Back to Our [Regularly?] Scheduled Programming…

July 22, 2020

Per usual, a fire hose of content, but there has been some really good stuff that I’ve managed to get through in between my adventures with Lucky (who came home with me three months ago on Sunday!!!).

On the COVID-specific front, I would highly recommend these recent pieces:

Rob Kelchen writes about the upcoming fall for higher education in the Chronicle of Higher Education. This one will hit all four of the major sources of higher education revenue – tuition, state funding, auxiliary sources like housing, and endowment returns and gifts. The fall will be rough. We will see layoffs, declarations of fiscal emergencies, and colleges that are not well-positioned to weather this storm may close.

Kevin Carey also looks at the campuses in the middle of the financial pack. Harvard, MIT? They’ll be fine. Carey notes that only about 14% of Cal State students live on campus, while other colleges/systems can derive as much as 30 percent of annual revenue from auxiliary services (see Kelchen’s op-ed above). Both types of institution are in for a tough time, but likely for somewhat different reasons.

This is less about COVID and more about never letting a crisis go to waste. Also in the Chronicle, Anthony Carnevale, Peter Schmidt, and Jeff Strohl take aim at merit aid. The piece discusses ways we fund elitism and the elites at the expense of students and campuses that need resources. They see an opportunity to end “affirmative action for rich white people.” I have heard a lot of folks discuss the ways in which societies dramatically shift in the wake of events like this pandemic. Will we seize the opportunities these authors discuss? I hope so.

On the less COVID-centric front:

Two pieces related to less traditional forms of community college enrollment caught my eye. We think a lot about students who start at community colleges, but what about those who start at four-years and take CC courses along the way? My friends Vivian Liu and Maggie Fay have some cool research out looking at students who enroll in a four-year institution, but who also supplement that enrollment with course-taking at a community college. The find that around 8 percent of students who began at a four-year institution in their data also took community college courses during their educational journey. These “supplementally enrolled” students had higher STEM and total credits earned, higher bachelor’s attainment, and better employment outcomes. Community colleges are pretty awesome.

Elizabeth Meza and Debra Bragg investigated community college baccalaureate (CCB) degree students in Washington. CCB students have slightly higher employment outcomes and initial earnings, but it looks like the traditional BA/BS students catch up and overtake their peers within about three years (given the relative recency of these programs, longer-term effects are tricky to study). They also find gaps by race and gender. If I’m reading their table 5 correctly, the earnings gaps between CCB men and CCB women are FAR larger than the earnings gap among traditional degree-earners. Small sample sizes render analysis by race somewhat difficult, but the authors do document racial differences as well. I’m not sure what’s going on with the healthcare earnings by race – those rows are surprising to me.

On the financial aid/financial well-being front, Kasey Klepfer, Allyson Cornett, Carla Fletcher, and Jeff Webster write up results from a student survey regarding student financial wellness. I don’t know that anybody here will be surprised by any of their findings. Perhaps the magnitude will be larger than we expect, but we see a majority of students worry about how they’ll pay for college and living expenses at the same time. Many students are not sure how they will fund their next semester, and students (particularly at community colleges) need to work to support families. There is a lot in here. It’s worth at least reviewing the executive summary.

The Student Borrower Protection Center released a report about race and student debt. Here too, you already know the upshot: areas with high minority residents are seeing faster growth in student debt, delinquency, and default.

The final piece for today is from the American Enterprise Institute. Jorge Klor de Alva and Cody Christensen examine economic mobility, looking at graduates from four-year institutions who are now in their 20s and 30s (side note, I love it when I’m part of a dataset…). In their executive summary, they note there are a number of schools that “beat the odds,” in that their grads climb the economic ladder more quickly than we would expect given the demographics of their graduates. I’ll admit that I have not had the chance to properly read it, but my questions are largely around how well it compares to other studies of intergenerational mobility (like Chetty et al.). Also, they provide their dataset…I do hope to find some time to look at the California subset, but I don’t know when that’s going to happen.

Stay home and stay safe!

Vikash Reddy, Senior Director of Policy Research