Here are a couple of thoughts to add to the mix as legal experts and university administrators work out the meaning of today’s unsurprising ruling on affirmative action in elite college admissions. First, the framing of higher education as a competitive prize to be won, which is shared by many parties on both sides of …
Affirmative Action Ruling Treats Higher Education as a Prize to be Won Read More »
In the latest IPEDS graduation rate data (2021 graduates), Pennsylvania’s two-year (primarily associate degree) public institutions ranked 14th among the 50 states, and its four-year (primarily bachelor’s) institutions ranked 37th in the percent of students completing within 150% of the normal time. (I know and agree with many of the arguments about IPEDS grad rates, …
Accountability Illusions, Simpson’s Paradox and the Bottom Line Read More »
I was recently engaged to help Orlando Sentinel reporters Leslie Postal and Anne Martin with data analysis for their extensively-researched article “How Bright Futures Favors Florida’s Wealthier Families.” If you want to explore the data in your own community, here is a set of maps and charts that let you see the distribution of lottery …
The Florida Lottery and Bright Futures Reverse Robin Hood Read More »
Collectively, the measures here are intended to reflect differences in levels of postsecondary investment from the perspective of students in different demographic groups. While no single measure is perfect, each one attempts to capture an important dimension of postsecondary funding. Most of the measures reflect differences in the types of institutions students attend. In these …
The “Cal Grant Equity Framework” (the “Equity Framework”) aims to cover more of the entire cost of attendance, including tuition and fees and other expenses such as textbooks, housing, and meals. It consolidates existing programs into two, makes benefits more predictable, and moves GPA requirements closer to alignment with the federal standard for Pell grants. …
Using data from the U.S. Census Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), this interactive Tableau data story shows how education debt is distributed by race/ethnicity, education level, income and state, subject to the sampling and design limitations of the survey. It also allows users to model different levels of theoretical debt forgiveness to see …
Distribution of Student Debt and Potential Forgiveness Read More »
My working analysis of institutional finance finds that, overall, U.S. postsecondary institutions spent $11,925 on instruction and student services in FY 2020 for every student enrolled in fall 2020. But different subgroups of students attended institutions with different levels of spending. Black or African American students attended institutions that spent $9,768 per student, or about …
Every year, the United States invests more than $800 billion in postsecondary education, if the budgets of postsecondary institutions and students and the cost of federal and state tax credits are all included. Yet the total extent of the investment is rarely discussed. This report, produced with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, …
In a paper published by TIAA Institute and NACUBO as part of a series examining higher education productivity, Nate Johnson argues that much of higher education’s output is a function of its systemic structure and composition, rather than simply the sum of its institutional parts. Historically, gains in total outputs have happened both by adding …
When Is Higher Education Productivity an Institutional Issue and When Is It Systemic? Read More »
In a paper commissioned by Lumina Foundation for a series on outcomes-based funding, Nate Johnson examines the role of institutional and student incentives in higher education finance. Nationally, the primary driver of revenue for colleges and institutions is the credit hour, a measure of short-term student enrollment. Credit hours produce revenue for institutions primarily through the …
