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Matthew Lynch published in Policy & Reform, Secondary Education, Teachers

High school Dropout Rates Up; Are Math and Science the Cause?

More rigorous math and science requirements for high school graduation are in place, and simultaneously dropout rates in the country are up.

Research back to 1990 showed that the US dropout rate rose to a high of 11.4 percent when students were required to take six math and science courses, compared with 8.6 percent for students who needed less math and science courses in order to graduate.

The dropout rate is up to 5 percentage points higher when gender, race and ethnicity are considered.

William F. Tate, vice provost for graduate education and dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences says that part of the problem with adding math and science courses to requirements was that a significant number of students weren’t prepared to meet the revised requirements.

Andrew Plunk, a postdoctoral research fellow in the psychiatry department at Washington University School of Medicine, says the study highlights that the one-size-fits all approach to education requirements is not ideal due to various demographic groups, states and school districts that are all different.

When educational policies cause an unintentional consequence like an increase in students dropping out, the effects reverberate far beyond the classroom walls.

“Communities with higher dropout rates tend to have increased crime,” says Plunk. “Murders are more common. A previous study estimated that a 1 percent reduction in the country’s high school dropout rate could result in 400 fewer murders per year.”

While I do feel that the high drop out rate could be blamed on math and science courses, I don’t feel that the US should ease up on those requirements. I think the key is to better prepare the students. We need to make sure the students are ready for the requirements and aim to help all students graduate high school.

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Matthew Lynch published in HBCU's, Higher Education

Turning the Tide: Can admissions reforms redefine achievement?

Julie Renee Posselt, University of Michigan

Individualism makes America unhealthy and unequal, and college admissions offices have the power to do something about it. So argues a short but important report, Turning the Tide, released last week by the Making Caring Common (MCC) Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

College admissions offices send messages to students about what society values. To change the message that individual achievement matters most, the report recommends admissions practices that balance intellectual and ethical engagement. It advises strategies for assessing community service and diversity experiences. Ultimately, it wants to redefine achievement to reduce pressure on students and improve access for low-income students.

Is this report part of a sea change in higher education?

As a professor whose research examines merit and diversity in academic gatekeeping, I think the answer to this question is a clear yes.

The question is, will their recommendations work?

The report is on the right track

For years, guidance and college counselors have prodded students to apply to colleges with the right fit, not just the best ranking. And educators have pushed to align preferences in admissions offices with higher education’s public mission.

In 2003, Harvard law professor Lani Guinier proposed that admissions consider both academic and democratic merit. She argued that if colleges’ mission includes preparing leaders for an increasingly diverse democracy, then admissions should reward potential for such leadership.

How to recognize and measure that leadership potential, like other so-called noncognitive factors, is still up for debate. But MCC’s call to consider “authentic” experiences with diversity and “ethical engagement” fits with a more democratic notion of merit.

Admissions officers strive for holistic review. But does it work?
COD Newsroom, CC BY

Around the country, educators are huddling to develop, test and refine models of holistic review that honor students’ diverse strengths. Administrators and faculty are hungry for strategies that will help their student bodies reflect the country’s demographic diversity.

There’s a spirit of experimentation in admissions today that the strategies in Turning the Tide can support.

Here are my concerns

I applaud MCC’s initiative and support their goals in principle. However, I have at least three concerns with their recommendations:

First, it’s not clear that they align with evaluation practices in admissions offices.

MCC wants to deemphasize AP courses, for example, but this won’t be a powerful lever for change. The 2014 State of College Admissions report of the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) documents that since 2002, no more than 10 percent of college admissions offices treat AP/IB scores as a major factor in their decisions.

Second, the strategies it will take to enroll more low-income students in selective colleges are not the same ones needed to reduce achievement pressure.

Everyone worries about the lack of transparency in college admissions, but concerns about pressure are largely coming out of upper-middle-class and wealthy families.

In many low-income high schools, where the real college access problem is, the concern is obtaining access to rigorous coursework and college preparation generally.

Third, even in systems that tend toward greater equity, the wealthy usually find ways to protect their privilege.

One way they do so, sociologists have shown, is by investing their resources in keeping up with the changing terms of access to high-status social institutions, including educational ones.

Participation in focused test preparation is one example, although scholars debate its benefits.

Or take my college-frenzied city of Ann Arbor: Less than three months after 80 selective colleges announced they would develop a shared online application with a digital portfolio, the city’s community education provider started offering US$49 workshops titled “How to Apply to Elite Universities.”

It is telling that they marketed the workshops to parents, not teens.

The fact is that “ethical engagement” could easily become the next dimension of merit through which privileged families preserve their competitive advantage.

Redefining ‘good colleges’

The final recommendation of Turning the Tide – broadening students’ ideas about what makes a good college – is perhaps the most important and difficult one.

Parents, employers, and graduate programs also need to take a broader view on college pedigree if they want to persuade students to do so.

Parents need to know how mixed the research record is (see here, here and here) on the link between selective college attendance and later earnings. They need to know that going to a selective college doesn’t necessarily lead to greater life and job satisfaction, even if colleges market themselves that way.

Looking to how graduate programs judge what makes a good college, my own research has revealed how faculty in top-ranked graduate programs think about college affiliations when admitting Ph.D. students. I interviewed 68 professors across 10 programs and observed admissions meetings in six of them.

Often faculty have a hard time trusting grad school applicants from institutions without strong reputations.
University of Pennsylvania Libraries, CC BY-NC-ND

Faculty routinely assessed college GPA based on the perceived quality of the institution where grades had been earned. They felt this enabled them to distinguish among the many applicants with high grades.

Across the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, professors in every program described being “impressed,” “excited” and “dazzled” by affiliations with the Ivy League, as one might expect.

Beyond a belief in the superiority of their training, professors admitted being drawn into the cultural mystique surrounding elite higher education. A few noted that students from elite institutions were “presocialized” or “confident enough” for programs like their own.

One waxed eloquent about the brilliance of his own undergraduate peers at Yale, while others assumed that students who had survived the gauntlet of elite undergraduate admissions must truly be “better.”

They also looked favorably on less prestigious institutions with respected undergraduate programs in their discipline. They admitted to me or revealed in committee that they had a hard time trusting applicants from unfamiliar institutions and ones with mediocre reputations.

Like the messages that parents send their children, how professors read college affiliations in graduate admissions sends messages to young people about what makes a good college.

MCC is right that updating admissions is a great strategy for cultural change. Admissions priorities subtly coerce adolescent behavior. A growing number of families organize their children’s time and very lives to put them on a trajectory that (they think) will land them in college.

But to really alter the messages about achievement that students hear, change shouldn’t be limited to the admissions office. Parents, employers and those of us who work in education also need to lead by example.

University of Michigan doctoral student Kristen Glasener contributed to this article.

The Conversation

Julie Renee Posselt, Assistant Professor of Higher Education, University of Michigan

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Read all of our posts about HBCUs by clicking here. 

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Matthew Lynch published in Education Leadership

Should schools provide free breakfast in classrooms?

Sean Corcoran, New York University; Amy Ellen Schwartz, New York University, and Michele Leardo, New York University

Child hunger is a serious problem: 48 million Americans, including more than 15 million children, live in households that lack the means to get enough nutritious food on a regular basis. In large cities, about 25 percent of households with children do not have sufficient food.

The federally funded National School Breakfast Program has long sought to improve these numbers, by providing a free or low-cost breakfast for students in participating schools. In addition to reducing food insecurity, the program has been found to improve students’ health and nutritional intake as well as their academic achievement.

Even though school breakfast is affordable (or free), meets federal nutrition guidelines and has the potential to benefit children in multiple ways, participation in the School Breakfast Program is surprisingly low. Nationally, only about half of eligible students participating in the School Lunch Program take breakfast.

In fact, in New York City, less than a third of all students take a breakfast each day. This is particularly surprising because breakfast has been offered free to all students since September 2003.

So why are the numbers taking advantage of free breakfast so low? What difference might it make if they were higher?

Why don’t kids eat free breakfast?

There are several reasons that participation in the School Breakfast Program is low.

Why don’t children eat breakfast? sheri chen, CC BY-NC

First, breakfast is offered in the cafeteria before school hours, and many students are unable to arrive to school early, because of transportation or family commitments. Second, children may not be aware that breakfast is served in the cafeteria before school. Finally, children are often unwilling because of the stigma associated with a trip to the cafeteria for a free breakfast.

Introduced more than a decade ago, Breakfast in the Classroom (BIC) has been adopted in many school districts as part of the school day. Breakfast is offered free to all students in their classroom at the start of the day, rather than providing it in the cafeteria before the bell. Cities such as Los Angeles, Dallas, Detroit, Cincinnati and Newark show high rates of participation.

Here is how it works

Breakfast in the Classroom is given during the first 10-20 minutes of the school day. It typically includes cold, packaged items (such as cereal, bagels, yogurt and fresh fruit). In some schools, breakfast is offered on mobile carts as students walk in the door (“Grab-n-Go”), or as a “Second Chance” breakfast, between the first and second periods of middle or high school.

New York City began rolling out Breakfast in the Classroom in 2007. According to the Department of Education, the program is now offered in nearly 500 of the city’s 1,700 schools. The city serves over 30,000 classroom breakfasts each day. Beginning this year, it is expanding the program to all elementary schools. And there are plans to extend the program to all schools in the district.

Advocates for the program argue that in addition to reducing hunger and food insecurity, moving breakfast from the cafeteria into the classroom will, in turn, improve school attendance and academic performance. Some also argue it will improve student engagement by building a sense of community around eating breakfast together, and provide an opportunity to integrate nutrition and healthy eating habits into the curriculum.

However, critics have raised concerns that Breakfast in the Classroom could contribute to weight gain, as some children consume more calories by eating two breakfasts – one at home and one at school. Or that the program could take away from instructional time at the start of the school day.

What does evidence show?

Our research looked at the early effects of New York City’s Breakfast in the Classroom program. We examined the program’s effects on school breakfast participation, student weight outcomes including body mass index (BMI) and obesity, as well as academic outcomes. We tracked data on student weight and academic achievement at different points of time, to compare students in schools that did and did not adopt the program.

Our sample included students in over 1,100 NYC public elementary and middle schools between the 2006-07 and 2011-12 school years (of which about 300 offered Breakfast in the Classroom at the time of our study).

Does breakfast in classroom lead to obesity? U.S. Department of Agriculture, CC BY

To begin with, we found that serving breakfast in classroom substantially increased school breakfast participation. For example, in schools offering breakfast in classroom in 25 percent or more of classrooms but not schoolwide, the participation rate nearly doubled. The increase was even higher – about two-and-a-half times – for schools offering the program schoolwide.

Importantly, we found no evidence that Breakfast in the Classroom led to student weight gain. We found no impact on BMI or the incidence of obesity. We also found no evidence that breakfast in the classroom reduced academic performance, as measured by achievement on reading and math standardized tests for students in grades three through eight.

Serve breakfast in classrooms

Our study suggests that the program certainly did no harm by taking away from instructional time or increasing student weight.

Other rigorous research on Breakfast in the Classroom has found the program can improve school attendance and increase academic achievement.

Taken together, our results show serving breakfast in the classroom increased participation in school breakfast even when free breakfast was being served in the school cafeteria.

Our work also shows critics’ fears that the Breakfast in the Classroom program will cause weight gain and reduce academic performance due to a loss of instructional time are largely unwarranted. There is no reason, therefore, not to expand Breakfast in the Classroom.

The Conversation

Sean Corcoran, Associate Professor of Educational Economics, New York University; Amy Ellen Schwartz, Professor of Public Policy, Education, and Economics and Director of the NYU Institute for Education and Social Policy, New York University, and Michele Leardo, Assistant Director of Education and Social Policy, New York University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Matthew Lynch published in Higher Education

Why the new SAT is a reminder to improve the teaching of writing

Jeff Grabill, Michigan State University

The SAT, the test that many schools require to check for college readiness, has recently gone through a makeover. Perhaps the most significant change is to the writing portion of the SAT, which presents students with new and more complex reading and and writing challenges.

College Board, the nonprofit that administers the test, had earlier announced that the essay in the writing section would be optional. However, many schools in the U.S. require their students to take the writing exam.

Connecticut, New Hampshire and Michigan are examples of such states, where the SAT, including its writing exam, is required, not optional. What’s more, scores from these tests are critical beyond their acceptance and placement in some colleges.

The SAT serves as the measure of the educational progress for all students in each state that adopts the SAT for that purpose. In such cases, the SAT is more than a bridge between high school and college. SAT has become a “high-stakes” K-12 assessment. In fact, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

But are schools preparing students adequately to take the new SAT?

I have been working for a number of years with K-12 writing teachers in Michigan on designing more effective approaches to learning in writing as part of my research. I believe the new writing test is complex and requires skills that U.S. schools are not teaching students.

The new SAT

First, let’s take a look at what’s different about the new writing assessment.

In a break from most standardized writing assessments, the new essay task is not designed to elicit students’ subjective opinions. Rather, its aim is to assess whether students are able to comprehend an appropriately challenging source text and craft an effective written analysis of that text.

Students need to discuss real-world topics in the revised SAT.Vancouver Film School, CC BY

For years, the formula for success on high-stakes writing assessments has been to craft a five-paragraph structure: thesis paragraph, three supporting paragraphs and a concluding paragraph. Within that structure, students are more or less free to say anything, and the more creative and engaging that “anything” is, the better.

Les Perelman, the former director of MIT’s Writing Across the Curriculum program, who helped create MIT’s writing placement test, summed it up, when he said:

It doesn’t matter if [what you write] is true or not…In fact, trying to be true will hold you back.

As Perelman noted, “in relaying personal experiences, students who took time attempting to recall an appropriately relatable circumstance from their lives were at a disadvantage.”

The revised SAT, therefore, is a major shift from “subjective opinion” to an analysis based on a real-world nonfiction persuasive passage.

The table below provides a quick overview of what the revised SAT asks of students. The five paragraph structure is still there, but the intellectual work required of students is vastly different.

The revised SAT. Jeff Grabill, CC BY

Students read a nonfiction argument that may be in the form of speeches, opinion editorials or articles that tend not to have simple for or against arguments but convey more nuanced views. Students are expected to marshal evidence about how the author builds a persuasive argument.

What makes the test challenging?

The first significant challenge is that the new prompt asks students to read rhetorically. Rhetorical reading is a form of analysis that is different from more literary forms of analysis that are likely taught in schools.

For example, the new SAT prompt asks students to notice how an author achieves a purpose, shapes a text for an audience and organizes information to achieve a goal. Students need to be able to analyze an argument pulled from topics across the disciplines.

For students to be able to do this, teachers need to help students become better rhetorical readers and better writers. This new way of reading and teaching reading must be layered into already overloaded existing curricula.

The second significant challenge, of course, is the writing itself.

In the past, success on “high-stakes” writing tests like the SAT could be achieved by following a highly structured formula.

That will no longer work. Instead, students will be asked to make arguments based on their own analytical reasoning. They will be required to marshal real evidence – not made-up events – drawn from the passage to be analyzed.

And students will be required to do this quickly, within a time frame in which they will already be engaged in more complex reading practices.

Writing instruction in schools

The reading and writing required by the new SAT will be new for students and many teachers. Rhetorical reading requires “reading like a writer” and answering questions such as “Why did the author do it this way?” Students will then have to write up that analysis in a way that makes evidence-based arguments.

What’s missing in the English writing curriculum? Dennis S. Hurd, CC BY-NC-ND

Any examination of English Language Arts curriculum in U.S. middle and high schools will reveal a nearly complete focus on literary forms and genres with relatively little writing. The basic values and focus that give us our “English” curriculum date back to a 19th-century shift from classical modes of education toward the study of literary texts. It was a shift from Latin and Greek models of discourse, and, most importantly, instruction in speaking and writing, to a shift to literature in English and a focus on reading and analysis.

The curriculum that resulted from these broad changes over time is “English,” and direct instruction in writing has never recovered. The National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools, and Colleges, a project to help improve the teaching of writing, argues that writing is the “neglected R” in education. That same report notes that little time is spent on writing instruction – at best less than three hours a week. In a recent survey, 82 percent of teens report that their typical school writing assignment is a paragraph to one page in length.

This evidence is consistent with education researchers Arthur Applebee’s and Judith A. Langer’s findings in their comprehensive study of writing instruction across the United States. As they say:

[T]he actual writing that goes on in typical classrooms across the United States remains dominated by tasks in which the teacher does all the composing, and students are left only to fill in missing information, whether copying directly from a teacher’s presentation, completing worksheets and chapter summaries, replicating highly formulaic essay structures keyed to high-stakes tests, or writing to “show they know” the particular information the teacher is seeking.

Let’s not teach to the test

I work with teachers and schools quite anxious about how to respond.
Anxious parents – mostly parents of students who struggle with language or have learning disabilities – have asked me questions about the revised SAT.

Teacher preparation programs have historically provided little to no preparation in teaching writing to new teachers, though this is slowly changing. Surely, good teachers and attentive schools will develop well-designed approaches to the new SAT. But I believe responding to the exam is the wrong approach and misses the point.

What is required is a comprehensive change in how we value writing and writing instruction. If that were to happen, then more complex writing exams would be taken in stride because our approaches to learning in writing would exceed the demands of any high-stakes test.

The Conversation

Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology, Michigan State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Matthew Lynch published in Higher Education

The history of student loans goes back to the Middle Ages

Jenny Adams, University of Massachusetts Amherst

In 1473, Alexander Hardynge, who had finished his bachelor’s degree at Oxford nearly two years previous, borrowed money through an educational loan service. The loan came with a one year repayment deadline.

With some of that money, he rented a room at Exeter College and offered tutoring services to college students. He soon repaid that loan. In 1475, Hardynge took out a second loan – again, in part to rent teaching space.

Then, in 1478, he was appointed as a subdeacon, a post two orders lower than a priest, likely in Durham, a city in the north of England. From all evidence, it seems that he promptly packed his robes and abandoned his teaching gig. There is also nothing to suggest that he gave a single penny to his lenders.

For students today, Hardynge’s story would be too good to be true. Not only did he get his bachelor’s degree without incurring debt, but also, he did not have to repay the money he borrowed.

Prompted by my own anxiety about educational debt, an anxiety that intensified several years ago with the birth of my own prospective college students, I have been researching the long history of educational loans in order to get a better context for the current student debt crisis.

With student loan growth rates spiraling out of control, it behooves us to think through the ways other time periods and cultures have monetized, funded or not funded student labor.

Loan chests, books as collateral

The history of student loans starts with the establishment of institutions of higher learning in medieval Europe from the late 11th century.

The University of Bologna, considered the first official university, was quickly followed by the University of Paris, Oxford University and Cambridge University. All of these places offered degrees to young men, training them for positions in the Catholic Church and, later, in government.

Sir Thomas Bodley’s chest. Norman Walsh, CC BY-NC

At first, scholars who needed money did not differ from other borrowers: everyone took loans from the same lenders. But in 1240, Robert Grosseteste, the bishop of Lincoln, used Oxford University money to launch the first documented student loan system. He named it St. Frideswide’s Chest.

St. Frideswide’s Chest was literally a chest. Bound by two different locks, with each key held by a different college magister, or faculty member, it resided at St. Frideswide’s Priory, a religious house in central Oxford, amid the city’s colleges, academic halls and student apartments.

To get a loan from St. Frideswide’s, a borrower had to be a scholar of modest means – and likely took an oath for proving so. He also had to have something of value to deposit in the chest as collateral. From the pledge notes I’ve seen in roughly 100 manuscripts and descriptions of manuscripts, it’s clear that scholars hocked everything from silver spoons to gold plates.

But the most commonly collateralized items were books. Not fancy, illuminated books. Just textbooks. In the late Middle Ages, this included works by Aristotle, the Bible, law codes and medical tracts. Here’s a link to a manuscript at Balliol College that was used as collateral. The lines on the final page record two loans taken out by a scholar, Thomas Chace, in 1423 and 1424. The Merton College manuscript (pictured) contains eight pledge notes from the same century.

Merton MS 32, fol. 137v taken by Jenny Adams with permission of the Warden and Fellows of Merton College Oxford. The Warden and Fellows of Merton College Oxford., CC BY-NC

These were not textbooks as we know them today. They were manuscripts made from animal skin and completed through hours of scribal labor. They fetched large sums. As in modern times, medieval textbooks too derived part of their value through the educational market.

Today, for example, the Encyclopedia of International Media and Communications (US$305 secondhand) commands a high price because faculty use it to teach and students use it to research in one of the fastest-growing majors. Back then, it was Peter Lombard’s Sentences, a staple of the Oxford curriculum and also the book Hardynge used for collateral.

Leaf from Peter Lombard’s Sentences. POP, CC BY

Sadly, the pledge note in Hardynge’s text, as recorded in the British Library’s on-line description of its manuscripts, does not include the loan amount. But on another leaf of the manuscript one can see a scrawled “precii xl.s.” or “price 40 shillings.”

Hardynge almost surely did not get a loan of this amount. As noted by other scholars who have written extensively on medieval loans and debt collection, the value of the collateral far outweighed the actual amount of the loan. But given that a student in the early 15th century could pay for an entire series of lectures for six shillings, even a loan of 20 shillings, or half the book’s value, would have represented a hefty sum.

Loans for scholars

This system might sound like a pawn shop crossed with a secondhand book store. But the use of collateral meant scholars did not always feel the need to repay their loans. Once employed, they could walk away from their debts, just as Hardynge did. If that happened, the chest manager would then put the collateral back into the market. For many borrowers like Hardynge, who had finished his education, buying back his book was simply not worth it. Now employed, he had little need for his copy of Peter Lombard’s Sentences.

By the end of the 14th century, roughly 20 more loan chests had appeared in Oxford. The chests had also moved in 1320 from St. Frideswide’s Priory to the university’s congregation house, and they held the equivalent of millions of today’s dollars. Most often the money came from wealthy patrons who either wanted to support scholars or liked the thought of having their name associated with a chest.

This later impulse seems to have been the case with some of the later chests, which were funded by professionals rather than the nobility. Thus, while King Edward I’s consort, Queen Eleanor of Castile, founded a chest in 1293, the Guildford Chest (1314) and the Robury Chest (1321) were founded, respectively, by a judge and an attorney-turned-judge.

These later chests opened borrowing to all scholars, not just poor students. In short, the chests now targeted the Alexander Hardynges of Oxford. Hardynge was not poor. He probably funded his education through parental handouts and part-time work, or received on support from a wealthy patron. But clearly by several years after his graduation, he needed money to stay afloat.

Printing press changes the system

For 300 years, the loan chest system thrived. Then, one evening in early March of 1544, two men – Robert Raunce and John Stanshaw – armed with an “iron bar and hammer,” broke into the congregation house and smashed all of the loan chests. Although Raunce and Stanshaw were eventually tried and sentenced, their burglary still managed to wipe out much of the chests’ wealth.

The arrival of the printing press changed the value of a book. Thomas Hawk, CC BY-NC

Yet even before this, the loan system had started to decline. Although the arrival of the printing press in the late 15th century didn’t have an immediate effect on manuscript production, it would eventually make books cheap and thus no longer worth collateralizing. Even in the chests’ final century of use, the use of gold plate and jewelry was increasing and by 1500 had surpassed the use of books.

Around the same time, bankers began to make loans on the premise of future returns rather than in exchange for real property. The shift toward anticipated future earnings soon came with the England’s 1624 legalization of interest-bearing loans, which pushed even more people into this model of lending.

With their loan chests gone, students again became just like other borrowers. And just like other borrowers, they, too, could end up the notorious debtors’ prisons that began to swell with inmates as early as the 17th century.

Modern-day loans

Student loans arrived in the United States in the mid-19th century. Like the medieval loan chests at Oxford, these loans started through a singular university, in this case Harvard, which administered them.

UMass students protest against student loans. Jenny Adams, CC BY

This localized system changed in the mid-20th century with the creation by the Department of Education in 1965 of federally guaranteed student loans made by private lenders and available to students across the country.

Students were once again put into a special category. But in this case, this meant they could now collateralize their estimated future incomes (without even knowing what those incomes might be) in order to obtain a degree.

For a long time and for many students (this writer included), this model of credit worked. Loans opened up college to many people, allowing them to pursue a career path otherwise unavailable. But now that we’ve entered the age of six-figure student loans, this freedom seems more like a virtual debtors’ prison than a chance to economic mobility.

I would never advocate a return to the Middle Ages. Yet as we consider the current morass of educational debt, we need to think harder about historical precedent.

True, medieval universities excluded many groups – religious minorities, feudal villeins (a commoner legally tied to a feudal lord in the Middle Ages) and women were barred from entry. Yet poor young men with talent had a chance. Fees were not high. Patrons helped out. And if one needed money, one might be able to pledge a book – not a future.

The Conversation

Jenny Adams, Associate Professor of English, University of Massachusetts Amherst

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Matthew Lynch published in Education Leadership, Teachers

Straight A students may not be the best innovators

Matthew Mayhew, New York University and Benjamin S. Selznick, New York University

Demand for innovation is at an all-time high. Innovation is now recognized as being key to economic growth strategies in the United States, Canada and countries in the European Union.

As a result, there is an increased need to understand what drives innovation. Certainly traditional research and development, funded by both the private and public sectors, continues to remain a primary source of new ideas and products. But innovation demands innovators.

So where do innovators come from? And how do they acquire their skills?

One place – perhaps among the best – is college. Over the past seven years, my research has explored the influence of college on preparing students with the capacity, desire and intention to innovate.

In this time we’ve learned that many academic and social experiences matter quite a bit; grades, however, do not matter as much.

What influences student innovation?

Our ongoing research, an example of which can be found here, has surveyed over 10,000 full-time undergraduate and graduate students in four countries – the United States, Canada, Germany and Qatar.

Our sample includes a wide diversity of students: those in fields of study often associated with innovation and entrepreneurship (e.g., business, engineering) as well as more traditional majors (e.g., arts, humanities, education); those from differing races/ethnicities and gender identifications; those from different socioeconomic and political backgrounds; and those from families that already include, or do not include, entrepreneurs.

To learn more, we asked students about their innovation intentions and capacities, their higher education experiences, and their background characteristics. We also administered a “personality inventory” to address the question of whether innovators are born or made.

Classroom practices can make a difference. Penn State, CC BY-NC-ND

We conducted a series of statistical analyses that allowed us to isolate the influence of any one individual attribute (e.g., classroom experiences, GPA, personality, gender, etc.) on our innovation outcomes.

Here is what our analyses have revealed so far:

  • Classroom practices make a difference: students who indicated that their college assessments encouraged problem-solving and argument development were more likely to want to innovate. Such an assessment frequently involves evaluating students in their abilities to create and answer their own questions; to develop case studies based on readings as opposed to responding to hypothetical cases; and/or to make and defend arguments. Creating a classroom conducive to innovation was particularly important for undergraduate students when compared to graduate students.
  • Faculty matters – a lot: students who formed a close relationship with a faculty member or had meaningful interactions (i.e., experiences that had a positive influence on one’s personal growth, attitudes and values) with faculty outside of class demonstrated a higher likelihood to be innovative. When a faculty member is able to serve as a mentor and sounding board for student ideas, exciting innovations may follow.

Interestingly, we saw the influence of faculty on innovation outcomes in our analyses even after accounting for a student’s field of study, suggesting that promoting innovation can happen across disciplines and curricula. Additionally, when we ran our statistical models using a sample of students from outside the United States, we found that faculty relationships were still very important. So, getting to know a faculty member might be a key factor for promoting innovation among college students, regardless of where the education takes place or how it is delivered.

  • Peer networking is effective: outside the classroom, students who connected course learning with social issues and career plans were also more innovative. For example, students who initiated informal discussions about how to combine the ideas they were learning in their classes to solve common problems and address global concerns were the ones who most likely recognized opportunities for creating new businesses or nonprofit social ventures.

Being innovative was consistently associated with the college providing students with space and opportunities for networking, even after considering personality type, such as being extroverted.

Networking remained salient when we analyzed a sample of graduate students – in this instance, those pursuing M.B.A. degrees in the United States. We take these findings as a positive indication that students are spending their “out-of-class” time learning to recognize opportunities and discussing new ideas with peers.

Who are the innovators?

On the basis of our findings, we believe that colleges might be uniquely positioned to cultivate a new generation of diverse innovators.

Counter to the Thiel Fellowship, an initiative that pays individuals to step out of college in order to become entrepreneurs, our work supports efforts by colleges and universities to combine classroom learning with entrepreneurial opportunities and to integrate education with innovation.

One of our most interesting findings was that as GPAs went down, innovation tended to go up. Even after considering a student’s major, personality traits and features of the learning environment, students with lower GPAs reported innovation intentions that were, on average, greater than their higher-GPA counterparts.

In short: GPA was associated with innovation, but maybe not in the direction you’d think.

Not GPAs, but being motivated, makes a difference. THINK Global School, CC BY-NC-ND

Why might this be the case?

From our findings, we speculate that this relationship may have to do with what innovators prioritize in their college environment: taking on new challenges, developing strategies in response to new opportunities and brainstorming new ideas with classmates.

Time spent in these areas might really benefit innovation, but not necessarily GPA.

Additionally, findings elsewhere strongly suggest that innovators tend to be intrinsically motivated – that is, they are interested in engaging pursuits that are personally meaningful, but might not be immediately rewarded by others.

We see this work as confirmation of our findings – grades, by their very nature, tend to reflect the abilities of individuals motivated by receiving external validation for the quality of their efforts.

Perhaps, for these reasons, the head of people operations at Google has noted:

GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring.

Somewhat troubling, though in line with concerns that plague the entrepreneurship community, women were less likely to demonstrate innovation intentions than men, all else being equal.

This is a problem, especially given jarring statistics that venture capitalists are funding males – specifically white males – more than any other group.

Such findings also speak to the need for higher education to intervene and actively introduce the broadest range of individuals to educational experiences and environments that spur the generation and implementation of new ideas. Fresh and creative ideas, after all, are not restricted to any one gender, race or family background.

As we say in our forthcoming paper’s finding on gender:

Imagine the explosion of new processes and products that would emerge in a world where half the population was socialized to believe that it could and should innovate.

Imagine indeed.

The Conversation

Matthew Mayhew, Associate Professor of Higher Education, New York University and Benjamin S. Selznick, Ph.D. candidate, New York University

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Matthew Lynch published in Higher Education

Why it’s so hard for students to have their debts forgiven

Neal H. Hutchens, University of Mississippi and Richard Fossey, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Outstanding student loan debt in the United States reached a record US$1.35 trillion in March, up six percent from a year earlier.

About 10 million people who borrowed from the government’s main student loan program – 43 percent – are currently behind or no longer making payments, with more than a third of them in default. Some students are especially at risk, such as those who attended for-profit institutions.

Meanwhile, the loan default rates widely reported by the U.S. Department of Education fail to account for borrowers who default more than three years after repayment begins. These rates also fail to account for the millions of borrowers who are struggling or unable to repay their loans but aren’t included in the numbers because they’ve claimed an economic hardship deferment.

These unsettling numbers raise the question of what happens to borrowers unable to repay their student loans.

The ‘undue hardship’ issue

While individuals with debt they cannot repay often turn to bankruptcy, this discharge option is frequently unavailable in the case of student loans. Such debtors must first demonstrate “undue hardship,” an exacting standard few borrowers are able to satisfy and one not applied to most types of unsecured debt in bankruptcy.

Credit card debt, for example, can be easily discharged as long as a person qualifies to file for bankruptcy protection. The standard also leaves student-loan debtors without the types of options open to businesses in bankruptcy to work with creditors to reduce debt.

Some student-loan borrowers may soon have some relief, however. The Department of Education proposed a new rule this week, for example, that would make it easier for students who are defrauded by their colleges to have their debt forgiven.

That’s a step in the right direction. But more needs to be done.

As higher education legal scholars who have been examining these issues for many years, we have a special interest in the ways in which laws and legal standards support or harm students. The general inability for Americans to discharge student loans under current bankruptcy law represents an issue affecting millions of borrowers and their families.

This and the growing mountain of debt have prompted lawmakers and other observers to warn of another bubble in the making, with potentially disastrous consequences.

How undue hardship was established

The federal role in student loans can be traced back to the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which made federal loans available to all students.

In 1965, the federal government shifted from making loans to serving as a guarantor of student loans. An overhaul of federal loan policy in 2010 made direct loans from the federal government the only federally guaranteed student loan program, although loans from other lenders, often referred to as private student loans, are still available.

Until the 1970s, student loan debt received the same treatment in bankruptcy proceedings as other types of unsecured debt. Concerns arose, however, that unscrupulous borrowers had sought to discharge their student loans after obtaining lucrative positions in such fields as medicine and law.

Evidence suggests no widespread pattern of abuse existed, but Congress directed in 1976 that federally guaranteed loans could not be discharged in bankruptcy during the initial five years of the repayment period, absent a showing of undue hardship. Congress extended the undue hardship requirement to seven years in 1990, and in 1998 made the standard applicable throughout the loan’s life. And in 2005, Congress also extended the undue hardship standard to private student loans not guaranteed by the federal government.

Congress did not define the term undue hardship, leaving it to the bankruptcy courts to interpret its meaning. Most courts have adopted the so-called Brunner test (named after a famous court ruling), which requires student loan debtors to make three showings. First, they must prove that they cannot pay off their student loans and maintain a minimal standard of living. Second, they must show additional circumstances that make it highly unlikely they will ever be able to repay their student loans. And finally, debtors must demonstrate that they have made a good faith effort to pay their student loans.

This stringent standard can lead to disheartening results. For example, in one case, a bankruptcy judge denied discharge under the undue hardship to a student loan debtor in her 50’s who had a record of homelessness and lived on $1,000 a month.

In practice, most courts have applied the Brunner test, or similar standards, in ways that make discharge in bankruptcy especially difficult for many student loan borrowers. In fact, a 2012 paper calculated that 99.9 percent of bankrupt student loan debtors do not even try to discharge them. Among the reasons for this low percentage is likely the difficult standard to qualify for a discharge.

Some courts push back

Recently, however, a few bankruptcy courts have interpreted the Brunner test more leniently.

In perhaps the most well-known example, a panel of judges reviewing a bankruptcy decision discharged the student loan debts of Janet Roth, a 68-year old woman with chronic health problems who was subsisting on Social Security income of $780 a month.

Roth’s creditor argued that she could not pass the good-faith prong of the Brunner test because she had never made a single voluntary payment on her student loans. But the panel rejected this argument on the grounds that Roth had lived frugally and had never earned enough money to pay back her student loans in spite of her best efforts to maximize her income.

The panel also rejected the creditor’s arguments that Roth should be placed in a long-term income-based repayment plan that would extend for 25 years. Roth’s income was so low, the creditor pointed out, that she would not be required to pay anything on the student loan anyway. Nevertheless, a remote possibility existed that Roth’s income would rise in the future, permitting her to make at least token payments.

In the court’s view, putting Roth on a long-term repayment plan seemed pointless. Applying a common law principle of basic fairness, the court stated “that the law does not require a party to engage in futile acts.”

One of the judges in the Roth case filed a separate opinion agreeing with the judgment but suggesting that courts should abandon the Brunner test altogether. He argued courts should replace it with a standard in which bankruptcy judges “consider all the relevant facts and circumstances” to determine whether a debtor can afford to repay student loan debts “while maintaining an appropriate standard of living.”

Such a standard would be more closely aligned with how most other types of debt are eligible for discharge in bankruptcy.

So far, federal appeals courts have not taken up the suggestion to scrap the Brunner test, although several lower courts have begun applying it more humanely. The Brunner test, however, is a subjective standard, and debtors experience widely different outcomes when they attempt to discharge their student loans in bankruptcy.

President Obama signs a presidential memorandum on reducing the burden of student loan debt in 2014. Larry Downing/Reuters

Moving toward a more humane standard

Recent actions by the Obama administration on the issue – including this week’s announcement on “predatory” colleges – has accompanied the judicial activity.

For example, in 2015 the Department of Education offered guidance on when loan holders should “consent to or not oppose” undue hardship petitions involving government-backed student debt in bankruptcy proceedings.

The department also recently announced an initiative to address problems in making loan forgiveness available to individuals who are permanently disabled.

In the case of private student loans, the Obama administration has urged Congress to make such loans no longer subject to the undue hardship standard.

Courts and federal agencies can help to humanize interpretation and application of the undue hardship standard and make discharge a more realistic option for some borrowers. Ultimately, however, authority rests with Congress to make any substantive changes to the treatment of student loan debt in bankruptcy.

While likely on hold until after the November elections, the pending reauthorization of the Higher Education Act – the centerpiece of federal higher education policy – presents a key opportunity for Congress to review the undue hardship standard. At a minimum, Congress should give serious consideration to abolishing the standard for private student loans.

Other options include reinstating limits on how long the undue hardship standard should apply to federal student loans or directing courts to adopt a more flexible test for discharge in bankruptcy, such as that advocated in the separate opinion in the Roth case.

With so many student loan borrowers struggling, circumstances suggest the need for Congress to take decisive action on this critical issue on public policy and humanitarian grounds.

The Conversation

Neal H. Hutchens, Professor of Higher Education, University of Mississippi and Richard Fossey, Paul Burdin Endowed Professor of Education, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

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Matthew Lynch published in Higher Education

What your choice of degree means for your future earnings

Francis Green, UCL

The mass expansion of higher education, the arrival of high fees in English and Welsh universities, the ongoing technology revolution and the Great Recession have pushed and pulled the graduate labour market in contrasting directions over the last 15 years.

So a new study published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies to help us to better understand how new graduates fare when they leave university is especially welcome. Until now, our understandings have come from surveys, with only some thousands of respondents, or else from the Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education survey, which tracks earnings six months after graduation.

By linking administrative data from the Student Loan company, pay data from HMRC’s records, and university level data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, the study’s authors have been able to work with a data set containing a quarter of a million English-domiciled graduates. They have been able to look at earnings in much greater detail, by institution and by subject area.

The study also captures earnings at the upper extremes better than surveys can, which is especially important at a time when earnings have become more and more unequal at the top end. Despite some weaknesses – it only covers students who applied when they were living in England, for example – this is a significant step forward.

Big differences in earnings

It’s well known that graduate earnings vary a lot according to subject taken. The report confirms that medicine and economics graduates earn the most, while creative arts graduates occupy the bottom of the earnings table, as the graph below shows. In addition, the study finds a remarkable spread in how much graduates earn, even among those doing the same subject at the same institution.

On the face of it, the investment in higher education is quite a risky business, when looked at solely in financial terms. The authors illustrate this with remarkable findings from the LSE, where the top 10% of male graduate earnings was £170,000, compared to median earnings at around £40,000. At the bottom end, graduation does not guarantee employment in a graduate job.

Naturally, there are also substantial earnings variations between graduates from different universities. Yet most of this is accounted for by differences in student intake and in subject composition.

The study also found that graduates from high-income households earned much more than those coming from low-income households – some 45% more for women and 60% for men. This family income gap is partially accounted for by subject choice, and further mediated by the university a student attended.

Nevertheless, it looks as though parental income continues to affect children’s fortunes beyond their time growing up – more so for men than for women, and more at the extremes of the earnings spectrum. So, while higher education continues to matter a great deal, the labour market seems not to be entirely meritocratic. Possible explanations have centred on the role of social and cultural capital, including the role of social networks.

What’s the endgame?

More studies such as these can be expected over the coming years as administrative data is better harnessed for research purposes. The ultimate aim is to find and present accurate information of the graduate earnings premium for each institution and subject. This information would then be available to aid students in their choices. It’s hoped this could address Britain’s low social mobility by minimising unwise choices by those from socially disadvantaged backgrounds.

While better information will surely be welcome, we should not hold too many high expectations for this new era of big data for higher education research. Not least, the focus will inevitably always be on earnings and employment. There will be a great temptation for the media to hold some universities to account when their students do less well in terms of pay. Yet one could hardly expect those universities to somehow fix the labour market by altering the changing demand for skilled labour – which is where the problem may lie.

While the IFS study does not name institutions at the lower end of the graduate earnings spectrum, it seems only a matter of time before this happens as future studies emerge with even larger data sets.

Concentrating only on the employment and pay implications of going to university also encourages neglect of the broader educational needs of a modern advanced democracy. Yet as my own ongoing research is finding, even when graduates do not succeed in getting graduate jobs, they gain in other ways: they contribute external benefits to others in society, and still earn more on average than those in non-graduate jobs.

The Conversation

Francis Green, Professor of Labour Economics and Skills Development, UCL

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Matthew Lynch published in Diversity, Higher Education

The real reason more women don’t code

Karin Verspoor, University of Melbourne

I menstruate and I code. I share this perhaps shocking personal information in the interest of full disclosure, and in solidarity with a new satirical campaign from Girls Who Code.

The campaign proposes a simple explanation for the low numbers of women in tech: that our hormonal cycles interfere with our ability to code.

Other explanations offered up in the campaign include that women can’t code because their boobs get in the way or their long eyelashes make it hard to see the screen.

These explanations are obviously ridiculous and therein lies the point. For example, if women can’t code because they menstruate, then there isn’t much we can do.

After all, menstruating is part of our basic female biology. If it prevents us from concentrating, or thinking rationally, or coding … what hope do we have?

According to the Australian Computer Society’s recent figures, only 28% of all ICT jobs are held by women in Australia. The proportion is even lower for specifically technical roles in ICT.

So there is certainly a basis for wondering whether there is a fundamental reason that women are so underrepresented in IT and computing roles.

But I’m not convinced that the latest campaign from Girls Who Code is asking the right question. “Why can’t girls code?” is a question that starts from the assumption “girls can’t code”. Is this really the prevailing attitude?

Boys v girls

There is, certainly, evidence that boys favour other boys when estimating the performance of their peers in science class.

There is also evidence specifically from the open-source software community that there is bias against accepting code produced by women, despite the overall high quality of their contributions.

Anecdotally, most technical women can share a story of a situation where their work wasn’t taken seriously.

Dr Maria Milosavljevic, national manager innovation & technology and chief information officer at the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC), told me how when she was the only girl in a year 12 computer science class, every boy in the class offered to “help” her with her assignments because they assumed she would need their help.

The implication seems to be that if boys don’t accept that girls can code, then girls can’t code. To me, that’s horribly paternalistic.

Worse yet is the idea that female biology is not suited to coding, an idea that was recently floated (seriously, I fear) citing a 1999 study of 15 people that identified brain differences between men and women.

Surely, there are biological differences between men and women. Periods, brain structure and so on must exclusively determine what women enjoy doing and what we are good at. Right?!

Girls can code

Let’s start from the default assumption that girls can, in fact, code. Nothing in our biology prevents us from being able to learn how to code.

There are plenty of examples that this is the case – after all, the proportion of women in technical roles is not 0%. And there have been some very high-profile female computer scientists. They include: arguably the first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace (1815-1852); the developer of the early COBOL programming language, Grace Hopper; her syster’s keeper Anita Borg; and Google’s first female engineer, now Yahoo’s CEO, Marissa Mayer.

Here in Australia, Kay Thorne was one of the early programmers of the CSIRAC computer nearly 60 years ago.

So, I think a better question is: “Why don’t (most) girls code?”

This is a question that has been explored many times, and even one that I have written about previously.

It is generally seen as a pipeline problem, with the challenge being getting girls interested in coding. The solutions proposed involve developing engaging opportunities for learning and creating with tech, demystifying coding and boosting confidence, and highlighting female role models.

Girls Who Code, Code Like a Girl, Go Girl, Go for IT and Tech Girls are Superheros are all organisations working to create these opportunities.

The truth behind the employment numbers, however, is more complex than that pipeline.

While we know that enrolments of females in ICT courses at tertiary level lag behind males, we also know from research done at Harvard that even if women enter employment in ICT, they don’t always stay there.

Beating the ‘brogrammer’ culture

There have been accusations of a “brogrammer” culture in tech that is hostile to women.

Microsoft got into trouble earlier this year for organising a party at a developer event featuring half-naked dancing women, highlighting that even companies that have worked to support women in tech still lose their way sometimes.

Which brings us full circle back to our biology and the idea that girls can’t code. Yes, women are different from men. Yes, women certainly can code.

On the other hand, women don’t want to face sexism or misogyny in the workplace, behaviour that is driven primarily by their biology. If girls are getting the idea that they can’t code simply because they are girls, then it’s no wonder they don’t see coding as a viable career path.

So maybe they don’t code because someone makes them feel that they can’t.

The Girls Who Code campaign oversimplifies a complex problem, and it delivers a message with nuances that may be lost on the people who need most to understand them.

But it has provoked a question about the connection between biology and cultural attitudes towards women in tech that is worth considering. Period!

The Conversation

Karin Verspoor, Associate Professor, Department of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne

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Matthew Lynch published in Higher Education

If we really want an ideas boom, we need more women at the top tiers of science

Emma Johnston, UNSW Australia; Nalini Joshi, University of Sydney, and Tanya Monro, University of South Australia

On Wednesday March 30, Emma Johnston, Nalini Joshi and Tanya Monro spoke at the National Press Club for a special Women Of Science event. Here they outline their views on how to promote greater participation by women at the top levels of science.

Few of us would imagine accepting that our daughters have fewer options than our sons. And yet that is exactly the situation we allow to persist in Australian science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) today.

The 2016 woman scientist’s story starts well enough, particularly when you compare it with her 1960s counterpart.

Fifty-six per cent of undergraduates and half of PhD students are female. Even better, almost 60% of junior science lecturers are female.

These bright, talented people are eager to find cures for all cancers, explain dark energy, invent faster mobile phones, design robots, become astronauts and prove the Riemann hypothesis, a millennial open problem in mathematics.

But towards the top end, things are very different. In STEM, women comprise about 16% of top-level professors. That figure rises to 23% if you include medicine.

Our own personal stories reflect this: when Tanya Monro arrived at Adelaide University in 2005 she was its first female professor of physics, even though there had been physics professors there since the 1880s.

In 2002, Nalini Joshi was appointed the first woman professor of mathematics at the University of Sydney, Australia’s oldest university.

In this respect, Australia is frozen in time. We are throwing away our opportunity to harness the huge intelligence and prodigious drive of the females already in the research workforce. How is this so different to the 1950s when talented women like Ruby Payne-Scott, one of the inventors of radio astronomy, when she was required to resign as soon as she was married?

The push now is often subtler, embedded in principles, conventions and bias that is rarely visible. Modern science is still conducted within organisational cultures that resemble a feudal monastery; information is power and it is tightly held, it is difficult to find anything unless you know the right person to ask, survival rests on competition to be noticed by a “nobility”.

Unconscious, subjective conventions have evolved in response and that impacts everyone, both men and women.

As a nation, by forcing half our potential innovators to work much harder to reach the same seniority as the other half, we are doing ourselves a grave disservice.

Buried bias

The standard of living for future Australians depends on how effectively we can bring innovation into our businesses. We know that 75% of jobs in the fastest-growing industries require STEM skilled workers, and since last year’s announcement of the National Innovation and Science Agenda (NISA), it appears we’re in an ideas boom.

NISA proposes “encouraging our best and brightest minds to work together to find solutions to real world problems and to create jobs and growth”.

We agree. And we propose that the single most powerful response Australia could mount to this challenge would be to transform the relationship between women and science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Australia is at, or near the bottom, of the OECD rankings in a range of critical innovation measures. The reasons for this are complex and multi-faceted, but a big one surely has to be that a huge proportion of our great thinkers – our potential science and innovation leaders – are being subtly and pervasively pushed out of STEM. Not based on their merit but based on gender.

A 2014 study found that without any information other than a candidate’s appearance (making gender clear), both males and females are twice as likely to hire a man than a woman to complete a mathematical task.

A study published earlier this year found that both male and female undergraduates were more likely to explain a woman’s science-related setbacks by mentioning factors about her, such as “she was let go because she messed up an experiment”. Whereas a man’s setbacks are more likely to be explained by contextual factors, such as “he was let go because there were budget cuts”.

Then there’s the “motherhood penalty”, with negative effects on income, career advancement, and perceived competence relative to both fathers and women without children.

Australia must pursue change. The benefits of that change will clearly go beyond gender, beyond sexual identity, race and ethnicity. That change will make our society become more creative, abundant, and innovative.

There’s no doubt that improved female engagement in STEM will drive all areas of science and innovation, and achieve aspirations articulated across the whole NISA agenda.

Re-think

There’s no single solution or silver bullet, but the prize is big enough that it’s critical that we tackle every facet of this issue.

We need to challenge the assumptions: the first and biggest is that it’s just a career pipeline issue. It isn’t, and we can’t just wait for the passing of time to solve it.

Next we need to re-think what a good research track record looks like. When Tanya Monro secured her Federation Fellowship in 2008, she had three children and had moved across the world to set up a lab from scratch in the five years over which track record is traditionally assessed. At the time, the application process provided no mechanism for extending the time window over which her productivity was assessed.

We need to re-think the language we use to describe women and their behaviour. Men are often called “assertive” where women are called “aggressive”. Male researchers who have children are more often described as “scientists”; female researchers who have children are often described as “mothers”. We can be both feminine and assertive. We can be both outstanding research scientists and loving mothers.

And we need to work on shifting the conscious and unconscious bias that many of us don’t want to admit exists. Science goes to great lengths to remove bias from observations and experiments, yet many in science fail to adequately recognise and respond to our own biases.

One of the most powerful ways to combat this bias is via the relentless promotion of role models – as NISA suggest – we should “highlight the amazing stories of Australia’s successful female innovators and entrepreneurs”. However, the media consistently under-represent women in science. One only needs to think of television science celebrities, and even in the social media, to find that 92% of the most successful Twitter scientists are male. And when female scientists are mentioned, they tend to focus on our appearance or parental status.

All three of us have done our bit to increase the representation of women in the media, taking every opportunity to speak in public and on radio and television – through news, Q&A, the National Press Club this week, Coast Australia, Catalyst, and other radio, TV and social media.

Be bold

The good news is that we know how to enact change. Some of it is as simple as structural and regulatory changes to increase early career job security, provide parental care that can be accessed by both parents, create flexibility in the workplace, enable career breaks with guaranteed re-entry, move towards anonymous grant and journal review processes, allocate teaching and administrative tasks in transparent manner and value those tasks.

We need to push against that “motherhood penalty”, and there have been some real gains in recent years. For example, changes to the Australian Research Council criteria, which now allows for the selection criterion of Research Opportunity and Performance Evidence (ROPE) to replace the concept of “track record”.

We must also embrace our national character: our diverse community, relatively flat hierarchy and willingness to challenge and take risks.

We must be willing to implement quotas or targets. You only have to look at the consistent success the Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE) has had in bringing in significant numbers of stellar female Fellows over the last decade, and the recent pleasing developments at the Australian Academy of Science (AAS).

We need to remind ourselves that whenever we see a space where there isn’t a diverse workforce we don’t have the best possible people for the task.

Part of the solution has already been underway in the United Kingdom for more than ten years. The Athena SWAN program requires participating organisations to look internally, find out where the holes in their own career pipelines are and propose action plan to address these holes. The charter then rates organisations based on these policies and practices, rewarding them with gold, silver or bronze awards.

The AAS and ATSE have joined together to mount a pilot of the Athena SWAN program as part of the Science in Australia Gender Equity (or SAGE) initiative. Thirty-two enthusiastic organisations have already signed up to participate in the pilot.

Even the first step, – data collection and analysis – will be a challenge for most pilot participants. Of course they know how many women work there and how many may be promoted there, but they have probably not considered questions like how many are in the eligible pool for the next promotion or how long a period qualified female staff have waited before being promoted.

The Athena SWAN evaluations in the UK tell us that the outcomes will encourage and improve the working life of everyone, whether they are men or women.

Australia stands today with an unparalleled opportunity to engage the next generation of potential scientists. We simply cannot afford to lose so many of the talented people that we produce. So many great ideas that go elsewhere.

Imagine if we could encourage and keep these talented people. Imagine the great ideas doubling our Nobel Prize winners. Imagine being in a room full of female STEM professors.

Imagine the ideas boom then.

The Conversation

Emma Johnston, Professor of Marine Ecology and Ecotoxicology, Director Sydney Harbour Research Program, UNSW Australia; Nalini Joshi, Professor of Mathematics, University of Sydney, and Tanya Monro, Deputy Vice Chancellor Research & Innovation, University of South Australia

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Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation, Higher Education

How to keep more women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)

Merryn McKinnon, Australian National University

There have been myriad promises made by the major political parties over the years focused on funding programs aimed at increasing the number of women pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

Although some of the policies do target disciplines where women are underrepresented, there seems to be very little acknowledgement of the bigger problem.

Attracting women to STEM careers is one issue, retaining them is another. And that does not seem to get the same level of attention.

Simply trying to get more women into STEM without addressing broader systemic issues will achieve nothing except more loss through a leaky pipeline.

Higher Education Research Data from 2014 shows more females than males were being awarded undergraduate degrees in STEM fields. Early career researchers, classified as level A and B academics, are equally represented in the genders.

Gender disparity in STEM fields at the higher academic levels (C-E) based on Higher Education Research Data, 2014. Science in Australia Gender Equity (SAGE)

At senior levels, though, the gender disparity plainly manifests – males comprise almost 80% of the most senior positions.

A biological and financial conundrum

Studies in the United States found that women having children within five to ten years of completing their PhD are less likely to have tenured or tenure-track positions, and are more likely to earn less than their male or childless female colleagues.

Angela (name changed) is a single parent and a PhD student in the sciences. She told me she is determined to forge a career for herself in academia, despite the bureaucratic and financial hurdles she has to overcome.

Finding ways to get enough money to afford childcare […] jumping through bureaucratic hoops […] It was ridiculous and at times I wondered if it was all worth it.

It may be just one reason for women leaving STEM, especially those with children, and doubly so for single parent women.

Women tend to be the primary caregivers for children, and are more likely to work part time, so perhaps this could explain the financial disparity. But according to the latest report from the Office of the Chief Scientist on Australia’s STEM workforce, men who also work part time consistently earn more, irrespective of their level of qualification.

Percentage of doctorate level STEM graduates working part time who earned more than $104 000 annually, by age group and gender.Australia’s STEM Workforce March 2016 report from the Office of the Australian Chief Scientist., CC BY-NC-SA

The same report also shows that women who do not have children tend to earn more than women who do, but both groups still earn less than men.

Perhaps children do play a part in earning capacity, but the pay disparities or part-time employment do not seem to fully explain why women leave STEM.

Visible role models

The absence of senior females in STEM removes a source of visible role models for existing and aspiring women scientists. This is a problem for attracting and retaining female scientists.

Having female role models in STEM helps younger women envision STEM careers as potential pathways they can take, and mentors can provide vital support.

Yet even with mentoring, women in STEM still have higher attrition rates than their male colleagues.

So what else can we do?

There are many programs and initiatives that are already in place to attract and support women in STEM, including the Science in Australia Gender Equity (SAGE) pilot, based on the United Kingdom’s Athena SWAN charter.

But women’s voices are still absent from leadership tables to our detriment.

Homeward Bound

This absence is especially noticeable in STEM and policy making arenas, and was the impetus for Australian leadership expert, Fabian Dattner, in collaboration with Dr Jess Melbourne-Thomas from the Australian Antarctic Division, to create Homeward Bound.

Dattner says she believes the absence of women from leadership “possibly, if not probably, places us at greatest peril”.

To address this, Homeward Bound is aimed at developing the leadership, strategic and scientific capabilities of female scientists to enhance their impact in influencing policy and decisions affecting the sustainability of the planet.

Initially, it will involve 77 women scientists from around the world. But this is only the first year of the program, and it heralds the beginning of a global collaboration of 1,000 women over ten years.

These women are investing heavily – financially, emotionally and professionally – and it is clearly not an option for everyone.

Flexible approaches

There are other simple ways to support women in STEM, which anyone can do.

Simply introducing genuinely flexible work arrangements could do a lot towards alleviating the pressure as Angela shows:

My supervisor made sure that we never had meetings outside of childcare hours […] or I could Skype her from home once my child was in bed. They really went above and beyond to make sure that I was not disadvantaged.

We have already attracted some of the best and brightest female minds to STEM.

If keeping them there means providing support, publicly celebrating high-achieving women, and being flexible in how meetings are held, surely that’s an investment we can all make.

The Conversation

Merryn McKinnon, Lecturer, Australian National University

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Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation

Want to inspire kids to learn STEM? Get them to build a robot

Heather Handley

The music is pumping, the crowd is cheering and people are dancing. This is science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM), but not as you know it.

I’m at the Sydney Olympic Park Sports Centre as an invited judge for the 2016 Australia Regional FIRST (For the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition.

The competition is for students aged around 14-18 who, with the help of mentors and teachers, have six weeks (or significantly less in several cases) to design, build and program a robot for a designated challenge. This would be a difficult task even for seasoned engineers.

Forty-three teams from all around Australia, China, India, Singapore, Taiwan and the USA are here to take part, and the atmosphere is electric.

This year’s challenge is a medieval quest, with the arena designed as a castle and the challenge is to break through their opponent’s defences, weaken their tower with boulders (sponge balls) and try to capture it.

The teams have to work in an alliance with two other teams and develop a strategy together to beat the opposite alliance. Things can go wrong, and when something fails it’s back to the pit to problem solve and fix things under intense time pressure, all with the additional stress of the judges pestering them with questions.

The task for the robots is to knock down a castle wall. Paul Wright, Author provided

Robots across the nation

Every team I spoke to had an incredible story to tell. The perseverance and dedication of the students in both building their robots and getting here is overwhelming, and for some teams both have been a major struggle.

A Chinese team from Lanzhou travelled here on their own without their mentor and had to ask companies and universities in China if they could borrow equipment and space in their laboratories to build their robot.

The Narooma High School team, from New South Wales, raised funds by selling 300 cupcakes and ran a RoboCamp to help 8-11 year olds learn the basics of robotics and computing to also generate money.

Another team is Thunder Down Under, which was established at Macquarie University and brings together mentors with students from schools across Sydney. It’s the first Australian FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) team, and helped bring the competition to Australia.

One of the members of Thunder Down Under working on the team’s robot. Chris Stacey, Author provided

Since starting up in 2009, Thunder Down Under has brought robotics to rural and remote communities in Australia. It has provided no-interest loans to teams for robotics kits so that teams can run RoboCamps and become self-sustaining. It’s partnered with another team to create FIRST ladies, a network for girls in FIRST globally. It has helped start up teams in China and also helped develop an underwater robot and lego-robotics-style water safety game to utilise technology to help save lives.

At the inspiring FIRST ladies’ breakfast on Friday morning, I spoke to Louise from the Kan-Bot Crew, a rookie team from Kaniva, a small Victorian farming town located about half way between Adelaide and Melbourne.

Kaniva College has around 100 students of secondary age and about 17% of the students are taking part in the team, an accomplishment in itself. The team was supported though Robots in the Outback, a Macquarie University and Google initiative.

The Kan-Bot Crew had just two and a half weeks to put their robot together and just one day with a mentor. They had difficulty finding local sponsorship due to a major drought last year, which placed financial stress on the small farming town.

They were unable to bring their two programmers to Sydney and so three other teams from Wollongong, Narooma and Ulladulla, have been lending them their programmers and other technical assistance in order to keep them up and running. For the Kaniva students this has been an extremely valuable opportunity to mix with like minded peers.

The winning alliance and their machines: Barker Redbacks (red shirts); House of Ulladulla, Game of Drones (green shirts); and Thunder Down Under (yellow shirts). Author provided

Education first

What really surprised me is that FIRST Robotics is not just about STEM. The students learn lifelong skills in leadership, entrepreneurship and communication as well as gaining confidence and meeting like minded peers from around the world.

There is a real emphasis on teamwork and assisting those around you, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen such generosity of time and resources in the heat of intense competition. Teams go out of their way to assist each other through “gracious professionalism”, part of the ethos of FIRST.

The Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop stopped by to see the action. Chris Stacey, Author provided

Judging the competition was tough. We spent hours behind closed doors trying to narrow teams down to worthy award winners. All decisions needed to be unanimous and eventually we reached consensus, wrote the award scripts and headed out to the arena just in time to catch the semifinal and finals.

It is heart breaking that some teams – especially the rookie teams – do not know how close they came to getting an award and how long we agonised over the decisions. All teams were deserving of awards and should be proud of their efforts at the competition. But in the end, the winning alliance was made up of the Barker Redbacks, House of Ulladulla, Game of Drones and Thunder Down Under.

As a judge, I’m also an ambassador for FIRST Robotics with a hope to inspire students by communicating my love of science, especially my passion for volcanoes, to show them what is possible through STEM.

However, at the end of the tournament, I am the one feeling truly inspired and uplifted after meeting such an ambitious, motivated, and brilliant set of young people.

The Conversation

Heather Handley, Senior Lecturer in Geochemistry and Volcanology

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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