As College Subsidies Rise, Student Learning Declines

The federal government provides more student loans and spends more money on higher education than it used to, but colleges just raise tuition to match the increased spending.

People’s vocabularies are shrinking at a time when more and more people have college degrees. As Zach Goldberg notes, people’s mastery of hard words has been falling for well over 20 years, and their mastery of easier words has been falling for over 15 years. Meanwhile, a higher proportion of Americans have college degrees than in the past, and their average amount of education in years has grown. These trends are illustrated on his graph, titled “WordSum Scores Overtime.”

Going to college no longer expands people’s vocabularies the way it once did: since 1970, there has been a steady decline in the correlation between years of education and people’s personal word stock.

Nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates learn almost nothing in their first two years in college, according to a 2011 study by New York University’s Richard Arum and others. Thirty-six percent learned little even by graduation.

Although federal higher education spending has mushroomed in recent years, students “spent 50% less time studying compared with students a few decades ago.” The National Assessment of Adult Literacy also shows that degree holders are learning less.

People’s minds may not expand much from attending college, but their indebtedness sure does. Increased college attendance has resulted in an explosion in student loan debt. Student loan debt now exceeds $1.56 trillion, saddling 45 million Americans with indebtedness averaging around $35,000 each.

The federal government provides more student loans and spends more money on higher education than it used to, but colleges just raise tuition to match the increased spending. That’s the conclusion to be drawn from a 2015 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

On average, the report finds, each additional dollar in government financial aid translated to a tuition hike of about 65 cents. That indicates that the biggest direct beneficiaries of federal aid are schools, rather than the students hoping to attend them.

By subsidizing college, federal financial aid diverts young people away from vocational training that costs taxpayers far less but can lead to jobs with better pay and more value for America’s economy. In City Journal, Joel Kotkin described the rising pay and opportunities for workers in manufacturing, who often need vocational training rather than college educations.

Yet states spend billions of dollars operating colleges that are little better than diploma mills in terms of academic rigor while managing to graduate few of their students—like Chicago State University, which had an 11 percent graduation rate in 2016. As one education expert noted, “Our colleges and universities are full to the brim with students who do not really belong there, who are unprepared for college and uninterested in breaking a mental sweat.” Many drop out of college before acquiring a degree but after running up student loan debt that will haunt them for years.

"Spending Triples; Results Slide"

Education expert Richard Vedder sums up education’s decline over the last generation as “Spending Triples; Results Slide.” As he notes:

Spending on K-12 schools, adjusting for inflation and enrollment growth, has roughly tripled over the last 50 years, yet there is little solid evidence that today’s students are better prepared for work and citizenship than their grandparents were — and even some evidence that they are less so … college costs are soaring, and almost certainly the education system is becoming less efficient, at a time when labor productivity is rising elsewhere. … More college grads are taking low-skilled jobs previously occupied by those with high school diplomas — more than 80,000 bartenders, for example, have at least a bachelor’s degree.

Colleges have spent much of the increased tuition they now charge students on vast armies of college bureaucrats and administrators. Professors have benefited far less. By 2011, there were already more college administrators than faculty at California State University. The University of California, which claimed to have cut administrative spending “to the bone,” was busy creating new positions for politically correct bureaucrats even as it raised student fees and tuition to record levels. As the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald noted in 2011:

The University of California at San Diego, for example, is creating a new full-time “vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion.” This position would augment UC San Diego’s already massive diversity apparatus, which includes the Chancellor’s Diversity Office, the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity, the assistant vice chancellor for diversity, the faculty equity advisors, the graduate diversity coordinators, the staff diversity liaison, the undergraduate student diversity liaison, the graduate student diversity liaison, the chief diversity officer, the director of development for diversity initiatives, the Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity, the Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues, the Committee on the Status of Women, the Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion, the Diversity Council, and the directors of the Cross-Cultural Center, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center, and the Women’s Center.

Some colleges have raised spending on administrators by more than 600 percent in recent years.

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Review of Palestinian textbooks launched amid British concern curriculum promotes anti-Israel violence

The UK government is to play a central role in a review of Palestinian school textbooks amid concern British aid money is funding a curriculum that allegedly incites violence against Israelis.

The Department for International Development (DFID) confirmed it had “successfully pushed” for the review of the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) current curriculum for primary and secondary school children.

DFID announced the Georg Eckert Institute - a leading international institute for analysing education media based in Germany - had been commissioned to produce an initial scoping report to expedite the full review.

An international group, including representatives from the UK, will work on the review, which is to due to be concluded by September 2019.

The PA agreed to “engage constructively” with the findings. DFID said that if evidence of material which incites violence is found they will take action.

International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt said: “The UK is rightly at the forefront of the international community on this issue. We are working closely with the PA to ensure that all Palestinian children receive a decent education and are able to fulfil their potential.”

The UK will donate £125 million to the PA by 2021 with £20 million of the total budget spent on education.

DFID says UK aid is helping to provide quality education for children in the West Bank, including by paying the salaries of specially vetted teachers.

The department disputed reports that UK aid funds the writing or provision of textbooks by the PA, and claims everything given to the PA is subject to safeguards to ensure aid is used for its intended purpose.

Labour Friends of Israel has been behind repeated calls for the government to probe the “scandal” of British money being used to fund a curriculum which incites the murder of Israelis and circulates antisemitic material to children.

LFI vice-chair Dame Louise Ellman told the House of Commons in January that young Palestinian minds were currently “being poisoned” and “the opportunity for Britain to help promote the values of peace, reconciliation and coexistence squandered.”

LFI chair Joan Ryan has also been a vociferous campaigner for action over the PA curriculum.

In 2017, a report by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education group (IMPACT-se) concluded that PA textbooks encouraged “young Palestinians to acts of violence in a more extensive and sophisticated manner” and that “the curriculum’s focus appears to have expanded from demonization of Israel to providing a rationale for war”.

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Principal of prestigious Australian girls’ school says students should be able to use Google during their HSC exams

The principal from a prestigious Sydney private girls’ school has suggested a radical new idea to add more “depth” to the HSC — and its not studying harder.

Shane Hogan, the principal of Kambala in Rose Bay, has voiced his support for students being allowed to use the internet and search engines such as Google on mobile devices while they sit their final HSC exams.

Mr Hogan thinks changing the way students sit the exam could add more “depth” to their learning, saying many enter exams having memorised entire essays.

He says the test has become outdated and has little to do with the real world. “You have to think historically about the HSC and what it was designed to do,” Mr Hogan told Ben Fordham on 2GB radio on Friday. He explained the HSC, originally introduced in 1967, was designed for school leavers who were hoping to enter university.

Students are now required to stay at school until they are at least 16 or 17 years old and school leavers are required to engage in training. Three-quarters of students remain at school throughout the HSC.

But the principal said the current system has been reduced to a “memory test” with students entering exam rooms having rote learned entire essays.

Mr Hogan said the reality of “today is that we all grab our phone as soon as we’re asked a question”. “If we’re gonna test the kids let them use the tools that they will really use when they’re out in the workplace.” This means access to the internet during an exam. “It’s down the track but I believe it’s the way to go,” Mr Hogan said.

“The students have the essays prepared before they enter the room. It’s almost irrelevant. “There’s no depth in their learning, there’s no passion in their learning. It’s merely a race to the finish. It’s time the HSC entered this century.”

Mr Hogan also questioned the relevance of the ATAR ranking, a percentile score derived from comparing HSC marks against students across the country. ATAR ranks compare students who take on vastly different types of course work, offering no recommendation for higher learning.

He compared students who take on a number of language subjects to those taking on courses like design and technology, art, drama and music, achieving the same ATAR score.

“How is that … relevant? And what courses are they entering?” Mr Hogan said. “It’s a tool for universities to pick students. It’s not relevant to life.”

Mr Hogan pointed to the US model, where entry applications are individually assessed by the institution, as opposed to being “plucked” from their ATAR numbers.

“We’ve got a group who want to go to university, where we need to ‘depth’ their study more,” he said. “But I also think we have a group of young people that are yet to decide, and we need to educate them in the basic skills of team building, problem solving, but also passions.”

He suggested changes to the later years of school, where students could be given the option to focus on one or two subjects and develop greater understanding.

Kambala’s principal says the exams were set up for students hopeful to gain entry to university, at a time when many more students left school at the end of year 10. Students are now required to continue on at school until they complete year 12.

There are now over 142 subjects tested at the HSC, including 62 language subjects. He said fewer than 25 per cent of HSC students use the ATAR to enter university.

At Kambala School, 99 per cent of students are university orientated.

The ATAR was introduced as a national system in 2009 by the Gillard government for students in NSW and the ACT. It was further rolled out to remaining states and territories in 2010, excluding Queensland who plan to introduce the ATAR system in 2019.

The HSC was introduced in 1967, and underwent its last major revision in 2001.

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