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MEET THE EXPERTS
KAY M.
MCCLENNEY
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FRANK
DEFORD
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GEORGE
KUH
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LARA K.
COUTURIER
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LEE
SHULMAN
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PATRICK M.
CALLAN
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RICHARD H.
HERSH
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PATRICK M. CALLAN
President, National Center for Public Policy & Higher Education
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A few more interesting comments from Patrick Callan, excerpted from his interview.
Q: Our college and university system has been invented and has evolved over the years in response to issues of the day. What's our challenge today?
CALLAN: American higher education was one of the great success stories of the second half of the 20th century. What we need now is something comparable to what we did with the GIs and the baby boomers. We need to create a world in which more people are prepared to go, can afford to go, and go to and complete higher education. We need a comparable shift in our thinking about college and its purposes. It's a shift the United States has been slower to make than much of the rest of the world, including countries that we're competing with for good jobs and so on.
Q:You're talking about something big here. Is this a revolution?
CALLAN: I don't know if it's a revolution anymore than the GI Bill might have been a revolution. Peter Drucker said it was beginning of the information age, once we sent all those people to college. It's a revolution in the sense of how we think about college and its role in American society. We believe that people who work hard and are highly motivated, ought to have the chance to advance themselves. But they can't do that today without education. We could do it with homestead provisions, for example, in the early history of the country. You could get opportunity if you could get land. Today higher education doesn't guarantee you anything, but your likelihood of even being in the queue for a job that will produce a middle class standard of living without it, is statistically highly improbable.
Q: The equivalent of forty acres and a mule�
CALLAN: Right. And just as in these previous eras, the role of government is to provide the opportunity for the homestead or the little family farm on the prairie. There's huge pressure on governments today, not just here but around the world, to provide more of this kind of opportunity because the message is much more clear.
The United States is not number one in the world anymore in higher education, in terms of proportion of people who go to college. We were flat for the whole decade, while England, France, Ireland, Spain, all had double digit increases. Why? Because they figured out that whoever succeeds in the development of human talent, whoever wins the educational sweepstakes, is going to have a huge advantage in the economic competition.
Q: So you've got some talented person who for whatever reason doesn't get an education. That's not just his problem, or her problem, that's my problem too?
CALLAN: It's the country's problem, because we need more people who have the knowledge and skills available with education and training beyond high school. Just like 50 years ago, it was everybody's problem if you didn't get to high school. We worked very hard to change that, and though today we still have 30 percent or so of kids who don't finish high school, now it's everybody's problem. Why? Because the economy demands it.
Americans still seem to be sort of asleep at the wheel, but how are we going to compete against the rest of the world, against people who were willing to take less money, if what we have to compete with are people who are less well educated? It seems to me that's a pretty big risk to take.
So yes, it is our problem, collectively. And it's a problem for the individual too, because their prospects of having a middle class life in American society are considerably diminished if they don't get some education or training beyond high school.
It's also a problem for democracy. From Aristotle on, everyone who's ever been serious about democracy has said having a middle class is an essential part. So if we become even more bifurcated, with a high end and a low end and a shrinking middle, then the prospects for democratic values and institutions are diminished.
Q: How many people don't get to go to college today and who are they?
CALLAN:A committee that was set up to advise Congress on student financial aid policy estimated that three years ago there were about 900,000 low- and moderate- income people who graduated from high school ready to go to college. Over half of them did not go to a four-year college, and almost 200,000 of them didn't go to college at all.
The best predictor of what your chances of getting to college, or whether you're going to get there or not, is your family income. And in 25 years in this country, we have not closed the gap in college attendance between the low-, the middle-, and the high-income groups.
The aspirations for college among Americans are very, very high. And interesting enough, in our research we've found that the aspirations are higher among some of the groups that go in the lowest numbers. For example, Latino parents have higher college aspirations for their kids than either white or African American parents. Among eighth graders, about 95 percent of eighth graders say they want to go to college. So college aspirations are very high.
People don't make it because there aren't the resources to get them adequately prepared; they don't complete high school, they don't take the appropriate curriculum. And many don't make it because they can't afford it; because either they don't have the income, or the financial aid is not available to them, or they don't know how to connect with the financial aid system.
Another issue that determines whether college people go to college ... an issue that is bigger now than it was a decade ago ... is are there enough places where you live? Are there enough spaces? California, for example, is supposed to need to add 750,000 spaces in this decade just because of population growth.
Q: Is the promise of going to college � the social contract we've been talking about � more or less likely now?
CALLAN: It's more problematic now whether college is going to be available to the next generations of students. For the first time since the GI Bill, what we call access � college-going in the country � has been flat for a decade. Ever since the GI Bill every generation has been better educated than the one before it. And now we have a decade of flat. No improvement. And that's happening at a time when many countries are seeing double-digit improvements in getting people into college, and through college as well. So it's more problematic, and it's something we can't take for granted. Part of the American problem may well be that we do take it for granted. It's been there for many of us. It's there for a lot of the upper middle class and our kids. We don't worry about whether there'll be a place in college for us, and we know we'll find a way to pay for it. But for the next generation of Americans, which is a much more ethnically heterogeneous, more Latino, more immigrant � the places where many of these young people who are going to be knocking on the doors of colleges - if we get them through high school - California, Texas, Florida, are places that tend to be above the national average in child poverty. How we handle things like tuition and financial aid is critically important to these kids. They have to believe they're going to get to college, and that they'll be able to pay for it once they get there.
Q: You say every generation since the baby boom has been better educated until now. Has something changed?
CALLAN: Something has changed. Part of it is, I think, that Americans have fallen asleep at the wheel, while the rest of the world has gotten quite aggressive about this. We've taken college for granted. I mean they may have to borrow more than they ought to, but it's there and people do take it for granted.
We also have been diverted by other issues. Affirmative Action, for example, as important as it is, has drowned it out. How most selective colleges in the country compete for the top ethnic minority students is very important issue to those groups, but it has drowned out the issue of all these people who are poor who aren't going to college at all.
And a lot of the focus in higher education has turned into intense competition for the students most sure to succeed, the ones who will boost up your prestige and your US News rating. Unlike the '60s, there have been fewer voices inside the academy saying, "What about the people who we're not serving?" And the focus, including many in the research community, has been on how do we make it better for those who are going? How do we attract more of those better students ourselves? Those are legitimate questions, but they have sort of drowned out the conversation about a country that needs more educated people. Why are we spending financial aid money to get you to come to my college instead of another one that made you an offer and you're going to go to college anyway, when there is another student out there for whom that money might make the difference between whether they can enroll or whether they can't?
Q: Is merit aid simply a marketing device or is it a legitimate way to reward accomplished students?
CALLAN: if there was enough financial aid in the system that everyone was being taken care of, if the universities had a surplus they wanted to spend on these kind of kids, I wouldn't be particularly concerned whether or not that way of spending money was most productive. There wouldn't be much to complain about. But what we've had in the last decade is a major shift in the way many private and public colleges spend their financial aid money. It used to be part of this engine of opportunity idea, now it's part of getting the freshman class profile to where you want it. They have quite precise mechanisms for deciding who to make offers to among different profiles of students, that will get them the freshman class that they want. So building the freshman class is more about meeting the institution's needs more than determining the students who may benefit the most. That's a kind of simplistic statement, but I would say, at the end of the day, that's true for many places.
The other thing that's happening, that's very closely related, is that for the first time since the baby boomers peaked in the mid '70s, it's a seller's market for higher education. That is, we have more kids graduating from high school every year. We're going to have the biggest high school graduating class in the history of this country at the end of this decade. And even with all the problems in high schools, more of them are qualified for college than ever before. They've taken a decent curriculum, and so on. This means that colleges and universities sort of have their pick. And they can also get away with increasing tuition. They're mostly government and non-profit institutions, but they're operating, in many cases, as if they were in the private market. What do you do when demand is high, and supply is scarce? You raise the price. So there's a whole set of behaviors that wouldn't be possible if there if there wasn't this kind of sellers' market for college education.
Q: Is it the college's responsibility in part to see the kids succeed?
CALLAN: Yes. Unlike elementary and secondary schools, we have to recognize that a larger share of the responsibility for the success in college falls on the students. They're all adults after all. But now we have abundant evidence that colleges and universities who do better in teaching and counseling, get better results. And if the college has no impact on whether people learn what they came to learn, or if they finish ... if their only influence is who they decide to take, then it seems to me there's not a lot of justification for the dollars and whatnot that society and students spend on what happens there.
Q: We saw a lot of what looked like �sink or swim.�
CALLAN: I think the idea that we put responsibility on students is terribly important. The question is, do we put the structure around them, in terms of the quality of teaching, the quality of campus life, the quality of counseling, that gives them the chance to succeed. And so when the colleges and universities dismiss any responsibility for this, it seems to me to be a kind of educational malpractice. That is, if we don't think we have any impact on the outcome, then I don't know why we're in business anyway. Just to provide students a chance to sink or swim?
So I think we want to keep the part of the system that says, "Yes, these are adults. Yes, they bear a big part of the responsibility for what they do, for the ... and for paying for it as well. But we also have to say, look: colleges and universities, in the case of every specific student, can't and shouldn't guarantee success. But a college or university that has a pattern of huge numbers of students who fail ought to be called to account for that.
We now have some studies that show that some colleges with very similar social, economic and academic profiles get much higher completion results than others. That tells us that what the college does makes a difference. And we haven't focused enough on that in America.
Q: What do you mean by �educational malpractice�?
CALLAN: It seems to me that, if it were a high school, no one would be bashful about addressing problems of large numbers of your students failing. So why isn't it a problem for a college? Again, I'm not characterizing the whole system of American education as educational malpractice. But I think where these high failure rates exist, and colleges are taking students that should be able to succeed, there is an element of malpractice involved. And it's not just the colleges that are implicated in this. Most states fund higher education based on how many students they enroll. So if a student drops out, and they can put another one in that seat the next day or the next quarter, there's no consequence for the college, in terms of the public accountability. It's a system that comes out of an old culture of higher education, and needs to be radically changed for the 21st century so there really is accountability, not just for students but for colleges too, about succeeding and meeting the educational goal.
Q: Earlier in our interview you used the term �trainwreck�. What did you mean by that?
CALLAN: American higher education has been a great success story for the GI's, for most middle class and upper middle class Americans, and for many who, over the years, pulled themselves up from the bottom. Do we have to have a train wreck to make the improvements? ... to make it a 21st century higher education system, which serves more people better, which knows more about the critical outcomes, which puts adequate preparation and financial resources behind the aspirations of the next generation of students? Do we have to have a train wreck for that to happen? The great American irony is that by any measure you want to use we have a disproportionate share of the best colleges and universities in the world�community colleges, four-year colleges�and yet we're falling behind in the education of the American public. How do we reconcile these two things? How do we harness the energy of higher education, the public, and the government to close that gap so that we have the best colleges and universities and the best educated population in the country world?
You can have great colleges and universities in the midst of populations that are underserved, and they can go get their students somewhere else. Some of our colleges can get students from anywhere in our country or the world. But when we take the temperature of higher education in the country we don't ask, how good are your colleges? We ask, how well are you doing getting people ready for, into, and completing affordable higher education? And using those kinds of measures, our country is slipping behind. |
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