Honors of Inequality, Part V

“[E]very student has an array of different probabilities of success that varies for every institution in the country. Little is known how these differential probabilities of success are distributed across institutions because opposition to institutional accountability and multi-institutional research has effectively constrained institutional research to the local outcomes at particular institutions. Nevertheless, institutions vary in their administrative service or academic responsiveness to each student, and the success or failure of students depends a great deal on how well institutions allocate resources to their entire body of students.” Outsourcing Student Success, Nov. 7, 2015

Inequality and Higher Education

At the 2016 Conference for the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), President Laura W. Perna explained the theme she selected for the year: “I believe one of the most important problems that researchers, policymakers, and practitioners should be addressing is ‘inequality and higher education.'”^[1] Conference participants responded to her call, submitting over 1,100 paper proposals relevant to the conference theme. Acknowledging that the presenters may not share a common understanding of the conference theme, Dr. Perna welcomed the number of proposals as indication of “a shared realization that inequality is a current and pervasive political, economic, and social problem in nations across the globe.”

In her address on “ten ways to ensure that higher education research continues to matter,” the ASHE president suggests scholars of higher education direct research to “important aspects of important questions.” To illustrate her point, she offers three examples of important research questions on the “problems” of inequality and higher education:

• “under-resourced high schools” whose students require developmental education,
• families who lack “the financial resources to pay the rising costs of higher education,”
• and, the transferal of college credits from “low-cost” community colleges to four-year programs.

Dr. Perna’s concise summary of the the “shared realization” among scholars of higher education carries forward systematic neglect for the sites most directly responsible for inequality and higher education: the colleges and universities. As we noted in a previous brief, the field of higher education turns a blind eye to the practice of institutional research by higher education institutions. Perna’s understanding of the origins of inequality in higher education suggests the discipline’s blind spot extends to the sites of higher education.^[2]

As the clarion call for a “sustained program of high-quality research,” the focus on “political, economic, and social problems” signifies that scholarly inquiry ceases inside the boundaries of the higher education institutions. The three bulleted examples direct scholars to seek the origin of inequalities in higher education to external sites and institutions that suffer some kind of financial distress: high schools, families, and “low-cost” community colleges. In general, none of the ten ways to secure the relevance of higher education research in the presidential address suggests deep consideration for the institutional mechanisms at the heart of inequality in higher education.

We agree in principle that inequalities originating outside of the institutions of higher education are important forces on college student success. It is not enough, however, to know that external political, economic, and social factors create inequality in higher education. Such forces carry a valence only when an institution deploys structural mechanisms to transfer those forces into its students’ experiences. As long as scholars of higher education ignore how their own institutions of higher education make current and amplify inequality, the extent to which higher education fabricates an “artificial aristocracy” — to use Thomas Jefferson’s phrase — in nations across the globe will remain unknown.

Colleges and universities do not inherently mitigate or neutralize political, economic, and social problems from outside higher education. Consequently, the first four parts of Honors of Inequality sought to expose certain institutional mechanisms through which higher education creates inequality.

In Part I, we endeavored to consider how data science vendors risk exacerbating the inequalities for students outcomes while channeling students into course sequences that provide no guarantee of student learning — creating inequality for outcomes with little evidence of merit. Erosion of merit will likely occur first. Student success vendors aggregate data to test for “predictors” of students who are likely to complete or withdraw from a course or from the college entirely. The success predictors are largely ancillary to learning, such as whether a student utilizes the learning management software in the first two weeks of a course, and the resulting insights “seem like common sense…” Finally, faculty are enlisted to perform the intervention, placing faculty in a position to demonstrate the success of their interventions rather than their teaching. As a consequence, “a 12 percent bump in students who passed the course” may not measure an improvement in student performance, but faculty’s self-interest in demonstrating the effectiveness of their new duties for intervention.

As the author of HackEducation.com has long challenged, education technology vendors approach the question of teaching and learning with a superficial understanding of the history and theory of education. As a consequence, vendors of education technology, including the vendors of data science for student success, ply their wares to higher education decision-makers with unverifiable claims on how to improve student outcomes. While the data science vendors, in particular, strain to present their results with scientific language, it is evident that the design of the intervention and research may lead to spurious results rather than actual, verifiable improvement in students’ learning. Little wonder, then, that the journalists who advocate for education technology as a profession periodically retreat from the scene, exhausted by the suspension of disbelief: “The hype has grown tiresome.”

In Part II, we endeavored to show that three common heuristic devices for interpreting student success – academic preparedness, engagement, and financial need – provide a shell game that obscures the allocation of faculty and curriculum resources to college students. Specialized programs, like an honors course, exhaust the limited faculty and curriculum resources at a higher rate per credit hour than the typical entry-level freshman course. At the same time, to entice the nation’s small minority of students with 1300+ SAT scores (~10%), the tuition-dependent institutions offer full-tuition discounts. As a consequence, the tuition collected from non-honors students pays for both honors and non-honors students’ college education.

Without an insight into the allocation of expenditures at an institution, it is hard to say that academic preparedness for college, engagement with the institution, or financial need leads to college withdrawals. Preparedness, engagement, and need are highly correlated with the subsidization of a small selection of students who the institution regards as meriting its instructional resources at no cost. In other words, it may be more accurate to say, the student who withdraws from college was not better prepared to receive a full-tuition scholarship and the engaged interest of the faculty at the institution. College is already free for many of “the talented tenth” in the nation — and it likely comes at the expense of the other 90% who pay full-tuition with family finances, state and federal grants, and/or student loans.

In Part III, we use the example of a recent college closure to illustrate how institutional mission and strategic priorities further solidify the direct connections between inequality and higher education. Instructional expenditures are, of course, only part of an institution’s total expenditures from the revenue collected from tuition and fees. Students must also pay for many administrative functions, some of which serve other constituencies at the college. In recent years, alumni fundraising to secure a “large endowment” has grown in significance and colleges, like in our example, have allocated resources to that area of administration from the tuition and fees collected from students.

Ultimately, tuition and fees increase in part to fund larger and larger non-instructional operations at tuition-dependent institutions, redistributing expenditures from instructional to fundraising priorities. To cover the “rising costs of higher education,” as Dr. Perna suggested uncritically at ASHE, students at the institution in our example accrued larger and larger sums of debt each year. At the same time, the college’s institutional effectiveness as measured by college graduation rates failed to improve over many years. In other words, the college priorities favored external interests over its own college students as the finance industry won on both ends: low-income students accumulated loan debt in order to subsidize fundraising campaigns to enlarge endowments to invest in Wall street equities. In effect, a college may serve as a direct instrument of wealth inequality in the nation and still be misconstrued as “the rising costs of higher education.”

In Part IV, we return to one of the main themes in the essays from last year: the recurring failure of the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) to provide a paradigm and program for institutional research that advances the status of the profession and the acquisition of generalizeable knowledge about what works in higher education. For over fifty years, the official position of the AIR has characterized institutional research as 1) a function, 2) divorced from scholarship on higher education, 3) circumscribed within a particular institution, and 4) effectively decentralized in an “elaborate profusion” of local units and decision-makers. Independent survey research by the heads of the nation’s public university systems captures well the failure of the AIR model for the organization of IR functions: “a field that is at best unevenly positioned to support change.” In the progress report, the system heads call for a transformation of institutional research such that an IR office is better able to be “the interpreter and analyst of data.”

Oddly, despite the opening for greater relevance created by the university system heads, the AIR repackaged its same four tenets under the guise of a “new vision” to steward the profession: “The task is not to create… skilled staff members who could work in an office of institutional research, but rather to develop an appropriate level of data literacy for decision-support roles that exist already.”^[3] More broadly, disruptive innovation in higher education portends greater centralization for institutional research functions and exposes the need for more rigorous and valid research studies, as the system heads call for. Recent trends among for-profit student success vendors, behavioral science NGOs, and the academic leadership at large point to the need for greater professionalization and standardization for the deployment of institutional research. These thought leaders in disruptive innovation in student success and higher education leadership look to the professional standards of social scientific scholarship as the preferred model for both the rigor and ethical use of research. Thus, at a time when leaders both inside and outside of higher education demand greater validity and reliability from institutional research, the AIR effectively sidelines the profession from the effort to study institutional effectiveness and student success more scientifically. IR professionals’ annual lament for their inefficacy at the Forum likely will continue for years to come.

Mere months after higher education scholars longed for greater relevance (i.e., “to matter”) to higher education policymakers and practitioners at the 2015 ASHE conference, the AIR firmly renewed its official neglect for higher education scholarship: “It is unlikely that basic research or traditional scholarly research will account for more than a minor advisory role in the future function of institutional research.” In effect, the two primary associations for the study of higher education choose not to acknowledge dependency on one another for the research objectives that each seeks to obtain. On the one hand, ASHE neglects to study higher education institutions critically in favor of a research program focused on external social, political, and economic forces. On the other hand, AIR relegates basic research and scholarship on higher education to a “minor advisory role” in the “new vision” for the profession.

Consequently, the intersection of inequality and higher education at the institutional level remains largely undertheorized and understudied. Now, more or less, the nation’s colleges and universities ceaselessly perpetuate inequities in resource allocations, student outcomes, socioeconomic hardship, and institutional effectiveness while cloaking outcomes in the guise of serving well those scholars regard as a “natural aristocracy” of college-level talent, preparedness, engagement, and financial means. As long as higher education scholars look to the indirect connections between inequality and higher education — and institutional researchers ignore the problem entirely — the direct contributions of higher education to inequality will remain unassailable by scientific investigation and sustain the persistent gap in knowledge about what works for higher education institutions. Likely, such conditions will remain until higher education executives adopt missions, strategic plans, and programs of institutional research at their colleges that force scholars and institutional researchers to conscientiously address higher education’s direct contributions to social, political, and economic inequality.

Continue to Part VI…