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Matthew Lynch published in Equity, HBCU's, Higher Education

If a female president is good for the Ivy League, why not for the rest of us?

Cathy Sandeen, University of Wisconsin Colleges and the University of Wisconsin-Extension

On July 1, Elizabeth Garrett assumed the presidency of Cornell University.

With this, half of the eight-member Ivy League schools now have female presidents. Garrett joins an illustrious group: Christina Paxson (Brown University), Drew Faust (Harvard University) and Amy Gutmann (University of Pennsylvania).

But what about colleges and universities outside the Ivy League?

Women in academia

I am enormously proud to have been appointed recently as chancellor of University of Wisconsin Colleges and University of Wisconsin-Extension. Although I am the first woman to hold this position, I am not the only woman in a top job in our system.

Four other campuses now have women leaders, including our flagship research university, University of Wisconsin Madison. In addition, a woman was recently elected as president of the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents (the governing body that oversees the UW system).

Women outnumber men at universities.
Jair Alcon, CC BY

It’s clear that there is a commitment to gender equity at Wisconsin. But national data show a different picture.

First, let’s look at how women have come to outnumber men on college campuses. The majority of degree earners in our colleges and universities are women. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, women began eclipsing men in terms of degree attainment beginning in 2000. By 2014, 37% of women between 25 and 29 years had earned a bachelor’s degree, compared to men at 31%.

Women are well-represented in education careers in general. For instance, 76% of K-12 teachers and 48% of college faculty in the US are women.

Based on this data, it might not be unreasonable to expect that now or in the near future, 50% of all colleges and university leaders would be women.

However, the latest figures indicate that only 26% of college presidents are women. How slowly it is changing becomes evident when we see that back in 2006, this number was at 23%.

Why women don’t make it

So why do women get left behind when it comes to leadership roles?

Here is where we need to see how college and university presidents are selected.

There is, as research shows, a tendency to play it safe and hire someone who fits the existing norm (ie, men). As an American Council on Education study put it:

In 1986, the first year of ACE’s college president study, the demographic profile of the typical campus leader was a white male in his 50s. He was married with children, Protestant, held a doctorate in education, and had served in his current position for six years. Twenty-five years later, with few exceptions, the profile has not changed.

The fact that there is often a dearth of women on search committees does not help.

There is higher bar for women in leadership roles.
The World Affairs Council of Philadelphia, CC BY-NC

In addition, as research shows, there is often a higher bar set for women seeking leadership roles in terms of qualifications and prior experience. This applies not just to the higher education sector but to other fields as well.

Here in the US, a former football coach, a former military officer and an elected official were all recently appointed as college or university presidents over the last year. They were all male.

No doubt, they are all strong leaders. But they did not “check all the usual boxes” we usually expect in terms of broad higher education experience. Unlike women presidents, none of them had a significant amount academic leadership experience.

Now take a quick look at the stellar curriculum vitae of the female Ivy League leaders: We see multiple books (including national award winners), distinguished and endowed professorships, service as founding deans and directors of major departments and centers, appointments to chair presidential commissions, and numerous awards and honors.

Lack of ambition or confidence?

The trouble may not lie with the hiring process alone. Often, women do not even consider applying for such jobs.

Research shows that women may hold themselves back if they feel they do not have the required experience or because they fear failure.

Men, on the other hand, are more willing to throw their hats in the ring and compete for a higher-level position, even if they do not have all of the stated qualifications.

Much of this comes from women’s tendency to play down their accomplishments.

A recent study of high-ranking Israeli women leaders found that women were reluctant “to take credit for their accomplishments. They attributed them to circumstances or luck.”

Perhaps surprisingly, female Ivy League presidents are no different. For instance, at a gathering in 2007, the Ivy League’s female presidents played down their accomplishments saying “they wound up at the head of four of the world’s leading universities almost by accident.”

Balancing a demanding job and parenting responsibilities also play a role in women’s willingness to seek major leadership roles.

This “childrearing penalty” may be especially strong in higher ed. Most women presidents come from faculty ranks. Women with children have a disadvantage in academic career progression compared to men with children. Gender bias may play a role as well.

Making connections

There is another crucial fact here that we cannot ignore: the role of a powerful sponsor.

Having a powerful sponsor probably paves a smoother path to the top. It is hardly a coincidence that three former and current Ivy League women leaders, Shirley Tilghman (former president of Princeton), Ruth Simmons (former president of Brown) and Amy Gutmann also had something else in common: they were all supported by former Princeton president Harold Shapiro.

A mentor provides advice and support. A sponsor will open doors and make crucial introductions. Often, men are more likely than women to have that sponsor.

Who wants to be the last?

Culture and attitude are critical in driving change. And competition is part of the Ivy League culture.

As Ruth Simmons, the first black president of an Ivy League institution, pointed out in a 2007 forum,

When it starts to become the issue of being the last Ivy League school to have a woman president – who wants to do that? This is a league and this is a league based on competition.

As we strive for greater gender equity in college and university leadership, we need more institutions to think of women leaders as a competitive advantage.

Those of us who already hold these positions need to also be leaders in raising awareness and becoming mentors and sponsors. Perhaps more importantly, we need to encourage other women to see themselves as qualified to apply for these leadership positions.

If the Ivy League can do it, if Oxford University can do it, why not the rest of us? Indeed, who wants to be the last institution to appoint a woman as president?

The Conversation

Cathy Sandeen, Chancellor, University of Wisconsin Colleges and the University of Wisconsin-Extension

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

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Matthew Lynch published in Equity, HBCU's, Higher Education

Let’s face it: gender bias in academia is for real

Cynthia Leifer, Cornell University; Hadas Kress-Gazit, Cornell University; Kim Weeden, Cornell University; Marjolein C H van der Meulen, Cornell University; Paulette Clancy, Cornell University, and Sharon Sassler, Cornell University

Cornell Professor Sara Pritchard recently made the argument in The Conversation that female professors should receive bonus points on their student evaluations because of the severe negative bias students have toward their female professors.

Commentators on FOX News attempted to discredit her argument as “insane,” ridiculed the idea that gender plays a role in evaluations and repeatedly mentioned a lack of data to support her claims. But the reality is women faculty are at a disadvantage.

Unfortunately, as we well know, for many women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), the path to academia ends long before they obtain a faculty position and are the “lucky” recipient of biased student evaluations.

We represent the success stories – women with careers at Ivy League universities. And yes, while we agree that there are more women in STEM fields today than ever before, bias still affects women in STEM, and not just in student evaluations.

Letters of recommendation and teaching evaluations

It starts right from the hiring process.

In the first stage of the hiring process, a candidate for an academic position must be selected from a pool of hundreds to give a job talk and on-site interview.

The decision of who to invite for a job talk is based on materials about the candidate including CVs, letters of recommendation from prominent figures in the field, samples of research, “buzz” about who’s a rising star and teaching evaluations.

A large body of research shows that many of these materials, and how they are evaluated by search committees, reflect bias in favor of male candidates.

Letters of recommendation, for example, tend to have a very different character for women than for men, and their tone and word choice can affect the impression that the hiring committee forms about candidates.

For example a 2008 study of 886 letters of recommendations for faculty positions in chemistry showed that these letters tended to include descriptors of ability for male applicants, such as “standout,” but refer to the work ethic of the women, rather than their ability, by using words such as “grindstone.”

It turns out that female candidates are seen as less hireable as well.
Mike Licht, CC BY

A similar study showed that female, but not male, students applying for a research grant had letters of recommendation emphasizing the wrong skills, such as the applicants’ ability to care for an elderly parent or to balance the demands of parenting and research.

Furthermore, a 2009 analysis of 194 applicants to research faculty positions in psychology found that letters of recommendation for women used more “communal” adjectives (like helpful, kind, warm and tactful), and letters of recommendation for men used more decisive adjectives (like confident, ambitious, daring and independent), even after statistically controlling for different measures of performance.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a follow-up experiment in the same paper found that these subtle differences in the language can result in female candidates being rated as less hireable than men.

Unfortunately, even when the same language is used to describe candidates or when the key objective criteria of productivity are used, evaluators rated female candidates lower than male candidates.

Teaching evaluations, as our colleague already pointed out, are also known to be biased.

Historian Benjamin Schmidt’s recent text analysis of 14 million rankings on the website ratemyprofessor.com showed substantial differences in the words students used to describe men and women faculty in the same field: men were more likely to be described as “knowledgeable” and “brilliant,” women as “bossy” or, if they were lucky, “helpful.”

If a female candidate makes it through the “on paper” process and is invited for an interview, the bias does not end.

What makes a ‘fit’?

Once a field of candidates is narrowed down from hundreds to a handful, very little distinguishes the top candidates, male or female. Final decisions often come down to intangible qualities and “fit.”

Although “fit” can mean many things to many people, it boils down to guesses about future trajectories, judgments about which hole in a department’s research profile or curriculum is most important to fill, and assessments about whether a person is going to be a colleague who contributes to mentoring, departmental service, and congeniality.

Research in social psychology and management shows that women are seen as competent or likable, but not both. The very traits that make them competent and successful (eg, being strong leaders) violate gender stereotypes about how women are “supposed to” act. Conversely, likable women are often perceived as being less likely to succeed in stereotypically male careers.

Despite all this information, FOX News isn’t alone in its view that women candidates for academic positions are not at a disadvantage.

In fact, one of the commentators in that segment cited a study from other researchers at Cornell that concluded the employment prospects for women seeking faculty positions in STEM disciplines have never been better.

The authors of that study go so far as to blame women’s underrepresentation in the sciences on “self-handicapping and opting out” of the hiring process.

Women doing better, but not better than men

The fact is at the current rate of increase in women faculty in tenure-track positions in STEM fields, it may be 2050 before women reach parity in hiring and, worse, 2115 before women constitute 50% of STEM faculty of all ranks.

This is supported by faculty data at Cornell itself. Between 2010 and 2014, there was only a modest 3%-4% increase in women tenure-line STEM faculty.

In contrast to these data, the study cited by FOX News argued women are preferred to men for tenure-track STEM academic positions. The authors of that study used a research method common in social sciences in which true randomized experiments are impossible to carry out in real-life contexts called an audit study.

In an audit study, people who make the relevant decisions, such as faculty or human resource managers, are sent information about two or more fake applicants for a position. The information is equivalent, except for a hint about the question of interest: for example, one CV may have a male name at the top, the other CV a female name.

The battle against sexism has yet to be won.
European Parliament, CC BY-NC-ND

Although the audit study design can be very useful, in the case of STEM faculty hiring it oversimplifies the complex hiring process, which typically involves many people, many stages and many pieces of information.

The authors sent out equivalent descriptions of “powerhouse” hypothetical male or female candidates applying for a hypothetical faculty opening to real professors. Among the respondents, more said that they would hire the woman than the man. However, the study in question “controlled for,” and thus eliminated, many of the sources of bias, including letters of recommendation and teaching evaluations that disadvantage women in the hiring process.

Furthermore, only one-third of faculty who were sent packets responded. Thus, the audit study captured only some of the voices that actually make hiring decisions. It is also hard to believe that participants didn’t guess that they were part of an audit study about hiring. Even if they didn’t know the exact research question, they may have been biased by the artificial research context.

The study by our Cornell colleagues has already generated a lot of conversation, on campus and off. The authors have entered this debate, which will undoubtedly continue. That’s how science works.

Contrary to what FOX News and some of our academic colleagues think, the battle against sexism in our fields has not been won, let alone reversed in favor of women. We must continue to educate hiring faculty, and even the society at large, about conscious and unconscious bias.

Paulette Clancy, Hadas Kress-Gazit, Cynthia Leifer, Marjolein van der Meulen, Sharon Sassler, and Kim Weeden are professors at Cornell University. Hadas Kress-Gazit, Cynthia Leifer and Kim Weeden are also Public Voices Fellows at The Op-Ed Project.

The Conversation

Cynthia Leifer, Associate Professor of Immunology, College of Veterinary Medicine, Cornell University; Hadas Kress-Gazit, Associate Professor of Mechanics and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University; Kim Weeden, Professor of Sociology, Cornell University; Marjolein C H van der Meulen, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Cornell University; Paulette Clancy, Professor of Chemical Engineering, Cornell University, and Sharon Sassler, Professor of Policy Analysis and Management , Cornell University

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

 

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Matthew Lynch published in HBCU's, Higher Education

While rethinking admissions process, consider creativity

James C. Kaufman, University of Connecticut

The Turning the Tide report released last week by the Harvard Graduate School of Education has colleges and universities across the country taking a hard look at what many believe is a deeply flawed admissions process.

A number of colleges have already been reexamining their admissions process. In September last year, more than 80 leading colleges and universities announced the formation of the Coalition for Access, Affordability and Success, so as to make changes in the admissions process and diversify student bodies.

The new report characterizes the message being sent by colleges to high schools “as simply valuing their achievements, not their responsibility for others and their communities.” It asks college admissions officers to take the following three primary steps to improve the admissions process so that it is fairer and inculcates a concern for others:

  • promote more meaningful contributions through community service and other engagement for the public good
  • assess how students engage and contribute to family as well as community across race, culture and class
  • redefine achievement in ways that level the playing field for economically diverse students and reduce excessive achievement pressure.

However, what often gets left out of admission criteria is a student’s creativity. As a creativity researcher, I have studied many aspects of creativity that reinforce the idea that creativity is a valuable and necessary attribute for students in the 21st century.

Why measure creativity?

Creativity can be seen at all levels – from young children to geniuses. Creativity can help us discover new things, from the next generation of smartphones to new ways of recycling our trash.

It enables us to make art, tell stories, design buildings, test hypotheses and try new recipes. Indeed, creative people have been found to be more likely to succeed in business and be happier in life.

There is a growing volume of research that shows putting greater emphasis on creativity assessments in the college application process could provide a more holistic impression of students’ potential. Right now, we look only at a narrow range of abilities, which means that we over-reward people with certain strengths and penalize people with other strengths.

SAT is a better predictor of success for white students.
Dennis S. Hurd, CC BY-NC-ND

Studies have shown that the most widely used standardized performance tests for college admission, the SAT, is a better predictor of college success for white students than African-American and Hispanic-American students.

However, creativity assessments are more likely to be gender- and ethnically neutral, thereby avoiding the potential for bias.

A study we conducted recently on more than 600 college applicants compared applicants’ performance on a series of online tests assessing various forms of creativity to application data, which included SAT scores, class rank and college admission interview scores.

We found that traditional admissions measures (SAT scores and GPA) were only weakly related to the creativity measures. Further, people with high creative self-efficacy (i.e., people who think they are creative) did slightly worse on some admission tests.

We are continuing to capture data about students over the course of their college careers to assess whether including creativity tests with traditional admissions measures can better predict student outcomes such as retention, college success and graduation rates.

Assessing creativity makes a difference

We do understand that assessing students’ creativity would not be easy. But that is not to say it is impossible.

As part of the admissions process, students could be asked about how they would solve world problems or what their dream job would be or how they would spend lottery winnings; these responses could then be rated for their creativity by admission officers or trained raters. Many studies have shown that this is a reliable and valid way of measuring creativity, although it can be resource-intensive.

Students participate in creative teamwork. Can creativity be measured?
Creative Sustainability, CC BY-SA

Some universities may ask such questions in current admissions, but most do not actually score answers for creativity. In fact, being creative on admissions essays can actually hurt students.

If there are concerns about adding too much stress on students during applications, schools could use a portfolio approach in which students could simply upload a poem, drawing, movie, invention or science experiment that they have already produced.

The fact is that using creativity as a criterion in admissions has been done before. At one point, Cornell University Professor of Human Development Robert Sternberg and colleagues included creativity and practical intelligence as an optional part of college admissions at Tufts University. What Sternberg and colleagues found was that students enjoyed the application process more and the average SAT score of all applicants increased from previous years.

In an equally important outcome, differences on these new measures showed reduced or no ethnic differences, and minority admissions increased.

Such results are typical in creativity studies. Whereas many standardized or intelligence tests show ethnic, cultural or gender differences, creativity measures tend to produce no differences – everyone has the same potential to be creative.

Creativity is more important than ever as college and universities try to both emphasize diversity in their student population and seek future innovators in science, technology, engineering and math, otherwise known as the STEM fields. Including creativity helps accomplish both goals.

If early impressions of the Turning the Tide report are any indication, we could be heading into a pivotal time for college admissions. Such changes should not be limited to the scope of this landmark report. We need to be creative.

The Conversation

James C. Kaufman, Professor of Educational Psychology, University of Connecticut

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

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Matthew Lynch published in HBCU's, Higher Education

Are lectures a good way to learn?

Phillip Dawson, Monash University

Imagine a future where university enrolment paperwork is accompanied by the statement: Warning: lectures may stunt your academic performance and increase risk of failure.

Researchers from the United States have just published an exhaustive review and their findings support that warning. They read every available research study comparing traditional lectures with active learning in science, engineering and mathematics. Traditional lecture-based courses are correlated with significantly poorer performance in terms of failure rates and marks.

The study’s authors boldly compare our new awareness of the harm done by lectures to the harms of smoking. Their article – they claim – is the equivalent of the 1964 Surgeon-General’s report that led to legislated warnings about smoking in the United States. The renowned physics education researcher Eric Mazur has described continuing with lectures in the face of this new evidence as “almost unethical”.

This paper is so important because it combines 225 individual research studies through a technique called meta-analysis. So although individual studies published over the past 70 years may have occasionally found lectures to be better, we now know that the collective evidence is in support of active approaches.

So what’s the alternative?

Rather than the perfect lecturer performance or PowerPoints, active approaches privilege “what the student does”. Courses built around active learning require students to spend class time engaged in meaningful tasks that lead to learning. These tasks might be online or face-to-face; solo or in a group; theoretical or applied. Most of our popular learning and teaching buzzwords at the moment are active approaches: peer instruction, problem-based learning, and flipping the classroom are all focused on students spending precious class time doing, not listening.

This new study confirms a significant difference in student achievement and failure rates between lectures and active learning. A hypothetical average student would move up to the top third of the class if allowed to participate in active learning instead of lectures. The difference in failure rates was large too: students in lecture courses were 1.5 times more likely to fail than active learning students. Active learning was better than lectures for all class sizes and all of the science, engineering and mathematics fields they considered.

But active learning as defined in this study is such a broad term. If your lecturer pauses to get you to solve a problem in a group, or asks you to explain a concept to the person sitting next to you, that is active learning. Worksheets, workshops or other activities taking up at least 10% of class time was enough to get a class labelled “active”.

Rather than a call to abandon lectures, this study is important evidence that we need to improve them. We now know beyond all reasonable doubt that talking at students non-stop for an hour or two is a bad idea. But we knew that already, didn’t we?

Sadly, the study authors calculate that in their dataset of 29,300 students, there were 3,516 students who failed but would not have failed if they were in an active class. They go on to muse that if those studies were conducted by medical researchers they would have stopped the experiments for ethical reasons, as denying the students access to active classes was harmful.

So perhaps the warning label should read:

Warning: bad lectures may stunt your academic performance and increase risk of failure.

What makes a good lecture?

In What’s the Use of Lectures, Donald Bligh notes: “One of the most common mistakes by lecturers is to use the lecture method at all”.

Bligh’s review of the research found that aside from transmitting information to students, lectures were not good for much at all. Lectures should not be a default teaching approach, but should instead be used in a targeted way when they suit the specific goals of the class. For other goals, such as teaching ethics, provoking thought, or developing practical skills, more active approaches work better than lectures.

There is some debate about the ideal length of lectures, with claims that student attention diminishes after 10 or 15 minutes, however the evidence behind these claims is thin. This doesn’t, however, give us permission to waffle on: unnecessary-but-interesting details can hurt learning, and so can excessive quantitative information.

The Conversation

Phillip Dawson, Lecturer in Learning and Teaching, Monash University

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

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Matthew Lynch published in Diversity, Equity, HBCU's, Higher Education

Diverse Conversations: Affordability Makes Diversity Possible on College Campuses

By Matthew Lynch

Colleges use the buzz word “diversity” when talking about their ideal student populations, but ideals and reality do not always add up. Dr. Paul Porter is the director of multicultural affairs at the University of Scranton and knows firsthand how important support programs are for minority and international students. Before his current role, he served as the director of the first-year experience program at the university, working to help students adapt to the demands of a college setting.

I spoke with Dr. Porter about his current role at the University of Scranton and what trends in diversity he expects to see in the coming years.

Q: How do affordable college options play into diversity?

A: The altruistic response is that they avail campuses to a multitude of self-identifying populations, while also creating a powerful educational experience in the classroom and beyond. However, they also call attention to the desperate need for institutional introspection. Before exploring the effects of affordability, campuses have to wonder if they are truly ready for population change. What type of experiences await students as campuses diversify? Are institutions appropriately preparing faculty and staff to engage an evolving student population and address potential changes in campus climate? Maybe most immediately, do we clearly understand our own frailties, prejudices, and concerns, as well as their influence on our institutional profile? Without a keen exploration of these issues, diversity of any kind becomes problematic.

Q: What trends in multicultural learning/campuses do you see coming in the next five years?

A: Preparation for a cultural reality that we’ve talked about but still remains unseen. For example, the increasingly blurred line between racial minority and majority; intensified discourses surrounding gender equity and the potentiality of more women in high level leadership roles (e.g. the White House); and even a reconstructed definition of marriage. I think it is safe to assume that we will be challenged to speak candidly yet sensitively about a continuously evolving social landscape – ESPECIALLY as these realities affect the climate of our campuses and the lives our students. But I’m also hopeful for a broader conversation that is more inclusive of not only the wealth of identities that shape our world view, but also the intricacies that emerge when those identities intersect.

Q: Is there still an advantage for students to attend a college campus, over online courses?

A: Absolutely! We live in a world in which people can disconnect themselves from human interaction far too easily, and our overuse of technology is the force that enables it. We don’t talk anymore. We have become cold to the human condition. However, the college campus as a social structure has done, by far, the best job of accommodating our digital obsession without dehumanizing us. Online courses, while convenient, don’t offer the type of engaged dialogue that takes place in the classroom. There is no service learning, or co-curricular activities like intercollegiate forensics (speech and debate). It’s called school spirit for a reason, and that reason is simple: campus is the physical space that plays host to the soul of a college or university. It is the one thing you cannot download. There’s no “app” for that.
Q: Do you think that being a small campus helps or hurts diversity at The University of Scranton?

A: It helps, primarily because the responsibility of maintaining a welcoming and inclusive environment sweeps across campus. Diversity is not a goal at The University of Scranton, it is an expectation. We all work from the “top-down” to ensure that it remains embedded in our institutional identity.

Q: What does your international student population look like?

A: We host approximately 130 international students and scholars, representing 20 countries, and our campus has experiences a gradual increase in enrollment every year. We have a strong Saudi Arabian student presence and a thriving Latino/Latina population.

Q: What programs/initiatives are in place to make The University of Scranton a truly multicultural place?

A: Maintaining a campus climate that celebrates multiculturalism is deeply rooted in our Jesuit Catholic tradition. From the lens of our Office of Multicultural Affairs, we pride ourselves on a philosophy that reframes the word multicultural to broaden the scope of students we serve. We are conscious of identities such as veteran status, geographic location, family structure, political preference, mental/physical ability, and body type when developing our programming, initiatives, visions, and goals. More importantly, we recognize and honor those identities without side-stepping or diluting the complexities of “traditional” cultural topics (e.g. race, gender, religion, etc.). We provide safe and nurturing spaces for all members of the campus community to develop, understand their cultural identities; and then encourage affective and appropriate means of expression.

I’d like to thank Dr. Porter for his insight and sharing his expertise with us.

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Matthew Lynch published in HBCU's, Higher Education, Matthew Lynch

The 1 Thing You Should Know About Rising Sex Crimes on College Campuses

There’s no denying it, sex crimes are a major issue on college campuses.

In fact, a new report released by the U.S. Education Department found that reported cases of sexual assault and offenses on college campuses rose from 3,357 in 2009 to 6,073 in 2013.

However, while the numbers seem rather daunting, there’s one thing to keep in mind about this:

Officials in the Education Department say (in the letter) that the actual crimes have likely not risen, but awareness of them has. The push to encourage young people to speak up when they feel their sexual rights have been violated is gaining momentum across the country. Even the Obama Administration has stepped up and encouraged colleges and universities to take stronger actions when cases of sexual assault are reported, threatening to investigate schools that do not take the proper steps.

Working on a college campus, I don’t believe for a second that it has gotten twice as dangerous for students since 2009 when it comes to sexual assault. I think these numbers are exactly what the Education Department hints at — a result of raised awareness. Victims are feeling more comfortable speaking up and friends are more empowered to speak up when they see something happen that isn’t right.

Frankly, I would rather see numbers like this that indicate more young people are coming forward and feeling supported than to see a drop in numbers at this point. Until all colleges and universities have stringent sexual assault policies that they enforce, reports like this one are necessary to wake us from our slumber.

What do you think about the rising numbers of reported sex crimes? Does it come from more assaults or more awareness? I’d appreciate hearing your thoughts, so please leave a comment.

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Matthew Lynch published in Diversity, Equity, HBCU's, Matthew Lynch

6 Facts You Must Know About Student Loans and College Debt

If the P-12 education system is all about preparing its students for success in adulthood, then college preparation is obviously a must. In the fall of 2012, 66 percent of high school graduates from that year were enrolled in college, and that number does not include students that waited longer to enroll or non-traditional adult students. It seems that P-12 classrooms are getting more students ready for the academic demands of a college education – but what about the financial commitment? In this article, we will discuss 6 facts that you must know about student loans and college debt.

Currently, there is a call for a more affordable college education, which makes sense. It comes on the heels of a recession that undercut the value of a college education. Even those with a college degree were not immune to the financial hit that the economy took and those still paying off their student loans were often left without the very job they had always assumed would pay off their educational debts.

In this article, I’m going to discuss a few interesting facts and statistics about student loans and debt that will hopefully trigger a conversation about possible solutions to make college more affordable in this country.

  1. Graduates with advanced degrees are not immune to inordinate debt.

A study by the Urban Institute found that almost 300,000 Americans with master’s degrees were on public relief, along with 30,000 with doctorates. The average debt of a college graduate is $35,200 and that can take decades to pay off.

  1. Half of black graduates finish school with $25,000 or more in debt.

A recent Gallup poll found that in the last 14 years, around half of black college students graduated with student loan debt exceeding $25,000. Only 35 percent of white students had loan debt that high.

Often the only way for black students to afford a college education is by taking on these loans. Four out of five black students take student loans to attend college and typically have nearly $4,000 more student loan debt compared to white students, according to a 2013 report by The Center for American Progress.

There is deep inequality here in the U.S. In 2013, the median income for black households was $34,600, and the poverty rate is 27%, nearly three times that of white Americans.

  1. College students with high debt suffer long-term health issues.

According to a new study via Gallup.com, college graduates “who took on the highest amounts of student debt, $50,000 or more, are less likely than their fellow graduates who did not borrow for college to be thriving in four of five elements of well-being: purpose, financial, community, and physical.”

The survey has an area of 25-years as Gallup only polled individuals who graduated college between 1990-2014. What the study found is that graduates who are burdened with $50,000 or more in student loan debt may struggle to repay their loans, which in turn has causes them to delay making large purchases, e.g. buying a new home.

Those saddled with debt are unable to save as much as their counterparts who do not have as much debt or none at all, and Gallup’s “thriving gap,” percentages between those with $50,000 in debt less the percentage of student’s without it, shows an 11 point percentage spread between the two parties.

The study also found that more recent college graduates seem to be performing worse than those who graduated prior to 2000. Those who obtained a college degree between the years of 1990-1999 are doing better socially, physically, and in purpose.

Student loan debt now outweighs credit card debt and has surpassed $1 trillion. With wage growth still stagnant and many individuals going without full employment, this will mean more health issues and many former graduates with void savings accounts as well.

These issues are not left ignored, however. The next few facts about college debt will focus on the solutions proposed and implemented to tackle the issue of college affordability. For example:

  1. President Obama has reformed student loans.

The Obama Administration has spearheaded college loan reform at the federal level. No stranger to student debt himself (nor the First Lady), he has implemented payment reform starting this year. Under this new plan:

  • New borrowers will pay no more than 10 percent of their disposable income towards outstanding student loans.
  • Any student debt remaining will be wiped clean after 20 years.
  • Public service employees, like military members, nurses or teachers, will have their debt forgiven in 10 years if they make their payments on time.
  1. Senator Marco Rubio and Oregon propose “paying it forward” instead of paying loans back.

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio spoke about his own efforts in his home state of Florida, and perhaps on a federal level, to make college attendance a shared cost. Rubio is no stranger to college debt. When he arrived at the U.S. Senate, he still had $100,000 in outstanding student loans. Rubio has been upfront about his modest upbringing and also the power his education gave him but he has acknowledged that the cost is too high. The basics of his college plan would allow private investors to pay for the tuition of college students in exchange for a portion of their earnings later on. This would mean the students acquired no traditional debt and would not start out their careers in the hole – at least not in a typical way.

Another college payment idea that is arising across the country is a state-run repayment program that is similar to Rubio’s private investor one. Already in Oregon the Pay It Forward program has been approved (though not yet enacted) that will give students their public college education upfront, free of cost, in exchange for paying the state a portion of their earnings post-college. Supporters bill it as a “debt free” alternative to a college education, but like Rubio’s plan there is still money owed at the end of the college term that does impact actual earnings. It will be interesting to keep an eye on Oregon in the coming years to see how the program impacts the first groups of students who take advantage of it.

  1. Tennessee and Bernie Sanders want to make education free.

What if a public college education were completely free, though? That’s the approach Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam wants to take when it comes to the state’s community colleges. At his State of the State address, he called for free tuition at Tennessee’s community colleges in order to improve the state’s reputation as one of the least educated. Haslam proposed that the money to pay for it come from the state’s lottery earnings that would be placed in a $300 million endowment fund. While a short-term solution, I’m not sure that this is a sustainable payment plan. But if even one class of students in the state are able to take advantage of it, that may make a huge positive impact on Tennessee’s long-term economic outlook.

Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders has proposed trying to ease the student loan debt burden that many college graduates now carry and he’s proposing something even more radical: free college tuition to students who attend four-year colleges and universities.

Sanders plans to present his proposal later this week as a way to encourage future labor participation and to combat the ever growing problem with student loan debt.

In his press release about his college tuition bill, Sanders also said that he believes passage of this legislation will help place the United States back at the top of the world in the percentage of people who graduate from college.

According to the Boston Globe by way of commondreams.org, the class of 2015 will carry a student loan debt of $56 billion and is “the most indebted class in history.”

Sanders’ bill has a close to zero percent chance of passing. Still–one has to admire his way of thinking. Student loan debt is out of control and so is the price of tuition at many of the country’s best colleges and universities. For lower income students, they are usually preyed upon by for-profit institutions with promises of attaining a college degree and future job placement.

What do you think about the current affordability of college in the United States? Do you think that any of the proposed solutions come close to hitting the mark?

 

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Matthew Lynch published in Equity, HBCU's, Higher Education

Why scholars emphasize the need for affirmative action

Kalpana Jain, The Conversation

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, during oral arguments in the affirmative action case, Fisher v University of Texas, on Wednesday, December 9, suggested,

There are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas, where they do not do well — as opposed to having them go to a less advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well.

Justice Scalia is no stranger to controversy. In an earlier Supreme Court ruling upholding Obamacare tax credits for people on the federal exchange in June 2015, Justice Scalia was scathing in his dissent from the majority opinion.

Writing for The Conversation, Robert Schapiro, dean and professor of Law , Emory University, said:

When Justice Scalia gets mad, he does not hold back. He has often adopted fairly sharp language in his dissents but even by that standard, his dissent in King v Burwell is extraordinary in tone…. His vituperation reaches a crescendo in the conclusion where he snipes, “We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.”

Scholars and journalists alike have emphasized the seminal nature of the Fisher v University of Texas case. Indeed, a number of our contributors have argued that the case could exacerbate the racial tensions that have been evident through protests on campuses around the country.

Clearly, following this week’s oral arguments, the world of social media was on fire. Students and others tweeted at hashtag #scalia. Some even denounced Scalia’s comments with a hashtag of “#impeachscalia.”

Why the case is pivotal

Scholars argue that the judgment in the case will influence not only the admissions policies at UT, but in colleges and universities across the nation. And that could have consequences not just for diversity in education, but also for the educational success of students of color.

Liliana M Garces, an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University, who served as counsel of record in a friend-of-the-court brief filed in support of the University of Texas at Austin when the case was before the court in 2012, said:

We might not think that admissions policies can have an influence on the work of administrators charged with supporting students of color once they are on campus, but findings from a more recent study suggest that the influence of these laws extend beyond the composition of the student body. Bans on affirmative action can have a detrimental influence on work that is critical to the success of students of color on campus.

Garces’ research also shows that after eight states banned affirmative action, via ballot initiatives and other measures, there was a drop in the number of students of color.

Before bans on affirmative action, for every 100 students matriculated in medical schools in states with bans, there were 18 students of color, whereas after the ban, for every 100 students matriculated, about 15 were students of color.

The case came before the Supreme Court after Abigail Fisher, a white female, applied to the University of Texas at Austin and was denied admission. She sued the university stating the university’s race-conscious admissions policy violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. A lower court decided in UT’s favor.

In 2013, however, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower court to conduct a more rigorous assessment of whether UT Austin needed to consider race in admissions.

Garces with her coauthor, Gary Orfield, a professor of education, law, political science and urban planning at University of California, Los Angeles, makes a strong argument that the decision in the case could affect affirmative action policy in higher education in general.

While the case raises questions specific to UT-Austin’s program, it is also possible that the Supreme Court may further limit the use of race in higher education admissions policies for institutions across the nation.

Other scholars underline the importance of looking at the historical context of the origins of affirmative action.

Tanya Washington, professor of law at Georgia State University, says:

Franklin D Roosevelt was the first president to issue an executive order prohibiting racial discrimination in hiring defense contractors in 1943. But it was President John F Kennedy who, in an executive order in 1961, coined the term “affirmative action” to stop racial discrimination by government contractors. Subsequently, state and local governments, including universities, were inspired to introduce similar programs to promote equal opportunity.

In her article, Washington refers to the recent protests on campuses across the country. Black students continue to experience hostility because of their skin color.

Colleges and universities, she says, urgently need policies to address these challenges.

One such existing policy includes the limited consideration of race in admission decisions. This policy allows institutions to build a racially and ethnically diverse student body.

What is happening globally?

Policymakers in the US are not the only ones to have pushed for affirmative action.

Michele S Moses, professor of Educational Foundations and Policy, University of Colorado and Laura Dudley Jenkins, associate professor of Political Science, University of Cincinnati, argue that about one-quarter of the world’s other countries have some form of affirmative action for higher education. And many of these programs have emerged over the last 25 years.

A wide variety of institutions and governments on six continents have programs to expand admissions of non-dominant groups of students on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, class, geography, or type of high school. Several use a combination of these categories.

In fact, as they point out, “the United States’ affirmative action policies in higher education are not the oldest: India’s policies for lower caste students take that prize.”

And this should give policy makers in the US pause, “given that US policies are older than most, much of the cutting edge thinking on the topic is now coming from other parts of the world.”

The Conversation

Kalpana Jain, Editor, The Conversation

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

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Matthew Lynch published in HBCU's, Higher Education

Why HBCUs need alumni more than graduates (and financial literacy, too)

**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**

A guest post by Anwar Dunbar

Being highly involved in the Washington D.C. Alumni Chapter for Johnson C. Smith University (JCSU), I’ve become keenly aware of the issues facing Historically Black Colleges and University (HBCUs).  As an education advocate and writer, I’ve helped promote the Quotes for Education collaboration between Allstate and the Tom Joyner Foundation the last two years.  In numerous interviews with Allstate’s Senior Vice-President and Florida A&M University alumnus Cheryl Harris, the importance of HBCU alumni giving back to their alma maters was stressed.  In addition to the other pressures these institutions are facing, one of the more significant problems is the lack of alumni giving.

At an Executive Board meeting, our Chapter President Robert Ridley shared with us an idea he read stating that; “A graduate is someone who gets a degree from an institution and never looks back.   An alumnus is someone who gives their time and money back to their alma mater.”  This was an important distinction that I had never heard before, not even when I was a student at JCSU.  It’s an important concept that arguably should be introduced from day one.

Why is it important for graduates to give back to their alma maters?  The main reason is to give future generations a fighting chance to succeed.  This is particularly important for Black America.  Secondly, institutions of higher learning rely on state, federal and extramural funding from private donors.  Many HBCU’s are “Land Grant” institutions and their funding has been decreased ironically under the Obama Administration.  Thus donations from alumni have become more important.

As unofficially told by an insider, for the 2014 fiscal year, less than 15% of my class of 1999 gave anything back to JCSU, a staggeringly low number.  When our school President Dr. Ronald Carter gave an overview of the current health of the University here in Washington, DC, he cited low alumni giving as one potential threat to the University’s future.  A key piece of that evening was encouraging alumni to consider cutting back on certain luxuries to free up money to give back.

Why don’t HBCU Alums give more to their Alma maters?  Why would only 14% of my class give back to the University?  One reason is that many students who’ve attended HBCU graduates feel as though they’ve given enough of their money to their alma mater when pursuing their educations, and don’t feel inclined to give anything else after graduating.  Another is hard feelings towards one’s alma mater.  Many graduates feel bitter about their experience at their alma mater for one reason or the other as well.  I’ve heard this personally and read about it in other articles.

Another piece to this puzzle though is socioeconomic.  Of the many curses to being born black in the United States, a key one is starting from lower rungs on the economic ladder than our counterparts of other ethnicities.  If for example, your parents planned ahead and saved a college fund for you, your economic burden will likely be lessened or non-existent upon graduation as discussed by Georgette Miller, Esq. in Living Debt Free.  You’ll have less debt and more disposable income (some to donate) after starting your career.

“They just weren’t thinking that way,” my father said in a discussion about my grandparents in a discussion about mortgages.  I stumbled upon the basics of financial literacy by accident (from books like Rich Dad Poor Dad and the Millionaire Next Door), and wondered why my parents didn’t teach me more about the vital knowledge shared in these books.  They didn’t know themselves and I think this is true for a lot of African American families in the United States.

Likewise I hypothesize that many other college graduates from my community have a low level of Financial Literacy and that in part drives this lack of giving that we see from alumni.  If my hypothesis is true and many students are matriculating into our HBCU’s with a low level of Financial Literacy, HBCU’s may do good to start educating their students on these topics from day one.  A good place to start would be Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University (FPU), or something similar.

I didn’t seriously start giving to either of my alma maters until going through the FPU class taught at my church.  In FPU I learned that the greatest misunderstanding about money is that one of major keys to building and maintaining wealth is blessing others.  Put another way, sustained financial health and giving are a function of one another, and in order for one to be able to give, one’s own financial house must first be in order.

Student loan debt can help explain the lack of giving, but my suspicion is that there’s a percentage of graduates that once they get established, their finances aren’t situated so that they’re able to give back, or giving back just isn’t a priority.  Coming from the African American community, there is truth to the myth that we as a community often collectively make poor financial decisions, particularly keeping up with the Joneses and trying to portray a certain image.  For this reason, and because so many of us don’t get it at home, HBCUs once again may do good to expose their students to a financial literacy a curricula such as FPU which ultimately stresses sound financial decision making and ultimately charitable giving.

So why give back?  Giving back to our alma maters, especially HBCUs, is important if we want to see future generations grown and thrive.  One of the keys to advancement of the African American community in the United States is financial stability and advancement as a group.  Likewise the community itself has a responsibility to give its younger generations a fighting chance to participate in our new global economy.   In the United States, economic power influences everything else.  Regarding my own graduating class of 1999, we can do better than 14% giving back to our alma mater, as can graduates from other institutions.

_____

 

Anwar Y. Dunbar is a Regulatory Scientist in the Federal Government where he registers and regulates Pesticides.  He earned his Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the University of Michigan and his Bachelor’s Degree in General Biology from Johnson C. Smith University.  In addition to publishing numerous research articles in competitive scientific journals,  he has also published over one hundred articles for the Examiner (www.examiner.com) on numerous education and literacy related topics in the areas of; Current Events and Culture, Higher Education, Financial Literacy, and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).  He actively mentors youth and works to spread awareness of STEM careers to minority students.  He also tutors in the subjects of Biology, Chemistry and Physics.  He is a native of Buffalo, NY.  He can be contacted via email at [email protected], and can be followed on Twitter @anwaryusef.

Read all of our posts about HBCUs by clicking here. 

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Matthew Lynch published in HBCU's, Higher Education

Students aren’t customers…or are they?

Geoff Sharrock, University of Melbourne

With the rise of mass higher learning, tight public funding and intense competition for students, universities are often encouraged to see students as “customers”. But should they?

Commentators who criticise them for “poor customer service” seem to think so.

But others object that these are social institutions, not businesses selling commodities to consumers. What’s more, if you commercialise higher education, you corrupt it.

To this, others say that all universities, public or private, create private benefits along with public goods. Yes, society benefits from the learning embodied in graduates. And students gain too, from credentials that offer them access to jobs, careers and social mobility.

So why not aim for “customer satisfaction” in the name of better quality, better value for money, or both? Whoever pays?

This seems logical; but the analogy has problems. As the angry professor in Hannie Rayson’s play Life After George says to the cash-strapped dean, “Students aren’t customers! We can’t just give them what they want. They don’t know what they want until after they’ve heard what we have to tell them!”

If it works in business…

Studies of successful businesses may have led to some cognitive dissonance in this debate. A century ago, American and English department stores succeeded with the slogan: “the customer is always right”. French hotelier Cesar Ritz had the same idea: “Le client n’a jamais tort”.

More recently that 1980s bestseller In Search of Excellence found that the best-run US companies stayed “close to the customer”.

Then came “Total Quality Management”. Its focus on process improvements aimed at boosting “customer satisfaction” made consumers the final arbiters of quality.

Meanwhile consulting firms engaged in “Customer Intimacy”, designing solutions for complex client needs, even if the “customer” couldn’t say exactly what they wanted.

Even in business the concepts of “consumer”, “customer” and “client” are not clear-cut. They are shorthand for a spectrum of simple products and complex services, brief encounters and extended engagements.

A “customer focus” spectrum. Source: author

As customers, are they “always right”?

Ideas such as these, tried and true in the commercial world, are hard to reconcile with the student/teacher relationship.

To a lecturer marking assignments, the notion that the “customer is always right” soon gets mugged by the reality that “the student is often wrong”.

The analogy seems to miss the fact that students co-produce what they learn, not just with books and lectures and tutors, but with peers.

For students, study may entail heavy workloads, challenging tasks and uncomfortable interrogations. Knowing this, many lecturers lament the use of short, sharp student surveys as blunt instruments to assess their course or teaching quality.

A spectrum of student experience

In fact, as they engage with the university, students step through a spectrum of identities. Do they ever occupy the role of customer or client? Yes, but with caveats.

The “student as customer” idea is not as novel as it seems. University of California president Clark Kerr observed 50 years ago that as study electives proliferated in US universities, patterns of student choice shaped academic programs: “Their choices, as consumers, guide university expansion and contraction, and this process is far superior to a more rigid guild system of producer determination…”

But here, as part of the bargain, the “consumer” had obligations: “The student,
unlike Adam Smith’s idealised buyer, must consume – usually at the rate of fiftee hours a week.”

We can add other caveats. In the marketplace, payment alone entitles the consumer to the product or service on offer. But most students must pre-qualify to enter their chosen course; and to graduate, they must show that they’ve earned their degree.

Student support and professionalism

Cocooned for a time as citizens and subjects of the university, students assume “membership” rights as well as responsibilities. These rights include access to facilities, advice and support.

The more study options there are, for example, the more guidance they may need, if only to avoid a timetable that even Hermione Granger couldn’t handle.

If they want to switch courses, can students find help that is responsive, respectful and reliable? Or must it be time-consuming, cranky, and confusing?

If the 1990s Melbourne film Love and Other Catastrophes is a guide, student administration can be chaotic, and academic supervision unprofessional, due to a lack of service commitment (or “customer focus”).

While the term is not used, a “customer focus” rubric informs the new national University Experience Survey. As a road-map to quality assurance, it shows how multi-faceted student life can be.

Along with what they think they’ve learned, it asks students to rate their experience of social engagement, teaching quality, student advice, administrative support, campus facilities and IT resources.

Limits to “customer satisfaction”

Yet clearly, students can’t finally dictate what universities do. Cambridge University’s David Howarth observes (in an essay on whether law is a humanity, or more like engineering) that academics, like judges, often serve a “virtual client”.

In court, a lawyer must act in her client’s best interests. But in determining the merits of the case, the judge must consider the interests of absent third parties: a whole society may be the “virtual client”.

Scholars are there to help individual “clients” succeed, up to a point. But when giving a grade that leads to the award of a degree, they must keep absent third parties (such as employers) in mind.

As graduates, students become “products” of the university. When assessing student work, a lecturer who gets too “close to the customer” (and here we include “customer intimacy” in its biblical sense) must take steps to avoid bias.

So, does it ever help to see students as “customers”? Yes, if this means ensuring they’ll be well advised and well supported, so they can make informed choices, use their time well, and benefit fully from study.

And no, if this means distorting the teacher-student relationship, failing to uphold course standards, or undermining the institution’s integrity and the reputation of its degrees.

The Conversation

Geoff Sharrock, Program Director, University of Melbourne

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

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