decoding the college tuition sticker price

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(Washington, DC) Tuition at Stanford is $41,000/year. But Keith Humphries notes that Stanford offers substantial financial aid, so that families that earn $100,000 per year pay no tuition. After mentioning that Stanford’s endowment is $17 billion, he says, “There are many ways for a wealthy university to allocate its resources … I am proud to say [Stanford] has chosen to spend heavily on ensuring that anyone who is admitted can afford to attend.”

I don’t think the implication is correct. It sounds as if undergraduate education costs Stanford $41,000/student, but it deploys its endowment income to defray those costs for middle-class applicants. But the price tag is the same at many private institutions that have far smaller endowments, that seem to have similar costs per student, and that also provide quite a bit of financial aid. Their aid packages for a family with 6-figure income may not match Stanford’s, but they often come close.

I’m pretty sure this is what is going on: There are thousands of families in the top 10% of the income distribution whose kids are highly qualified for college and who want to get into name-brand institutions. It is easy for those families to spend $41,000/year on tuition; their concern is whether their children will be admitted. To charge them anything less than $41,000 is just leaving money on the table–money that can be used for a variety of worthy educational purposes, including scholarships. But if you charge everyone $41,000, you will end up with a much more homogeneous and less talented student body than you want. So you plan to discount in pursuit of both excellence and diversity. As long as the real cost of education is well under $41,000, you can discount tuition for many students without using any endowment income. In fact, I figure that the real cost per student of an excellent college education is more like $15,000. Setting the base price much higher than that generates resources that can be used for good purposes. The problem, however, is that many families see the sticker price and assume that college is not for them.

the Cesar Chavez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy

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(Washington, DC) Today, I will be meeting with students and staff of the Chavez Schools in DC. This blog shows that I have visited before–in February and April 2003. The Chavez network has since grown to four schools and 1,300 students. Its founder, Irasema Salcido, not only wanted to provide an excellent education for DC students by engaging them in the critical study of public policy; she also wanted to improve DC’s governance by developing a new generation of mostly minority leaders who had the skills and motivations to run the city. It was an inspiring vision from the start, and the early outcomes were impressive. I look forward to catching up.

See also my posts on Charter Schools and Democracy, The Argument for Small Schools, and Illumination from the Charter Debate–and especially a great series of case studies and policy briefs on “teaching citizenship in charter schools,” from the AEI Program in American Citizenship.

Melissa Bass, The Politics and Civics of National Service

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Melissa Bass has published The Politics and Civics of National Service: Lessons from the Civilian Conversation Corps, VISTA, and AmeriCorps (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2013). This book originated with a CIRCLE grant and two CIRCLE Working Papers (numbers 11 and 12). It is a great achievement and truly essential reading for anyone who is interested in civilian national service as an instrument for social reform, civic education, or strengthening communities.

Because Bass describes three federal service initiatives that originated, respectively, in the Depression, the 1960s, and the 1980s, her story also provides an excellent opportunity to think about broader changes in the definition of “citizenship,” the aims of government, prevailing ideas about education, poverty, youth development, and the environment, and the relationship between state and market. Although the Civilian Conservation Corps, VISTA, and AmeriCorps share certain common features, the differences are perhaps more illuminating. No one in 1932 would have thought to promote “social entrepreneurship” with competitive grants to NGOs that place many of their volunteers in white collar nonprofit jobs. No one today would envision housing young men in racially segregated federal work camps to study American ideals while building dams and laying telephone lines.

The interest of the book is not merely historical or analytical. To revive ideals of active, responsible, and inclusive citizenship requires supportive institutions and policies. When designing these policies, we must be attentive not only to how they may affect their participants and beneficiaries, but also to how they will fit into–or alter–the broader political system. Most policies have feedback loops, either strengthening or undermining themselves over time. The CCC, for instance, grew to almost 100 times the maximum size of VISTA because it was understood as a jobs program in the midst of an unemployment crisis. But it was quickly killed when the economic situation changed. In contrast, AmeriCorps’ decentralized model creates a network of grantees that lobby for the program’s preservation–but the grantees are far too small and weak to expand it much. (Despite its breadth and diversity, AmeriCorps remains one fifth the size of the CCC in a much bigger country.) Michael Sandel once called for a “political economy of citizenship.” Anyone who takes up his challenge should pay serious attention to the lessons of Melissa Bass’s book.

coming of age politically in different historical moments

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At a fine panel on “The Civic Mission of Higher Education” last week, the panelists basically said:

  1. We should care about college students as whole people, considering their emotional and social well-being as well as their academic success. Engaging with communities benefits students holistically.
  2. Students should not only seek fulfilling and educational experiences, but also fight for justice even if that has costs for themselves. They must ask the really difficult and troubling questions.
  3. Graduate students and others heading for scholarly or intellectual careers face a terrible shortage of traditional jobs, but there are openings for more engaged intellectuals.

All that is true, but putting the three parts together is very difficult. In fact, I doubt that anyone can do it alone–asking profound and troubling questions, taking effective action, finding a relevant career path or calling, and obtaining personal satisfaction and fulfillment along the way. You can do all of that if you belong to a thriving political or social movement, but not if such movements are missing.

In other words, we cannot merely encourage students to ask and explore questions. They must also have a menu of available answers. Meaningful answers are more than ideas or theories. They consist of ideals plus strategies, current leaders and role-models, agendas, institutions, jobs, cultural expressions, and vocabularies, all wrapped up together.

For instance, if you went to Washington with FDR in 1932 or JFK in 1960, you thought you were building something new and great. You had ideas, leaders, agendas, and institutions all ready to embrace you. You could engage in debates within those movements, but you had a structure. In 2008 and 2012, young people voted for the candidate who supported the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society, Barack Obama. But very few young people felt called to Washington to work for the federal administrative state. Its heroes are dead, its ideals are fulfilled or compromised, its vocations seem routine.

If you went to Washington with Reagan and the resurgent conservatives of 1980, you also had an agenda, ideals, theories, strategies, and living heroes. My sense is that the conservative movement does not provide any of that for young people today.

A subtle case is the Civil Rights Movement. In Freedom Summer, Doug McAdam shows that the 1,000 young white college volunteers who went to Mississippi in 1963 did not (for the most part) benefit personally from that experience. They tended to struggle with jobs, relationships, and psychological issues later in life. The Civil Rights Movement was certainly a structure that developed leaders. But for that purpose, it worked better in 1955 than in 1963. By the early 1960s, it was beginning to splinter, its dynamic and vibrant debates turning divisive and caustic. Also, an argument had broken out about whether white middle-class leaders has a place in the movement. I think the critics had a point, but for young white volunteers, the argument was pretty alienating. Most moved to the anti-War or Women’s movements, but the transition was tough.

Higher education cannot build social and political movements. Movement-building cannot be an objective of our institutions, which must be more neutral and deliberative than that. But we must reckon with the political and intellectual context in which we work. If our young people lack a choice of vibrant political movements, that will make our educational mission much harder.

teaching citizenship by teaching about guns

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(Concord NH) While traveling up and down the East Coast and talking about civic education, I opened the New York Times to find that the gun industry uses the same language of “citizenship” that my colleagues and I employ:

The N.R.A. has for decades given grants for youth shooting programs, mostly to Boy Scout councils and 4-H groups, which traditionally involved single-shot rimfire rifles, BB guns and archery. Its $21 million in total grants in 2010 was nearly double what it gave out five years earlier.

Newer initiatives by other organizations go further, seeking to introduce children to high-powered rifles and handguns while invoking the same rationale of those older, more traditional programs: that firearms can teach “life skills” like responsibility, ethics and citizenship.

The people I’ve been hanging around with–from Georgia to New Hampshire–argue that deliberation and debate, community-service, and political participation teach “life skills,” ethics, and citizenship. We cite evidence that these organized forms of civic participation are related to psychological well-being, writing skills, academic success, and employment (among other good outcomes).

Is it possible that a shooting club could also bring such benefits? Before you say “no,” I would direct you to the National 4-H Shooting Sports program, which is billed as “Skills for Life–Activity for a Lifetime.” 4-H has one of the best overall civic development models in the country, and its Shooting Sports program aims to:

  • teach decision making, teamwork, self- discipline, self-confidence, and problem solving;
  • promote the highest standards of safety, sportsmanship, and ethical behavior;
  • encourage an appreciation and understanding of natural resources;
  • develop leadership abilities;
  • build character and willingness to assume citizenship responsibility;
  • furnish enjoyable, positive relationships with peers and adult instructors;
  • strengthen families through participation in lifelong recreational activities;
  • build awareness of related career opportunities.

(This all comes from a 4-H brochure entitled “Point Kids in the Right Direction.”) I am suspicious of efforts sponsored by the gun industry to get young children shooting (and buying weapons). According to the Times, an ad in Junior Shooters magazine says, “Who knows? Maybe you’ll find a Bushmaster AR-15 under your tree some frosty Christmas morning!” The motive is transparently commercial and the product is an assault rifle. But 4-H has a well-deserved reputation for actually developing young adults’ leadership and civic skills. And 4-H offers Shooting Sports.

I don’t think anyone conducts comparative research on shooting clubs versus community service programs. We don’t ask which is a better way to teach responsibility and life skills. Of course, the answer might depend on how one defines the goals. If “citizenship” is essentially about caring and non-violence, then community service will have a leg up. If “citizenship” includes a readiness to bear arms in defense of the country or the community, then gun clubs will have the edge. In that respect, the debate is essentially normative–concerning values.

Empirical claims are also relevant. 4-H asserts that Shooting Sports “teach decision making, teamwork, [and] self- discipline.” That could be true (or false). Scholars who investigate community service and political engagement are unlikely to study the possible benefits of gun clubs–or stop-and-frisk policies, or boot camps, or high school football. I assume this is because they do not like these activities very much and are not hoping to find evidence in their favor. Meanwhile, on a different moral planet, Americans who like guns are now positing empirical links between shooting clubs and “life skills.”

Studying things that you hope will work is fine–but your hope is as important as your data. You should have moral principles as well as causal hypotheses. I prize “discursive accountability”: saying what you value and why. I am frustrated by social science rhetoric that bypasses the basic moral questions, and also by the kind of discourse prevalent in the humanities that merely poses moral questions. As I have written in a different context, “Stop problematizing; say something.”

For instance, if you don’t like the idea of 10-year-olds shooting assault weapons, explain why not. Don’t depend on an empirical claim (shooting clubs could make some kids into mass murderers) unless that is your true objection to the shooting clubs. If it is your only objection, be prepared to drop it if the evidence disproves the empirical link. But if you dislike the idea of 10-year-olds with Bushmasters for some other reason, you should be able to say what that is.

Similarly, if you prefer community service, you should be able to justify that preference. I actually have trouble endorsing “service” per se; it rings too much of charity or apolitical altruism. I’d rather see the citizen as a nonviolent fighter for justice. But there is scant evidence that a struggle for justice promotes “life skills” or success on the job market. On the contrary, real political activists sometimes pay a heavy price. So empirical evidence won’t take us where we need to go; the deeper questions are inescapable:

  • What is a good life for you (or me)?
  • What is a just society?
  • How important is your own well-being in comparison to the pursuit of social justice?

Having made that long statement in favor of normative explicitness, I ought to practice what I preach. So, my view of gun clubs as civic education …

Hunting is sustainable and ethical as long as one hunts safely and humanely and uses the meat. Firing at targets is an acceptable pastime. Learning to use a deadly weapon may teach an important lesson about our capacity to kill and thus our profound need for self-control. Owning guns is deeply embedded in some American subcultures. Hunting and target-practice are properly social activities that often involve due respect for peers, adults, and nature. 4-H mentions careers in law enforcement and the National Guard; those are honorable and valuable callings.

On the other hand, in civilian life, it is almost never acceptable to employ either violence or the threat of violence. Even when threatened by a gun, using a gun is almost never the right response. The market for legal guns drives the production of guns used in murder and war. Thus anyone who learns to use a gun should learn not to use it on people. A gun program that presents itself as a citizenship program ought to include lessons about not firing on people and not purchasing or using a weapon more deadly than the legitimate purpose requires. Students should also learn the arguments for and against second-amendment rights and be encouraged to form their own independent views.

I am not saying that these features of civic education are absent in today’s gun clubs, only that they must be present if gun programs are to promote good citizenship. Again, a promising example may be the National 4-H Shooting Sports programs.