The dot-edu sector isn't yet connecting the dots

A consulting firm has just attempted to do to doctoral universities what US News and World Report famously does to American colleges: use various quantitative data to arrive at easily-understood rankings. Inside Higher Ed has a thorough writeup posted.

The consulting firm's chosen headline for their data (that public universities are falling behind private ones in their productivity of PhD-level research) seems highly debatable for a number of reasons covered in that article. Well down in there an administrator from Arizona State, after blurting the usual silly cliche about how "you can say anything with statistics", actually does a nice job detailing core flaws of the specific data being used here. The response from the consulting firm is quite unpersuasive.

For me though this small tempest fits into a broader storyline about this country's educational institutions and experts. Like charitable foundations, that sector still seems mostly to think that 21st-century America is still happy with its 20th-century social contract. There are lots of signs to the contrary, such as the growing public interest in some way to compare institutions' actual productivity other than just taking their word for it. The educational system's customers, which is everybody, are less and less willing to do that and the sector itself continues to fail to offer any other robust way to measure and compare its own output.

Hence we see the current standardized-testing mania that has infected our primary and secondary schools, which everyone agrees has tons of drawbacks -- but so long as educators offer no practicable alternatives that would measure educational results on a wide scale, the parents will keep voting for politicians who impose standardized testing. Looking at colleges and universities its clear that a similar dynamic is underway: the educators insist that their output cannot be measured objectively and respond to college and university rankings mainly by deploring the very idea.

That "trust us to know what's best for your children" attitude will not wash in today's world, and a good thing too. Moreover this society's expectations about transparency have moved way past what the .edu sector gets -- 15 years ago Congress had to pass a tough federal law just to get universities to admit how many young women were being date-raped on their campuses. If colleges and universities don't feel like getting serious about identifying measurable, transparent, regular ways to document and compare their output, it will be done for them. Slowly, erratically, clumsily and who knows how intelligently -- but it will.

Women in higher education (including science)

The presidency of Harvard is something like a symbolic top of the heap in American higher education, and so the uproar that drove Lawrence Summers out of the job last year made national headlines. The authors of a new book on women in science recently made some interesting comments about that episode in the online magazine "Inside Higher Ed".

Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams, professors at Cornell, report that "some scholars felt that they could not contribute (essays to the book) because their views were scorned, and had resulted in personal attacks against them on their campuses. If you read between the lines in several of the essays, you will detect this theme even among those who did contribute essays...." In other words, the professors re-discovered what Summers arguably should have known: that even wondering something like whether the gender imbalance in higher education might not be due to discrimination is a third rail on today's campuses. In a word, yecch.

Much more positive was the news (to me anyway) that women have in just the last decade or two become drastically more prominent at the top levels in higher education. Three Ivy League universities now have female presidents (Brown, Penn and Princeton) as do plenty of other well-known schools (hundreds of four-year colleges and universities in the U.S., according to one study). Actually Harvard's world-famous law school is now led by a woman (who is, according to the New York Times, on the short list for the university's top job). One might see progress, of a sort, in things like the female president of the University of New Hampshire being headhunted away by Temple, or the female president of the University of Colorado getting hounded from her job partly for being tonedeaf in much the same way Summers was (on a different topic). No glass ceiling here, for good and ill. (Including the ultimately tragic story of the chancellor of the University of California.)

I also did not know that women are now earning more than half of all bachelor's degrees, 43% of all master's degrees and more than a third of all doctorates in science and engineering in the U.S. If those trend lines continue up (the doctorate fraction has almost quintupled since 1966) then obviously that will filter up through academia (it's already led to sharp increases in the percentage of women employed in various scientific and engineering fields, in some cases to more than half.)

Progressive pricing of education

The New York Times seems to have just discovered, in a front-page story today, the way that private colleges price their services in the U.S.: charging families higher or lower tuition based on what they're able to pay. I'm not sure why this is news -- when I was in college the financial-aid office was perfectly candid about it.

Maybe its just the cute news angle they found, about several colleges which only woke up to the game recently and discovered that raising its tuition made it seem like a better school. So they raise the tuition by 18% and the financial-aid pool by 20% and promptly start getting more applications, because full-cost-paying families assume that a place that costs more must be better. (Or perhaps because .edu-world currently offers its customers no single quantifiable measurement of quality other than sticker price, and bitterly resists attempts to create one such as the US News and World Report rankings.)

I was surprised at just how progressive private-college pricing has become: "aid is now so extensive that more than 73 percent of undergraduates attending private four-year institutions received it in the school year that ended in 2004, not even counting loans." And I happened recently in my office to hear, from the executive director of an association of small Midwestern colleges, another point made in the article: "some students may not even apply to private colleges, scared away from the start by tuition and unaware of the available discounts." The solution to which is, of course, clueing them in to the system and the opportunity to benefit from it. (Like the first time an older relative explained to you that nobody actually pays the listed price at a used-car dealership.)

The article did quote someone raising the familiar spectre of a "squeeze of the middle class": upper-income families can pay full sticker price while poor families get lots of aid. No actual data was offered to back that up, and since the article notes that aid is offered to families earning as much as $150,000/year if they have several kids, the worry seems to depend on a rather expansive definition of "middle class". Or for that matter of "squeeze."

Other than sardonic amusement at the discomfort of certain parties with discovering that they must deal with (horrors!) market dynamics like supply and demand, I'm fine with all this. Access to the finest system of higher education on the planet is being priced in a highly progressive manner? Works for me.