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In 2003, the New Jersey Department of Education released a white paper, “New Jersey Special Review Assessment,” which called for among other things, an end to Special Review Assessment (SRA) alternate graduation routes. The Department summarized all of its objective thus:
The elimination of the SRA; the creation of expanded remedial opportunities for students failing the High School Proficiency Assessment (HSPA); the development of an appeal procedure; and the award of a differentiated diploma for students who fail to achieve proficiency on the HSPA, but who do meet other graduation and attendance criteria.
As a consequence of this effort to be rid of the SRA, there are now two instruments of alternate assessment, the HSPA is the first level, considered by some to be a “middle school” level exam, and the SRA, which never went away.
The Installment of the HSPA has had little effect as 60 percent of those who take it are unable to meet the standard and therefore must take the SRA. When the NJDOE’s report was released in 2003, the graduation rate, according to Education Week’s annual Diplomas Count report, was 84.8 percent. New Jersey’s has since continued to top graduation rates, 82.5 in 2004, 83.3 in 2005, 82.1 in 2006. The current year’s Diploma’s Count report is based on 2006 data.
Sharing the top of the list with New Jersey, in ranked order: New Jersey (82.1), Wisconsin (81.7), Iowa (80.7), and Minnesota (79.2). The change in graduation rates for each state from 2000 to 2006 were: Wisconsin (+3.5), Iowa (+2.0), Minnesota (+0.3), and New Jersey (-1.3). New Jersey, despite being ranked first in high school graduation, actually enjoyed a higher rate of graduation in 2005.
Though New Jersey’s graduation rates over this period reflect a decline of -1.3, the rate has been relatively constant, hovering around 80 percentage points for six years, despite the external strain of policy mandates like No Child Left Behind (NCLB) which makes graduation more difficult for both students and teachers. The change in the other three states for this period can be described in each case as a modest increase, very modest in Minnesota.
New Jersey for six years has been producing more high school graduates than the three other states. According to Census Bureau data, higher education enrollment, which was estimated to be around 470,302 in 2000, has increased by 85,761 students to 556,063 in 2007. That’s a 15% increase in higher education enrollment. Comparing New Jersey’s higher education enrollment data to that of the other three states reveals the following ranking: MN (+18%) WI (+17%) NJ (+15%) IA (+14%) . Though New Jersey has the highest high school graduation rate among the three other states, New Jersey’s is only third highest increase in college enrollment during the period in question. Third highest is nothing to scoff at but why not first?
We would like the data to suggest that New Jersey’s alternate assessment is churning out high school graduates who lack the skills to move on to higher education. However, New Jersey does not seem to be doing so bad – though enrollment in New Jersey colleges is growing at a lower rate than it is in two of the other three states. Should New Jerseyans continue to ask questions about the SRA and what alternate graduation routes are doing to New Jersey’s future workforce? Perhaps.
According to some, more New Jerseyans are going out of state for college. Also, there are a greater number of special needs students like immigrants since 2000. This is something like an account proposed in the fall of last year by the New Jersey Association of State Colleges and Universities (NJASC). NJASC at that time placed the blame for the supposed “brain drain” on the State of New Jersey for underfunding higher education and playing a part in making our higher education institutions unattractive for in-state students. But what about the effect of alternate routes on New Jersey’s future workforce? The immigration account holds a bit of weight, though when we examine the increase in the approximate number of high-school enrolled students during the period in question there has been very little, about 37, 437.
The other three states have enjoyed steady, though modest, increases in the high school graduation rates since the reinvention of The Elementary and Secondary Education Act, NCLB. Yet, we cannot be certain that just because New Jersey’s college enrollment is 1-3% lower, students in those states are performing better than students in New Jersey. For instance, all four states, due to the testing mandates of NCLB, require students to take a kind of exit exam. And all four states now have alternate assessments in place. Two of the four states, Wisconsin and Minnesota, make explicit on their education department websites that alternate assessments are in place for students with disabilities. Though each of the other states now have alternate assessments in place, until recently New Jersey was alone in the practice of alternate assessment. Indeed, as recent as 2002, many states were without exit exams much less alternate exit exams. And in the rush to comply, many states have erected both with relative simultaneity. The institution of these standards occurred during the time span from which the enrollment data was gathered. Consequently, the effect of alternate routes on college enrollment in the three other states discussed may not yet be reflected in the survey data. For New Jersey, however, the effect would show in the data.
In all of this, a few questions persist. To what degree have Minnesota’s and New Jersey’s enrollment percentages been affected by the lack alternate routes? And how would New Jersey’s enrollment percentages look if alternate routes were not available. How high school is a function of higher education in New Jersey requires deeper investigation.
New Jersey Graduation Rate Tables:
| 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | Change | |
| WI | 78.1 | 78.9 | 80.6 | 77.3 | 80.5 | 81.7 | 3.5 |
| IA | 78.7 | 79.1 | 82.7 | 81.1 | 82.8 | 80.7 | 2.0 |
| MN | 78.9 | 78.7 | 78.6 | 78.7 | 78.1 | 79.2 | 0.3 |
| NJ | 83.4 | 84.9 | 84.8 | 82.5 | 83.3 | 82.1 | -1.3 |
| 3-Year Averages | New Jersey’s Higher Education Enrollment |
| 2000 | 470,302 |
| 2004-07 | 556,063 |
| Change | 85,761 (+15%) |
| State | Change in College Enrollment |
| MN | +18% |
| WI | +17% |
| NJ | +15% |
| IA | +14% |
Today, as the Senate Education Committee met over Senate bill no. 1609 (Lesniak, Whelan) The New Jersey Business and Industry Association petitioned that although it didn’t disagree with the project set out in the bill which seeks to reform New Jersey’s Higher Education Act, or to the installation of a new secretary of higher education, it wanted to ensure that “flexibility” was available to New Jersey’s state universities. I believe the sentiment was that “business believes in flexibility.” This was followed by, I think it was: “business also believes in affordability.” Ok, well, there comes a time when we have to stop thinking about what this business chump “believes.” Have you seen what he’s done to Rutgers, no, even better, to the country? So what if business believes in flexibility, the pope believes a lot of fine things but people still give that guy a hard time.
Proposed legislation, among other things, does the following:
• Installs a Secretary of Higher Education at the head of the New Jersey Commission on Higher Education.
• Forms the membership and stations of the new New Jersey Commission on Higher Education.
• Requires that the boards of state colleges and universities create an audit committee of financially experienced voting members of the board, an internal audit staff, and an external auditor.
• Compels the New Jersey Commission on Higher Education to prepare a “comprehensive master plan” for state higher education.
• Requires that the boards of state colleges and universities create a nominations and governance committee to revise policy and oversee the internal governance of the board itself.
• Requires that the boards of state colleges and universities develop fund raising strategies.
• Places tighter restrictions on campus expansion and new construction.
• Requires that outside grants and funds received be for the purpose of higher education.
• Redirects all incoming revenue through the Office of Management and Budget and to the discretion of OMB’s director.
Given the recent and varied controversy at our research schools these reforms are good things. Especially striking are the audits, and other reports required from the commission which could add a much needed layer of transparency and community involvement to New Jersey higher education. Also, the redirection of funds through OMB is a great idea. These are good steps toward creating oversight so state universities can do what they are supposed to—teach New Jersey kids. Though the bureaucracy and process described in the bill is enormous, perhaps the rigorous oversight will gain more revenue for higher education in the long run, capturing it from the various projects which have had nothing but tentative connections to higher education, and from the scandals that have not only injured our public higher education funds but the general morale of students, alumni, and taxpayers.
Regarding “flexibility,” we have to ask ourselves whether our state universities have actually earned their autonomy since passage of The State College Autonomy Laws (SCAL) of 1986. Have these institutions budgeted with student affordability in mind? When they accepted money from outside sources, did they do so for reasons that would ultimately increase the likelihood that kids would graduate on time and pay less out of their own pockets? In 2008, the New Jersey Association of State Colleges and Universities claimed that tuitions increased because states cut back their funding and because their capital projects must be financed independently. This latter, independent financing, means that the debt falls back on students. I remember that representatives of a certain college were going on about how hotel room-like accommodations were absolutely necessary if they were to enhance their enrollments. They complained that not only was there less funding but that more regulation/oversight would cramp their style and that they would not be able to find the most competitive bidder for this project. They blamed other state schools for dirtying the bath water and bringing this regulation down on them. They blamed the state for insufficiently funding their “campus modernization” processes and forcing them to raise tuition. Under the SCAL of 1994, the college or university is allowed to invest college funds, to put their income to work. Also, our state colleges under the SCAL, fix tuition. There is simply too much incentive to raise tuition in order to use state money to offset the costs of capital projects.
As SCAL increased the powers of colleges and universities to self govern, the Education Restructuring Act (ERA) of 1994 in turn removed the then unnecessary State Department of Higher Education. There since has been no balance between taxpayer money and the receiving institutions. A new Secretary of higher education would be a great thing, or, at least, not a bad thing. Flexibility and business is out of place in a state funded school. Also, what’s the use of funding an institution that admits the majority of its student population from out of state? These kinds of state institutions exist among those included in the bill. Leave that out-of-state diversity to someone else, to Seton Hall, state schools. There’s plenty of diversity here in New Jersey, and disparity, too.
Do state colleges and universities think that this new layer of bureaucracy is paralyzing and unfair? You bet they do. But to many in the public, accountability is what is needed here. For many,New Jersey’s colleges and universities have blown their chances at autonomy. If some of our state colleges or universities think that they are being punished for wrongs that they haven’t committed, then perhaps these people shouldn’t have been so complicit when others in the system were abusing their autonomy. Being innovative with finance, “flexible,” can certainly help during a recession, but great business ideas are just bad bets when they go wrong. New Jersey cannot let its state higher education schools gamble with public money.
Here’s Michael Riccards talking about his experience working for the previous higher education agency in New Jersey listen>
It is a pity that that first stimulus package was given to the architects of our crisis and received by no one in particular with less than nominal oversight. It looks now as if Democrat officials have begun to think hard about round two of troubled asset relief funding as spending proposals are released this week. The National Association of Budget Officers (NASBO) counts that $141.6 billion is to be applied to the project of education, and $79 billion of that number is for the purpose of paying for education within the states:
The state directed funding is made up of $39 billion to local school districts and public colleges and universities distributed through existing state and federal formulas; $15 billion to states as grants for meeting key performance measures; and $25 billion to states for other high priority needs such as public safety and other critical services, which may include education. Additional funds include $15.6 billion to increase Pell grants by $500 and $6 billion for higher education modernization.
For one, as New Jersey’s school funding formula is difficult enough to understand without the confusion of exterior formulas and legislation, it will be important for New Jerseyans to keep an eye on this money—school funds disappear inexplicably in this state. Also, whether New Jersey even qualifies for this kind of assistance isn’t clear. It would be unfortunate if the money marked for education was absorbed somehow into the pet issue of lowering the property taxes of suburban New Jersey while poor schools and poor students in our various blighted areas continue to decline.
Whether every state should qualify for stimulus or not, the new plan should be much better appreciated by Americans than the prior plan, if you can call it a plan. The initiative shown by legislators to enrich all tiers of our nation’s schools is refreshing and long overdue. And if we think about it, the stimulus infusion gives educators and administrators the space and time to work out all of the un- or under-funded school reform programs of the past eight years. For instance, one often wielded bone of contention, the lack of funding for after school programs has been the most blaring of the nation’s school reform issues. Here is a program that gets kids off the street and makes constructive the time that might otherwise be spent in a troubled or empty home. Organizations like New Jersey after 3 are probably the best suited for this type of assistance. Specifically speaking, somewhere in the modest $39 billion, we may be able to find the resources to keep school facilities like libraries and study areas in low income areas open and supervised long after school is out. We could expand counseling programs, sports and leadership programs. We should add to, extend the duration of, and fundamentally amend the title 1 program in order to make it more like a grant or fellowship based on excellence and experience rather than willingness and need. Let us network with organizations like vista and sweeten stipends, pay new teachers to shadow, intern, and build or maintain urban habitats rather than paying them to cut their teeth on disadvantaged kids who, really, have enough on their plates without the added aggravation of inexperienced and mercenary teachers. Enriching after school and reforming title 1 are two of the most important priorities for any sincere education reformer.
Let us make these changes while reforming the way we test and spend. This isn’t an economic buffet but a buffer that may allow reformers to set in place what works and swiftly remove what doesn’t. Obama once said that he wants teachers to have a buy-in to accountability. Let’s sell them accountability while we have time to pay for it. Before we grade and discourage future adults with our accountability complex, why can’t we turn accountability on educators. I do not mean to say that we should be over harsh when we hold people accountable, but that it should be common sense that we hold educators accountable before we discourage, alienate, and experiment on students in an effort to make test scores and coffers balance. There are better ways to make education work. These children are assets who must be prepared to enter the labor market and perpetuate that business cycle that we are all so concerned about. Let us give educators SAT and GRE exams regularly and let us leverage their scores with promotions. Our $141 billion should be used as breathing room and it should encourage administrators to air out the unsatisfactory teachers and reward the excellent ones. Educators should base their decisions on a number of factors including competency and student performance. If educators are “teaching to the test” in order to keep their jobs then people should begin to wonder why there is such a divide between “the test” and “the teaching.” What is it, exactly, that children should learn and is that in some way different from what we expect them as adults to know? There are fundamental and philosophical problems that precede any attempt to induce the education of children with a 100 percent chance of success. Education is more subtle than this.
The “subtlety” of education describes a notion held by former New Jersey governor Brendan Byrne’s education commissioner Fred Burke who during the national shift to quantified educational outcomes in the 1970s and 1980s, emphasized “process” measures rather than the logic of input-output that reigns over our education system today.
Presumably, “process” describes a method of funding only the sufficient means of education, i.e. facilities, books, teachers, rather than the educational means to some predicted end. Process holds education to be variable, something experienced differently by everyone. The notion that educational success is subtle rather than predictable supports the notion of genius, originality, and novelty. Further, a process approach assumes that educational outcomes are, essentially, unpredictable. This does not mean that there are no conditions for adequate education but that deep and lasting educational experiences come only through a delicate process that cannot be reproduced in a lab with a 100 percent rate of success. Simply put, let us at least put a sufficient amount of money into providing programs and facilities that tend to produce better educational outcomes and better students. Let us raise the quality of life for students in poor districts.
In the higher education sphere, we must get realistic about the meanings of words like “modernization” and “education.” Schools that consider the erection of temples to Ditka, i.e. stadiums and massage rooms for coaches and athletes should be excluded from stimulus as long as their priorities are not the higher education of their students. It’s a shame but no one should ever have to insist that higher education be the first priority of our institutions of higher education. I know that people like sports, it’s great for families and alumni, for morale and all that. However, just like any school spending gimmick, there ought to be some measurement of tangible return to the school for each dollar spent. If even the money is not being redirected from the original purpose of education, parents and students must still wonder what kind of people would allow New Jersey’s future labor force to drop out or bankrupt themselves at so young an age so that wealthy football fans can have a cushy new sky box and a cute little tapas bar to enjoy once a year. At least use the room for classes in the off season. The skybox idea was absurd. College graduates know that building a school requires that a school be built. Building a stadium requires that…well, you get it. Trading a new stadium with a sky box for books and educational opportunity is not how I would define the modernization of higher education. Rather, I would call that instead the noticeable decline of civilization. Three years ago when students at Rutgers University were being turned away at the financial aid line or asked to take on significantly more debt and a part time job, these private sport-funding people didn’t move a finger. School funding whiners—look there and only there before you ask the state and random alumni for more money. Don’t hound your graduates for donations when several millions are flowing into the college without a dime devoted to relieving the real and rising debt of students. Call some “helicopter company” somewhere and ask them to foot the bill for 25 or 50 deserving undergraduates. You’ll impress everyone. Regarding the definition of education, the University of Chicago since the 1930s has had a pretty good definition of higher education that other schools may want to emulate. It’s called a strong core curriculum. Not only does it make teaching a profession, it also adds worth to the degrees of graduates. It should be nurtured and strengthened because, for employers, it represents the quality of the graduates that it tempers. Likewise, it earns graduates real jobs and thereby earns departments real endowments. That’s real return. There is your god, educators. It’s not the skybox, it’s the curriculum.
Spending our money wisely is absolutely necessary because there will most likely be no third chance to get things right. This $141 billion dollars does not exist, this is money borrowed from the next generation that the federal government is investing in the American people. The stakes are high. Will we settle on a definition of “education modernization” and play football with old pads and without the skybox or will we destroy the next generation of students and tax them into oblivion simultaneously?
Today, the AP reports that while it still falls short of Harvard in selectivity (and endowment) Princeton ranks #1 in alumni giving. The story features the enthusiasm of Princeton alumni and the pride they have for their top ranked Alma mater. We might be led here to assume that rankings merely increase prestige of alumni who are then more than willing to give back. AP quotes a retired physician and Princeton Alumni: “Being the No. 1 school and having attended it and/or graduated from it, you naturally retain that for the rest of your life.” So it’s the ranking (published and not) rather than the afterglow of an exceptional educational experience that keeps them giving. I prefer to think that there are more complex forces which influence our compulsion to give as I am forced to hang up on the Rutgers telethon kids 2-3 days a week. You might say that because of where I went to college, I hold a unique perspective of charity. I am not ashamed to say that I have refused to give as little as $20 because I know it will do nothing to increase the library’s resources, lower tuition or further the pursuit of academic progress in any shape or form. I once tried to procure an oath from one of these student telemarketers in exchange for $100 if only they could tell me a pleasant lie, create a brief account of how my contribution would improve the academic environment for students. No answer came and I was forced to imagine that my $100 would do no more than help buy McCormick a new pair of Jordans… Disappointed, I kept my $100. Call it civil disobedience, I feel moral. Rutgers might meditate on this.
Anyhow, AP continues onto the line that these rankings, while increasing the giving zeal of alumni, might be destroying today’s education. I think there’s something there. Rankings surely promote a kind of instrumentalism in schools that packages education as a mere institution of licensing, what Robert Maynard Hutchins described in his development of the doctrine of the ad hoc in his 1953 The Conflict In Education. To this end, AP reports the sentiments of education reform heavy-hitter Loyd Thacker who is the executive director of The Education Conservancy, a site dedicated to the purpose of reforming the admissions angle of the higher education question. Thacker sees rankings like those of U.S. News and World Report as harmful to education which ought, in his opinion, be about learning. AP reports:
To Thacker, rankings add to the stress and pressure kids are under, and make them more concerned about grades and SAT scores than learning.
“This process makes kids sneaky, game-playing conformists,” he says. “The high-end kids are over-processed, over-packaged, disengaged with learning. The poor kids, the disadvantaged kids, see this process as so complex and so convoluted and so costly that they’re not even engaging in it.”
Certainly, the “high-end kids” are disengaged but I don’t think it’s solely because of rankings, I think rankings really do work for these types of kids. Their opposite numbers, the “poor kids” of course, are stuck with degrees that suit their lot in life. Dewey once saw a complimentary learning disability between the very rich, whose experience of pleasure without pain has caused them to become disengaged from reality, and the very poor whose experience is dominated by pain which in turn causes them to learn only negative pleasure and take every stimulus as a mere means of lessening their suffering. Practically speaking, if any of these lower-end kids can transcend their environments and come to understand the value of an education (which alone is actually screenplay-worthy)they will most likely be forced to attend community college, to work in the meantime, incur debt, and finally draw lower wages. In a sorting system where higher education has become nothing but a licensing program, there is almost as much financial incentive for poor kids to attend community college for education’s sake as there is to use it as a gateway to material prosperity. Unfortunately, productivity rather than process is the aim of the community college – and rightly so. On its face, there is no incentive to go to community college. But that’s neither here nor there.
What is most interesting is the idea that there is some conflict, as yet unresolved, in education. Namely, this conflict between the need to package education up like an ipod or a suit and the need to learn. Education has become nothing but a means to some professional end. This, as I’ve mentioned, might be called the doctrine of needs or of the ad hoc. Robert Hutchins warned that American Universities are susceptible to the efforts of occupational groups who are able to create professional schools as a benchmark test for new professionals. The aim of this, says Hutchins, is to raise the quality of professionals but also to limit competition. We, right now, are no strangers to professional schools though when Hutchins wrote about the conflict in education, professional schools were still a slightly foreign fact of the university campus.
American universities, because of the influence that these groups may have upon legislatures that support the state institutions or because of the role that they may be expected to play as donors or fee payers to the private universities, have been unable to resist the claims of these occupational groups.
And as time drags on, higher education becomes a purely vocational institution. Well done. Not only does admission exclusivity now represent the sole determinant of your professional potential, but education everywhere is nothing more than the mouth of a channel that takes kids, “high-end” and the others, to some narrowly defined educational destination. Hutchins thought this was a problem but you might say: so what?
If you say so what, then we can no longer take Jefferson’s stated intentions for an institution of general education to be the obvious aim of our current education system. Universal suffrage, it would seem, is no longer the aim of general education. Preparation for the graduated professionalism of higher education is the curriculum of our primary and secondary schools. Further, enfranchisement is a pallid illusion for Americans without at least an associate’s degree in something.
That brilliant president of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins, was one of those high-end kids having inherited a great intellectual legacy from his parents. Having served as the Editor in Chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s great books collection we can safely assume that he knew much about his culture’s greatest thinkers from every discipline but mathematics, an exclusion for which we should not blame him. If a wide range of experience is a key ingredient of competent citizenship, and John Dewey thought it was, then John Maynard Hutchins was also a great citizen. His solution: leave the Universities alone to their escalating specialization and create another institution, perhaps one that closely matches in aims and means the traditional University, or better, Academy. He does not provide many details about this new institution, like whether it will be compulsory, selective or 1 or 5 years, though he calls this new institution the light and hope of “the nations now wandering in darkness” and seems to suggests that the benefit of its very human curriculum will somehow reach round the world. He suggested that these new institutions “might fashion the mind of the 20th century and make it equal to the dreadful obligations that Providence has laid upon it.” Though a bit inarticulate with his solution he makes it clear that the pace and purpose of education have outstripped our capacity to learn as an end in itself rather than as a means to some end like the MCAT, LSAT or GRE Subject Test – to learn for the love and novelty of learning new things. That’s a very human sort of thing to sacrifice, in my opinion.
Some months back the New Jersey Promise Council of the New Jersey Association of State Colleges and Universities (ASCU) invited the wisdom of the higher education community into one room so that they might share their wisdom and apply it to a list of issues afflicting New Jersey colleges and universities. The meeting convened one morning at the College of New Jersey campus and ran for several hours which, according to the syllabus distributed weeks prior, were to be spent searching for a novel approach to the basic problems of productivity, accessibility and the affordability of higher education. The list of topics went something like this:
The goals of the effort include helping the state colleges/universities gain greater control over cost to keep tuition affordable; increasing their ability to serve more New Jerseyans; and strengthening accountability and public trust. We hope the project will result in a renewed public agenda for state college higher education. The New Jersey College Promise will reflect that New Jersey’s state colleges and universities are dedicated to serving our citizens and willing to hold themselves accountable to the citizens they serve. Elements of this effort include the following:
1. Engaging independent expert consultants to examine rigorously state college/university cost structures for the purpose of gaining greater efficiency to help keep college affordable, citizens’ biggest concerns.
2. Convening a group of national experts on higher education and individuals from outside of higher education to examine the benefits and means of improving nonpartisan, lay citizen trustee-governed institutions; to protect public colleges from political intrusion; to identify policy that will increase college affordability and access; and to promote innovation, change and public accountability.
3. Consulting experts from New Jersey state government, business, labor and higher education to study and recommend where state policy and regulation needs to be changed to assist the colleges and universities in being more efficient and effective in serving their missions and the state.
4. Commissioning scientific opinion polls to learn what New Jerseyans think and to test public support for solutions to college affordability that can be implemented.
5. Hosting forums on higher education to make New Jersey the national leader in college access, affordability and accountability in the 21st century.
6. Making specific annual policy recommendations to the governor, legislature and others to achieve the Promise; and keeping all parties informed regarding succeeding on this agenda.
7. Building effective communication strategies, including using internet technology to inform a broader constituency for public higher education, to bridge the gap between opinion and policy action to achieve the “Promise” agenda.
Following this list there was a series of facts about higher education such as the state’s graduation rate, funding levels, the rate of out-migration and cost of tuition. (I’ve pulled all of this from the NJ College Promise website. It looked more or less like the information from the previous statement.)
The attendees, drawn from various parts of the community, business leaders, and grinning local college presidents, were mailed briefing packets which contained a clear articulation of the goals of the meeting. For this reason, some attendees from New Jersey think tanks even brought along their own detailed proposals for the systemic reorganization of higher education. Soon those grins would fade and those proposals, to the chagrin of their authors, would depreciate in purpose and relevance.
At the outset, the forum was amiable and ready to share their ideas, they offered suggestions for all the basic points detailed in their briefings. The council members, however, seemed unwilling to provide a tangible statement of purpose or some so what to let their attendees know how the stated mission of the dialog was progressing or if they were on the right track. Rather than an answer, Executive Director Darryl Greer would rest and reassure, dispel the suggestions of the forum as too specific 0r something and refuse to spill the beans as if he had something special planned, as if he were addressing a room of giggling expectants waiting for a traffic cop in a thong to jump out of a birthday cake. It would turn out that he had other motives.
Standing at the base of a mess of bound white butcher paper, he insisted that all would be salient once every topic had been addressed, though, not convinced by the wizard’s palliatives, the attendees continued to pick at the edges of the suspicious curtain until the great plan was discovered, or better, denuded. Near the end of the discussion, in more words: they want more money dedicated to higher education and more public trust for their institutions.
The ride continued as Greer and company seemed to be attempting to obfuscate their meaning, possibly to lend their words more credibility and novelty, timeshare-salesman-like. On the issue of trust, Greer and friends noted that the recent host of UMDNJ scandals has created an infamous association between the latter and all New Jersey institutions. This association was not formed casually and is largely the result of the The New Jersey State Commission of Investigation (NJSCI) report released in October of last year (2007). “Higher Education: Vulnerable to Abuse,” found the UMDNJ incidents to be more symptomatic of a prevailing systemic susceptibility in all New Jersey’s state colleges and universities, a conclusion deemed unfair by colleges like TCNJ who have recently anticipated pressure from the state regarding school expansion and construction. The NJSCI report found:
“an entire system vulnerable to problematic governance, serious shortcomings in oversight, accountability and transparency and outright violations of the public trust. While the expansive panorama of corruption at UMDNJ clearly is an aberration in the extreme, it nonetheless signifies what can happen within a system structured to render its constituent parts susceptible to a host of questionable and patently abusive practices. The findings of this investigation demonstrate that piecemeal change would be a grossly inadequate strategy in the face of complex problems whose scope and cause extend well beyond the narrow confines of a single institution. Unless the state is willing to tolerate the risk of history scandalously repeating itself somewhere within this troubled system, wholesale reform is the only sensible and responsible course of action.”
Indeed, when discussing accountability, productivity and access earlier in the meeting it was very difficult for the forum to veer away from examples drawn from Rutgers University. It was only natural that Greer et al. be adamant about dispelling these exported solutions, though I would argue that it was only natural for the forum to make them. This perhaps might have materialized as obfuscation on Greer’s part as his aim might have been more to prove the discrete characteristics of each state college in order to dispel the idea that there is some uniform vulnerability to corruption as coined by the NJSCI.
Taken in whole, the mission of NJ College Promise is murky and can be paraphrased thus: New Jersey Colleges need freedom from state control because that control will be essential to navigating the new terrain of higher education. That is the meaning of their emphasis on out-migration, that is the meaning of the “emergent populations.”the most important message in their statement, it seems, is: “state colleges/universities gain greater control over cost to keep tuition affordable; increasing their ability to serve more New Jerseyans.” More state money or less financial control, fewer mandates, etc, seems to be what they mean when they float facts like “Higher education’s share of total state budget has declined by almost one-half since FY 1983 to 5.4% from 9.8%” and the like.
The argument is not far removed from the argument made by the majority of K-12 edvocates when they call for an end to unfunded mandates under the tyrannical No Child Left Behind. This argument carries weight in a discussion of K-12 education though I still don’t see how it creates a compelling argument for less state control or how it undermines the findings of the NJSCI—not that there aren’t compelling reasons to think that all New Jersey schools are systemically unique and discrete in regard to their susceptibility to abuse or corruption. In fact, during the meeting, Gregg Edwards of the Center for Policy Research urged the council members to leave their “K-12 mindset.” Constructing some tenuous bridge between state control and out-migration can only undermine their larger plans, which seem to have something to do with hiring private contractors to undertake school construction/expansion projects. People have and always will leave the state. Famously, Benjamin Franklin called attention to this phenomenon when he described New Jersey as “a valley of humility between two mountains of conceit” or more illustrative, “a keg tapped at both ends.” In fact, Franklin actually left his home in Boston at an early age to live on one of those very “mountains,” Pennsylvania. He thereby gave New Jersey a complete miss.
In short, the NJ College Promise people ought to clearly state that they would like to have more or total control over their finances and construction projects by offering a concise solution to some of the perils they’ve listed. They ought to insist on positive strategies that include the lowest degree of state participation and perhaps offering to cut costs on the college level. They might pursue the old notion of shared services and equipment or perhaps manipulating the schedule. Hall Institute trustee Bob Haney has suggested that colleges run year-round programs in order to cut costs and make better use of expensive facilities and resources that aren’t utilized during the summer months. They might investigate some of these things rather than holding more confusing press conferences and baffling more reporters with their esoteric calls for solutions from the community. NJ College Promise might actually investigate some of those solutions. Otherwise, the second coming of the State Department of Higher Education or its like may be on its way. Perhaps these institutions have had their training wheels removed too soon. If a Department of Higher Education presided over our state colleges, it might be more difficult to justify an appropriation for a vacant position, or to pay a football coach $1.5 million. A DOHE might do more to politicize the way money arrives at colleges, though sometimes partisan bickering is preferable to unchecked unscrupulousness. Let’s buy college educations for more kids and fewer yachts for administrators and coaches.
On the 12th of this month, June, The Economist ran an interesting article on technology in America. Using the results of RAND Corporation’s National Defense Research Institute report, “US Competitiveness in Science and Technology” they inferred that “the world’s brightest people are gravitating to the world’s best opportunities. A higher proportion than ever of these paragons want to make their homes in the United States.” RAND’s findings:
-America “accounts for 40% of total world spending on research and development”;
-“produces 63% of the most frequently cited [science and technology] publications”;
-“employs 70% of the world’s living Nobel laureates”;
-“scientists and engineers continue to earn on average more than non-S&E workers (about 25 percent more) and continue to have lower unemployment than the non-S&E workforce for similar levels of education. The salaries of U.S. citizens in S&E have grown in line with those of U.S. citizens in non-S&E positions, suggesting that, on average, the relative attractiveness of S&E careers has not changed much”;
-“within each percentile category of S&E salaries there is little difference between the average salaries of U.S. citizens and noncitizens […]. The similarity in salaries across the salary spectrum suggests that the quality/skill range of noncitizen S&E workers is similar to that of citizen S&E workers”;
Is the funding importance of math and science over verbal skills and literacy simply a fact of life in America? Considering RAND’s findings, science and engineering fields provide a remarkably equal opportunity for immigrants – and probably the children of immigrants – to flourish. Does American public policy owe anything to English education or will America be fine without it? Perhaps English education, literacy, verbal ability and other characteristically similar skills should be optional like art or music rather than tested and touted as standard and indicative of intelligence. Or maybe the science/verbal imbalance is fine the way it is. If you can create your own markup language or write Java code in your sleep is it so important that you can’t decide where a semicolon is appropriate or you can’t conjugate the verb “nuke”? Perhaps not.
Link to the Economist article
Link to RAND report
In the June/July 2008 issue of Miller-McCune, researchers Norman Nie and Saar Golde frame their findings in a way that finds education to be nothing more than a system of filtering, more a means of demonstrating one’s inborn talents rather than developing them. In “Does Education Really Make You Smarter?” researchers Nie and Golde found that, counter to the popular belief that there is a positive correlation between verbal ability and the level of a person’s educational attainment, when vocabulary scores over the past century were actually charted alongside levels of educational attainment the latter rose significantly while the former stayed in a plateu. This observation, say Nie and Golde, demonstrates that there is now less reason to support the popular assumption that more education is causally responsible for better scores. On the contrary, more education does not improve our verbal abilities. For the authors, it follows that particular instances of public funding dedicated to increasing educational outcomes may actually be better spent somewhere else.
As they only provide data about verbal scores, their argument is significantly limited to conjectures about verbal skills. So, in order to make their results more compelling, the authors declare verbal skills to be one of the strongest determinants of both intelligence and employability: “Verbal ability serves as the foundation for interpersonal communication and the transmission of ideas, both of which are necessary for success in the job market, and for other positive outcomes we mentioned […] There is also substantial literature asserting that verbal ability is the single most important indicator of general intelligence.” If verbal scores qua intelligence are equal to employability, it follows that class is also a function of intelligence and therefore people may be unemployed or unemployable because they are immutably stupid. The researchers, however, have not themselves produced any evidence to support this idea that verbal scores are markers of intelligence, or perhaps more concerning, that employment is a function of verbal scores.
As someone who studied English in college, I must say that I would have been much better off had I undertaken a course of computer studies and science rather than the literature and writing classes that, in the end, must only have increased the clarity and eloquence of my communications. My peers in English most often use their communication skills in the service industry, or, ironically, in education where, if we take seriously the reasoning of Nie and Golde, they teach mean things to no useful end and probably should be fired for producing low verbal scores. I often think upon my self-indulgent choice to major in the subject of English as the cause of my indelibly maimed salary. I am just as often led to dream of a better life in finance. I think about law school, a lot. What I mean to say is that vocabulary has not been a marker of competence or employability, for employers at least, for quite a while.
Nie and Golde have reported that, for a good portion of the century, verbal scores have been in a plateau while education attainment scores have increased phenomenally. It is important to note that Nie and Golde, “to avoid complications caused by changing demographics and questions about the validity of such tests with minority and immigrant populations, […] included only the native-born, white American population 30 to 65 years of age, using information collected over the last 35 years of parallel surveys.” From data collected from a sample of white Americans over 35 years, they conclude that education has no effect on verbal ability/intelligence. They fail, however, to notice that government money and attention has never been as dedicated to the purpose of raising our nation’s verbal scores as it has been to the project of our nation’s defense and that the effects of this attention have influenced the incentives for educational attainment for white Americans, minority Americans and immigrants alike. Government subsidies have been applied to education both from within, as direct departmental funding, and without, as employment opportunities in the public and private sectors. They have not noticed that the greatest increases in education were increases in government subsidy leading up to and spanning the Cold War era. For instance, in 1944 the G.I. Bill increased college enrollment exponentially and most likely fed into the growth in military and technological interests, rather than verbal scores, in various ancillary ways. Also, 14 years later, the passage of the National Defense Education Act of 1958—widely assumed to be the direct result of the launch of Russia’s Sputnik, an unprecedented technological feat—forced English/verbal related departments to play second fiddle to math and science. This move in American policy to science and technology has led to astounding technological advancement, the birth of private industries that were inconceivable only 60 years ago and significant distinction among American researchers in fields related to science and math. Since 1951, Americans have won over 50% of Nobel Prizes in math and science related fields—a significant achievement.
English verbal ability cannot compete with math and science in the realm of American education funding, however, it is interesting to see how many have used the American education system to become fluent in Russian or Arabic languages since the presidencies of FDR and Eisenhower. FYI: enrollment in Arabic language courses has gained 126% between 2002 and 2006; Chinese, 50%.
American industry has not actually prohibited the study of English but, due to a dearth of employment opportunities, it has produced generations of fairly literate gas attendants and Olive Garden waiters—all the while funding and incentivizing the fields most important to national defense and to a specific definition of progress. Said differently, little has been done to support fields which develop verbal ability.
The inequality between educational attainment and verbal scores can therefore be accounted for without the wholesale and rudimentary rejection of the link between funding education and educational outcomes. Public and private subsidy and attention have not been wholly applied, either directly as education funding or indirectly as employment opportunity, to the growth of fields for which verbal skills are important. It follows that in an environment where college has become a mere means to economic stability and national defense and where English verbal ability can provide neither of these things, there are simply no economic incentives and therefore no compelling reasons for students to develop their verbal skills. We are more than a century removed from the time when higher learning was considered an end in itself.
The most important point I wish to make is not that the authors underestimate the value of education subsidy in educational outcomes, but that they drastically overestimate the importance of verbal skills in the job market. According to The College Majors Handbook, although there have been recent increases, the average English graduate still earns 10% below the national average. Payscale.com reports that the median American salary for less than 1 year of experience in the field of Communications is $32-33,000; in Journalism, $33-34,000; in English, $34-35,000. In contrast, a Science major will begin at $40-41,000; Science/Computer Information Systems, $43-44,000; Computer Science, $48-49,000. Salary caps are understandably lower for English than for science or math-related fields.
Rather than simply assuming that verbal ability is essential to communication in the workplace, which is a correct assumption, the authors might have added the verbal scores of college graduates who make the median American salary to their data. This might have caused us to examine the true causes of the plateau in verbal ability.
If we are to assume that progress is generally dependent upon verbal ability, then we might look for a solution that enables job seekers from English/verbal backgrounds to compete with those employed based upon their backgrounds in math and science. A positive solution might be to increase the incentives for job seekers with developed verbal skills in the job market. These new incentives would add competition to this field that might help to raise mean verbal scores, more so than direct funding to English or communication departments. If these kinds of incentives existed in both public and private sectors, demand might cause better education funding to flow into these areas.
A negative solution might be to cut down the numbers employed in the science and technology related industries by somehow mandating that employees be held to a more rigorous and holistic assessment of both math and verbal abilities. This would root out people with poor verbal skills, ensure clear communication in the workplace, and indirectly raise mean verbal scores. This absurd negative solution, apart from its obvious problems, has a less apparent downside; it is not very representative of our American democracy.
Although verbal aptitude is great for communication in the workplace, it may not actually be an essential component of our modern American definition of progress. In fact, assigning it too much weight may actually have political and economic side effects. By suggesting that verbal skills have played or ought to play such a significant role in the hiring process, as Nie and Golde have suggested, we are led to absurd negative solutions like that above. Also, historically speaking, if verbal skills had been as important to employment as the authors suggest, then American industry would not have enjoyed the labor of so many highly competent first and second-generation immigrants. In turn, these immigrants would not have had a place or chance to succeed. Historically, our science and technology related industries could not afford to lose the human capital that has fueled our phenomenal success to this point. Perhaps then, verbal ability is not essential to our American definition of progress and perhaps real progress is not something that requires definition.
Popular Sovereignty 