UVA: Poster Child for Empty Promises and False Hopes

Just a few years ago, we the people of UW-Madison were hearing quite a bit about the flagship university of another state -- the University of Virginia.  Our Chancellor at the time, Biddy Martin, is from Virginia, and lauded UVA's efforts to gain autonomy from the state while also increasing affordability through its "Access UVA" program.

I vehemently and repeatedly disagreed with Martin's assessment of UVA and its "successes" at the time, but to little avail.  She managed to convince most of the university that a semi-divorce from the state would allow for financial flexibilities that would help to make college more affordable. While some of her plans were thwarted by the rest of Wisconsin, she got the vote of the Faculty Senate and to this day, many students and faculty speak of her efforts as if they made UW-Madison more affordable.

In point of fact, they did not, and today even the poster child she commended-- UVA-- fell to pieces. Access UVA will no longer be a grants program, instead it will be scaled back and shifted to include a sizable amount of loans.  Students from low-income families will graduate with $14,000 in debt (if they escape after just 4 years--unlikely) and other students with up to $28,000.

Access UVA, said President Teresa Sullivan, wasn't "sustainable."  There's an end-stop to her statement that makes you wonder if she and the school recognize that the result was not inevitable but rather stemmed directly from the political and policy choices made over the last decade.  Now UVA must face facts: its costs of attendance are high, its support from the state of Virginia is low, and it is going to ask students from poor families to graduate with debt amounting to a third or more of their families' annual income.  These things don't just happen.

High-tuition high-aid models of financing higher education were formulated and evaluated at a time when college students were on average wealthier, whiter, and smaller in number.  It was perhaps possible to feel proudly progressive about taking tuition from the top 75% and redistributing aid to the bottom 25% (or even 90/10).  No longer.  Today about 80% of students feel college is unaffordable, and yet they have to pay high tuition to make the top 20% happy in their glorified teeny-tiny classes, lush campuses, and elitist environments. Only a fraction of that 80% gets any significant grant aid, while the rest carry debt.  In this model, 80% of the students bear the brunt of the education of the top 20%, who escape from their college party years with debt that Mommy and Daddy pay off on graduation day.

The student leader at UVA who objected to these changes perfectly described the real underlying problem when he said "[but] there are increasingly few places left to streamline or cut back on to make these ends meet without impacting the quality of education or student experience.”   There it is-- we need to spend a lot to have high quality.  Affordability be damned.

Anyone who's taken a stroll across UVA's lawns knows that it would be perfectly possible to have a darned good college education for the students of the state at a fraction of what they are spending now. Sure, it wouldn't be the same-- but times they are changing. And it is far less tenable for colleges and universities to throw up their ivy-covered walls and say "sorry you cost too much" to poor students than to insist that they take action to lower their costs for all students, to make college opportunities for all Americans the realities they should and must be.

Money Matters, but So Does Avoiding Red Tape

Cross-posted from the original over at the Chronicle of Higher Education. 

“There’s no such thing as free money,” Joanne, a middle-aged African-American mother of two sitting across the table from me declared. “But for me, getting this college degree depends on whether I have enough money to afford it.”

Solving the problem of college affordability lies at the heart of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s $3.3 million Reimagining Aid Delivery & Design project, which has spurred a series of reports covered weekly in the news this year. While the reports run the gamut of possible suggestions, from tying aid to students’ academic backgrounds to replacing the Pell Grant with a federal-state matching grant, they all have a similar refrain: Whatever the solution, it must be cheaper—it simply isn’t possible to request any additional spending.

Similarly, when I visit Washington policy makers and talk about the needs of the Pell Grant recipients I’ve been studying for the past five years, and describe how financial scarcity is affecting their lives, most listen sympathetically and then apologize, sadly, noting there’s no more money to be found. I get it: They are pragmatists and politicians, unfailingly realistic, and simply asking me to get in line with the new normal.

So if there’s “no free money” and yet more money is essential, what are we to do? First, it’s time to search for answers outside of Washington. And second, we have to consider the possibility of finding solutions outside the narrow higher-education-policy space. Maybe we can learn new things in communities across the country, where hard-working people are thinking beyond the usual silos, connecting the dots to develop new approaches.

Back when I was a graduate student, I spent time conducting research at community colleges across the country as Bill Clinton’s infamous welfare reform was enacted. I watched as programs providing supports to low-income, parenting, community-college students were shuttered, in the name of a “work first” approach to poverty alleviation.  While many students were receiving federal financial aid, the additional child care and transportation they got met their many unmet needs above and beyond the stated institutional “costs of attendance.” Welfare reform ended those supports, and widened the gulf between America’s education and poverty-reduction agenda. College for all, my colleagues and I wrote in our book, Putting Poor People to Work (Russell Sage, 2006), was clearly more hype than reality.

In 1998, as welfare reform was getting under way, Joanne began attending classes at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. She came for a few sessions and was excited about the opportunity to get an education, but quickly realized that the cost of her 45-minute subway commute was draining her budget. She began hopping the subway turnstiles, trying to stay in school and get by. She looked for help at BMCC and didn’t find it. And after a month, she decided that hopping turnstiles wasn’t OK, wasn’t what she really was about, and she dropped out of school.

As advocates like those at the Center for Law and Social Policy have pointed out, transportation is a common barrier to community-college success, as is a lack of housing and food. But usually, community colleges do not have the power or resources to provide vouchers or free rides, nor are they in the business of coordinating social services. And post-welfare reform, they were explicitly disarmed from doing so.

Fast-forward more than a decade. The recent recession hit Joanne hard. She lost her job, and in 2011 re-enrolled at BMCC to try again. This time, as she walked through the doors of her school, she saw a new green sign: Single Stop USA. She walked in a Pell Grant recipient, and walked out equipped with food stamps, transportation vouchers, and child-care benefits.

This wasn’t a typical city social-services office with long lines and suspicious counselors who often treat poor women like Joanne with disrespect. Right in the middle of campus, between her classes, she had a 15-minute appointment with an electronic evaluation process facilitated by a knowledgeable counselor who equipped her with the money and support it seems she needed to make a degree possible. This spring, she will complete her associate degree.

Single Stop sprang into being in the years following welfare reform, arising to pull together the fragile strings of the remaining social safety net and knit them well enough to give the working poor a bit of a landing. Originally located in community-based organizations in New York City, where it was homegrown by the Robin Hood Foundation, in the last three years, the small Harlem-based nonprofit has found homes in 17 community colleges around the country.

In the last 12 months alone, Single Stop served almost 20,000 students. All told, its efforts brought an additional $38-million into the hands of those students, not by increasing the Pell Grant or encouraging them to take on debt, but simply by helping them navigate complicated social services to get the benefits already allocated for their use. Using trained professionals who help students see the importance of efficiently using existing resources to push toward a college degree, and by working closely with colleges to promote a focus on the whole student in order to promote academic success, Single Stop complements the development of both individuals’ soft skills and their financial resources. For every $1 the program costs, it brings $14 in benefits students wouldn’t have otherwise had.

Can we assume that additional money is pushing students like Joanne toward degrees? It’s too soon to tell—there haven’t yet been any rigorous comparison-group evaluations. Thus far this year, I’ve tried to find out by visiting six community-college campuses in New York and Miami where Single Stop is functioning, and interviewing administrators, staff, and students.

Good stories like Joanne’s abound. So do horror stories of tremendous need—community-college students sleeping on grates, suffering strokes, going without food for days—which would make anyone wonder about cruelty of the college-for-all rhetoric unbuttressed by sufficient support.

But even before demonstrating clear impact, Single Stop USA has already proved one thing: If money really matters for college degrees, we may be able to find a lot more of it by bridging unreasonable divides between public agencies, reducing paperwork, and repositioning the community college as a point of connection as well as education. That’s a pragmatic solution we may be all able to live with, and it’s a good place to start.

Know Before You Go

Recent conversations with several college access programs prompted this post.  My experiences studying the college pathways of students from low-income families have led me to formulate several suggestions for college preparation, and while I plan to write these up in more formal venues in the future, I thought perhaps it's best to begin dissemination now--especially since, in some respects, I think my suggestions are unconventional.

1. There is no one "right" college for you.  Talk about "matching" with a college abounds, and it sort of reminds me of dating advice.  Find the person who is right for you, suited to your skills and temperament, and all will work out. Well, two caveats: first, maybe yes, maybe no.  There are far too many unobservable characteristics of people and colleges to predict success based on observables.  And second, there are many plausible matches-- if one doesn't work, you need to be prepared to try again.  This means that students need to have a healthy sense of possibilities and alternatives, and a framework for evaluating when college is meeting their needs, and when it might be time to transfer.  They need to know how to go about that process, and to not feel ashamed to make the choice to find a new college.   Nearly one in two undergraduates attend more than one institution in pursuit of a degree, and my research with Fabian Pfeffer shows that this is true even among four-year college students.  Transfer is typically in the purview of community colleges, and many universities lack outbound transfer resources-- and will even discourage departure.  Students need to graduate from high school knowing that transfer later might be necessary, and ready to know what to do.

2. You won't do it alone. The normative view of a college student who leaves home, embraces independence, and engages in college life as a fully formed adult is outdated--or perhaps never really existed.  Remarkably, young people are becoming less not more mobile-- and it may not be a terrible thing.  Family ties promote survival, and kinship can mean the difference between starving alone or managing to make it.  Undergraduates in my study are not only receiving support from their family, but also supporting their family emotionally, and by devoting both monetary and non-monetary resources. The trick is finessing how to do this well.  Students need to graduate from high school prepared to discuss with their parents (and other relatives) how they can best stay connected while also getting to focus on their studies.  What do you do when an assignment is due and mom needs you to babysit?  How can you discuss with your parents the amount of your earnings that you can share with them for the rent, while also having enough to buy books?  This requires strong interpersonal skills we have to help young people develop.

3. Shoot for the stars, but don't over-reach. Many programs are focused on helping students aspire to careers in science and engineering, and that message is leading some students to proclaim the intention of becoming such professionals even though high school hasn't quite prepared them. The unintended consequences may be severe.  In one example, I know a student who was rejected from his first choice college-- a public university-- because his application stated a desire to become a physicist.  Yet, while he had excelled in AP Literature and History his senior year, he hadn't gone further than Algebra II in high school.  The university likely denied him because of a sense he wouldn't achieve his goals there-- at least not in four years (one of the unintended consequences of a focus on measuring grad rates?).  While in a better world, he would have been admitted and then apprised of what it would take to achieve that goal, so he could choose a longer time-to-degree or a different path, instead he was denied.  Crushed, he diverted for a community college.  High school students like this one need to ensure their big dreams are either backed up with the right coursework, or counseled to be circumspect in their college applications.

4. It's ok to not know.  Students in my study often speak of fear of failure, of getting bad grades, of being caught not knowing how to answer a question in class. They don't know that professors have much respect for students who can say confidently "I don't know the answer, but I'd sure like to learn."  The cool pose many students adopt when they are unsure alienates professors.  Instead, high school students need to be encouraged to express their concerns, and ask ask ask.  Perhaps this could be modeled for them, and they could practice it in their senior year courses.

5. Always ask twice.  For four years, I have watched students leave college without a degree because of a snafu-- a minor happenstance that felt enormous and real, but could have been resolved by asking for help more than once.  One student left because he thought his misdemeanor conviction meant he could no longer get financial aid- a concern a fellow student confirmed. He needed to ask again at his financial aid office.  Another student left because she was dropped from her program due to low grades, and she thought this meant she was expelled from the entire college.  She waited for the college to call and explain it to her.  I wish that was something we could reasonably expect colleges to do, but right now the orientation and resources simply aren't there.  High school students need to know that when something's wrong, they need to ask- and ask -- and ask.

I hope this proves useful for the many programs and people working to make college success possible for the least likely graduates.  If you have lessons of your own to share, please write in.

Increasing % Pell-- What Does it Tell Us?

Over the last several years, UW-Madison has increased its tuition at a higher rate than its System peers, thanks to the Madison Initiative for Undergraduates. That shift has not been accompanied by a decline in the percent of students receiving Pell Grants--in fact there's been a 5.5 percent increase in % Pell since 2000. Some are saying that this means that low-income students have been "held harmless" from the rising tuition, and that further increases would likely not lead to diminished economic diversity on campus. Furthermore, we are told, we can look to the outreach campaigns of institutions like UVA and UNC-Chapel Hill (home to Access UVA and the Carolina Covenant respectively) for models of anti-"sticker shock" programs that "work."

These claims are terrific examples of why it's a bad idea to make causal claims based on correlational data. If you want to make those statements, you can look to those examples and find support for your agenda. But you shouldn't.

In fact, the increase in the percent Pell at UW-Madison over the last few years is consistent with increases in % Pell at many colleges and universities nationwide over that time period. The cause lies not in successful outreach campaigns, or the failure of tuition increases to inhibit student behavior, but mainly in the recession. The recession had two relevant effects: First, many people were laid off-- and thus saw a temporary loss of income. Thus, students from families that in 2007 were not Pell eligible found themselves eligible for the Pell in 2008. The Pell is based on current and not long-term disadvantage. So an increase in % Pell doesn't mean you coaxed "new" low-income students into attending Madison or did a better job retaining those you already enrolled, but rather that a greater proportion of those who were already UW-bound (or already enrolled) now found themselves eligible for the additional help. Second, the Pell reduced the number of jobs available to students not enrolled in college--thus lowering the opportunity costs associated with college (e.g. foregone earnings). This could have independently increased both enrollment and persistence.

Furthermore, during the same time period, as part of the legislation that increased the maximum Pell the federal government also increased the family income (AGI) a student could have and qualify for the Pell-- from $20,000 to $30,000. Thus, a whole bunch more people became Pell-eligible during the period in which the MIU was implemented. And, the maximum Pell was increased-- possibly helping to offset the increase in tuition.

Thus, it should abundantly clear that it would be incorrect to state that the increasing % Pell at UW-Madison over the last several years is evidence that tuition increases do not inhibit enrollment of low-income students and/or that additional investments in need-based financial aid hold students harmless.

Same goes for the "success" of programs like the Carolina Covenant. Don't get me wrong-- the program seems great, and feels great, and the leadership is great. And for sure, the program's data looks nice-- they've seen an uptick in the representation of Pell recipients on campus and increased retention over time. As an evaluation they show better outcomes than prior cohorts of students. But as compelling as those numbers seem to be, they cannot be interpreted as evidence that these changes are attributable to the program itself-- and that's where the burden of proof lies. Indiana saw increases in college enrollment among the children of low-income families when its 21st Century Scholars Program was implemented, but reforms to the k-12 system were made at the same time, and the economy was booming. The program "effects" may have been little more than happy coincidence. We cannot rely on the potential for such happy coincidences when crafting new policies and making decisions about affordability.

It's time to get honest about what data can and cannot tell us. I've heard too many claims around here that it can tell us whatever we want. While that's undoubtedly partially true under the best of circumstances, it is especially true when we take no steps to collect data systematically and use sophisticated tools when analyzing it. If we were really committed to holding students harmless from tuition increases, we'd have commissioned an external evaluation (external= not done by institutional researchers) and made the data available for analysis. There are plenty of talented folks on campus who know how to do this work-- why not ask them to take a look at what happened under MIU?

The So-Called Boy Mystery

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights recently announced that it would investigate whether some colleges are discriminating against women in an effort to generate a more gender-diverse student population. Reaction was mixed, with some saying it's about time that the "crisis with boys" in higher education is acknowledged and addressed, and others expressing some disbelief and ridicule that the gender wars have come to this.

But part of the overall response really stuck in my craw--the oft-repeated claim that we "just don't know" what's going on with boys. According to many, sources for the gender differential in higher education are a complete "mystery," a puzzle, a whodunit that we may be intentionally ignoring.

Yes, there are numerous potential explanations for the under-representation of men in higher education--and in particular the growing female advantage in terms of bachelor's degree completion. For example, it could be that boys and girls have differing amounts of the resources important for college success (e.g. levels of financial resources or parental education) or that the usual incentives for college-going (e.g. labor market returns) have differential effects by gender (why, laments the Wall Street Journal, don't boys "get" the importance of attending college?). It's also possible that changes in the labor force or marriage markets, gender discrimination, or societal expectations play a role--or that the reasons have to do with the growth of community colleges, changes in college affordability, or shifts in the available alternatives to college (e.g. the military).

Sure, this is a wide range of potential factors, not easy to untangle. But while a few years ago we really hadn't a clue about what mattered or why (partly because the trendlines were just becoming visible) this simply isn't true now. This is a topic getting plenty of attention in the research community, there's a reasonable amount of solid data for analysts to use to tackle the major questions, and researchers are on it. Just as one example, I recently reviewed conference proposals for higher education sessions at a national academic meeting, and more than half of the approximately 50 I reviewed were focused on the gender in higher education question.

I've learned the most in the past couple of years from a series of studies conducted by Claudia Buchmann and Thomas DiPrete. Buchmann and DiPrete are well-known for their very rigorous approach to hypothesis testing, and thorough (though often complex) approach to investigation. Their findings on this topic have been published in the top sociology and demography journals--places, admittedly, media commentators are unlikely to find them. So, to help shape a more informed debate on this topic, here are two key Buchmann & DiPrete findings which deserve a wider audience.

1. The growing female advantage in BA completion is much more about college success than it is about college access. While it is the case that there have been changes in college participation (with women's participation growing more rapidly), the gender gap in BA attainment mostly stems from gender differences (among 4-year college goers) in who completes degrees. This suggests that whether or not boys "get" that they need to go to college has little relevance.

2. Women experience greater college success because they are academically better-prepared to do so. Boys and girls score similarly on standardized tests, but girls excel in terms of course grades--and these grades are highly correlated with college outcomes. In fact, the gender gap in college completion is well-predicted by middle school grades. Moreover, girls exhibit greater effort (e.g. on homework) and other important non-cognitive characteristics.

So the gender differences we now see in higher education are largely reflective of already-observed differences in k-12. Buchmann and DiPrete have tested for other explanations, including those described above, and they just don't hold much water. The empirical story is thus pretty simple--now that the (mostly cultural) barriers to college entry for women have fallen away, we shouldn't be surprised to see the issues we already know exist in k-12 having impacts on college outcomes.

Now, the search for explanations as to why there are gender differences in earlier schooling outcomes is the topic of a much more contested body of literature. Some argue that the problems lie in schools and that reforms (e.g. single sex schooling or the development of a more masculine culture in classrooms) should be targeted at schools. For their part, Buchmann and DiPrete think that the answers lie in some combination of school resources (the gender gap is smaller in highly-resourced schools), and a kind of culture re-orienting (driven by parental involvement) that can help more boys integrate attachment to schooling with the boy-culture desire to be emotionally detached. Girls exhibit stronger behavioral and social skills from the very start of kindergarten, and continue to exceed boys in the development of those skills throughout elementary school. Notably, the kinds of skills girls appear to have-more self-control, interpersonal skills, etc-are the target of certain kinds of preschools and parenting strategies.

In the end, does research tell us definitively whether the appropriate policy response to a gender gap in BA completion is affirmative action for boys? Of course not. It's pretty clear from these studies and others, including a new book from Thomas Espenshade and his colleagues, that any solution will need to address not only gender disparities but racial and class ones as well. The clearer implication of Buchmann and DiPrete's work is that policymakers concerned with the lower rates of college completion among men need to focus not so much on the actions of colleges and universities, but on k-12 education and pre-adolescent experiences in particular. This is a pipeline issue, and is has been for a long time--for decades girls have outperformed boys in most aspects of k-12 schooling (despite a chillier climate there), and as the barriers to entry into postsecondary education have fallen away, they have entered and performed better there as well. Buchmann and DiPrete argue that instead of targeting interventions at boys per se, reformers could instead target groups of students from similar social strata who are underperforming in school. In theory, at least, it should be possible to develop interventions that help all students, but incur particular advantages for boys.

To sum up: the gender advantage in higher education is not surprising and it's not a "mystery." In fact, there are some clear directions for intervention. So, instead of lamenting a "whodunit," let's get to work.

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This particular post requires a long list of references rather than links, so here they are. Unpublished or forthcoming pieces (aside from the book) can be found on DiPrete's website.

T. DiPrete and C. Buchmann. Advantage Women: The Growing Gender Gap in College Completion and What it Means for American Education. Manuscript in preparation for the Russell Sage Foundation.

A. McDaniel, T. DiPrete, and C. Buchmann. (Forthcoming). The Black Gender Gap in Educational Attainment: Historical Trends and Racial Comparisons. Demography.

J. Jennings and T. DiPrete. (Forthcoming). Teacher Effects on Social/Behavioral Skills in Early Elementary School. Sociology of Education.

J. Legewie and T. DiPrete. (2009). Family Determinants of the Changing Gender Gap in Educational Attainment: A Comparison of the U.S. and Germany. Schmoeller's Jahrbuch.

C. Buchmann, T. DiPrete, and A. McDaniel. (2008). Gender Inequalities in Education. Annual Review of Sociology 34: 319-337.

T. DiPrete and C. Buchmann. (2006). Gender-Specific Trends in the Value of Education and the Emerging Gender Gap in College Completion. Demography 43 (1):1-24.

C. Buchmann and T. DiPrete. (2006). The Growing Female Advantage in College Completion: The Role of Parental Education, Family Structure, and Academic Achievement. American Sociological Review 71:515-541. (Note: This paper won a national award from the American Sociological Association's Section on Sociology of Education.)

J. Jennings and T. DiPrete. (No Date) "Social/Behavioral Skills and the Gender Gap in Early Educational Achievement." Working paper.

The Prison-Education Connection

An article in today's Chronicle Review covers a surge of scholarly interest in "prison studies." The author does a nice job of capturing key areas of research on this topic, though coverage of work by Bruce Western, Chris Wildeman, Alice Goffman, Nikki Jones, and Devah Pager would have deepened the portrait. For example, a discussion of Goffman's recent ethnography of men in Philadelphia could have illustrated how prison life (and the threat of life in prison) is intimately connected with how daily life--outside prison--is experienced by many of today's young urban men.

I just hope educators are paying attention. It's far too easy (and common) for scholars to focus on a single societal institution (like schools) to the exclusion of all others. But anyone committed to democratizing education must connect to the conversation on prison reform.

For example, here are two reasons why higher education researchers, practitioners, and policymakers should follow the debates over prisons:

(1) We want to find ways to broaden access to new populations and spread opportunities. Just 2% of those in state prisons and 8% of those in federal prisons have attained any form of college degree.

At least one study has found that after prison, African-American men are more likely to attend college, perhaps because they hope it will protect them from future participation in undesirable activities.

(2) College attendance during prison is associated with lower rates of recidivism (though evidence has not yet established the relationship as a causal one).

It is thus highly disconcerting that several recent education policies have made it more-- not less-- difficult to use prison time to enroll in postsecondary education and to access college after leaving prison. Consider the following

--Since the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act in 2000, the "aid elimination penalty" has blocked access to aid for adults with drug convictions. By one estimate, this rule has made over 200,000 students ineligible for federal grants, loans, and work study. While the penalty has since been reformed (currently, only students who receive drug convictions during college enrollment and do not pass two unannounced drug tests are ineligible for aid), some suggest that even in its current form it discourages college enrollment (because the financial aid application includes a question about drugs) and perpetuates dropout among vulnerable populations. Wheelock and Uggen write that "relative to whites, racial and ethnic minorities are significantly more likely to be convicted of disqualifying drug offenses and significantly more likely to require a Pell Grant to attend college...It is therefore plausible that tens of thousands have been denied college funding solely on the basis of their conviction status."

--Since 1994, Pell Grants may not be used to support college course-taking that occurs while in prison, a change that has made college much less affordable for that population. Yet at the same time, the number of state prison systems offering postsecondary education is rising (from 30 in 2002 to 43 in 2003-2004)--in Texas and North Carolina more than 10 percent of all inmates participate in some form of college coursework, typically offered by community colleges.

It's time for educators to start thinking hard about who isn't enrolled in their schools, and why. Looking to the ever-growing prison state in this country is a good place to start.

Where Have You Been?

A spate of recent articles, including those covering Bill Bowen and Mike McPherson's new book (which I promise to review just as soon as my copy arrives), have left me a bit perplexed-- wondering aloud "where have you all been?" The punchline each time is that a fair proportion of adults starting college are not finishing. Yes, and duh. This is not new, and if it's news well I guess it's only because we've deliberately kept our heads in the sand.

But there's no way that folks like New York Times reporter David Leonhardt have been deliberately oblivious, and yet he's writing about low college completion rates as if they've just been unearthed. In a recent blog post, Kevin Carey implied the same-- just as he did in a recent American Enterprise Institute report. But this has been a prominent topic of discussion for years--maybe a decade plus! Just look at Kevin's own 2004 report A Matter of Degrees (which received plenty of media coverage), or the Spellings Commission report, or Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz's book. I know I could go back several more years and find plenty more evidence.

I think it's one thing to imply something is new when it isn't (because again, maybe you just didn't know, or you feel the issue still is widely known enough and want to beat the drum more), and it's another thing entirely to claim that policymakers still aren't paying attention. In Leonhardt's case, he's simply wrong when he says the current Administration isn't focused on college completion. Um, how about that $2.5 billion Access and Completion Fund, part of Obama's original budget proposal? What about the performance (outcomes)-based components of the new community college monies contained in HR 3221? Foundations like Lumina and Gates have been beating this drum for years, and those in the Administration are well aware. No one in DC is saying institutions should continue to be judged solely based on enrollment (even enrollment of disadvantaged groups). There is plenty of ado about completion rates. The question is now, what exactly are the best solutions? That's a debate that needs to be richer and more visible, since the answers are far from clear-- and we'd be terribly wrong to simply resort to NCLB-style responses that remind me of my toddler: "Institutions bad. Do wrong. I punish you and you do better. Now." Let's direct our energies toward really identifying the sources of the problems, and developing a sense of how reforms can be most effective. When I get a chance to read the new Bowen and McPherson book, I'm hoping I come away with new ideas on how to do that.