After college, what will you earn?

If college is an investment, students should have some idea what they’ll earn with a degree in nursing or marketing or whatever from College X vs. College Y, writes Daniel de Vise in College, Inc. Soon more information will be available about post-college employment.

Especially as college continues to get more expensive, students rightfully want to make sure that that their investment has value. They’re asking: What are the chances I’m going to get a job earning a decent wage? And if I’m choosing between two or three schools as a prospective student, which will give me the biggest bang for my (and my family’s) buck?

The Labor Department is working with the states to share data on earnings and employment.  In addition, the Education Department will be releasing “gainful employment” reports on how for-profit and community colleges’ vocational certificate earners are doing in the workforce.

“If these reports show wide disparities among graduates from different colleges, can it be long before the same data are demanded for all bachelors’ degree programs?” asks de Vise.

The drive to raise graduation rates doesn’t address degree quality, he points out.  For most students — and especially those from low-income and working-class families — it’s important to earn a credential that puts them “on a path to earning a decent living.”

If students understood college costs and potential earnings, they’d be wary of enrolling in a high-cost for-profit college, especially for a bachelor’s degree program. They’d also avoid high-cost private colleges that don’t offer a lot of financial aid and an elite degree.

In Student Loans Weighing Down a Generation With Heavy Debt, the New York Times introduces a debt-doomed borrower: Kelsey Griffith, 23, borrowed $120,000 to earn a marketing degree from Ohio Northern University. She’s working two restaurant jobs and will move in with her parents while looking for a marketing job.

Her father, a paramedic, and mother, a preschool teacher, have modest incomes, and she has four sisters. But when she visited Ohio Northern, she was won over by faculty and admissions staff members who urge students to pursue their dreams rather than obsess on the sticker price.

“As an 18-year-old, it sounded like a good fit to me, and the school really sold it,” said Ms. Griffith, a marketing major. “I knew a private school would cost a lot of money. But when I graduate, I’m going to owe like $900 a month. No one told me that.”

Ninety-four percent of students who earn a bachelor’s degree borrow to pay for higher education — up from 45 percent in 1993, according to a Times analysis of Department of Education data. This includes federal and private loans.

“Pursue your dreams” — but don’t do the math — is a cruel hoax being played on 18-year-olds and their financially naive parents.

Equal access, but less success

More students are starting — and completing — college, according to Replenishing Opportunity in America, an Education Trust report on its Access to Success Initiative. “Improvements are driven largely by African-American, Latino, American-Indian and low-income students.”

At community colleges, low-income and minority students are well represented.  At four-year institutions, the access gap for low-income freshmen has been cut in half, but there’s been little progress for black and Hispanic students.

When it comes to success, the report is not as positive.

Success rates at two-year colleges remain low, and gaps persist. Four-year institutions have made gains, improving graduation rates for all students. But success among low-income students and students of color has not yet moved fast enough to begin closing the completion gaps.

The gap in college attainment rates between white students and students of color is bigger now than it was in the 1970s, Ed Trust warns.

A head start on college, careers

Chicago will open five early college high schools that give students six years to earn a high school diploma, an associate degree (or two years of college credit) and job credentials that will put them “first in line” for an interview at high-tech companies.

Partnering with employers that need skilled workers is an up-and-coming version of early college high schools, I write on U.S. News.  Five-year and six-year programs are growing popular as students seek an affordable route to a college degree or a skilled job.

“It has just now hit me how far ahead I really am,” writes Emily G. Fore, a 2011 graduate of Caldwell Early College High, a five-year program that’s part of North Carolina’s New Schools Project (NSP). “I’m 18 with a 2-year degree. I qualify for some full time jobs already … As our school motto says, ‘Ready for college. Ready for career. Ready for life.’”

Early college high schools focus on low-income, minority and immigrant students who otherwise might not be on the college track. Those who pass gateway college courses in English and math in high school will skip remedial courses in college, greatly increasing their odds of success.

Cut tax breaks to save Pell

Congress Should Cut Tuition Tax Breaks Before Cutting Pell Grants Again, argues Stephen Burd on Education Sector.

. . . at a time when the budget axe is falling on the Pell Grant program, providing billions of dollars in tax benefits to upper-middle-income families who don’t really need the help is a luxury that the government can ill afford.

For the sake of preserving access and equity in higher education, Congress should eliminate, or at least scale back, the tuition tax benefits and use the savings to put the Pell Grant program back on a sustainable path.

Despite changes that limited Pell eligibility, Congress “will need to find at least an additional $7 billion (and probably much more) to avoid slashing the maximum award in fiscal year 2014,” Burd writes. “Already there has been talk that Congress may consider eliminating the in-school interest subsidy on federal student loans entirely, or significantly reducing the amount of income students can earn before it counts against their Pell Grant eligibility—penalizing those who have to work while in college to support their families.”

How federal aid pushes up tuition

When financial aid flows to affluent students, college raise tuition to capture the dollars, writes Andrew Gillen of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. However, aid to low-income students, such as Pell Grants, is unlikely to push up tuition, he writes in an Inside Higher Ed essay.

Aid restricted to low-income families allows students who were previously priced out of higher education to attend, without giving colleges the ability to raise tuition without again pricing these students out of higher education. That is not the case with aid given to relatively affluent students who will attend college regardless of price.

Not all colleges will raise tuition, when aid rises, he adds. Instead, “many colleges will instead grow their applicant pool, allowing them to become more selective” and move up in college rankings.

“Don’t leave money sitting on the table” was the ethos, when he attended meetings with university administrators to discuss tuition, writes Peter Wood in a Minding the Campus discussion.

The metaphoric table in question was the one on which the government had laid out a sumptuous banquet of increases of financial aid. Our job was to figure out how to consume as much of it as possible in tuition increases. . . . A substantial portion of the money we captured would be reallocated as “tuition discounts” or “institutional aid.”

. . . And we did all this in the pursuit of educational excellence. It was a large private university in the shadow of world-ranked neighbors and it was attempting to pull itself up in the world of prestige and influence by its bootstraps. There were townhouses that needed buying; laboratories that needed building; faculty stars that needed hiring; classrooms and residence halls that needed refurbishing; symphonies that needed performing; grotesque modern sculptures that needed displaying; and administrators that needed chauffeuring.

Herbert London adds a quote from Derek Bok, a former Harvard president:  “Universities share one characteristic with compulsive gamblers and exiled royalty: there is never enough money to satisfy their desires.”

The federal government should provide college aid only to low-income students with performance criteria to weed out mediocre students, proposes Richard Vedder, Gillen’s colleague at CCAP.

Make the college absorb some of the risk for loan defaults — a lesson we should have learned from the financial crisis. Give Pell Grants as vouchers directly to students, not schools. Reinstate private lending options. Unveil new human capital contract approaches that reduce debt reliance. Downsize and reinvent federal programs and allow market discipline to operate more.

Groceries or graduation?

By helping low-income students access public aid — food stamps, health insurance, housing and energy vouchers, child-care subsidies and the like — community colleges hope to improve retention and graduation. Single Stop, a national nonprofit, has partnered with colleges to set up offices on campus. Students also can use legal and financial counseling and free tax-preparation services.

Julio Cohen came with his father to the Single Stop office at Miami Dade College. Laid off as a construction surveyor—the boss kept the guys with degrees—he had decided to study architectural design. But he was thinking of giving up on college to help his father, who was struggling to care for a disabled wife.

Maria Rubios unemployment ran out. The foreclosure papers came in the mail. She couldnt afford medications for bipolar disorder, so she cut each pill in half. She decided to drop out of Miami Dades healthcare administration program. “You’re on the deans list,” a financial aid counselor said. “Wash your face, get some coffee, and be back here in half an hour. You need Single Stop.”

About to “purge” a student from the class roll, a professor first called Single Stop. Could someone call the students cell phone to ask why she had stopped attending?

You can read the full story on U.S. News.

More help for low-income students

By linking low-income community college students to benefits such as food stamps, medical insurance, child-care assistance, legal aid and other public help, the Benefits Access for College Completion hopes to increase retention and graduation rates.

The American Association of Community Colleges has launched the three-year, $4.84 million initiative, which will be piloted at six community colleges.  Led by the Center for Law and Social Policy and AACC, with funding from the Ford, Kresge, Lumina, Annie E. Casey and Open Society foundations, BACC hopes to help students complete college faster and become economically self-sufficient.

The participating schools are Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, Gateway Community and Technical College and Owensboro Community and Technical College in Kentucky, LaGuardia Community College in New York, Northampton Community College in Pennsylvania, and Skyline College in California. In addition, two schools in Michigan — Macomb Community College and Lake Michigan College — will share perspectives from similar work.

LaGuardia Community College President Gail Mellow said the initiative is a “huge opportunity” to help “financially troubled students get the benefits they are eligible to receive” and to help “shape the policy environment.”

California may require higher grades for grants

California Gov. Jerry Brown wants to raise the minimum grade point average to qualify for state-funded student aid, directing scarce resources to students who are the most likely to graduate. However, the state’s Legislative Analyst believes the change will hurt the neediest students.

The governor would raise the minimum GPA from 3.0 to 3.25 to qualify for Cal Grant A, which covers tuition.  Students would need a 2.75 GPA, up from 2.0, to qualify for Cal Grant B, which gives low-income students $1,551 for books, living expenses and tuition assistance. Community college students often use Cal Grant B. In addition, community college transfers would need a 2.75, up from 2.4, to apply for Cal Grants.

More than a third of current Cal Grant recipients would be locked out, predicts The Institute for College Access and Success.

These are students who have worked hard and earned the grades that the state has long promised entitled them to participate in California’s primary student aid program. These are also the students, research shows, for whom financial aid may make the biggest difference in terms of helping them persist and succeed in college. As they finally reach the point where they are ready to go to college, many will find their dreams shattered.

Three out of four applicants cut out would be prospective Cal Grant B students, who on average have family incomes well below the poverty line. And the majority of these students go to community colleges, where students receive too little aid and are already less likely to receive state grants.

The legislative analyst’s report recommended a smaller increase in the GPA requirement. The report also said Gov. Brown is underestimating the cost of Cal Grants in the proposed budget.

Obama shifts higher ed policy

President Obama’s higher education plan represents a policy shift away from low-income students and toward the middle class, writes Inside Higher Ed.

“They’re sending a strong signal about where the second Obama administration, if we have one, is likely to go,” said Kevin Carey, policy director at Education Sector, a think tank. “They’re not going to just keep putting millions of dollars into the Pell Grant Program and letting the chips fall where they may.”

Expanding Pell Grants would do more to make college accessible, said Sara Goldrick-Rab, an associate professor of higher education policy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

“I don’t have high hopes for [the new plan] being very effective in helping him achieve what I thought his goal was, which is getting more students from low-income families to be college graduates,” Goldrick-Rab said, describing the plan as “a little all over the place.”

“This is going to cause problems for the institutions that have the least resources to begin with.”

Judging whether a college provides “good value” is complex, writes Robert Sternberg, provost of Oklahoma State, in an open letter to the president.

Open-admissions colleges with many disadvantaged students won’t have the same graduation rates as elite institutions, he writes. “Over-focusing on completion can lead one to disregard the important issue of whether the education being completed is of the best quality our institutions of higher learning can provide.”

In addition, job preparation isn’t the only mission of colleges, Sternberg writes.

Rising tuition isn’t the biggest scandal in higher education, writes Jonathan Zimmerman, an NYU education and history professor, in the Los Angeles Times. It’s college’s failure to figure out whether students are learning. “Millions of American students and their families are mortgaging their futures to pay for a college education. We owe them an honest account of what they’re getting in return: not just what it costs, or where it will take them, but what it means.”

Repayment study left out blacks

A U.S. Education Department analysis on the relationship between race and repayment of student loans left out black students, skewing results used to justify the gainful employment rule, reports Inside Higher Ed.

For-profit colleges, which enroll many minority, low-income and older students, argue the high-risk demographics explain their students’ higher default rates on student loans. Not so, said the department in June, concluding that only 1 percent of the variance in repayment rates could be explained by the racial composition of enrollment. Sorry, never mind.

But by failing to count black students, the study understated the impact of race: the actual variance at for-profits is 20 percent over all, and 31 percent for four-year institutions, the department said in the December filing.

Eduardo Ochoa, the department’s assistant secretary for postsecondary education, said “accurate figures would have had no impact on the final regulations.”

Interesting.

The Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, the for-profit trade group challenging the gainful employment rules, charges the new figures show that “schools that enroll a higher percentage of minority students are more likely to fail the department’s repayment test.”

President Obama talked about defunding colleges that raise tuition in his State of the Union speech, writes Andrew Kelly on the Enterprise Blog.  That means shifting “some Federal aid away from colleges that don’t keep net tuition down and provide good value,”  according to a White House blueprint (pdf). Deciding whether a college is providing value for the money will require collecting gainful employment data on all higher education sectors, writes Kelly.