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Friday, November 22, 2024

Accreditor ACCSC Again Grants Maximum Renewal To Troubled For-Profit Colleges (David Halperin)

College accreditor ACCSC has renewed approval of four for-profit colleges owned by California-based International Education Corp. (IEC), a company that was forced to shut down many of its campuses in the past year after a U.S. Department of Education investigation revealed the schools were rigging student entrance exams and engaging in other fraudulent conduct.

By memo dated November 15, ACCSC noticed the public that it had renewed accreditation of four IEC-owned schools for five years, which is the maximum period of renewal that ACCSC grants to colleges. Three of the schools — in Gardena, Riverside, and Sacramento, California — are branded as UEI College, while the fourth, called United Education Institute, is in Las Vegas.

Abuses at IEC schools

In February, the Department of Education terminated financial aid eligibility to another IEC-owned chain called Florida Career College, and the school closed. As part of the resolution of that matter, the CEO of IEC, Fardad Fateri, stepped down. The Department acted because it found, as described in a detailed 38-page letter sent to FCC in April 2023, blatant cheating at FCC on “ability-to-benefit” entrance exams for students without a high school diploma.

Republic Report, relying on interviews with numerous FCC staff, had first exposed that long-running rampant misconduct, along with other blatant recruiting and financial abuses, at FCC. FCC’s misbehavior lured numerous students — veterans, single parents, immigrants, and other struggling Americans — into low-quality school programs that left them deep in debt and without the career advancement they sought.

The Department’s February settlement agreement with IEC indicated that the Department had an open investigation of potential violations at UEI similar to those found at FCC. The settlement barred UEI from administering ATB tests going forward. As part of the settlement, the Department agreed to end its investigation of UEI, if UEI complied with the settlement agreement. That investigation of UEI is apparently now over.

However, a September 2023 letter from ACCSC to IEC revealed that the company was also under investigation by California’s attorney general. It’s unclear whether that investigation remains open.

ACCSC was not the accreditor of Florida Career College, but it does accredit some of the UEI campuses. Soon after the Department announced in April 2023 that it was moving to cut off federal student aid to FCC, ACCSC placed UEI College and International Education Corp. on “System-Wide Warning” status, citing the Department’s findings that senior IEC leaders knew of and encouraged the cheating, and also citing IEC’s alleged failure to inform ACCSC of the Department’s investigation in a timely manner. ACCSC also noted that IEC had voluntarily halted ability-to-benefit testing and enrollment at UEI; the accreditor’s May 2023 order included a requirement that such testing and enrollment be suspended — suggesting already that there might be questions about ATB testing at UEI.

Yet now ACCSC has renewed accreditation for IEC/UEI schools for the maximum period, the same renewal that it would grant to the best-behaving schools. The renewals are effective back to dates in 2020 and 2022, reflecting in part that ACCSC delayed decisions on renewal while the schools were being evaluated, so the schools must seek renewal again soon. But it’s fair to ask whether the full five-year renewals were appropriate, or whether, instead, ACCSC continues to tolerate college abuses, to the detriment of both students and of the U.S. taxpayers who support the hundreds of millions in federal financial aid that have flowed to ACCSC schools.

ACCSC executive director Michale McComis did not respond to a request for comment regarding the renewal for the IEC schools.

Abuses at other ACCSC-accredited schools

The question of ACCSC’s tolerance for predatory college abuses is again squarely presented as ACCSC faces its own next review: its application to be renewed in 2026 by the Department of Education as a recognized accreditor, a status that allows schools it accredits to be eligible for federal student grants and loans. The maximum renewal period for this gatekeeper status is also five years. That review process is already underway at the Department.

The last time ACCSC was up for renewal, in 2021, the Department, citing failures by ACCSC in curbing long-running abuses at another awful predatory college operation, the Center for Excellence in Higher Education (owner of now-shuttered Independence University), delayed renewal of recognition, required ACCSC to explain its conduct, and ultimately extended ACCSC f0r three years instead of five — although the way the process went forward, the practical effect, disappointingly, was a five year renewal.

Data shows many ACCSC schools have left students worse off than when they started.

Since ACCSC’s last review, the accreditor has engaged in other troubling behavior.

Most notably, as Republic Report first reported, in July 2023, ACCSC had watched while Atlantis University, a Miami-based for-profit school, acted in blatant violation of an ACCSC rule governing the use of “branch campuses” tied to a school’s central campus. Atlantis’s executive director was, at the time, the chair of ACCSC.

The Atlantis branch campus, called Florida Palms University, shut down soon after our report. ACCSC then put Atlantis on warning status, via a letter that, as we noted at the time, was heavily redacted in the version released to the public. Whatever problems the many blacked-out passages of the October 2023 letter concealed stood in sharp contrast to ACCSC’s unconditional five-year renewal of Atlantis in December 2022. ACCSC removed Atlantis from warning status by February 2024.

This year, after Republic Report had repeatedly been able to learn valuable information about the bad behavior of some ACCSC-accredited schools through the public release of detailed letters from the accreditor to schools like UEI and Atlantis — at least the unredacted portions — ACCSC moved away from transparency and accountability. It started releasing, instead of the actual letters to schools, vague summaries that keep the public in the dark about what is actually happening.

ACCSC is also the accreditor of troubled Connecticut-based for-profit Paier College, which faces possible closure after losing access to federal student aid and having been sued for deceptive practices by the state’s attorney general. ACCSC placed Paier on warning status in June, citing low graduation rates and weak validation of faculty credentials. But that action by ACCSC came six months after the school, facing scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Education, voluntarily withdrew from eligibility for federal student grants and loans.

Another ACCSC school, Career College of Northern Nevada (CCNN), abruptly closed in February, replacing its website with a closure notice and literally locking students out of the building.

In June 2023, yet another ACCSC-accredited school, Hussian College, suddenly shut down. In June 2022, ACCSC had put Hussian on system-wide warning, citing concerns about student achievement at the schools. But ACCSC removed the warning and renewed Hussian’s accreditation in December 2022.

ACCSC also accredits Florida’s for-profit Southeastern College. There is much evidence suggesting that that school, owned by ultra-rich Floridians Arthur and Belinda Keiser, effectively receives improper subsidies from Keiser University, a non-profit college controlled by the Keisers.

ACCSC’s renewal application and the new Trump administration

Members of the public have until December 6 to submit written comments to the Department of Education regarding ACCSC’s bid for renewal.

The Biden administration, and U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, to their credit, took much more seriously the Department’s obligation to review accreditors for their vigilance in guarding against predatory college abuses than the first Trump administration and Secretary Betsy DeVos did. If the second Trump administration, and new education secretary pick Linda McMahon, truly want to help students, and truly want to implement the incoming administration’s professed commitment to rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in federal government programs, then it should continue the Biden team’s work of holding predatory colleges accountable — and also holding accountable the accreditors that allow such abuses to persist.

[Editor's note: This article originally appeared on Republic Report.] 

Tuesday, November 5, 2024

Questioning the Higher Education Establishment

"So that's how it is," sighed Yakov. "Behind the world lies another world." Bernard Malamud

The Higher Education Inquirer has published a number of articles about how US higher education works and the institutions, organizations, and individuals it serves. 

We have written about US higher education in a number of ways, discussing the history, economics, and underlying ideologies (e.g. neoliberalism, white supremacy) and theories making it what it is--an industry that reinforces a larger (and environmentally unsustainable) economic system and an industry that produces too many unneeded credentials--and soul crushing student loan debt. 

We have listed the myths that US higher education perpetuates and the methods it uses to disseminate them. We have examined a number of higher education institutions and their categories (including university hospitals, state universities, private colleges, community colleges, and online robocolleges). We have investigated several businesses associated with higher education, some nefarious, many profit driven, and a few (like TuitionFit and College Viability App) driven by integrity and values. And we have followed the struggle of labor and consumers. HEI has even created an outline for a People's History of US Higher Education.

But we haven't examined higher education as part of the establishment. Like the establishment that students of the 1960s talked about as something not to trust. The trustees, endowment managers, trustees, foundation presidents, accreditors, bankers, bond raters, CEOs and CFOs who make the decisions that affect how higher ed operates and who at the same time work to make consumers, workers, and activists invisible. 


To say we cannot trust US higher education administrators and business leaders may sound passe, or something that only extremists of the Left or Right might say, but it isn't, and more folks are seeing that

Examining US higher education needs to be assessed more deeply (like Craig Steven Wilder, Davarian Baldwin, and Gary Roth have done) and more comprehensively (like Marc Bousquet), and it needs to be explained to the People. It's something few have endeavored, because it isn't profitable, not even for tenure in some cases. 

Without our own sustainable business model, the Higher Education Inquirer will continue writing (and prompt others to write) stories significant to workers and consumers, the folks who deserve to be enlightened and who deserve to tell their stories. 

And as long as we can, the Higher Education Inquirer will ask the Establishment for answers that only they know, something few others are willing to do

Thursday, October 31, 2024

Why the Higher Education Inquirer Continues to Gain Popularity

The Higher Education Inquirer (HEI) continues to grow, with no revenues, no advertising, and no SEO help. And for good reason. HEI fills a niche for student/consumers and workers and their allies. It provides valuable information about how the US higher education system works and what folks can do to navigate that system. 


We cover layoffs and union organizing and strikes in higher education, and we expose predators with some degree of risk-risk that other outlets often won't take. We take a stand on holding big business accountable and we side with struggling student debtors and their families. We question and interrogate higher ducation technology and credentialsAnd we dispel myths, disinformation, and hype. 

We research documents of all sorts, including information from the US Department of Education, Securities and Exchange Commission, Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Defense, Department of Labor, and Federal Election Commission

The Higher Education Inquirer provides trustworthy information and expert opinions and analysis. Our list of authors is diverse and impressive, for many reasons. HEI treats our readers with respect. It gives students and workers a voice, accepting information and evidence from whistleblowers. And it allows for comments (including anonymous comments), comments that we value. 

When others do accept our research, we appreciate it. HEI has been a background source for the NY Times, Bloomberg, Chronicle of Higher Education, ProPublica, Forbes, Military Times, the American Prospect, and several other outlets. We strive to be ahead of the learned herd.  


Friday, October 25, 2024

New higher education enrollment numbers: a mixed bag (Bryan Alexander)

How is higher education enrollment changing?

Today the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center published its first analysis of student numbers for fall 2024.  This is important data, as ever, and I’ll dig into it with this post.

It’s a mixed bag. Total enrollment rose, but a key indicator fell.

 National Student Clearinghouse Research Center logoi

One caution: this is the first such report for the semester, representing just over one half of the Center’s respondents’ data. They’ll revise this over the next few months.

The good news: total post-secondary enrollment rose 2.9% compared to fall 2023, with undergrad numbers rising 3% and grad school up 2.1%.   The heart of this growth is to be found in community colleges, who are using dual enrollment (teaching high school students) to rebuild their classes for the third year in a row.  For-profit colleges are also doing very well, seeing their numbers up 5%.

The main degree growth is not from graduate or undergrad degrees (not the BA, BS, MA, PhD, and so on), but from undergrad certificate seekers (a 7.3% rise).

There are other positive findings.  The sophomore retention rate (the proportion of first-year students who return for their second year) did better, as the drop out rate decreased.  Returning student numbers were higher.  In terms of race, all non-white populations enjoyed increased numbers: “Undergraduate and graduate enrollments for Hispanic, Black, Asian, and Multiracial students are seeing strong growth this fall.”  Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs) all saw increases. In terms of economic class, there were more students from the lowest economic quintile.

In terms of gender, there were no meaningful differences, as both male and female numbers rose at roughly the same amount.

Geographically, nearly all states enjoyed an increased in overall enrollment at the undergrad level:

enrollment 2024 fall by state_undergrad_ Clearinghouse

At the graduate level things were still rosy, although more mixed:

enrollment 2024 fall by state_grad_ Clearinghouse

Primarily online institutions (think Arizona State, Southern New Hampshire, Western Governors, etc.) saw enrollment rise by more than 6%.

Yet with all of these bright spots, the Clearinghouse shared some bad news.  First-year student enrollment dropped 5% overall.  This decline reversed gains made in 2023, taking things back to 2022 levels, and was especially pronounced in public and private four year institutions (-8.5% and -6.5%):

enrollment 2023-2024 first years Clearinghouse

In terms of age, “an almost 6% drop in the number of 18-year-old freshmen (a proxy for those enrolling immediately after high school graduation) accounts for most of the decline.”  In terms of economic class, this decline was especially true of state schools serving more Pell-eligible students, which saw drops of 10% and more.

Further, one negative sign of race and enrollment involves the caucasian population: “Undergraduate White students, on the other hand, continue to see enrollment declines (-0.6%).“  The Chronicle of Higher Ed generated this helpful and contrasting graphic:

enrollment higher ed by race 2024 fall Clearinghouse data_Chronicle viz

I and others who attended a briefing asked Clearinghouse staff to speculate on the decline.  Vice president for research Doug Shapiro thought multiple factors were in play: the FAFSA chaos, the attraction of the job market (unemployment being low), fear of student debt.  The Supreme Court ruling against academic affirmative action might have discouraged some minority students from applying, at least to elite institutions.

What might we take away from this report?

I need to preface my remarks by reminding readers that enrollment matters for two vital reasons.  To the extent that the United States wants more people to have more college study, the number of students who actually pursue higher education indicates how successful we are in reaching that goal.  And since we’ve effectively privatized most of higher education economics, student enrollment means essential revenue for keeping college and university doors open.

First, the Clearinghouse report is very good news for community colleges, who are enjoying growth after years of losses.  Their strategy of reaching into high schools is making up for their losses in the rest of their communities. It’s also good for for-profits, who saw their sector flattened during the Obama administration.

Second, certificates are in the lead.  The Center’s director told me that this sounds like a short-term trend, as the number of students pursuing shorter-term credentials is continuing to grow.  How many campuses will be inspired to expand their own certificate offerings as a result, sensing a growing market?

Third, there aren’t any clear signs of students responding to abortion policies.  That is, we might expect younger people (who tend to be more liberal) and especially younger women to avoid states with strict abortion bans, but the geographic data does not bear this out.

Fourth, in terms of how we think about higher education, the major developments here focus on the parts of academia which don’t normally get much attention or media buzz: for-profits, community colleges, certificates, online learning.  I don’t know if most academics in public and non-profit higher ed, and most Democrats, will be happy to see for-profits strengthen.

Fifth, this decline in first-year students could depress enrollments for years to come.  It might mean fewer sophomores next year, fewer juniors the year after, and so on.  Colleges will have to do heroic feats to boost retention, and high schools ditto to expand graduation and application, to nullify this issue.

Sixth, institutions which teach mostly online continue to grow. This is a long-running trend and feels likely (to me) to keep building up.

Seventh, it’s good to see higher ed actually grow after more than a decade of decline.  We’re still nowhere near the numbers we enrolled in 2012’s peak and have a long way to go before reaching that.  Meanwhile, America’s total population has grown, thanks to immigration, so we have farther still to go in reaching our peak proportion.

One last note: keep an eye out for updates to this data, as the Clearinghouse gets more evidence from its affiliated institutions.

This article first appeared at BryanAlexander.org

Wednesday, October 2, 2024

What would a second Trump administration mean for higher education? Summing up Project 2025 (Bryan Alexander)

[Editor's Note: This article first appeared at BryanAlexander.org.]

What happens to higher education if Trump wins November’s election?

We’ve been exploring this question over the past year, including months of reading, analysis, reflection, and conversation about Project 2025 might mean for higher education. Today I’d like to sum up what we found.

The book, Mandate for Leadership, addresses academia directly on multiple levels. I’ll break them down here. The implications for the broader society within which colleges and universities exist – that’s a subject for another post.

I’ve organized the various ideas and threads into several headers: the Department of Education, higher education economics, international education and research, research supported and opposed, military connections, sex education, and anti-intellectualism.

Higher education and the Department of Education Many accounts of Project 2025’s educational impact draw attention to its attack on the Department of Education, which makes sense, since this is where the document focuses its academic attention. to begin with, Mandate for Leadership wants to break up the DoE and distribute its functions to other federal units. For example, the work the Office for Postsecondary Education (OPE) does would move to the Department of Labor, while “programs deemed important to our national security interests [shift] to the Department of State.” (327).

It would revise the student loan system to a degree. “Federal loans would be assigned directly to the Treasury Department, which would manage collections and defaults.” (327-330) Income-based repayment schemes would continue, but with restrictions. (337-8) Project 2025 would end the Biden team’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, along with “time-based and occupation-based student loan forgiveness” plans. (361) More ambitiously, the new government could just privatize loans. (353)

The chapter’s author also calls for “rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory” in the department or through its successor units. (322) This might also proceed via changes to one law, as a new secretary would “[w]ork with Congress to amend Title IX to include due process requirements; define “sex” under Title IX to mean only biological sex recognized at birth; and strengthen protections for faith-based educational institutions, programs, and activities.” (333) This culture war move could have another legal feature, given the call to amend FERPA in order to make it easier for college students to sue the government for privacy violations, in response to school support of transgender and nonbinary students. (344-346)

The obverse of these moves is having the new DoE or its replacements “promulgat[ing] a new regulation to require the Secretary of Education to allocate at least 40 percent of funding to international business programs that teach about free markets and economics.” Additionally, the government would “require institutions, faculty, and fellowship recipients to certify that they intend to further the stated statutory goals of serving American interests,” although it’s unclear what that would mean in practice. (356)

This section’s author, Lindsay Burke, also wants the next administration to change its relationship with post-secondary accreditors. She supports Florida’s new policy of requiring public universities to cycle through accrediting agencies. (332) Burke also wants to encourage new accreditors to start up. (355) Her chapter further calls for a new administration to prevent accreditation agencies from advocating for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work on campuses. (352)

The economics of higher education The Department of Education chapter would see a revamped Department of Education or its successors “[r]equir[ing]… ‘skin in the game’ from colleges to help hold them accountable for loan repayment.” (341) I can’t see how this would work in detail. Her new federal administration would also reduce funding to academic research by cutting reimbursement for indirect costs. (355)

That section also wants to reduce the labor market’s demand for post-secondary degrees. Under the header “Minimize bachelor’s degree requirements” we find: “The President should issue an executive order stating that a college degree shall not be required for any federal job unless the requirements of the job specifically demand it.” (357). Later on in the book, the Department of Labor section section also calls on Congress to end college degree requirements for federal positions. (597) That chapter wants to boost apprenticeships, mostly likely in competition with college and university study. (594-5)

International research and education. Cutting down immigration is a major Project 2025 theme, and the book does connect this to academia. It calls out international students like so:
ICE should end its current cozy deference to educational institutions and remove security risks from the program. This requires working with the Department of State to eliminate or significantly reduce the number of visas issued to foreign students from enemy nations. (141)

First, this would impact many would-be students’ careers. Second, implementing such a policy would likely depress international student interest.

Project 2025 consistently focuses on China as America’s enemy, and this means it wants United States higher education to decouple from that adversary or else face consequences. For example, the introduction warns that “[u]niversities taking money from the CCP should lose their accreditation, charters, and eligibility for federal funds.” Later in the text is some language about the government and universities supporting American but not Chinese research and development. (100) Another section sees “research institutions and academia” playing a role in Cold War 2.0:
Corporate America, technology companies, research institutions, and academia must be willing, educated partners in this generational fight to protect our national security interests, economic interests, national sovereignty, and intellectual property as well as the broader rules-based order—all while avoiding the tendency to cave to the left-wing activists and investors who ignore the China threat and increasingly dominate the corporate world. (emphases added; 218)

Later on, the Department of Justice discussion offers this recommendation:

key goals for the China Initiative that included development of an enforcement strategy concerning researchers in labs and universities who were being coopted into stealing critical U.S. technologies, identification of opportunities to address supply-chain threats more effectively, and education of colleges and universities about potential threats from Chinese influence efforts on campus. (556)

This seems to describe increased DoJ scrutiny over colleges and universities. I’m not sure what “education… about potential threats” means, although I suspect it might include pressure on academics.

The Department of Commerce section wants to “[t]ighten… the definition of ‘fundamental research’ to address exploitation of the open U.S. university system by authoritarian governments through funding, students and researchers, and recruitment” (673) More succinctly, that chapter calls for strategic decoupling from China (670, 674). We can imagine a new federal administration – along with, perhaps, state governments, businesses, nonprofits, and foundations – asking academia to play its role in that great separation. One of the trade policy chapters broods about how “more than 300,000 Communist Chinese nationals attend U.S. universities” and it’s hard not to see this as a call for reducing that number. (785)

That chapter’s author, Peter Navarro, condemns one leading American university for allegedly enabling Chinese power:

Huawei, well-known within the American intelligence community as an instrument of Chinese military espionage, has partnered with the University of California–Berkeley on research that focuses on artificial intelligence and related areas such as deep learning, reinforcement learning, machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision, all of which have important future military applications.28 In this way, UC–Berkeley, whether unwittingly or wittingly, helps to boost Communist China’s capabilities and quest for military dominance. (785-6)

I can’t help but read this as a call for federal scrutiny of academic international partnerships, with sanctions in the wings.

Project 2025 looks at other regions of the globe and wants higher education to help. For example, the State Department chapter calls on American campuses to assist its African policy: “The U.S. should support capable African military and security operations through the State Department and other federal agencies responsible for granting foreign military education, training, and security assistance.” (187)

Other federal units come in for transformation which impacts colleges and universities. One chapter calls for “reinstituti[ng] the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board.” (Wikipedia; 218) The USAID chapter would cut some post-secondary support, based on the argument that “[w]e must admit that USAID’s investments in the education sector, for example, serve no other purpose than to subsidize corrupt, incompetent, and hostile regimes.” (275)

Support for and opposition to research Project 2025 consistently calls for research and development, at least in certain fields. The Department of Energy chapter enthusiastically promotes science. That chapter also tends to pair research with security, so we might infer increased security requirements for academic energy work. Alternative energy and decarbonization research would likely not receive federal support from McNamee’s departments, as he might see them as a “threat to the grid.” (373)

The document also calls for transparency many times, which might benefit academics as it could (should it occur) give greater access to more documentation. One passage actually uses the language of open source code: “True transparency will be a defining characteristic of a conservative EPA. This will be reflected in all agency work, including the establishment of opensource [sic] science, to build not only transparency and awareness among the public, but also trust.” (417)

On the flip side, Project 2025 opposes climate research throughout. For a sample of the intensity of this belief,

Mischaracterizing the state of our environment generally and the actual harms reasonably attributable to climate change specifically is a favored tool that the Left uses to scare the American public into accepting their ineffective, liberty-crushing regulations, diminished private property rights, and exorbitant costs. (419)

That passage exists in the Environmental Protection Agency chapter, and fits into its author’s desire to cut back the EPA in general, but particularly to end its support for academic research. There are specific examples, such as “[r]epeal[ing] Inflation Reduction Act programs providing grants for environmental science activities” (440). This is also where we see a sign of Project 2025’s desire to get more political appointees into federal positions. There would be “a Science Adviser reporting directly to the Administrator in addition to a substantial investment (no fewer than six senior political appointees) charged with overseeing and reforming EPA research and science activities.” (436) That would have further negative effects on academic work.

Later on, the Department of Transportation chapter calls for shutting down the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Why? NOAA is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.” (675) Faculty, staff, and students who rely on NOAA would lose out.

Military and civilian higher education There are many connections here, reflecting a view that all of academia can contribute in an instrumental way to American military and foreign policy goals, while also being reformed by a new administration. For example, the text calls for reforming post-secondary military education, asking a new government to “[a]udit the course offerings at military academies to remove Marxist indoctrination, eliminate tenure for academic professionals, and apply the same rules to instructors that are applied to other DOD contracting personnel.” (104)

There’s also an idea for creating a new military academy, a Space Force Academy:
to attract top aero–astro students, engineers, and scientists and develop astronauts. The academy could be attached initially to a large existing research university like the California Institute of Technology or MIT, share faculty and funding, and eventually be built separately to be on par with the other service academies. (119)

Related to this, a later discussion calls for the creation of a new academic institution dedicated to financial warfare:

Treasury should examine creating a school of financial warfare jointly with DOD. If the U.S. is to rely on financial weapons, tools, and strategies to prosecute international defensive and offensive objectives, it must create a specially trained group of experts dedicated to the study, training, testing, and preparedness of these deterrents. (704)

Earlier in the book there’s some discussion of reforming the Pentagon’s purchasing systems calls for spreading some Defense Acquisition University (DAU) functions to “include accreditation of non-DOD institutions” – i.e., potentially some civilian institutions. (98)

Project 2025 would reverse certain Biden- and Obama-era human rights provisions for military academies’ faculty, staff, and students. It calls for “individuals… with gender dysphoria [to] be expelled from military service…” (103)

Sex education, research, support for student life All of this appears under threat. Here’s the relevant passage from the introduction, a shocking response to pornography: “Educators and public librarians who purvey [pornography] should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.” (5) This seems aimed at K-12 schools, where so much culture war battling has occurred, but we shouldn’t assume higher education would escape. Remember that it’s a common strategy for critics to label sex education and research materials as porn.

Anti-intellectualism Project 2025 respects knowledge and skills insofar as they assist with making a new administration succeed, but is at the same time very skeptical of their role in broader society, when formally recognized. It wants universities to develop new technologies, but not to advance DEI. For a clear sense of what I’m talking about, here’s the introduction’s take on credentials:

Intellectual sophistication, advanced degrees, financial success, and all other markers of elite status have no bearing on a person’s knowledge of the one thing most necessary for governance: what it means to live well. That knowledge is available to each of us, no matter how humble our backgrounds or how unpretentious our attainments. It is open to us to read in the book of human nature, to which we are all offered the key just by merit of our shared humanity. (10)

One could respond that most of the book’s authors possess intellectual sophistication and/or advanced degrees and/or financial success, but that’s part of the conservative populist paradigm.

Summing up, Project 2025 presents multiple challenges, threats, and dangers to American higher education. Proposed policies strike at academic teaching, research, finances, autonomy, and some of the most vulnerable in our community. It outlines routes for expanded governmental surveillance of and action upon colleges and universities, not to mention other parts of the academic ecosystem, such as accreditors and public research entities.

Keep in mind that Project 2025 isn’t necessarily a total guide to a potential Trump administration. The candidate has denounced it and led the publication of another platform. I’d like to explore that document next. We should also track Trump’s various pronouncements, such as his consistent desire to deport millions of people. For that alone we should expect a major impact on higher education.

Yet Project 2025 draws deeply on Republican politicians and office holders, not to mention conservative thinking. It seems fair to expect a new administration to try realizing at least a chunk of it, if not more.

What do you think of this sketch of a potential Trump administration?

Saturday, September 14, 2024

Credential Inflation Makes College Degree Not Worth The Cost (Randall Collins)

[Editor's note: This article first appeared in Randall Collins' blog The Sociological Eye.]



Belief in the value of college education was sacrosanct throughout most of the 20th century. In the early 2000s, the question began to be raised whether the payoff in terms of a better-paying job was worth the cost. For several generations, almost a taboo topic--but once out in the open, an increasing percentage of the US population has concluded a college degree is not worth it.

The first big hit was the 2008 recession, when graduates found it hard to get jobs. But even as the economy recovered and grew, faith in college degrees has steadily declined.

In 2013, 53% of the population—a slim majority, agreed that a 4-year degree gives “a better chance to get a good job and earn more income over their lifetime.” In 2023, education-believers had fallen to 42%, while 56% said it was not worth the cost. Both women and men had turned negative in the latest survey—even though women had overtaken men in college enrollments in previous decades. The youngest generation was the most negative, 60% of those aged 18-34. Not surprisingly; they are the ones who had to apply to dozens of schools, a rat-race of test scores, scrambling for grades, and amassing extra-curricular activities; most not getting into their school of choice, while paying constantly rising tuition and fees, and burdened with student-loan debt into middle age. Not to mention the near-impossibility of buying a house at hugely inflated prices, many still living with their parents; while all generations now agree that the younger will not enjoy the standard of living of their parents.

The only demographic that still thinks college has career value are men with a college degree or higher, who earn over $100,000 a year. They are the only winners in the tournament. Every level of education—high school, junior college, 4-year college, M.B.A. or PhD or professional credential in law, medicine, etc.—has value as an entry ticket to the next level of competition for credentials. The financial payoff comes when you get to the big time, the Final Four so to speak; striving through the lower levels is motivated by a combination of American cultural habits and wishful thinking.

The boom-or-bust pattern of rising education makes more sense in long-term perspective. For 100 years, the USA has led the world in the proportion of the population in schools at all levels. In 1900, 6% of the youth cohort finished high school, and less than 2% had a college degree. High school started taking off in the 1920s, and after a big push in the 1950s to keep kids in school, reached 77% in 1970. Like passing the baton, as high school became commonplace, college attendance rocketed, jumping to 53% at the end of the 1960s—there was a reason for all those student protests of the Sixties: they were suddenly a big slice of the American population. By 2017, 30% over age 24 had a college degree; another 27% had some years of college. It has been a long-time pattern that only about half of all college students finish their degree—dropping out of college has always been prevalent, and still is.

The growing number of students at all levels has been a process of credential inflation. The value of any particular diploma—high school, college, M.A., PhD—is not constant; it depends on the labor market at the time, the amount of competition from others who have the same degree. In the 1930s, only 12% of employers required a college degree for managers; by the late 1960s, it was up to 40%. By the 1990s, an M.B.A. was the preferred degree for managerial employment; and even police departments were hiring college-educated cops. In other words, as college attendance has become almost as common as high school, it no longer conveys much social status. To get ahead in the elite labor market, one needs advanced and specialized degrees. In the medical professions, the process of credential-seeking goes on past age 30; for scientists, a PhD needs to be supplemented by a couple of years in a post-doctoral fellowship, doing grunt-work in somebody else’s laboratory. In principle, credential inflation has no end in sight.

An educational diploma is like money: a piece of paper whose value depends inversely on how much of it is in circulation. In the monetary world, printing more money reduces its purchasing power. The same thing happens with turning out more educational credentials—with one important difference. Printing money is relatively cheap (and so is the equivalent process of changing banking policies so that more credit is issued). But minting a college degree is expensive: someone has to pay for the teachers, the administrators, the buildings, and whatever entertainments and luxuries (such as sports and student activities) the school offers—and which make up a big part of its attraction for American students. And all this degree-printing apparatus has been becoming more expensive over the decades, far outpacing the amount of monetary inflation since the 1980s. Colleges and universities (as well as high schools and elementary schools) keep increasing the proportion of administrators and staff. At the top end of the college market, the professors who give the school its reputation by their research command top salaries.

Credential-minting institutions have been able to charge whatever they can get away with, because of the high level of competition among students for admission. Not all families can afford it; but enough of them can so that schools can charge many multiples of what they charged (in constant dollars) even 30 years ago. The result has been a huge expansion in student debt: averaging $38,000 among 45 million borrowers; and including 70% of all holders of B.A. degrees. Total student debt tripled between 2007 and 2022.

These three different kinds of inflation reinforce each other: inflation in the amount of credential currency chasing jobs in the job market; inflation in the cost of getting a degree; inflation in student debt. We could add grade inflation as a fourth part of the spiral: intensifying pressure to get into college and if possible beyond, has motivated students to put pressure on their teachers to grade more easily; in public schools, to pass them along to the next grade no matter their performance (retardation in grade, which in the 1900s was common, has virtually disappeared); in college, GPA-striving has a similar effect. Grades are higher than ever but the measured value of the contents of education, ranging from writing skills to how long the course material is remembered after the course is over is low (Arum and Roksa 2011, 2014). College degrees are not only inflated as to job-purchasing power; they are also inflated as a measure of what skills they actually represent.

The remedies suggested for some of these problems--- such as canceling student debt by government action—would temporarily relieve some ex-students of the burden of paying for not-so-valuable degrees. But canceling student debt would not solve the underlying dynamic of credential inflation, but exacerbate it. If college education became free (either by government directly picking up the tab; or by canceling student debts), we can expect even more students to seek higher degrees. If 100% of the population has a college degree, its advantage on the labor market is exactly zero; you would have to get some further degree to get a competitive edge.

Scandals in college admissions are just one more sign of the pressures corroding the value of education. College employees collude with wealthy parents to create fake athletic skills, in a time when students apply to dozens of schools, and even top grades don’t guarantee admission. Since athletics are a big part of schools’ prestige, and are considered a legitimate pathway to admission outside the grade-inflation tournament, it is hardly surprising that some try that side-door entry. There is not only grade inflation, but inflation in competition over the pseudo-credentials of extracurricular activites and community service. Efforts at increasing race and class equity in admissions increase the pressure among the affluent and the non-minority populations. Since sociological evidence shows that tests and grades favour children of the higher classes (whose families provide them with what Bourdieu called cultural capital), there are moves to eliminate test scores and/or grades as criteria of admission. What is left may be letters of recommendation and self-extolling essays--- what we might call “rhetorical inflation”, plus skin color or other demographic markers; but the result will do nothing to reduce the inflation of credentials. The underlying hope is that giving everybody a college degree will somehow bring about social equality. In reality, it will just add another chapter to the history of credential inflation.

Except for the small percentage of really good students who will take the tournament all the way to the most advanced degrees and become well-paid scientists and professionals, the growing disillusionment with the value of college degrees will result in more and more people looking for alternative routes to making a living. The big fortunes of the last 40 years--- the age of information technology—have been made by entrepreneurs who dropped out to pursue opportunities just opening up, instead of waiting to finish a degree. The path to fame and fortune is not monopolized by the education tournament. For the rest of us, finding more immediate ways of making a living (or living off someone else) will become more important.

P.S. The advent of Artificial Intelligence to write students’ papers, and other AI to grade them (not to mention to write their application essays and read them for admission) will do nothing to raise the honesty and status of the educational credential chase.

References

“More Say Colleges Aren’t Worth the Cost.” Wall Street Journal April 1, 2023 (NORC-Wall St. Journal survey)

Average Student Loan Debt (BestColleges.com) 

U.S. Bureau of the Census

Randall Collins. 2019. The Credential Society. 2nd edition. Columbia Univ. Press.

Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. 2011. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. 2014. Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.