Thursday, December 14, 2017



Is there hope for the education system?

Both sides of the aisle can agree that education reform is a necessity. With rising costs of higher education and increased joblessness amongst graduates, the higher education system is failing millions of young Americans. Rather than merely reauthorizing the Higher Education Act as administrations before have done, Congress is voting on the first significant changes to the legislation since 2008.

The Promoting Real Opportunity, Success, and Prosperity through Education Reform (PROSPER) Act was introduced by Congresswoman Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) as an opportunity to reauthorize the Higher Education Act with changes to fit it into a modern context.

As Representative Foxx explains, “We need a higher education system that is designed to meet the needs of today’s students and has the flexibility to innovate for tomorrow’s workforce opportunities. The PROSPER Act is higher education’s long overdue reform.”

The bill encourages greater partnership between industry and institutions by focusing additional resources toward Federal Work-Study programs and provides institutional aid to develop and implement career-specific programs. In a major shift toward private sector partnership, the bill also requires grant application boards and accreditation boards to have at least one member of the business community present, to ensure institutions receiving federal funds are preparing students to meet the needs of the labor force.

Higher education provides no benefit if students cannot receive jobs upon completion of their degree, the situation many students are currently finding themselves in.

Millennials are the most college educated generation, but at the same time too many are finding themselves unable to enter the labor force. The value of a college degree has dropped substantially due to increased enrollment, while tuition soars alongside attendance.

In states like Iowa, more than half of the available jobs are middle-skilled jobs requiring some form of vocational training or employment that needs more than a high school degree but less than a four-year college degree. Students entering college, rather than taking these careers have caused a skills gap across industries in the state’s labor force.

This leaves students with costly degrees but no place to find jobs, most of these students are merely forced to peddle in their debt until an opportunity comes along.

The PROSPER Act begins to taks aim at assisting students with debt as well.

According to the Act’s summary released by the House Education Workforce, the act simplifies the FAFSA system and streamlines student aid programs into a single grant, single loan, and single Work-Study program to “ease confusion for students who are deciding the best options available to responsibly pay for their college education”.

However, this has been a frequent area of controversy for the bill as well. Opponents of the bill have been quick to notice the legislation ends several student loan forgiveness and repayment programs for individuals working in the public and non-profit sector.

This is not the first time this option has been discussed, the Department of Education discussed the possibility of removing loan forgiveness programs earlier this year. Almost 600,000 borrowers have signed up for this program since President George W. Bush introduced it in 2007 to encourage graduates to enter the public service.

Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute argues while this bill does take significant steps to mend the federal aid system and reduce debt, it does not do enough, “What needs to happen, ultimately, is for federal student aid to be phased out… Students with a demonstrated ability to do legitimate college-level work in in-demand fields would almost certainly be able to find private loans; both borrower and lender would likely profit. This bill, not surprisingly, does not phase aid out. It does, though, consolidate aid programs, and takes some small steps forward, capping total amounts students and their families can borrow from Washington, and letting schools say they won’t let students borrow a lot if the program doesn’t seem to justify it.”

The federal government leads student financial assistance, but only because former President Barack Obama made it so. While passing Obamacare, a healthcare policy, President Obama federalized student loans to pay for the costly health plan. Republicans blame this action for souring student loan costs in recent years.

If the history of higher education chaos, exacerbated by elements of this bill, teaches us anything, it is that the federal government should not be handling education policy. While this legislation attempts to limit the federal government’s role in education, it does not go far enough to ensure state control. Many of these very reform elements could be shifted to the states.

The Constitution says nothing about Congress or the executive branch’s role in education, let alone higher education. If states wish to build private sector relationships, they should be the facilitator of those, rather than the federal government which is woefully out of touch with statewide industry needs.

Higher education should be a bipartisan point for Congress, but not federal legislators, state legislators. While the full jury is still out on this bill, as it has not reached the House and Senate floor yet, once it does, representatives would do best to push issues to state governments rather than attempt comprehensive reform on their own

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Here’s the gender gap that matters

The gender gap in engineering and math is old news by now. Despite society's strenuous efforts to close it – including giving girls pink Lego sets to play with – nothing seems to work. The percentage of female engineering students remains around 20 per cent, give or take.

Meanwhile, there's another gender gap that everyone ignores. This one is in the ultra-competitive field of veterinary medicine. Not long ago, all vets were men, and women who aspired to be vets were told to aspire to something else. Scarcely any women were admitted into vet schools before the 1970s. Today the ratio in veterinary school is 80-20 – in favour of women. In 2015, for example, Guelph's Ontario Veterinary College admitted 83 women and only 18 men.

Oddly, nobody is hollering about discrimination in veterinary medicine. No activists or politicians are lobbying for preferential treatment for men, or preaching about systemic discrimination, or complaining because women win all the scholarly awards. No one gives two hoots about the vets (except for the veterinary schools themselves, which are desperate to recruit more males). The reason is that this particular gender imbalance doesn't fit the prevailing narrative, which is that women in historically male fields face systemic discrimination at every turn.

The gender gap we talk about incessantly – the one focused on the relatively small number of professions where men still outnumber women – is not the one that matters. The one that matters is the absence of so many men in higher education. Today, women dominate at all levels of education, including the graduate levels. In most postgraduate fields, as well as in law and medicine, women now outperform and outnumber men by growing margins.

Here's the picture, according to economist Mark Perry writing for the American Enterprise Institute. For every 100 men enrolled in U.S. graduate schools, there are now more than 135 women. In 2016, women earned 57.4 per cent of the masters' degrees and 52.1 per cent of the doctoral degrees. Women earned more doctoral degrees in seven of the 11 graduate fields tracked by the Council of Graduate Schools, including education, arts and humanities, public administration and biology. Men earned most of the doctoral degrees in only four fields: business, engineering, math and computer science, and physical and earth sciences.

I couldn't find similar comprehensive information for Canada, but the University of British Columbia is probably representative. Today, 56 per cent of all UBC graduate students are female. Women dominate in five of the eight fields tracked by UBC, sometimes by overwhelming margins: they make up 75 per cent of graduate students in education, 65 per cent in health sciences, 58 per cent in humanities, 67 per cent in non-health professional areas, and 56 per cent in social sciences. Women make up 44 per cent of the sciences. They lag significantly in only two areas: business and management (38 per cent) and engineering (26 per cent).

"Men have increasingly become the second sex in higher education," writes Mr. Perry.

What's clear from these trends is that educational inequality has worked its way up from elementary school, and is now solidly entrenched at all levels of attainment. This, in an age when higher education and cognitive skills are more important than ever. Why? Surely one reason is the temperamental differences between males and females. Females aim to please; males tend not to give a darn. Females don't mind sitting still and colouring inside the lines; a lot of men go crazy. The modern world demands the type of social skills that women are very good at. Most young men simply aren't wired to sit in classrooms until their mid-to-late 20s.

And that basically explains the feminization of veterinary schools. They're hard to get into. They require many years of extra schooling. The vast majority of the applicants are female because the guys don't even bother trying. They've gone missing in action.

Higher education has become so feminized that it's hard to see how it can be re-engineered to appeal to men. Meanwhile we've hit another watershed. A record number of men are marrying women who are more educated than they are. That's because, as the Institute for Family Studies reports, wives now have more education than husbands do. Among newlyweds, the trend is even more pronounced. In 2015, it says, nearly a third of newlywed women married down, educationally speaking.

Tell your daughters to get used to it. Because the way things are going, they will too.

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Elite colleges are making it easy for conservatives to dislike them

Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard University, has been lobbying in Washington against a Republican proposal to tax large university endowments and make other tax and spending changes that might adversely affect universities. Faust says the endowment tax would be a “blow at the strength of American higher education” and that the suite of proposals lacks “policy logic.” Perhaps so, but they have a political logic. We hope that Harvard and other elite universities will reflect on their part in these developments.

The proposed tax and spending policies aimed at universities are surely related to the sharp recent drop in support by conservatives for colleges and universities. According to a recent Pew Research Center report, 58 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the way things are going in the country, a figure that has grown significantly in the past two years. This development likely reflects four related trends.

First is the obvious progressive tilt in universities, especially elite universities. At Harvard, for example, undergraduate students overwhelmingly identify as progressive or liberal and the faculty overwhelmingly gives to the Democratic Party. Even Harvard Law School, which has a handful of conservative scholars and a new conservative dean, is on the left end of law school faculties, which are themselves more progressive than the legal profession.

Second, the distinctive progressive ideology of elite universities is relentlessly critical of, to the point of being intolerant of, traditions and moral values widely seen as legitimate in the outside world. As a result, elite universities have narrowed the range of acceptable views within their walls.

Third is the rise of anti-conservative “mobs,” “shout-downs” and “illiberal behavior” on campus, as New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes it. Conservative speakers of various stripes are being harassed and excluded with increasing frequency. “Today, on many college campuses, it is liberals trying to repress conservative ideas,” noted former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg at a Harvard address a few years ago. Harvard is actually somewhat better on these issues than many universities — it hasn’t had anti-conservative mobs, and it has been relatively respectful of conservative speakers. But even at Harvard, the pervasive progressive orthodoxy chills conservatives’ speech in the classroom and hallways.

Fourth is the public contempt of so many university academics for those who fund their subsidies. Paul Krugman, an emeritus professor at Princeton University now at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, as well as a New York Times op-ed columnist, offered a self-described “deep thought” in reaction to a Post article about rising conservative anger at American universities: “Maybe conservatives are turning against learning because learning is incompatible with modern conservative ideology.” Krugman’s statement was a mere tweet. But in our experience it reflects an attitude that is widespread at elite universities.

We do not believe that every university in the country, or even every department in most universities, reflects the progressive views that we have described. Nor are we expressing a view on the merits of the current tax and spending proposals, which have complex consequences for universities and the public welfare, about which reasonable minds can differ. And Harvard and other private universities of course have every right to adopt a progressive ideology and to enforce it, more or less, by decisions on faculty hiring, student admissions and the allocation of resources.

But educational institutions should not be surprised when these attitudes and behaviors prove unappealing to a Congress and executive branch that are largely in the control of conservatives. Conservative politicians and their constituents hear, on the one hand, that government owes universities a continuance of largesse and, on the other, that conservatives are ignorant, unworthy or corrupt. This sounds suspiciously like special pleading by an intellectual elite that wants to indulge in social criticism at the expense of the criticized, in both figurative and literal senses.

Universities have become distinctively sectarian, limiting their appeal to federal elected officials who do not share those sectarian views and who are less and less willing to pay the universities to trumpet them.

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