking the policy down.

My own reading of the paper is that drawing such conclusions from this work, and highlighting them with such an inflammatory headline ("preferentially admitted students"?) is grossly inappropriate. While the authors document (1) racial/ethnic variation in the relationship between initial academic preparation and later major-switching and (2) that major-switching accounts for the diminishing racial/ethnic gap in GPA during college, there is absolutely no evidence presented that the use of race in college admissions is the driving factor behind such switches.

But I can see where the reporter got such ideas. The authors frame the paper from page 1 in terms of the debate over racial preferences. There were other options, including framing it in terms of unpacking the significant fluctuation in students' choices of college majors over time (e.g. as documented by Jerry Jacobs in Revolving Doors), and the implications of that fluctuation for labor market outcomes. Or they could have thought in terms of the debates over student learning, and how this may help us understand racial differences in rates of learning, such as those laid out in Academically Adrift. Instead, the authors open with a discussion of how affirmative action is "promoting access" to the "less prepared,"suggesting that such admits would need to "catch up" over time. This is the language of affirmative action critics, not researchers who recognize that the literature on testing and admissions hardly indicates that students who are admitted through the use of some form of preference may not be less prepared at all, and thus have no reason to catch up.

The first finding presented in the paper is that even though they start "behind" white students at Duke (behind as proxied by their first semester GPA, which is hardly solely a function of intelligence or preparation), black and Hispanic students make steady gains in GPA over time. One could look at this and think many things-- for example, perhaps over time minority students learn the "system" and figure out how to reap its rewards. (For the record, even white students do this, and have for decades--read about the "grade point average perspective" in Howard Becker's classic Making the Grade.) Or maybe black students benefit disproportionately from mentoring and other attention on campus. There are many possible explanations, but the authors turn to two in particular--variance and course selection. And in the end, they hang their hats on major migration--black students catch up on their GPA by switching to easier majors, and this is because they are disproportionately weaker students. Controlling for switching explains almost all of the black/white convergence in grades, say the authors. And so, they write, "Attempts to increase representation [of minorities] at elite universities through the use of affirmative action may come at a cost of perpetuating under-representation of blacks in the natural sciences and engineering." There you have it: we oppose affirmative action because it hurts black people.

Ok, let's say it together: COME ON. There are no alternative explanations proffered by these very fine academics (one of whom trained at UW-Madison)? And seriously, issuing such a policy proclamation based on a study of one single, highly unusual private university?

It is easy to come up with many, and next to impossible for the authors to rule them out. So black students have lower first year GPAs than white students, and this explains why they'd be more likely to switch majors over time. This can be true even WITHOUT affirmative action. Only if we hold a very high bar that says "we will only admit students above this bar so that they will not change majors" would this be stopped. Moreover, have the authors considered the potential that Duke's affirmative action program is the problem-- not affirmative action itself? As Doug Massey and his colleagues have pointed out, programs of all kinds that admit students but fail to adequately support their success are bad programs-- period. That does not mean the admissions practice itself is bad-- it means the university is hypocritical. It wants the glory of claiming diversity without devoting sufficient resources and effort required to ensure that all who are admitted fully succeed.

These are but a few conjectures- and deciding on which is right is not my job. My point is straightforward: this paper begins and ends with a political agenda, and it's being used as such. There is no more reason to think the patterns observed are attributed to the use of race in Duke's admissions decisions than to discriminatory practices in the allocation of university resources to its students, or to inadequate teacher quality on the part of its professors in some majors. Who knows the reason? Certainly not these researchers.

0 Is Higher Tuition What the Public Wants? And Who Cares?

In a blog over at the Washington Post today, Daniel de Vise raises an interesting question: Does the public want lower (or higher) tuition? He engages with this issue mainly in the context of private institutions, discussing anecdotal evidence from a recent meeting with college presidents.

In a nutshell, here are the highlights of his findings:

1. There is some evidence that the public wants a deep discount on a more expensive product. In other words, families are happier when they get a lot of merit-based financial aid at a high-priced college. Some colleges have found that when they cut tuition, applications drop too, and families complain they aren't getting much aid.

2. There is also some evidence that the public embraces -- even demands-- lower tuition, even thought it means getting less aid. At Sewanee, The University of South, which de Vise highlights, cut its (very high) tuition by 10% and focused efforts on need-based aid, resulting in an increase in applications. de Vise also notes that Sewanee took a key step, first done by George Washington University, freezing tuition for returning students. This prevents surprising hikes in cost from year to year, something that my own research (forthcoming) suggests can alarm students and even induce some to drop out of college.

So what's going on here? How can college presidents say that they must raise tuition because that's what the public wants, while others work to lower tuition, because it's what the public wants?

The answer is quite simple, actually. The "public" doesn't exist. It's an averaged American, comprised of heterogeneous individuals.

Some people equate the price of college with quality. Those are likely the same people who will buy a Lexus, thinking they're getting a better car, even though Lexus and Toyota use the same components. They're thrilled with a discounted Lexus, and have the cultural capital to know that if they go to a dealer and haggle, they might get one.

Other people have negative connotations associated with high prices. They see expensive things as "elitist", "snobby" and most importantly out-of-reach. They don't want to haggle for an affordable price, since they know that when people like them (who don't wear Banana Republic, look white, or speak formal English) walk into a dealership or admissions office, they aren't likely to get a deal. They want the price low, period. Discounting doesn't work for them.

Both types-- and there are nuanced versions of each-- are now part of higher education. But the pricing model, advocated by so many college presidents and backed by evidence produced by economists, is built for the first group-- the We Like Deep Discounts on Expensive Things group. Why? Because it suits the needs of institutions, who want to have more cash on hand, it seems "realistic" given budget cuts from governments and declining endowments, and it's said to be more efficient.

Ok. Let's say that's true (and I worry about the evidence, since much of it is based on studies of students from the 70's and 80s, before tuition went through the roof and disadvantaged students became a large part of enrollments). It doesn't necessarily make it effective policy. The relative effectiveness of the two strategies depends on who's in higher education (who dominates enrollment), what goals are sought, and whose outcomes are more affected by the pricing strategy. If first-generation students are in the I Want It Cheap camp, and they begin to comprise a sizable fraction of enrollment, if the primary outcomes measured are college graduation rates of at-risk students, and if first-generation students are most price-sensitive, then I'm sorry but hiking prices and discounting simply isn't effective.

Thus, the question we ought to be asking is not the one de Vise posed -- Is higher tuition what the public wants?-- but rather, Is higher tuition going to achieve the goals America has set for higher education? If we want to make progress, that's the one we have to get focused on answering.

0 Remaking Academia: Disclose Your Funders

In my first post on remaking academia, I recommended that authors disclose the funders of their research--as well as the costs of the work. The recommendation had twin aims: to expose any potential influences (positive or negative) on the research, and to allow others to make more accurate cost-benefit calculations when planning how to conduct their own research. Unless you know what good research really costs, it's hard to realistically plan for it-- and to fundraise to support it. If you know it'll be expensive, you have to seek outside support, and that will lead directly to the decisions you'll make that will eventually require that you name your funders.

This week, the national association of economists adopted similar standards. Given the extent to which economics is alpha dog in social science research, capturing headlines and exerting disproportionate influence on public thinking, this is the right move-- just long overdue. Said one economist in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "Economics is in the harm business but we don't wrestle with the ethical implications."

Admittedly, sometimes naming funders is easier said than done. For example, I have been supported by a foundation that stipulates in a contract that it is not to be named in publications. I have difficulty with this, and pondered the reasons for it, but ultimately abided by the request. I do this only because I feel certain that receiving funding from that source has had no other influence on my actual research other than making data collection (which I designed and conducted) possible. The foundation is extremely low-touch, especially compared to others which I do name-- those that provide professional development and other supports which could shape the direction of my thinking and research.

It can also be unclear when a funder must be named. Academics often have multiple sources of support from our time, and our time is blurry-- summers can be funded from 3-4 sources and who knows who's paying for the time you spend on a given Fridsy writing an article. In those cases, I recommend acknowledging them all.

Finally, we have to check our propensities to overreact to the naming of funders-- and not too quickly presume untoward influence, while maintaining a healthy skepticism. It's very common, for example, to see the Gates Foundation listed as a funder of education research-- but the role the Foundation plays in each piece varies tremendously, according to both authors and program officers. Sometimes the idea started with the Foundation, and other times it was the last funder in-- hardly influential.

The main goal should be honesty and transparency. Don't wring your hands over it-- just do it.