 Delightful to see so many of you here today for this New America Foundation and Washington Monthly event on college rankings and higher education. I'm Jamie Marisotis. I'm president of Lumina Foundation, and we're pleased to be partners both with the Washington Monthly and with New America in terms of their work in higher education. So I think I believe this is my fourth or fifth time kicking off this event. And one thing I'd like to note here at the outset is how much the conversation about higher education has really changed in this relatively short period of time. Higher education is really one of the most important topics of conversation now today here in Washington, in state houses, in corporate boardrooms, in mayor's offices, in community-based organization headquarters, and at kitchen tables across the nation. And the reason, I think, is that two fundamental things have changed. The first is that the demand for talent is clearly rising in the United States. Coming out of that 2008 recession that impacted so many Americans, we've come to the clear and probably irreversible conclusion that some type of post-secondary education, not just four-year degrees, but all of the sub-baccalaureate and indeed all of the non-degree credentials that have been talked about in the last few years, are really a prerequisite to success. Some college or some type of post-secondary education that you can get through what we now recognize is a growing number of avenues and channels that extend beyond higher education institutions themselves is no longer nice. It's absolutely necessary. We've long known that individuals are compelled to go to college for two reasons. One is to help you lead a good, ethical, productive, and civically-minded life. And the other is to gain skills and knowledge that will help you succeed in work. But plainly, all of us who've gotten a good college education can say that their degree helped them accomplish two things, to get a good job and to lead a good life. Now, however, we know better than ever before that these two things aren't just critical to individual success, but to collective well-being. Success in college and having more people with post-secondary skills, knowledge, and abilities leads to a host of outcomes that impact all of us, lower unemployment, higher wages, more productivity, greater appreciation for diversity, improved civic participation, and a host of other benefits. So that demand for talent is growing. And higher education's ability to contribute to meeting that demand, I think, is one of the profound things that we've seen change in the public discourse over the last few years. This, of course, relates to the second reason that things have changed in the last half decade. And that is that higher education's ability to produce that talent in ways that are affordable, accessible, and of sufficient quality to meet those public and private and social and economic outcomes we need is being questioned like never before. The question really isn't, or in my view, shouldn't be, is college worth it? Because I think the evidence is overwhelming that absent a higher level of college attainment, our economic and social futures are very much in doubt. Rather, the question being asked or should be asked is how we can build a 21st century higher education system that can literally serve more people better. Higher education's ability to produce those outcomes or, as the monthly has been saying for much of the last decade, what can college do for the country is the topic of today's event and the spirit of the work that I think New America Foundation and the Washington Monthly have embarked upon since they began their partnership. So today, we're going to hear about the Washington Monthly's influential rankings, which have made, I think, the student level and civic outcomes of higher education rather than the reputational factors and input measures as the entire point of what ranking should be about. We'll also talk about related efforts, like the president's much anticipated, highly debated, though at this point, still invisible rating system and how they might impact our ability to generate more and better graduates from our higher education system. I think there's a lot to cover in that conversation and, as many have observed, the devil really is in the details. But my point here is let's not get caught up in the wonky debates about the differences between ranking and rating or whether we have the perfectly right data to produce these kinds of data-driven metric systems. Instead, let's remember that the entire point of these exercises is to ensure that colleges and universities focus on making what students know and are able to do with their college credentials the fundamental core of everything that they do. I'm probably less interested than who's the best or even who's the worst, which is the provocative title of today's event, than I am in ensuring that we focus on developing and deploying much greater capacity to serve those much larger number of Americans who need post-secondary degrees and certificates. Now, we'll also be discussing several other topics near and dear to my heart, the role of federal regulation, a topic that I'm sad to say I was writing about back in the early 1990s and that has clearly gotten worse since I first started writing about it, and how it can be both a boon and a bane to higher education's success. My own view here, and I'll actually be joining the panel discussion later for some Q&A and might wanna expand on this point, is that we've had the wrong conversation about regulation for far too long. What we should be talking about is smart regulation, squarely aimed at unleashing the innovative capacity of higher education to meet that growing demand for talent that I was talking about, especially when it's aimed at serving well the low income minority and underserved populations who should be our top federal policy priority. I'm also very much looking forward to the discussion about improving the largely dysfunctional nexus between the undergraduate experience and that first rung of the career ladder. It seems to me that this is a conversation we've largely avoided in part because we aren't really sure what we mean when we want people to be prepared for those good jobs I mentioned earlier. So let me just conclude with some heartfelt thanks and praise really for what the Washington Monthly has done since it began its work on college rankings in the production of the college guide back in 2005. The fact is the Washington Monthly team have been pioneers in the construction of the annual college rankings. Long before it was in vogue to do so the Washington Monthly saw a need for an approach to assessing higher education institutions that clearly puts the needs of all students and society at the core. One that avoids the tempting allure of traditional post of traditional rankings that are aimed at, sorry, that are aimed at making sure that prestige is at the center. Instead, they focus on the more practical assessment of how well institutions fulfill their important mission of serving all types of students well. And you know, Paul, I'm happy and perhaps even a bit amused to see many others jumping on this bandwagon now, including some venerable national publications that we probably won't mention. Indeed, I think it's clear that the inspiration for the president's rating system was probably derived from what the Washington Monthly has done here today. You know, if the country is going to move the needle and increasing attainment, emphasis needs to be placed on the right outcomes, outcomes that reflect student progress that ensure that higher education is affordable and that it's producing high quality degrees. The Washington Monthly and New America Foundation deserve our praise and thanks for helping to make this the central focus of the higher education debate today. And I, for one, am very grateful that they've done so. With that, let me introduce the editor and chief of the Washington Monthly, my friend and some of you who've been to these events before know my former fellow Washington Monthly intern 30 years ago, Paul Glasteris. That's actually right. We were both interns at the Washington Monthly and I think it was at that internship that Jamie, if I remember correctly, got an assignment to do something on college access, college financing. And that was the right assignment at the right time. Surely. Thank you, Jamie. And sometime next year, Jamie's book on American talent will be published and we're all eager for that and we're just thrilled to have this partnership with Lumina. It's been very important to us. We've been able to really expand our guide and infuse it with great journalism and we're very pleased to continue and deepen our relationship and partnership with New America. And so Jamie did a great job of sort of setting the stage here of what we're gonna be talking about. Ideas really do matter and at this event, we're gonna try to talk about a couple of ideas on regulation and on that, as Jamie said, the nexus between college and career. So let me just jump right in and introduce our panel today. The first speaker is gonna be Ben Miller. He's a senior policy analyst here at New America. And at the education program, he was previously a senior policy advisor in the U.S. Department of Education where he also worked on regulatory issues related to the gainful employment rule and has served as a policy analyst in the education sector and has written or been cited in the Washington Monthly and Chronicle of Higher Education and other publications. Zach Schrag is gonna be joining us. He's a professor of history at George Mason University and the author of Ethical Imperialism, Institutional Review Boards, and the Social Sciences, which is gonna be the basis of his talk today and his article on the current issue of the Washington Monthly. His articles appeared in the Journal of Political History, the Journal of Urban History, and other publications as well as the Washington Post. Amy Binder is a professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego, and that university is the number one national university in the Washington Monthly rankings this year. Congratulations. There she studies higher education, politics, organizations, and culture. Her most recent book is Becoming Right, How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives. And she received her PhD from Northwestern University, my alma mater, which is number 101 on the Washington Monthly rankings. We've got some work to do. Finally, Kevin Kerry, who directs the Educational Policy Program at New America and is the longtime guest editor of the Washington Monthly College Guides and our guru on all things higher ed. He has published articles in The New York Times, Slate, The New Republic, American Prospect, Chronicle of Higher Education, and others. His writing has been anthologized into best American legal writing and has received two Education Writers Association Awards. And he's got a book coming out next year, The End of College, Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everything. So panel, come on up and we'll begin our talk. Fourth question. Good morning. So when you look at some of the rankings produced by other publications who I'm not going to name here, there's a little bit of a secret they're not telling you. And that's really that when you're looking at those top elite colleges, you're really looking at a series of distinctions without differences. Yes, there are some sort of research universities, there are some liberal arts colleges, there are some on the West Coast, there are some in the Northeast, but really regardless of which ones you're picking there, you're almost certainly guaranteed to be choosing a place where you know you have extremely high odds of graduating and you're going to have a degree that has a lot of national recognition. But if you look further down those lists and start flipping past the point where they even have numbers attached to the rankings, that's not necessarily the case. And so for a lot of students there, they may very well be faced with a set of options where one school is actually gonna serve them pretty well and the other is a lurking danger where they're likely to take on a lot of debt for college and much less likely to finish. And so we set out to try to sort of acknowledge who some of those colleges might be, particularly at the four year level where the data are a little bit better. And as we started going through this, one of the things we saw was that this is actually a much different exercise from just sort of taking the list of best colleges and just changing the direction in which it's sorted. And that's because the best colleges tend to be sort of the best at everything with the noted exception of socioeconomic and racial diversity. And that's because when you're sitting on billions of dollars in an endowment and taking one out of every 10 students, it's pretty easy to achieve things like a low student to faculty ratio, low class size, a lot of research dollars, and the other things that other rankings not done by the Washington Monthly tend to get rewarded for. Whereas when you talk about college that are really struggling and not doing as good of a job, there are a number of different factors and they don't all look the same. And in particular, I think there's sort of a judgment call that you have to start thinking about and making between sort of the connection between cost and student debt and completion. In other words, sort of as you think about a school, what is more troubling? A place where someone might be paying $30,000 a year out of pocket and have a completion rate say in the low 30s or a place that's a third of that price but has a completion rate say in the low 20s. And so what we set out to do is sort of create a number of different lists to sort of explore some of these questions and choices, which I think are also very instructive as you think about some of the same tradeoffs and decisions that are gonna have to be made by the Obama administration as part of its ranking, or I'm sorry, ratings work. So the first thing we started with was just asking the question of if you were to think about sort of what's the most concerning college, what would the factors it have be? And we really boiled this down to four things. So one is sort of the cost that families have to pay out of pocket, which is known as the net price. The next is the graduation rate for bachelor's programs. We only looked at four year institutions and we used only federal data. The other is the rate at which students default on their student loans. And then the fourth was the median amount of borrowing that someone who takes out loans ends up with. And when you weight all these things equally, you get a list of colleges that's entirely made up of private institutions. And it's about 50-50 between private non-profits and private for-profits. On the for-profit side, there are branches of colleges you've probably heard of, including a number from the Art Institutes, which is owned by the Education Management Corporation. And then there's largely a number of non-profits you sort of haven't heard as much of, including a couple Art Institutes, which are different from the Art Institutes. But as we looked at this list, it sort of raised some questions. Are debt and cost really as important as completion? Because we know that sort of earning a college degree really has so many positive benefits in terms of lower unemployment, greater earnings, and even things in terms of greater likelihood to not default on your student loans. So we tweaked the list a bit and just sort of asked, okay, well let's put a greater emphasis on completion and include some other metrics like retention rates so that you get credit if you're able to sort of keep those students from your first year to your second year. And when we did this, the list actually looked very different, because again, sort of the value choices we made started to change who showed up here. And so the second list looked a lot more heavy with for-profit colleges, but interestingly, sort of different ones from the first one. There were only sort of four schools that were on both lists. But this raises another of other questions because one of the common critiques you'll hear whenever you start talking about federal graduation rates is that it's not capturing all of the students in the measure because the one the federal government uses only includes what's called first time, full time students. So someone who is attending college full time and is not transferring from elsewhere. And as we looked at the data we saw there were some schools in there where only say about 10% of their students actually fit that measure. So we created a third list that tried to acknowledge that by subbing out the typical graduation rate for an alternative one that really looks at sort of of the number of students you have how many are getting degrees in a given year. So it's a little bit more of a measure of institutional productivity. The other thing we realized is there were some schools on the list such as one in I believe Oklahoma and another in Illinois that had almost identical borrowing amounts. But at one school about 70% borrowed and at the other about 90% borrowed. And really that's not necessarily the same school because you're asking about 20% of the student body to take on loans, more of the student body to take on loans at one place rather than the other. So the other thing we did was we adjusted all the debt statistics to acknowledge that actually the rate at which people borrow matters as well as just how much they take out. And when we did this I think the results of this list really showed sort of one of the thorniest issues that I think has to be addressed as you think about a rating system. And the reason for that is the list that we produced was actually the only one that had public institutions on it, there were a couple. And a large number of institutions on here were minority serving institutions. And this really raised the other question which is sort of how do we think about the demographic makeup of a college when we're considering its results? You know I think it would be foolish to claim that demographics have absolutely no effect on results. It's pretty clear that they do matter. But at the same time we see a number of institutions that do a very good job in rolling low income and minority students and achieve perfectly fine if not exceptional results. And so to sort of do a final list what we did was we actually tried to include a measure that would give colleges credit depending on if they, how they did on their expected versus their actual graduation rate. And this is a measure we actually pulled from the rest of the Washington monthly rankings. And in addition we decided that to really hammer home that point we would give colleges credit for enrolling large numbers of low income students and enrolling large numbers of black and Hispanic students. But at the same time we didn't think it was fair to just sort of say oh if you just have a lower income population you just get credit. So we also included measures of the net price charge to the lowest income students and the graduation rate for minority students. Basically saying we're gonna give you credit for it but as part of that we really do have an expectation that you will serve them well and not just take them in the door. Because higher education access really has to be more about just sort of are you providing a spot but are you also serving them well? And you know here I think what we saw was a list that was again more similar to the first two in that it was all private colleges. Only this one was actually more weighted toward private non-profit institutions. Particularly some a little bit more in the Northeast which I think is reflecting a little bit of their diversity being behind sort of other institutions and other parts of the country. And so that's where we ended up but I think it really showed that kind of the choices you make and the value choices in particular on the sort of cost, debt and completion spectrum really have a large effect on sort of what you view as worst. And it also showed that you know there are places where the data are reasonably good and useful in terms of sort of the student financial aid side but there are also some holes in the data that have to be thought about in terms of completion rates. And then the other sort of big lingering piece that we really couldn't answer and would have loved to is sort of the learning side because there's just not any sort of national set of data we could have incorporated there. So I'll stop there and look forward to the QA. Thank you. I wanna switch gears a little bit and talk about the research mission of the university rather than the teaching mission primarily. And to do so I think I need to set forth a couple of premises, three actually. First is that universities should do research. This is not set in stone. There are certainly colleges that primarily teach and don't produce a lot of research and there are great research institutions like the Institute for Advanced Studies that don't take students particularly not undergraduates. But I would say that we've had a track record of about 150 years of the research university and it's produced some pretty great things creating knowledge as well as disseminating it. And also there's a long tradition within the research university of training the next generation of researchers whether they remain in the university or go on to careers outside of the university who will produce knowledge that our society needs. So I think research is a good thing. The second point I would make is that if we're going to have a research mission we should do it as efficiently as possible. Research does consume resources, taxpayer dollars, foundation dollars and perhaps most significantly for our discussion today, student dollars as well as the scarce time that faculty and students have to devote to their work. So we don't want unnecessary obstacles to research. And my final premise is that research is actually not an unusual activity but a fundamental human experience. If you have children you know that by two months or so they are observing other people and looking around the world and by two years they are asking questions and since my kids are only seven and eight, eight and nine now I don't actually know when that phase stops they're still asking questions constantly. And one of the functions of the university is to tell people that it's okay to keep asking questions as adults and to extend that sense of childhood wonder throughout life. And these aren't terribly controversial ideas that most people in the university would agree so it would take a pretty powerful force to persuade university faculty and university administrators to constrict research and tell people not to ask questions but there is such a force and it's called ethics. In the name of ethics, this wonderful thing, strange things happen, we have these university bodies called institutional review boards or IRBs that assert the right to tell researchers what questions they can ask and what questions they cannot ask. And they take these leading researchers in the field to top people from around the world and make them take these online training tests with insipid multiple choice answers that are often completely irrelevant to the projects that they are planning. They demand reports with useless information and if a researcher resists the boards or in many cases the office staff that serves the boards, threaten them with firing or what in many cases is more alarming the denial of a degree. So you have graduate students working for years on a dissertation being told, you will not get your doctorate if you don't follow these rules. So they have a lot of power. In my article for the magazine, I tell the story of one such researcher, Kimberly Sue who was simultaneously pursuing a medical degree at a PhD in anthropology at Harvard. So she had some things going for her. Her project was to understand what happens to women who are addicted to opiates, heroin and other opiates many of whom are terribly served by the combination of the criminal justice system and the social service system. So they come into jail, there's a little bit of heroin but usually they go cold turkey by necessity and they're kicked out onto the street, no program to help them back in the same environment where they were using drugs and they have a lot of trouble staying clean and they're not getting good help. And Sue's project talking to these women honestly I think is university research at its best. You're serving the immediate community, you're serving the long-term needs of the country in terms of policy and at the same time you're taking this young researcher and who has plans to go on to be a clinician and a teacher and you're giving her the skills under expert supervision to continue to do that research. But Dr. Sue, she has her PhD now told me just a terrible story about her encounter with this ethics board and I've heard some pretty bad ones. It took her about half a year to get initial approval to talk to the women whom she'd already known from various contexts. The IRB staff offered one objection after another. They said you can't talk to children or if they're children nearby. You can't talk to people who have mental illness. You have to get signatures on these long consent forms that no one actually understands. Once you have data, you have to keep it in a locker that not even janitors have access to the same thing as if it were bioterrorism research. And Sue was able to eventually negotiate an agreement but in part this was by compromising things that she really wanted to do and as a result her research is less bold and less rich than she would have liked. All of this was done with good intentions. She had taken a medical school ethics class. She had read about some of the horrible medical experiments that were done in prisoners in the 1950s and 60s and when I talked to her she said look I would love to have an ethics review process that worked that actually is relevant to the challenges that I face but instead she felt that she was facing a bureaucracy whose main goal seemed to avoiding short term risks to Sue, to her informants and to the university no matter the long term consequences to each of them and to human knowledge. This is a particularly dramatic case but it's not a unique one. We've had IRBs since the mid 1960s and from the beginning anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, later historians have been complaining that it's silly to take a review process to design for medical experimentation and impose it on all kinds of information gathering including ethnography and other qualitative research and since at least the 1970s it's proven that their complaints were quite right. We have researchers such as Professor Binder here who are forced to limit some of the dissemination of their results and she was forced to disguise some of the information in her very fine book. Something similar happened to a geographer I talked to Joshua Inwood who was talking to public officials about their political positions and the IRB said well if you reveal that information they might not win re-election and that would be a harm to human subjects. Joshua Inwood has another name for it he calls it democracy. So you have people who are banned from researching in certain places, talking to certain people, asking certain questions and then there are folks like me I don't have a terribly bad IRB story I just had to waste a lot of my time on these multiple choice tests in this paperwork and it got me annoyed enough but for a lot of people that inhibits research we have historians for example who won't let undergraduates interview their grandmothers because it would just be too much of a hassle to get all the necessary approvals. So many of the researchers I've talked to and this was my own experience go into the process thinking that it's going to work they say ethics what could be wrong with that and when things start to go bad when they get these unreasonable requests they think I must be doing something wrong it must be me and they start to ask questions they ask questions to the administrator of the IRB chair, of the vice provost for research whatever it is and they're constantly told no the system is working you are the problem and it's true that for a lot of IRBs out there for certain kinds of research it's not a problem if you're doing a psychological experiment trying to find how people respond to alarm bells of different tones and you're doing 27 different varieties of the experiment getting approval for the 26th is probably pretty easy you get through one proposal and then you modify it so quantitative researchers, psychologists and even medical researchers don't have too much trouble but when you try to do something qualitative when you try to do something innovative some of the most important research that we need the IRB can be a significant obstacle. Typically qualitative researchers do not have a lot of clout in the university we don't bring in big research grants we don't employ armies of postdocs but we are better than average storytellers and so we have a steady stream of narratives explaining the problems we faced with these well-intentioned but misguided ethics boards I have a blog that's been going on since late 2006 that collects these stories and in part I'm just trying to remind individual researchers no it's not you it's the system that is causing the problem and I hope that this may bring some systemic change we've seen this in Canada already where they had a terrible set of regulations guidelines technically go in in 1998 social scientists from around the country complained and those guidelines were significantly revised in 2010 and made much more adaptive to the different kinds of research that goes on in the university it's still a little too early to tell how those are going in on practice it's very hard to change a culture but it shows what is possible and here in the United States three years ago the federal government quite to my surprise conceded that over-regulating social and behavioral research in general may serve to distract attention from attempts to identify those social and behavioral research studies that do pose threats to the welfare of subjects and thus merit significant oversight so this was an abrupt change and admission that the system is not working that is putting harmless research through a lot of trouble and taking attention away from the relatively small numbers of social science projects that could cause real ethical concerns so that was very exciting it's been three years we're still waiting for a proposed rule so I'm not too sure whether those regulations will change until they do we need to rely on researchers to avoid self-censorship we need them to push against inappropriate restrictions and as best they can to tell their stories and most of all we need them to keep asking questions Thank you I'm tempted to through my notes overboard and just tell you horror stories about IRB but I won't do that I found it a little awkward to be on this panel because it's title is Worst Colleges and I'll be talking about the sector of higher education which has traditionally been recognized as the highest quality so those universities Harvard and Stanford in my current research that would buy for the number one slot on say US News and World Report rankings that said there are dysfunctionalities at these universities in particular as they pertain to student searches on the job market so I'm going to start with a couple of observations about these universities in relation to the labor force based on research that I and a graduate student at UC San Diego whose name is Dan Davis are conducting currently and the first is that there have always been occupations that have served as pipelines or as feeder schools to particular occupations I'm sorry, there are universities that serve as pipelines or feeder schools to particular occupations so in the 1950s and 60s the CIA, the State Department recruited heavily on campuses like Harvard, Princeton, Yale in the 1970s and 80s law and medicine via professional schools hoovered up large numbers of students continue to do so but since the 1980s for historical reasons that I won't get into right now finance and consulting firms so Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, McKinsey Bain and so forth have hired an extraordinary share of students from our most elite universities so in 2007, 47% nearly half of all graduating seniors from Harvard and peer institutions accepted two year analyst positions in these two industries of course then there was an economic meltdown we had the worst recession in American history since the Great Depression and these sectors along with other sectors in the economy contracted these contractions led to less hiring from these universities but even then they only went down to about 20% of the graduating seniors and since 2008, 2009 these numbers have been climbing again such that in 2014, 31% almost a third of graduating seniors from Harvard went into finance and consulting so together these two industries are far outpacing all other sectors now how does this happen? Most explanations and here I get my little dig into the economist back so most explanations by which I mean economists explanations would give not explanations by sociologists economists would argue a basic supply and demand kind of relationship between well-paying jobs on the one hand and students who are eager to take these jobs after all entry level jobs in finance and consulting firms pay starting salaries of 80 to $100,000 a year these days and that's before bonuses and so forth but what we found in our research is that this economic explanation is partial at best it doesn't capture what's really happening on these campuses in terms of the links between these two schools for one, most of the students that we talked with are taking these jobs but are not eager to do so as we usually think of the word eager they talk about falling into these jobs for a bunch of other reasons besides being inherently swept up by their passion for working on derivatives, working on mergers and acquisitions restructuring downsizing, et cetera these are not generally people who have dreamed all their lives of being Gordon Gekko or masters of the universe or a wolf of Wall Street and so forth and in fact when they walk onto campus they have never heard of these professions by and large the vast majority had not heard of these professions now it's definitely true that Ivy League students are vocationally minded and they're thinking about their future job opportunities a lot but they talk about wanting to have jobs that are personally rewarding they wanna have jobs that make an impact on society they want jobs that will signal their talents and excellence to their peers and to others in their universities and they see this as the rightful province of having attended Harvard and Stanford in the first place they wanna be leaders in society and what's really fascinating is that students who end up falling into finance and consulting jobs can figure out ways to think about those jobs as making an impact and being personally rewarding but even they realize that it takes a lot of contorted logic to do so and they mostly told us that they take these jobs because they're the ones that are most readily available on campus they take them because these are the jobs that so many of their classmates are also chasing after which by definition must mean that they're good jobs prestigious jobs they're taking them while they're trying to figure out what their passions are what they truly want to do and they also take them because they see them as career accelerators that they will open doors later on for them so it's not that students are eager to take the jobs in the way that we usually think about it they're really falling into them now a second reason a strict economistic version is incomplete is that this explanation completely misses the middleman so if we have the kind of economist view of supply over here and demand over here it's not that kind of explanation is not seen this incredibly important intermediary which is the universities where recruitment is happening these kinds of job choices are not happening in an organizational vacuum these students are not finding these jobs on the internet they're not searching monster.com for them they're not even using personal connections to get these jobs and they're getting them through universities and universities are involved in a very concerted effort to link the jobs with the students and career services centers at Harvard at Stanford at Princeton at Yale and so forth make it extraordinarily easy for employers to find students and for the students to find these employers in these sectors and when I say easy I don't mean cheap these firms pay hundreds of thousands of dollars not millions of dollars per year to run what's known as structured recruitment on campus and structured recruitment is a system by which schools charge very large fees for nearly unlimited access to students so in exchange for payment career service centers hand out the best tables at campus career fairs but that's just the beginning folks they facilitate access to students in boxes students are absolutely inundated with emails their fall and fall semester and fall quarters the career services center scheduled networking and information sessions for the firms where alums from the very schools where they're coming back to recruit these students talk about their transition from say Harvard or Stanford to these fantastic jobs at Goldman Sachs the career services centers schedule opulent receptions help the firms schedule these receptions and in an additional move a very important one the universities collect students resumes and bundle them together for delivery directly to the finance and consulting sectors each firm at a time and another scholar Lauren Rivera who's an assistant professor at the Kellogg School at Northwestern University ranked 101 on the Washington monthly list she estimates that 70% of Harvard students enter into this structured recruitment system this is a massive organizational production so it'd be a real mistake to think of universities like Harvard and Stanford as innocent bystanders which are passively looking on as investment banks come and recruit their students rather they're the facilitators of these linkages they're being paid to facilitate these linkages and they are these facilitators because it's of great interest to them to do that I mean they have interests of many different sorts in putting kids on a conveyor belt to these professions and some of them that are worth mentioning is they want to make sure that their students are gainfully employed indeed they want to make sure that their students are gainfully employed in high with high salaries because as you might recall from the US News and World Report rankings this is one of their criteria that adds up into what makes a school one of the best they're also interested in making sure that their students are building high powered networks as they're leaving school they are also satisfying alums of their own who already work in these industries and they're creating another generation of deep pocketed alumni many of these folks will not stay in these analyst positions but they'll move on to other kind of high powered positions from the kinds of networks that they've made in these sectors and at a more immediate level the schools are making a lot of money through this recruitment so as a result what Dan Davis and I see happening in terms of the number of students taking Wall Street jobs has much more to do with how career prestige and status come to be constructed on campus and that this occurs as a direct result of the kind of organizational apparatus that is on campus leading students to these jobs and providing this organizational structure that actually delivers students into these jobs and by bolstering all of this prestige talk that happens on campus they're really narrowing the job options that these students have I've had just a couple more comments about what might change on campus and as an academic I normally don't get to do this talk about policy implications because it's not part of the research profile as much but having worked with Washington monthly I was pushed to do so I'm very happy to share just a couple of ideas if we want to change things on campus this sounds perhaps like a cynical move but I think that what we would have to do is get universities to subsidize in part other industries to come on campus and to create the kinds of high stakes tournament system that currently exists for finance and consulting and it's very interesting to look at Teach for America I don't know what people think about Teach for America in the room there are benefits, there are drawbacks but they did, Wendy Copp the founder of Teach for America absolutely did understand that competitive structures of the sort that exists for finance and consulting can actually lure students into poverty schools right so the students aren't necessarily chasing salaries in finance and consulting they're chasing that competitive tournament that proves that they are the best of the best and Teach for America was able to mobilize the same kind of ideas on campus and other sectors from the federal government to MGOs biotech industry, energy industries might also think about creating such structures on campus thank you I'd like to start just by tying some of the themes we've just heard about together if I might I think one of the things that Ben talked about was that in exploring this idea of America's worst colleges we don't, there's certain kinds of important information that we didn't have available to us to work with and one of them was information about student learning and I've always throughout my career when this sort of subject of how much do students learn while they're in college, come up and I talk to people, academics in the field I'll say something like well why can't you find out because after all you work on a university full of students they're right there they're all around you so it's not as if you don't know who to go to or who to look at in trying to figure out how much they're learning but sometimes the answer is aha but if you talk about them that way they're human subjects and if they're human subjects then I'm gonna have to go through the whole IRB process in no way am I doing that it would be crazy and I mean it's not only actually just having to go through the IRB process I mean researchers on their own campuses routinely can't get information from registrars they would have to go to and get permission from individual departments which are or from the dean of students all of whom are presumed to have different levels of control and different interests and so the IRB process I think is an important part of a larger set of arrangements in which universities have made their own students invisible to themselves and into any of their own possible efforts to find out how much their students are learning and that presumes they even wanna know so I think that's one of the things that we're gonna have to work through as we continue to build that important piece of information another big element of this question of college quality is what happens to students in the labor market and that's another area where we don't currently have enough national data to really include that in a worst colleges list and by and large I think there's a desire among policymakers and parents that there should be a functional relationship between higher education and the workforce that when you ask parents and students why are you going to college the answer they overwhelmingly give is to get a better job or to get a job that's why they're going and it's what they're paying for and because you have to work to live in the United States of America and increasingly you have to borrow to be educated people have to be able to get jobs in order to pay their loans back and as we see did the new loan data come out yesterday is it worth? It is not public yet for unknown reasons. For unknown reasons okay well let's just say that the data that everyone thought was coming out yesterday show that many and a growing number of students are having trouble repaying their loans we have to be concerned about whether students can get jobs because the only way you pay your loan back is to get a job and earn a wage. It is interesting however to sort of see how that mindset could be taken to an extreme and that's what I was really reminded of in reading Amy's article where certainly one couldn't complain that Harvard and Stanford are not creating a system in which there's a connection between their students and the workforce. The connection seems to have been made to a fault and it sort of shows how the logic of the marketplace and the actions of people making rational choices either at the institutional level, at the student level or at the labor market level about maximizing value and money can start to sort of overwhelm the non-market mission of higher education the good life that Jamie mentioned as well as the good job. And so it's I think something for us to be mindful of as we try to kind of build those connections and try to create incentives for institutions to help their students get jobs via introducing labor market data into our notions of quality. And more broadly I think it's been interesting. One thing I think we've learned over the last few weeks is that if you want to get a lengthy and very well written email from a college president explaining why you don't know what you're talking about locate his or her college somewhere near the phrase worst colleges. And I mean it's very clear to us that just the phrase worst colleges is considered to be impolite if not inappropriate to even use in the context of higher education which of course is one of the reasons that we used it. You know I think that it is the logical corollary of the idea of best colleges and that's an idea that colleges are more than willing to embrace but you know more broadly and just to kind of emphasize something Ben said at the very beginning. We feel the stakes are much higher for understanding who America's worst colleges are. If you are lucky and privileged enough to make a choice among the institutions that are commonly thought to be America's best colleges there really is no bad choice to make. You are just sort of blessed with a bunch of good choices. You could roll the dice and you would be fine. Whereas if you are as and this is of course the case for the vast majority of American college students not in a position to choose among many, many elite institutions but rather making a series of somewhat more per se choices among different kinds of colleges that are relatively open admission that are not particularly famous. It's actually a much, much riskier proposition than I think parents realize. You know one of the articles in the issue it was kind of to go along with Ben's sort of broader analysis of this idea of worst colleges focused on one of the colleges that shows up in the list. It was a small liberal arts college here in Virginia called Ferrum College which was interesting first of all because until the list came out I had never heard of it before it's not that far from Washington. And you know like we do this for a living. We sort of are always kind of looking at long lists of colleges. I'd never heard of Ferrum College before. We sent a reporter out there to spend some time talking to people and asking them questions like why is it that half of your freshmen don't return for their sophomore year? And again this is not an institution built to educate transient or part-time students overwhelmingly the students who were enrolling were 18 years old and coming full-time right out of high school. Half of them were coming back for their sophomore year. Graduation rates were low. Loan default rates were high. It wasn't particularly inexpensive. And the thing is what you realize is that there's absolutely no awareness in the market that this is true. To the extent that you can make a plausible case and I think this case can be made that even in the context of liberal arts colleges in the mid-Atlantic region with low admission standards this college is doing substantially worse than its peers. Nobody knows that. The students don't know it. It's not in any way influencing that fact which I think is a fact is not in any way influencing the choices that parents and students are making about where to go to college. They just don't know. The college kind of knows if you press them on it but they have a series of explanations which are kind of plausible, kind of not. It's a complicated thing to figure out. And I just don't think that we can rely on the market by itself for parents and students to make a very, very difficult set of choices with information that is either hard to get, unavailable, hard to interpret, hard to synthesize. And that I think is really what has led to that fact is I think one of the main reasons that has led to the still-notional federal college rating system that the Obama administration has proposed and although I don't know this for a fact, I suspect it's because somewhere in the White House or the Department of Education they're sitting here with a bunch of lists that look kind of like the list that Ben put together and said, gosh, this is pretty complicated once you sort of get down to it and you're not doing the easy thing which is to just identify the institution that have all the money and all the smart people in them. But I do think it is a very necessary thing to do. I think it's, I'm glad that the administration has taken on this difficult challenge that's probably going to win them more enemies than friends. But when you kind of look at these numbers and you realize the stakes involved and you realize the students and how vulnerable they are, I think it's something that has to be done. Well, thank you, a round of applause for a tremendous series of presentations. Thank you very much. I'm just gonna ask a few questions before opening up to the audience just to, because I actually edited these pieces, I know there's some interesting points that can be made and so let me make one point, which is that we have identified problems at the upper end of the college system and at the lower end of the college system. At the lower end, while we have these problems that have been identified, I think it's worth pointing out that this is also the America's goldmine. The economy needs several million more college four-year degrees, two-year degrees, technical training than the system is now producing. And as the president of Arizona State University likes to say, the upper 50% of the income bracket, that market of college graduates is saturated. Everybody who can go to college is going to college for the most part. It is in the bottom 50% where the potential supply of college grads can be found to fill the needs of a growing economy and to make us all more prosperous. Those folks are by and large for reasons of geography and finance and culture being channeled into the worst colleges, right? These are kids who made it through the worst high schools for the most part, so they're the scrappy, hard-charging people that we should most be, our hearts should be with them the most and having achieved this sort of against the current goal of getting out of high school, we then put them into colleges where their chances are much less of success than somebody from a middle- or upper-middle-class background. So not only is it sort of horrible when you think about it from a moral point of view, but it's wasting the greatest asset the country has in terms of filling the supply that we need of people with post-secondary degrees. Let me just ask Amy Binder a question. Amy, why is it structurally or economically that Wall Street and the consulting industry is so motivated to go and essentially rig the game at Harvard and Stanford and so forth to get these young undergraduates and other industries that have, it would seem to me, equal need for smart new employees, the energy sector that's figuring out how to drill down 20,000 feet or as you mentioned, the biotech industry that's sequencing the genome and so forth. Why aren't they doing the same recruiting? You think those needs are as great as figuring out derivatives, Paul? Well, almost as great. Okay, well, so I have relied on other people's research to figure out the answer to this. I have not done the archival, the hard archival research on this yet, but as far as what I can tell in the research is that in the 1980s, when this structured recruitment began, Wall Street was flush with money and what they wanted to do was bring in folks who could signal to their clients that these are the best brains in the world and that even our lowest employee can help you do these very difficult things that you need to do. So I think it's very much a kind of symbolic ceremonial effort on their part. Interesting. Then we, Kevin talked a little bit about Ferrum, this college in Virginia that by all, in every way we looked at it, it looked like a kind of a normal liberal arts college. What is the difference between some of these colleges like Ferrum that seem to want to do right? And some other colleges on your list that maybe are a little bit more openly predatory. Sure, I think one of the things that struck me in looking at this list is that you didn't see sort of any necessarily common indicator across all of them. So you did see some of these smaller liberal arts colleges where their challenges are probably somewhat a reflection of the fact that they don't have a ton of money and so they're charging people probably too much given what they're offering, but that's sort of where they're coming from. And then you see some others that they're not only on these lists, but if you go into Google Finance and pull up their stock symbol, they're also showing up there as well. And I think that you have to wonder a little bit about some of them, in particular the EDMC schools, which sort of back in the day weren't too bad, but sort of I think over time as the influence of the pressures from Wall Street has probably changed their mission somewhat and rebalanced kind of that need to fundamentally serve students at the end of the day with also the need to fundamentally meet sort of quarterly enrollment targets and quarterly profit targets that's going to change their mission and affect things like how much they're charging for people or how much they have to rely on loan debt to make their revenue streams work and things like that. And so I think there is a real difference you see in this list between the nonprofits who they have a challenging set of circumstances but are ultimately sort of trying to educate people and the for-profits that have that mindset as well but then also an additional set of external pressures that can change the way they have to operate. Zach, I just want you to tell the audience the one little fact that really jumped out, one of the many facts that jumped out at me from your terrific piece was college librarians. Yes. Yes, so this is actually an interesting case. One of the colleges that was mentioned is doing quite well as Baruch College where I taught for a year and it's a great place, but this goes to this question about studying your own students where a librarian wanted to know how the students were using the library and it took her five months to get the approval. And I asked her, we corresponded by email, what were they worried about? Well, you know, what if the students are dealing drugs in the library and they'll tell you that and they'll get arrested and then I asked her, well, why would they tell you that? You know, you're asking like, do they use the card catalog or do they go online? So, and the sad thing there in my correspondence with this librarian, she'd written this article in a kind of happy tone, like it only took me five months. And I had to say to her, you should be outraged, right? There is no reason for this. And she sort of said, well, no, I can't think of a reason, can I? There are other ways to do this. I mean, you could have a focus group and if a student does say, well, yes, I do deal drugs in the military science section, you can edit that out afterward. You don't have to like go through all the consent forms beforehand, you can sort of fix some of these things after, not everything has to be prior review. So it is a barrier. I mean, you mentioned not being able to study your own students, that's hard. What's more common is you can't find out good things about your students, but you can't publish it because it stays within the university, it's quality improvement, but if you tell someone at another university about it, well that's research and you didn't get the right permissions ahead of time so you spike it. And so one of the things that happens is that a university that is doing great things with its students can't tell anyone. You know, I also mentioned that in your story, there's some very simple fixes to this, right? For the bulk of these sorts, tell me if I'm wrong. For the bulk of these sorts of research projects, one could have a system where you don't get pre-approval but you simply fill out a form saying this is what I'm going to research. You file the form. If through a spot audit, some of those, some of that research turns out to have elements that are questionably, questionable ethically, there can be a process to penalize or question that. And people will be on guard, they'll not want that to happen. But the system won't slow down or in any sort of significant way impede the librarians from asking their students how they use the library. So let me just say there were some comments posted on the article and one of them was saying, well what about these researchers who went out and lied to the people they were studying? And deception actually would be a potential red flag, right? You could, that would be part of a filter where if you're going to lie to people about your project and that's a central part of your research strategy and it is for some valid research, then you get review. But I don't lie to the people I ask questions to, Dr. Sue didn't lie to the people she was talking to, Dr. Binder I think didn't lie. She goes to the Harvard students say, why did you interview for Goldman? That is a different kind of interaction than telling a restaurant owner falsely, I got food poisoning, how are you going to react about it? So yes, there are a lot of fixes. I'm not sure I would call them simple because any system you can devise will have type one and type two errors. That is guaranteed. But we can do a lot better than we're doing now. Kevin, on the subject of regulation, there's regulations that we have on the books that need tweaking, but there are also regulations we need to allow for more innovation. You've got a story in the current issue of the magazine on boot camps. These are, well, if you don't mind just taking two minutes, summarize your story about what boot camps are and why they're important and how they connect with this issue of the nexus between undergrads and the workforce and what regulations would allow us to do more of them. Sure, the premise of talking about good colleges and bad colleges and regulating colleges and rating colleges is that to solve whatever public policy problems we want, we have a fixed universe of institutions to work with and so we need to try to influence them or push them or punish them to be better than they are in the way that we want to. But that's, from my perspective, a very limited way of thinking about what's possible. And so the article that I wrote was focused on a little more on the immediate years after finishing your bachelor's degree as part of the educational continuum and tells the story of an organization called General Assembly, which is a for-profit, I'm not gonna say college, because they're not officially a college, they're a for-profit education organization that basically is in the business of, among other things, running what they call boot camp programs where you learn how to code, you learn how to do user experience design, user interface design, a whole bunch of skills that are very much for the economy we live in now. There are a lot of people out there trying to hire people who can code in Ruby on Rails, for example, it is, if you can do that well, you will find a job as long as you're, particularly if you're living in San Francisco or New York or Boston or one of the places where a lot of these new companies reside. And the thing about these boot camp, these boot camps, and there's one of them right here in Washington, D.C., about 10 blocks from here, is that they exist wholly outside of that system of existing colleges that we have today. All of these questions that the federal government is posing are moot to them because they're not colleges. They don't take any financial aid, you can't pay with a Pell Grant, you can't pay with a student loan. This is actually people paying their own money out of their own pocket so they can learn something. And that's it. So the question that I sort of pose is, to what extent is this something that could start to be a replacement for the vastly growing professional master's degree industry that has essentially been created by existing colleges and universities as a way to make money? You see a huge increase in the number of people getting master's degrees because once you're in accredited college, no one can sort of stop you from saying, oh, I have a master's degree program. And because of federal policy, there's actually no limit to how much money you can borrow to attend a master's degree program. So if you're an undergraduate, you can only borrow X amount of money and that's it to get a master's degree. For a master's degree, it's whatever the college charges, plus your books, plus your rent, plus your cost of living, you can borrow a ton of money to go to these programs. So all of which is to sort of say that as we think about the solution, I think it is a combination of working with the institutions we have, but also creating policies that allow for the creation of new institutions. And it's been interesting to see kind of get back to your question, Paul. Out in California, the state regulatory agency that is in charge of looking after colleges started to notice a lot of these boot camps and started to say, well, hey, wait a minute, you look kind of like a college to me. You need to go and be my approval to be that college. And I think that's very much coming from, to a certain extent, the bureaucratic mindset that as you say, exists for a reason, but can be very complicating when it comes to people doing new and interesting things. Well, with that, I want to open to your questions and we've got some folks with microphones. And so raise your hand if you want, you've got a question for the panel and please, if you can't state your name and your affiliation. Any questions? We have a lady right here at the front row with a question. Thank you very much. Thanks. I'm Peggy O'Chaskin, I'm the congressional correspondent for the Hispanic Outlook magazine. We focus on higher education. So I have a bunch of questions. I don't know with one, but have you done anything on the gender gap that more and more women are going into college now and more and more boys are dropping out? Have you looked at that at all? Is there anything going on in colleges that are encouraging women to stay in boys to drop out? And the same with like in engineering colleges where you have more and more, there's more boys and girls, but most of them are foreign boys. What's happening to American boys going into engineering? I mean, there's some department, especially in graduate school, so it's over 50% foreign students. So that's a couple of things I wanted to ask. Well, thank you. I don't know that we've actually, I can speak to the magazine. I don't think we've focused as much on the gender issue. We did do a story in the last year's college guide about the growth of foreign students at American schools, especially the flagships. Kevin, that was your story. Well, somebody else wrote it, but it was your data. Do you wanna just speak to that a little bit? Sure, yeah, I don't think that there's any question that there has been a large increase in the number of undergraduates. This has traditionally been seen as a graduate student issue to the extent that you think it's an issue or not, but for a long time, a very disproportionate share of graduate students, particularly in the sciences, some of the hard sciences have been from outside the United States. And that's, in many ways we see that as it's sort of our immigration policy by default, right? Since we don't really have much of an immigration policy in the United States. What we've seen more recently is a growth in the undergraduate student population. I think it's almost all coming from China. So, it's late as 2007, 2008, we had about the same number of Chinese and Korean students coming every year, for example. I think we now have 10 times as many Chinese students. I mean, it's been that fast and that they can increase. It's being driven, as near as I can tell, almost entirely by the financial interests of American colleges. In other words, these are students who receive no financial aid. They all pay full tuition. And the full pay undergraduate is the Holy Grail of enrollment managers in colleges across America right now. It's finding that student who will actually pay the sticker price. Turns out there are a lot of people in China. And many of them very much see American colleges as high quality and prestigious, almost to a certain extent, irrespective of where they are here in the United States. And so there's been an intense increase in recruitments and a lot of increase there. The gender gap is an issue that's been with us for a long time. Women, past men, in their percentage of undergraduate enrollment, I think, in the late 1970s. By and large, I think it is more a story of female success than male failure. More men are graduating from college than used to also. It's just that women have increased their college, going and graduating rates even faster over time. And I think for a lot of reasons that make sense given the opportunities are lack thereof in various employment fields. But it's certainly at a campus by campus level. It's something that we see playing out a lot. And it is the case that not only are women more likely to enroll in college, but they're less likely to drop out. Particularly on some campuses, that is something that they're aware of. Jamie? Just to add to Kevin's point there. You know, I think this is an issue that's generally been poorly treated in the research. I think the trends that Kevin's talking about are very important for us to understand. But, you know, we're a national foundation. We get a fair number of over-the-transom proposals. Many of which aren't very well thought out in terms of how to address these issues because there's an assumption in the conversation and particularly in the policy debate that the gains made by women have come at the expense of men, which is literally the mis-specification of what's going on here. What's going on here is we've got to dramatically increase attainment and we've got to increase attainment for all groups. And if you look at the challenges that women continue to face, Tony Carnivali's research has pointed this out that women still essentially need a higher qualification to earn wages that are comparable to what men earn at the next lowest qualification. So in other words, as a woman, you still need one more degree than a man to earn the same amount of money according to the Georgetown Center's research. That tells us something pretty profound about the fact that we should be focusing on increasing attainment for all groups, zeroing in on the challenges that men have had. So I'm certainly in favor of the focus, particularly on men of color, in gaining access to and succeeding in college. But let's be clear here. We got to talk about increasing attainment for men and women. And this zero-sum philosophy, I think, is worrisome and I think is part of the challenge of us getting over those issues and recognizing that we have a macro problem, both with participation in higher education and success and entry into the workforce for men and women. Amy? That's such a great point about women. I just wanted to go back to Kevin's point about universities chasing money. So in the University of California system, which clearly has a mission of educating Californians, Berkeley has a target of about 25% out-of-state international students, UCLA is about 22%, UC San Diego is about 18% for undergrads. Right, that's a different subject, but really this is about bringing in money and it obviously has a lot of repercussions on the social mobility rates that we've obviously been very good at in the University of California system. So these are issues that are very serious. Great. Back there, there's a... Hi, good morning. Thank you for this really great presentation. One of the things that, I'm sorry, I'm Leticia Bustillas from National Council of La Raza and one of the things that never really gets spoken about is the question of teaching. Teaching matters and how a student is taught in the classroom has a tremendous implications for how they do in the classroom and how they succeed but it's not something that is easily quantifiable. It doesn't appear in the ranked gains and I would dare say that it doesn't factor prominently in tenure decisions about faculty. So I'm wondering if there's any if you have any thoughts of how we can be more inclusive of the teaching process at the universities. Anyone? So this is actually something that when I first started out to do this list I wanted to try to get some indicators on this because the National Survey of Student Engagement actually does look at some of these things. It's not great and it's a little bit of proxy for some of them but you can at least get some information on sort of how often students are interacting with professors and things on the actual educational experience they have in the classroom to try to acknowledge like those places that are doing that and sort of bump them up out of the list if they were doing it. And unfortunately that data used to be public. I think USA Today used to host it and nowadays you actually can't, I couldn't find it sort of on a national set anywhere and so I couldn't include it. So it was something that I thought is important and it'd be nice to sort of see those data come back in a largely public manner. There, I mean the Survey of Student Engagement is one, one thing that we're doing, just anecdotally at Mason is trying to increase the number of undergraduates who do an independent research project. This was a part of a long-term, university-wide discussion about what would make Mason better and that's what we came up with and I think it's pretty good. It crosses all fields. It can be artistic as well as scholarly and when you think about what it takes to end up with a senior thesis or a senior project, you start working on that your first year. So there probably are ways to measure this that would not be as brutally simplistic as some of previous attempts. This gentleman here had his hand up. Sorry to make you run down the aisle back and forth but I wanna be fair to both those close in and those further back. I'm Alan Sessom, I'm a senior fellow with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and I run a couple of universities but I'll comment just on one thing that Amy said. My daughter just graduated from Dartmouth with a bachelor's degree in physics and there were recruiters all over the place from Goldman Sachs and Bain and others but they were recruiting with a very large pool because you don't need to know very much to go into that business and if you're specifically in a technical discipline, there are very few, there were seven people graduating in physics at Dartmouth last year. So it doesn't pay to recruit in that sense but you get hundreds of kids who can be recruited because there's a lot of fish in that pond. I think that may be more telling than the fact that they have this tradition. Well, the recruiters actually say we don't need you to have any experience in anything. We just want you because you're the best and the brightest and that I think goes back to the point of we want you because you've come from Harvard or Stanford or Princeton or Yale or Dartmouth, period. One of the interesting things we found in Kevin's piece is that a lot of employers are no longer doing the kind of junior management training or give you a year to get your feet wet and learn on the job. It's too expensive. They can't count on new employees sticking with them. They don't want to spend money to train somebody who's then gonna go work for their competitors. So they want a kind of just in time skill set where that person can come in and start adding value from the moment they get there. Hence the creation of these boot camps which teach specific skills that provide value to the employer right off the bat. And this is almost unheard of in the undergraduate experience. It's just not what undergraduate degrees are about. Job skills specific for specific industries. And that's part of the... So you have on the one hand the Wall Street that will take the poetry major from Dartmouth, just fine that we can make you an analyst son. And you have the other employers that despite a STEM degree, we're not gonna hire you because you can't immediately start working. So it's a weird broken nexus that we have. This gentleman right here. I'm Chloe Ascentos with National Public Radio. Can someone up there talk about what the consequences of should be for worst colleges? Colleges that are just not doing a good job. Is that a regulatory thing that the government should have a role in? Is the market the place to kind of shame these schools into reform and to improvement? Great question. Well, I think it's pretty clear the market doesn't seem to do too well at this because the schools are not gonna go out there and put on their advertisements, we're not a good school, you should still come here. You know, you can walk around the town and if you get on the subway, you'll see plenty of ads for schools where if you were to go and look at their data, they're quite poor and they're never gonna tell that to you. And so I think the market mechanism to push students toward those colleges is always gonna outweigh sort of their ability to sort of recognize the challenge. I think there are a number of things you probably could do on the sort of regulatory side from the federal government. Part of it is it could do a better job sort of making more data available so that people who work one-on-one with students could help get some of that information to them. But the other thing is I think it could start asking the question, you know, there is a requirement that every college who is in the federal financial aid programs has to demonstrate that they're administratively capable of being in them. And I think you really should start to ask the question if you're seeing a place that has an extremely low completion rate, high rates of default on federal student loans, and they're making a large usage of those programs to actually take a closer look and say, are they really administratively capable enough to hold on to these loans and allow them to stay in here? And then I think the other part is sort of asking about how do we actually change these institutions? You know, with the private ones, I think it's a little bit more of maybe there needs to be some more force that just says you really can't make it in the market and if you can't, that's unfortunate, but we need to find a way to wind you down. But for some of the public institutions where they really have a mission where they need to be serving people in a certain area and they're the only option, we probably need to ask some more questions about what can we do to encourage either changes in sort of administrative practices or sort of the leadership to get them to mimic some of the things we see the more successful colleges doing. Jamie, you hinted at some broader thoughts about this and the- So here's the issue, Clara. I think that we've got a, the starting point's gotta be that we have to raise our expectations of higher education to contribute to our wellbeing as a society and if we do that, there should be three responses that are important. The first is the colleges and universities need to respond to that challenge. They need to up their game and that's part of the conversation I think we're having now. The second is the market's gotta apply more pressure than it's applying to Ben's point. There isn't a whole lot of market pressure right now and I think that's a very important issue. And the third is there's gotta be a different and better regulatory frame, one that's focusing more on the results that the institutions are producing, particularly innovative steps that they might be taking to serve more students better. What's undergirding all of that in my opinion is part of why we're all here which is more and better information. This is one of the critical things that I think the Monthly and New America Foundation are bringing to the table here which is helping to better inform the conversation. The truth is we can't answer a lot of these questions like the question about teaching that was raised earlier and that's not acceptable in 2014 given how important higher education is to our society. So I just think more and better information is really, really important and it's something that the market should focus on, something that the institution should focus on and something that the regulatory system's gotta focus on. By the way, one more, since we were plugging books today, mine's not even done, Kevin's is done but not yet out. Goldie Blomensick has a new book out called American Higher Education in Crisis, right? And which is a great primer on where we are in all of these conversations and it's a great, I call it a higher education to English translation about what's happening right now in the space and we need more of that kind of work, more of this peeling back of the onion, a better understanding of what's going on and then the application to your point, Claudio, in the context of the institutions, how the market's using it and being used smartly in the regulatory context. I'll take this opportunity to plug my own book. We actually, I'm co-authoring a book, The Washington Monthly is Publishing with the new press this spring with the help of the Kresge Foundation and this is a book for the, most of the college guides out there for the families who are trying to get their kids into the top 100, 200 colleges. This is maybe 10% of all students. This is a college guide for the other 90%. And we're hoping to inform the students who are maybe first generation, lower middle class, poor students, maybe their families have never been to college. I've got a son who's about to go through this process and a daughter who just did. This is a daunting process to figure out what school to send your kid to. As we heard today, it is a much more consequential if you're high school is not preparing your students well, if you're not a genius and you're gonna be wind up going to second, third tier state school or a private college where you could wind up with a whole lot of debt, no degree in a world of hurt. And this is a book that's gonna, I hope inform, if we can sell a lot of them, millions of students about what their options are and how to make it through the system. And again, to create the market mechanisms of self-interest and knowledge that right now just don't exist in the college field. So look for that. My friend Amy. So, Jamie talked about information. I'm in this question of what do we do once we've identified the worst colleges and there's been some talk about the information that we don't know, like we can't figure out learning, there's some of these pieces we don't know. There's some information, like labor market information that we could know and could know pretty easily because we know how to measure that, for example. One of the other pieces that was in this edition was about a law that the federal government has put in place that would prevent us and us being students, their families, policymakers from knowing some very basic information, like are students graduating, are they transferring, are they getting jobs? And I was wondering if you, well, as we think about your question, Mr. Sanchez, what should we be doing? Well, we can't do anything if we don't know how bad things are or how good things are. So could somebody talk about that piece a little bit? Yeah, that's a great question and it sort of brings up the politics of this rating system. It hasn't kicked in yet, my guess is we're not gonna see this draft rating system until after the elections, but we are gonna see it. What's gonna happen, what is the reception likely to be? Jamie, you've been, you've kept your eye on this for a while, what do you think? Yeah, I think that it's, the reaction's probably gonna be predictable, which is what Amy's alluding to, which is the laws that are preventing student level data, student unit record data, for example, as one of the key issues, which I think there's gonna be a pretty negative reaction from a fairly large swath of higher education. But the Kevin's point earlier in this session, I think it's very important that we continue to pursue those types of transparency measures. My point is not in isolation, this is not solely the federal government's responsibility, it's the responsibility of the institutions and the market as well. And I think that to the extent that the rating system can actually help improve the public's understanding of what's happening and improve the responsiveness of the college universities to do what I think they wanna do, but they can't quite figure out some of the ways to get from here to there. I think the rating system's gonna be a good thing, but I think there will be a fairly large, negative reaction to whatever it is that's produced. And just because of the nature of what we've seen in the last 15 or so months, since they've been talking about it. And I think the real question will be, will there be actual legislation, like there was with unit records a decade ago, to actually prohibit a rating system, which I think would be unfortunate. I think that the answer can't be, we need less information. That can't be the right answer. The answer's gotta be, let's figure out a better, a different, a deeper, more thoughtful way. But if the response is, let's get rid of this whole thing, I think we'll be taking a step back. Well, and to your point, Amy, I think it's the case that if we went, please, I urge you all to read the story in the magazine about this. Having a student unit record system whereby the federal government can link individual outcomes at universities with their outcomes once they leave so that we can know which universities are leading people to get jobs would actually be administratively easier for the colleges than what we have now. They could produce more information and yet have to fill out fewer forms. So the opposition to this that you're gonna hear about, which is, oh, this is a burdensome new federal regulations. This actually would lighten the load on universities and at the same time provide a wealth of new information for parents and teachers and all of us in order to evaluate our choices when picking a college. So I'm gonna go with a lightning round here. We're gonna ask three questions, very short questions and throw them up to the panel and then we're gonna say goodbye. So this lady right back here, very short question. Yes, my name is Miriam Gusevich. I'm a professor at Catholic University. I'm one of the few people left who has the privilege of having tenure. And my question is, are you at all addressing the other crisis, which is the fact that becoming a professor at the university at this point is becoming almost impossible. Most universities rely on adjunct faculty who are in many cases closer to the poverty line after huge debts. And how are you addressing that issue? Because that impacts the student. Okay, we have a question about tenure. Next question. Well, no, just even becoming a full-time faculty. Absolutely, this gentleman here. I'll make this really quick. Not as the cock. I run a MOOC platform in the Middle East. I'm a Carnegie fellow here at New America for six weeks. We've talked a lot about sort of consulting, finance, and having gone to Yale for college, I understand the impact. What I'd like to hear more about is what about the rest of 95% of students that don't go to these schools? What are these colleges doing for their employment prospects? Have you guys considered, okay, graduation is great, but if I graduate and I'm unemployed for a year, et cetera, the wage scar starts taking effect, et cetera. So what are colleges doing that works well in terms of employment and job-to-work transitions? What Kevin mentioned about what Jake and Matt are doing at General Assembly is great, but for example, one thing they do that colleges don't do is they measure one of their metrics for success is how many people get employed. So you did the bootcamp on UXUI, they can say 80% got a job within X number of months. Great question. And one final question from our friend Goldie here. I'm trying to understand how do you reconcile this small but growing revolution in data analytics and learning analytics with some of the concerns that you've all been raising about how you can't measure what students are learning on campus because it seems like these two are quite in conflict. Okay, panel, lightning answers. I hate to argue against the idea that more information is better, but we've seen over and over that when you apply a metric, people gain the system one way or another. That if you say you've got to get your students' jobs, the easiest thing to do is to bring in recruiters who may not have the best job for the students. If you say we're gonna measure ROTC and Peace Corps participation as one of the graphs do, you boost up the engineering schools because that's what the military and the Peace Corps want are engineering schools and schools that don't have big engineering programs fall to the bottom and maybe they say, let's fire the history department and bring in more engineering. And when you look at some of these effectiveness measures, if you look at student evaluations, then you bring in adjuncts who will do anything to get a top rating on the student evaluation including lowering the challenges they put to the students and there's some data on the inverse proportion of challenging courses to good evaluations you get from your students. So the fact is that data can be misused, have been misused and I think we need to be a little more careful about applying these metrics. Yeah, I was, last week I was on a different panel and I was there with a gentleman from the Texas system of technical training colleges which has recently flipped over to a system of funding that's entirely based on employment outcomes. I mean, it's radical from a policy standpoint. You get 100% of the amount of money that go, public money that goes to these public institutions is a function of essentially the difference between how much graduates are making in the labor market and the minimum wage. The more they make, the more you get. Now, obviously easier to do that with a system that is entirely focused on job training and there is no research mission and there frankly isn't a liberal arts mission that's kind of thrown in there either. It's about getting a good job, a good life that's for someone else to kind of worry about. And these questions came up about perverse incentives and this and that but his answer was he had two plausible things that he said in response. One, he's like, look, we're an open access institution so we can't actually start creaming off the best students to kind of come in here and we should keep in mind that most colleges and universities are either open access or kind of open access like minimum, anyone above minimum standard gets in. And the second thing he said, he's like, look, pardon me, imagine if we were switching back. Imagine if we had this system and someone said, you know what we should do instead of paying for outcomes, we should just pay for enrollment and seat time and do it that way. He said everyone would be like, oh my gosh, imagine the perverse incentives that you're creating. They're just gonna enroll anyone and just keep them in college or it's not gonna pay any attention to quality. They're not gonna pay any attention to labor market outcomes. It's all just gonna be about marketing and recruitment and making sure the freshman class is there and enrollment management. We can't have that. Let's not create incentives for that system. So all of which is to say there is no easy solution to this where we're not gonna have to kind of guard against how people are likely to react. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to optimize our incentives as best we can. You know, I'll just add to that that the Washington Monthly's basic college ranking system doesn't, we'd love to have outcomes data on employment. And if we get data that we think is reliable, we're gonna add it. But we don't just look at service. And in service, we don't just look at ROTC. We look at a whole variety of things because we don't think the college experience is just about employment. But we do look at every possible outcome we can, including graduation rates and loan default rates. And I think that if you've got a rich metric, sort of like the founding fathers created system with checks and balances, there's less likelihood, there's less capacity for universities to really improve their rankings by gaming one or two measures because there's dozens of other measures there. And frankly, there are dozen things we want from our college. It's not just one thing. Folks, any other answers to some of the other questions we've got? I'm trying to remember the issue of full-time professors. The issue of tenure. I mean, so I think it's important to note that there are more tenure professors in America than there used to be. So we have, the number of tenure professors has not been increasing in proportion to either the population or the population of the growing proportion of students who go to college. What seems to have happened is that we had about a certain number of tenure professors in the 1970s. Over time, a larger percentage of college, of high school, more people graduated from high school, more high school graduates decided to go to college for a lot of reasons. The nation got quite a bit bigger. We had a baby boom, echo, generation move through. So we all of a sudden had to educate a lot more students and more or less all of the employment growth that happened to meet them was on the adjunct side. So tenure professors are shrinking as a percentage of all professors as individual colleges make some economically rational choices about what they can buy in the labor market. That in the end kind of circles back around to the incentives that research institutions have to have doctoral students and to produce students which don't really have a whole lot to do with the future economic wellbeing of the students and have a lot to do with what's good for the tenure professors who are already there. So this is a lot of the sort of Academy heal by self to me, I mean, I think these are issues that kind of have to be resolved within the community of research universities and research professors and what's good for some people is bad for a lot of other people at least. Well, I have a student who's actually working on a report card rating the experiences of contingent faculty. So those faculty who are adjuncts who may get paid $2,300 for a course if they teach 10 courses over the course of the year, they're making $23,000 a year. And in any case, he's creating this report card that shows that different institutions have different kinds of models for treating these contingent faculty, but that's probably the next kind of rankings that we'll be looking at. 2015 question. Absolutely. With that, I'm gonna say thank you to New America. Thank you to Lumen Foundation for making this our higher education coverage possible. Thank you also to the Kresge Foundation, which has helped publicize this and is funding our book and to the folks at New America and the Washington Monthly who helped put this together. Thank you very much. Really enjoyed having you all. Thank you.