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University of Iowa’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences graduation ceremony, Iowa City, May 2016
The Years that Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us
By Paul Tough
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
The College Dropout Scandal
By David Kirp
Oxford University Press
As growing numbers of young people have entered college over the last two decades, the racial and social-class gaps in completing a degree have widened. The completion gap between the bottom fourth and top fourth of students grew from about 30 percentage points for those who attended college in the 1970s to about 45 percentage points for those who attended college in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The gap is likely even wider now.
The sources of the gap are clear. Students from families in the top income group have usually attended better high schools, have the economic resources to finish college in four years, feel more comfortable in the college environment, and can depend on parental and peer support. They also attend institutions where graduation and academic accomplishments are the norm rather than the exception. Strikingly, according to Georgetown University researchers, 75 percent of the students attending the 450-plus best-funded and most selective four-year colleges are white, while enrollment in the 3,250 least well-funded two- and four-year colleges is 43 percent black and Hispanic.
About half of students who enter college complete a degree within six years, a shockingly low figure, given much of the country’s belief in education as a social and economic cure-all. Political leaders and foundation heads who are concerned about inequality have been pushing for more than a decade for colleges to graduate more students from families with incomes below the median. They argue that the United States has fallen behind other countries in graduation rates and that a college education provides the surest way to gain the skills and knowledge that lead to stable, well-paying jobs. They also see the wider social benefits of a college education. Graduates are more likely to do well economically, provide security for their children, volunteer in their communities, and stay informed about public affairs.
This emphasis on lower-income students reflects an inescapable reality. If U.S. colleges are going to raise college graduation rates, they have to improve their record with students from less-affluent families. The ones in the top quartile are already completing college at nearly an 80 percent rate.
To be sure, some of the statistics used in these debates are a bit misleading. Many of the countries with higher college graduation rates than ours offer three-year, rather than four-year, baccalaureates. And a fair number of American college graduates are working in jobs that do not require a college degree. We might also wonder whether the one-quarter or more of college students who engage in only token study really gain all that much in skills from college. Even so, the larger point holds: Where college was once considered the great equalizer, it seems now to have become just another feature of the increasingly unequal institutional environment facing young people.
Where college was once considered the great equalizer, it seems now to have become just another feature of the increasingly unequal institutional environment facing young people.
The question is: What, if anything, can be done about it? Two new books offer contrasting solutions—one focusing much of its fire on the testing industry and the other extolling college interventions that can help keep students on track to graduation.
Paul Tough’s book, The Years That Matter Most, draws compelling portraits of upwardly mobile working-class students trying to make it in a higher-education system whose definitions of merit tend to privilege whites and Asians with high test scores. These portraits show the misalignment between institutions designed for the affluent and students who have grown up in unstable families and have had little opportunity to develop their talents fully. Their drive has kept them moving forward; the college environment keeps them forever uneasy.
One African American student at Princeton bounced from town to town as her mother looked for work as a songwriter. Tough recounts her thinking prior to the beginning of her first Humanities Sequence course freshman year: “Her heart was pounding in her chest, and she couldn’t get it to stop. She was anxious, consumed by doubt. It wasn’t that she doubted herself, exactly. It was that she felt certain that everyone else doubted her, that all the other students taking their seats around the table didn’t believe she belonged in this room with them.”
Tough’s book includes a scorching critique of the testing industry and its role in perpetuating inequalities in access to elite higher education. In most cases, SAT results are highly correlated with students’ high school grades, but there are two discrepant groups: those whose SAT scores are higher than would be expected given their grades and those whose SAT scores are lower than would be expected. The first group is disproportionately white and Asian and from higher-income families. These students contribute greatly to the party culture on campus but only rarely to the academic intensity of the classroom. The second group is disproportionately black and Latino and from lower-income families. Contrary to the common critique of elite college admissions as consumed by affirmative action goals, it is the first group that tends to be preferred. They have two commodities that elite colleges covet: enough money to pay high tuitions and test scores that contribute to the campus profile in rankings systems.
In our era of heightened concern about inequality, established institutions have an interest in being seen as doing something about the inequalities of American society. The College Board, the organization responsible for the SAT, has argued that the SAT helps to equalize college admissions because high school grades are now so compressed that they provide limited information about the probable performance of students admitted to elite colleges. Tough contends that the College Board disseminated what it knew to be misinformation—in fact, the SAT contributes to making admissions more unequal. And, he shows, elite colleges also game the system. Princeton gained national attention a few years back for increasing the proportion of Pell grant students in its freshmen classes. But Tough provides evidence that Princeton admissions disproportionately picked students at the high end of Pell grant eligibility. Because of the complicated formulas used to determine Pell grant eligibility, a sizable proportion of these students were middle-class rather than poor.
Readers will be moved by the stories of struggle and resilience Tough tells and perhaps infuriated by the chicanery of some of the institutions that have won plaudits for addressing the problem of inequality in college admissions. I am more skeptical than Tough, however, about the influence of elite colleges on social inequality. Majoring in engineering is more important than attending a selective college as a predictor of midcareer incomes for those who do not pursue graduate degrees. And graduate degrees from the leading business, law, medical, and engineering schools are more important than attendance at an elite college for students who do pursue advanced degrees. A similar pattern holds at the top of the occupational structure. My own research has shown that less than one-fifth of business and political leaders attended one of the top 39 undergraduate colleges, while about half of the leaders who received graduate degrees attended either a top-ranked business or law school.
For all the storytelling power Tough brings to the issues, his book focuses too much attention on a few elite colleges and a smallish sliver of talented low-income students. Elite colleges could do a much better job of recruiting low-income students and helping them to be successful, yet they would still barely scratch the surface of the college inequality problem. Tough does not entirely ignore the remaining 90percent of college students who would not be admitted to elite colleges under any plausible scenario, but the book compresses their stories into three of nine chapters.
In this respect, David Kirp’s book, The College Dropout Scandal, is potentially the more important work for readers who want to reduce college inequality. Kirp is right to focus on improving the graduation rates of students who are enrolled at the lower end of the system, not at the top. He’s interested in interventions that he believes can raise graduation rates for the group he calls “new-gen” students wherever they’re enrolled.
One such intervention is predictive analytics. These are computer algorithms that provide up-to-the-minute feedback on students who are in danger of falling off-track to on-time graduation due to taking the wrong courses or achieving grades indicative of future trouble. His model institution is Georgia State University, which adopted predictive analytics in 2012 and has seen a steady rise in graduation rates among “new-gen” students. The Georgia State effort turned not only on predictive analytics but also on the employment of dozens of additional undergraduate advisers to help students find pathways in which they can succeed.
Skill- and confidence-building programs are another of the interventions Kirp touts. The University of Texas’s University Leadership Network is the model here. The program enrolls 500 students a year who are predicted to have a low chance of on-time graduation. It provides weekly professional-development seminars, opportunities for community engagement, and $5,000 scholarships for those who keep their grades up. UT has also pioneered work on helping students see themselves as competent and capable through the development of an understanding of intelligence as in process of continuous development rather than fixed at birth.
Kirp also highlights other efforts to help new-gen students. The City University of New York has rethought remedial mathematics by focusing on the everyday uses of math and by organizing the curriculum around questions rather than lectures. In central Florida, community colleges and universities have created stronger links between their programs to help students moving from two- to four-year institutions. Georgia State has offered completion grants to enable low-income students to worry less about expenses and concentrate on their schoolwork during their last two college years.
Each of these programs works, according to Kirp, because, in addition to their practical assistance, they convey to students a “we-have-your-back” attitude: “They enable students to recognize that they are full-fledged members of a community that takes them seriously, as individuals,rather than members of an impersonal bureaucracy.”
The ideas highlighted by Kirp can stimulate new thinking about how to reduce college dropout rates, but the actual record of scaling “proven interventions” is not as impressive as he suggests.
If only it was so easy! The ideas highlighted by Kirp can stimulate new thinking about how to reduce college dropout rates, but the actual record of scaling “proven interventions” is not as impressive as he suggests. I know this from having participated as a university leader in University Innovation Alliance (UIA), an organization that has attempted to reproduce and expand interventions like those Kirp highlights. The alliance includes several of Kirp’s model institutions: Georgia State, the University of Texas, and the University of Central Florida, together with eight others.
Scaling predictive analytics did not work at the other institutions that adopted the same method that worked so successfully at Georgia State. Nor did adding advisers for at-risk students show a measurable change at institutions other than Georgia State. Moreover,researchers have discovered that the promising outcomes of freshman-year interventions to build “growth mindsets” fade over time as performance evidence accumulates. Kirp also underplays the expense of some of these interventions. Not every institution has the extra $2.5 million it takes for the University of Texas to incentivize 500 at-risk students to keep their grades up.
Based on my experience with the University Innovation Alliance, I’ve come to believe that we should not expect “off-the-shelf” interventions to have the same results wherever they are tried. If advisers are stuck in their ways or overworked, they will not use predictive analytics appropriately. If evidence of weak performance accumulates, growth mindsets will not solve the problem. If students’ financial problems go beyond the $1,000 level set by Georgia State, they will not be sufficient to relieve students’ anxieties. Every campus has its own set of issues that only deeply engaged insiders know, and each one employs staff members who have different strengths and weaknesses.
Moreover, even the most promising interventions face the recalcitrant reality of students’ difficult lives and easily shaken feelings of belonging. Here Tough’s engagement with the lives of the students he profiles offers a valuable cautionary note: “The effort to help more college students graduate is always going to be something of an asymmetrical battle. Yes, on the one side you’ve got predictive algorithms …and experimentally designed belonging interventions. But on the other, there is the psychological minefield of being an American eighteen-year-old, and the particular strengths and burdens and complexities each one brings to campus. Any science that tries to steer college students in one direction or another is inevitably going to be an inexact one.”
The best way to improve graduation rates is to bring a committed group of administrators and faculty members together to analyze weaknesses at the campus level and then to carry out policies tailored to addressing those weaknesses. Some universities like my own have greatly improved their four- and six-year graduation rates simply by offering enough of the right kinds of courses with enough seats at the right times of the year; by leveraging summer to add classes that are in high demand; by adding outstanding teachers in introductory math courses; and by launching well-funded “finish-in-four” campaigns. None of these actions are in the “silver-bullet” category of interventions discussed by Kirp.
Liberal politicians and their constituents are in search of more ambitious solutions to the college inequality issue. In a concluding chapter, Tough endorses the most ambitious of these solutions: tuition-free college. Tough argues that U.S. policymakers should treat college in the same light that reformers saw high school in the early 20th century—as a requirement for citizenship rather than as a luxury for those who can afford it.
Maybe so, but there are other considerations. “Free college” is not actually free. Someone has to pay for it, and those people are called taxpayers. To make college free is to make it totally dependent on taxpayers, and that has its risks, as both faculty and students can testify in the many states that have sharply cut back their spending on higher education. When budgets are tight, it is hard to make the case that college is more important than health care or many other urgent needs. Nationally, as the climate emergency grows, it’s going to be difficult to argue for all the funding that free college would require. So we can’t be sure that making college free is compatible with achieving high quality.
If quality deteriorates, we may see public colleges following along the same path that public high schools have taken—stagnating teaching salaries, poorly maintained facilities, and a climate of low expectations in a larger number of classrooms. Before reformers use early-20th-century high schools as a model for a new approach to citizenship, it would be a good idea to investigate how well high schools performed that job.
“Free tuition” plans are not the only way to help students finance their college educations. A better approach would be to combine a substantial raise in Pell grants with the institution of an income-contingent loan repayment system similar to the ones found in Australia and England. Pell grants have not kept up with rising tuitions and that has been a major factor in the declining proportion of low-income students who have the financial resources to attend the best public universities in their states.
Fixing the student loan system is equally necessary to address the problems of students who are ineligible for Pell grants. It is a myth that most student borrowers accumulate unmanageable debt; the average graduate spends about as much each month eating out as she does repaying student loans. But the timing of loan repayment is a major problem. Most student borrowers begin repaying their loans as soon as they leave college, at a time when their earnings are at their lowest and most variable from year to year. Higher-education economists like Sandy Baum and Susan Dynarski have proposed a sliding scale for loan repayments based on income. They have also recommended that monthly payments be automatically deducted from paychecks in a manner parallel to that used for Social Security contributions. At least eight countries are currently employing income-contingent repayment programs for student borrowers. It’s a more practical and sustainable approach, and one that is likely to have more progressive effects on income inequality than free college.
