Login
Here, as promised, is a podcast we made at the Center for Ethics and Education based on interviews we did with Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson, authors of the excellent book Can College Level The Playing Field, which is an indispensable read if you want to understand the relationship between inequality and higher education, and inequality within higher education, in the US. (For CT discussion of a very poor quality review of the book, see here). Also I unabashedly recommend the whole podcast series!
The UK government’s advisory panel on drugs has rejected a call to ban the sale and possession of nitrous oxide – also known as laughing gas or nos – despite the home secretary’s desire to see the drug banned.
In 2021, the then home secretary Priti Patel asked her independent scientific advisers to review the evidence of harm associated with nitrous oxide. The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) has now reviewed the evidence and has not recommended nitrous oxide be placed under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 (MDA), which would have made possession of the drug for non-exempted purposes a criminal offence.
The current home secretary, Suella Braverman, has made no secret of her view that nitrous oxide should be brought under the MDA. One reason for government interest has been its recent policy focus on antisocial behaviour.
Discarded nitrous oxide canisters are a highly visible form of littering, and use is often associated with nuisance behaviour in groups of young people hanging out in public places. Three and a half tonnes of these canisters were collected during last year’s Notting Hill festival alone. Targeting nitrous oxide would provide a clear signal of policy intent.
Possession of nitrous oxide for legitimate purposes (use as an anaesthetic, or as a catering product) is not a criminal offence. In their review, the ACMD acknowledged the potential for the drug to produce health and social harms, but argued that classifying the drug under the MDA - and the penalties this would bring - would be disproportionate, and there was insufficient evidence to justify this.
There are also developments in the UK, supported by the police, to move away from the punishment of drug possession offences towards diversionary interventions, such as drug education, and so the recommendation should also be seen in this wider context.
This is the second time that the ACMD has been asked to review the evidence on nitrous oxide. The last review in 2015 reached the same conclusion: that it should not be prohibited.
Nitrous oxide use is not exactly a niche drug, with at least half a million people using the drug every year, making it the second most popular recreational drug after cannabis.
Some neurologists have expressed concern about the increasing number of people who have been harmed by the drug. However, these patients tend to be those who have used very large amounts of the drug, often over a prolonged period of time.
The health problems include paralysis and numbness in the hands and feet. Other neurological problems such as memory loss, poor balance and weakness in the arms and legs have also been found – but again, these are very rare.
In some people these symptoms resolve quickly, but in others they can persist for weeks or months. Historically, there has been a lack of inquiry from doctors about nitrous oxide use, and a hesitancy for patients to disclose it. Recent publicity has helped to raise awareness of this issue in both patients and doctors.
The ACMD highlighted that restricting access to nitrous oxide would be felt by not just those using the drug recreationally. It has a long history of use as an anaesthetic (“gas and air”), a car-fuel additive, and in catering as a propellant and food preservative.
Recent research has also investigated its use as an antidepressant. If controlled under the MDA, a significant number of people and organisations would be subject to stricter regulations. New laws would still have to facilitate legitimate uses, and resolving this – for example, special licensing of purchasers – would present significant resource and administrative burdens.
Although the ACMD doesn’t recommend controlling the drug under the MDA, they do make some practical suggestions to reduce social and health problems. These include recommending restricting online sales of the drug, through to providing health warnings on packaging used for the drug as has been introduced in other countries such as France.
They also suggest that the government considers giving the police more powers to intervene when they suspect nitrous oxide is about to be used for recreational purposes. Local powers such as Public Spaces Protection Orders could also be introduced to prohibit use in public places, with fixed penalty notices rather than criminal records as punishments.
Littering of canisters is an individual responsibility, but could also be addressed through existing powers, and strategies to improve recycling and responsible waste disposal.
Ultimately, the ACMD is an independent body, and while the home secretary is obliged by law to seek their expert advice, she is at liberty to ignore it. Were this to happen, it would be a political decision.
The drugs policy field is not unique in this regard and decision-makers have to balance a range of considerations and competing interests, so issues of politics cannot be ignored. But if the home secretary introduced stricter controls and punishments, any problems associated with the use of nitrous oxide would not simply go away. There is a high level of demand – and, as the ACMD highlights, control under the MDA can have “significant unintended consequences”, and that is no laughing matter.
Harry Sumnall receives and has received funding from public grant awarding bodies for alcohol and other drugs research. He is an unpaid member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Mind Foundation. He is also a former unpaid member of the UK Government Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs referenced in this article.
Ian Hamilton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Countries are betting on forests and soils to mop up their remaining “difficult-to-decarbonise” emissions to achieve their climate targets. More forests and better soils are good for nature and for adapting to climate change, but this strategy may prove a risk to the global goal of net zero greenhouse gas emissions.
Substantial emission cuts across the global economy are required to stay on course with global temperature targets. Reaching net zero, however, will also involve removing CO₂ from the atmosphere and storing it, a process known as carbon removal.
The latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claimed that carbon removal will be “unavoidable” for balancing out the continued emissions from “difficult-to-decarbonise” sectors, such as aviation and agriculture. In our new paper, we examined how governments plan to pursue carbon removal in their national climate strategies.
We examined all national climate strategies published in English before 2022, totalling nearly 4,000 pages across 41 strategies. We found that the majority did not estimate how much of their emissions would be difficult to decarbonise in 2050.
Out of the 20 strategies that did, the majority rely primarily (and in some cases solely) upon forests, soils, or other natural sinks to compensate. In fact, forests and soils are the most commonly mentioned removal methods, present in nearly all strategies.
Forests, soils, or other natural sinks are not the only carbon removal options available. Engineered methods are increasingly gaining traction in climate policy.
One engineered method is direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS), which uses chemical reactions to pull CO₂ out of the air and pump it underground. Another is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), which captures the CO₂ released when burning plant matter (referred to as “biomass”), before also storing it underground.
These engineered methods feature in far fewer strategies. Only two countries (the UK and Switzerland) estimate how much CO₂ they might remove with DACCS, while the method receives mentions in a further five.
BECCS fares better. Its contribution to carbon removal is quantified in five strategies and mentioned in a further 11. Many of the examples in which they are mentioned are speculative, stressing that their potential deployment depends upon further technological breakthroughs.
Governments seem hesitant to embrace engineered methods and are more drawn to nature-based carbon removal. This isn’t too surprising – removing CO₂ through land use has been a feature of global climate policy dating back to the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.
Many existing policies, such as the EU’s LULUCF Regulation, help countries account for carbon removals by forests and soils in their emission totals. Engineered methods meanwhile account for a tiny proportion of what is currently removed from the atmosphere, according to a recent report.
Countries are rightly drawn to nature-based methods as they not only remove carbon but are critical to halting the decline of biodiversity and adapting to the impacts of climate change. Nature-based methods, however, may be a risky bet when it comes to removing and storing carbon to mop up remaining emissions.
Countries seem aware of these risks. Portugal’s national climate plan relies on forests and soils to close the gap to net zero yet describes damaging rural fires, which in 2017 flipped its forests from removing and storing CO₂ to adding it back to the atmosphere.
Sweden and Slovenia similarly rely upon their forests, but fear they are vulnerable to pests and disease. Hungary, Finland, Slovakia, South Korea and Ukraine anticipate that their forest carbon sinks will make a shallow contribution towards their long-term climate targets owing to the age of existing forests or limited land for growing new ones.
Countries such as France note that carbon storage in soil will be temporary if farmers decide to move away from practices that add carbon to soils and instead return it to the atmosphere. Malta similarly fears that the impacts of climate change may reduce the ability of soils to store carbon.
These concerns largely echo what researchers have already identified, underlining the limitations of removing CO₂ through these methods, particularly as climate change makes forests and soils more vulnerable to natural hazards.
Engineered carbon removal methods may offer a more durable way to remove and store carbon by pumping it underground. But the capacity of these methods must be urgently scaled up this decade.
Within their national strategies, countries either note a lack of potential storage sites or ample storage capacity. Making widespread deployment of engineered methods a reality may rest on countries collaborating to transfer CO₂ between one another or remove CO₂ on one another’s behalf.
Given the limited capacity of countries to remove carbon, the challenge of rapidly scaling up engineered methods and the necessity of addressing other pressing issues like declining biodiversity, carbon removal cannot substitute emission reductions.
Mitigating climate change requires both large and rapid emissions reductions and the responsible scaling up of carbon removal methods. Both natural and engineered methods are likely to be needed. Our research suggests that countries may need to engage with engineered removal methods if the challenge of net zero is to be met.
As of March 2023, 58 national climate strategies have been submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Compare this to the 194 nationally determined contributions, shorter term emission pledges made by countries, and it’s clear that there should be many more strategies to come.
These strategies must quantify the pathways they will take to their climate target and recognise the unique but different roles nature-based and engineered removals have. Those with existing strategies should follow suit in future revisions.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 10,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.
Harry Smith receives funding from The Leverhulme Trust.
Johanna Forster receives funding from Horizon Europe and has previously received funding from the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF).
Naomi Vaughan receives funding from The Leverhulme Trust and has previously received funding from the Natural Environment Research Council.
Education secretary says UK ‘should be very proud of’ university sector, amid briefings with Suella Braverman
Gillian Keegan has signalled that she disagrees with the Home Office’s plan to cut migration by targeting overseas students, adding the financial boost from international students to British universities was “hugely valuable”.
The education secretary has said the university sector is something Britain “should be very proud of”, amid briefings that the home secretary, Suella Braverman, is considering looking at cutting the number of international students coming to the UK, or changing the terms of their stay.
Continue reading...I sometimes employ an undergraduate to observe my teaching, and criticize what I do. I’ve learned a lot from them over the years, but I really employ them, these days, to hold me accountable to the standards I set myself and to tell me what is happening in the room (this is especially valuable in large classes) more than with the expectation that I’ll learn something brand new.
Anyway, last week my new observer, Allyson, solved what has been a longstanding problem for me. In my large classes students get antsy n the last ten minutes, and start, slowly, and discreetly, to put their stuff away and get ready to go. Each individual student is not disruptive, but having most of them doing this over a 7 minute period is very distracting (for them and for me). Its especially bad in winter because they have lots of clothes to put on. [1]
And I am not blaming them for this. My campus is large, and there is a 15 minute gap between classes. Unless they are ready to go the second class ends many of them will be late for the next class.
Allyson pointed out the antsiness, and suggested the following: 7 minutes from the end of class tell them that they are not leaving till the end of the class, but that I am giving them one minute to get their stuff together.
So, I did it on Monday. It was magical, in something like the way that Think Pair Share is magical: one minute of total disruption, followed by 6 minutes of complete focus. Wednesday was the same. What I really noticed on Wednesday was the different noise at 3.45; I dismissed them and the class went from silence to all the noise happening at once, briefly, as they departed much more quickly than I’ve ever seen.
Obviously, what happens in that last 6 minutes is different from before. They can’t take notes, so the 6 minutes has to be stuff that they don’t feel the need to take notes on: last week it was Q&A (and the questions were great), but I can imagine setting up a 5 minute video, or a brief Pair Share about what they have learned in that day. I haven’t read about this before, and when I asked Allyson whether she’d seen this work in other classes, she said no, she just thought it up as a possible solution to a problem she’s seen in all her classes (and almost all of her classes have been large — she’s an Industrial Engineering major). I’m not the least surprised that she is imaginative, but still it was a stunning success. If you try it, or have seen it work already, I’m curious what your experience is/has been.
[1] This is hardly ever a problem in my smaller classes. Indeed in the class Allyson is actually taking from me this semester, which is the last class of the day, it is clear that I could keep them back for an hour and they’d be happy. Its also not a problem even in the large class if I am in the Tues/Thurs 11-12.15 slot, because nobody who is in a class in that slot has another class till 1. But I try to teach smaller classes in that slot because I know that students in smaller classes are much more likely to hang around chatting for a long time after class, and that is the one slot in which I can guarantee that will be possible because nobody else will need the room till 1.
Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson recently published a book, Can College Level The Playing Field?: Higher Education in an Unequal Society, which I’d recommend to anyone who wants to understand the structural position of higher education in the US. Spoiler alert here: Their answer is “No”. Most of the book is taken up with explaining why, by showing the multiple ways in which background inequalities and inequalities in the pre-college education system constrain any efforts higher education might make to level the playing field, and showing how unequal the higher education system is anyway, including – and this seems not to be well understood by politicians or a lot of commentators – how unequal the public sector itself is.
Full disclosure: I’m close friends with both of the authors, and read at least 3 versions of the manuscript before it was published and, I just realized by looking at its Princeton University Press page, wrote a blurb for it. The producer of the CEE podcast series is putting the finishing touches on an interview that we’ve done with them, and as soon as it is published, I’ll post about it encouraging you to listen and, again, encouraging you to read the book.
This (extremely long) post, though, is only secondarily about the book. My main interest is in a genuinely awful review of it, and of another book by Gary Orfield (which, I will emphasize several times, I have not read yet), in Boston Review by Christopher Newfield. I’m writing about it partly because it so irritated me that I want to get my irritation out of my system, but also partly because it illustrates some of the failings that are common to many of the books and commentaries I read about higher education.
Let’s start with Newfield’s criticism of the final two chapters, which articulate a series of measures that legislators and campus leaders could feasibly adopt to reduce somewhat the role of higher education in reproducing inequality. He accuses them of advocating “tinkering toward utopia”. What we need, he says, is bold, large scale, dynamic reforms of higher education. Unfortunately Baum and McPherson reject the two examples of what he calls “the two most significant educational movements of the last decade”: the movements for student loan cancellation, and free college.
“Tinkering toward utopia” is a nice phrase (not Newfield’s own, as he acknowledges). But it’s an odd way of describing proposals which the authors specifically say will not come anywhere close to achieving anything like utopia (because, as I’ve said, their answer to the question posed in their title is a very firm “No”).
And how would what he calls the “two most significant educational movements in the past decade” lead toward utopia? Frankly, it seems odd to call student debt cancellation an educational movement. It really has nothing to do with education. It’s a simple way of putting $1.7 trillion in the hands of people who went to college, on a one-off basis. It would not increase spending in, or funding of, higher education, and it would not make it more affordable for anybody. It wouldn’t alter the inegalitarian structure of higher education: indeed, full scale debt cancellation would give far more money to graduates who were already recipients of higher public subsidies than to people who were subsidized less (because, being from poorer families they attended less selective colleges, on which the government spent and spends less money. As Baum and McPherson demonstrate in chapter 3, this is true within the public higher education system, as well as between it and some parts of the private system). Indeed: student debt cancellation might actually turn out to be a chimera: Biden seems to have been unable to deliver it, thus possibly paying whatever electoral cost is associated with seeming to favour the better educated without harvesting any of the electoral benefit of actually getting money into their hands. (And: one big argument for student debt forgiveness was that it was a fiscal stimulus measure that the President could enact without Congress: surely if Congress were inclined to act we wouldn’t be asking it to give $1.7 trillion just to people who attended college? Progressives, I assume, would want to get at least a little bit of it into the hands of people with no experience of college)
Free public college would, by contrast, have substantial effects on higher education, not all of which are well understood. But it’s worth mentioning that it, too, would not result in increased spending in, or funding of, higher education. Free public college would, at best, keep total spending on public education constant: families that currently pay tuition would keep the money, which would be replaced by funds from the Federal and/or state governments [1]. Higher income students would receive a much bigger handout than low income students because there are many more of them, they attend public institutions that spend more on them, and they stay in those institutions longer, than low income students. And for most low-income students public college is already tuition-free or nearly so, because most low income students in the public sector either attend lower tuition institutions (which, as the previous sentence implies, and as Baum & McPherson’s book shows not coincidentally, receive less State support per student) or, as in the case of UW-Madison and many other flagships, get a package which eliminates tuition. So what Warren and Sanders proposed was a massive transfer of money to families in the upper third of the income distribution which did very little to address the real college affordability problem for lower income students, which is not tuition and fees but living expenses and the educational resources available to the institutions they attend. (Indeed, the Sanders proposal restricted spending on facilities and administration; whereas one of the serious problems that community colleges, which most lower income students attend, notoriously suffer from is a lack of administrative staff, especially counselors, and on other campuses space is a serious issue).[2][2.5]
The most peculiar part of Newfield’s review is the following passage (warning: it’s long):
Equality of opportunity has been a mainstream policy goal for years now, and it is the ethical horizon of these two arguments—the “level playing field” of Baum and McPherson’s title. But a different mainstream operated in the mid-1960s, one that saw equal opportunity as the means to the end of equal outcomes. That goal appeared in a famous commencement address Lyndon Johnson delivered at Howard University in 1965:
Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society—to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others.
But freedom is not enough. . . You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “You are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.
Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. And this is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights.
We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact, and equality as a result.
Johnson defined equal opportunity as the gateway to equal results. This could not mean that every individual would end up with equal resources, but it did mean that equal outcomes should hold across racial groups. On average, Black students would graduate from high school at roughly the same rates as whites, go on to university at the same rates, get bachelors’ degrees at the same rates, and so on. (The same would be true of indigenous and Latino students—indeed students from any racial group.) With visible and structural inequalities truly undone, Blacks as a group would come to earn, on average, the same as whites in employment after college, and their family wealth would soon become comparable (rather than get stuck at 15 percent of white wealth, where it has lingered for years). A similar line of thought lay behind the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution: women should earn the same as men. On this conception, justice entails not the right to compete to be equal—as had been done for centuries—but being equal in fact.
If a social system is producing unequal group outcomes, the only reasonable conclusion is that opportunities are not distributed equally.
Johnson said the quiet part out loud—the part that Baum, McPherson, and Orfield cannot bring themselves to say even today. The argument of his Howard speech is the only coherent theory of civil rights: if no racial group is innately inferior to another and opportunity is genuinely equally distributed, then we should expect to see equal outcomes across groups. The upshot is that if a social system is producing unequal group outcomes, the only reasonable conclusion is that opportunities are not distributed equally. This is what Johnson was saying.
Again, I have not read Orfield’s book (though I have read enough of Orfield’s work to find it spectacularly surprising that he suddenly can’t bring himself to say out loud something he’s been saying for decades. Whatever). Baum and McPherson are unequivocal in their assertion of what Newfield says they cannot bring themselves to say even today. The title of their book is Can College Level the Playing Field? and, as I said earlier, their answer to that question is “No”. It’s actually more elaborate — something like this: “No way. You would have to ignore all the available evidence to think that the answer is “yes”. Much of our book is taken up with providing you with the available evidence. Opportunities are so utterly unequal from conception to age 18, and educational interventions so much less efficient year on year as children age that it is utterly impossible to think that college could level the playing field, and you would have to be completely deluded to think otherwise”.
Well, they are politer than that, perhaps because they are politer than me. But the answer is reflected on every single page of the book. They have a view that John Quiggin has occasionally articulated here at CT, and that, of course, Rawls shares and that Quiggin, Rawls, Baum and McPherson all believe because it is true – that if you want equal opportunities, you need to massively restrict and maybe even eliminate inequality of outcome, because unequal outcomes in one generation produce unequal opportunity in the next. It’s quite impressive to read more than 4 pages of their book without picking this up; to have read the whole thing and think that they are unwilling to say it is a spectacular achievement.[3] Later he says “Both books stop short of drawing the obvious conclusion: that American education is trapped in an inequality machine”. (Yet again, although this conclusion has been a central theme of Orfield’s work over many years, I don’t know, just perhaps he has made a volte face and has suddenly decided to stop saying it). But the main message of Baum and McPherson’s book is exactly this: “American education is trapped in an inequality machine”. They don’t, it is true, do any hifalutin’ theorizing or call it “racial capitalism”, or appeal to Foucault, or whatever, but they document the way that the inequality machine traps American education on every page.
Newfield seems to really dislike that Baum and McPherson understand what it means for higher education to be trapped in an inequality machine.
Baum and McPherson call for better pathways to degree completion, better advising, and more auditing of colleges to improve “accountability.” We’ve long been doing the last of these, to little effect, and the authors give no reason why their other prescriptions will do much better.Baum and McPherson do say we need to focus on “reducing the differences in opportunities and outcomes between individuals from low-income backgrounds and those with more resources.” Yes—but that’s where the book should start, not where it should end! They add, “There is persuasive evidence that spending more on the education” of students at community colleges and other broad-access institutions “pays off in higher graduation rates.” Yes! So let’s spend more—a lot more! “Inadequate funding of broad-access colleges is a major national problem.” Yes! So let’s actually fund the reduction of racialized outcomes gaps!
Actually Baum and McPherson do want us to spend more. A lot more. But, oddly for people who are supposed not to understand that higher education is trapped in an inequality machine, they want to spend that money on reducing (maybe even eliminating) poverty. They want to reduce the racialized outcome gaps not by spending $60 billion/year mainly on wealthy and white students in higher education but by spending it on pre-school and elementary schools that all black children attend and which are, they think (maybe Newfield disagrees) currently under resourced. (Perhaps their hunch is that spending money on educating black and poor children is more likely to benefit them than spending that same money on white and more affluent young adults. Just a hunch, but maybe not a crazy one). They prioritize improving universal education (especially early years education, where the money will have more effect) over selective education. The reason they are skeptical of debt forgiveness and free public college is that those programs direct money almost entirely into the upper 30% of the income distribution (if you don’t believe this, go ahead, carry on not believing it, but you won’t be able to not believe it if you read their book) and they think that government spending would be better directed at getting us out of, rather than, as Newfield seems to prefer, entrenching, the inequality machine.
Even if you’re going to restrict new education-related spending to giving families involved in higher education money (as Newfield’s headline programs would), Baum and McPherson point out that point out that the $1.7 trillion Newfield recommends for debt relief, most of which would go to higher income earners, would enable us to double the size of the Pell Grant program for 25 years, so that it would cover not just tuition, but for many low-income students, most living costs. Add in the $60 billion/year that free public college would cost (and disqualify for-profits from receiving it) and you have something that, unlike debt forgiveness and free public college, would likely have a massive positive impact on college success for low and lower middle income students.
In reality, the portrait of inequality so scrupulously depicted in these books implies a conclusion their authors effectively recoil from: that we must massively rebuild a full range of social systems on truly egalitarian grounds.
Nope. (Yet yet again, maybe Orfield has had a late life conversion and does recoil from that. I’ll read his book and find out. Or maybe someone can ask him). But Baum and McPherson advocate precisely that we must massively build (I take Newfield’s ‘rebuild’ comment to be a rhetorical bit of golden ageism) a full range of social systems on truly egalitarian grounds.
Ok, here’s a revealing passage:
Both books focus on increasing limited kinds of procedural fairness, clouding the egalitarian vision animating the overall struggle. The result—like so much cognitive dissonance in a mind divided against itself—makes for painful reading. “I’m not a neoliberal,” the ego insists, but the superego plainly is.
The book I’m talking about does not focus on procedural fairness (though it does, as I’ve said, point out that if you did want to achieve that kind of procedural fairness you’d have to pursue an extremely egalitarian social policy agenda). But it does try to understand the constraints under which higher education operates in our, highly inegalitarian, society, and attempts to give guidance to agents operating under those constraints. It’s possible that Newfield mistakes an understanding and description of the state of the world for an endorsement of that state. But description is not endorsement. When Marx said that philosophers had hitherto only sought to understand the world and the point is to change it he did not mean that it was a mistake to understand it. If you want to change it you need to understand it, and that’s what Baum & McPherson (and much of Orfield’s previous work) does. I don’t know how to use Freudian terms, so I won’t, but Baum and McPherson are not neoliberals: they just understand that the agents they are addressing live in a world shaped by neoliberalism, and don’t have the power, right now and within the time horizons they are concerned with, substantially to shape it.
I haven’t quite finished venting. Here’s the final annoying passage I want to talk about.[4]
Over the last several decades, public universities have accepted state cuts in large part because it was harder to fight the statehouse than to raise tuition on students. In 1995 states on average allocated $8,922 per “full-time equivalent student.” In 2020 that figure was $8,636, below the 1995 level adjusted for inflation. Public college students spent much of the 2010s getting allocations that were 10–20 percent below those of 1995. The federal government accepted a dramatic drop in the relative value of its main grant, the Pell grant, and a shift of financial aid from grants to loans. It let a good chunk of the federal loan system be siphoned off by for-profit colleges, leading disproportionate shares of students of color toward the worst graduation rates, highest debt loads, and highest default rates in known higher education history.
So, there’s some truth here, and some falsehood. Straightforwardly false: its not true that the Pell grant has diminished in value since 1995. Indeed it was declining in value in real terms for over a decade till 1995, since which it has climbed in value, and the program itself has grown hugely (because more and more low-income students are attending college). It is true that States are now spending less per student on higher education, despite spending more total dollars in real terms, and in many cases a larger proportion of their budgets, on higher education. But this is somewhat misleading. Federal government spending on grant aid and tax benefits for higher education has grown dramatically in that period, offsetting the reductions in state aid/student. Of course, different students benefit from Federal aid than from the direct subsidies to institutions that States provide. Those go to all students who attend (more for the more affluent students who attend the better subsidized more selective public institutions, less for the less affluent students who attend the less and non-selective public institutions, sure, but still, everyone shares in the aid). Pell grants go to low-income students, veterans benefits (which grew dramatically after 2003 for some reason) go to… veterans, and tax advantages go to more affluent students.[5] The recipients are different, but the public is paying.
One thing that’s unambiguously right in the passage is that a non-trivial proportion of Federal loans – and, actually, of Federal grant aid – ends up in the hands of for-profit colleges. Dare I imagine that there is a reason why the two so-called “two most significant educational reform movements” of the last decade have been attempts to distribute resources to people who have graduated college, or have attended college or who are attending public colleges, rather than focusing on regulating or improving or eviscerating for-profits that prey on low-income and non-white students. Maybe it’s an entirely innocent reason – it’s not sexy. But it would be really easy for individual States, if they wanted, to regulate for-profits or, preferably, steer Federal resources away from for-profits and get those resources diverted to public and non-profit colleges. Any State could establish a Pell-top up grant and a Veteran’s Benefit top-up grant of, say, $3k-5k/year for which for-profits would be ineligible, and immediately low-income students would flock out of for-profits, mainly to public institutions, bringing their Pell and Veteran’s Benefit grants with them. Any state where the Democrats hold all branches of government, and perhaps even some where they don’t control the State Supreme Court, could do this, and a few do. But plenty of others could.
Baum and McPherson advocate increases in federal and state grant aid, and better accountability for both for profits and non-profit and public institutions. If Newfield, or Warren or Sanders, want to start an educational movement that would be genuinely egalitarian, they could start by reading Baum and McPherson’s book, where they’d get a lot of help. Which, I strongly recommend, you should do too!
[1] I say at best because I think there are reasonable fears that it would, over time, reduce the level of resources available to public colleges and universities. Two fears I have (that I don’t think Baum and McPherson mention, but I might be wrong). One is: what happens when Republicans control all 4 branches of government? In Wisconsin when Republicans have held the reins of power they have used them to limit state funding of higher education, and have frozen in-state tuition rates. Do we really think that Republicans would act differently at the national level? For that matter, how confident are we that Democrats would? And second, if you suspect, as I do, that would result in an erosion of available resources, do you really think that affluent families will keep spending $30-50k/yr in tuition sending their children to degraded public flagships in other states rather than to financially healthier private schools which will spend the tuition revenues on their children rather than using them to cross-subsidize low-income students and state residents?
[2] How is space an issue? Many more selective public schools have better equipped and less crowded classrooms, more relaxing spaces within which instructors and students might mingle, and less pressure on classroom use, allowing, for example, for students and instructors to chat before or after class, than do many of the regional comprehensives in their systems. They also have more scope for scheduling classes to optimize use of building space, because a higher proportion of their students have flexible schedules being younger, from more affluent families, and residing on campus. Even on flagships: on my campus Kinesiology, a large and one of the fastest growing majors, is stuck in the basement of a terrible building replete with classrooms designed for bad science teaching in the 50’s.
[2.5] I did some investigation that suggested that for both Warren and Sanders what you saw was what you got: literally everything in each of their plans was on their website, suggesting that quite limited thought had gone into them.
[3] I believe Newfield read the book because he has quotes from several parts of it. My first book was reviewed by two different reviewers who I am sure did not read it, one because he criticizes the book for making an argument for exactly the opposite conclusion that it in fact argued for, and the other because the entire review was focused on one of the blurbs, which I didn’t write.
[4] That’s a complete lie. I want to talk about several more annoying passages. For example, this silliness pissed me off: “this cautionary moral is more likely to function as an alibi for the status quo than to inspire action capable of meeting the structural challenge”. But, really, you get the idea.
[5] Federal aid typically comes in voucher form, so it shows up as tuition revenue, whereas state aid typically goes directly to institutions. So if all government funding were in the form of vouchers tuition would look high, even though families would only actually be spending the same amount as if all government funding were direct-to-institution and tuition looked low.
FreshRSS 