Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson recently published a book, Can College Level The Playing Field?: Higher Education in an Unequal Society, which I’d recommend to anyone who wants to understand the structural position of higher education in the US. Spoiler alert here: Their answer is “No”. Most of the book is taken up with explaining why, by showing the multiple ways in which background inequalities and inequalities in the pre-college education system constrain any efforts higher education might make to level the playing field, and showing how unequal the higher education system is anyway, including – and this seems not to be well understood by politicians or a lot of commentators – how unequal the public sector itself is.
Full disclosure: I’m close friends with both of the authors, and read at least 3 versions of the manuscript before it was published and, I just realized by looking at its Princeton University Press page, wrote a blurb for it. The producer of the CEE podcast series is putting the finishing touches on an interview that we’ve done with them, and as soon as it is published, I’ll post about it encouraging you to listen and, again, encouraging you to read the book.
This (extremely long) post, though, is only secondarily about the book. My main interest is in a genuinely awful review of it, and of another book by Gary Orfield (which, I will emphasize several times, I have not read yet), in Boston Review by Christopher Newfield. I’m writing about it partly because it so irritated me that I want to get my irritation out of my system, but also partly because it illustrates some of the failings that are common to many of the books and commentaries I read about higher education.
Let’s start with Newfield’s criticism of the final two chapters, which articulate a series of measures that legislators and campus leaders could feasibly adopt to reduce somewhat the role of higher education in reproducing inequality. He accuses them of advocating “tinkering toward utopia”. What we need, he says, is bold, large scale, dynamic reforms of higher education. Unfortunately Baum and McPherson reject the two examples of what he calls “the two most significant educational movements of the last decade”: the movements for student loan cancellation, and free college.
“Tinkering toward utopia” is a nice phrase (not Newfield’s own, as he acknowledges). But it’s an odd way of describing proposals which the authors specifically say will not come anywhere close to achieving anything like utopia (because, as I’ve said, their answer to the question posed in their title is a very firm “No”).
And how would what he calls the “two most significant educational movements in the past decade” lead toward utopia? Frankly, it seems odd to call student debt cancellation an educational movement. It really has nothing to do with education. It’s a simple way of putting $1.7 trillion in the hands of people who went to college, on a one-off basis. It would not increase spending in, or funding of, higher education, and it would not make it more affordable for anybody. It wouldn’t alter the inegalitarian structure of higher education: indeed, full scale debt cancellation would give far more money to graduates who were already recipients of higher public subsidies than to people who were subsidized less (because, being from poorer families they attended less selective colleges, on which the government spent and spends less money. As Baum and McPherson demonstrate in chapter 3, this is true within the public higher education system, as well as between it and some parts of the private system). Indeed: student debt cancellation might actually turn out to be a chimera: Biden seems to have been unable to deliver it, thus possibly paying whatever electoral cost is associated with seeming to favour the better educated without harvesting any of the electoral benefit of actually getting money into their hands. (And: one big argument for student debt forgiveness was that it was a fiscal stimulus measure that the President could enact without Congress: surely if Congress were inclined to act we wouldn’t be asking it to give $1.7 trillion just to people who attended college? Progressives, I assume, would want to get at least a little bit of it into the hands of people with no experience of college)
Free public college would, by contrast, have substantial effects on higher education, not all of which are well understood. But it’s worth mentioning that it, too, would not result in increased spending in, or funding of, higher education. Free public college would, at best, keep total spending on public education constant: families that currently pay tuition would keep the money, which would be replaced by funds from the Federal and/or state governments [1]. Higher income students would receive a much bigger handout than low income students because there are many more of them, they attend public institutions that spend more on them, and they stay in those institutions longer, than low income students. And for most low-income students public college is already tuition-free or nearly so, because most low income students in the public sector either attend lower tuition institutions (which, as the previous sentence implies, and as Baum & McPherson’s book shows not coincidentally, receive less State support per student) or, as in the case of UW-Madison and many other flagships, get a package which eliminates tuition. So what Warren and Sanders proposed was a massive transfer of money to families in the upper third of the income distribution which did very little to address the real college affordability problem for lower income students, which is not tuition and fees but living expenses and the educational resources available to the institutions they attend. (Indeed, the Sanders proposal restricted spending on facilities and administration; whereas one of the serious problems that community colleges, which most lower income students attend, notoriously suffer from is a lack of administrative staff, especially counselors, and on other campuses space is a serious issue).[2][2.5]
The most peculiar part of Newfield’s review is the following passage (warning: it’s long):
Equality of opportunity has been a mainstream policy goal for years now, and it is the ethical horizon of these two arguments—the “level playing field” of Baum and McPherson’s title. But a different mainstream operated in the mid-1960s, one that saw equal opportunity as the means to the end of equal outcomes. That goal appeared in a famous commencement address Lyndon Johnson delivered at Howard University in 1965:
Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society—to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others.
But freedom is not enough. . . You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “You are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.
Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. And this is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights.
We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact, and equality as a result.
Johnson defined equal opportunity as the gateway to equal results. This could not mean that every individual would end up with equal resources, but it did mean that equal outcomes should hold across racial groups. On average, Black students would graduate from high school at roughly the same rates as whites, go on to university at the same rates, get bachelors’ degrees at the same rates, and so on. (The same would be true of indigenous and Latino students—indeed students from any racial group.) With visible and structural inequalities truly undone, Blacks as a group would come to earn, on average, the same as whites in employment after college, and their family wealth would soon become comparable (rather than get stuck at 15 percent of white wealth, where it has lingered for years). A similar line of thought lay behind the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution: women should earn the same as men. On this conception, justice entails not the right to compete to be equal—as had been done for centuries—but being equal in fact.
If a social system is producing unequal group outcomes, the only reasonable conclusion is that opportunities are not distributed equally.
Johnson said the quiet part out loud—the part that Baum, McPherson, and Orfield cannot bring themselves to say even today. The argument of his Howard speech is the only coherent theory of civil rights: if no racial group is innately inferior to another and opportunity is genuinely equally distributed, then we should expect to see equal outcomes across groups. The upshot is that if a social system is producing unequal group outcomes, the only reasonable conclusion is that opportunities are not distributed equally. This is what Johnson was saying.
Again, I have not read Orfield’s book (though I have read enough of Orfield’s work to find it spectacularly surprising that he suddenly can’t bring himself to say out loud something he’s been saying for decades. Whatever). Baum and McPherson are unequivocal in their assertion of what Newfield says they cannot bring themselves to say even today. The title of their book is Can College Level the Playing Field? and, as I said earlier, their answer to that question is “No”. It’s actually more elaborate — something like this: “No way. You would have to ignore all the available evidence to think that the answer is “yes”. Much of our book is taken up with providing you with the available evidence. Opportunities are so utterly unequal from conception to age 18, and educational interventions so much less efficient year on year as children age that it is utterly impossible to think that college could level the playing field, and you would have to be completely deluded to think otherwise”.
Well, they are politer than that, perhaps because they are politer than me. But the answer is reflected on every single page of the book. They have a view that John Quiggin has occasionally articulated here at CT, and that, of course, Rawls shares and that Quiggin, Rawls, Baum and McPherson all believe because it is true – that if you want equal opportunities, you need to massively restrict and maybe even eliminate inequality of outcome, because unequal outcomes in one generation produce unequal opportunity in the next. It’s quite impressive to read more than 4 pages of their book without picking this up; to have read the whole thing and think that they are unwilling to say it is a spectacular achievement.[3] Later he says “Both books stop short of drawing the obvious conclusion: that American education is trapped in an inequality machine”. (Yet again, although this conclusion has been a central theme of Orfield’s work over many years, I don’t know, just perhaps he has made a volte face and has suddenly decided to stop saying it). But the main message of Baum and McPherson’s book is exactly this: “American education is trapped in an inequality machine”. They don’t, it is true, do any hifalutin’ theorizing or call it “racial capitalism”, or appeal to Foucault, or whatever, but they document the way that the inequality machine traps American education on every page.
Newfield seems to really dislike that Baum and McPherson understand what it means for higher education to be trapped in an inequality machine.
Baum and McPherson call for better pathways to degree completion, better advising, and more auditing of colleges to improve “accountability.” We’ve long been doing the last of these, to little effect, and the authors give no reason why their other prescriptions will do much better.Baum and McPherson do say we need to focus on “reducing the differences in opportunities and outcomes between individuals from low-income backgrounds and those with more resources.” Yes—but that’s where the book should start, not where it should end! They add, “There is persuasive evidence that spending more on the education” of students at community colleges and other broad-access institutions “pays off in higher graduation rates.” Yes! So let’s spend more—a lot more! “Inadequate funding of broad-access colleges is a major national problem.” Yes! So let’s actually fund the reduction of racialized outcomes gaps!
Actually Baum and McPherson do want us to spend more. A lot more. But, oddly for people who are supposed not to understand that higher education is trapped in an inequality machine, they want to spend that money on reducing (maybe even eliminating) poverty. They want to reduce the racialized outcome gaps not by spending $60 billion/year mainly on wealthy and white students in higher education but by spending it on pre-school and elementary schools that all black children attend and which are, they think (maybe Newfield disagrees) currently under resourced. (Perhaps their hunch is that spending money on educating black and poor children is more likely to benefit them than spending that same money on white and more affluent young adults. Just a hunch, but maybe not a crazy one). They prioritize improving universal education (especially early years education, where the money will have more effect) over selective education. The reason they are skeptical of debt forgiveness and free public college is that those programs direct money almost entirely into the upper 30% of the income distribution (if you don’t believe this, go ahead, carry on not believing it, but you won’t be able to not believe it if you read their book) and they think that government spending would be better directed at getting us out of, rather than, as Newfield seems to prefer, entrenching, the inequality machine.
Even if you’re going to restrict new education-related spending to giving families involved in higher education money (as Newfield’s headline programs would), Baum and McPherson point out that point out that the $1.7 trillion Newfield recommends for debt relief, most of which would go to higher income earners, would enable us to double the size of the Pell Grant program for 25 years, so that it would cover not just tuition, but for many low-income students, most living costs. Add in the $60 billion/year that free public college would cost (and disqualify for-profits from receiving it) and you have something that, unlike debt forgiveness and free public college, would likely have a massive positive impact on college success for low and lower middle income students.
In reality, the portrait of inequality so scrupulously depicted in these books implies a conclusion their authors effectively recoil from: that we must massively rebuild a full range of social systems on truly egalitarian grounds.
Nope. (Yet yet again, maybe Orfield has had a late life conversion and does recoil from that. I’ll read his book and find out. Or maybe someone can ask him). But Baum and McPherson advocate precisely that we must massively build (I take Newfield’s ‘rebuild’ comment to be a rhetorical bit of golden ageism) a full range of social systems on truly egalitarian grounds.
Ok, here’s a revealing passage:
Both books focus on increasing limited kinds of procedural fairness, clouding the egalitarian vision animating the overall struggle. The result—like so much cognitive dissonance in a mind divided against itself—makes for painful reading. “I’m not a neoliberal,” the ego insists, but the superego plainly is.
The book I’m talking about does not focus on procedural fairness (though it does, as I’ve said, point out that if you did want to achieve that kind of procedural fairness you’d have to pursue an extremely egalitarian social policy agenda). But it does try to understand the constraints under which higher education operates in our, highly inegalitarian, society, and attempts to give guidance to agents operating under those constraints. It’s possible that Newfield mistakes an understanding and description of the state of the world for an endorsement of that state. But description is not endorsement. When Marx said that philosophers had hitherto only sought to understand the world and the point is to change it he did not mean that it was a mistake to understand it. If you want to change it you need to understand it, and that’s what Baum & McPherson (and much of Orfield’s previous work) does. I don’t know how to use Freudian terms, so I won’t, but Baum and McPherson are not neoliberals: they just understand that the agents they are addressing live in a world shaped by neoliberalism, and don’t have the power, right now and within the time horizons they are concerned with, substantially to shape it.
I haven’t quite finished venting. Here’s the final annoying passage I want to talk about.[4]
Over the last several decades, public universities have accepted state cuts in large part because it was harder to fight the statehouse than to raise tuition on students. In 1995 states on average allocated $8,922 per “full-time equivalent student.” In 2020 that figure was $8,636, below the 1995 level adjusted for inflation. Public college students spent much of the 2010s getting allocations that were 10–20 percent below those of 1995. The federal government accepted a dramatic drop in the relative value of its main grant, the Pell grant, and a shift of financial aid from grants to loans. It let a good chunk of the federal loan system be siphoned off by for-profit colleges, leading disproportionate shares of students of color toward the worst graduation rates, highest debt loads, and highest default rates in known higher education history.
So, there’s some truth here, and some falsehood. Straightforwardly false: its not true that the Pell grant has diminished in value since 1995. Indeed it was declining in value in real terms for over a decade till 1995, since which it has climbed in value, and the program itself has grown hugely (because more and more low-income students are attending college). It is true that States are now spending less per student on higher education, despite spending more total dollars in real terms, and in many cases a larger proportion of their budgets, on higher education. But this is somewhat misleading. Federal government spending on grant aid and tax benefits for higher education has grown dramatically in that period, offsetting the reductions in state aid/student. Of course, different students benefit from Federal aid than from the direct subsidies to institutions that States provide. Those go to all students who attend (more for the more affluent students who attend the better subsidized more selective public institutions, less for the less affluent students who attend the less and non-selective public institutions, sure, but still, everyone shares in the aid). Pell grants go to low-income students, veterans benefits (which grew dramatically after 2003 for some reason) go to… veterans, and tax advantages go to more affluent students.[5] The recipients are different, but the public is paying.
One thing that’s unambiguously right in the passage is that a non-trivial proportion of Federal loans – and, actually, of Federal grant aid – ends up in the hands of for-profit colleges. Dare I imagine that there is a reason why the two so-called “two most significant educational reform movements” of the last decade have been attempts to distribute resources to people who have graduated college, or have attended college or who are attending public colleges, rather than focusing on regulating or improving or eviscerating for-profits that prey on low-income and non-white students. Maybe it’s an entirely innocent reason – it’s not sexy. But it would be really easy for individual States, if they wanted, to regulate for-profits or, preferably, steer Federal resources away from for-profits and get those resources diverted to public and non-profit colleges. Any State could establish a Pell-top up grant and a Veteran’s Benefit top-up grant of, say, $3k-5k/year for which for-profits would be ineligible, and immediately low-income students would flock out of for-profits, mainly to public institutions, bringing their Pell and Veteran’s Benefit grants with them. Any state where the Democrats hold all branches of government, and perhaps even some where they don’t control the State Supreme Court, could do this, and a few do. But plenty of others could.
Baum and McPherson advocate increases in federal and state grant aid, and better accountability for both for profits and non-profit and public institutions. If Newfield, or Warren or Sanders, want to start an educational movement that would be genuinely egalitarian, they could start by reading Baum and McPherson’s book, where they’d get a lot of help. Which, I strongly recommend, you should do too!
[1] I say at best because I think there are reasonable fears that it would, over time, reduce the level of resources available to public colleges and universities. Two fears I have (that I don’t think Baum and McPherson mention, but I might be wrong). One is: what happens when Republicans control all 4 branches of government? In Wisconsin when Republicans have held the reins of power they have used them to limit state funding of higher education, and have frozen in-state tuition rates. Do we really think that Republicans would act differently at the national level? For that matter, how confident are we that Democrats would? And second, if you suspect, as I do, that would result in an erosion of available resources, do you really think that affluent families will keep spending $30-50k/yr in tuition sending their children to degraded public flagships in other states rather than to financially healthier private schools which will spend the tuition revenues on their children rather than using them to cross-subsidize low-income students and state residents?
[2] How is space an issue? Many more selective public schools have better equipped and less crowded classrooms, more relaxing spaces within which instructors and students might mingle, and less pressure on classroom use, allowing, for example, for students and instructors to chat before or after class, than do many of the regional comprehensives in their systems. They also have more scope for scheduling classes to optimize use of building space, because a higher proportion of their students have flexible schedules being younger, from more affluent families, and residing on campus. Even on flagships: on my campus Kinesiology, a large and one of the fastest growing majors, is stuck in the basement of a terrible building replete with classrooms designed for bad science teaching in the 50’s.
[2.5] I did some investigation that suggested that for both Warren and Sanders what you saw was what you got: literally everything in each of their plans was on their website, suggesting that quite limited thought had gone into them.
[3] I believe Newfield read the book because he has quotes from several parts of it. My first book was reviewed by two different reviewers who I am sure did not read it, one because he criticizes the book for making an argument for exactly the opposite conclusion that it in fact argued for, and the other because the entire review was focused on one of the blurbs, which I didn’t write.
[4] That’s a complete lie. I want to talk about several more annoying passages. For example, this silliness pissed me off: “this cautionary moral is more likely to function as an alibi for the status quo than to inspire action capable of meeting the structural challenge”. But, really, you get the idea.
[5] Federal aid typically comes in voucher form, so it shows up as tuition revenue, whereas state aid typically goes directly to institutions. So if all government funding were in the form of vouchers tuition would look high, even though families would only actually be spending the same amount as if all government funding were direct-to-institution and tuition looked low.
{ 119 comments }
LAL 02.06.23 at 3:59 pm
What is to be done in terms of public policy to counter the “inequality machine” ? Pragmatically is a major revamping of higher education funding and access without reform of early education- pre-K plus- a formula for massive investment with limited success ?
Jim Dandy 02.06.23 at 7:01 pm
I really appreciate this piece. Newfield is a very smart person, but sometimes his takes on things strike me as very odd, and this is a perfect example.
I haven’t read either book, but based on this piece and Newfield’s review, my takeaway is that Newfield is somehow arguing that college can fix problems that were introduced into the system literally from the moment children are born (and even before that). that seems to me a very strange and college-centric thing to believe, but he wouldn’t be the only one who seems to think that. as a professor, i’m sure occasionally we do help with problems like that, but most of the time the students who really need that “help” don’t even make it to our classrooms, for the reasons you outline.
as you argue very eloquently, interventions at much earlier phases of life are likely to have much more sustained and pronounced effects, and themselves likely even to improve the college experience and college prospects for more people from very disadvantaged backgrounds who actually make it to college. I’m pretty sure they would even be significantly less costly because they can be better targeted.
of course I am very worried about the costs of college, but that doesn’t seem to me like the major issue here, which is how to give more people, especially economically disadvantaged minorities, access to greater social mobility.
LFC 02.06.23 at 7:20 pm
Not an expert on any of this, but there’s one aspect of the OP I don’t follow (actually more than one aspect, but my time is limited right now).
The OP says:
So Baum and McPherson want to spend more money on pre-school and elementary schools. Fine. But why not also spend more in a targeted way on community colleges and other “broad-access” higher-ed institutions that, by the OP’s own statements, serve a lot of low-income students?
I also wonder whether there shdnt be some mention of the increasing re-segregation of public education in the U.S. A recent bk on this, reprinting Breyer’s opinion in the Seattle schools case and adding some updated material, might be worth a look: here.
engels 02.06.23 at 7:22 pm
It’s a simple way of putting $1.7 trillion in the hands of people who went to college, on a one-off basis.
Writing off a debt isn’t putting money in anyone’s hands (if it was I’d be rich by now). I didn’t support student debt cancellation but I’m also opposed to analysing a basic isssue of principle (education) in terms of efficient distribution of “subsidies” to market actors (rather than, say, the overall distribution of resources within a society), which seems to me inherently reformist at best and neoliberal at worst, and something that Rawls and similar theorists, for all their sins, didn’t do.
Harry 02.06.23 at 7:43 pm
“But why not also spend more in a targeted way on community colleges and other “broad-access” higher-ed institutions that, by the OP’s own statements, serve a lot of low-income students?”
They do think we should do both, as I think the OP indicates (sorry if its not clear). There is a reason not to by the way: its not as efficient a way of reducing inequality as spending it all in the earlier years. They don’t quite explain it like this but I think they think (and conversations with McPherson have convinced me) that this reason is outweighed by a concern about the wellbeing of young people from low income backgrounds who are now young adults and had bad and underfunded education up to this point.
Tim Worstall 02.06.23 at 7:48 pm
” but Baum and McPherson are not neoliberals: they just understand that the agents they are addressing live in a world shaped by neoliberalism,”
I am a neoliberal, proudly so.
“They want to reduce the racialized outcome gaps not by spending $60 billion/year mainly on wealthy and white students in higher education but by spending it on pre-school and elementary schools that all black children attend and which are, they think (maybe Newfield disagrees) currently under resourced. (Perhaps their hunch is that spending money on educating black and poor children is more likely to benefit them than spending that same money on white and more affluent young adults. Just a hunch, but maybe not a crazy one).”
Sure. The inner city education systems that vast numbers of black children attend are vile. I’m unconvinced that money is the problem – Baltimore has for years been among the best funded by actual dollars (without getting into the argument of whether poorer places necessarily need even more) systems in the country. How the money is spent matters as well as how much money is spent. So, you know, maybe examination of how instead of just how much?
But let’s get the basics sorted sounds very neoliberal to me – you know, given my proud neoliberality and agreement with the idea. Or, as I might put it, it seems to be possible to teach all sorts of kids all over the place the basics of the three Rs on $8k a year. So, why do some places fail dismally at that same task? Could it be the way the task or the money is being managed? A question that could be usefully investigated at least.
“The reason they are skeptical of debt forgiveness and free public college is that those programs direct money almost entirely into the upper 30% of the income distribution”
Entirely so, nasty little neoliberal that I am. Whether we’re using Smith (more than in proportion) or the equality or equity arguments the justification for taxing the rich to benefit the poorer is indeed that the poorer get the benefit of the taxation of the rich. Seems like a sensible principle.
And just to be really neoliberally objectionable, this fuss over AP African American studies. There’s a bit of the AP site that tells of which careers might be the result of taking the specific AP class under discussion. The one and only mentioned for AP African American history was “community activist”. Well, maybe, everyone getting Wolfie Smith might improve society, but it’s unlikely to improve the incomes or the familial wealth of those who take that specific class. Accounting, or financial analysis, so as to be able to skin society from Wall Street seem more likely to work at that task.
Omega Centauri 02.06.23 at 9:02 pm
I substitute in three high schools, which run from top few percentile to lower third percentile in terms of outcome (percent of students entering college). While there is a gradient in terms of the quality of the facilities, and also though not as strongly of the teaching staff, I think that is only a minor factor in determining the outcomes. I would place group cultural values -especially as concerning the value of education, an the effort demanded of the kids as the primary determinant of outcome. Secondary to that is parental knowledge of how to help their children learn. Change is these factors is very difficult to make via government programs, although offering programs to train parents might help on the margin.
I’m involved with a church dominated by West African immigrants, and am quite confident that their kids, even those with lower income families will have far above average outcomes -baring other issues such as learning disabilities. Cultural attitudes among this group are about as strong as any, and that goes a very long way.
Mike T 02.06.23 at 9:24 pm
Harry, I’m wondering if, as an empirical matter, you think high schools can level the playing field. (This is related to an argument I’ve been having with our local school district.) I’m guessing the answer is either “they can do more than colleges, but still not nearly as much as earlier interventions” or “nope, they can’t substantially help either”. But I’d be curious to know which of those it is.
Alan White 02.06.23 at 10:18 pm
WRT you @4 Harry, I think you’re dead on. In my 4 decades career spent mostly at a 2-year transfer institution for our UW System, it was clear over time that the students we were seeing were less and less prepared for college-level work, and increasingly much time and money had to be spent on remedial courses (often with little or no earned credit) trying to repair damage done earlier. Yes, the two-years serve an important role of access especially for lower socio-economic students, but a lot of that could be eliminated/eased by spending money earlier on well-researched pedagogy.
engels 02.07.23 at 12:09 am
I can’t pretend to follow the details of this but have some sympathy with Newfield having heard this kind of fatalism for decades from Oxford every time somebody pointed out they only ever seemed to admit privately educated white guys called “Charlie”. There was nothing they could do, it was all down the schools and Society then a few years ago the political temperature changed and suddenly… there was.
Harry 02.07.23 at 12:31 am
“I’m wondering if, as an empirical matter, you think high schools can level the playing field.”
Actually LEVEL?: no definitely not. No society has worked out a way of using education fully to counteract the effects of living in high concentrations of poverty, and even if we worked out how to do that nobody would implement whatever was needed to counteract the effects of living in affluence, comfort, and with highly educated and motivated parents.
But. They can do much more than college to reduce the effects of inequality on children’s prospects. We know that, eg, most of the increase in the achievement gap occurs during the summer, when kids are not in school. And that the more hours kids spend in school the lower the inequalities of achievement. And think about Emily Hanford’s new podcast, Sold A Story: when schools engage in really bad pedagogical practice affluent and/or educated parents compensate because they can, whereas less affluent and less educated parents have less ability to do so.
Harry 02.07.23 at 12:57 am
Tim W: I dunno, prompting a reference to Wolfie Smith makes this all the more worthwhile (you do know that only 1% of our readers know what you are talking about, right?)
You should listen to Sold a Story, Emily Hanford’s new podcast about the science of reading. I’ll write about it and demand everyone listen to it in a subsequent post, but… it’s a great example of how getting the money spent in the right ways matters. Baum and McPherson are totally on board with that, but k-12 isn’t their topic in the book. But the same applies in HE. To give an extreme (but real) example, it is probably more productive to spend money on Spanish teachers who teach classes that students take than on Russian teachers who attract no students at all. And there’s a pernicious myth (which both management and unions collude with) that teachers are more or less interchangeable: no, really, some are much better than others, and a system which gave them incentives to stay in the profession but didn’t give the same incentive to their less skilled colleagues might be worth considering. That said, and of course how money is spent matters, in the US school districts with low income students need to be able to compete with suburban districts for talented teachers and principals, and they need to pay more in order to do so. They are also bound by Federal regulations which constrain them on how they spend their funds. One internal study in LAUSD in the late eighties (pre-IDEA) showed that the entire (and large) increase in real terms in spending per student was accounted for by increased spending on special education students. (Around 2010 the then Superintendent of a very large urban district told me that her most expensive student cost her $350k/year. She was under a court order to pay that amount to a private institution in another State for a particular student who was a repeat criminal. Definitely inefficient spending, but not spending over which she had any control).
But every single PD day my wife attended as a public school teacher was a waste of money, and many of the days (eg the days spent telling the janitors and secretarial staff and the less fancilly educated teachers they were racists) were worse than a waste of money.
I think you and Brad DeLong are the only people I know who call THEMSELVES neoliberal. And Brad seems to have backed off in his new (fantastic) book. I try not to use the term, because its a term of abuse (except toward you) and people seem to mean so many different things by it. Sandy and Mike definitely don’t identify as neoliberals and nor do I, but as you know perfectly well most of what you have said is just sensible.
M Caswell 02.07.23 at 3:47 am
I don’t really see why people say education ‘reproduces inequality.’ Rich people aren’t rich because they go to fancy schools; it’s the other way around. Replace ‘fancy schools’ with ‘gourmet restaurants’, ‘yoga classes,’ ‘foreign travel’, or any other high-priced service industry consumable, and the analysis is the same. A mere engine of inequality should simply be abolished, while a precious good in itself like education should be amply shared.
Peter Dorman 02.07.23 at 4:32 am
A lot of pixels are spilled here decrying the idea of free public higher education on the ground that this would constitute a massive upward income transfer. I understand the argument, but surely the more rational proposal is FPHE accompanied by higher taxes on upper incomes to pay for it. That way, wouldn’t you get the advantages of free education without the distributional costs?
And of course it is not enough to simply not charge tuition. The larger barrier facing low income students is the cost of everything else, including the opportunity cost of not being fully in the labor market. This means a stipend is needed, also to be financed through progressive taxes.
I can see the political argument against this, that you’ll never get it through congress etc., but isn’t it a mistake to trim one’s analysis in anticipation of the hostility it will evoke?
Incidentally, my preference for FPHE comes not as much from its contribution to equality (which I agree will be limited as long as the lives of higher ed students are molded by inequality from conception through HS), but its reduction of financial pressure on the students who, whatever their background, largely pay their own way. I saw too many of my own students nodding out in morning classes because they hadn’t had time to sleep off the night shift. If done right, college is hard enough without this extra layer of challenge.
Tim Worstall 02.07.23 at 7:21 am
“you do know that only 1% of our readers know what you are talking about, right?”
I glory in the advance that is on most of my utterances.
“people seem to mean so many different things by it. ” “but as you know perfectly well most of what you have said is just sensible.”
What I mean by neoliberal (and being at a self-proclaimed neoliberal think tank, the Adam Smith Institute, this definition includes “We” as well as “I”) is a rather pure pragmatism. What works? If those early claims (Fabians, Webbs, Wells etc) about scientific socialism had been proven true then I (we) would probably be scientific socialists. Sometimes that is even the efficient method of doing something. Sometimes to often it’s not. Running A&E on a cash up front basis doesn’t work well. So let’s not do that. Running banana supply on a state planned basis (all those stories about “bananen” and E and W Germany) doesn’t seem to work so let’s not do that. Shrug.
Socialism – usefully defined as worker ownership, not capitalist – works all through the modern economy. John Lewis and Waitrose is a worker co-op, the CoOp is a consumer one. Great.
Sadly, standing outside Tooting Bec station, fist raised, top hat secured and shouting “Pragmatism to the People” doesn’t have great motivational power.
John Q 02.07.23 at 7:28 am
I think a university system like Australia’s has a net equalizing effect. Key components
Although there’s a status gap in terms of research, all Oz unis would be R1 or R2 in the US, and none is above the level of a flagship state.
engels 02.07.23 at 12:04 pm
Tuition fees are replaced by an income contingent loan recovered through a tax surcharge
I recently encountered the perfect example why this is unnecessary. Two childhood friends, one from (high-ranking) university, one from (lowly state) school turned out to both be partners at the same accountancy firm, earning astronomical sums enabling corporate tax avoidance. Why did it become an obsession for a certain kind of left-liberal that the first should be charged for his education and the second shouldn’t? (Nothing to do with the dreaded neo-word I’m sure…)
Tim Worstall 02.07.23 at 12:14 pm
Apologies, apologies:
“Sadly, standing outside Tooting Bec station”
Tooting Broadway of course…….
Freddie deBoer 02.07.23 at 12:27 pm
“inequalities in the pre-college education system”
But then, nothing in education has proven to meaningfully and consistently change student position in the relative performance spectrum, as I’ve argued at considerable length: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work-20
So it’s hard to see where kicking the can back down to K-12 gets us.
superdestroyer 02.07.23 at 1:42 pm
The workability of free undergraduate education is very questionable in the U.S. What happens to the private universities that charge much more for list price tuition than public universities. How does one sort out in-state tuition versus out-of-state tuition. Does the free college only over 8 semesters, 4 school years, or until someone finally gets a degree?
Free tuition for college students who attend public universities where they are eligible for instate tuition could result in fewer total seats available for students along with the bankruptcy and closure of most second tier and lower private universities.
Tim Worstall 02.07.23 at 6:38 pm
“The workability of free undergraduate education is very questionable in the U.S. ”
As the British system found out free is entirely affordable when it’s not very many. Trying to get 50% of the age cohort through “for free” (rather, just moving the cost to elsewhere or elsewhen) gets very expensive very fast.
Annoying, of course, but choices do have to be made.
Sam D 02.07.23 at 6:57 pm
So you’ve convinced me that I really need to read this book. But I would point out that two seemingly contradictory things can be true, and as someone who teaches at a community college I’m firmly convinced they are both true: Community colleges have far too few administrative staff and community colleges have too many administrative staff. What I mean by this is that you are 100% correct that most community colleges don’t have enough advisors or other support staff for students. We have less than four years and given our students’ relative lack of the sort of knowledge upper class students get from their high school guidance counselors or parents we actually need more than they have. At my institution we need more deans and other middle management. Upper level admin has thinned out the number of deans here by getting rid of positions when deans leave and then giving the deans who are left more work as well as foisting off stuff deans used to do like class scheduling on faculty, which they try to spin it as shared governance. (Maybe I should tell my wife that it’s shared governance if I want to get out of my turn changing the baby’s diapers?) On the other hand my institution and most other community colleges have massive bloat at the level of upper level admin. For instance, my own institution has 7 vice presidents, and while we’ve laid off faculty, librarians, and yes advisors in dire financial moments and demoted deans, we have never eliminated a vice presidential position. In fact, I’m pretty sure we actually added one or two of our current seven while thinning out the number of deans. Anyway, I think the Sanders proposal is an attempt to deal with a very real problem, though an extremely hamfisted one. I don’t know how you would manage the very real bloat in both the number and salary of upper level admin without artificially restricting the number of people like advisors who are classified as admin.
Chris Stephens 02.07.23 at 7:24 pm
Great rant, Harry.
One thing we do in British Columbia that helps reduce some of the inequalities in spending on K-12 education (compared to the US, at least), is that property tax money that goes to pre-University education is collected centrally by the Provincial government and then redistributed equally among the public schools (while the local school districts still have some discretion about how to spend the money). This prevents wealthy neighbourhoods from getting much better funded public schools, as tends to happen in the US. Of course, as others have noted above, this is only one element in improving educational outcomes among the poor.
engels 02.07.23 at 7:51 pm
Whether it is expensive or cheap I believe the price is the same whether the state or the individual pays (and that’s leasing aside individuals mostly have to purchase on the never never).
On the suggestion that the impartial ASI would be Fabians if that “worked” I understand that as an anonymous nobody I am forbidden from writing mean things about real people or think tanks but I can only encourage interested readers to
Google it (possibly along with “tobacco industry”).
Trader Joe 02.07.23 at 8:44 pm
Does the book make any mention of the impact that unions have had in the delivery of K-12 education? The mileage varies substantially and there are few one-size fits all assertions but its been my observation that the school districts with the weakest performance and the poorest student populations are quite often represented by the most strident union representatives.
To be clear I’m not anti-union in the slightest. I think in the aggregate they do more good than harm, but there are decidedly instances where salaries absorb every bit of any increase in government spending with no accountability back to improved outcomes with only limited ability to cull underperforming instructors.
Also – Three +++ to Omega Centari @7 I agree with the points made and have similar experiences.
Peter Dorman 02.07.23 at 8:58 pm
@22: The problem with “cut the fat, not the bone” is that, more often than not, it’s the fat that makes the cuts.
superdestroyer 02.07.23 at 10:50 pm
If one spends a couple of minutes searching the research, one can find several studies that found a negative correlation between per student spending and student achievement. It is due to the urban school districts spending more per pupil while having almost no students above lower middle class.
J, not that one 02.07.23 at 11:17 pm
I assume the measure of “reducing inequality” is whether adult income becomes less correlated with parents’ income, for kids who attend a given school. I wouldn’t accuse the authors mentioned in the OP of this, but there does seem to be an assumption among much of the meritocratic-journalistic elite that — since they got where they are purely because they went to college and learned what was being taught, because they went to schools that taught them what college would expect — anyone who isn’t as successful as they are must have gone to worse schools. Correspondingly, they sometimes seem to think that there’s a direct school-to-good-job pipeline.
So when they think about equality, they look to provide everyone the education they got, which means schools that can “reduce inequality.”
MisterMr 02.07.23 at 11:31 pm
So I shouldn’t probably comment on a post about a review I didn’t read of a book I didn’t read, however I will note that, eyeballing income by family by percentile and average USA household income, the average income is probably just a little north of the 30th upper percentile, so it is still possible that a program that favors the top 30 percentiles is still redistributing down, depending on how it is funded and what part of the top 30% is actually getting the money (it is not automatic but not impossible).
I say this because I think people don’t realize how income is distributed and that earning an average income literally puts you in the top 30% or more, people often unconsciously assume that the average is close to the median.
J, not that one 02.07.23 at 11:40 pm
“And think about Emily Hanford’s new podcast, Sold A Story: when schools engage in really bad pedagogical practice affluent and/or educated parents compensate because they can, whereas less affluent and less educated parents have less ability to do so.”
My experience at bad schools (to be fair, schools that had some excellent teachers, but several departments were awful) that were very large and took kids from a variety of backgrounds up to (a handful of) lower-upper middle class, and with my kid’s relatively small schools with few children of professionals and a lot of recent immigrants with little English – is that this could also be described as: the schools are mostly geared to allow the kids with natural academic skills (as much as educated parents) to do well regardless of direct education, and to focus most of their efforts on the kids who can be brought up to average with a lot of effort.
The schools are not going to put most kids in a position where it looks like they can fail. There are plenty of affluent parents who accept that the teachers know best and that they shouldn’t be supplementing. There’s a tacit assumption – outside the big urban systems that see themselves as offering everything for everyone – that the school should seek its own level. I do worry that too much talk about “of course schools reproduce inequality” can be read as an “ought” rather than an “is,” absent a prior conviction that inequality is wrong (rather than that inequality should be factored into planning). But that’s not really relevant to the books reviewed.
TM 02.08.23 at 8:36 am
TW: “Trying to get 50% of the age cohort through “for free” (rather, just moving the cost to elsewhere or elsewhen) gets very expensive very fast. … choices do have to be made.”
This isn’t exactly news to anybody commenting here. The whole question is how to finance higher education. What I never understood: why should the burden of financing higher education be on 18-25 year old students without income. How does that ever make sense? I think it simply doesn’t.
TM 02.08.23 at 8:50 am
Harry 12: “And there’s a pernicious myth… that teachers are more or less interchangeable: no, really, some are much better than others, and a system which gave them incentives to stay in the profession but didn’t give the same incentive to their less skilled colleagues might be worth considering.”
My understanding is that there is considerable disagreement on the question of whether the better teachers can reliably be distinguished from the worse ones based on their stuents’ performance in standardized tests. What do you actually suggest?
Common Reader 02.08.23 at 12:34 pm
This comment is a reply to Jim Dandy, who writes:
I don’t know who Jim Dandy is or how he possibly got this impression from Newfield’s review, but it is exactly the opposite of what Newfield argues, as is obvious in passages like this:
Nothing “college-centric” about that. Dandy’s comment is just wrong.
Harry 02.08.23 at 1:57 pm
“What do you actually suggest?”
I don’t have a systematic suggestion. But: stop hiring principals who know nothing about teaching and learning. Make the evaluation of teachers a central part of the work of principals (and train them to do it and give them time in their day that allows them to sit through at least 5 lessons a week). You could buy some of this time by adopting, eg, behavior management systems that work well rather than (as in our district, which is far from an outlier) allow serious criminal behavior to go unchallenged. Change teachers contracts so that they are more like contracts in other countries, with competitive promotions. Provide PD that is about improving instructional skills rather than, as the PD my wife got in the last ten years of her teaching career, berating teachers and ancillary staff for being white supremacists (and, in this case, literally the same PD year after year, not even new and imaginative ways of berating them).
I’m haunted by a meeting of Wisconsin teachers’ union leaders (a loose federation of the leaders of the most militant locals in the state) which I was asked to attend in order to explain Race to the Top. I did so, and included a discussion of the many reasons why trying to evaluate teachers via improvements in test scores are flawed. In the ensuing discussion the leader of a large AFT local said “Of course, everybody knows that teachers evaluation is broken. Principals don’t bother to use the probationary period to get rid of the worst teachers. They don’t even observe them, and then we are stuck with defending them when they get tenure, which absorbs our time and demoralizes everyone” One reason some teachers unions seem so unreasonable is because they are in districts with terrible management.
Harry 02.08.23 at 2:02 pm
My comment above is also relevant to Trader Joe’s comment: I agree that unions probably have bad effects in some cases, but the causality is really hard to determine. The union’s demands seem unreasonable, but how much worse would things be if really awful managers were unconstrained? Wisconsin is a fascinating case study here: Act 10 was passed 12 years ago, depriving unions of collective bargaining rights. There are all sorts of good things management could do without the constraints of bargaining with unions, and that was partly how Act 10 was sold. So… all those good things have happened now, right? No. Hardly any of them, maybe none. It was never the unions blocking good things from happening: as my above story suggests, it was that management really has no desire to do the good things.
engels 02.08.23 at 2:49 pm
What I never understood: why should the burden of financing higher education be on 18-25 year old students without income.
It might help to keep in mind that this never applied to a lot of the people pushing this, who were either old enough to go to university for free or rich enough to have their parents pay.
Michael Sullivan 02.08.23 at 6:41 pm
MisterMr @29: “I say this because I think people don’t realize how income is distributed and that earning an average income literally puts you in the top 30% or more, people often unconsciously assume that the average is close to the median.”
Average is a funny and imprecise word. mean income would put you in the top 30%. But most people don’t realize how skewed the income distribution is, and want “average” to mean something more like the median.
Published income figures are much more likely to cite median family income, which makes sense. Mostly where I see “average” (meaning “mean”) income used, is in polemics which are aimed at making people in the top quartile feel closer to “average”.
the mean is skewed dramatically by the incredibly high values in the top 1% and even top .1%. I’m pretty sure if you calculated the mean as if everyone in the top 1% earned the same amount (same as the lowest of the 1%), the mean would end up not all that much higher than the median. the crazy incomes of the very rich do a lot of work in bringning up the mean. But these are not representative of what “average” people make.
If your goal is to understand what the average Joe/Jane/family earns, the median is a better measure after all.
Trader Joe 02.08.23 at 6:53 pm
@35 Harry
Thank you for the input. I guess that would suggest that in most cases unions by themselves are neither the problem nor the solution though they may contribute to muddying the waters a bit.
Its also a quite fair point that Unions rarely set their response in isolation – management certainly plays a hand and my comment should have made that point. Its the engine and the drive-shaft together that move the vehicle, each doing their job independently doesn’t create the linkage needed for forward progress. Quite often where that linkage occurs is over the topic of money, rarely over the topic of accountability since neither side has quite the necessary interest in that.
Harry 02.08.23 at 7:33 pm
“It might help to keep in mind that this never applied to a lot of the people pushing this, who were either old enough to go to university for free or rich enough to have their parents pay.”
I think a large part of the appeal of free public college to affluent voters is thinking about how much money it will allow them to keep. I have 3 kids, one of whom went through 4 years of (public) university, and the other two of whom might manage 8 or 9 years between them, so free public college would have saved me around $160k. For low income families in my state free public college will save them hardly anything because most of their children won’t go, and those that do will pay little or no tuition.
Of course I have some more affluent colleagues whose parents pay for the grandchildren to attend college, and can afford private universities, so it wouldn’t save them much. But most children from affluent families in fact go to public institutions.
Tim Worstall 02.08.23 at 7:58 pm
Well:
“What I never understood: why should the burden of financing higher education be on 18-25 year old students without income. How does that ever make sense? I think it simply doesn’t.”
The standard argument is that gaining higher education increases lifetime income. Therefore those who gain higher lifetime income should be paying for having gained higher lifetime income. As JQ above says, there are different ways of doing this. A graduate tax is one, student loans another and so on.
It’s also possible to try and differentiate between undergraduate education (ie, to first degree, variants of English aren’t always the same on this) and the postgraduate part which leads to actual scientists advancing human knowledge and thereby enriching all.
That society pays for the society enhancing public good of science being done, sure. Well, leaving aside quite whether all and quite every part of the Academy is involved in such of course, insert the bits you don’t like here. But “these folk here gain private benefit, these folk here should pay for their private benefit” isn’t an entirely awful idea now, is it?
There is also another possible answer: “why should the burden of financing higher education be on 18-25 year old students without income.” They shouldn’t. Educating 18-25 year olds should be, obviously, but the rest of the system can go beg on street corners.
engels 02.08.23 at 8:18 pm
I honestly don’t think most people approach political issues in such a superficial way. There is a normative dimension, there are motives about exclusivity and opportunity hoarding, and then there is the obvious fact affluent people pay taxes. In Britain I have only heard the arguments for fees and markets from affluent people (maybe I don’t know enough working class Tories).
Sebastian H 02.08.23 at 9:08 pm
“I’m unconvinced that money is the problem – Baltimore has for years been among the best funded by actual dollars (without getting into the argument of whether poorer places necessarily need even more) systems in the country. How the money is spent matters as well as how much money is spent. So, you know, maybe examination of how instead of just how much?”
This is really frustrating in relation to discussing the US because we are currently in a moment where any test or measurement that reveals an education gap is immediately decried as racist by people who have been listening to Kendi/Diangelo/Okun style anti-racists. We are DEI’ing our way out of being able to figure out what spending works.
LFC 02.08.23 at 10:56 pm
If you’re a student from a low-income family and you apply to and get into a private university with a solid financial-aid program — which does sometimes happen, even if much less often than it might or should — you won’t pay any tuition there either (at least not at the one univ w/ whose policies I’m slightly familiar).
Harry 02.09.23 at 1:49 am
Or possibly you don’t know enough working class socialists.
“I honestly don’t think most people approach political issues in such a superficial way.”
You really give the impression that you do think most people think about political issues in such a superficial way. I think that both free public college and debt forgiveness were utterly cynical on the part of Warren who knew perfectly well how inegalitarian they are as policies, knew they would never be implemented, but needed to compete for the Sanders vote. Not so sure about Sanders, who comes across to me as a very capable politician who has a very limited understanding of the higher education business (and whose perception is possibly distorted by the exceptionally high in-state tuition rates, and low levels of State subsidy in his home State).
TM 02.09.23 at 8:38 am
TW 40: “The standard argument is that gaining higher education increases lifetime income. Therefore those who gain higher lifetime income should be paying for having gained higher lifetime income.”
If that is the argument, then it doesn’t support charging tuition from students without income. What it does support is charging people with a higher lifetime income due to gaining higher education. Iow they first have to realize the income gain before it is fair to charge them for it. But that is not how tuition usually works. Certainly not in the US (not sure about the UK).
CR 33, thanks for the quote. Nothing in that quote seems objectionable to me, to the contrary.
Trader Joe 02.09.23 at 12:18 pm
@45 TM
“Iow they first have to realize the income gain before it is fair to charge them for it. But that is not how tuition usually works. Certainly not in the US”
If you think of a student loan as effectively deferred tuition it works exactly the way you suggest – someone else pays your way now and you pay back later when you are earning money.
The problem of course is that not all who recieve loans ultimately achieve income uplift or alternatively they have to pursue jobs or career paths that are remunerative rather than what they actually want to do.
I think a reasonable portion of the Student loan crisis could be abated if repayment was deferred for about 5 years and then loan repayments structured specifically to a person’s vocation and circumstance rather than the way its currently managed which is exactly like a commercial bank loan. Beyond that you can utilize the 5 year mark as a point to forgive all or a portion of loans to individuals who pursue desired fields (i.e. teachers, nurses etc.) and provide no such incentive to bankers or lawyers.
engels 02.09.23 at 12:48 pm
The more I think about it the more I am convinced the “justice” argument for tuition fees just piggybacks on people’s intuitions about whether education is a commodity. If you think it is, then you will think individuals should be taxed on the profits. If you don’t, you will favour equalising financial outcomes through the tax system.
reason 02.09.23 at 1:30 pm
Harry
“I think that both free public college and debt forgiveness were utterly cynical on the part of Warren who knew perfectly well how inegalitarian they are as policies, knew they would never be implemented, but needed to compete for the Sanders vote.”
Harry – I’m someone who supports a universal basic income, less income tax deductions (which are really regressive) and a more progressive tax system AND free public college and debt forgiveness (depends on the conditions but I don’t see why you see debt forgiveness as necessarily regressive). In other words apart from universal basic income make things more like when I was growing up. I believe you should have ONE means test per year, when you do your income tax return and that should be sufficient. I’m inclined to believe to believe you believe the things you do like many people in America, because your political system is so dysfunctional that tax increases are unimaginable and you are adopting a second best approach. There will always be cases of individuals (for instance those estranged for their parents, or who for one reason or another – including illness – fail to achieve a degree). I creating lots of intrusive and expensive and confusing bureaucracy in trying to identify special cases makes sense. Subsidize things you think are worth subsidizing and tax people more. It is more efficient.
reason 02.09.23 at 1:31 pm
oops – somehow that second last sentence got mangled. Should read “I DON’T THINK creating lots of intrusive….”
MisterMr 02.09.23 at 2:51 pm
@Michael Sullivan 37
Yes but, if the mean income is, say, at the 29th percentile, then even if taxes are completely flat (which they aren’t) a policy that gives money to people exactly at the 30th percentile is still redistributing downwards.
Then of course if you are interested in the life experience of the Average Joe, what is really meant is the Median Joe.
I’m perplexed because the OP seems to imply that free tuition (paid for by the government, which in turn taxes people) would be a form of redistributing upwards, even though this is not what the number say: even if other policies would be more redistributive (possible), free tuition would still be redistributing downwards, even if all the benefits ended exclusively at the top 30%.
There are other things that make me perplex but, as I said, I didn’t read the book, didn’t read the review, and I don’t know enough of the realities they are speaking about so I’ll leave it there.
Harry 02.09.23 at 3:08 pm
Here’s the thing. Making college free in an environment in which you have done the more fundamental things of making universal education (k-12) high quality and making wage rates close to equal, would not be regressive. But literally nobody was proposing that. AS things stand, state and federal governments combined spend about 50% more per student per year in higher education than in k-12. Sanders and Warren proposed increasing that gap to 65%. Not reducing it. And they proposed spending far more on wealthy students than on poor students (as we currently do). SO lets get back to the UBI. Would you support a UBI only for people who go to college, and that was larger for students from affluent homes than for students from poor homes? And if we already had a UBI with that structure, would you actively propose to increase the UBI, thus increasing the gap between what the government gives to affluent people and what it gives to low earners (keeping that latter amount at zero).
I wouldn’t. And I don’t think that’s because I am trapped in second best thinking. I do tend to be a second best thinker, yes, because I live in a dysfunctional political system in which 25-40% of children grow up in poverty, but the most left wing people who could possibly get power (and the supposedly left wing people who support them) spend their time talking about making public college free and giving money to wealthy graduates, and don’t talk about childhood poverty or improving universal programs like k-12 education. But opposing those measures isn’t an instance of my second best thinking, just an instance of opposing even greater inequalities of income and wealth,
I really recommend to people who have this enthusiasm for free public college and full debt cancellation that they learn something about how public college in the US is actually structured and how student debt is distributed.
engels 02.09.23 at 3:23 pm
It is ridiculous to suggest that Corbyn, Sanders and their “supposedly left wing” supporters never talked about childhood poverty—the neoliberal left, who made bashing “wealthy graduates” in pursuit of more privatised education a recurring sporting event, were in charge for two decades.
nastywoman 02.09.23 at 4:48 pm
‘I really recommend to people who have this enthusiasm for free public college and full debt cancellation that they learn something about how public college in the US is actually structured and how student debt is distributed’.
and I recommend to people who have this enthusiasm about how public college in the US is actually structured and how student debt is distributed – that they learn how European countries who offer their people a FREE EDUCATION from first day in school to the last day in University and/or college – DO IT!
As y’all can do it –
and HAVE to do it –
exactly the same way Europen Countries like Germany – Italy of France offer a FREE EDUCATION –
or y’alls homeland NEVER will see any type of equality in educating y’alls children!
And I understand that you never will post a comment like that – as it seems to be completely incomprehensible for Americans – whatever ‘political’ preference.
Omega Centauri 02.09.23 at 6:38 pm
To echo Sebastian. Last year the high school teachers had to attend grading for equity training. They were instructed that grading homework was racist because underrepresented minorities disproportionately have poor home situations. Fortunately I haven’t seen any evidence that teachers are not grading homework (few would do it but for the grade).
J, not that one 02.09.23 at 8:38 pm
When I argue with people about this topic, I feel like it goes something like this: They say, only kids with rich parents go to college, so helping kids who go to college is distributing upwards. But, I answer, some kids from less affluent areas also go to college. They reply, no, actually only the kids whose parents are more affluent than average in those areas and who cheat by paying cash money to buy services the schools shouldn’t be expected to provide. It just goes on and on, because by definition, the poor don’t have access to any goodies, and anyone who has more is “rich.”
The kids who get left out from that conclusion are the ones who do better than average in any given school or parental income level, and who are able academically to go to a college that isn’t able to give them the tuition support they need (whether it’s a smaller, poorer selective college, or a larger, poorer community college).
OC @ 52 I have seem homework scaled back drastically (from starting in 2nd grade, to fourth, to never) and the reason given as “equity,” whether that was the real reason or not. The current accepted opinion is that homework is a waste of time, so there might not have been much pushback. If only 5% of the class finishes homework slightly regularly, what are you going to do? At some point in middle school, the focus switches to “we don’t want the kids from our school to overwhelmingly be unprepared for high school.
Harry 02.09.23 at 9:40 pm
J — your correspondents are empirically misinformed, as they’d learn if they read Baum and McPherson’s book!
I think, as they do, that there is a very strong case for increasing the size of the Pell Grant a great deal, and raising the income cap to, say, median or mean income for a family with college age children. Basically, doing this could make attending college free for lower income students. Free public college does almost nothing for them, and certainly doesn’t come close to making it free.
Harry 02.10.23 at 2:04 am
“European countries who offer their people a FREE EDUCATION from first day in school to the last day in University and/or college”
Do they? I would like to know how that works. I didn’t realize that the government covered full cost of living for all students. How big is the grant? Is it really not means tested?
Worth noting that no politician in the US proposes making even public college actually free. Just free of tuition & fees. Nobody proposes getting rid of the Pell grant, which is means tested. Nor do they propose getting rid of the means test for it (as Peter Dorman seems to above). If they did! Well that would be the icing on the cake. What Baum & McPherson propose is expanding it so that attending college would actually be free for lower income students (not what either Warren or Sanders proposed) and considerably cheaper for students in some unspecified but large part of the income distribution. I don’t understand the fetishization of tuition fees. engels seems to think de-commodifcation is more important than reducing equality and making college more accessible for working class and poor students. Fine, but some of us have different priorities.
Here’s the question I want Warren and Sanders to answer. Why, when you think that k-12 education is underfunded, especially for lower income students, do you prioritize policies that would increase the already large gap in funding between k-12 and higher education, knowing that hardly any of the money you are adding to higher education will help lower income students and families, over reducing that gap by spending more in k-12 education, focusing on the schools that working class and poor children attend?
Worth noting, too, that, unlike many means tested grants, the Pell Grant has held its value much better than the non-means-tested state subsidies (which are higher for higher income than for lower income students). SO the argument against means-tested grants is not robust in this policy arena. Newfield obscures this because, I think, he hasn’t bothered to look at the actual trends (eg, his claim about the change in the value of Pell since 1995, which just isn’t true).
Harry 02.10.23 at 4:56 am
“It is ridiculous to suggest that Corbyn, Sanders and their “supposedly left wing” supporters never talked about childhood poverty”
I didn’t mention Corbyn, I meant the US, as you know (and, Sanders is ok, but really he’s nothing like Corbyn or McDonnell).
Here’s the test: can you tell me, without looking it up, what Sanders’ plan was to eliminate or reduce childhood poverty? Can you tell me what Warren’s was? And yet, did you have to look up their positions on free public college or student debt forgiveness? The candidates had very clear priorities. To be fair, even after looking it up you’ll have a hard time telling me what Sanders’ plan was. (Incidentally pretty much everyone who has looked at their policies agrees that Warren had the more left wing offer, though certainly the less left wing vibe. Sanders was much better at sounding like a left winger somehow).
TM 02.10.23 at 8:26 am
engels 47 Yes.
TJ: “if repayment was deferred for about 5 years and then loan repayments structured specifically to a person’s vocation and circumstance rather than the way its currently managed which is exactly like a commercial bank loan.”
Perhaps, but far more just and also far more efficient is a progressive tax code.
TM 02.10.23 at 8:38 am
I agree with Harry that in the current US context, expanding the Pell grant is the more urgent and more effective measure for higher ed compared to making tuition free. I wish this debate didn’t get confused between the desirability of free tuition in general and the question what should be done, and what is politically feasible, in the specific US context.
Trader Joe 02.10.23 at 12:22 pm
@56
“Free public college does almost nothing for them, and certainly doesn’t come close to making it free.”
This comes closest to what I see as the actual problem – free tuition is only a portion of the battle.
In general I think high schools do a good job of identifying kids from disadvantaged backgrounds and/or minority groups that can be a successful college student and encouraging to apply.
I also think in general, IF those student apply – colleges do what they are able to do to get those people in the doors and provide the education. For these people, the problem is they will likely either wind-up with a meaningful amount of debt or have to work significant outside jobs to afford living expenses partly eroding the benefit the university education can provide. This cohort of students isn’t failed by the entry system but the support system.
Additionally there is a pool of people who never bother to apply because either they perceive the cost to be impossible (and they may be right) or don’t have the necessary High School guidance to realize that it might be more possible than they think. Quite often there is a lot of social aspect around not-going (i.e. none of their friends are/can go, so they don’t try either). This is a pool that can at least partly benefit from actually Free college (as per @56).
All this says nothing of the vast pool of upper/middle class kids who reflexively go to college spending whatever it costs and really have no business being there either because they make no effort or are simply the sort that have more money than brains. I surmise that exactly the right number of people are at university, but there are many there that shouldn’t be and just as many that should be that aren’t.
Dane-ish 02.10.23 at 2:05 pm
Tim at (21)
In fact, in Denmark university education is free, and students get a stipend – ALL students. There has to be wide-spread will for these things, and a will for equality. America celebrates inequality – I lived and taught there for many years. Even many poor students have drank the potion – they really believe America is fair, and they will get a fair shot. Go figure, eh.
J, not that one 02.10.23 at 2:38 pm
I’m perplexed as to how far the focus on child poverty is supposed to imply a sense that the system works, and that we only have to improve the inputs to the system (the babies) in order to improve the outputs. And how far it’s associated with a common sense that babies are cute and we like to see them fed and plump, while teenagers are annoying and helping them get what they want isn’t a good idea.
If the system isn’t working, how does it help to give more money to the poorest? Does it raise them to the level of the affluent or to the level of the already existing working class? If they get more money and then still can’t go to college because we were looking the other way until child incomes are equalized, what happens then?
Sashas 02.10.23 at 2:42 pm
The general vibe in this thread is that money spent on higher education would be better spend on K12 education. Harry convinced me of that long ago. As I’ve argued in other threads, having a better approach doesn’t make other approaches bad. Increased funding of higher ed does not imply decreased funding of K12 as far as I’m aware. Are we assuming some sort of inflexible cap on “education spending” generally, and if so, why? As a practical matter, I would expect it to be the reverse. I would expect an actualized increase in higher ed funding to drive up demands for increases in K12 funding.
One thread from the OP that I’d like to pull on is the idea that making college free would primarily benefit the affluent because they go to the expensive schools. I agree with this up to a point, but I’ve interacted with a significant number of non-affluent students at the public University where I work, and I can share two distinct patterns that I’ve seen: (1) Students without privileged backgrounds who make it to college choose the colleges they can afford. (2) Students without privileged backgrounds often work full time while attending college — and their experiences suffer as a result. Making college free would allow some of my students to attend more prestigious (more expensive) colleges. Making college free would allow some of my students to reduce their work hours and access more of the “college experience”, and in particular help them succeed in their classes. I’m not going to go so far as to claim that on the whole making college free would reduce inequality. I’m just saying that there is a factor here that seems to have been overlooked so far.
When it comes to the student debt forgiveness concept, I mostly see a bunch of loans that I thought everyone agreed were predatory. Sure, the victims mostly come from moderately well off backgrounds, but aren’t the predators mostly the super rich and their companies? Why are we framing this as the Upper Class vs the Poor, and not the Super Rich vs the Upper Class? (And as a political matter, this seems unambiguously to be a case where some politicians have identified the number 1 issue for a constituency and decided to make a promise to that constituency. We can argue about theoretical justification all we like.)
I’ve been lurking in this thread for a while, so hopefully I’m not too much repeating things already said!
@Harry (58)
One data point for you: I don’t know either of their plans for free public college, student debt forgiveness, or reducing child poverty.
Harry 02.10.23 at 2:44 pm
Its associated with very robust evidence that early investment in children has a much better pay-off for them and for society than later investment. Also very robust evidence that when people have more money (up to some quite high cap) their lives go much better (healthier, live longer, less stress, self-report higher wellbeing, etc), and so do their children’s lives.
MisterMr 02.10.23 at 3:19 pm
@Trader Joe 61
“[…] identifying kids from disadvantaged backgrounds and/or minority groups that can be a successful college student and encouraging to apply.”
“vast pool of upper/middle class kids who reflexively go to college spending whatever it costs and really have no business being there either because they make no effort or are simply the sort that have more money than brains.”
Generally I think that university should be free for everybody, not just for the gifted.
Also in my experience, unless we are speaking of people with cognitive disabilities, everyone is able to do university (yes I include stem stuff in this), it is mostly that people are not able to get a degree because, for example, they don’t know how to study, or are not able to organize their work etc.
This rises a question: should everybody just get a degree, like we expect more or less everybody to get an high school diploma? And if this is ok for a degree, why not for a PHD? Where does this stop?
If we agree that there is a certain point where only a minority of people can or should have that level of education, and we are worried for inequality, then the only answer is that education must not confer an effective economic advantage; otherwise if it does we have to put everyone at the same level, it is either one or the other.
Unfortunately keeping tuition high does not work as a way to counter the economic advantage because, basically, it becomes just a sort of rent ovver a previous investiment.
I don’t really understand the idea that university can’t be free for all, what’s so different between university and high school?
(for someone who said twice that I shouldn’t comment here I certainly comment a lot).
engels 02.10.23 at 3:26 pm
engels seems to think de-commodifcation is more important than reducing equality
Perhaps but that’s not what I’m arguing here. Why do you wish to reduce income equality in this specific way (leaving aside the very valid points that have been raised about its effectiveness)? You have said it isn’t pragmatic but that you think it is unfair if graduates earn more as a result of their education and do not have to pay for it. That seems to me to tacitly assume that education is a kind of commercial product and that learning about philosophy for free, for example, is something like walking off with a can of baked beans from the local cornershop.
Fundamentally I don’t see things this way. An example that helped to clarify this for me is the one I gave above: two acquaintances I can think who are both earning similarly large incomes doing a very similar (morally questionable) job, one of whom didn’t go to university. Why is it morally important at all that they should be taxed/charged differently? To me, it isn’t. (It’s a side point but some graduates will earn less than they would have done if they’d remained in the workforce: do you think they should be compensated?)
Harry 02.10.23 at 3:47 pm
“you think it is unfair if graduates earn more as a result of their education and do not have to pay for it.”
I’m not sure that’s what I think. (I might think it’s unfair that anyone earns more than anyone else, but that’s a different matter). I wouldn’t have a problem with people earning more as a result of a higher education without paying for it if that made people who were badly off better off, for example. What I do think is that in an environment in which higher education carries a large earnings premium (which as Baum& McPherson has been growing for 40 years), prioritizing putting even more resources into the hands of those who benefit from that premium (knowing that they also come, on average, from more affluent backgrounds) over improving the education for young people who don’t go to university (who, on average, are from much less affluent backgrounds, and who get much worse education prior to age 18) is inegalitarian. And wrong. And, if you are going to spend more in higher education, it is wrong to spend most of that new money on students from more affluent backgrounds on whom the government already spends considerably more, who have higher expected lifetime earning and will, on average, do less socially valuable work, and almost none on students from low income backgrounds on whom the government currently spends considerably less and who, on average, will do more socially valuable work and who, as things stand, graduate at 1/3rd the rate of the more affluent students. Do you actually disagree with those two things? Because that is what Warren and Sanders were both proposing.
J, not that one 02.10.23 at 4:19 pm
HB @ 65
But that’s statistics, not causation, and at much too unspecific a level to be useful for policy-making.
If I imagine an exchange:
Q. What should we do to improve K-12 education?
A. We’re spending too much money on K-12 education, if anything, and we should focus on reducing child poverty to zero instead.
I can’t see that leading to any helpful change in K-12 (or higher) education at all. Encouraging teachers to believe there’s nothing their schools can do, because all the problems are due to the kids’ being poor, seems actively pernicious.
I’m actually perplexed by so much about this discussion. Should we take money away from schools we think work, because we’re so certain that’s because they have more money than equality should permit, and give that money to SNAP programs and free early-childhood programs? Then what happens to the kids who are encouraged to learn in those programs, who get to elementary school and find the resources they particularly need aren’t there?
The way the equality discussion is framed (as Sashas notes), as poor and affluent and nothing in between, is especially weird. Should we take money from schools attended stable working-class immigrant families where one parent may have a college degree but neither is able to use their education in this country, because they’re “affluent”? That doesn’t seem right.
The idea that only some people benefit from a college education also seems outdated. Where do programs intended to increase the chances kids from poor backgrounds go to college fit into the schema?
Harry 02.10.23 at 4:34 pm
No, there’s very good experimental and quasi-experimental evidence. Perry Pre-School, Abacaderian, Jim Heckman’s work. Not absolutely decisive, because nothing ever is, but strong evidence of causation.
J, not that one 02.10.23 at 4:39 pm
I don’t believe any result at a population level can possibly be evidence of causation in this sense. Not unless correlation is 100%.
Anon15 02.10.23 at 4:51 pm
Re Heckman etc.:
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/07/20/nobel-prize-winning-economist-become-victim-bog-standard-selection-bias/
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/04/06/heckman-curve-update-data-dont-seem-support-claim-human-capital-investments-effective-targeted-younger-ages/
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/01/24/the-latest-perry-preschool-analysis-noisy-data-noisy-methods-flexible-summarizing-big-claims/
Harry 02.10.23 at 4:54 pm
I guess I can just recommend reading Heckman, and judging for yourself. Or some of Greg Duncan’s work, or the studies of the EITC or Gatreaux. Definitely evidence of causation, but, for sure not decisive. There isn’t even decisive evidence that spending money on educating rich kids but not on educating poor kids reduces inequality of educational success.
J, not this one 02.10.23 at 6:07 pm
The researchers’ claim is presumably not that preK education is the sole determinant of success in this and indeed all possible worlds, or even the primary determinant for 100% of children, much less that tweaks to K-12 could have no effect on even large subgroups.
At this point it feels like my inability to accept your point of view is too deep for my continuing to comment on this thread to be appropriate.
MisterMr 02.10.23 at 6:46 pm
I think one of the reasons many commenters are miffed by the OP is that this kind of rethoric, that public money is used to the advantage of the rich, is very common on the right, and was often used against programs that overall actually advantaged the poor, so many people on the left are reflexively skeptical of this kind of argument.
Harry 02.10.23 at 6:51 pm
The thing about Perry Pre-School is that the kids were randomly assigned between the treatment and control group and then attended the same schools as one another, where effects on test scores faded (as always happens) and the evidence concerns much longer term outcomes (high school graduation, college matriculation, mental health, involvement in criminal justice, early adulthood earnings, etc). Head Start, a much cheaper intervention, exhibits similar (but commensurately smaller) effects. I’m by far not the best person to explain this. And, obviously, I’m a consumer not a producer of this sort of research.
Harry 02.10.23 at 7:06 pm
Yeah that might be right. Compounded by in some cases total lack of interest in the details of how US higher education funding works and presumptions of bad faith on my part. And then there’s nasty woman’s weird performance art. Engaging with those people may not be a good use of time, but plenty of readers are interested the actual evidence and reasons, a few presume good faith, and most don’t presume bad faith.
engels 02.10.23 at 7:31 pm
one of the reasons many commenters are miffed by the OP is that this kind of rethoric, that public money is used to the advantage of the rich, is very common on the right
Some of us just thought about the implications of the idea that public services should be privatised, marketised or abolished if they benefit the upper 50% of the population more than the lower 50%.
-Who draws the state pension for longer?
-Who gets better access to the NHS? (Google “inverse care law.)
-Who makes more use of roads, railways, museums, libraries, national parks and the court system?
In the name of equality, maybe we should privatise… [completing this line of argument is left as an exercise for Tim Worstall]
Harry 02.10.23 at 7:52 pm
And if you were introducing those programs now, you would deliberately design them to ensure that the top 30% get almost the whole benefit and the bottom 30% get hardly any benefit even though it is entirely feasible to spend the same money so that it benefits the bottom 30% and 50% far more than it benefits the top 30%?
Because that’s what Sanders and Warren were proposing.
And that’s what Baum, McPherson and I baulk at. Understanding what Sanders and Warren were proposing takes some attention to the detail of the design of public higher education in the US. But if you didn’t assume I was writing in bad faith you’d get much of what you need from the OP. And the rest from their excellent book.
engels 02.10.23 at 8:08 pm
I don’t think you’re writing in bad faith. I don’t know much about the US system; I have been trying to draw out the principles behind your position, which must also apply to the UK and which led you support the introduction of university tuition fees there.
I don’t think distributional justice, narrowly conceived, should be the over-riding consideration in designing new government programmes or evaluating old ones. The most straightforward mechanism for redistributing income and wealth is the tax and benefit system. Minimum wages and unionisation are examples of other developments that could improve the situation of the non-graduate workforce.
I think disparaging mass movements whose aims one broadly supports because they don’t share one’s exact normative priorities or accept all of one’s close technocratic reasoning is not a recipe for positive political influence.
engels 02.10.23 at 9:06 pm
Perhaps this is an egregious misunderstanding but isn’t there also something really strange about assuming there’s a pot of money for education that universities, schools and nurseries are competing for and you can’t make it bigger by, say, taking money from policing or defence?
Harry 02.10.23 at 9:33 pm
That’s what Sanders and Warren are assuming.
To be honest, I think its a huge mistake to think we need to spend less on policing. If anything we’re already underpoliced, which is why the police are so dangerous. And funding for the police is really from local pots, whereas for universities its from State and Federal pots. But defence: no, I think that its strange to assume that defence spending will reduce significantly in the next 20 years, however much it ought to. Maybe it will but there’s no political will for that, which is why Warren, Sanders, etc, assume they can’t get traction on it.
Harry 02.10.23 at 9:36 pm
Does this mean your answer to my question is, yes? Because if so, you don’t think distributive justice should be any kind of consideration at all. And I don’t believe you think that.
MisterMr 02.10.23 at 10:32 pm
I can’t speak for engels but:
@Harry 79
“And if you were introducing those programs now, you would deliberately design them to ensure that the top 30% get almost the whole benefit and the bottom 30% get hardly any benefit even though it is entirely feasible to spend the same money so that it benefits the bottom 30% and 50% far more than it benefits the top 30%?”
My answer to this would be that I see the restribution coming from the taxation, so as long as the money comes from new taxation I’m okay with a program that benefits the top 30% if the money comes from the top 30%, because (1) inside the top 30% it is still redistributive (2) it will marginally help also those below the 30% (3) once other, perhaps more important reforms are put in place, said program can and likely will help also a lot of people below the top 30%, but the money for it would still come from the 30%.
Now my answer comes with the assumption that said program includes increased taxation, if instead it comes at the expense of other measures, say for example it comes at the expense of lower unemployment benefits, I would be much more dubious.
You are pitting it against another program, so I can understand why you think that, if the choice is between lower tuition in universities and more investiment in schools that you currently believe are underinvested into, and serve poorer people, the second option is much better.
What I’m against is the implication that free tuition would be in itself (that is, not relative to other programs but just the program in itself) a form of upward redistribuition.
engels 02.10.23 at 11:31 pm
No I wouldn’t deliberately design the national park system etc to exclude the poor; no I don’t seriously think that’s analogous to anything Sanders was proposing. I’m not going to defend him to the death on foreign policy in particular but was he was a quantum leap beyond anything I’ve seen in US (and would have beaten Trump in 2016).
If you’re worried about the distributive effects of government policy (I am) there seem to be better targets for your concern than free uni: UK government handed out £500 billion during Covid, primarily to the rich, before that there was a little thing called quantitative easing, and bank bailouts, …
Harry 02.11.23 at 2:39 am
“I think disparaging mass movements whose aims one broadly supports because they don’t share one’s exact normative priorities or accept all of one’s close technocratic reasoning is not a recipe for positive political influence.”
Yes, that’s right, and its why numerous politicians who know better nevertheless support bad programs. I’m not sure that we’re doing anyone a favor by refraining from criticizing bad reasoning and bad policy choices though. One message I hope gets through to the free public collegers from Baum & McPherson’s book (which will be widely read and influential) is that the government spends substantially more on more affluent than on less affluent students who attend college, and that any free public college plan should be designed not to entrench that, and ideally to reform it. If you read the Warren and Sanders proposals it really looks as if they didn’t consult anyone who understands how public higher education funding and student financial aid works (or if they did, they ignored them). I’d feel better if I believed there was some background detailed plan, but gentle enquiries of people who advised the candidates indicate that’s not so.
In the UK abolishing tuition fees is a vote-winner. I’m not at all sure it is in the US: certainly there’s no evidence to that effect, and if either Sanders or Warren had won the nomination it was a hostage to fortune with Republicans gradually taking over the votes of people who didn’t go to college and whose children won’t. If I thought it was a vote winner I might take the view you do that every policy package has some bad parts, and maybe they’re needed for coalition building, and if that gets the job done, fine. I think its bad policy, and in the US quite likely bad politics too.
I dunno if its the same thing, but I do regret not speaking out against the extended school closures in parts of the US (including my part). My reasoning at the time was that doing so was completely pointless (it probably was), but the short term effects looked like being catastrophic electorally until the Supreme Court saved the day for the Dems by striking down Roe v Wade. And the long term effects are looking pretty bad too, both for the children affected, and for the public school system, support for which has been eroded by leaders who suddenly seemed to think that public schools were a dispensable service, a view that has many allies on the right who are willing to amplify it. (The president of our school board, a teacher-hating “left winger” welcomed the closures saying that children learn more at home anyway, and at least the children wouldn’t be around the racist teachers). It was reckless, and I know plenty of people with influence who refrained from comment, some knowing that they’d lose their jobs if the spoke out, and others because they didn’t want to rock the boat.
engels 02.11.23 at 3:42 pm
Uneven deterrent effect of charges/debt also missed by the subsidy incidence analysis:
Harry 02.11.23 at 4:47 pm
Note that study is about attitudes, not actual behaviour. The introduction of fees in the UK had no effect on the class composition of undergraduates in the UK, nor did the hiking for fees by the Tories, nor did the elimination of fees in Ireland. Nor did it any of those things effect (from the perspective of the US astonishingly high) graduation rates. I don’t know about choice of course (I did a study on changes in funding of the Humanities which included looking at numbers in BA humanities courses, both of which rose more or less continuously in the period we studied (early 90s to mid teens), though not as fast as funding and undergraduate numbers in other areas, but we couldn’t find data on changes in class composition of particular kinds of course of study).
The evidence in the US is that making college tuition free for lower income students increases the rate at which they matriculate (a bit) and providing COL allowances also increases the rate at which they matriculate and more importantly (and not surprisingly) the rate at which they graduate. One thing that makes the US and UK hugely different is that working class and poor students who attend college in the UK almost all graduate, and w-c and poor students who attend college in the US graduate at very low rates. Lots of reasons for this, including that they don’t get allowances that cover living costs (whereas more affluent students do, from their parents and often from merit aid etc), but also that because they attend less well resourced institutions they get less good academic advising, worse health services on campus, more adjunct instructors (so less institutional support via instructors, etc). Free public college does nothing at all to address the problem of very low graduation rates for working class and poor students, and might well make things worse (by signalling that public college is free, whereas for not a few students, as is true now, high sticker price private colleges will still be cheaper given need based aid. Whereas improving k-12 education for those students, or expanding Pell so it provides them with Cost of Living allowances would help graduation rates (at least that’s what the evidence strongly suggests). At the very least the “no additional money to be spent on buildings and administration” rider displays an astonishing lack of understanding of what happens in public higher education or a cynical bit of crowd-pleasing.
reason 02.11.23 at 4:52 pm
Harry,
I just read in the Guardian that over 90% of Finns have tertiary education. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/11/britons-gullible-fake-news-finland-misinformation
How does this affect this discussion? And the consideration that education is valuable not just as a preparation for a careeer. Democracy needs an educated population to function well (see article again).
I still think you are making what is clearly a second best argument. You should make it explicit. You think the way you do, because you think it is impossible to raise effective tax rates in the United States. Say so.
Omega Centauri 02.11.23 at 6:24 pm
Interestingly the local news had a piece on the value of and scarcity of black male teachers. They cited some studies that for black, and especially black male students having had one or more black male teachers by an early age ( by 3rd to 6th grade was cited) had substantial effects on later measures, such as HS and college graduation rate. They said only 2% of teachers are blacks with male gender-ID. This is something understood by the K-12 schools, but progress is very slow.
TM 02.11.23 at 6:29 pm
Related to the question of “leveling the playing field”:
“Again, the absurdity I want highlight here is not the incoherent and indeed oxymoronic idea that it’s even possible to create anything like “a level playing field” in a society as hierarchical and class-stratified as our own, but the apparently invisible absurdity inherent in the notion that it’s acceptable for millions of Americans at any particular moment to be living in “the bleakest poverty,” as long as we continue to work toward creating a society where this outcome is “fair,” because it reasonably reflects the individual merit of everyone in the class hierarchy.
The problem, in other words, is not that the little girl born into the bleakest poverty doesn’t currently have the same prospects of getting into Harvard that Jared Kushner enjoyed: the problem is that “Harvard” — or rather the very concept embodied in that word — remains such a central concept in our culture. …”
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/02/the-meritocracy-and-the-poverty-of-the-liberal-imagination-in-21st-century-america
engels 02.11.23 at 7:06 pm
Joy in heaven: “I put up tuition fees. It’s now clear they have to be scrapped” Andrew Adonis
engels 02.11.23 at 9:19 pm
Off-the-wall proposal for funding public education and a functioning welfare system that could reduce child poverty etc: taxing the rich .
LFC 02.11.23 at 10:49 pm
TM @92
I may be slightly biased on this point by contingent facts of personal history, but my view is that the problem is not the centrality of the word/concept “Harvard” in “our” [meaning here the U.S.’s] culture but rather the centrality of the word “Yale.” George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush went to Yale. By contrast, Harvard College has not produced a President of the U.S. since John F. Kennedy, in other words not for more than half a century. Case closed.
Harry 02.11.23 at 11:30 pm
That is an amazing article. To talk about Finland’s higher education without talking about its Gini coefficent, or child poverty rate, or primary and secondary schooling (and how its teachers are paid and treated) is really weird frankly.
Baum & McPherson’s book argues, compellingly, that changes in higher education can have, at best, very small effects on k-12 education, inequality, and child poverty. By contrast, if we had 4% child poverty here, an excellent pre-k and k-12 system, low inequality, we could get very high participation rates in HE, and much higher and more equal graduation rates, than we currently can. If you want to improve higher education most of your effort (and money) will go on pre-k, k-12, and reducing child poverty.
Honestly. Do I have to say its a second best argument? We all live in the same world, in which we know that the US will not reduce child poverty (or poverty) significantly, or improve k-12 education much, and we know that, among other things, because the most left wing candidates for the Democratic nomination prioritize free public college and student loan forgiveness over aggressive measures to improve the schools low income children attend and reducing child poverty. So: we face constraints. Do I think that we should make college free for everyone in a society with extremely progressive tax rates (or, better, measures strengthening unions and regulating labour markets so that wage rates don’t vary much)? Honestly, I don’t have strong intuitions either way, but I don’t feel I need intuitions because in that society I wouldn’t care very much.
Harry 02.11.23 at 11:32 pm
See. You agree with Baum and McPherson and me after all. That’s what their book is about.
Dwight L. Cramer 02.12.23 at 5:43 pm
Isn’t the purpose of higher education to perpetuate the social status of the children of upper and upper middle class parentage and conserve the existing social order? I mean, there’s a lot of blather to the contrary, but if one looks at how the system operates and how it’s funded and disregard the rhetoric and propaganda, the intrinsically conservative purpose of elite universities is undeniable. I am not talking about the hate filled agenda of contemporary populism that has highjacked the word ‘conservative’, of course, but rather the perpetuation of social order in which rank, status and power are reasonably fixed and predictable.
There is absolutely nothing morally wrong with being a cog in or instrumentality of that machinery, but it’s a category error to confuse role and rhetoric.
LFC 02.12.23 at 6:11 pm
@97 Actually there is something morally wrong with being a cog in that machinery. It’s not the worst thing one can do, but it’s not great. And btw higher education does not have one singular purpose; to say it does is not a category error but a sociological one.
reason 02.12.23 at 9:32 pm
Harry
“SO lets get back to the UBI. Would you support a UBI only for people who go to college, and that was larger for students from affluent homes than for students from poor homes? And if we already had a UBI with that structure, would you actively propose to increase the UBI, thus increasing the gap between what the government gives to affluent people and what it gives to low earners (keeping that latter amount at zero).”
Harry I don’t know why you put this in. A UBI is UNIVERSAL, so I find this comment incomprehensible and irrelevant. Thanks for admitting that your view is based on your view of an ideal policy environment but is a tactical view based on living under a dysfunctional political system. Those many of us living in different environments might quite validly think differently.
Harry 02.12.23 at 11:44 pm
“Thanks for admitting that your view is based on your view of an ideal policy environment but is a tactical view based on living under a dysfunctional political system.”
I honestly don’t understand why I need to say anything about it. The book is about higher education in the US; the review is about higher education in the US; the OP is entirely about higher education in the US. Was it excessively charitable of me to imagine that people would see that the conclusions were about that specific policy context?
TM 02.13.23 at 9:44 am
Dwight 97: “Isn’t the purpose of higher education to perpetuate the social status of the children of upper and upper middle class parentage and conserve the existing social order? … the intrinsically conservative purpose of elite universities is undeniable”
Worth pointing out that higher education doesn’t equal elite universities. American education discourse really is poisoned by the prominence of elite institutions.
MisterMr 02.13.23 at 11:30 am
“Isn’t the purpose of higher education to perpetuate the social status of the children of upper and upper middle class parentage and conserve the existing social order?”
People of upper middle class will try to preserve or improve their kids social status by chasing for the pest education or other means, it is a matter of competition between workers (including middle class people into “workers”).
The pression comes from the users, the institutions just react accordingly IMHO.
Tm 02.13.23 at 7:34 pm
I would simply disagree that the purpose of higher education is to „conserve the existing social order“. Obviously the rich and powerful will always try to tweak social institutions to their advantage, and because they are rich and powerful, they often succeed to some extent. But that isn’t the same as saying that any and all social institutions only exist for the advantage of the rich and powerful.
TM 02.14.23 at 8:19 am
Is it fair for students to pay tuition so university administrators can be shamelessly overpaid? We didn’t get into this part but it’s another reason why American higher ed is so particularly fucked up. (And we didn’t mention all the higher ed money going into fancy facilities, sports stadiums and so on that have nothing to do with education period.)
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/02/getting-in-on-the-higher-ed-admin-racket
(If Democrats and especially education unions don’t manage to exploit this to the utmost extent, I don’t know…)
Tim Worstall 02.14.23 at 1:58 pm
@21 Re college and stipends etc. What I said was that it gets expensive real quickly – or some such.
“As in 2010, in 2011 Denmark was the OECD country that spent the largest share of its wealth on education with a total expenditure on educational institutions of 7.9% of its GDP,
Between 2008 and 2012, the proportion of Danes with a tertiary education grew both among the young (aged 25-34) and older adults (aged 55-64), from 36% to 40% and from 26% to 29% respectively.”
That’s fewer go to college at greater expense.
https://www.oecd.org/education/Denmark-EAG2014-Country-Note.pdf
And 7.9% of GDP really is a lot. A lot, lot.
Tim Worstall 02.14.23 at 2:06 pm
“In the name of equality, maybe we should privatise… [completing this line of argument is left as an exercise for Tim Worstall]”
….the arts sector. Terrible idea to tax the dustman to provide opera for the Duke. We should stop doing that.
Tim Worstall 02.14.23 at 2:32 pm
@89 “Harry,
I just read in the Guardian that over 90% of Finns have tertiary education.”
Hmm, well, there’s an awful lot of vocational schooling in that. Not college in the US sense. The police academy, for example, plus all nurses training. What in other countries would be called apprenticeships too.
Not saying it’s a bad number, in the sense that 90% should gain training. But it’s not quite college in the way being used here.
Tim Worstall 02.14.23 at 2:36 pm
Harry @ 95 “(and how its teachers are paid and treated)”
Well, yes.
https://data.oecd.org/teachers/teachers-salaries.htm
Pretty middle of the pack for Finalnd – although not by PPP so not wholly informative. On the other hand it is before taxes which are, as we know, quite high in F.
Tim Worstall 02.14.23 at 2:38 pm
“Finalnd”
Clearly the Typing Academy was the educational route best suited to my intellectual needs…..
Harry 02.14.23 at 2:59 pm
If you think that free public college will stop DeSantis and his cronies extracting high salaries, good luck to you.
We also didn’t discuss what a boost free public college would give to the private sector: elite privates would be even better able to compete for faculty than they do now.
Harry 02.14.23 at 3:02 pm
“A UBI is UNIVERSAL, so I find this comment incomprehensible and irrelevant”
I thought that’s why it is relevant. People are proposing large payouts, but restricting them to people who attend college, and ensuring that among those people they will go mostly to the more affluent. Its like designing a UBI but making sure that the uneducated won’t have any chance of getting it.
nastywoman 02.14.23 at 3:19 pm
‘We also didn’t discuss what a boost free public college would give to the private sector: elite privates would be even better able to compete for faculty than they do now’.
Impossible – as any society which offers University for FREE -(‘Tuitions’) the ‘private sector’ can’t compete – or only in the eyes of a few Rich, who believe you nee to go to the University of Spoiled Children in order to also make it into the Country Club afterwards.
Harry 02.14.23 at 3:26 pm
“as any society which offers University for FREE -(‘Tuitions’) the ‘private sector’ can’t compete”
You really have no clue about the environment of American higher education.
TM 02.15.23 at 9:11 am
“over 90% of Finns have tertiary education”
“there’s an awful lot of vocational schooling in that. Not college in the US sense.”
Since this hasn’t been mentioned yet: we should not want, nor expect, everybody to pursue an academic education. There is absolutely no reason for that. There is no reason to think that everybody needs it, everybody benefits from it, and even less that everybody wants it.
Regarding the definition of postsecondary education, I think it is totally appropriate to count relevant nonacademic education and it always annoys me when education statistics totally disregard any kind of postsecondary education that doesn’t consist of listening to lectures. Germany and Switzerland have low postsecondary education rates by official statistics but most people who haven’t gone to university do have postsecondary education in the form of apprenticeship, and I don’t mean a few months vocational trainings, these are serious three to four year trainings with on the job and vocational school combined. Importantly, these forms of education are respected and valued by employers, to the extent that nowadays, complaints about a lack of workers with completed apprenticeships are far more common than complaints about a lack of university graduates.
Harry 110: I don’t suggest that. But obviously any meaningful discussion of US higher education cannot be restricted to the single question of tuition cost.
“what a boost free public college would give to the private sector: elite privates would be even better able to compete for faculty” Why?
engels 02.15.23 at 10:17 am
…the arts sector. Terrible idea to tax the dustman to provide opera for the Duke.
Funny how it’s always dustmen footing the bill: the most heavily taxed profession in Britain.
Harry 02.15.23 at 2:17 pm
Just to say I’m done with engels and nasty woman — I just went through the many comments of yours I have not approved (so that some sort of conversation could continue). They are numerous and don’t contribute much (well, nasty woman’s don’t contribute anything) and if I’d allowed them through the interesting points others have made would have been lost. So. Don’t bother commenting on my posts again: they will not be approved.
engels 02.15.23 at 2:42 pm
Wha… I’ve only posted one comment in the last four days as far as I know, and that was a brief reply to Tim Worstall.
There were a couple of comments at the very start of the thread that didn’t appear (which I think were similar in tone to the ones that did) but I was happy for them not to be published as I probably repeated the points in subsequent comments (it’s very hard to avoid redundancy when comments are approved retrospectively).
I thought this was a civil and substantive conversation: sorry if you didn’t think so. Ofc I won’t comment further if you wish.
Harry 02.15.23 at 3:34 pm
I’ve looked through it again, and you are right that you haven’t posted much lately. So I genuinely apologize (I realise that ‘genuinely’ sounds disingenuous, and hope you can defeat that implicature). So I withdraw the bad-tempered and ill-judged ban (on you, not on nasty woman).
I find that I frequently learn from thinking about how to respond to you, and appreciate that, but I also sometimes find the lack of engagement with what I see as all important details, and sometimes relentlessness (and repetition) extremely frustrating. Anyway, I am annoyed with myself for lumping the two of you together, and appreciate the tone of your protest, and being allowed to reverse myself.
engels 02.15.23 at 9:57 pm
Thanks. Sorry for tub-thumping and for not engaging with the details of the post and comments.
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