Category Archives: access

May 16

Think Big?

With all the chat recently about reducing unit costs through ever-larger instructional units (e.g. MOOCs), it occurred to me that the world already has a lot of models for this. They just aren’t in the developed world.

University World News recently carried a very interesting article regarding a new higher education master plan in Nigeria. One of the plan’s key elements is to construct a half-dozen “mega-universities” – each with 100-150,000 students – to soak up the rising demand for higher education. On the one hand, this plan is self-evidently mad: large Nigerian universities are already a violent and lawless mess, plagued with cults such as the Black Axe and the Supreme Vikings (I wrote about them a couple of years ago: here); surely these new, even larger campuses will face even bigger gang problems. On the other hand, you can sort of see where Nigeria’s coming from on this. Thanks to some truly staggering levels of corruption, the ability of Nigeria to use public funds to meet demand for higher education is quite small – currently just $1.4 billion to cover expenses at 33 federal universities. So the solution is simple – go big, and keep unit costs low. Just like MOOCs.

Actually, the way access has been increased in much of the developing world is through strategies like this. The world’s largest universities are Open Universities – Indira Gandhi in India (3.5 million), and Anadolu in Turkey (2 million). The largest residential schools are ones with multiple constituent campuses. The reigning world champion here is Islamic Azad University in Iran – a private school with 350 locations, 1.5 million students, and a very significant endowment of contested legality (I don’t buy the $200 billion number, but it’s substantial nonetheless).

What about single-campus institutions? On the Indian subcontinent, there are a handful (e.g. Delhi, Pune) which boast enrolments of 400K plus, but most of those students are not residential – rather, they study at a college somewhere, and simply take the Delhi or Pune exams. For really big schools, you need to go to places like the University of Buenos Aires (300K plus) or UNAM in Mexico City (250K plus). The University of Cairo, at about 150K, is the biggest in Africa; it’s also generally considered the continent’s best school outside of South Africa, which may explain Nigeria’s attraction to the model.

William Gibson once said that the future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed. So it is. These mega-institutions can provide some lessons about the perils and promises of uber-massification through mega-universities. We probably shouldn’t ignore them just because they’re happening offline and in poor countries.

April 12

In Praise of Downward Mobility

One much-used trope, among those wanting to bash higher education, attacks the idea of “downward mobility”. Typically, a journalist finds a kid from a nice middle-class family, having a hard time making-it in the labour market, and uses this as a platform for a string of Wente-isms: “Higher education is supposed to be about upward mobility – but now graduates are downwardly mobile! Won’t somebody please think of the children?” Etc. etc.

But upward mobility is greatly overrated. Downward mobility is where our focus should be. And here’s why:

Part of the problem with the notion of upward mobility is that, with respect to education, the term gets used in two distinct ways. The first is a, “rising-tide-lifts-all-boats” interpretation, where everyone is upwardly mobile in the sense that everyone’s purchasing power is rising. Universities and colleges, through their enriching of human capital, and their contributions to the national innovations system, are seen to be key actors in this process – though, obviously, there are many other things which also go into economic growth. Right now, this kind of upward mobility is in short supply.

But even where there is little or no economic growth, upward mobility in a second sense – that of people changing their position within the overall social hierarchy – can still exist. But this type of mobility is a zero-sum game. Upward mobility can only exist to the extent that downward mobility does.

The book I discussed yesterday, for example (Paying for the Party), is full of stories about downwardly mobile middle-class kids (albeit mostly ones who don’t work very hard at their studies). That’s sad, but what’s truly appalling is the complete lack of downward mobility among the upper-class students. No matter how useless they are academically, mom and dad are always there to help them avoid the consequences of their inaction.

A fair society, one where social position is actually reflective of effort and ability, requires more downward mobility, not less. We need to be finding ways to take inherited privilege away, not re-inforce it. It’s why the rich need to pay more in tuition (and why the poor need grants to offset it). It’s why legacy admissions and merit scholarships that don’t take social origins into account need to be fought. It’s why all those unpaid internships in so-called “desirable” fields (mainly media and publishing) are not just illegal but are also immoral, because they tilt the playing field to the trustafarians who can afford them.

In a low-growth economy, allowing some to rise in social position means others must fall. We in higher education have a vital role to play in this, and we shouldn’t be squeamish about it.

February 21

Stuff Happens: Rise of the Latinos

When you think about recent developments in American higher education, the negatives tend to predominate. Cutbacks in state funding, soaring tuition fees, ballooning debt levels – it all leads you to believe that there’s been an enormous diminution of access. But, very quietly, there’s been one incredibly good piece of news: a massive jump in Latino participation rates.

For decades, now, one of the biggest challenges in American higher education has been low participation rates among Latino students. Latinos are, of course, quite heterogenous, even with respect to higher education. Puerto Ricans in the Northeast have long had access rates similar to those of whites, while participation rates among Mexican and Central American Latinos in the West and Southwest have been persistently abysmal. Other immigrant groups with low-education backgrounds have tended to see their participation rates rise by the time the second generation rolls around. In many cases in the west, the Latino population was well into its third generation; it seemed, by-and-large, as if Latino youth simply hadn’t grasped the fact that higher education was increasingly necessary to succeed in the modern economy.

As Latino birthrates rose, and as that population became an increasing percentage of the general population, there were real worries in the Southwest that the persistently-low participation rates would lead to declining overall participation rates, and an increasingly de-skilled labour force. A lot of policy attention – and some money as well – got lavished on this population, through groups like Excelencia in Education. But for years, Latino access rates flatlined, and all this work seemed to be for naught.

Then suddenly, in the middle of this recession, the situation changed dramatically. Between 2008 and 2011, the participation rate of Latinos, aged 18-24 years-old, who had completed high school, jumped from 36% to 46%, surpassing the black participation rates for the first time ever. And no, this wasn’t a trick of the denominator – Latino high school completion rates were rising too, from 65% in 2005, to 76% in 2011. In 2010 alone, the country saw an increase of nearly 200,000 Latino enrolments from the previous year (to put that in perspective, that’s the equivalent of the population of Quebec’s francophone universities).

Maddeningly for policy wonks who want to replicate this little miracle, it’s really not clear what prompted it. There was no big policy shift that preceded it, for instance. Many say “it’s the recession”, but this begs a lot of questions (e.g. why this recession, and not earlier ones? Why isn’t it having a similar effect on black enrolments?).

Sometimes, if you work at something long enough, stuff just happens. That’s bad news for social scientists who like to link cause and effect, but good news for America’s Latinos.

December 05

Access to Opportunity

There’s been a fair bit of talk over the past few months about the practice of articling in Ontario. Specifically, the problem is that there are too many law school graduates for too few articling positions. The situation has deteriorated to the point where the Law Society of Upper Canada has released a major report outlining an “alternative work experience,” in order to deal with the surplus of students who don’t get “real” articling positions. For what it’s worth, I tend to agree with the minority report: if implemented, this proposal will create a two-tiered system, and anyone who uses the alternative will, from the get-go, be stigmatized within the profession.

In one sense, there’s something impressive here about the way law schools have themselves escaped much of the blame; after all, the root cause of the problem was their decision to increase capacity well beyond what the articling system could support. Now, I don’t believe in making universities alter admissions based on labour-market conditions; if people want to pay for the privilege of learning about law, there’s no reason to refuse their money. But greater honesty with students is needed: if you know that a quarter of your graduates aren’t going to be able to get professional licensing because of an overloaded system, you should be required to explain that fact in very clear terms to incoming students. Not to do so is ethically suspect.

But the real story here has not to do with the number of articling students, but rather with how they are actually distributed. The Law Society report does make a passing reference to “equity” issues – the suspicion that, perhaps, non-white students aren’t getting a fair shake in articling spots. But they never get to the heart of the matter, which is that law firms’ control of the articling process gives firms an enormous, unregulated role in controlling access to the profession. And though no one will ever say this out loud, firms use this power to do favours for colleagues and clients. “Oh, your son needs a spot? We’ll see what we can do …”

We need to take a hard look at how real-world opportunities get distributed in Canada. Justin Trudeau, a man given opportunities well beyond what his native talents would command, because of who his father was, is just the tip of the iceberg. At the highest levels, this is a clique-y and insular place; jobs get publicized through insider networks rather than through open, merit-based competitions. We’re not yet in New York publishing industry territory, where trustafarians have a hammerlock on all the choice positions, but in Toronto, at least, we’re closer to that situation than we’d like to admit.

Canada’s done a good job of ensuring access to education. Pretty soon, though, we’ll need to start having serious discussions about ensuring access to opportunities. And as Ontario’s articling situation shows, these are two different things.

October 30

Setting Tuition

Some interesting news out of Florida last week: Governor Rick Scott (or rather, a task force he created) wants to set tuition in so as to encourage enrolments in the sciences and engineering; so, basically, he’s proposing that tuition in those disciplines remain frozen for a number of years while at the same time allowing it to rise in disciplines deemed less “worthy” (arts, business, etc.).

There are some fairly obvious drawbacks to this idea: not everyone is equally skilled at these subjects and so cannot equally take advantage of the incentive, there are fairly large windfall gains to people already inclined to those disciplines, and – my favourite – if there’s really a need for those kind of skills, surely it’s the labour market’s job to adjust through rising wages, not the government’s to adjust through tweaking tuition.

Nevertheless, it raises a useful question: what’s the right way to set tuition? It basically comes down to just a few options:

Make it Free: A bad idea for a whole bunch of reasons, but it has the benefit of being consistent.
Equal Fees Across All Disciplines. Ditto. Simple to understand and implement.

Let the Market Rip: Also probably a bad idea (for first degree programs at any rate), but there’s an intellectual purity to it.

Differential Fees Based on Private Returns: Doctors pay more, social workers pay less. This is the Canadian model, to the extent institutions are allowed to get away with it (which is to say, with second-entry programs); otherwise we’re closer to the “equal fees” model.

Differential Fees Based on “Social Need” or Labour Force Planning: This is essentially the Florida proposal (Estonia has a version of it too, and some Canadian provinces use student aid to accomplish the same thing through the back door). Basic problems include working out what future needs (social or otherwise) really are and why public funds should be used to set market signals on employers’ behalf.

Differential Fees Based on Cost of Provision: This would have some of the same winners and losers as fees based on private returns, but not all. Law would be cheaper, fine arts a lot more expensive.

It would be nice if, once in a while at least, we could actually discuss these models and make conscious choices between them. It could get a bit confrontational, of course, but presumably grown-up societies can handle a bit of that. Sadly, being Canadian, we shy away from this and make tuition policy the way we always do (i.e. “whatever it cost last year, plus a couple of percentage points”). Score nil, again, for rational policy-making.

October 29

Pop Quiz

So, we all know that tuition is terrible because it’s perfectly obviousthat tuition impedes access. Right? I mean, come on. Who doesn’t know this?

Ok, try this on for size:

There have been four jurisdictions that have had major changes in tuition policy in the last fifteen years. Ontario in 1996 (a series of increases from 1996-99 of roughly 20% per annum), Manitoba in 2000 (a 10% cut in tuition with a freeze thereafter), Newfoundland and Labrador in 2000 (a 20% decrease in fees implemented over four years), and British Columbia in 2001 (a 55% increase over two years).

The graph below shows full- and part-time enrolment in those four provinces for three years before and five years after the policy change, indexed to the year of the policy change.

Figure 1 – Changes in Enrolment Near Times of Major Tuition Fee Changes in Ontario, Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador, and British Columbia

Amazing, huh? In all four cases, enrolment rose, and in three cases, the policy change made essentially no difference to the pre-change trend (in the fourth, it just preceded a change in the trend, but it’s pretty light).

Here’s the quiz: Match the provinces to the lines on the graph. Which provinces saw rises in tuition and which ones saw declines? Answers tomorrow in the grey box, but the first person who writes in and correctly identifies the four lines before then gets to choose the subject of a future One Thought.

In the meantime, do feel free to give this to anyone you know who’s insufferable about the evils of tuition. Especially if they’re wearing some kind of red square.

September 10

Worst Back-to-School Article, 2012 Edition

Carol Goar from the Toronto Star, take a bow. Your article “Ontario students paying more but getting less” wins my vote as the most facile, ill-informed article of la rentrée.

The article contains two basic screw-ups which merit the award.

First, the “paying more” bit. Her contention is that the average tuition fee has risen $4182 since when Mike Harris was elected. The figure is correct, but unadjusted for inflation. When you actually compare apples to apples – as any first-year econ student would do – you lop 35% off the increase; in real dollars the tuition increase is actually $2718.

But that’s not all; Goar chooses to completely ignore offsetting subsidies, which have ballooned over the past fifteen years. In 1995-96, the province’s expenditure on grants and loan remission was $350/student; now, it’s $1,544. In 1995-96, the average student (or their parents) received about $1100 in tax credits. Now that figure is just over $2100. In other words, if you take subsidies into account, the net increase in real tuition over 15 years was… $600. Or, if you prefer, $40/year. Clearly, a $600 increase is a lot harder to spin as a Bad Thing than a $4182 increase. So the question is: did Goar use the higher figure because she deliberately wanted to sensationalize a subject, or because she is totally clueless about subsidies and inflation-adjustment?

The other way Goar screws up is in looking at the benefits. For some reason she seems focused on the increasingly crowded classroom. And yes, they’re a problem until you realize that the reason they’re crowded is because there are vastly more students attending university than was the case fifteen years ago. In raw numbers, there are 160,000 more university students in Ontario than there were when Harris was elected. The system has grown by 58%. The participation rate is 33% instead of 21%.

Obviously, it would be better if we could accommodate this massive growth without cutting corners, so you can’t say it’s an unalloyed triumph. But to claim it’s a disaster? Come on.

By the time you reach Goar’s conclusion, which essentially is that asking students to pay an extra $40/year to help fund a massive increase in access is evidence of “the quiet death of society’s commitment to ensure that each generation does better than the last,” you’re left either one of two conclusions. Does she genuinely believe that life was better when there were fewer people being educated? Or does she really not understand how little tuition has increased and how much access has improved? Either way, it’s a disastrous article, well deserving of this year’s award.

May 09

Better Thinking about Access and Tuition

Hey, have you heard about what’s going on in Quebec and Ontario?

Turns out one province is way ahead of the other in terms of university participation rates. And in terms of attainment rates among 25-34 year olds. Also, it turns out one province has tuition almost three times higher than the other. And higher rates of indebtedness. And, among those who borrow, much higher levels of indebtedness at graduation (almost 60 percent higher, in fact).

The thing is, the relationship isn’t the one most people think it is.

That’s right, the province with higher tuition and higher debt has – by some distance – the better outcomes. And it’s not just total numbers; Ontario’s also substantially more successful than Quebec at pulling in low-income students.

Undoubtedly, there are some structural factors behind this. For one thing, low-income students in Ontario are much likelier to be recent immigrants (or children thereof); and as work by my colleagues Ross Finnie and Richard Mueller has shown, these youth are far more likely than non-immigrant youth to attend PSE. Parental education, another major determinant of educational outcomes, is also on average higher in Ontario (a third-generation legacy of low education levels in pre-Quiet Revolution Quebec). And finally, student aid is also in some ways much more generous in Ontario, even if more of it comes in the form of loans.

But then, on the other hand, listing these factors is just a complicated way of saying IT’S NOT ABOUT TUITION! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, CAN WE ALL SHUT UP ABOUT TUITION AND GET BACK TO STUFF THAT REALLY MATTERS?

There’s lots of blame to go around for the perpetuation of this preposterous meme, but if we have to single out anyone for egregiousness on this file, the Ontario Liberals probably deserve it most. Through eight years of patient work, they’d created an excellent, progressive student aid structure that underpinned the country’s most accessible system of higher education. Then, instead of taking credit for this magnificent achievement, they came up with a hare-brained tuition reduction scheme that was not only implemented with all the grace and subtlety of a Michael Bay movie, but which deliberately undercut the government’s own signal achievement, which was to prove that good outcomes don’t depend on low tuition.

Ernest Rutherford once said “Gentlemen, we have run out of money; it is time to start thinking.” Well, Canadian higher education is rapidly approaching that point. The sooner all our governments stop pandering to students and middle-class voters with tuition freezes and rebates and start actually thinking about the real social and cultural determinants of access, the better we’ll all be.

February 29

The Heinous Difficulty in Understanding What Works

The empirical consensus on the question of barriers to access in Canadian education is pretty clear: and among those few secondary school graduates who don’t go on to post-secondary education, affordability is very much a secondary issue (not non-existent, but secondary). The primary issue is that most of these young people don’t feel very motivated by the idea of spending more years in a classroom. It’s a vicious circle: these students don’t identify with education, so they don’t work at it, so they receive poor grades and become even more demotivated.

The problem is that it is easier to identify problems than solutions. Big national datasets like the Youth in Transition Survey (YITS) can help identify relationships between inputs and outputs factors, but are useless at examining the effects of interventions because they simply don’t capture the necessary information. What is needed is more small-scale experimentation with various types of interventions, along with rigorously-designed research to help understand their impacts.

This, by the way, is the tragedy of Pathways to Education. It ought to work because it ticks nearly all the boxes that the literature suggests should ameliorate access. But for some reason there has yet to be any serious attempt to evaluate its outcomes (my bet is that Pathways board members prefer anecdotes to data for fundraising purposes – and given their fundraising success to date, it’s hard to blame them). That’s a shame, because if they are on to something it would be useful to know what it is so that it can be replicated.

Now, one shouldn’t pretend that these evaluations are easy. In the United States, a top-notch research company’s multi-year, multi-million-dollar evaluation of the Upward Bound program is currently the subject of intense controversy because of a dispute regarding how data from different intervention sites was weighted. Do it one way (as the evaluators did) and there’s no significant result, do it another and a significant effect appears.

The Upward Bound controversy is a shame because of its likely chilling effect on research in this area. Governments might well question the point of funding research if the results are so inconclusive. But the nature of social interventions is such that there are hundreds of factors that can affect outcomes and hence research is always going to be somewhat tentative.

So what’s the way forward? Research can’t be abandoned, but probably needs to go small-scale. Having lots of small experimental results aggregated through meta-analysis will in the end probably yield far better results than will mega-experiments or more large-scale surveys. It might take a little longer, but it’s both more financially feasible and more likely to deliver durable results.

February 28

Changing Cultures

A few months ago, HEQCO put together an interesting conference called Fear of Finance which examined the subject of financial literacy and PSE. Now, take this term “literacy” with a grain of salt: the evidence that improving students’ ability to understand compound interest or student aid rules is going to improve access to education is basically zero (though it might make those that do go to PSE better off during and after their studies, which is a good in and of itself). But if you expand the term to include getting students to better understand middle-class concepts of “investment,” then we’re into some potentially quite promising territory.

One speech by my colleague Andrew Potter apparently created some controversy. He made the point that improving access to PSE through programs like Pathways to Education and the Harlem Children’s Zone are essentially attempts to give young people from deprived areas some of the benefits of a middle-class upbringing in the hope that they will then “act middle-class” and get a post-secondary education. This, he said, bore a significant resemblance to “nation-building” in places like Afghanistan in that both involve external interventions to try to inculcate a more positive “culture” in an attempt to get people to better invest in their own futures.

Not everyone thought this was a great analogy, and I suspect Potter’s inclusion of the term “counter-insurgency” in his simile might have had something to do with it (who would we be “fighting,” exactly?). That quibble aside, I think Potter’s analogy is excellent and thought-provoking. Both efforts are attempts to change culture by creating an alternative set of social structures. And in both cases, the state of our understanding about what works and why is very weak.

Take Pathways to Education for instance. Let’s ignore the fact that it has still never undergone anything resembling a program evaluation, and grant that they seem to have had considerable successes in their original home in Regent Park, if nowhere else. Do we know how much of this has to do with mentoring, how much with tutoring, how much with payments for bus passes to get to school, etc? Do we know how much had to do with the specific mix of students they were helping or the specific people delivering each intervention (i.e., would there be different results with a different group of mentors and tutors)?

The answer to all these questions is no. We have some guesses, but no more than that. As with nation-building in Afghanistan, we’re trying to change something as unbelievably complex as “culture” and flying essentially blind with respect to what works.

So, how can we change this? More tomorrow.

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HESA

Higher Education Strategy Associates