Monday, May 28, 2012 4:24:46 AM
Making Schools Work
Jimmy Dugar on his first day in 1978 at a mostly white elementary school in Cincinnati.
Natalie Fobes/Corbis
By DAVID L. KIRP
Published: May 19, 2012
AMID the ceaseless and cacophonous debates about how to close the achievement gap, we’ve turned away from one tool that has been shown to work: school desegregation. That strategy, ushered in by the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, has been unceremoniously ushered out, an artifact in the museum of failed social experiments. The Supreme Court’s ruling that racially segregated schools were “inherently unequal” shook up the nation like no other decision of the 20th century. Civil rights advocates, who for years had been patiently laying the constitutional groundwork, cheered to the rafters, while segregationists mourned “Black Monday” and vowed “massive resistance [ http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/brown/brown-aftermath.html ].” But as the anniversary was observed this past week on May 17, it was hard not to notice that desegregation is effectively dead. In fact, we have been giving up on desegregation for a long time. In 1974 [ http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=case&court=us&vol=418&invol=717 ], the Supreme Court rejected a metropolitan integration plan, leaving the increasingly black cities to fend for themselves.
A generation later, public schools that had been ordered to integrate in the 1960s and 1970s became segregated once again, this time with the blessing of a new generation of justices. And five years ago, a splintered court [ http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/05-908.ZS.html ] delivered the coup de grâce when it decreed that a school district couldn’t voluntarily opt for the most modest kind of integration — giving parents a choice of which school their children would attend and treating race as a tiebreaker in deciding which children would go to the most popular schools. In the perverse logic of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., this amounted to “discriminating among individual students based on race.” That’s bad history, which, as Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote in an impassioned dissent, “threaten[s] the promise of Brown.”
To the current reformers, integration is at best an irrelevance and at worst an excuse to shift attention away from shoddy teaching. But a spate of research says otherwise. The experience of an integrated education made all the difference in the lives of black children — and in the lives of their children as well. These economists’ studies consistently conclude that African-American students who attended integrated schools fared better academically than those left behind in segregated schools. They were more likely to graduate from high school and attend and graduate from college; and, the longer they spent attending integrated schools, the better they did. What’s more, the fear that white children would suffer, voiced by opponents of integration, proved groundless. Between 1970 and 1990, the black-white gap in educational attainment shrank — not because white youngsters did worse but because black youngsters did better.
Not only were they more successful in school, they were more successful in life as well. A 2011 study by the Berkeley public policy professor Rucker C. Johnson concludes that black youths who spent five years in desegregated schools have earned 25 percent more than those who never had that opportunity. Now in their 30s and 40s, they’re also healthier — the equivalent of being seven years younger.
Why? For these youngsters, the advent of integration transformed the experience of going to school. By itself, racial mixing didn’t do the trick, but it did mean that the fate of black and white students became intertwined. School systems that had spent a pittance on all-black schools were now obliged to invest considerably more on African-American students’ education after the schools became integrated. Their classes were smaller and better equipped. They included children from better-off families, a factor that the landmark 1966 Equality of Educational Opportunity study had shown to make a significant difference in academic success. What’s more, their teachers and parents held them to higher expectations. That’s what shifted the arc of their lives.
Professor Johnson takes this story one big step further by showing that the impact of integration reaches to the next generation. These youngsters — the grandchildren of Brown — are faring better in school than those whose parents attended racially isolated schools.
Despite the Horatio Alger myth that anyone can make it in America, moving up the socioeconomic ladder [ http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/Hertz_MobilityAnalysis.pdf ] is hard going: children from low-income families have only a 1 percent chance of reaching the top 5 percent of the income distribution, versus children of the rich, who have about a 22 percent chance.
But many of the poor black children who attended desegregated schools in the 1970s escaped from poverty, and their offspring have maintained that advantage. Of course desegregation was not a cure-all. While the achievement gap and the income gap narrowed during the peak era of desegregation, white children continued to do noticeably better. That’s to be expected, for schools can’t hope to overcome the burdens of poverty or the lack of early education, which puts poor children far behind their middle-class peers before they enter kindergarten. And desegregation was too often implemented in ham-handed fashion, undermining its effectiveness. Adherence to principle trumped good education, as students were sent on school buses simply to achieve the numerical goal of racial balance. Understandably, that aroused opposition [ http://www.issr.ucla.edu/sears/pubs/A068.pdf ], and not only among those who thought desegregation was a bad idea. Despite its flaws, integration is as successful an educational strategy as we’ve hit upon. As the U.C.L.A. political scientist Gary Orfield points out, “On some measures the racial achievement gaps reached their low point around the same time as the peak of black-white desegregation in the late 1980s.”
And in the 1990s, when the courts stopped overseeing desegregation plans, black students in those communities seem to have done worse. The failure of the No Child Left Behind regimen [ http://www.youthlaw.org/publications/yln/2009/april_june_2009/no_child_left_behind_fails_to_close_the_achievement_gap/ ] to narrow the achievement gap offers the sobering lesson that closing underperforming public schools, setting high expectations for students, getting tough with teachers and opening a raft of charter schools isn’t the answer. If we’re serious about improving educational opportunities, we need to revisit the abandoned policy of school integration.
In theory it’s possible to achieve a fair amount of integration by crossing city and suburban boundaries or opening magnet schools [ http://www.publicschoolreview.com/articles/2 ] attractive to both minority and white students. But the hostile majority on the Supreme Court and the absence of a vocal pro-integration constituency make integration’s revival a near impossibility.
David L. Kirp is a professor [ http://gspp.berkeley.edu/academics/faculty/kirp.html ] of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Kids First: Five Big Ideas for Transforming Children’s Lives and America’s Future [ http://www.amazon.com/Kids-First-Transforming-Childrens-Americas/dp/158648947X ].”
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/opinion/sunday/integration-worked-why-have-we-rejected-it.html [with comments]
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Colleges for Profit Are Growing, With Federal Help
The New York Times
By FLOYD NORRIS
Published: May 24, 2012
There are a lot of government subsidies, and in the current fiscal atmosphere many are shrinking by necessity. What appears to be lacking is any rational way of deciding which should shrink.
The volume of federally guaranteed student loans to students at so-called proprietary colleges — the ones that intend to operate at a profit and get nearly all their revenue from the government — continues to grow.
At the same time, state and local governments across the country are slashing spending on higher education, and community colleges [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/community_colleges/index.html ] — the ones most likely to offer alternatives to the students recruited by the far more expensive proprietary schools — are suffering some of the largest reductions.
That trend has been welcome news to the proprietary colleges. “The competitive landscape” is getting better, Kevin M. Modany, the chief executive of ITT Educational Services [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/itt-educational-services-inc/index.html ], one of the larger for-profit colleges [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/forprofit_schools/index.html ], told analysts this year.
“When you look at what’s going on right now from a community college perspective,” he said, “we’re seeing a lot of state budgets being constrained. We’re seeing dollars being pulled from their budgets and they’re really capped in terms of their enrollment opportunities.”
ITT Educational, on the other hand, opened four new campuses in the first three months of this year, raising its total to 148 locations in 48 states. It expects to open at least four more later this year. It has 71,000 students enrolled.
In Washington, the Obama administration has been trying to write rules that would stop loans going to students at the most exploitative of the schools, ones whose students are most likely to default on the loans and least likely to get jobs if they graduate. The Department of Education is expected to announce within a few weeks which programs at which schools are failing, but that determination will have little immediate impact. The earliest that any school will lose financing is 2014.
ITT Educational Services, which runs ITT Technical Institute, used to be part of the international phone company known as ITT, but it was spun off years ago. It issues associate’s and bachelor’s degrees, and even some master’s degrees. Its shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange and it advertises heavily.
I got interested in ITT Tech after I watched one of its commercials, full of promise of bright career opportunities for students who sign up. At the end of the commercial, the following words flashed on the screen, in small type and for only a few seconds:
“Credits earned are unlikely to transfer.”
If you enroll in a public community college and get a two-year associate degree, you can almost certainly transfer to a four-year college and complete your bachelor’s degree in two more years. If you drop out, as many do, you can return to the same or another college years later and complete a degree. But it appears that ITT Tech students are stuck. ITT Tech will award degrees to students who complete enough classes, but any student who wants to transfer will probably have to start over.
How many students who enroll at ITT Tech go on to get a degree?
That sounds like a simple question, but it is not one that ITT Educational wants to answer.
The company does disclose a lot of numbers. But many of those numbers are not very useful. From the Web site, I learned that half the students who earn associate’s degrees in business administration do so within the normal period, while the other half take longer. For that two-year diploma, I learned that they pay an average of $48,000 in tuition and fees. Similar numbers are available [ http://programinfo.itt-tech.edu/ ] for the myriad other programs ITT Tech offers. But there are no hints as to how many students actually get degrees, or how many drop out. The company would not provide any overall figures.
It did, however, point me to a government Web site [ http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/ ] that lets you check graduation rates campus by campus. Some of ITT Tech’s campuses had no information available, but the headquarters location in Indianapolis said that 16 percent of students who entered the school in 2004 earned degrees within three years of enrolling in associate degree programs or six years of enrolling in bachelor’s degree programs. In the fall of 2010, the Indianapolis campus had 7,619 undergraduate students. By the end of that school year, it had awarded 538 associate’s and 336 bachelor’s degrees. Last year, ITT Educational had revenue of $1.5 billion, of which 89 percent came directly from the government through grants and loans. Some of that money came from states, but a large majority came from Uncle Sam. Students and their parents put up about 4 percent, and 7 percent came from nongovernment loans.
Raising that 7 percent has been an issue. Last year, the company was able to arrange such nongovernment guaranteed loans by promising lenders it would repay the loans if the students did not. This year it could not renew that arrangement and is having to finance the loans itself. In effect, that means it gets less than full tuition from some students, with a promise they will pay the money later.
ITT Educational has impressive profit margins. In 2009 and 2010, pretax profits exceeded what it spent on educating students. Even in this year’s first quarter, when revenue and profits were off from a year earlier, pretax profit amounted to just under 30 percent of revenue.
The decline in earnings did not slow the flow of money to shareholders. During those three months, the company spent $135 million on education costs and paid nearly $147 million to buy back shares. Those education expenses were down 2 percent from a year earlier, while spending on share buybacks rose 5 percent. Marketing costs were up 6 percent.
All those profits would dry up and vanish were government support to wither away, but so far there is little sign of that. In the 2010-11 academic year, the government guaranteed nearly $24 billion in loans to students at proprietary schools and provided almost $9 billion more in grants. All that money went to the schools.
Critics of the schools say that many students, even those who graduate, are unable to earn enough to repay the loans. Students who attend such colleges are far more likely to default on their loans than are students who attend other types of schools.
It is far from clear whether the Obama administration’s effort to cut off loans to particularly unsuccessful schools will have much impact, or even if it will happen. A trade group of proprietary schools has filed suit to halt the rule, calling it an unjustified “regulatory excess.”
That group used to be called the Career College Association, but it changed its name to the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities and proudly proclaims that “the market” has determined the success of its members. If so, it is a market in which the government pays nearly all the bills but leaves students with debts many cannot pay.
Whatever the case used to be for subsidizing these highly profitable companies, it ought to be a lot less compelling now when the country is slashing subsidies for other types of schools — ones that generally do a better job for their students but that spend far less on lobbyists.
*
Related
Degrees of Debt: Slowly, as Student Debt Rises, Colleges Confront Costs (May 15, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/15/business/colleges-begin-to-confront-higher-costs-and-students-debt.html
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/business/us-subsidies-to-for-profit-colleges-keep-growing.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/business/us-subsidies-to-for-profit-colleges-keep-growing.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
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Obama and Roberts: The View From 2005
By James Fallows
May 25 2012, 7:37 AM ET
Here are two quotes from two 40-ish Harvard Law School graduates back in 2005. They make for a very interesting comparison now. First, a few words of set-up:
I mentioned recently, in an item [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/in-praise-of-the-wsj-ed-page-no-seriously/257544/ ] about the possible Roger Taney-ization of Chief Justice John Roberts, the fascinating time-capsule quality of a Washington Post story [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/29/AR2005092900859.html ] about the vote on Roberts's confirmation, in 2005. Roberts (who had just turned 50) was approved by a 78-22 margin, with all Republicans voting in favor and the Democrats split evenly, 22 for and 22 against.
The Post story discussed the motives and rationales of the leading Democrats in the Senate for voting the way they did, and considered the ramifications for the later ambitions of several of them, including Sens. Biden, Bayh, Clinton, etc. It also discussed the views of Sens. Chuck Schumer, Lindsey Graham, Jon Kyl, et al -- but did not even mention one of the Democrats opposed to Roberts. This was of course the 44-year-old freshman senator from Illinois whom Chief Justice Roberts would swear in as president less than three and a half years later. It is one more reminder of the out-of-nowhere quality of Barack Obama's rise.
A reader has just sent in a link to a WSJ item [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124390047073474499.html ] from 2009, which quoted Obama's stated reasons in 2005 for opposing the Roberts choice. Given what we know about Roberts from his six-plus years on the Court, and what we have learned about Obama, it makes worthwhile reading now. Here are passages from Obama's 2005 statement of opposition to Roberts, with emphasis supplied by the reader:
"The problem I face...is that while adherence to legal precedent and rules of statutory or constitutional construction will dispose of 95% of the cases that come before a court... what matters on the Supreme Court is those 5% of cases that are truly difficult.
In those cases, adherence to precedent and rules of construction and interpretation will only get you through the 25th mile of the marathon. That last mile can only be determined on the basis of one's deepest values, one's core concerns, one's broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one's empathy.
In those 5% of hard cases, the constitutional text will not be directly on point. The language of the statute will not be perfectly clear. Legal process alone will not lead you to a rule of decision.... In those difficult cases, the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge's heart.
I talked to Judge Roberts about this. Judge Roberts...did say he doesn't like bullies and has always viewed the law as a way of evening out the playing field between the strong and the weak.
I was impressed with that statement because I view the law in much the same way. The problem I had is that when I examined Judge Roberts' record and history of public service, it is my personal estimation that he has far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak. In his work in the White House and the Solicitor General's Office, he seemed to have consistently sided with those who were dismissive of efforts to eradicate the remnants of racial discrimination in our political process. In these same positions, he seemed dismissive of the concerns that it is harder to make it in this world and in this economy when you are a woman rather than a man.
I want to take Judge Roberts at his word that he doesn't like bullies and he sees the law and the court as a means of evening the playing field between the strong and the weak. But given the gravity of the position to which he will undoubtedly ascend and the gravity of the decisions in which he will undoubtedly participate during his tenure on the court, I ultimately have to give more weight to his deeds and the overarching political philosophy that he appears to have shared with those in power than to the assuring words that he provided me in our meeting.
Now, compare this with what John Roberts said about himself in his opening statement at his confirmation hearings. Here I've added the emphasis:
My personal appreciation that I owe a great debt to others reinforces my view that a certain humility should characterize the judicial role.
Judges and justices are servants of the law, not the other way around. Judges are like umpires. Umpires don't make the rules; they apply them.
The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules.
But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire.
Judges have to have the humility to recognize that they operate within a system of precedent, shaped by other judges equally striving to live up to the judicial oath.
I leave it to you to judge which of those statements from 2005 stands up better seven years later as a guide to John Roberts's temperament and jurisprudence. I will tip my hand in saying: whether or not you admire his role on the court, it is impossible to see how anyone could describe it as umpire-like or "reflecting a certain humility." In the Citizens United ruling, he and his allies set out to answer [ http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/05/21/120521fa_fact_toobin ] questions the case itself did not necessarily raise, so as to overturn precedents they considered incorrect. If you're using the umpire analogy, it would be as if someone behind home plate suddenly yelled "Foot fault!" about a tennis match he saw out of the corner of his eye, with "Pass Interference!" and "Icing" calls thrown in to boot. The potential overturn of the Obama health care law may be desirable or not, according to your own views -- but it is anything but "humble."
I mention this mainly because of the apposite pairing. We have two men who now sit atop two of the three branches of the government. They both laid down markers seven years ago on how one of those men was likely to perform once in office. One of the predictions seems a lot more prescient than the other.
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/obama-and-roberts-the-view-from-2005/257624/
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Jimmy Dugar on his first day in 1978 at a mostly white elementary school in Cincinnati.
Natalie Fobes/Corbis
By DAVID L. KIRP
Published: May 19, 2012
AMID the ceaseless and cacophonous debates about how to close the achievement gap, we’ve turned away from one tool that has been shown to work: school desegregation. That strategy, ushered in by the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, has been unceremoniously ushered out, an artifact in the museum of failed social experiments. The Supreme Court’s ruling that racially segregated schools were “inherently unequal” shook up the nation like no other decision of the 20th century. Civil rights advocates, who for years had been patiently laying the constitutional groundwork, cheered to the rafters, while segregationists mourned “Black Monday” and vowed “massive resistance [ http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/brown/brown-aftermath.html ].” But as the anniversary was observed this past week on May 17, it was hard not to notice that desegregation is effectively dead. In fact, we have been giving up on desegregation for a long time. In 1974 [ http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=case&court=us&vol=418&invol=717 ], the Supreme Court rejected a metropolitan integration plan, leaving the increasingly black cities to fend for themselves.
A generation later, public schools that had been ordered to integrate in the 1960s and 1970s became segregated once again, this time with the blessing of a new generation of justices. And five years ago, a splintered court [ http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/05-908.ZS.html ] delivered the coup de grâce when it decreed that a school district couldn’t voluntarily opt for the most modest kind of integration — giving parents a choice of which school their children would attend and treating race as a tiebreaker in deciding which children would go to the most popular schools. In the perverse logic of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., this amounted to “discriminating among individual students based on race.” That’s bad history, which, as Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote in an impassioned dissent, “threaten[s] the promise of Brown.”
To the current reformers, integration is at best an irrelevance and at worst an excuse to shift attention away from shoddy teaching. But a spate of research says otherwise. The experience of an integrated education made all the difference in the lives of black children — and in the lives of their children as well. These economists’ studies consistently conclude that African-American students who attended integrated schools fared better academically than those left behind in segregated schools. They were more likely to graduate from high school and attend and graduate from college; and, the longer they spent attending integrated schools, the better they did. What’s more, the fear that white children would suffer, voiced by opponents of integration, proved groundless. Between 1970 and 1990, the black-white gap in educational attainment shrank — not because white youngsters did worse but because black youngsters did better.
Not only were they more successful in school, they were more successful in life as well. A 2011 study by the Berkeley public policy professor Rucker C. Johnson concludes that black youths who spent five years in desegregated schools have earned 25 percent more than those who never had that opportunity. Now in their 30s and 40s, they’re also healthier — the equivalent of being seven years younger.
Why? For these youngsters, the advent of integration transformed the experience of going to school. By itself, racial mixing didn’t do the trick, but it did mean that the fate of black and white students became intertwined. School systems that had spent a pittance on all-black schools were now obliged to invest considerably more on African-American students’ education after the schools became integrated. Their classes were smaller and better equipped. They included children from better-off families, a factor that the landmark 1966 Equality of Educational Opportunity study had shown to make a significant difference in academic success. What’s more, their teachers and parents held them to higher expectations. That’s what shifted the arc of their lives.
Professor Johnson takes this story one big step further by showing that the impact of integration reaches to the next generation. These youngsters — the grandchildren of Brown — are faring better in school than those whose parents attended racially isolated schools.
Despite the Horatio Alger myth that anyone can make it in America, moving up the socioeconomic ladder [ http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/Hertz_MobilityAnalysis.pdf ] is hard going: children from low-income families have only a 1 percent chance of reaching the top 5 percent of the income distribution, versus children of the rich, who have about a 22 percent chance.
But many of the poor black children who attended desegregated schools in the 1970s escaped from poverty, and their offspring have maintained that advantage. Of course desegregation was not a cure-all. While the achievement gap and the income gap narrowed during the peak era of desegregation, white children continued to do noticeably better. That’s to be expected, for schools can’t hope to overcome the burdens of poverty or the lack of early education, which puts poor children far behind their middle-class peers before they enter kindergarten. And desegregation was too often implemented in ham-handed fashion, undermining its effectiveness. Adherence to principle trumped good education, as students were sent on school buses simply to achieve the numerical goal of racial balance. Understandably, that aroused opposition [ http://www.issr.ucla.edu/sears/pubs/A068.pdf ], and not only among those who thought desegregation was a bad idea. Despite its flaws, integration is as successful an educational strategy as we’ve hit upon. As the U.C.L.A. political scientist Gary Orfield points out, “On some measures the racial achievement gaps reached their low point around the same time as the peak of black-white desegregation in the late 1980s.”
And in the 1990s, when the courts stopped overseeing desegregation plans, black students in those communities seem to have done worse. The failure of the No Child Left Behind regimen [ http://www.youthlaw.org/publications/yln/2009/april_june_2009/no_child_left_behind_fails_to_close_the_achievement_gap/ ] to narrow the achievement gap offers the sobering lesson that closing underperforming public schools, setting high expectations for students, getting tough with teachers and opening a raft of charter schools isn’t the answer. If we’re serious about improving educational opportunities, we need to revisit the abandoned policy of school integration.
In theory it’s possible to achieve a fair amount of integration by crossing city and suburban boundaries or opening magnet schools [ http://www.publicschoolreview.com/articles/2 ] attractive to both minority and white students. But the hostile majority on the Supreme Court and the absence of a vocal pro-integration constituency make integration’s revival a near impossibility.
David L. Kirp is a professor [ http://gspp.berkeley.edu/academics/faculty/kirp.html ] of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Kids First: Five Big Ideas for Transforming Children’s Lives and America’s Future [ http://www.amazon.com/Kids-First-Transforming-Childrens-Americas/dp/158648947X ].”
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/opinion/sunday/integration-worked-why-have-we-rejected-it.html [with comments]
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Colleges for Profit Are Growing, With Federal Help
The New York Times
By FLOYD NORRIS
Published: May 24, 2012
There are a lot of government subsidies, and in the current fiscal atmosphere many are shrinking by necessity. What appears to be lacking is any rational way of deciding which should shrink.
The volume of federally guaranteed student loans to students at so-called proprietary colleges — the ones that intend to operate at a profit and get nearly all their revenue from the government — continues to grow.
At the same time, state and local governments across the country are slashing spending on higher education, and community colleges [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/community_colleges/index.html ] — the ones most likely to offer alternatives to the students recruited by the far more expensive proprietary schools — are suffering some of the largest reductions.
That trend has been welcome news to the proprietary colleges. “The competitive landscape” is getting better, Kevin M. Modany, the chief executive of ITT Educational Services [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/itt-educational-services-inc/index.html ], one of the larger for-profit colleges [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/forprofit_schools/index.html ], told analysts this year.
“When you look at what’s going on right now from a community college perspective,” he said, “we’re seeing a lot of state budgets being constrained. We’re seeing dollars being pulled from their budgets and they’re really capped in terms of their enrollment opportunities.”
ITT Educational, on the other hand, opened four new campuses in the first three months of this year, raising its total to 148 locations in 48 states. It expects to open at least four more later this year. It has 71,000 students enrolled.
In Washington, the Obama administration has been trying to write rules that would stop loans going to students at the most exploitative of the schools, ones whose students are most likely to default on the loans and least likely to get jobs if they graduate. The Department of Education is expected to announce within a few weeks which programs at which schools are failing, but that determination will have little immediate impact. The earliest that any school will lose financing is 2014.
ITT Educational Services, which runs ITT Technical Institute, used to be part of the international phone company known as ITT, but it was spun off years ago. It issues associate’s and bachelor’s degrees, and even some master’s degrees. Its shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange and it advertises heavily.
I got interested in ITT Tech after I watched one of its commercials, full of promise of bright career opportunities for students who sign up. At the end of the commercial, the following words flashed on the screen, in small type and for only a few seconds:
“Credits earned are unlikely to transfer.”
If you enroll in a public community college and get a two-year associate degree, you can almost certainly transfer to a four-year college and complete your bachelor’s degree in two more years. If you drop out, as many do, you can return to the same or another college years later and complete a degree. But it appears that ITT Tech students are stuck. ITT Tech will award degrees to students who complete enough classes, but any student who wants to transfer will probably have to start over.
How many students who enroll at ITT Tech go on to get a degree?
That sounds like a simple question, but it is not one that ITT Educational wants to answer.
The company does disclose a lot of numbers. But many of those numbers are not very useful. From the Web site, I learned that half the students who earn associate’s degrees in business administration do so within the normal period, while the other half take longer. For that two-year diploma, I learned that they pay an average of $48,000 in tuition and fees. Similar numbers are available [ http://programinfo.itt-tech.edu/ ] for the myriad other programs ITT Tech offers. But there are no hints as to how many students actually get degrees, or how many drop out. The company would not provide any overall figures.
It did, however, point me to a government Web site [ http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/ ] that lets you check graduation rates campus by campus. Some of ITT Tech’s campuses had no information available, but the headquarters location in Indianapolis said that 16 percent of students who entered the school in 2004 earned degrees within three years of enrolling in associate degree programs or six years of enrolling in bachelor’s degree programs. In the fall of 2010, the Indianapolis campus had 7,619 undergraduate students. By the end of that school year, it had awarded 538 associate’s and 336 bachelor’s degrees. Last year, ITT Educational had revenue of $1.5 billion, of which 89 percent came directly from the government through grants and loans. Some of that money came from states, but a large majority came from Uncle Sam. Students and their parents put up about 4 percent, and 7 percent came from nongovernment loans.
Raising that 7 percent has been an issue. Last year, the company was able to arrange such nongovernment guaranteed loans by promising lenders it would repay the loans if the students did not. This year it could not renew that arrangement and is having to finance the loans itself. In effect, that means it gets less than full tuition from some students, with a promise they will pay the money later.
ITT Educational has impressive profit margins. In 2009 and 2010, pretax profits exceeded what it spent on educating students. Even in this year’s first quarter, when revenue and profits were off from a year earlier, pretax profit amounted to just under 30 percent of revenue.
The decline in earnings did not slow the flow of money to shareholders. During those three months, the company spent $135 million on education costs and paid nearly $147 million to buy back shares. Those education expenses were down 2 percent from a year earlier, while spending on share buybacks rose 5 percent. Marketing costs were up 6 percent.
All those profits would dry up and vanish were government support to wither away, but so far there is little sign of that. In the 2010-11 academic year, the government guaranteed nearly $24 billion in loans to students at proprietary schools and provided almost $9 billion more in grants. All that money went to the schools.
Critics of the schools say that many students, even those who graduate, are unable to earn enough to repay the loans. Students who attend such colleges are far more likely to default on their loans than are students who attend other types of schools.
It is far from clear whether the Obama administration’s effort to cut off loans to particularly unsuccessful schools will have much impact, or even if it will happen. A trade group of proprietary schools has filed suit to halt the rule, calling it an unjustified “regulatory excess.”
That group used to be called the Career College Association, but it changed its name to the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities and proudly proclaims that “the market” has determined the success of its members. If so, it is a market in which the government pays nearly all the bills but leaves students with debts many cannot pay.
Whatever the case used to be for subsidizing these highly profitable companies, it ought to be a lot less compelling now when the country is slashing subsidies for other types of schools — ones that generally do a better job for their students but that spend far less on lobbyists.
*
Related
Degrees of Debt: Slowly, as Student Debt Rises, Colleges Confront Costs (May 15, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/15/business/colleges-begin-to-confront-higher-costs-and-students-debt.html
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/business/us-subsidies-to-for-profit-colleges-keep-growing.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/business/us-subsidies-to-for-profit-colleges-keep-growing.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
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Obama and Roberts: The View From 2005
By James Fallows
May 25 2012, 7:37 AM ET
Here are two quotes from two 40-ish Harvard Law School graduates back in 2005. They make for a very interesting comparison now. First, a few words of set-up:
I mentioned recently, in an item [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/in-praise-of-the-wsj-ed-page-no-seriously/257544/ ] about the possible Roger Taney-ization of Chief Justice John Roberts, the fascinating time-capsule quality of a Washington Post story [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/29/AR2005092900859.html ] about the vote on Roberts's confirmation, in 2005. Roberts (who had just turned 50) was approved by a 78-22 margin, with all Republicans voting in favor and the Democrats split evenly, 22 for and 22 against.
The Post story discussed the motives and rationales of the leading Democrats in the Senate for voting the way they did, and considered the ramifications for the later ambitions of several of them, including Sens. Biden, Bayh, Clinton, etc. It also discussed the views of Sens. Chuck Schumer, Lindsey Graham, Jon Kyl, et al -- but did not even mention one of the Democrats opposed to Roberts. This was of course the 44-year-old freshman senator from Illinois whom Chief Justice Roberts would swear in as president less than three and a half years later. It is one more reminder of the out-of-nowhere quality of Barack Obama's rise.
A reader has just sent in a link to a WSJ item [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124390047073474499.html ] from 2009, which quoted Obama's stated reasons in 2005 for opposing the Roberts choice. Given what we know about Roberts from his six-plus years on the Court, and what we have learned about Obama, it makes worthwhile reading now. Here are passages from Obama's 2005 statement of opposition to Roberts, with emphasis supplied by the reader:
"The problem I face...is that while adherence to legal precedent and rules of statutory or constitutional construction will dispose of 95% of the cases that come before a court... what matters on the Supreme Court is those 5% of cases that are truly difficult.
In those cases, adherence to precedent and rules of construction and interpretation will only get you through the 25th mile of the marathon. That last mile can only be determined on the basis of one's deepest values, one's core concerns, one's broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one's empathy.
In those 5% of hard cases, the constitutional text will not be directly on point. The language of the statute will not be perfectly clear. Legal process alone will not lead you to a rule of decision.... In those difficult cases, the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge's heart.
I talked to Judge Roberts about this. Judge Roberts...did say he doesn't like bullies and has always viewed the law as a way of evening out the playing field between the strong and the weak.
I was impressed with that statement because I view the law in much the same way. The problem I had is that when I examined Judge Roberts' record and history of public service, it is my personal estimation that he has far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak. In his work in the White House and the Solicitor General's Office, he seemed to have consistently sided with those who were dismissive of efforts to eradicate the remnants of racial discrimination in our political process. In these same positions, he seemed dismissive of the concerns that it is harder to make it in this world and in this economy when you are a woman rather than a man.
I want to take Judge Roberts at his word that he doesn't like bullies and he sees the law and the court as a means of evening the playing field between the strong and the weak. But given the gravity of the position to which he will undoubtedly ascend and the gravity of the decisions in which he will undoubtedly participate during his tenure on the court, I ultimately have to give more weight to his deeds and the overarching political philosophy that he appears to have shared with those in power than to the assuring words that he provided me in our meeting.
Now, compare this with what John Roberts said about himself in his opening statement at his confirmation hearings. Here I've added the emphasis:
My personal appreciation that I owe a great debt to others reinforces my view that a certain humility should characterize the judicial role.
Judges and justices are servants of the law, not the other way around. Judges are like umpires. Umpires don't make the rules; they apply them.
The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules.
But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire.
Judges have to have the humility to recognize that they operate within a system of precedent, shaped by other judges equally striving to live up to the judicial oath.
I leave it to you to judge which of those statements from 2005 stands up better seven years later as a guide to John Roberts's temperament and jurisprudence. I will tip my hand in saying: whether or not you admire his role on the court, it is impossible to see how anyone could describe it as umpire-like or "reflecting a certain humility." In the Citizens United ruling, he and his allies set out to answer [ http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/05/21/120521fa_fact_toobin ] questions the case itself did not necessarily raise, so as to overturn precedents they considered incorrect. If you're using the umpire analogy, it would be as if someone behind home plate suddenly yelled "Foot fault!" about a tennis match he saw out of the corner of his eye, with "Pass Interference!" and "Icing" calls thrown in to boot. The potential overturn of the Obama health care law may be desirable or not, according to your own views -- but it is anything but "humble."
I mention this mainly because of the apposite pairing. We have two men who now sit atop two of the three branches of the government. They both laid down markers seven years ago on how one of those men was likely to perform once in office. One of the predictions seems a lot more prescient than the other.
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/obama-and-roberts-the-view-from-2005/257624/
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"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
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upon the Right of Election, 1790
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