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.