Category Archives: U.S.

April 11

Paying For the Party

Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality is a quite remarkable new work of ethnography, by sociologists Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton. I recommend it unreservedly for student professionals, or anyone interested in how university affects social mobility.

Embedded in a women’s dormitory at a large, unnamed Midwestern flagship state university (which, if I had to guess, is probably either Indiana or Illinois), the authors observed the girls on one floor for a year, and then conducted regular follow-up interviews with them for another four years. The results are fascinating, in a horrifying sort of way.

The authors advance an argument that the culture of partying – specifically fraternity/sorority (or “Greek”) partying – is the key factor determining long-term success in college. Rich kids can live the Greek life through a combination of massive parental subsidies and a proliferation of “business-lite” degrees, and their job prospects aren’t diminished because their success in post-graduation job searches depends much more on parental connections than it does on academics. Their less-wealthy, and less-networked peers can either attempt to keep up (which can lead to much higher debt and/or reduced academic achievement, which hurts them more than their better-networked peers) or they end up feeling alienated and alone, which also has negative effects on completion rates.

The authors’ most interesting claim is that flagship public universities actively aid and abet the partying culture, both by providing the Greek system with legitimacy/prestige and by dumbing-down the curriculum with too many “business-lite” degrees. (I’m usually skeptical about “dumbing-down” arguments, but some of this stuff shocked me – karate and ballroom dancing as for-credit courses?) Almost without exception, the kids in this book who studied hard turned out fine; the problem is that too many students are either distracted by other things, or not given institutional encouragement to study the right things.

Two small caveats about this book, though. The first is that its arguments for state-level public policy change are much weaker than the ones it makes for campus reform. Asking for more public funding because students party too much, and don’t study enough, just isn’t going to sell.

The second, simply, is that this is an American book. Much of the really nasty stuff documented here occurs in Canada only in a very attenuated fashion. The Greek system is less important here than it is in the US, and our class systems are different, too; so one shouldn’t assume the arguments translate directly. Still, Armstrong and Hamilton’s message about how social class affects the pathways one takes in higher education, and how they affect post-graduation experiences, is nevertheless a very important one; we should all pay much closer attention than we currently do.

March 15

The US Debt Freak-Out

If you read the US papers at all, you’ll have noticed a recent ratcheting-up of panic about student debt. Take Charles Blow’s recent New York Times column, which describes US debt levels as “staggering”, and having “long-term implications for our society and our economy, as that debt begins to affect when and if young people start families or enter the housing market.”

Some facts are in order.

It is certainly true that, in the United States, it’s possible to accumulate some absolutely staggering amounts of student loan debt, to no good purpose. Law grads, in particular, routinely rack up six-figure debts, only to end up in positions with mid-five-figure salaries (do read Paul Campos’ Don’t Go to Law School (Unless) – it’s an eye-opener on this topic). But those numbers are severe outliers. In fact, among the 60% of American students who borrow, the average debt is about $27,000 – with median debt being somewhat lower.

Sound familiar? It should. Those numbers are almost exactly the numbers we’ve had in Canada since the turn of the century. And though life isn’t as easy for young people with loan debt today as it was thirty years ago, it’s not as though the last decade’s worth of graduates are some kind of immiserated proletariat. Against expectations, the rise in debt in the 90s didn’t reduce access (quite the opposite, actually), and it didn’t lead to a generation of debt peonage. In fact, grads in their late 20s and 30s live pretty much the way they always have. True, home ownership rates have fallen among the under-40s, but that has at least as much to do with a historic rise in house prices as it is does student debt. In short, current levels of debt don’t have major behavioural or life-course consequences.

So, are Americans freaking out to no good purpose? Only partly. There are two good reasons why a similar level of debt in the US might be more consequential than it is here. The first is that, with weaker safety nets, the consequences of falling into poverty are much, much worse. The second reason is that the US student loan policy choices have been sub-optimal.

In Canada, thanks to Interest Relief (and later, the Repayment Assistance Program), students with incomes into the mid-$20,000s are exempt from making payments on their loans. In the US, the threshold for loan deferment is, in practice, about half that, meaning that, unlike in Canada, some very poor borrowers can be required to make large loan payments. America could have copied us in ensuring a good safety net for the poorest; instead, they chose to subsidize student loan interest rates across the board, regardless of need.

High levels of student debt are manageable. It just takes good policy choices.

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.

January 24

American College Sports

You may have heard something last week about a new report from the Delta Cost Project, in the United States. Typically, I’m a big fan of the Delta Cost Project, but I think this particular study misses the point.

The main line of argumentation against college sports in the US is that only a few big schools actually make money on athletics; on the whole, schools lose money, which could otherwise be spent on academics. While true, this point could also be made of other institutional activities, as well. Tech transfer, for instance: it’s pretty clear that schools spend a lot more money on patenting activities than they get back in licensing fees, but everybody does it because you never know if that next patent is going to be the “home run” that makes everything worthwhile.

More to the point, schools that “lose” money aren’t really losing it. As Charles Clotfelter points out in his recent book, schools still get mileage out of that money, because big-time college sports is really about advertising and community relations, and it always has been (historical oddity: part of the quid pro quo for expansion of public higher education in the US south and west was that the institutions “give something back” to the community, in the form of entertainment).

I’m quite sure, for instance, that Alabama gets better treatment in the state legislature now than it did before the Tide began its current run of football dominance. The Flutie Effect that winning sports teams have on college applications is well known. Aren’t those examples of money well spent? Detractors may point out that only a few institutions can ever hope to win big like that; but, yet again, you could make the same argument about tech transfer.

Surely, the more persuasive argument against American college sports centres not around money, but around ethics. As Taylor Branch pointed out in The Atlantic, last year, the system exploits students – mainly African-American men – for the financial benefit of the NCAA and television companies. Instead – as Tom Wolfe so brilliantly exposes in I Am Charlotte Simmons – student athletes are compensated by an on-campus star-system, which not only excuses them from the academic rigours of a campus, but which also, and all too often, condones outright barbarity and violence. And the whole college sports industry colludes in this; the fact that Notre Dame gets more press for Manti T’eo’s fake imaginary girlfriend than for the very real sexual assault/suicide scandal, involving at least two of its Football players, may not be surprising… but it is disgusting.

The lost money isn’t really a big deal. But the loss of ethics at an institution, the loss of its soul, that’s unforgivable.

January 11

Comparative Salary Data – Canada vs. U.S.

Yesterday, we looked at trends in Canadian faculty salary data. But how does our compensation stack up again the United States?

Here, I take 2009-10 U.S. salary data for professors at four-year institutions from the AAUP’s Report on the Status of the Academic Profession. For Canada, I use the same data as yesterday but add professors in medical fields. I do not adjust for currency since the dollar is roughly at par. The comparison looks like this:

Canada vs. U.S. Base Salaries, 2009-10

Of course, U.S. profs are paid on a nine-month basis while our pay is based on 12 months. To compensate, American professors can pay themselves an additional two months of salary out of their research grants – if they have them. So table 1 is only an apples-to-apples comparison of people who don’t hold external grants.

I haven’t been able to find good data on grant-holders at U.S. universities. Based on NRC data, my impression is that about 65% of professors at doctoral universities hold these. My best guess (take it with a grain of salt) is that the figure is probably about 25% at “master’s” universities and maybe 5% at “baccalaureate” universities. Multiplying that out implies that in total, 44.3% of profs get a boost of 22.2% (2/9) to their base salaries, which averaged out means we should bump the American salary figure by just under 10%, making the apples-to-apples (with salt) comparison more like this:

Average Salaries, Adjusting for U.S. Summer Research Income

That’s still a 28% gap overall, though only 15% at the top end (and it’s possible that I’m understating the latter gap because I spread the 10% research bump across all ranks). No matter – it’s big enough that you can’t argue Americans are better off because of lower tax rates.

Part of the difference is due to Canadian faculty being more senior: 74% of profs in Canada are “associate” or “full,” compared to 69% in the US. I suspect part of it is also that a greater proportion of our professors teach at doctoral-equivalent universities, where pay is better. But those don’t come close to explaining the full gap – one which would be substantially larger if we confined the analysis to public universities. Our pay is higher – full stop.

What about looking at increases over time? We can do that, too, but it’s worth keeping in mind that it’s not just pay that’s increased since 2001 – so, too, has the value of the Canadian dollar. A fair comparison requires an examination of changes in both domestic and foreign currencies.

Changes in Base Salary 2001-09

To say that our ability to compete with the US for academic talent has improved lately would be a bit of an understatement, no?

September 19

International Student Recruitment: Not as Good as We Think We Are

One of the most startling things about Canada’s recent success in attracting international students is how easy it has all been. Australia and the U.K. took decades to build up their position in international higher education, and in the former case it took decades of government-backed investment in developing overseas networks. Our recent extraordinary spurt of growth in international higher education – particularly in the Indian market – came in the space of about five years in a comparatively uncoordinated way.

So are Canadians just brilliant at this stuff or are there other factors at work?

I’d argue for the latter. Consider that in recent years the Americans have been imposing ludicrous visa regimes, the U.K. has been making menacing noises about rejecting international students and Australia’s image has been tarnished by events that have highlighted problems of racism and student security. We’ve therefore reaped the benefits without making any serious investments ourselves. We didn’t hit a triple; we were born on third base.

But this situation isn’t going to last forever. Universities around the developed world are heading for big trouble financially, and they are all going to be spending more time trying to tap the foreign student market. And in the developing world, institutions are improving all the time and improving their value position vis-à-vis our own. Competition is going to increase, and it’s not clear how well placed we are to win.

At HESA, we’ve developed the Global Student Survey to examine the views of students in various exporting countries about education in general and international education in particular. Our India survey, available for purchase as of today, shows some of the obvious vulnerabilities that Canadian institutions have, and the value proposition and the rising competition from Indian institutions are clearly there.

More importantly, our national brand in education is a problem. We rank well behind the U.S. and U.K. as a destination in Indian students’ minds, and even Singapore and the U.A.E. peg above us in some categories. And whereas Indian students describe American, British and Singaporean higher education in terms that are generic synonyms for excellence, Canada gets described like this:

Forget the temporarily rosy enrolment statistics: we have a problem here. We ignore it at our peril.

September 02

America – the Exodus

As we watch our southern neighbours slide into seemingly perpetual budget crises and many state universities undergo some brutal austerity, it’s worth thinking about the American crises’ global impacts on higher education.

Scientific talent is not distributed evenly around the world. If there’s one thing that the Shanghai rankings show, it’s how unbelievably deep the scientific talent pool is at American universities. But talent can move. Twice in the twentieth century, countries suffered major exoduses of scientific talent. In 1930s Germany, hundreds of key scholars migrated from Germany to (primarily) America, a process which not only boosted the Allied war effort enormously, but set the stage for a period of dominance of American science that has lasted for over 65 years.

Though not quite on the same scale, the 1990s saw an enormous movement of Russian scholars to new homes in Europe and America in order to escape the economic collapse and concomitant shortages of research funds. What’s about to happen in the U.S. will probably not be on quite the same scale, but you can’t expect universities in California, Illinois, Texas and elsewhere to suck up financial hits of 20 to 40% and not lose talented staff to universities who can make them a better offer. Lucky for them, a lot of OECD universities are getting smacked just as hard by austerity and thus aren’t in a position to outbid them. But that’s not quite true in Canada, Scandinavia, and Asia (where the National University of Singapore, for instance, is hiring aggressively). Here, there is the potential to accommodate refugees from American budget cuts.

The key question is: how best to take advantage of this? If you’re a truly aggressive (and strategic) school, you might take a gamble: front-load your hiring for the next few years and specifically target some promising staff at U.S. schools. Hire your next five years’ worth of profs this year and make sure 90% are from American institutions. Sure, it’ll mean short-term deficits, but hey – credit’s never been cheaper and top academic talent is the very definition of productive capital. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity.

Memo to provosts: Carpe diem.