Student Outcomes Vary at For-Profit, Nonprofit, and Public Schools

From the US GAO

Institutions of higher education, including for-profit, nonprofit, and public schools, receive billions of dollars each year from the Department of Education (Education) to help students pay for school.1 In the 2009-2010 school year, Education provided $132 billion in grants and loans to students under federal student aid programs, up from $49 billion in the 2001-2002 school year.2 However, relatively little information is available about the quality of education being provided by these schools.3 Measuring the quality of educational programs (i.e., how much knowledge or skill students gain) is difficult. Because few direct measures are available, indirect outcome measures, such as graduation and student loan default rates, are often used. Although no single outcome can be used to fully measure something as complex as educational quality, looking at multiple outcome measures (e.g., graduation rates, pass rates on licensing exams, employment outcomes, and student loan default rates) can shed light on the quality of education provided by schools.

Continued at: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d12143.pdf

Castes and Higher Ed

By Gloria Nemerowicz

Income and wealth inequality in the United States, which has become even more pronounced since 1967, continues to interfere with the national need for an increasingly sophisticated and skilled workforce and citizenry. Federal financial assistance to financially needy college students is a rational response to this recognized social and economic inequality.  About 30 years ago, in ways clearly demonstrated by Tom Mortenson in ”How to Limit Opportunity for Higher Education 1980 – 2011,” federal and state policy shifts placed an increasing share of the cost of higher education on students and their families, turning higher education into a commodity provided to those who could pay. Primarily as a consequence of these policies and the associated spiraling costs of attending college, the growth in the portion of our population with a college degree has been slow, increasing from 17 to 30 percent over the past 30 years.  Strikingly, the gains were made primarily by those from the wealthiest backgrounds (18 percent increase) in contrast to a small 4 percent growth, over the same 30 years, for those in the lowest socioeconomic quartile.

Continued at: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/12/09/essay-calls-sustained-effort-colleges-focus-economic-inequality#ixzz1g6JkTUXv

Peeling Back Layers of Ethnicity to Learn More About Students

By Rashid F. Davis

Kirk Semple’s recent article in The New York Times about the high dropout rate among Mexican students compared with other groups raises more questions that are worth asking about achievement among different ethnic groups in New York City.

Most of the conversations we have had about the dropout rate and the achievement gap have been about broader ethnicities — blacks, whites, Hispanics and Asians — because this is the way the schools in New York City and the state break down the graduation data. Those conversations have not been about intra-ethnicities or about nonimmigrants versus immigrants.

Mr. Semple has peeled back the ethnicity onion that has many layers. He provided information for six major immigrant groups: Mexican, Dominican, Chinese, Jamaican, Guyanese and Ecuadorean.

Continued at: http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2011/12/09/peeling-back-the-ethnic-onion-to-learn-more-about-students/?ref=education

Review the data: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/11/25/nyregion/25mexicans-graphic.html?ref=nyregion