This may not seem like a big deal, but the capital budget of universities has long been the black hole of college financing. With virtually no [...]]]> Toiling away in federal education databases is rarely very exciting, but every once in a while, you are rewarded with a discovery. My latest reward was finding that IPEDS is now collecting data on capital appropriations—defined as “amounts provided by government appropriations intended primarily for acquisition or construction of capital assets for the institution.” When a state legislature gives a college money to build a new science building, this is where we will find it.

This may not seem like a big deal, but the capital budget of universities has long been the black hole of college financing. With virtually no reliable and comparable data available, very little is known about the capital budget.

One basic question is how much is spent. Among public colleges, total capital appropriations in 2010-11 were around $5.7 billion. By way of comparison, non-capital state appropriations—the money used to pay professors, keep the lights on, etc.—were around $63.3 billion.

The chart below shows state appropriations per student and capital appropriations per student to give a better sense of their relative sizes (note some schools fall outside the plotted range). We can see that capital appropriations are relatively small compared to regular appropriations.

More flexibility on flexibility waivers. The U.S. Department of Education will allow some states that have gotten waivers from pieces of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to postpone using student growth on state tests as a factor in personnel decisions for up to one additional year.  (Education Week)

The humanities Ph.D. A leisure pursuit [...]]]> Debt and educational equity. The already crushing student debt will rise on July 1 as federal interest rates on students loans are set to double. Randy Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, urges Congress to act quickly to pass the Student Loan Affordability Act.  

More flexibility on flexibility waivers. The U.S. Department of Education will allow some states that have gotten waivers from pieces of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to postpone using student growth on state tests as a factor in personnel decisions for up to one additional year.  (Education Week)

The humanities Ph.D. A leisure pursuit for those with outside means of financial support? Or the key to professional satisfaction, wherever they end up being employed (and it’s probably not in academia)? The debate continues.  (Inside Higher Ed and Pacific Standard)

Astronaut education.  NASA has now selected its 2013 astronaut candidate class!

Anne Mishkind, ES policy intern, contributed to this report.

Reinventing public schools. Combatting high dropout rates and violence, 87 schools in Oakland have reinvented themselves as “full-service community schools.” While other places have experimented with offering emotional and health services along with academics, this will be the first time the community school model has been embraced throughout an entire district. (The Hechinger Report)

Standards and curriculum [...]]]> Want to enhance the creativity and sophistication of your thinking? A study by researchers at the University of Toronto suggests that reading fiction increases a person’s comfort with ambiguity. Fiction readers tend also to be more open-minded, and less restricted in their thinking. (Pacific Standard)

Reinventing public schools. Combatting high dropout rates and violence, 87 schools in Oakland have reinvented themselves as “full-service community schools.” While other places have experimented with offering emotional and health services along with academics, this will be the first time the community school model has been embraced throughout an entire district. (The Hechinger Report)

Standards and curriculum are not the same thing. While this distinction should not be news to anyone who has been following the implementation of the Common Core State Standards, a refresher might be helpful for some. (Education Next)

The road less traveled. Against all odds, Dunbar High School valedictorian Johnathon Carrington is heading to Georgetown in the fall. He deserves to be there, but is he truly prepared for college work? (Washington Post)

Anne Mishkind, ES policy intern, contributed to this report.

Education Sector’s fundamental mission is to improve student outcomes and opportunities. This has been my passion for as many years as I have been in education. I have every confidence that in the coming years Education Sector [...]]]> I am honored and delighted to be named the managing director of Education Sector. Since coming on board as a member of the K20 Task Force last year, I have been inspired by the founding spirit of Education Sector—independence, innovation, quality, and courage. I am humbled by the accomplishments of those who founded Education Sector and all those who have contributed to its success.

Education Sector’s fundamental mission is to improve student outcomes and opportunities. This has been my passion for as many years as I have been in education. I have every confidence that in the coming years Education Sector will join with others in finding creative and positive educational innovations so all Americans have the opportunity to develop their talents and contribute to a vibrant, productive, and inventive society and economy.

The Education Sector team is incredibly dedicated and talented. What they do every day is what makes Education Sector a trusted voice in education. They are the foundation of all we do. I also want to thank our senior fellows for contributing so richly to the world of ideas; their continued work helps us break new ground and ask better questions.

Our board of directors continues to guide us forward as keepers of what we hold most important and as valued members of our intellectual and policy community.

We want to give John Chubb, who has led Education Sector for more than a year, special recognition to thank him for his vision, enthusiasm, and determination. We wish him well in his new role as president of the National Association of Independent Schools.

We believe in community and will reach out in the coming months to all of you who care so deeply about excellence and equity in education. We are setting a bold agenda for ourselves and ask you to join us in this journey. The combined energy of all of us who care deeply about improving student outcomes and opportunities will fuel a genuine transformation in education.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. At least, that’s what Ed Helms suggests to new graduates in his Knox College commencement speech. Fear, he says, can help you become “your best possible self.” (Huffington Post)

The new college savings plan. San Francisco has come up with a simple, yet radical, idea: open college savings accounts for every single public school student in the city. (The Daily News)

“Another day, another bag of nothing.” For the second day, Illinois lawmakers [...]]]> “Saundz Like American English.” This up-and-coming software app that allows students to practice English pronunciation may provide the support needed for traditional ESL curricula. (Getting Smart)

Be afraid. Be very afraid. At least, that’s what Ed Helms suggests to new graduates in his Knox College commencement speech. Fear, he says, can help you become “your best possible self.” (Huffington Post)

The new college savings plan. San Francisco has come up with a simple, yet radical, idea: open college savings accounts for every single public school student in the city. (The Daily News)

“Another day, another bag of nothing.” For the second day, Illinois lawmakers met with Gov. Pat Quinn to negotiate a deal on state pension reform. (Maybe third time’s a charm?) (Crain’s Chicago Business, h/t @ChadAldeman)

Amanda Stafford, ES policy intern, contributed to this report.

Well, a new report to Congress from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General confirms the notion that financial aid fraud is a big problem that is getting worse.

The OIG “determined that the population of recipients considered [...]]]> For the past few years, anecdotal stories seemed to indicate that financial aid fraud was becoming a bigger problem. A new name was created for some of these fraudsters: Pell runners, which Kelly Field described as “a scam artist who bounces from college to college, staying just long enough to receive a Pell Grant.” And then there were the numerous stories about fraud rings.

Well, a new report to Congress from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General confirms the notion that financial aid fraud is a big problem that is getting worse.

The OIG “determined that the population of recipients considered as potentially participating in this [financial aid] fraud activity had increased 82 percent from award year 2009 (18,719 students) to award year 2012 (34,007 students). We identified more than 85,000 recipients who may have participated in this type of student aid fraud ring activity and who received over $874 million in Federal student aid from award year 2009 through award year 2012.”

The best way to combat this growing problem is for the department of education to create a student unit record (SUR)—basically assigning each student a unique identifying number. This would allow the department to know before sending checks out that the same student received Pell grants at eight different colleges, rather than (occasionally) figuring that out after they’ve already sent the money.

We can add the elimination of most financial aid fraud to the list of other good reasons to create a federal student unit record.

Indeed, as Anthony Carnevale of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce noted in a sensible Wall Street Journal piece last week, there’s a middle ground in this discussion. It’s quite true, he says, that students who major in fields such as [...]]]> Liberal arts or manual arts? Truth-seeking or job-seeking? It’s a debate about the purpose of college that never seems to end. And it’s one, as Tom Dawson pointed out in his recent post, that too often plays out misleadingly, as if the choice to opt for liberal arts inevitably consigns anthropology majors to the margins of the labor force.

Indeed, as Anthony Carnevale of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce noted in a sensible Wall Street Journal piece last week, there’s a middle ground in this discussion. It’s quite true, he says, that students who major in fields such as science and engineering have higher employment rates and salaries immediately after graduation, compared to humanities majors. On the other hand, the benefits of liberal arts degrees “often aren’t fully realized until later in life.” Many humanities and liberal arts students (43 percent) get graduate degrees that raise their lifetime earnings by 27 percent. And those who reach the managerial ranks earn median salaries of $103,000—still less than the STEM crowd, but narrowing the earnings divide by almost half.

So we know that college-major choice has a significant impact on immediate post-graduation salaries (and we’ll know even more as more states join Florida, Washington, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Virginia in publishing major-by-major salary figures for all their universities). We also know, per Dawson and Carnevale, that liberal arts grads face brighter economic prospects over time than their initial prospects might suggest. Transparency about outcomes—which is coming, slowly but surely—would seem to be just what students need to make informed choices about what and where to study.

But what about students’ souls? This is where the purpose-of-college debate becomes thorniest, I believe, even for liberal arts sympathizers like myself. Consider an eminent representative of the purist camp, Columbia University professor Andrew Delbanco. In his passionate defense of the liberal arts, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, he dismisses “narrow training in vocational subjects such as accounting or information technology” in favor of giving students “the precious chance to think and reflect before life engulfs them.”

It’s hard to be against reflection. All the more so if, as Delbanco advocates, universities take responsibility for giving students much more guidance than they receive now about “what’s worth thinking about.” However, it’s unclear why practicality should always take a backseat to the life of the mind. When I reviewed Delbanco’s book recently, I gave him credit for recognizing that a large and growing number of college students are working adults with kids and career-minded commuter students. But there doesn’t seem to be much place in his postsecondary universe for their legitimate workplace aspirations. Although “it is indeed patronizing to assume that nontraditional students can’t benefit from liberal arts education,” I wrote, “they may not want it. Most have very practical goals when they take on college classes along with their other demanding real-world commitments.”

If slavishly following marketplace imperatives when thinking about educational choices is a mistake, so is ignoring students’ practical desires. Fortunately, we don’t always face stark choices: Engineers can take literature classes, and history majors can study finance. But when firmer decisions must be made, it’s important to remember that different students want and need different things. So long as they’re well-informed—about both the educational and career consequences of their choices—that’s nothing to agonize about.

Image Credit: Gary Varvel

Looking to the future. Lindell Stone from Texas and Nathan Tilford from California both recently received football scholarships to attend to college. The amazing part? They are both still in middle school! (Education Week)

Clearing up confusion on the Common Core. NPR’s OnPoint hosts Education Week’s Catherine Gewertz, Eduwonk Andy Rotherham and others for a download on the Common Core and the mounting politics involved.

You guys vs. y’all. An [...]]]> Teaching with Google Glasses. The first teacher to ever have Google Glasses describes how she used them to teach physics in the “first person” and how it could change the future of teaching. (Edutopia)

Looking to the future. Lindell Stone from Texas and Nathan Tilford from California both recently received football scholarships to attend to college. The amazing part? They are both still in middle school! (Education Week)

Clearing up confusion on the Common Core. NPR’s OnPoint hosts Education Week’s Catherine Gewertz, Eduwonk Andy Rotherham and others for a download on the Common Core and the mounting politics involved.

You guys vs. y’all. An N.C. State University graduate student is in the limelight this week for creating maps of regional dialects. Joshua Katz created the maps for a statistics class project and is looking to how he can improve it and what the “next cool thing” is. (News Observer)

Amanda Stafford, ES policy intern, contributed to this report.

This observation isn’t [...]]]> If the Supreme Court strikes down or severely limits affirmative action in college admissions when it rules in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, don’t expect its decision to radically transform the landscape of U.S. college admissions. The reason? The court’s ruling will surely be influential, but as a practical matter, affirmative action is mostly irrelevant to admissions policies at the great majority of colleges or for the great majority of students. Most postsecondary institutions take almost all comers, so on those campuses racial and ethnic differences in applicants’ grades and test scores rarely come into play.

This observation isn’t new, but it’s often overlooked. Perhaps that’s because access to elite colleges and universities has taken on such an outsized (though understandable) role in how we think about our national creed of meritocracy and upward mobility.

In The Shape of the River, their influential (and controversial) 1998 defense of affirmative action, former Princeton president William Bowen and former Harvard president Derek Bok explicitly focus on a small set of academically selective institutions that disproportionately educate the nation’s leaders. After all, they say, there’s not much to debate in institutions where almost all qualified applicants get in. “It is when there are strict limits on the number of places in an entering class and far more qualified applicants than places, that the choices become difficult and the issue of whether to give weight to race comes to the forefront.”

By Bowen and Bok’s estimate, just 20 or 30 percent of four-year colleges and universities are selective. “Many people are unaware of how few colleges and universities have enough applicants to be able to pick and choose among them,” they write. (This selectivity figure would be even lower, of course, if the two-year institutions attended by about one-third of all college students were included.)

There’s no reason to think much has changed since then. A 2010 paper by Georgetown University Public Policy Professor Peter Hinrichs looked at how affirmative action bans in states such as California and Michigan affected college enrollment. He concluded that eliminating affirmative action does indeed lower enrollment of blacks and Hispanics at selective colleges, but that such bans “have no effect on the typical student and the typical college.”

Make no mistake: The Supreme Court’s decision will be immensely important for the country. Elite universities, for better or for worse, play a disproportionate role in molding the nation’s leaders (including, of course, current and past Harvard, Yale, and Columbia-trained Supreme Court justices). Who gets in, and how, has consequences. But whether selective college admissions move toward more focus on class, greater transparency, continued use of race, or some combination of the three, it’s worth remembering that the typical college and student won’t be affected one way or the other.

Photo Credit: Salon/AP

A second chance. The superintendent of Newark, NJ. has stopped school closures to conduct research on each school’s vulnerability. Schools slated to close next year will remain open indefinitely. (NJ Spotlight)

Gangnam Style. The head teacher of Penketh High school in the United Kingdom promised his 11th year students that if they met the school’s education goals he would perform “Gangnam Style.” The students met [...]]]> Welcoming new charter schools. Baltimore City has approved three new charter schools to open in 2014 and 2015. The schools include an all-girls school, a sciences and arts school, and an environmentally themed school. (The Baltimore Sun)

A second chance. The superintendent of Newark, NJ. has stopped school closures to conduct research on each school’s vulnerability. Schools slated to close next year will remain open indefinitely. (NJ Spotlight)

Gangnam Style. The head teacher of Penketh High school in the United Kingdom promised his 11^th year students that if they met the school’s education goals he would perform “Gangnam Style.” The students met the goals and the teacher followed through on his promise. (Huffington Post)

Extra money for upgrades. School officials in East Hampton, CT. have voted to use extra money to update the district’s “prehistoric” technology. Some upgrades will include the installation of wireless internet and nearly 200 new desktop computers. (The Middletown Press)