Category Archives: education

The betrayal of higher ed?

Posted on April 5, 2011 | 5 Comments

I’m back from four fantastic days with 20-somethings in Philadelphia, including freezing my tusch in line for an audition for MTV’s Real World, hanging with the waitresses at Winberie’s, a long talk with parents, a “guy” shopping trip (grab pants, pay for them, leave), Philly cheese steak, Rita’s water ice, and countless hours talking with Kelly (pseudonym) and David (pseudonym) about their lives, their struggles, and their futures. It was priceless. And I thank them.

I was shadowing Kelly and David for research on our new book, about how the recession is affecting this latest generation to enter to workforce. I came away from it alarmed, afraid, sometimes hopeful, and more often than not, flashing back to my own early 20s—-the confusion, the excitement, the despair, the exhilaration. I also came away from it increasingly alarmed at the betrayal of our higher education system. Just let me go on record here as saying I think we’re staring at a new bubble, and it’s called the student loan bubble.

David’s story may not be typical, but it’s telling on many levels. David lives in a working class, borderline middle-class, neighborhood of Philadelphia. He grew up in a modest two-story home next door to his grandparents, who passed away a few years ago. His aunt lives down the street. He still hangs out with his high school friends, all of whom still live at home.

David is the kid on the football team who sits on the bench and who knows a lot of arcane trivia. He’s a huge movie buff, with a floor-to-ceiling bookcase of dvds in his childhood bedroom–a dark cave of wood paneling, piles of clothes, and clutter. His mom would love nothing more than to brighten up the room, but “David doesn’t like change.”

Overweight, nails bitten to the quick, he’s struggling to find his fit, at once sure of himself and yet wondering why he doesn’t get the call-back from the job interview when some of his other friends landed a desk job. He’s a “sucker for love,” as he puts it, a romantic who suffers from bouts of depression when things get overwhelming. He wants nothing more than to get on with life, find a 9 to 5 job and move out, get married and have a “baseball team” of kids, and the “white picket fence with the tire swing.”

Yet David isn’t moving out any time soon. He has $100,000 in college debt and two part-time jobs at minimum wage. He will soon owe $1,000 a month on those loans by his estimation. He earns about that much each month he told me over coffee at Starbucks the second morning. He also told me he is pinning his hopes on a bank teller position—one of the 200 jobs he’d applied for since graduation. The job would pay about $25,000 a year, which would allow him to start paying back the student loan and maybe move out.

David was an average kid in high school. He actually hated the whole affair and just phoned it in, doing the bare minimum to not flunk out. He wasn’t in any extra curriculars, and he didn’t talk to a guidance counselor but probably twice. He watched a lot of movies and stayed out of the way of his younger brother, who was rapidly becoming a serious juvenile delinquent.

And yet, he knew he’d go to college. “Every job you think of, you need a college degree,” he said. He’d originally wanted to go to a community college to get his grades up, but his dad, a laborer who removes asbestos in refineries, wanted him to go directly to a four-year school–the American Dream. David gathered the pamphlets he’d collected at a college fair and chose two that he thought he could get into with his low grades and that were far from home. He ultimately chose a private school in upstate New York–for $24,000 a year in tuition and $13,000 a year in room and board, with no financial aid, no scholarships, nothing. He chose the bank for his student loan based on the brochure the college handed out.

Four years later, he graduated with a BA in sports management in a town that is home to Wharton Business school, one of the best b-schools in the nation. He currently delivers pizzas for Domino’s for $7.25 an hour when he’s in the store and $5.25 when he’s delivering. He gets to keep part of the delivery charge and tips, but he pays for his own gas. If he works until 4a.m., he can clear $60-70 in tips in a night. He works three nights a week. His second part-time job is a check-out cashier at Kohl’s, scrambling to get 10 emails and 3 credit card applications every day for $7.50 an hour.

The debt weighs on him. He’s hoping for another six-month grace period where he will only pay on the interest in order to just save up a little bit more money. Then he hopes to consolidate and extend the loan out a few more years so the payments will be cut in half at least.  “Something like that,” he said.

We argued in Not Quite Adults that college pays, and it does–if you’re strategic about it, and if you graduate. Two big “ifs.” Studies like those we cite in the book calculate returns to education based on medians or averages. The median wage after college, the average cost of college, and so forth. That’s of course necessary and certainly an accurate portrayal of the typical kid, or the typical return. But the average can gloss over, ironically, the average kid’s story—stories like David’s, stories that are increasingly becoming the norm.

The question I have is why did David think college was the only route? In part, the promise of college is the American Dream for working-class parents like David’s. David’s dad, a second-generation laborer, did not want his son to follow in his footsteps. He had bigger dreams.”College” was where that dream took form. Yet, the ins and outs of college were a blur. As his mom said, “we were naive. We just sighed a big sigh of relief when he got in. But we’ve wised up now.”

Middle-class high schools like David’s are complicit in this dream. The weekly school newspaper proudly prints the future plans of all its seniors, and stresses that the majority are college-bound. Granted, the high school offered “third-tier” students options like voc-tech, but it came with a whiff of loser. As David said, “the voc-tech kids  were the kids who don’t do very well and this gives them something to do, some security in life.” Ironically, while standing in line for the MTV audition with Kim later in the week, she said when asked how many of her friends had jobs, “actually the only kids who have a decent job are the kids who went to trade school or cosmetology school.”

David came out of high school assuming that a paralegal needed a law degree and a x-ray tech needed a medical degree. Granted, he didn’t make very good use of his guidance counselor who probably would have disabused him of that notion, but his sense of things shows just how deeply ingrained this “college for all” mantra really is.

Colleges are complicit as well. They take in students like David without any compunction. They don’t have to worry about whether he graduates or not, or even whether he can afford it, because the spotlight is not on their graduation rates, only their enrollment rates.

So in the meantime, David lives at home, saddled with debt, and basically, as his mom put it, is just shoveling snow in a snowstorm. His parents, no stranger to financial strain, say they are happy to have him home. “We don’t mind doing this until he can get on his feet. We raised him to be independent, but it’s just not possible yet. I worry for him with that debt. That’s the mortgage on a fixer-upper around here. How can he move out with that?”

Indeed. As we sat talking, David flipped through the mail. A letter from the bank where he’d applied for the teller position was in the batch. He didn’t need to open it. He already knew. Rejected again.

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Financial incentives help community college students stay in school

Posted on March 23, 2011 | Leave a comment

A new report finds that paying students to keep their grades up and stay in community college has the biggest effects among four different approaches. My mother would be appalled. I couldn’t even convince her to give me an allowance let alone pay me for good grades. But, after reading this report, I came away convinced.

Community colleges are the workhorse of the country’s higher education system. They are both a bridge into a four-year college and path into the workforce for millions. Yet far too many community college students never make it to graduation. Two-thirds drop out. That is a huge problem in today’s world.

According to the Center for Education and the Workforce, by 2018, the U.S. economy will create 22 million  jobs for workers with at least some education after high school. But if we don’t produce more college grads faster, 3 million jobs will go wanting. That is, we will be 3 million workers short of filling this capacity if we can’t steer the ship back on course.

That is one reason why MDRC, a nonprofit research group working to improve social policy, launched “Opening Doors” in 2003. The effort designed and test-drove several interventions to boost graduation rates at the nation’s community colleges. Seven years later, they have tallied the results of the varied experiments and summarized them in “Opening Doors to Student Success,” a wonderfully concise and cogent synthesis of the short- and long-term results.

But first, the demand: According to the Center’s recent report, “Help Wanted,” by 2018, nearly two-thirds of all jobs (both new and replacement jobs for those retiring) will require at least some college. By “some college,” they mean at least a certificate or an associate’s degree. The other one-third of jobs will require a high school degree.

This demand for more education is not new, of course. We have been on this escalator for some time now. Indeed, since 1973, according to the Center, “the American job machine nearly quadrupled the number of jobs available to people with at least some form of education beyond high school.” Much of this shift was spurred by the decline of manufacturing and the rise of the “knowledge” economy. The iPad is a good illustration of this shift. Today, the iPad is manufactured overseas, taking with it the blue collar jobs that required only a high school degree. But its marketing, design, financing, and dissemination happen here. And all those jobs require more education.

Yet, as MDRC notes in its brief, roughly two-thirds of students entering community college drop out, and at the four-year level, upwards of 40% fail to graduate in six years. We chronicled the same trend in Not Quite Adults. Far too many young people have no clear path through college, they lack good advice on what to take and how to navigate the college landscape, and they have only half-baked notions of what lays ahead as far as jobs go. As a result, they switch majors, take a smattering of coursework, and eventually wander right out the door.

On the community college end of things, too often young people are ill-prepared for college and get stuck in that “remedial” purgatory of “catch-up” courses for no credit.  Or, they are attempting to make up for past mistakes and are returning to school. But now they have other demands as well, including a job and kids. We need to do better if we are to increase the numbers of young people who are equipped to step into the jobs of the future.

MDRC took a first step in that quest with Opening Doors. The project helped community colleges design different interventions to keep young people in school: financial incentives, reforms in instructional practices, and two different forms of enhanced student services.

MDRC then evaluated the results using random assignment, and compared students in a control group with those who  received the services. This is one of the surest ways to test the effectiveness of a program.

The results show that financial incentives worked the best of the four. In this case, students were given $1,000 a semester to use in any way they wanted if they kept their GPA at the “C” level and enrolled at least half-time. The program ran for two semesters only. The stipend was in addition to any Pell Grants or other financial aid.

It worked. Students–who were all low-income– earned better grades, took more credits, and were more likely to attend full-time than students in the control group. Notably, the positive effects lasted for several more semesters after the stipend ended.

Instructional reforms had less effect than the stipends, and the effects didn’t last as long. The reforms focused on creating a “learning community” for vulnerable students. They took coordinated courses as a group and were offered enhanced counseling and tutoring, as well as a voucher for text books.

While they initially passed more courses, earned more credits, felt more connected to school, and moved through the remedial classes faster than those in the control group, the program didn’t help them stay in school in the long run.

Student services was the third type of intervention. Its intent was to provide more personalized and intensive assistance to prevent students from wandering off course or to help them overcome the inevitable hurdles that spring up in everyday life and interfere with school.

In one case, the students met twice a semester with a counselor, whose student load was reduced to be able to focus more energy on the students. Most of the students in this program were juggling family and jobs on the side. The enhanced counseling again had some early effects, but they tended to fade with time.

The MDRC brief ends on an encouraging note. All the programs tested, they note, had some positive effects on students. They were short-term interventions that targeted students facing the most substantial hurdles, and they had short-term positive effects. It makes one wonder if the services were scaled up and given serious resources how much long-term good they could do.

The most interesting result–and long-lasting–is that financial incentives work, probably no surprise to economists, who regularly argue–and prove– that money matters.

As Rachel Glennerster and Michael Kremer write in their post “Small Changes, Big Results,” the Mexican government in 1997 instituted a “conditional cash transfer” program, which paid poor families if they kept their children in school. “Enrollment of girls in secondary school increased by 14.8 percentage points. Similar programs have been rigorously evaluated in many countries around the world, and school enrollment has risen in every case.”

Or maybe it’s the “nudge” that makes it all just a little easier, not to mention more motivating, to stay on course. As the Richard Thaler and Cass Sustein, both behavioral economists and the authors of the popular book, “Nudge,” put it on their blog: “Financial incentives have a behavioral element to them…The basic point is that the context around the incentive (its size, when it’s delivered, how salient it is made) are all critical to its effectiveness.”

Whatever the incentive or support, it appears from MDRC’s findings that well-designed, intensive programs to help young people stay on course in school can and do work. Unfortunately in these cash-strapped times, it’s likely  that these services will be the first cut. That’s disappointing, and short-sighted, given the uphill road we face in meeting the demands of the future workforce.

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A “calorie counter” for college investments—-a new report calls for more explicit information on the costs and outcomes of college

Posted on March 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

I’m reading transcripts of interviews we’re doing for the next book on how the recession is affecting young adults, and if one trend stands out, it’s how confusing and muddled the “what should I major in?” decision truly is. Many teenagers are picking majors because that’s what they were “good in” in high school, with little regard for what the job market might hold (that’s you English majors!). Once in college, they realize, gads, “this isn’t at all what I thought” and  they start casting about for something else. In a case of the blind leading the blind, they talk to their friends or see that their roommate loves art history, and think, “What the heck. That sounds like a good idea.”

If they make it–and that’s a big if–they graduate with about $22,000 in debt (on average) and no idea what to do with that degree in art history. If they don’t make it, they are in an even worse pickle: they have debt but no degree.

So I was heartened to read a new report by the Center for American Progress that offers suggestions for how this fraught process might be improved. The report, “Buying College,” by Julie Margetta Morgan, calls for more college accountability and tools to help parents and young adults figure out what college is the best fit for them. Baby steps.

Some of this information is available already on government web sites. But in its current form, it’s a morass of statistics and data and frankly, no one uses it. As the report notes, currently, such “information is available on the Internet if you’re inclined to look for it and if you can find it.”  I’m betting no one finds it–even though the risks to not knowing this kind of information are extremely high.  You can’t return a college degree after all once you’ve signed on to the debt. And with about 40% of all four-year college-goers dropping out before they’re finished, that’s a pretty harsh “buyer beware” policy.

Luckily, Morgan offers some excellent suggestions to fix this problem, starting with the basic questions a student should ask before enrolling at an institution, like:

  • Am I likely to finish this program?
  • What will it cost me?
  • Is that cost worth it given the likely outcomes of my degree?

The information [should] allow a student to understand the risks inherent in the college choice, found in places where students are likely to find it.

And this information should not be bogged down in all the technical minutia that seems to pervade any discussion of college enrollment and college debt. Sure, there are fine-grained differences that researchers obsess over in reporting, say, graduation rates. But parents in Ohio or Nevada don’t need that level of granularity. Just give the typical (median) or in some cases average scenario.

Morgan argues, for example, that information on costs and debt should include three things:

  1. Out-of-pocket cost of attending a particular institution—what the average student pays, net of all grant aid.
  2. The likely cumulative debt they will incur for a given educational program
  3. The monthly payment they can expect to pay off that debt over a 10-year period.

The final important question is, Is it worth it? We’re hearing many more cases in our interviews of kids really questioning the value of their education. They understand that they need a degree–that a BA or AA is the equivalent of a high school degree a couple of decades ago. They’re heard that message all their life.

But they are truly frustrated, especially with the current job picture. They are spinning their wheels, unable to land a job, even though they played by the rules and went to college. The English  or  art history majors are kicking themselves for not getting a business degree. The business majors are kicking themselves for not doing smarter internships. Many are living at home while they pay off their debt. Many are wondering whether they shouldn’t just go back to school for a master’s degree.

Of course, no one could have known that the economy would melt down just as they were finishing college, making their situation more precarious than ever. But even before the recession, far too many young adults were treading water, finding themselves underprepared or ill-prepared for the jobs that await them.

Surely there are other, non-job-related values to a college degree, like the expansion of your horizons, the critical thinking skills you acquire, the exposure to ideas and the canon that undergird our society. But with the cost of college creeping ever-upward and its “signal” to employers becoming watered down as more flock to college, the practicality of the degree takes precedence for many families and young adults. Therefore, as the report notes, any tool to help families make smart choices must have information on the value of that degree in the workforce.

Granted, this information is tricky with all the variables that come into play, but as the authors say:

Just like nutrition labels on food …, the information does not need to present the whole story of a college’s value to serve as a good indication of the risks inherent in consumption. Whether I know what a calorie really is, whether it’s a fair measure of the nutritional value of my food, I’ll still think twice about ordering at the Dunkin Donuts counter when I see a muffin has 600 calories in it. And that’s a good thing—even if I choose to order it anyway.

The paper nudges policymakers in the right direction. Now we have to figure out the specifics and find the political will to make it happen.

For now families can use the “College Navigator website.” Be warned, it’s technical and jargony.

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New report on “Pathways to Prosperity” for young adults throws down the gauntlet for the “college for all” mantra

Posted on February 3, 2011 | Leave a comment

A new report on how we can better prepare our kids for the workforce and stop the costly churning in education is right up my alley. Experts at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education argue  in “Pathways to Prosperity” [pdf] that the “college for all” mantra might be misplaced and we should be doing a better job of helping kids seen alternative paths into the workforce earlier in life. Sound familiar? See chapter 2 of Not Quite Adults. Or here and here, and here.

As the blog at Higher Ed summarizes the report:

By concentrating too much on classroom-based academics with four-year college as a goal, the nation’s education system has failed vast numbers of students, who instead need solid preparation for careers requiring less than a bachelor’s degree.

Leaders of the “Pathways to Prosperity” project at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education argue for an education system that clearly articulates students’ career options as early as middle school and defines the coursework and training required, so young people can chart an informed course toward work, whether as an electrician or a college professor.

Agreed! Yet several people are up in arms about this, suggesting that this call for tracking–which it is–will relegate too many minority kids into dead-end careers and paths. I realize that’s been a long-time worry, but it seems that young minority men are already being tracked–right into prison. Yes, we’ve been doing such a stellar job making educating relevant to young lives that a young black male with just a high school degree has a better chance of ending up in prison than college.

Ah, but before you check out at the mention of urban minority kids, this report is not about those “other kids” whom we as a country (shamefully) rarely think about. This report is about all of our kids. Two startling truths about our current system are that about 60% of the workforce does not have a BA, and this may be the first generation to get less education than their parents. Recognizing the problem, the nation’s colleges are aiming for a graduation rate of 55%. As commendable (and sadly telling) as that is, the Harvard report points out: what about the other 45%? Indeed. I’d say the worry over tracking is akin to putting out a brush fire while Rome burns.

The problem, the Harvard report says, is that “We fail these young people not because we are indifferent [to their needs and goals], but because we have focused too exclusively on a few narrow pathways to success.” Instead, they argue, we should develop other models that help kids make a more direct connection to work, while in high school. They especially like the model of Finland and Denmark:

Finland and Denmark… keep all students in a common, untracked comprehensive school up through grade 9 or 10, at which point students and their families, not the school, decide which kind of upper secondary education they will pursue. We believe this model makes much more sense for the U.S. to consider, but it would mean that we would have to be willing to abandon our reliance on the various forms of tracking, subtle as well as overt, that pervade much of our education system through the elementary and middle school years.

They also like the German apprenticeship model (with some adjustments) that typically combines classroom and workplace learning that culminates in a diploma or certificate, a “qualification” that “holds real currency with employers.” Thanks to high standards, those who complete the programs leave high school with qualifications roughly equivalent to a technical degree from a community college–at no cost to them, mind you. The government and employers split the cost.  Employers are heavily invested in this training, aligning it carefully with their needs. As a result, employers know they’ll get a graduate ready to join the workforce–unlike many U.S. teens, whose opportunities for teen employment have eroded significantly over the last decade. No wonder American employers complain loudly that kids with just a high school degree lack the soft skills like being on time, integrity, and not standing slumped over a cash register with a look of utter boredom on their face.

The report offers many more great ideas for reforming our education system to better integrate careers, to bring “vocational training,” as it was once called, out of the basement, and to reform guidance systems. I like this suggestion especially:

In the U.S., our goal should be to assist every young
adult beginning at the end of middle school to develop an individualized pathway plan that would include career objectives; a program of study; degree and/or certificate objectives; and work-linked learning experiences. These pathway plans would be hardly be set in concrete, and young adults would not be forced into tracks. But the merits of this approach are obvious. Young adults simply can’t chart a course if they don’t have a goal.

We saw this inability to chart a course over and over in the young people we interviewed for “Not Quite Adults.” These were kids who couldn’t fathom four years of school, but were at a real loss for other alternatives. They ended up in $10 an hour jobs, dissatisfied and casting about for a lifeline, as they treaded water during one of the most important decades (the 20s) in their lives. If they’d had the lifeline of some concrete guidance that helped them see goals earlier in life, and the path to achieve those goals, I bet a lot of them would be much happier, and much more secure, than they are today.

The Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce predicts that the U.S. economy will produce 47 million job openings by the end of 2018. Almost two-thirds of these openings will require some college education. But not necessarily a four-year degree. They predict that nearly half of the jobs that demand higher education will only require an A.A. degree
or less. “And virtually all of these sub-B.A. jobs will require the kinds of real-world skills students master in career and technical education.”

We have to do better. The Harvard report offers some excellent suggestions for how to get there, including many of the same things I’ve noted here and in the pages of Not Quite Adults.

They also point out programs that are already doing many of the things they suggest–and doing them successfully. Programs in high schools like  Project Lead the Way, or Career Academies, or High Schools That Work, or Linked Learning Initiative in California, and the Florida state legislation that requires new career and technical education programs be developed that match real-world employer needs.

They also point to employer-based programs that are pretty amazing. Programs like U.S. First for future engineers, the Wisconsin Youth Apprenticeship Program, the National Academy Foundation, and Year Up. Dick Bonnet wrote in from W. Virginia about Energy Corporation of America’s program called College Summit that helps send students to college to train to work in the oil and gas industry. Now let’s build on the existing programs and bring them to scale, nationally–and for a much broader range of kids.

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We need more accountability from colleges: Nearly half of students don’t learn much in college–and about the same share drop out

Posted on January 20, 2011 | 4 Comments

Another wrinkle has emerged in the “is college worth it?” question. A new book, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, finds that among more than 2,300 undergraduates surveyed, 45%  showed no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years, and 36% showed no progress by the time they graduated.

The authors used data on students in 24 representative schools. The schools took part on the condition that their institutions not be identified. The progress was gauged by a standardized test, the Collegiate Learning Assessment (which has its share of critics).

Here’s the nut of the findings, and something I’ve been harping on for awhile now:

The research found an average-scoring student in fall 2005 scored 7  percentage points higher in spring of 2007 on the assessment. In other words, those who entered college in the 50th percentile would rise to the equivalent of the 57th after their sophomore years.

That’s not much progress for two years and countless dollars. The results aren’t much better by the end of four years, either. The point to note here is that the results are for the “average student.” This is the student who is in the middle of the pack,  a student who is probably more interested in partying than studying, and who is probably casting about for a major and some kind of direction. These are decidedly not the “stars” whom we hear about in the news– those really smart and ambitious kids with stellar resumes and the genuine strengths that will take them far (and that would take them far no matter whether they went to college or not, to be honest).

I point this out not to be snarky but because, in essence, these results align with  what several people much smarter than I are saying as well: the returns to college are not universal for everyone. Or as I wrote in another post:

If [a student is] below average, his return might just be below average as well. He might not have a shot at the high-end job that his dorm-mate had–the straight A kid from an elite high school with well-off and highly educated parents. Instead, he might land in a middle management job. Still a decent job, but not the six-figure salary his roomie is making. And yet he doesn’t pay any less for that degree. Thus, his “return” is less.

Richard Vedder and Anthony Carneval have been holding a lengthy debate on this topic over at Inside Higher Ed blog. The word “hogwash” was even thrown down–a truly momentous occasion in academic debate.

The debate centers on the question whether college is worth it, for everyone. I tend to side with Vedder, who thinks not.  Sure, on average, it pays to go to college. But, in short, he says:

A good maxim is ‘different strokes for different folks.’ A one-size-fits-all solution does not work as long as human beings have vastly different aptitudes, skills, motivations, etc. On balance, we are probably over-invested in higher education, not under-invested. The earnings data [the college premium, that is] reflect less about human capital accumulation imparted to college graduates by their collegiate experiences than the realities of information costs associated with job searches.

In other words, he thinks we’ve allowed the BA to carry too much weight in the work world and that it has become a cheap screening tool for employers (but an expensive one for kids). The screening device assumes, he argues, that those with a college degree are sharper and have learned more than those without a degree. But as “Academically Adrift” finds, that’s just not true. Colleges are not imparting skills to the extent we all assume.

So the message here is twofold. On the part of young people, think hard about college and what you want to get from it. And be honest.As Vedder puts it:

A student who was at the top of her class at a top-flight suburban high school, had a composite SAT score of 1500, and plans to attend a private college with relatively low dropout rates is probably going to get a reasonable return on her investment, although even that is no certainty. By contrast, a student who is below average in his graduating class from a mediocre high school, has a combined SAT score of 850, and is considering a college with high dropout rates is very likely not to graduate even in six years, and probably will get a very low return on his college investment. That student might well do much better by going to a certificate program at a career college, learning to be a truck driver, or becoming a barber, for example.

And—if you do go to college, don’t take it for granted and just screw around for four years, because in this highly competitive world, a middling performance in college is going to be stomped by those who are excelling. Employers will pass you by, but you’ll still have the bill to pay. You might instead want to consider a gap year and do some community service or something mind-opening while you figure out what you want to do with your life.

Colleges, too, have some responsibilities, particularly as the price tag continues to bolt upwards. Transparency is key. As the president of the University of Charleston, in West Virginia told the Huffington Post:

“I think we do need more transparency. I think a student at a private institution who might go into debt for $40,000 or $50,000 has the right to know what he can learn at the institution.”

President Obama calls for more education as the route to continued economic progress, for individuals and for the country. And he’s right to do so. But the question is, does “education” mean solely four years of college? I think not. We need to get off this “college for all” course and think about better tailored options for individual kids. And we need to develop some kind of meaningful credential to signal to employers how job-ready young people are–a credential that goes beyond the BA.

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Young adults and their fractured futures

Posted on January 10, 2011 | Leave a comment

I’m not keeping up on my blog as well as I should be, mainly because the book events and media have me hopping. It’s both fun and draining to pimp a book. Fun in that people are talking about the book, which means (hopefully) they’re reading it, which means the hard slog in writing it was worth it. But it’s also draining because I’m not one for being center of attention. I deliberately eloped so I could avoid a wedding.

There’s more to come, including another tv appearance this week on Chicago’s WTTW. Check it out Wed in the 7-7:30 slot on “Chicago Tonight.”

Last week saw a great review in the Economist. We had a little snafu early on about the unemployment rate–a typo put it at 36%, when it’s 16%. But they quickly corrected it. I was amazed, however, at how fast the information (and in this case misinformation) spreads. I follow twitter comments about the book, and was mildly horrified when the 36% figure was quickly spread around, reaching as far as Brazil. Let’s hope people went back to the site to read the corrected review.

And speaking of unemployment, TIME Magazine ran a rather optimistic look at the economic recovery. While I think they may have on rose-colored glasses, what struck me, however, was in a side article, “Where the Jobs Aren’t.” It is there they raise this scary issue of what economists call “structural” unemployment–that is, unemployment that is the result of major restructuring and not just a cyclical response to a crisis (like most of our recessions have been).

This is worrying because that structural unemployment could well hit young adults the hardest. Structural unemployment is far more enduring, and harder to rebound from, than regular old unemployment. It follows from massive changes in the economy–changes that require a reboot. But reboots take time, and we happen to be ill-equipped at this moment to manage that reboot. We should have been investing in education far more and for far longer than we have.  The shift away from jobs that required little skill to those that require greater skills (and thus more training and education) is leaving far too many far behind. It has created a glaring skills mismatch–and has (and will continue to) ultimately led to diverging destinies. As TIME puts it,

“America is facing a bifurcated employment future. At the top end is a highly educated, technically competent workforce attuned to the demands of the global marketplace. At the other end is a willing but underskilled group that is seeing its prospects undermined by workers in countries like China in low-end manufacturing and by a skills mismatch in emerging industries.”

We saw this bifurcated future in not just the economy in Not Quite Adults. We saw it in the futures of young adults themselves, a future divided into those who swim and those who tread water and barely stay afloat.

And as the Economist review so aptly put it:

The [swimmers} often have supportive parents, wider social networks, university degrees and a greater sense of civic engagement. Many “swimmers” even choose to move back home to help pay off student loans and save for the future….Most twenty-somethings, however, are “treaders”, who simply replicate the lessons of their poorer, less stable, non-voting and hands-off parents, but to worse effect.

“To worse effect,” is key in that last sentence. Because of the massive changes, and because of our underinvestment in education, a generation is now faced with too few options and many more potential pitfalls. It is simply easier today to dig yourself into a deep whole and much harder to get out.

We have no experience with chronic high unemployment like you see among young adults in Europe–where unemployment tops 30% in some countries. We just don’t know how to react, and that means several lost years just trying to figure out what needs to be done. Will it truly be a “lost generation” before we figure out how to retool an economy that has room for everyone?

Let’s hope not–for all our sakes.

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Generation Recession–peering 10 years into the future looks pretty dim

Posted on January 5, 2011 | 1 Comment

In the several interviews I’ve now done for the book, the conversation has generally hewed to kids living at home and why that’s a good thing. We’ve talked about how it leads to a more secure future when kids have the space, literally and figuratively, to create a good foundation with education or training, and the time to figure out how to get on a good escalator in the workforce. We’ve talked about parents’ role in this period–the valuable resources they provide in offering that launching pad.

We’ve also talked about the many, many young adults who are trying to play by the old rulebook and trying to reach “adulthood” on the same time-table as their parents did. Those kids are more often than not treading water at risk of sinking, because today’s world is a lot different from when their parents were 20. The stakes are higher all around today– in jobs, in education demands, and in many other areas of life as well. It’s (sadly) easier to dig yourself into a hole, and much harder to get out.

So it was sobering to read in this issue of Democracy the prognosis of leading labor force experts for the next ten years, and by default for this generation. Things have only gotten worse since we published “Not Quite Adults,” and it makes me worry that the ranks of the “treaders” is going to grow even larger (and include many more college grads).

Here’s Thea Lee of the AFL-CIO on what life might look like in 2021:

Ten years from now, the trauma of the Great Recession will still be with a lot of workers. We’ll have permanent scars of long-term unemployment…We worry about a “lost generation,” young people coming into the labor force right now and finding they don’t have jobs. There might be a several-year period of excessively high unemployment or underemployment where their skills are underutilized.

She goes on to warn that the pillars of recovery have been seriously eroded. Consumption, that tried-and-true growth engine? Nope, we consumers are maxed out. Investment? The private sector is in lock-down because we consumers have no money. Exports? Too many others (like Germany) are far ahead of us in that game. Innovation? We lack the basics. We are sinking in education, we don’t invest in training, and our infrastructure is crumbling.

The result for this crop of 20-somethings just entering the workforce? Here’s Sherle Schwenninger of the New America Foundation:

There will also be a new form of generation conflict because a lot of baby boomers aren’t going to vacate jobs that 25-year-olds normally would get…They will be hanging onto their jobs as long as possible. This will create a bottleneck for generational mobility, affecting the employment prospects of new entrants into the labor market.

Even the college-educated will feel the reverberations of this enduring pain, as Harry Holzer, an economist at Georgetown, notes:

“My fear is that all of them [workers with low, middle, and high levels of education] will live, if not with more inequality, certainly with more insecurity over time. Even if we recover from this downturn…if you have a college diploma, it’s growing increasingly clear that that’s no longer the kind of guarantor of a decent standard of living (though it’s better to have one than not to have one) or of job stability. People at all levels will feel more insecurity, and the public sector will provide less of a safety net.

One man on a comment board recently complained that Not Quite Adults was just one big excuse for a coddled generation. Claiming that “times change,” he ranted, is a liberal cop-out. What’s really at fault, he said, is bad parenting and spoiled children. Well, if there was ever a refute, the three comments above are it. It is not coddled kids or bad parenting that is preventing young people from launching their adult lives. Times had already changed when we wrote Not Quite Adults. Jobs had become less secure. Education was in higher demand. Americans were increasingly left on their own to fashion their personal safety net in a do-it-yourself economy. But now, all those changes have been exacerbated beyond imagination–and it is this generation that will bear the brunt.

When we focus too much on personal blame and finger-pointing, we shift our focus away from the real issues, in this case the huge social forces –from globalization, technology, political disinvestments in education and R&D, changing social conventions –that have altered the playing field. Times do change. And we must respond to those changes and not try to recreate a nostalgic “golden era” of growing up.

This generation faces a tough road ahead. We need to start thinking about how to make that path to adulthood smoother and more secure, for everyone. Parents cannot continue to bear the full responsibility of the after-effects of these profound social changes–the latest being the long-lasting recession.

As Harry Holzer suggested, a good place to start is to invest in improving worker education and skills along with the quality of jobs–perhaps with an employer tax credit to spur on-the-job training. It also means revamping education policy. Education policy cannot be only about raising test scores. It must be about preparing a generation for viable work, and retraining people for the skills we will need in the future. As he says, it’s not about getting more people into college. It’s more about making sure they finish college, whether that be two-year or four-year colleges. It’s also about making paths to good-paying middle-tier jobs more visible earlier on in life. It’s also about helping kids discover their interests and strengths, even if those interests are not as lofty as we as parents had hoped. When kids follow their interest, whether that be into neuroscience, engineering, or mechanics or phlebotomy, they will more likely love what they do. If they love what they do, they will do a good job at it. And that, alone, is something to be proud of.

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College–results may vary

Posted on January 3, 2011 | Leave a comment

This morning’s Miami Herald finds that graduates from two-year applied programs in community colleges are earning more than four-year graduates from the state’s public universities. According to data crunched by the state’s employment bureau, those with a BA from one of the state’s 11 public universities earned an average starting salary of about $36,500 in 2009. Meanwhile, those who earned an associate’s degree in science from a community college started, on average, at $47,400.

Part of this difference, the article notes, is that those graduating in science from a community college tend to be older, and likely have more job experience. But still, the $11,000 difference is striking, particularly when you factor in the lower cost of community colleges. Less debt plus a higher salary equals a more secure start as an adult.

The key, the article notes– and what Rick and I say in our book, “Not Quite Adults” as well–is to be strategic in choosing the course of education. For a long time, just getting a BA was a passport to higher earnings. But now, with costs rising and jobs expected to be tight for several years to come, it pays to be more strategic. We’re hearing rumblings in our new interviews for Generation R project of growing discontent with the payoff to college. In this current recession, far too many graduates are finding themselves back at home, with a college debt hanging over their heads, while they search for work. The competition in the workforce is stiff–so stiff that even those from the most elite universities are discovering the unemployment line.  There is nothing quite like sending out countless resumes and not even getting a phone call to make young adults start to wonder, is college still worth it?

It’s probably cold comfort to a recent grad working for $10 an hour as a receptionist or slinging drinks for tips, but in the long run, a BA will more likely pay off in greater lifetime earnings because the salary ceiling is higher with a BA. That said, as I noted in this post, applied training can still pay off–even seven years later, according to recent studies.

In one case, researchers compared the earnings of young adults who had gone through a career academy in high school and those who had not. A career academy mixes traditional academics with applied learning in a particular field, such as accounting, nursing, or engineering. The curriculum is aligned with the demands of the job, and young people do internships and shadow actual workers on the job. In an evaluation of career academies by MDRC, young men—often most at risk for becoming disconnected—did particularly well. They earned about $30,000 more over eight years than their peers from the same high school.

Similarly, as a recent Demos report, “Graduated Success,” finds, two-year technical degrees pay off in the longer-term. Eight years after graduating from high school, 43% of technical certificate holders earned a median annual salary that was higher than that earned by someone holding a general associate’s degree. (This is where being strategic comes in.) Moreover, 27% earned more than those with a BA.

As in all things, one needs to be realistic and choose a field that is growing and that aligns with one’s interests. Labor economists note that it is the middle-tier jobs that are most likely to grow in the next decade, and if one is looking for job security–as more young people are–then jobs that require face-time and hands-on skills that can’t be exported are good bets.

Not all community college experiences, unfortunately, are as successful as the above examples. Far too many enter college–either two- or four-year–with only a vague idea what they want to do. And as a result, far, far too many drop out. We need community college reforms  that help more students stay focused and on a path to success. Here’s a few ideas for doing just that.

Granted, if you go to community college and wander through some English courses and a philosophy class, with little direction, as many of the young adults we interviewed for Not Quite Adults did, then the payoff to community college is won’t be great. But if, like the young men we interviewed in a landscaping program and phlebotomy program, they choose a course that aligns with growing job demand (health care, green technologies to name two), then the payoff is solid. And worth it.

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Unemployment nears 16% for young adults–and you wonder why they’re living at home

Posted on December 28, 2010 | 3 Comments

Not Quite Adults launches itself into adulthood today. Woot. I was thrilled yesterday to get a shout-out from the New Yorker’s Book Bench. I can die a happy woman now. Today we’re on Leonard Lopate show in NYC at noon for all the homebound New Yorkers. Later tonight, for the night owls, I’m on WGN’s Milt Rosenberg show from 11pm-12 central time. Milt is a terrific interviewer so should be a fun ramble.

If we had one goal with this book it was to change the conversation we have with our kids and them with us. But I fear that our book pales in comparison to the effect the recession will have (has had) on this conversation. The hard economic times and the truly bleak job market for young adults has done more than we could have ever managed with our small book to make people realize that this generation is facing a vastly different world than any of us older folks did.

The unemployment rate for young people under age 25 is a whopping 15.9%–and rising. It’s been going up since October while the national rate has fallen slightly. For men of this age, it’s a stunning 18.2%. It gets a little better the older you are, but not much. For those age 25-34, 10.4% are out of work.

Being out of work, or in the case of young people, unable to find that first job makes it hard to plan for a future. For us Americans, jobs define us. They support us. They make everything else run smoothly.

Young adults are stalled. Job fairs are packed. The pickings are slim and the competition is tight. One young woman told us in our interviews for the Generation R book that she was putting off moving in with her boyfriend because she didn’t want to be a burden to him–she has college debt and no solid job leads. I’m sure many more young people are thinking the same thing. Although some economists say the economy is lifting, I think they need to get out on the street more often. It certainly isn’t lifting for these young people.

We’ve been here before of course. Recessions in the early 1980s were bad, and of course there’s the Great Depression. It’s interesting that the trends in living at home longer began to rise during the 1980s recession. In fact, about the same share of young adults aged 18-24 were living at home in 1982-3 as are doing so now. What’s different now, however, is how many 25-34 year olds are living at home–up about 50% since the 1980s. In the Depression, we also saw many more young people living at home. Nearly 70% of young white men age 20 were living at home in 1939, while about 30% were still living at home by age 25. Marriage rates also dropped.

Economists worry that this recession will not only last longer, but its reverberations will be felt for many years to come. We’re just not as prepared to bounce back as we were before. So many more people have been out of work for more than a year this time around. Being out of the workforce that long really sets you back. On top of that, our education ranking is dismal. We’re just not well-positioned to rally as quickly or as convincingly as we once were.

A new report by researchers at Rutgers on the recession finds a deep vein of pessimism running through our collective psyche right now. The report’s title says it all: “The Shattered American Dream: Unemployed Workers Lose Ground, Hope, and Faith in Their Futures.”

One of the authors told Bob Herbert in the New York Times that he was struck by how pessimistic some respondents have become, “not just about their own situation but about the nation’s future. ‘They’re losing the idea that if you are determined and work hard, you can get ahead,’ Van Horn said. ‘They don’t think they or their children are going to fare particularly well.’”

Frank Rich in Sunday’s Times added another layer to this story. In “Who Killed the Disneyland Dream,” he takes us along on a trip to Disneyland that the Barstows–a typical can-do family in the 1950s– took after winning a slogan contest for 3M’s Scotch Tape.

The difference between then and now is palpable. While the Barstows marveled at the innovations before them in Disneyland, our government’s R&D budget is slashed. Their optimism in America and their ability carve out a simple, but comfortable life in the suburbs sustained them. They also were comforted by the fact that most Americans were like them–middle class. (Not all mind you–black Americans were still at the back of the bus.) But there was not the huge divide between the wealthy and the rest of us. There was also no striving for out-of-reach material goods like huge houses and multiple cars that occurs when you try to keep up to the Joneses when the Joneses are rich and setting the bar so high (Robert Frank talks more about this in his many books).

And it is this difference–this changed world, this rise of a high-stakes competitive “game” that demands a resume in high school, this demise of employers who believed that what was good for their workers was good for their bottom line, and the rise of a winner-take-all society–that we try to capture in  NQA. For those still trying to play by the old rules, trying to bolt out the door to a fast adulthood, it is this changed game that puts them on a high-risk collision course between their aspirations and their reality.

It is also this changed world that young adults find themselves inheriting. Yet unlike the Barstows, their shot at the middle class has withered.

As Rich puts it:

How many middle-class Americans now believe that the sky is the limit if they work hard enough? How many trust capitalism to give them a fair shake? Middle-class income started to flatten in the 1970s and has stagnated ever since. While 3M has continued to prosper, many other companies that actually make things (and at times innovative things) have been devalued, looted or destroyed by a financial industry whose biggest innovation in 20 years, in the verdict of the former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, has been the cash machine.

It’s a measure of how rapidly our economic order has shifted that nearly a quarter of the 400 wealthiest people in America on this year’s Forbes list make their fortunes from financial services, more than three times as many as in the first Forbes 400 in 1982. Many of America’s best young minds now invent derivatives, not Disneylands, because that’s where the action has been, and still is, two years after the crash. In 2010, our system incentivizes high-stakes gambling — “this business of securitizing things that didn’t even exist in the first place,” as Calvin Trillin memorably wrote last year — rather than the rebooting and rebuilding of America.

In last week’s exultant preholiday press conference, Obama called for a “thriving, booming middle class, where everybody’s got a shot at the American dream.” But it will take much more than rhetorical Scotch tape to bring that back. The Barstows of 1956 could not have fathomed the outrageous gap between this country’s upper class and the rest of us. America can’t move forward until we once again believe, as they did, that everyone can enter Frontierland if they try hard enough, and that no one will be denied a dream because a private party has rented out Tomorrowland.

It is this new order that we try to capture in NQA. It is this narrowing of the possibilities, the questioning of the fair shake–along with many other equally fundamental changes–that have affected the path to adulthood. And because the stakes are higher, and because young people need to position themselves so much more carefully if they are to compete, their embrace of “adulthood” is going to take time. We no longer live in the world that allowed a fast start. Young people need more education (which comes with a high price-tag), they need more credentials, they must be more strategic in that first job choice. In turn, they should hold off on children and marriage until they’re ready and able to commit to a family. All this was true before the recession, and it’s even more critical now. That’s why we hope to have a different conversation than the one we hear so frequently–”kids are coddled,” or “kick them out and let them grow up.” A slower path to adulthood is a better path because it ensures a more secure future in this increasingly unstable, unpredictable world.

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Is Harvard still worth it?

Posted on December 21, 2010 | Leave a comment

In a sign that a tremor is turning into a rumble, the Times on Sunday asked on the front page of the Week in Review: Is going to an elite college still worth it? Young adults, and their parents, are beginning to wonder whether that high tuition is worth it when young Ben or Molly finds him or herself living back home and thinking that the unpaid internship looks pretty darned good about now.

Normally, when I scoop up the morning paper from the hallway floor where it lands and see a headline this like blaring back at me, my heart sinks. With “Not Quite Adults” about to drop in a week, my first reaction is, ‘oh no, now I’m going to have to defend our book against this article, too.’ But while I stood there reading as my latte steamed (yes, I’m a latte-drinking, city-dwelling liberal), my mood perked up. They were running through the very argument we make in our chapter on education. Rex was going to be spared my rant on this particular morning.

Basically, what the article and our chapter says is that, yes, Harvard and Penn and Brown do pay off, sometimes handsomely, down the road. Graduating from the likes of Penn or Smith earns you about 40% more ten years later than the grads of the “less elite” University of Illinois or Rutgers. So it would seem that the money sunk into the high tuition is indeed worth it.

The article, like our chapter, also notes that too often, parents and young adults fail to consider these long-term payoffs when they grouse about the debt they hold. The cost of college is not a short-term payment, but rather one that pays off much farther down the road, like a mortgage instead of a car payment. So while Molly or Ben may not yet have found a job, they probably will, and the payoff of that elite degree is going to boost them into a more comfortable living–all else equal. (That same argument, by the way, holds for any college degree, at least for now.)

But there’s some important caveats to that scenario. As we point out in Not Quite Adults, there’s an issue of what economists call “selection bias.” Who’s to say that the same kid who made it into Harvard wouldn’t have done just as well at U of I? After all, getting into those elite schools is no easy task. You have to be pretty sharp. And won’t that same intelligence and ambition get the person noticed on the job and propel him or her up the ladder quickly–thus leading to more income? So is it the degree itself that results in the income difference ten years later or some inherent quality that got the young adult into Harvard in the first place?

Research would suggest that it’s the latter. Kids who get into Harvard have a skill set, drive, intelligence to make it anywhere. Indeed, when researchers compared young people with similar SAT scores and class rankings, half of whom went to an Ivy school and the other half who went to a state school, they found few differences in earnings. So it would seem that kids who are bright enough to get into Yale are going to use those same attributes on the job, regardless of where they go to school.

That says to me that if you don’t have money to burn and you’re not going into a field, like finance, that hires based on school reputation, then why not go to a cheaper school and spare yourself the big bills? Or as we suggestion in NQA, you can pay the price of a Mercedes if your budget allows, but a Corolla will get you there as well.

This is particularly true if the young person wants to go into fields that don’t pay high salaries, like teaching or social work. In other words, college still pays, but only if families are strategic in their choices and honest about the future paths their son or daughter want to take.

The Times article also notes that in life satisfaction, those who go to the elite schools fare no better, and actually worse, than those who went to less prestigious schools. Perhaps, they suggest, the higher expectations of an Ivy League sets one up for a harder fall when those high expectations butt up against reality.

Or as Scott Thomas, a sociologist who studies this sort of thing put it, “prestige does pay, but prestige costs, too.” One of our interviewees may have said it best. Jamil, a first-generation immigrant from India, was a smart kid with his sights set on medical school. For his undergrad work in pre-med, he chose the local University of California over elite Northwestern.

“We all wanted to go to the schools that would give us that decal we can put on our car,” he says. “You know, Harvard or Northwestern.” But to his parents, the school was not important; the education was what mattered.

“Looking back, they’re right. I didn’t really sacrifice anything by taking the route that I did. You know, maybe life in Chicago would have been different from life in Riverside, but I don’t know if that justifies spending my parents’ money that they could be using, say, for their retirement, or paying off their house.”

I had a conversation about this with one of the economists who is part of the Network on Transitions to Adulthood–the group whose research we based our book on.  She was on a train back to Princeton, where she worked at the time (she’s now on the Council of Economic Advisers).  Sure, she said, kids who do well in Harvard will likely do well on almost any job–it isn’t the elite education that will catapult them to success. But, she said, there are intrinsic things that Princeton and Harvard and their ilk provide–namely, connections. That is what parents pay for when they fork over $50,000 a year. And of course she’s right. It is those connections that vault people into positions of power and prestige.

But, for too many families, striving for that opportunity is costing them an arm and a leg. It’s putting their retirement, their own futures in jeopardy. I suspect that as the middle class continues to hollow out, the stakes will feel higher and higher, and more people will sense that they have no choice but to sink themselves into deep dept if their children are to be allowed into the club. Sad, really. Maybe it’s time we stand down in this arm’s race and dial down our expectations of what the “good life” is. Of course everyone wants a shot at the keys to that special club. But if we redefine was success is, then there will be keys to many clubs within reach, and we’ll all be able to retire a lot earlier and our kids will be a lot happier.

 

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