Failure by Colleges and Government to Bridge Inequality

<Click here to download entire commentary from NY Times.>

Sobering commentary in NY Times on the initial promise of college as levelor of inequality through GI Bill and early years of federal financial aid programs and subsequent failure to keep up the financial commitment to the majority in society without the social capital of the priveledged classes.  Following is a short excerpt from the commentary.  Be sure to read some of the comments to the article (as of the moment, they number more than 250).

"When the G.I. Bill of Rights of 1944 made colleges accessible to veterans regardless of socioeconomic background, Robert Maynard Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago, worried that it would transform elite institutions into “educational hobo jungles.” But the G.I. Bill was only the first of several federal student aid laws that, along with increasing state investment in public universities and colleges, transformed American higher education over the course of three decades from a bastion of privilege into a path toward the American dream.

Something else began to happen around 1980. College graduation rates kept soaring for the affluent, but for those in the bottom half, a four-year degree is scarcely more attainable today than it was in the 1970s. And because some colleges actually hinder social mobility, what increasingly matters is not just whether you go to college but where.  The demise of opportunity through higher education is, fundamentally, a political failure. Our landmark higher education policies have ceased to function effectively, and lawmakers — consumed by partisan polarization and plutocracy — have neglected to maintain and update them. . . ." <Click here to continue reading.>

New Publication: Understanding the Peer Assisted Learning Model

Since 2006, the PAL program at the University of Minnesopta has contributed to improved academic performance of participating PAL students in rigorous introductory-level college courses.The program is built upon best practices from previous international peer learning models like Supplemental Instruction, Peer-led Team Learning, Emerging Scholars Program, and others.  PAL is also guided by learning theories such as Universal Design for Learning to make the model more culturally-sensitive and embedded within the courses to increase its effectiveness for all students.  Both quantitative and qualitative studies of PAL validate its effectiveness for increasing academic success of participating students and fostering development of personal and social skills.  In addition to benefits for the participants, the PAL experience benefits PAL facilitators through deeper mastery of rigorous course material, increased confidence in public speaking and small group management skills, and encouragement to pursue a teaching career.  While the PAL program was started to address the achievement gap in courses, it has bloomed into one that also enhances personal and professional skills for all that are involved.Built upon principles identified by other academic support programs and innovations of its own creation, PAL is an integral part of UMN’s overall academic support efforts.

Arendale, D. R. (2014). Understanding the Peer Assistance Learning model: Student study groups in challenging college courses. International Journal of Higher Education, 3(2), 1-12. doi:10.5430/ijhe.v3n2p  Retrieved from http://www.sciedu.ca/journal/index.php/ijhe/article/view/4151/2498

<Click on this link to download the article>

Postsecondary Peer Cooperative Learning 2014 Annotated Bibliography

Postsecondcary Peer Cooperative Learning 2014 Annotated Bibliography. Compiled by David Arendale.

<Click on this web link to download the document.>

I just updated my annotated bibliography on peer learning programs.  The bibliography is 160,000 words and 340 pages in length.  It features every article or report published on six of the major peer learning programs in higher education:  Accelerated Learning Groups (developed by Sydney Stansbury at University of Southern California), Emerging Scholars Program (developed by Uri Treisman at UC-Berkeley), Peer-led Team Learning (developed at City Univeristy of New York), Structured Learning Assistance (developed at Ferris State University), Supplemental Instruction (developed at the University of Missouri-Kansas City), and Video-based Supplemental Instruction (developed at UMKC as well).

Peer collaborative learning has been popular in education for decades. As both pedagogy and learning strategy, it has been frequently adopted and adapted for a wide range of academic content areas throughout education at the elementary, secondary, and postsecondary levels due to its benefits. The professional literature is filled with reports of individual professors integrating this approach into postsecondary classrooms in diverse ways. Increased attention has been placed on this practice due to claims by some programs that carefully coordinated and managed learning programs with specific protocols can increase student persistence rates towards graduation, supporting both student goal aspirations as well as bolstering institutional revenues..

This annotated bibliography does not attempt to be inclusive of this broad field of literature concerning peer collaborative learning. Instead, it is focused intentionally on a subset of the educational practice that share a common focus with increasing student persistence towards graduation. At the end of this overview, several suggestions are made for differentiating the models from each other and the level of institutional resources and resolve with implementing them.

The six student peer learning programs included in this bibliography meet the following characteristics: (a) the program must have been implemented at the postsecondary or tertiary level; (b) the program has a clear set of systematic procedures for its implementation that could be replicated by another institution; (c) program evaluation studies have been conducted and are available for review; (d) the program intentionally embeds learning strategy practice along with review of the academic content material; (e) the program outcomes include increased content knowledge, higher final course grades, higher pass rates, and higher college persistence rates; and (f) the program has been replicated at another institution with similar positive student outcomes. From a review of the professional literature six programs emerged: Accelerated Learning Groups (ALGs), Emerging Scholars Program (ESP), Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL), Structured Learning Assistance (SLA), Supplemental Instruction (SI), and Video-based Supplemental Instruction (VSI). Some of the programs share common history and seek to improve upon previous practices. Other programs were developed independently.

<Click on this web link to download the document.>

White House Report on Efforts to Support Low Income College Students

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Executive Summary.  With the growing demand for college educated workers, a college education is one of the surest ways into the middle class.  To help more students afford and graduate from college, the Administration has taken steps to address these challenges doubling Federal investments in Pell Grants and college tax credits, reforming student loans, and taking new steps to reduce college costs and improve value. But while the President continues to push for changes that keep college affordable for all students and families, we can and must be doing more to get more low income students prepared for college, enrolle d in quality institutions, and graduating. success. Low income students face barriers to college access and Each year hundreds of thousands of low college, apply to the best fit schools, apply for financi al aid, enroll and persist in their studies, and ultimately graduate. As a result, large gaps remain in educational achievement between students from low- income families and their high income peers. Increasing college opportunity is not just an economic imperative, but a reflection of our values. We need to reach, inspire, and empower every student, regardless of background, to make sure that our country is a place where if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead. Under the President and First Lady’s leadership, the Administration and the Department of Education engaged with leading experts to identify the barriers to increasing college opportunity

Some of the most promising actions are to help and encourage low income students to apply, enroll, and succeed in college. Based on the existing evidence, we identified four key areas where we could be doing more to promote college opportunity. On January 16 the Administration is announcing new commitments from colleges and university presidents, nonprofits, leaders of philanthropy and the private sector in these four key areas. These efforts mark the beginning of an ongoing mobilization that will work to promote evidence based techniques, continue to understand what works, and expand successful efforts.

Commitment by University of Minnesota for Low-Income Students

During the recent summit called by the White House for low-income college students, the University of Minnesota was represented at the meeting and made the following commitment to build upon current support to low-income students.  You can check out commitments by other colleges by clicking on the following web link provided by the Chronicle of Higher Education.  <Click on this web link>.

In summer 2014, the University of Minnesota will begin a new initiative, Retaining all Our Students (RaOS), that will focus on closing or eliminating the first-year retention gap between Pell-eligible students (86.9 percent), and non-Pell eligible students (91.3 percent). This three year $300,000 initiative is designed around four key components, including: (1) an enhanced financial literacy program with new materials focusing on the specific financial planning and information needs of low-income students and their families; (2) strong incentives for low-income students who are also in the President's Emerging Scholars (PES) program to participate in a PES summer bridge program; (3) the development of better success tracking tools for advisers to monitor academic progress and enhance the advising of Pell recipients students, including a targeted communications campaign; and (4) further leveraging the resources of the SMART Learning Commons tutoring centers by promoting the available services and connecting low-income students with peer tutors. Building on Existing Efforts: The University of Minnesota Promise Scholarship program, which began in 2007, now provides over $30 million annually in scholarships to more than 13,000 low- and middle-income Minnesota resident students who enroll on any of the University's five campuses. Eligible freshman and new transfer students with family incomes of up to $100,000 receive a guaranteed, multi-year scholarship. The PES program is designed for students who have faced challenges that may have impacted their high school metrics, but whose personal experiences and high school records indicate potential for collegiate success. The majority of the 500 PES students in this program are low income, students of color, and/or first-generation. PES provides nearly $1.5 million to support services that address the needs of PES students.

Why the White House Summit on Low-Income Students Matters

Why the White House Summit on Low-Income Students Matters

Richard Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation.

Yesterday, socioeconomic diversity on college campuses—an issue long overshadowed by the question of diversity by race—took center stage at the White House,  President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, and the staffers Gene Sperling and James Kvaal convened an extraordinary meeting of more than 100 college presidents and 40 businesses and philanthropies to promote greater access and success for low-income students of all races.  The price of admission for participants was agreeing to make a tangible commitment to improve opportunities for disadvantaged students—a pledge to increase the proportion of students eligible for Pell Grants, for example, or to create a new mentoring program or a new high-school-outreach program.

It would be tempting to dismiss this meeting as a one-day effort among a relatively small number of institutions. After all, most colleges across the country did not make commitments to greater equity and were not represented at the conference. Moreover, the effort was limited to the extent that the White House announced no new federal programs to support colleges in promoting educational opportunity for low-income students.  But putting the prestige of the White House behind an effort to extract pledges to increase socioeconomic diversity at a significant number of colleges represents a remarkable paradigm shift in American higher education. For almost 50 years, socioeconomic diversity has been higher education’s disfavored stepchild in comparison with racial diversity. Racial and socioeconomic diversity are related, of course, but they also represent distinct concerns, and in the past colleges have been much more willing to take on the former challenge than the latter.

Socioeconomic gaps are much larger than racial gaps. Anthony Carnevale and Jeff Strohl, for example, found in a 2010 Century Foundation report that while white students are overrepresented at the nation’s most selective colleges by 15 percentage points, the most socioeconomically advantaged quarter of the population is overrepresented by 45 percentage points.  Likewise, in college admissions, while universities claim that they provide a boost to both underrepresented minorities and low-income students, careful research suggests that that is not true. A 2005 study by William Bowen found that while being black or Latino increased one’s chance of admission to selective colleges by 28 percentage points, being low-income did not increase one’s chances whatsoever.

Why has higher education shown more progress in promoting racial diversity than socioeconomic diversity? For one thing, racial diversity (or a lack thereof) is more visible to the naked eye than is economic diversity. It is also more expensive to provide financial aid for low-income students than to recruit upper-middle-class students of all races. And while civil-rights groups are admirably organized to place pressure on colleges to address a lack of racial diversity, there are no strong constituency groups to lobby on behalf of low-income students per se.  That’s why the White House program to elicit from colleges concrete action plans for advancing economically disadvantaged students of all races is so significant. Effectively, the president and first lady threw their power and prestige behind a group that is largely voiceless in higher education.

At the summit, colleges made a wide variety of pledges to help a mostly powerless constituency:

• Franklin & Marshall College committed to raise its financial aid budget by 10 percent.
• Miami Dade College agreed to provide mandatory advising for all first-time college students who have skills gaps.
• Northeastern College committed to provide 150 full-tuition, need-based scholarships to graduates of Boston Public Schools.
• Pomona College committed to increase the proportion of students receiving Pell Grants from 17 percent to at least 20 percent.
• SUNY at Stony Brook committed to increase its four-year graduation rate to 60 percent by 2018, through expanded tutoring and a freeze on tuition for low-income students, among other steps.
• The University of Arkansas committed to establish a six-week summer bridge program for low-income freshmen.
• The University of Minnesota pledged to close the first-year retention rate between Pell-eligible students and those not receiving Pell Grants.
• Vassar College will expand pre-orientation and support programs for low-income students and military veterans.
• Yale University plans to increase by 50 percent the number of low-income students admitted as part of the QuestBridge program.

What’s notable about those commitments is not their scale but that they were made despite incentives not to aid low-income students. The U.S. News & World Report rankings—chief arbiter of who is up and who is down—give no credit for enrolling low-income students; indeed, putting resources into financial aid could take money away from activities that do improve a college’s rankings.

Significantly, President Obama’s own speech at the White House summit reinforced the day’s message about the salience of class over race. He pointed to his wife’s remarkable rise as a first-generation college student and implicitly contrasted that with the Obamas’ daughters, Sasha and Malia, who, at Sidwell Friends School, are showered with intensive advising and support not available to low-income students.  Of course, Sasha and Malia are not typical of African-American students nationally, who are disproportionately poor and will disproportionately benefit from the programs that Obama champions. Which is precisely why, in the long run, the White House summit may prove good not only for socioeconomic diversity but for racial diversity as well.

The White House is surely aware that the legal winds are blowing against the explicit use of racial preferences in college admissions. In that sense, the president’s emphasis on low-income students of all races is welcome on two levels. He encourages colleges and universities to take new steps on behalf of economically disadvantaged students, for whom higher education has fallen short. And he is stimulating colleges to create—through a variety of programs—what may well become the affirmative-action plans of the future.

Senators Consider Changes in TRIO and Gear Up College-Prep Programs

I read with interest this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education.  It is not a surprise that too often policymakers think that just throwing more money at a problem/challenge is all that is needed. Reading the statements from some of those at the meeting, it appears they think just providing larger Pell grants is all that is needed. And an option is to kill off TRiO and GEAR Up to find more money. Who said it, "simple solutions to complex problems are almost always wrong." Having additional financial aid does not provide mentoring, tutoring, encouragement, counseling, and all the other resources needed for timely college completion. One of the problems is that our policymakers had lots of social capital, are 2nd or 3rd generation college-goers, family members who provided financial support to eliminate need for lots of college part/full-time jobs, and the rest. While they may think life was hard, it is no comparison to the students served by TRiO and GEAR UP. What students need is not a more generous ATM to dispense money, but a full-featured package to support their success. But that kind of answer does not fit the mold for a simple solution. -- David

Senators Consider Changes in TRIO and Gear Up College-Prep Programs By Andy Thomason

While President Obama was urging college presidents on Thursday morning to follow through on their new commitments to improve access for low-income students, lawmakers on Capitol Hill dusted off some older promises for examination.  The U.S. Senate's Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee met for a special "round table" to discuss changes in two federal programs that aim to improve access by helping needy and minority students prepare for college—TRIO and Gear Up. The hearing was part of the coming reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. 

Consistent with past reauthorization hearings' focus on simplifying federal higher-education policy, some senators on Thursday questioned whether the two programs were still relevant.  Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the committee's senior Republican, asked a group of five panelists if the budgets for TRIO and Gear Up, which each encompass several separate programs, would be better spent on more Pell Grants.  Members of the panel giving testimony largely defended the programs' benefits, saying they offer one-on-one counseling and support that many students cannot get anywhere else, among other things.  Tallie Sertich, director of the Climb Upward Bound program at Hibbing Community College, in Minnesota, said many students who received Pell Grants "still need the academic preparation that the TRIO program provides on the front end."

But senators and panel members agreed that simplifying federal student aid was in order. Senator Alexander alluded to past testimony that recommended shortening the main federal-student-aid application and informing students during their junior year of high school how much aid they will receive, among other changes.  Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who testified on Thursday, said such simplification "has been a great idea for years," and the committee should ask the Department of Education why it has not happened.  Other panel members stressed that simplification was only part of the solution. "We need a bunch of big strategies to make a big dent" in the access problem, said Douglas N. Harris, an associate professor of economics at Tulane University.

Senators and panel members also focused on how to improve elementary and secondary education in order to increase college access. "Kids from low-income families come to the K-12 system already seriously behind," Mr. Haskins said, adding that "the K-12 system makes them further behind."  Sen. Elizabeth A. Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, widened the discussion, asking panel members to suggest ways to drastically increase the number of degree holders over the next several years. Members of the panel suggested more spending on TRIO and Gear Up, along with a greater focus on community colleges and precollege education.  Sen. Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa and chairman of the committee, concluded the hearing by suggesting that the way forward for TRIO and Gear Up may be "incentivizing states to come up and support" the programs.