Digests (Page 5)

| “We Need More Vigorous Debate”: A Conversation with Michael S. Roth | Institutions that want to enhance belonging and overcome the privileges wealthy students enjoy generally have hard choices to make in allocating resources. Do they devote more financial aid to bring in more low-income students, or do they provide funds to help a smaller number of low-income students truly flourish? If a selective private school has, say, 15 percent Pell-eligible students, it might set a target of increasing financial aid resources so as to enroll 25 percent of these low-income undergrads in the future. Alternatively, with more resources, it can set the goals of providing greater academic and psychological support for the cohort it already has. Most institutions find it difficult to do either, and very few can do both (although the wealthiest certainly can). [Note: If only private nonprofit institutions had such altruistic agendas for recruiting low-income and Pell-eligible students. In truth, many of these colleges recruit low-income students and Pell-eligible students to attend for a year or two so that the revenue generated from their federal grants and students loans can be reallocated to academic programs that service the wealthiest students.]Continue Reading

| The Tyranny of the Market | American colleges and universities exist within a highly competitive marketplace. Individual institutions compete for students, faculty, research dollars, external funding, donations, visibility and prestige, and, in some cases, survival. Indeed, one of American higher education’s most distinctive features, from the early 19th century onward, has been its market-driven character. [Note: This is a fabricated history of higher education in America invented in the late 1950s by right-wing academic activists who sought to frustrate the efforts of statewide coordination and planning, and aided by funding from anti-New Deal big business foundations.]Continue Reading

| Recalibrating Our Understanding of Failure | In a nutshell, Tony Carnevale and his colleagues at CEW lay out data that illustrates that poor kids with higher intelligence and aptitude are less likely to succeed in school than more well-to-do kids with lower intelligence and aptitude. Let me put that another, less diplomatic, way. Despite our best efforts and intentions, when it comes to academic success and persistence to date, schools tend to sort kids by income and zip code, not aptitude, and colleges complete the job.Continue Reading

| How College Became a Commodity [subscription required] | Neoliberalism was a diverse but coherent and influential body of theory championed by neoclassical economists and politicians — including, of course, the authors’ own intellectual progenitor, James Buchanan. The reimagining of education as a commodity purchased by individuals, rather than a universal public good provided by the state, was an explicit project of neoliberal economists and politicians on both the right and left as they moved to slice and reorganize the welfare state along leaner, more punitive lines. Neoliberalism hardly explains everything about contemporary higher education, but it explains a lot. [Exhibit A — Nearly every article in this week’s news digest speaks of higher education almost exclusively in terms of the private benefits (or burdens) of college education.]Continue Reading