Category Archives: education

A Good Beginning

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Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) wants random inspections of Texas’ schools focused on safety checks and protocols. In a letter of instruction, Abbott wrote Texas School Safety Center Director Kathy Martinez-Prather:

Your team should begin conducting in-person, unannounced, random intruder detection audits on school districts. Staff should approach campuses to find weak points and how quickly they can penetrate buildings without being stopped.

The inspections are intended to lead to a series of recommendations for legislation regarding security system improvements.

It’s a good start; although I would have thought such inspections already would have been de rigueur on individual school administrators’ initiative for some years, at least since the Columbine shooting.

Those inspections, though, need to go unpublicized at the individual school level, although results aggregated to the school district level should be readily available to the public.

The goal should be to help individual school administrators and school district administrators identify and correct weaknesses (as well as provide those legislative recommendations, which should center on systemic weaknesses) rather than to embarrass the administrators.

Of course, publicizing district aggregations of findings will tend to contradict that last, but here’s where the parents’ need, and right, to know must take precedence over administrator embarrassment. And parents aren’t stupid; they’ll recognize whether a district administrator takes prompt action to correct weaknesses or weasel words his way around them or otherwise blows them off.

What’s the Logic?

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President Joe Biden (D) has decided to forgive all $5.8 billion of the loans outstanding still held by the folks who went to any of the Corinthian Colleges institutions.

[T]he remaining 560,000 borrowers will be eligible for automatic discharges of their remaining Corinthian federal student-loan debt. All remaining federal loans held by anyone who attended a Corinthian school between its founding in 1995 and its 2015 closure are eligible.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona:

As of today, every student deceived, defrauded, and driven into debt by Corinthian Colleges can rest assured that the Biden-Harris administration has their back and will discharge their federal student loans[.]

Either the Corinthian students were cheated, or they were not; I have questions. Notice that I’m eliding the question, here, of why us average American taxpayers should be on the hook for the misbehaving Corinthian Colleges’ pecadilloes.

Why does only some of the debt—the unpaid balances—get canceled? Why don’t the amounts already paid by those students with remaining debt balances also get returned?

Why aren’t the Corinthian students who paid off their debt—and there are quite a number—eligible for recompense?

Is Biden actually saying, with a straight face, that the students were cheated only to the extent they still owe money?

Help me understand the logic of this.

A Bit More on Student Debt

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I wrote a bit ago about what colleges and universities should be required to do regarding student loans and student debt.  Here’s a bit more concerning why college and university management teams’ feet should be held to the fire. Mike Brown, writing for lendedu, has some data that compares, by school, student salary expectations with salary reality. In general,

median expected salary after graduating was $60,000, but the PayScale data showed that the typical graduate with zero to five years experience makes $48,400.

Brown published salary expectation vs reality for 62 schools; here are those data for the first 15 schools in his table:

School Actual Early Career Pay (0-5 Yrs. Experience) Expected Median Salary (0 Yrs. Experience) Percent Difference
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale $49,100 $70,000 70%
Washington State University $54,600 $70,000 78%
Central Michigan University $47,000 $58,500 80%
University of Louisville $48,800 $60,000 81%
East Carolina University $47,200 $58,000 81%
University of California, Riverside $54,000 $65,000 83%
University of Tennessee, Knoxville $50,200 $60,000 84%
Binghamton University $58,900 $70,000 84%
University of Illinois at Chicago $55,000 $65,000 85%
Temple University $50,800 $60,000 85%
University of Alabama $51,200 $60,000 85%
University of Colorado Boulder $55,600 $65,000 86%
University of California, Los Angeles $60,000 $70,000 86%
Kansas State University $51,600 $60,000 86%
Oklahoma State University $51,700 $60,000 86%

 

Who sets these expectations? That’s not clear. Who allows these expectations to stand uncorrected? The management teams at those colleges and universities.

Allowing this distortion to stand uncorrected is one more reason colleges and universities should be required to publish

  • graduation rates for their students given
    • 1 year of attendance
    • 2 years of attendance
    • 3 years of attendance
    • 4 years of attendance
    • 5 years of attendance
  • by major, the average and median salary for their graduates one year after graduation and five years after graduation—note that these data are not for one and five years of employment

The data from Brown also demonstrate why colleges and universities should be required to play the decisive role in lending money to their students and prospective students. Colleges and universities should be required, with respect to borrowings taken in order to attend the college/university, to

  • be the lender for the majority of the money borrowed by each student or student’s parent/guardian and not allowed to sell or otherwise transfer the loan, or
  • be the co-signer with the borrowing student or student’s parent/guardian on loans the student or student’s parent/guardian originates, or
  • be the loan guarantor of such loans, or
  • any combination of those three

Colleges and universities must absorb the risk of students’ or parents’/guardians’ borrowing in order for the student to attend their school. It’s the colleges and universities that are misleading the students concerning the value of the degrees gained, whether that misleading is overt through their setting inaccurate expectations, or passive through their silence regarding inaccurate expectations.

Close in Spirit

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…but wide of the mark. Wide of the target itself, even. In Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section, a letter-writer offered this on the matter of student loan debt:

The solution is to hold academic institutions accountable. If they want government to give my money to their students, they need to prove the value of their product. Set parameters: an 80% graduation rate in five years, and the ability to secure a job at a reasonable salary one year postgraduation. Failure results in withdrawal of federal money available to future students until parameters are met.

It’s entirely appropriate to hold the colleges and universities individually responsible for their product: students taught, successfully or not, for one or more years along with graduated students. But the writer’s suggestion still wants far more government intervention than is warranted.

Let the free market solve the puzzle, and here is where legitimate government intervention would be appropriate. Information is key. Require the colleges and universities to publish their dropout rates by number of years in school, graduation rates by major, and both the median and mean annual incomes, again by major, of graduated students five years after graduation.

One more path for government intervention: require the colleges and universities to be the primary lender to the student or to co-sign as borrower on the loan to their students. As part of the loan or co-signed loan document, require the borrowing student to answer the income survey.

A final act of government intervention: let the borrowing student discharge his student loan debt through personal bankruptcy, as with any other personal debt, and then deal with the economic and reputational consequences of that bankruptcy.

With this, there would be no need for government to lend to students or to guarantee any loans to students. Thus, a final final act of government intervention: government should withdraw entirely from the student loan industry.

Local Control vs Federal Funding

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Tennessee’s General Assembly is considering a bill that would indemnify teachers and all other employees of public schools and local education agencies against civil liability or “adverse job actions” if they refer to a student by pronouns consistent with his biological sex rather than by his preferred gender pronouns. The General Assembly’s Fiscal Review Committee noted that the bill

could violate Title IX and would put at risk the state’s federal funding, which for the current school year is more than $5 billion.

That’s the important aspect of this bill, and it has much broader implications for all State-level legislative actions. The $5 billion might seem like a lot of money for a State, but it pales against the long-term cost outcomes of a State accepting any Federal funds under any guise: the more money a State accepts from the Federal government, the more control over its own internal affairs the State surrenders to the Federal government.

The Feds are acting entirely legitimately when they attach strings to the money they provide the States, or to any non-State entity. Anyone providing money to anyone or anything else naturally gets to specify the manner and purpose for which the money is to be used. It’s the existence of those strings, not what they require, that should give States pause in the decision to accept any of the Federal government’s money.

In the end, States that want to retain control of their own intra-State affairs should reject Federal funds transfers—and join with other States in efforts across the legal spectrum to end Federal transfers of State tax remissions to other States altogether except in the event of an emergency declaration. Nor should any exceptions to the bar be allowed: once carve-outs are begun, in very short order, the bar will be so exception-ridden as to cease to exist in any meaningful form.