Charles F. Desmond: COVID-19 crisis displays 'The Amazing Generation'

— Photo by Artur Bergman

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

BOSTON

As a nation, we are taught to understand that it is sometimes necessary to send soldiers into harm’s way to fight for values and principles that we believe are worth sacrificing for.  Today, and throughout our history as a nation, young men and women have been called upon to fight in foreign lands for the advancement of democracy and to secure and preserve the religious rights and political freedoms of marginalized groups and disenfranchised individuals.

I am a decorated veteran of the unpopular war in Vietnam. I went to war believing in the aforementioned values and principles. Over the many years that have passed since then,  I have on occasion questioned whether my military service mattered, whether the suffering, destruction and loss I saw on the battlefield served a larger purpose, or whether anything of value in America was derived from the loss of treasure and human sacrifices made in that war’s name.

Over the past month, I have watched the deadly march of the COVID-19 virus from across the world and onto our nation’s shores. The human toll wrought by the virus has now exceeded 22,000 in the U.S. Coupled with this dreadful loss of human life, the economic and social upheaval the virus has rendered is beyond anything we have witnessed in recent history.

In the face of this human suffering and social upheaval, we are witnessing across the country, I have been heartened and inspired by the selfless and heroic actions of our younger generation of Americans. Any doubts I had about what American stands for or how we as a nation care for and support each other have been answered.  One need only read the daily newspaper or turn to any television station and you will see thousands of young Americans who have put themselves into harm’s way in their battle to do whatever is necessary to defeat this virus.

I see a generation who were not drafted and who did not enlist to serve in this war but who have stepped forward in cities and towns, hospitals and schools and everywhere else where they are needed in the national campaign to eradicate this virus from our country. I have watched in wonder and pride as doctors, nurses, researchers, emergency medical personnel, police, fire and military service members, truck drivers and grocery store cashiers who all have put their personal and family safety aside and, under unimaginable conditions, fearlessly faced this horrific disease in an effort to serve, support and save their fellow Americans who, without them, would surely fall victim to a virus that does not discriminate by race, color, age or economic status.

The generation that fought in World War II much later came to be called The Greatest Generation.  Some scholars and pundits have written that that generation may have been America’s greatest. I do not agree. I believe we are now witnessing the emergence of a new generation of Americans that cannot be called anything other than “The Amazing Generation. ” If their actions and behaviors now are any indicator, America is now and will continue to be in good hands.

Charles F. Desmond is CEO of Inversant, the largest parent-centered children’s saving account initiative in the Massachusetts. He is past chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education (NEBHE) and since 2011, has served as a NEBHE senior fellow.

Emily P. Crowley/Robert M. Kaitz: N.E. colleges must consider labor laws in the pandemic

College lecture halls are now empty.

— Photo by ChristianSchd

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

BOSTON

As COVID-19 rapidly changes the economic landscape throughout the country, higher education institutions (HEIs) are facing new, constantly evolving challenges. To address these challenges, federal and state governments are quickly drafting laws and regulations that are impacting colleges and universities, and their employees.

Wage and hour challenges

As HEIs grapple with COVID-19 fallout, including the cancellation of in-person courses, commencements, freshman orientations and other events in the upcoming months, they must remain cognizant of existing wage and hour laws when rolling out reductions in hours or furloughs for employees due to the diminished workload. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), employers need to pay only non-exempt, hourly employees for actual time worked, rather than for time employees are regularly scheduled to work. As a result, reduced-hour schedules or unpaid furloughs are relatively straightforward for these employees, with institutions obligated to compensate them for all hours worked, and nothing beyond that. Perhaps due to public relations concerns, some HEIs have gone beyond their obligations by continuing to pay employees who can neither come to work nor work remotely. Harvard initially offered full pay and benefits for 30 days to direct employees who could not work in light of the campus closure. But in the face of a social media campaign and other negative press, Harvard agreed to provide paid leave and benefits through May 28, 2020, to all direct employees, plus subcontractors. Many schools have enacted similar policies.

Unlike hourly, non-exempt employees, a reduction in hours or furlough may have significant ramifications for exempt, salaried employees. The FLSA exempts these “white collar” salaried employees from overtime premium pay, as their salary is considered remuneration for all hours worked in a week, whether more or less than 40 hours. As a result, employers must pay exempt employees their full week’s salary if they perform any work during that workweek, including work from home. This remains true even while an employee is on furlough, so colleges and universities must communicate clearly to all exempt employees that they cannot perform any work while on furlough—even small tasks like sending work emails—without prior written approval of a supervisor, because any such work would trigger the employer’s obligation to pay that employee a full week’s salary. Where an exempt employee is not furloughed but is working a reduced schedule, employers should be aware that if the reduction in hours causes the employee’s salary to fall below $684 per week, the employee will lose their exemption from overtime premium pay under the FLSA.

Higher education institutions must also consider two other wage and hour requirements. First, any reduction in compensation must only apply prospectively, and employers should give affected employees notice of the impending reduction, in writing. Second, under Massachusetts law, employers must pay furloughed employees all wages owed on the date the furlough is announced, including accrued, unused vacation time. However, the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office has stated that furloughed employees can defer their accrued, unused vacation time until after the furlough ends. Any such deferral agreement should be obtained in writing. Other New England states may have similar payment obligations when furlough is announced.

Families First Coronavirus Response Act

On March 18, 2020, Congress passed the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which took effect on April 1. The act’s two provisions relevant to employers pertain to paid sick time (PST) and Emergency Family and Medical Leave (EFML). Private employers with fewer than 500 employees and public employers of any size must provide PST and EFML. Employers will receive dollar-for-dollar federal tax credits for the PST and EFML benefits they pay.

The act requires covered employers to provide 80 hours of PST to an employee unable to work due to:

• COVID-19 symptoms and seeking a medical diagnosis;

• an order from a government entity or advice from a healthcare provider to self-quarantine or isolate because of COVID-19; or

• an obligation to care for an individual experiencing COVID-19 symptoms or a minor child whose school or childcare service is closed due to COVID-19.

The employee’s reason for taking PST will determine their rate of pay during leave. Employees are eligible for PST regardless of how long they have been on payroll.

Covered employers must also provide up to 12 weeks of job-protected EFML to all employees on payroll for at least 30 days who are unable to work because their minor child’s school or childcare service is closed due to COVID-19. The first 10 days of EFML are unpaid, though an employee may use PST during this period. Eligible employees are thereafter entitled to two-thirds of their regular rate for up to 10 weeks, based on the number of hours they would otherwise be scheduled to work. However, the act caps EFML benefits at $200 daily and $10,000 total, per employee.

Notably, the act contains a broad, discretionary exclusion from PST and EFML coverage for healthcare providers, which may affect higher education institutions. “Health care provider” is defined under the act as any employee of various types of medical facilities, including a postsecondary educational “institution offering health instruction,” a “medical school” and “any facility that performs laboratory or medical testing.” This provision, which forthcoming regulations will likely clarify, ostensibly means that an institution that performs medical research or offers classes in healthcare may exclude any employees from PST and EFML benefits.

Emergency expansion of Mass. unemployment insurance

Employees subject to a furlough or reduction in hours may qualify to take advantage of expanded unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. Massachusetts, for example, has waived the usual one-week waiting period for UI benefits, allowing Massachusetts employees affected by COVID-19 (including those permanently laid off) to collect benefits immediately.

The Massachusetts Department of Unemployment Assistance (DUA) has also published emergency regulations to address the onslaught of new UI claims and provide more flexibility for prompt financial assistance to employees affected by COVID-19. All employees who temporarily lose their jobs due to COVID-19 are deemed to be on “standby status” and are eligible for UI benefits, provided they meet certain criteria. A claimant is on “standby” if he or she “is temporarily unemployed because of a lack of work due to COVID-19, with an expected return-to-work date.” The claimant must:

• take reasonable measures to maintain contact with the employer; and

• be available for all hours of suitable work offered by the claimant’s employer.

The DUA will contact employers to verify its employees are on standby status and ask for an expected return date. An employer can request that an employee go on standby status for up to eight weeks, or longer, if the business is anticipated to close or have operations severely curtailed for longer than eight weeks and the DUA deems the requested time period reasonable.

Other New England states have likewise implemented similar emergency regulations to ease the burden on employees who have been furloughed, subject to a schedule reduction, or otherwise affected by COVID-19. For example, Maine enacted emergency legislation with many of the same provisions as the Massachusetts emergency UI expansion, but went an extra step in extending UI eligibility to employees on a temporary leave of absence due to a quarantine or isolation restriction, a demonstrated risk of exposure or infection or the need to care for a dependent family member because of the virus.

Federal and state lawmakers are considering additional legislation to address the workplace ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic and will likely continue to do so as new and unanticipated challenges develop. HEIs should actively monitor recent developments and speak with counsel as needed to discuss the impact of additional legislation on their workplaces.

Emily P. Crowley and Robert M. Kaitz are employment and trial attorneys at the Boston law firm of Davis Malm.

M. Gabriela Torres/Claire Buck/Cary Gouldin: At Wheaton College, making the sudden leap from in-person teaching to virtual

Panorama of Wheaton College’s campus, in the small town of Norton, south of Boston

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

As our computer screens filled with tiny squares of faces of students and faculty alike, we watched them fidget with their chairs and screens and heard their voices ring in our earphones … Social distancing measures took hold at Wheaton College, in Norton, Mass., forcing the same screen encounters that are now spreading across higher education nationwide.

In the wake of the effort to control the rapid spread of COVID-19, the conversations we have been having with students and faculty are not as different as you might imagine. Both groups described new contexts in which they would be learning: now sharing confined spaces at home with others, unable to have all the answers they needed to understand the future of their work, working through the differences among themselves and the others who now inhabited their unexpectedly virtual classes.

The virtual technologies for connection have included many tools that are now ubiquitous in higher education such as Google Meet and Zoom, a doubling down on course-management system use (in our case, Moodle), shared documents and worksheets, as well as immediate connection tools such as slack and project management tools like Trello.

But perhaps most importantly, this transition has enabled us to see continuity in three key issues that Wheaton’s Center for Collaborative Teaching and Learning (CCTL) has been addressing since it launched a year ago: inclusion and diversity, the educator as learner, and the strategic importance of centers for teaching and learning in the educational mission of colleges and universities.

When students were surveyed about their access to technology, their ability to focus on school projects in their relocated settings and changes in their autonomy to manage their schedule, the inequalities were stark. While some students had stable connections and multiple devices, others were only able to access phones and had no privacy. Similarly, as we got a sense of faculty familiarity with technology and how the changes compelled by social distancing affected child and elder care, it became clear that the move to remote teaching and learning was fraught with inequities.

Differences in access arising from a wide variety of inequalities are always present in higher education, and the transition to our work in the cloud only clarified these. Our work in a close-knit liberal arts college with a social justice bent moved us to pay attention to inclusion. The CCTL was already mandated in its mission to focus on inclusion. To this end, we regularly work with the educators in our college to maximize the access for all learners in classrooms and co-educational spaces such as peer advising and residential life leadership trainings. We work based on the idea that to enable inclusive teaching, we begin by viewing ourselves as learners.

In the past two weeks, we have lost our ability to ignore how much we need to learn about technology and the changing world, but most importantly, to learn about one another. Reframing educators as learners central to our mission was no longer a difficult sell. In the transition to remote teaching, learning to sustain connections with our students is critical as we manage the need for physical distance. A college like ours that has for the past 186 years prided itself as being a community where relationships between faculty and students are fostered and valued is remaking itself anew driven by the need to sustain our connections—albeit, now at a distance. To honor our legacy, our work in teaching and learning is focused on the intentional creation of connection and community. Today, in the midst of physical distancing measures that have been misnamed as “social distance,” and the isolation of lockdowns, this heritage is more important than ever.

A humanized virtual experience

Strategically, our problem became less about learning the tools to make us virtual and more about creating courses where students and faculty alike have the possibility of being successful through a rapidly morphing global crisis. In other words, our problem was how to create a more humanized virtual educational experience that enables our students and us to withstand the unknowns that are to come.

To provide a sustainable and humanized educational experience, the work of the CCTL is grounded on our values: We view our students as full persons, we prioritize our relationships and collaboration with each other, and sustain our commitment to thoughtful and impactful teaching.

In practice, this has meant that, in less than a week, we consulted individually with 25 percent of our faculty with more consultations scheduled in the weeks ahead. We have also facilitated a network of colleagues willing to support their peers with learning new technologies—relationships that we hope will yield as much community as they do technological capacity. Our approach is based on the understanding that proficiency in software tools is not the same as knowing how to use tools to further pedagogical goals. Next week, we begin communities of practice where we can discuss pedagogical strategies as they emerge. Pedagogical practices will require sharing, problem solving and iterative revision as we transition to remote teaching that communities of practice enable. Before COVID-19, Wheaton College did not offer any online courses with regularity. Supporting educators as fully social persons at a time of physical distance, we believe will yield fruit in the student experience.

Though the strategic work of our CTL has moved quickly constructing offerings curated tools, a menu of pedagogical strategies in the span of a week, and one-on-one support, our pre-existing toolkit focused on inclusion, collaboration and connection has been invaluable to our rapid take off.

We have worked to assuage what one college termed “the pressure of feeling that you have to go at it alone.” This work has involved colleagues at all stages of online-readiness. We work with colleagues who have decades of excellence in teaching but who are now just learning to turn on the camera on their computers, as well as with colleagues who are ambitiously trying to recreate classroom discussions through novel use of collaborative mapping tools such as Mural. In both cases, the work we do together revolves around core values: how to teach effectively and compassionately, and keeping the varied student experience that each approach will yield at the center of our concern.

The value of a pedagogy focus offered to colleges and universities by centers for teaching and learning has, in our experience, provided a sense of calm and clarity. Instead of fearing new technologies, our one-to-one approach to a pedagogy-centered transition gave faculty members we heard from the agency they had originally thought they had lost in moving to the cloud. Enabling colleagues to repurpose their expertise as teachers, albeit in a different venue, empowered one colleague to now feel that she can “continue to find the right balance for my students.” Finding balance can sometimes be a challenge, one that she realized she is familiar with in a face-to-face class. In both settings, online and traditional, we balance tools to best support our students’ learning.

M. Gabriela Torres, Claire Buck and Cary Gouldin are co-directors of the Center for Collaborative Teaching and Learning at Wheaton College.

Russ Olwell: Early college programs are way for New England colleges to avoid demographic disaster in years ahead

At Merrimack College, a private Augustinian college in North Andover, Mass. It was founded in 1947 by the Order of St. Augustine with an initial goal to educate World War II veterans. The college has grown to encompass a 220-acre campus and almost 40 buildings. North Andover is both a Boston suburb, high end in some places, and also a former mill town. It also hosts the Brooks School, a fancy boarding school.

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

This photograph on top from Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker’s State of the Commonwealth address last month shows more than just happy college students in their sweatshirts. These students, from Northern Essex Community College and Merrimack College, are part of cohorts of students who have graduated from “early college” programs (with up to a year’s college credit) and successfully matriculated into a two- or four-year college. Recipients of the Lawrence Promise Scholarship at the Haverhill-based (but multi-site) Northern Essex Community College and the Pioneer Scholarship at Merrimack College, these students are on track to graduate on time, and can serve as mentors and role models to young people in their families and in their neighborhoods—proof that college is a real possibility.

Why are these students so important?

The students in the picture, and graduates of similar programs, offer a chance to avoid a demographic crash that faces higher education nationwide (but hits hardest in New England). This is most strikingly laid out in Nathan Grawe’s book Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education, which uses survey data and mathematical modeling to predict the future of higher education. For two-year institutions, regional four-year institutions and all but the top 50 colleges nationwide, the news in Grawe’s book is grim: The decline in childbirths in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008-9 will reverberate into the 2020s and 2030s. This will lead to fewer high school graduates, and fewer students with the family background and finances to propel them into traditional college enrollment.

Grawe considers a full range of possibilities to counteract this curve, such as changes in state higher- education policy, that could increase the proportion of students who might attend colleges, and reduce the racial gaps in groups attending college. In Grawe’s analysis, however, none of these policy tools will close the gap enough to save many higher-education institutions from closing, or from a stark decline in students and revenue.

What can change the curve?

The Commonwealth can try to bend this curve by increasing the number of students who aspire to go to college, and who have the skills to enroll and graduate. One such intervention, which has the potential to scale to the state level, is early college programming, in which high school students are able to take college coursework during the K-12 experience, in order to learn to successfully navigate the college world. Through success in college classes, these students stop thinking of college as a possibility, and instead as something they know they can do.

Early college programs have been a success story in American education, raising enrollments and enhancing student outcomes. Early college programs can help low-income and underrepresented students gain access to higher education and be more successful students once they arrive to college full time, according to research by David R. Troutman, Aimee Hendrix-Soto, Marlena Creusere and Elizabeth Mayer in the University of Texas System.

Early college programs (high school students attending college courses on campus) have shown great impact on academic achievement of students, net return on investment, and graduation rates of participating students.

In successful programs and statewide efforts, students thrive in these programs, are more likely to attend college and are remarkably more successful once they get to campus full time. They are more likely to graduate on time than their peers who attend traditional high schools, and earn a higher GPA.

Recent studies released by American Institutes of Research found the economic return of investment on early college programs to be $15 in benefit for every $1 investment; the U.S. Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse recently certified the results of a random-assignment early college study that showed a positive impact in such key metrics as school attendance, number of school suspensions, high school graduation, college enrollment and earning a college credential.

New England has been a growing force in the early college field. Massachusetts now is home to at least 30 designated early college partnerships; Maine has created early college programs for its state four-year colleges, community college and maritime academy; and New Hampshire has launched a STEM-focused early college effort centered on career-technical education and the community college system. While these are far smaller than the efforts in Texas and North Carolina, they are making a positive impact and appealing to a broad range of families.

Scaling and expanding access

Early college programs have not been easy to expand or spread. First, like most successful policy interventions, they are hard to scale without losing the power of the model. The best early college programs are often about 400 students in size, run by dedicated instructors and leadership. Maintaining a size where each student can connect with at least one adult in the building is one of the keys to this work.

This model is hard to scale statewide, which is what would need to happen to have any meaningful impact on the downward curve of college applicants. Early college programs can also suffer from elitism. They can attract smart, ambitious, well-off students and families, leaving behind the populations that can be helped the most by the model. As college costs drive more behavior across the economic spectrum, middle-class and upper middle-class parents will see early college programs as a lifeline, and could seek out opportunities that had previously been designed for lower-income families. In my earlier work in Michigan, I saw programs start to fill up with the children of professors at the college housing the early college, as it was seen to be such a bargain.

However, as early college is embraced by new states and regions, policymakers are paying more attention to making sure that programs can grow, and can retain the characteristics that make the model so effective. As new programs are developed in Massachusetts, there is renewed emphasis on reaching the at-risk students who could be most helped by this intervention. With a push to help all students in a high school leave with some college credit, the impact of early college programs on student enrollment could counteract economic and social barriers to enrollment, moving whole cohorts of students into higher education.

In order for any of the above to have an impact on college enrollment a decade from now, state policy and spending will need to shift, investing in areas such as early college that can help students be successful in college from day one. Most importantly, early college programs and their impact would need broader recognition and support, and would need to be embraced by a wider range of K-12 and higher education leaders than have supported it to date. It might take today’s downward facing enrollment curve to get the attention of policymakers, who up until now have regarded early college with a mix of curiosity and suspicion. To save higher education in Massachusetts, we need more students up in the balcony, graduating from high school with college credit, ready to help their younger peers make the same good decisions.

Russ Olwell is a professor and associate dean in the School of Education and Social Policy at Merrimack College.

— Photo by NAThroughTheLens

An aerial view of the North Andover Old Center showing the North Parish of North Andover Unitarian Universalist Church.

David R. Evans: How is Bulgaria like New England?

Graduating seniors at the American University in Bulgaria

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

This question in the headline above probably seems like a lead-in for a funny non-sequitur, but bear with me for a moment.

The American University in Bulgaria (AUBG), in Blagoevgrad, where I currently serve as interim president, was founded in 1991, soon after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, originally as a branch campus of the University of Maine. Like several other international institutions, AUBG is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education, so we’re at least an honorary New England institution. This strategy streamlined initial accreditation and provided us with a base of institutional resources to start from scratch in a country that had no tradition of American-style undergraduate education. We have long since become completely independent, but our roots in New England remain fundamental to our institutional identity.

Our mission was, and remains, to promote democratic values and open inquiry and to provide opportunities for students to experience the freeing—liberating—benefits of the liberal arts. We strive to create engaged, effective citizens, critical thinkers and excellent communicators empowered by their education to take an active role in their professions and communities and always work to make the world better.

In this respect, AUBG embodies a modern version of the ethos that founded so many colleges in New England and spread across the U.S. in the 18th and 19th centuries. While unlike many such institutions, we have no history as a training ground for the clergy, the parallels remain clear: Our founders envisioned a better world and hoped, through establishing this institution, to play a definitive role in bringing that better world into being. In a country where, for nearly a half-century prior to our founding, the absolute last thing the communist government wanted was engaged, empowered democratic citizens who had learned and been encouraged to question and critique everything, our project and mission to bring the outcomes of a good liberal arts education to Bulgaria have been genuinely revolutionary.

AUBG also shares with many small New England colleges some significant challenges. Most importantly, Bulgaria, like many parts of New England, is in a serious demographic crisis. Bulgaria is a small country with a population of just under seven million people. Its population peaked at nearly nine million in about 1985, and has been declining ever since. Moreover, its fertility rate has been below replacement since about 1985 and is now at only 1.6 live births per woman, while the replacement rate is about 2.1. Because AUBG, like most private colleges, is significantly dependent on tuition revenue, and because our primary market is Bulgaria, the steady decline in our national population is something to take very seriously. We are, in short, deep into the worst nightmares that Nathan Grawe has recently articulated in his indispensable book, Demographics and Demand for Higher Education

Unlike institutions in the U.S., we face another specific enrollment challenge. When AUBG was founded, Bulgaria was not a member of the European Union, and the university quickly became an—if not the—institution of choice for Bulgarian young people seeking a top-quality education conducted in English. However, since Bulgaria joined the E.U. in 2007, such young people have a range of options throughout Europe at very favorable prices and have chosen particularly to pursue higher education in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Because of generous public support for higher education in the E.U., there are some parallels with the challenges the “free public college” movement poses to private institutions in the U.S., but the complexities of language and culture further complicate these situations.

In Bulgaria and most of our primary markets extending throughout Eastern Europe, we face another issue in that we proudly promote American-style liberal arts undergraduate education (though honestly more in philosophy and educational practice than in our majors, which are highly weighted toward careers in our service region in business, IT, journalism and communications, and politics).

Where in the U.S., comparable institutions face increasing skepticism about the “liberal arts” in general, in our area, the question is more about what a liberal arts education actually is, and how it differs and adds value to the undergraduate experience. The public universities of Bulgaria, of which there are many, tend to follow the European model of institutional specialization, with strong specific emphases rather than a deep investment in broad liberal education. (The technocratic and often applied focus of many of these universities is also surely a relic of communist practices as well.) In that context, as sadly often in the U.S. as well, our stress on general education is often seen as alien and unhelpful, a useless distraction from the actual business at hand. In many cases, our programs require an additional year to accommodate our curriculum’s required breadth, as we follow the traditional American four-year bachelor’s model, and this added time requires a real commitment on the part of our students and their families.

I bring a very particular, painful experience to my work here, because I was the president of the private Southern Vermont College when it closed last spring as a result of declining enrollment and the associated financial stress. I have seen first-hand the challenges that face private colleges in a highly competitive market, with a product not fully understood or appreciated by its clientele, and presenting a value proposition that is not always evident to the people who most need to embrace it. There, our mission was to provide a strong, broad education to a student body comprising mostly first-generation students and students from diverse and high-need backgrounds. Over time, and exacerbated by the broad declines in high school graduates across our region, it became increasingly difficult to manage institutional finances to support affordable access for them and thus to convince them to invest in our institution despite our evident success in supporting students to graduation and successful careers.

At recent professional meetings back in the U.S., in conversations with colleagues, I have been struck by how comparable, if not similar, our challenges are. Like many colleagues, I take strength from the power and importance of AUBG’s mission and from the tremendous success of our alumni, and work constantly to ensure that this mission can endure in the context of unprecedented challenges to a basic model that has, as New Englanders know, developed and supported exceptional leaders for over three centuries.

David R. Evans is interim president of the American University in Bulgaria.

RIP: Seal of Southern Vermont College, in Bennington, 1926-2019

John O. Harney: The latest in the N.E. 'free college' movement

2008–2012 bachelor's degree or higher (5-year estimate) by county (percent)

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

The New England Board of Higher Education recently honored Hartford Promise and the Rhode Island Promise Scholarship with 2019 New England Higher Education Excellence Awards. And NEJHE has been paying close attention to innovations—and challenges—facing such “free college” programs.

In June, the Campaign for Free College Tuition (CFCT) lauded NEBHE delegate and Connecticut state Rep. Gregg Haddad for his work helping the land of steady habits become the 13th state to meet CFCT’s criteria for having a robust free college tuition program for its residents.

Under the budget signed by Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, eligible students at the state’s 12 community colleges will be able to attend without paying any tuition or fees starting in 2020. Haddad co-chairs the Legislature’s Higher Education and Employment Advancement Committee. He worked on the issue with Sen. Mae Flexer, Senate vice chairman of the Higher Education and Employment Advancement Committee, after the two heard of the enrollment success at Rhode Island Community College under its Rhode Island Promise program. Sen. Will Haskell and Rep. Gary Turco also helped make the legislation happen. Connecticut’s program will provide a “middle dollar” scholarship to all recent high school graduates with at least a 2.0 HS GPA who fill out FAFSA and take at least 12 credit hours each year. “If the student’s Pell Grant fully covers tuition, they will still get a $250 per semester grant to spend on other costs of attending college. The revenue to pay for this new program is expected to come from online lottery sales which have not yet been legally approved. But the budget directs the Governor and the State’s Board of Regents for Higher Education to find alternative sources of revenue should that idea not work out,” the CFCT reports.

Meanwhile, the 2019 Education Next Poll found 60% of Americans endorse the idea of making public four-year colleges free, and 69% want free public two-year colleges. “Democrats are especially supportive of the concept (79% approval for four-year and 85% for two-year). Republicans tend to oppose free tuition for four-year colleges (35% in support and 55% opposed) and are divided over free tuition for two-year colleges (47% in support and 47% opposed).”

A paper from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research explains that while college promise programs offer invaluable opportunities, “eligibility requirements and rules on whether funds can be used to cover non-tuition costs, can exclude students who are older, working, or who have children.”

Writing in The Conversation, William Zumeta, professor emeritus of public policy and governance and of higher education at the University of Washington, notes that “Washington state’s new college affordability initiative differs from the ‘free college’ efforts being undertaken by other states such as Tennessee and Oregon. In other states, such as these, Rhode Island and, soon, Massachusetts, the ‘free college’ initiatives are mostly limited to tuition-free community college for some students. But in Washington state, the Workforce Education Investment Act provides money for students to attend not only a community college, but four-year public and private colleges and universities.”

In a Chronicle of Higher Education piece titled “The Fight for Free College Is Your Fight Too,” Ann Larson, co-founder of the Debt Collective, called on academics to help win back the promise of college as a necessary and vital public good.

There are also critics of free college schemes. They include some families who had to scrimp and save for their children to earn degrees. And Bloomberg recently published this piece by Karl W. Smith, a former assistant professor of economics at the University of North Carolina, under the headline: The Hidden Cost of Free College.

More recently, College of William & Mary economics professor David H. Feldman and Davidson College visiting assistant professor of educational studies Christopher R. Marsicano wrote in USA Today: “While free college has its benefits, its simplicity makes it a regressive policy that will most help the wealthy.”

Feldman and Marsicano propose instead: increasing the maximum federal Pell Grant by 50%; partnering with states by offering a federal block grant for higher education if states appropriate at least a certain dollar amount per full-time student; offering nonprofit colleges and universities that work with significant numbers of lower-income students a small operating subsidy equal to a percentage of the Pell dollars their students receive; and tying any additional grant subsidies and student loan interest rates to accountability measures such as graduation rates and gainful employment for students upon graduation.

Two other key resource for the movement are The Campaign for Free College Tuition and the clearinghouse for College Promise Programs at UPenn.

Expect to hear more about free college as the 2020 elections approach and student indebtedness grows. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaigned for free college in 2016. Most of the other candidates now call for at least two years of free college.

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

Student political engagement in New England and beyond

Student demonstration against Tufts University’s fossil-fuel investments

From The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE), a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

Nancy Thomas is director of the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life.

In the following Q&A, NEJHE Executive Editor John O. Harney asks Thomas about her insights on higher education, citizen engagement and elections. (A Q&A along the same lines has been conducted with the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate. Watch this space for more on higher education and citizen participation in this critical time for American democracy.)

Harney: What did the 2016 and 2018 elections tell us about the state of youth engagement in American democracy?

Thomas: Only 45% of undergraduate students voted in the 2016 presidential election, compared with about 61% of the general population. People on both sides of the political aisle had strong reactions to the election of Donald Trump as president, making 2016 a wake-up call. That, coupled with some intriguing, diverse candidates and growing issue activism, is a formula for youth engagement. We do not have our numbers for 2018—they will be available in September—but all signs point to a big jump in college student voting. Overall, Americans turned out at record high numbers in 2018.

Harney: How else besides voting do you measure young people’s civic citizenship? Are there other appropriate measures of activism and political involvement?

Thomas: Measuring student civic engagement is tough. In her 2012 review of civic measures in higher education, Ashley Finley at the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) concluded that although students participate in a continuum of civic learning practices, we need more evidence of their impact on student development, learning and success.

One problem is a lack of consensus over what counts as engagement. Knowledge about democracy? Intercultural competencies and other skills? Volunteering? Activism off campus? Following an issue on social media? Joining a group with a civic purpose? To measure engagement, many campuses conduct head counts of how many people took certain courses or volunteered or joined a club engaging in issue activism or attended a forum, etc.

Usually, civic engagement and development are measured by self-reported responses to surveys about behavior and attitudes. The CIRP senior survey asks whether students have worked on political campaigns or local problem-solving efforts. And the National Survey of Student Engagement,also a student survey, asks about voting, contributing to the welfare of the local community, and developing cultural understanding and a personal code of ethics.

Another approach is to administer pre- and post-experience questionnaires or require students to write reflective essays about their experiences. Some institutions survey alumni and correlate alumni engagement with learning experiences, if they have kept that record.

To my knowledge there is no objective, quantitative measure of civic engagement, much less political engagement, other than our voting study.

Harney: What are the key issues for college students?

Thomas: College students care about the same issues that most Americans care about—economic stability and jobs, health and access to healthcare, and education quality and access, particularly student debt and college affordability. They also care deeply about civil rights, discrimination and injustice, encompassing a range of concerns: immigration and the treatment of refugees at the border, DACA and, for those not threatened by the possibility of deportation, the treatment of their DACA peers; mass incarceration; criminal justice reform, racial discrimination and profiling; and hate speech and rise of hate groups and crimes. They also care about climate change and gun violence. I should note that, much like any group in the U.S., college students represent nearly all perspectives you can imagine. Right now, these are the issues that appear to be driving them.

Harney: Do they pay as much attention to local and state policy as to national and global?

Thomas: Some do, but it may be specific to the region or state. Or the institution. Around 50% of college students attend local community colleges, and nearly 85% attend college in-state. Local and state politics directly affect them, their families and communities.

It also depends on who is running for office. In Kansas and Iowa in 2018, for example, students turned out to impact the governor’s races. In the 7th Congressional District of Massachusetts, which is home to several universities, young people turned out to elect Ayanna Pressley.

Our office spent a lot of time on the phone during the 2018 midterms, and that was one trend that stood out to us—there was a great deal of feedback from administrators on campuses that students were engaging in local races more than in the past. We heard stories of local interest that often dovetailed with what was happening at the national level: local judicial elections (in the wake of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings), state representative races (amid a number of stories about state legislatures and state power structures), along with students jumping into races themselves, looking to create change.

In 2018, several students ran for local office. A sophomore at Spelman College ran for the local school board and narrowly lost. Rigel Robinson chose to run for local city councilrather than go to grad school right after graduating from UC Berkeley. He won.

That said, students are like all Americans—they care about the presidential election more. In 2014, only 13% of 18- to 24-year-old college and university students voted. That low number reflects national malaise. It also reflects the unique barriers to voting facing first-time voters and student attending institutions away from home. In midterms, students are less motivated to overcome barriers to voting.

Harney: Do they show any particular interest in where candidates stand on “higher education issues” such as academic freedom?

Thomas: They care about student debt and college affordability as significant higher education issues. I don’t think students would frame the issue as being about “academic freedom,” but they do care about speech and expression on campus and efforts by individuals and groups from off campus who come to campus to espouse discriminatory and hateful ideas. Our research on highly politically engaged campuses revealed nuanced attitudes to free expression on campus. Students want it and support it, but not if it crosses a line. The prevailing view is that students want their learning environments to be inclusive and welcoming regardless of race, ethnicity, immigrant status, sex, LGBTQ status and religion. They do not want groups or individuals with hateful ideas to have a platform on campus. Recently, the Knight Foundation published a report that confirmed this but also noted stark differences among different groups. Only four in 10 college women would protect speech over inclusion, compared with seven in 10 men. I have pushed backagainst this zero-sum-game approach of pitting speech against inclusion. The dominant narrative seems to be that speech, even hate speech, is always protected, at least at a public institution. I disagree.

Harney: How do the New England states treat voting rights for the many college students who live out-of-state?

Thomas: For most people, deciding where to vote is easy: They vote in the district in which they live. Students who attend and reside at a college away from home or out of state, however, may also vote near campus. Sounds easy enough, but it isn’t. Some states, for example, require not only evidence of residency but of permanence or intent to remain in the area. But what does that mean? A person has been living in the area for a month? A day? These kinds of standards are difficult to apply to most residents, and as a result, they tend to be applied to college students only.

Going into effect, ironically, right before the Fourth of July 2019, New Hampshire passed a law requiring students to obtain New Hampshire driver’s licenses or register their cars in state in order to register to vote near campus. The law is being challenged by the ACLU, the League of Women Voters and groups of students. Some legislators have also introduced a new bill that would create an exception for students, members of the military, and others living in the state temporarily. I doubt the law will hold up legally, but as of right now, students will need to go to a lot of trouble to vote locally.

The other New England states are not trying to suppress student voting, but there are many laws that could change to make voting easier, such as allowing for same-day voter registration and voting, early voting and longer time periods within which to register.

Harney: Are there any relevant correlations between measures of citizenship and enrollment in specific courses or majors?

Thomas: Yes! Education and library science majors vote at the highest rates; STEM and business majors are among the lowest. Gender might explain these differences to some extent. Women vote at higher rates than men, and fields that are dominated by women are likely to have higher voting rates. But that’s not the entire story. Education students study the historic and essential relationship between education and a strong democracy. The U.S. supports a public education system so that its citizens will be informed and prepared to participate in democracy. Both education and library sciences have a clear public purpose. This doesn’t mean that STEM and business fields do not have a public purpose. They do. But I am not sure the curriculum is designed to teach the public relevance of that field.

Harney: Are college students and faculty as “liberal” as “conservative” commentators make them out to be?

Thomas: Studies of college professors demonstrate that, overall, faculties lean liberal. In some fields like economics, they lean conservative, but overall, the professoriate is progressive. But that does not lead to “liberal indoctrination,” contrary to media reports or unique and inflammatory stories tracked by self-appointed watchdogs. Students do not arrive at college without opinions, nor are they easily manipulated. There is no evidence that students move left politically in college. Indeed, according to a recent study, college exposes students to new viewpoints and teaches them how to think, not what to think.

In our research on highly politically engaged campuses, we found that professors want students to think critically about their own perspectives, not just the perspectives of those with whom they disagree. They assign students projects in which the students must advocate for a position not aligned with their own. They teach using the Socratic method or discussion-based teaching to draw out multiple perspectives on an issue. They get students to work in groups reflecting diverse ideologies and lived experiences. If they do not hear a more conservative perspective expressed, they will introduce it. Do they sometimes take a stand on a political issue, like climate change or civil rights? Yes, but that’s the job. The job is not to be apolitical. Professors can’t cross the line into partisanship by telling students which candidate or party to support. But they can, and should, teach students to think critically about and even take a stand on political problems and solution.

Harney: What are ways to encourage “blue state” students to have an effect on “red-state” politics and vice versa?

Thomas: For better or worse, political polarization is a strong motivator for activism and voting. Young voters believe that they can make a difference and that government can solve public problems. I am confident that energy will continue through 2020.

I worry, however, that other forces like gerrymandering, money in politics, and the way politicians now cater to their “base” rather than all their constituents, will reinforce distrust in our political system. Many Americans believe that their vote doesn’t count or that their elected representatives do not represent them or their views. This leads them to ask, “why bother?”

Unfortunately, they may be right. In June 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court once again rejected efforts to stop partisan gerrymandering, leaving the drawing of districts to state legislators. Many state legislatures (both red and blue) gerrymander their districts to ensure dominance of their party. It is unlikely that politicians will voluntarily give up that power.

What’s the solution? One way to fix this problem is to get people to force their legislators to appoint nonpartisan redistricting commissions. In most states west of the Mississippi, residents can force a change to laws or state constitutions through ballots or referenda. Massachusetts is the only New England state that allows citizen-initiated statutes and amendments to the state constitutions. In 2018, voters in Michigan, Missouri, Colorado, Utah and Ohio passed initiatives to end partisan gerrymandering.

Young people can do the same on issues such as money in politics and extremism in policymaking. Educators should teach about these issues. Remember the old civics courses that taught “how a bill becomes a law?” Let’s resurrect that in college through experiential learning.

Harney: What role does social media play in shaping engagement and votes?

Thomas: Social media plays a significant role in shaping participation by young people. It’s how they get their news and information, find groups and people who care about their issues, and communicate with their peers. At its best, political engagement is a collective, and even social, act. Social media facilitates that.

The downside to social media, however, is misinformation and fake news. Manipulation through social media is a frightening truth. Colleges and universities should teach all students how to distinguish facts and fiction and to identify reliable news sources.

Harney: What do you think of an idea broached in NEJHE about ranking colleges based on the percentage of their students who vote?

Thomas: Some voter competitions compare basic voting rates; others compare election-to-election improvement. I have mixed feelings about using voting rates to compare one institution to another.

On one hand, voter competitions generate enthusiasm. They can be fun, and our research suggests that activities around elections should be spirited and celebratory. Again, engagement, including voting, is a social act. Students vote if their friends vote. Competitions can draw diverse groups to an activity, not unlike sporting events.

On the other hand, voting rates need to be critically examined. We know who the more likely voters are and what predicts voting: gender (women vote at higher rates), age (older people vote at higher rates), race (white, and some years, black Americans vote at higher rates), and affluence (wealthy people vote at higher rates). External factors also affect voting: Is it a battleground state or is student voting suppressed? Competitions will be won by institutions that admit older, affluent white women in states with same-day registration and voting.

The better approach is to calculate expected voting rates for a campus and then compare their actual with the expected, and then recognize campuses that overperform. We’re working on that, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. Student populations and voting conditions change every election. We’ll keep watching this.

We published a set of recommendations for colleges and universities interested in fostering student learning for and participation in democracy, actions that we believe will positively impact voting rates. I’d prefer to see a system that recognizes colleges and universities for how well they educate students about their responsibilities in a participatory democracy. Voting would be a factor, but it would not be the only factor.

Harney: How will New England’s increased political representation of women and people of color affect real policy?

Underrepresentation has been a serious problem in this country for a long time. According to the Reflective Democracy Campaign, white men make up 30% of the U.S. population and 62% of elected officials, while women of color make up 20% of the population and only 4% of elected officials. Practices like gerrymandering, special-interest money, how campaigns get funded, the power of incumbents and so forth allow leaders of political parties to serve as gatekeepers to perpetuate underrepresentation. While we saw historic shifts in 2018, we have a long way to go.

We have a partisan divide in this country that cannot be ignored. Fully 71% of Republican elected officials are white men, compared with 44% of Democrats. Only 3% of Republican leaders are people of color, compared with 28% of Democratic leaders. The historic shifts in 2018 reflect shifts in the Democratic party, not the Republican party.

Today, many politicians do not even pretend to represent people other than “their base” of die-hard supporters. They do not need to. The party in power sets their positions on issues and remains unmoved because they face no consequences for ignoring dissenters or opinion polls. It’s a maddening situation.

So, in answer to your question, increased political representation of women and people of color should affect policy, but the systems need to change to ensure that will happen.

Harney: How can colleges and universities work together to bolster democracy?

We need an industry-wide effort to increase education for the democracy we want, not the one we have. Regardless of their discipline, students need to learn the basics of our Constitutional democracy—how the government is structured, how elections work, how decisions are made and separation of power, and not just rights but responsibilities of people who a fortunate enough to live in a democracy.

I am deeply concerned by a 2019 publication by the Baker Center at Georgetown University that reports that nearly one-third of young Americans feel that living under non-democratic forms of government (e.g., military state or autocratic regime) would be equally acceptable to living in a democracy. That suggests to me a need for an educational response at the K-12 and higher education level.

But it also points to the need for systemic reform. Colleges and universities not only need to teach what a strong democracy looks like and why students have a responsibility to work for democracy’s health and future, but also need to enable student activism on electoral reform. They need to teach students how to run for office or how to effectuate policy change through laws and ballot initiatives. Students need to get involved in changing systems that underrepresent and disempower most groups of Americans. As I mentioned earlier, young people care deeply about equal opportunity and equity, along with other issue advocacy. The academy’s opportunity is now. It’s time to seize it.

Jeffrey Roy/Edward Lambert Jr.: Listen to Lowell students on expanding vocational opportunities

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

A shared challenge for our higher education institutions and employers is the large number of students graduating high school unprepared for success in college and the workforce. It leads to lower-than-acceptable college completion rates, particularly for our most disadvantaged youth, and a broken workforce pipeline that threatens economic growth and opportunity.

The lack of skilled workers to fill open positions is a growing concern for our economy. The talent search firm Korn Ferry has estimated that the U.S. could face a deficit of 6.5 million highly skilled workers by 2030, and the skills gap could cost the country $1.75 trillion in revenue by that same year. More important, our failure to better connect k-12 education to college and workforce success translates into lost opportunities for students. Put simply, we need to do more to help young people seize the many excellent opportunities our economy creates.

A proposal we have introduced and are championing in Massachusetts aims to do just that. House Bill 567 would expand opportunities for high school students to earn industry-recognized credentials (IRCs) that data confirm are of high employment value. The proposal will fuel a diverse, highly skilled workforce pipeline that is the engine of growth and prosperity and provides students with opportunities for upward mobility.

Many students in our vocational technical schools are already earning IRCs in information technology, welding, construction, healthcare and other fields. We can and should make these available to students in our traditional high schools as well. IRCs certify the student’s qualifications and competencies and are often “stackable,” meaning they can be accumulated over time to build the student’s qualifications to pursue a career pathway or another postsecondary credential. Some IRCs also earn the student college credit.

For students going directly into the workforce from high school and for those who enter but never complete college, credentials can be the difference between low-wage positions and better paying jobs that offer opportunities for growth. Earning credentials in high school can also lead to stronger preparation for higher education. Students who earn them are exposed to career pathways before entering college and deciding on a major. In Florida, students earning credentials in high school were more likely to take Advanced Placement or dual-enrollment courses and to go to college.

We heard from students at Greater Lowell Technical High School in Massachusetts who have earned multiple web development, programming and IT credentials that having those credentials will help them secure the higher paying jobs they need to help them afford their college education and in the fields they plan to ultimately pursue.

Our legislative proposal would require the state Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development to provide the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education with an annual list of high-need occupations that require an industry-recognized credential, ranked by employment value. The top 20% of the list will be credentials that lead to occupations with annual wages at 70% of average annual wages in the Commonwealth. The idea is to ensure we’re sending the right signals to schools and students about where the opportunities lie. The district would get a financial award for each student who earns a credential that has high employment value, is recognized by higher education institutions and addresses regional workforce demands identified by the local MassHire Workforce Board. To ensure that all districts have equal opportunity to participate, the bill includes start-up funding for implementation to encourage less well-resourced districts to get the programs up and running. The funds can support teacher training or cover assessment costs or equipment needs.

This proposal dovetails and complements several state and regional initiatives already underway, including the New England Board of Higher Education’s High Value Credentials for New England initiative launched last summer that is identifying high-value credentials in key growth industries and making that information more easily accessible to the public. The ultimate goal is to enable students to make informed decisions about their course of study and future employment opportunities.

Several other states have adopted similar incentive strategies or integrate credentials into the school curriculum and career preparation activities like work-based learning and internships. In Ohio, students can earn industry-recognized credentials in one of 13 career fields with a choice of more than 250 in-demand credentials. Students in any district can sign up for an industry-recognized credential course. Florida, Wisconsin and Louisiana provide a financial incentive such as the one we propose. Students enrolled in the program in Florida demonstrated higher GPAs, graduation rates and postsecondary enrollment rates.

Massachusetts can provide these important opportunities to students in our traditional and comprehensive high schools by providing the right incentives to our schools. It is an important step in addressing our urgent need for a highly skilled workforce and ensuring our education system is creating pathways to economic opportunity and success.

Jeffrey Roy is a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives and chairs the Joint Committee on Higher Education and the Legislature’s Manufacturing Caucus. Edward Lambert Jr. is executive director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education.

Neeta Fogg/Paul Harrington/Ishwar Khatiwada: Measuring the GEAR UP program for R.I. students

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

‘The federally financed GEAR UP (Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Program) was organized two decades ago with the purpose of increasing high school completion and college enrollment among low-income students. The College Crusade of Rhode Island’s GEAR UP program was designed as a long-term effort to buttress student success by providing various kinds of educational and social service supports beginning in the sixth grade and continuing through high school completion.

Back in 2015, the authors completed the first study in the nation that measured the net impact study of a GEAR UP program. That study track a cohort of entering sixth-graders who participated in the College Crusade GEAR UP program relative to a comparison group selected with the rigorous Propensity Score Matching (PSM) method that creates a comparison group with traits equivalent to the participant group at the time of sixth grade entry into the program. This baseline equivalency at the time of program entry means that differences in outcomes that occur between the participant and matched comparison groups are attributable to participation in the GEAR UP program.

That longitudinal impact study found substantial and statistically significant gains for a single cohort of GEAR UP program participants relative to the comparison group on the likelihood of completing high school on time and immediately enrolling in college in the fall following high school completion, providing evidence that the College Crusade of Rhode Island was able to substantially improve these two important educational outcomes of GEAR UP participants.

While high school completion and college enrollment have remained high priorities for the nation’s education system, in recent years, much greater attention has been focused on college retention and completion. This raises the question about the lasting effects of participation in the College Crusade’s GEAR UP program. Do the gains that the program provided in the sixth through 12th grades persist for participants once enrolled in college? At the time that these cohorts of students were participating in the College Crusade GEAR UP program, participants who were enrolled in college did not receive any systematic support from the College Crusade. This created the opportunity for us to examine whether the sizable impacts of GEAR UP participation in middle school and high school persist beyond high school completion and immediate college enrollment or do they fade out after entry into college.

Enough time has now elapsed for three cohorts of College Crusade GEAR UP participants to have completed their first year of college, providing an opportunity to measure the impact of participation in the College Crusade GEAR UP program beyond initial college enrollment.

The effects of participation in the College Crusade GEAR UP program are cumulative; that is, we found that the program was able to increase the likelihood of on-time grade attainment for participants relative to the matched comparison group for each year after initial enrollment in the sixth grade. The cumulative effects of these positive outcomes in each successive year for participants relative to comparison group students become quite sizable as students progress from middle school to college.

The chart below illustrates the divergent educational pathways of College Crusade participants and their matched comparison group counterparts. Beginning in the eighth grade, a gap emerges between participants and comparison group students in the likelihood of staying on track; and the size of this gap continues to grow in each successive grade/year. By the time of high school graduation, the gap had grown to 9.3 percentage points in favor of GEAR UP participants; 77% of the three cohorts of participating students had graduated from high school on time compared with just 67% of their counterparts in the matched comparison group. During the fall term following their expected on-time high school graduation, 56% of the three sixth grade participant cohorts had enrolled in college, compared with 42% of the three 6th grade comparison group cohorts.

Eight years after the beginning of sixth grade when these three cohorts of participants had enrolled in the College Crusade GEAR UP program, 40% had returned to college after the freshman year, relative to 30% among their matched comparison group counterparts.

This means that the cumulative impact of the College Crusade’s GEAR UP program was to increase the relative likelihood of a low-income sixth grader in Rhode Island to progress through middle and high school and complete a year of college by 35%.

The Pathway from Sixth Grade to One Year of College Retention, Combined Sixth Grade Cohorts, 2007-08, 2008-09 and 2009-10

These findings reveal that the College Crusade’s GEAR UP program had a cumulative effect that reached beyond its formal goals of high school completion and college enrollment. The cumulative gains for participants relative to the comparison group increased each year though high school graduation and college entry. Beyond that, despite no formal GEAR UP services for participants once enrolled in college, the gains to their earlier participation in the program continued. No evidence of a fade out of the substantial positive effects of GEAR UP participation is found one year after participants had exited the program.

The first year results are promising, but the kinds of obstacles to degree attainment that low-income college students confront are associated with complex academic, social and financial issues that are somewhat different from the barriers that these students face in completing high school and initially enrolling in college Will these cumulative one-year college retention gains persist through college completion with no fade out effects? Stay tuned.

Neeta Fogg is research professor at the Center for Labor Markets and Policy at Drexel University. Paul Harrington is director of the center. Ishwar Khatiwada is an economist there.

These findings reveal that the College Crusade’s GEAR UP program had a cumulative effect that reached beyond its formal goals of high school completion and college enrollment. The cumulative gains for participants relative to the comparison group increased each year though high school graduation and college entry. Beyond that, despite no formal GEAR UP services for participants once enrolled in college, the gains to their earlier participation in the program continued. No evidence of a fade out of the substantial positive effects of GEAR UP participation is found one year after participants had exited the program.

The first year results are promising, but the kinds of obstacles to degree attainment that low-income college students confront are associated with complex academic, social and financial issues that are somewhat different from the barriers that these students face in completing high school and initially enrolling in college Will these cumulative one-year college retention gains persist through college completion with no fade out effects? Stay tuned.

Neeta Fogg is research professor at the Center for Labor Markets and Policy at Drexel University. Paul Harrington is director of the center. Ishwar Khatiwada is an economist there.

Stephanie M. McGrath: N.E. colleges -- falling enrollments, higher tuitions

Presque Isle, Maine, site of the most remote state university campus in New England.

From the New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of the New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

Tuition and fees across New England have risen by 16 percent ($734) at community colleges and 10 percent ($1,001) at four-year public institutions since 2012-13, according to NEBHE’s 2017-18 Tuition and Fees Report.

The report, published annually by NEBHE’s Policy & Research team, takes an in-depth look at the tuition and required fees published by public two- and four-year postsecondary institutions across New England. It explores emerging trends by providing a historical analysis of tuition and fees in the region to shed light on college prices, as well as legislative and institutional initiatives that seek to address affordability challenges.

In New England and across the U.S., it has never been more critical to hold a postsecondary credential to be able to fully participate in the workforce and earn a sustainable wage. Roughly 90 percent of the jobs available in four of the nation’s five fastest growing occupational clusters require some form of education beyond high school, according to research at the Georgetown University Center for Education and the Workforce. The same study estimates that 63 percent of all jobs available nationwide in 2018 require a postsecondary degree. As a result, employers will need approximately 22 million new employees with a postsecondary degree.

However, in recent years the cost of a college degree has risen precipitously resulting in rising tuition and fee charges–often prohibitively expensive for far too many Americans to attend college. As postsecondary education becomes increasingly important for the vitality of New England’s economy and its workforce, the growing cost of higher education has garnered substantial critical attention from the public and from policymakers. New England’s public colleges continue to be the most affordable and financially accessible option for most individuals in the region. Their primary mission is to serve their state’s residents. Tuition and fees at public colleges are of particular interest to both students and state policymakers.

Among other key findings in the NEBHE report:

• From 2015 to 2016, enrollment at New England’s public colleges and universities declined by 1.8 percent, or 8,036 fewer undergraduates — a trend that is expected to continue in years to come due to a projected 14 percent decline in the number of new high school graduates in New England by 2032.

• On average, in 2017-18, the federal Pell Grant covers approximately 49 percent of tuition and fees at four-year institutions for students in the lowest income quintile ($0-$30,000 annual household income).

• Since 2012-13, increases in tuition and fees at New England’s two-year colleges (16 percent) and four-year institutions (10 percent) have outpaced increases in the maximum Pell Grant (6.25 percent), leaving a widening gap for low- and moderate-income families to offset with additional aid and/or family resources.

These trends are putting pressure on institutions and systems to find creative solutions to ensure that college is affordable for students, maintain enrollment and meet the needs of regional employers, who increasingly demand workers with postsecondary credentials.

In Massachusetts, a state known for its high in-state tuition prices, Gov. Charlie Baker announced in his 2018 State of the Commonwealth Address that the Bay State will increase college scholarship funding by $7 million so that the state’s lowest-income community college students with an unmet financial need can have the remaining balance of their tuition and fees fully covered.

Connecticut passed legislation during its 2018 session to allow undocumented students who attend one of its public colleges and universities the opportunity to qualify for the state’s financial aid. Previously, these students were not granted access to the financial aid system by state law but had been offered in-state tuition.

The University of Maine System launched a promise initiative in which, beginning in fall 2018, first-year Maine students who qualify for a federal Pell Grant are able to attend the University of Maine campuses at Presque Isle, Fort Kent, Augusta, and Machias free of having to pay any out-of-pocket tuition and fees. Beneficiaries of the initiative must commit to take a minimum of 30 credit hours each academic year and maintain at least a 2.0 GPA. As of October 2018, the initiative has resulted in a 2.5 percent increase in enrollment at these institutions over the previous year.

Click below to view individual state data used in the report:

• Connecticut

• Maine

• Massachusetts

• New Hampshire

• Rhode Island

• Vermont

Stephanie M. McGrath is NEBHE’s policy & research analyst.

Readers may comment on this and other New England Diary articles by emailing to:

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Jennifer Ware: When bad stuff comes from technology

Via The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

It’s an unpleasant reality, but also an inevitable one: Technology will cause harm.

And when it does, whom should we hold responsible? The person operating it at the time? The person who wrote the program or assembled the machine? The manager, board or CEO that decided to manufacture the machine? The marketer who presented the technology as safe and reliable? The politician who helped pass legislation making the technology available to consumers?

These questions reveal something important about what we do when bad things happen; we look for an individual—a particular person—to blame. It’s easier to make sense of how one person’s recklessness or conniving could result in disaster, than to ascribe blame to an array of unseen forces and individuals. At the same time, identifying a “bad guy” preserves the idea that bad things happen because of rogue or reckless agents.

Sometimes—as when hackers create programs to steal data or drone operators send their unmanned aircraft into disaster zones and make conditions unsafe for emergency aircraft—it is clear who is responsible for the adverse outcome.

But other times, bad things are the result of decisions made by groups of people or circumstances that come about incrementally over time. Political scientist Dennis Thompson has called this "the problem of many hands." When systems or groups are at fault for causing harm, looking for a single person to blame may obfuscate serious issues and unfairly scapegoat the individual who is singled out.

Advanced technology is complex and collaborative in nature. That is why, in many cases, the right way to think about the harms caused by technology may be to appeal to collective responsibility. Collective responsibility is the idea that groups, as distinct from their individual members, are responsible for collective actions. For example, legislation is a collective action; only Congress as a whole can pass laws, while no individual member of Congress can exercise that power.

When we assign collective responsibility and recognize that a group or system is morally flawed, we can either try to alter it to make it better, or to disband it if we believe it is beyond redemption.

But critics of collective responsibility worry that directing our blame at groups will cause individuals to feel that their personal choices do not matter all that much. Individuals involved in the development and proliferation of technology, for instance, might feel disconnected from the negative consequences of those contributions, seeing themselves as mere cogs in a much larger machine. Or they may adopt a fatalistic perspective, and come to see the trajectory of technological development as inevitable, regardless of the harm it may cause, and think to themselves, “Why not? If I don’t, someone else will."

Philosopher Bernard Williams argued against this sort of thinking in his “Critique of Utilitarianism” (1973). Williams presents a thought experiment in which “Jim” is told that if he doesn't kill someone, then 20 people will be killed—but if he chooses to take one life, the other 19 will be saved. Williams argues that, morally speaking, it is beside the point whether someone else will kill or not kill people because of Jim's choice. To maintain personal integrity, Jim must not do something that is wrong—killing one person—despite the threat.

In the case of an individual who might help develop “bad” technology, Williams’ argument would suggest that it does not matter whether someone else would do the job in her place; to maintain her personal integrity, she must not contribute to something that is wrong.

Furthermore, at least some of the time our sense of what is inevitable may be overly pessimistic. Far from being excused for our participation in the production of harmful technologies that seem unavoidable, we may have a further obligation to fight their coming to be.

For many involved in the creation and proliferation of new technologies, there is a strong sense of personal and shared responsibility. For example, employees at powerful companies such as Microsoft and Google have made efforts to prevent their employers from developing technology for militarized agencies, such as the Department of Defense and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Innovators who have expressed some remorse for the harmful applications of their inventions include Albert Einstein (who encouraged research that led to the atomic bomb), Kamran Loghman (the inventor of weapons-grade pepper spray), and Ethan Zuckerman (inventor of the pop-up ad), all of whom later engaged in activities intended to offset the damage caused by their innovations.

Others try to make a clear distinction between how they intended their innovations to be used, and how those technologies have actually come to be used down the line—asserting that they are not be responsible for those unintended downstream applications. Marc Raibert, the CEO of Boston Dynamics, tried to make that distinction after a video of the company’s agile robots went viral and inspired dystopian fears in many viewers. He stated in an interview: "Every technology you can imagine has multiple ways of using it. If there's a scary part, it's just that people are scary. I don't think the robots by themselves are scary."

Raibert’s purist approach suggests that the creation of technology, in and of itself, is morally neutral and only applications can be deemed good or bad. But when dangerous or unethical applications are so easy to foresee, this position seems naive or willfully ignorant.

Ultimately, our evaluations of responsibility must take into consideration a wide range of factors, including: collective action; the relative power and knowledge of individuals; and whether any efforts were made to alter or stop the wrongs that were caused.

The core ethical puzzles here are not new; these questions emerge in virtually all arenas of human action and interaction. But the expanding frontiers of innovation can make it harder to see how we should apply our existing moral frameworks in a new and complicated world.

Jennifer Ware is an editor at Waltham, Mass.-based MindEdge Learning who teaches philosophy at the City University of New York. 

George McCully: Academic disciplines: Synthesis or demise?

From the New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

Current anxiety over the values and directions of what we used to call “higher education” has rich and complex roots in the past, as well as problematic branches into the future. A crucial and core aspect of the subject not yet adequately understood is the structure and strategy of scholarship itself, and its future.

Forty-five years ago, in the heyday of “multiversities” lauded in books by presidents Clark Kerr (UC Berkeley) and James Perkins (Cornell), I wrote an article for the Journal of Higher Education entitled “Multiversity and University.” It contrasted the two models of scholarship, and contended that, whereas multiversity academic disciplines are each internally rigorous as scholarship, taken together as a putative whole, the multiversity had never been defended as scholarship and could not be so defended, because it is not scholarship. The disciplines arose and came together by historical accidents, not by intentional, systematic, scholarly or philosophical design.

They arose in the early modern period of Western history—the 15th to 18th centuries, with the Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution, Absolutism and Enlightenment—arguably the first “Age of Paradigm Shifts” in every field, significantly driven by Gutenberg’s IT revolution in printing. Each of the various modern disciplines created its own vocabulary and conceptualization, which were based on analyses of contemporary events and developments, and—this is crucial—were exclusively specialized.

Scholarship is always necessarily specialized—it examines the world in detail. What is distinctively modern with the multiversity is that its specializations exclude other subjects—studying each one (e.g. economics, politics, astronomy) separately, to the exclusion of others, in various languages that are mutually incompatible and incommensurable. Collectively, modern academic disciplines imply that scholarship at its highest levels describes the world as if it were fragmented, in separate silos. This structure and strategy of knowledge, inquiry and education played a leading role in producing modern secular Western civilization.

Its long-term effects have been profound. Exclusive specialization was originally intended only to separate each field from religion in a period of religious wars. The cumulative effect—coincidentally and inadvertently—was that they also excluded each other, obviating our sense of reality as a coherent whole, which it actually is. This also gradually undermined authentic liberal education, which seeks self-development in wholeness of life. In the multiversity, “higher education”—advanced self-development—has devolved, as we see today, into advanced technical training—information and skills development. As such, it leads to lives fragmented accordingly—even divided against themselves. Translated into public policy in the real world, the disciplines’ exclusions feed back as problems—in the early '70s Journal of Higher Education article the prime examples were our failures in Vietnam and the deepening ecological crisis caused by technology ignoring ecology. In sum, the flaws of fragmented scholarship have inclined us to problems at strategic levels in modern culture—in knowledge, education, public policy, and personal values—owing to the unattended gaps among the disciplines.

Needless to say, however, the article’s fundamental critique raised no noticeable dust. Basically no one cared—in part, no doubt, because they had been trained not to care about the whole. But because the assertions were true, it should not be surprising that today we are compelled to return to the subject by a new set of historical circumstances and trends in this second Age of Paradigm Shifts, also propelled by an IT revolution—this time of computers and the internet.

It may help to recap the history of how and why the tradition of university or universal learning was superseded. Basically, medieval civilization broke apart as printing enabled the flood of new information in all fields in this period to be much more rapidly and broadly shared, so as to set new standards in the sciences and scholarship. The Reformation and Wars of Religion encouraged scholars and scientists to dissociate their work from the contending universal religious doctrines and authorities. The best-known examples are those of the Scientific Revolution in astronomy, physiology and other physical sciences, which became increasingly empiricist in protective isolation from Classical and Christian authorities and dogmas. The flood of biological discoveries from the New World, of flora and fauna previously unknown and thus without symbolic significances, freed “natural history” from medieval natural philosophy and theology. In the social sciences, Machiavelli gave birth to political science by asserting that the application of traditional Christian values to questions of “how to maintain the State” in Renaissance Italy would likely fail, so that to be successful rulers should focus exclusively on power relationships.

Rampant monetary inflation spreading throughout Europe in the 16th Century, initially thought to be caused by sinful covetousness, was shown by Sir Thomas Smith to result from the sudden huge influx into the European economy of gold and silver bullion from the New World. Juan Luis Vives, the Spanish humanist living in northern Europe, pioneered modern sociology by analyzing permanent poverty in Bruges, modern psychology in his advocacy of women’s education, and a secular understanding of current events based on the Stoic categories of concord and discord. Humane letters addressed an increasingly bourgeois secular society, and rationalist and empiricist philosophy sought autonomous grounding. By the 18th Century Enlightenment, intellectuals were consciously seeking secular alternatives to medieval universal values based on theology. A symbolic example is that “philanthropy”—the “love of what it is to be human”—became a central value in ethics, especially in forward-looking Scotland and America.

The cumulative result of all these paradigm shifts was the disintegration of what had been a university encyclopedia (etymologically: encyclos paideia: “universal” or “all-embracing” learning) of scholarship and culture. The various disciplines, to their credit, were freshly and hugely productive; they gradually hardened and were drawn into academic institutions. By the end of the 19th Century, they had become a standardized structure of separate parts with no integrating whole. To be sure, outside and on the periphery of academe, there were significant exceptions and even resistance to the disintegrating academic trend—by Alexander von Humboldt, George Perkins Marsh, Charles Darwin, Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Henry Adams, William James, Ernst Haeckel and many others. The term “multiverse” was coined by Adams to describe the emerging pluralistic view of reality. By 1963, Clark Kerr coined the term “multiversity” to describe the heterogeneity of branches within single academic institutions, and lauded its intellectual dominance in American society. In 1966, James Perkins echoed his enthusiasm. The 1973 Journal of Higher Education article cited above was, therefore, a radically non-conforming view.

But the subsequent history of the multiversity has not been a continuing success. By the early '90s, Jaroslav Pelikan’s The Idea of the University: A Reexamination asserted that colleges and universities were in “crisis.” The political and cultural turmoil in academe of the late-'60s and early '70s rudely deposed both Kerr and Perkins. The business model of higher education became increasingly dysfunctional, with runaway costs mainly for ballooning administrations, declines in public funding, inexorably growing reliance on underpaid “adjunct” faculty, a decline in tenured faculty ratios, and students graduating with enormous loan indebtedness. Students and their parents have become highly critical, seeing themselves as exploited consumers buying academic credentials on unfavorable terms for short-term, unreliable job markets.

Thus, to the intellectually weak organization of learning is now added an institutionally and financially weak infrastructure, making the whole system more vulnerable in a rapidly transforming world. There is even evidence of increasing scholarly and professorial unease —e.g., the widespread increase in attempts to reconnect the disciplines in “interdisciplinary” and “multidisciplinary” studies; the AACU’s promotion of “integrative learning;” Northeastern University’s new “humanics” curriculum; Arizona State University’s experiments in replacing the academic departmental structure with integrative fields of study addressing real-world problems; and Georgetown University’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, among others.

Moreover, six powerful factors—“conducive conditions”—fundamentally challenge today’s multiversity structure of academic scholarship:

First and most powerful is the continuing Information Technology (IT) revolution, which arose outside and independently of the multiversity in the late ‘90s, and has been transforming the content, management and communication of information in all fields. Because the multiversity consists of information and depends on its technology, scholarship and teaching are being thoroughly—broadly and deeply—affected.

Second is a part of that revolution, namely, the explosion of sheer data—recorded and collected facts—to be analyzed. The most prominent expression of this is so-called “Big Data”—datasets so large and complex that ordinary software, even massively parallel systems running on hundreds or even thousands of servers, cannot manage them. Over 94 percent of all data are now estimated to be stored digitally, much of it with open access, usable by anyone, anywhere, at virtually no cost. Adequate management will require and thus evoke new technology and methods of analysis, some already existing, more yet to be developed.

The data explosion is subversive of multiversity disciplines because it comes from, and is about, the real world, which is not divided into separate parts conforming to academe’s conventions. Big Data is not separated out into silos. When it becomes manageable with more powerful technology, the exclusionary fallacies of academic silos will be further illuminated, calling into question the entire multiversity structure. Professors will have to retool their work.

Third is personnel—the huge increase and surplus of qualified researchers forced to work outside academe. Doctoral degrees today far exceed academic and research job openings. Fewer than half of those earning science or engineering doctorates gain jobs directly using their training. In the most popular fields like biomedicine, fewer than one in six join a faculty or research staff. Every year, the market tightens while federal research grants are flat or declining. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences reports the same for the humanities—numbers of doctorates awarded rise annually, while numbers of job openings decline.

Fourth is a knowledge explosion produced by the first three factors. What do these highly trained and underemployed people do with their skills? Some find gainful semi-relevant employment in industries, which are outside academic disciplinary restrictions; many take advantage of computers and the internet to do independent research, translating data into knowledge, largely freed from academic constraints. The capacity of traditional paper-printing in books and periodicals has been far exceeded by qualified research, so the surplus finds expression in many forms on universally accessible and even peer-reviewed spaces on the infinitely capacious internet. The bottom line is that the total output of research from all practitioners, significantly empowered by the IT revolution, now far exceeds the capacity of our academic and commercial information infrastructure to absorb and use it, much less to govern its content and formats. A crisis in knowledge management has already begun.

Fifth, which might administer the coup de grace for the multiversity, is future IT. The successors to today’s digital computers are now being developed outside academe by leading global corporations and governments: “quantum computing”—computers with exponential processing power (“qubits”) that are already capable of operating 50,000 times faster than today’s equipment, and soon will reach 100,000. The new technology has already run two million quantum programs to test and write papers on theories that we never before had the processing power to prove. New machines create new fields, which are not retrofitted into academic departmental straitjackets, but are free to roam and graze among the masses of new Big Data, to solve real-world practical problems such as climate change and overpopulation. This will render exclusive specialization obsolete.

Sixth is the real-world environment of academic infrastructures, which is enhancing the power of the first five disruptive innovations. Our world is transforming at an accelerating pace propelled by developing technology. Higher education is more than ever held accountable to the outside world in today’s monetized consumer economy of academic accreditations for jobs to repay the loans that bought those credits in the first place. A telling example is the revolution in AI—artificial intelligence—that can already drive cars and trucks and make homes and other accessories “smart,” self-regulating and intercommunicating, and that will certainly transform higher education. IBM CEO Ginni Rometty predicts that all jobs will be augmented by AI, requiring constant new learning and adaptation by jobholders. Therefore what today’s students need is not just information transfer as in the traditional multiversity, but learning how to teach themselves, with online and accessible “lifelong learning systems,” enabling constant retraining and upgrading of knowledge and skills—even (best case scenario) self-development.

The disruptive innovation of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is no longer experimental; students can gain academic credits for approved courses taught by experts from anywhere in the world, both inside and outside academe. Some of those courses are organized by conventional disciplinary categories, but many are not; they address real-world subjects and are accorded academic credits for business reasons. Other innovations—e.g., experiential learning, civic engagement—are moving in the same direction, from inside the academy out into the real world, signaling that conventional academicist categories are increasingly felt to be unrealistic.

These six factors—the IT revolution, data explosion, researchers surplus, knowledge explosion, future technology and the transforming real-world environment of scholarship—are radically more powerful than their counterparts in the first, early-modern Age of Paradigm Shifts, to which the emerging disciplines were originally attuned. Ours is a second Age of Paradigm Shifts, powered by the second IT revolution. Scholars then were concerned with the Classical distinction of humans from animals; today we are concerned to distinguish humans from machines.

We know that technological revolutions are inexorable and unavoidable; they must be accommodated. The entire set of academic disciplines, describing the world in separate parts by exclusive specialization evoked by actual conditions in the early modern period, is now antiquated and needs to be transcended by another innovative set, similarly evoked. To be sure, traditional subjects still exist—economies, polities, societies, cultures, physical sciences, etc.—for which deep expertise is always needed, but they can no longer be considered autonomously. What needs to change are the interstices. We need now to describe the world systematically, as computers will press us to do, but in realistic terms as a coherent whole—which science assumes. We may also hope our new learning will be firmly humane, distinguishing us from our artificially and massively intelligent machines. Colleges and universities, which have a special commitment to human values, would do well to assume leadership roles in accomplishing this.

George McCully is a former historian, professor and faculty dean at higher education institutions in the Northeast, then professional philanthropist and founder and CEO of the Catalogue for Philanthropy.

Stephen J. Nelson: John Hennessey, a great academic and a great reformer

John Hennessey speaking at a Tuck School function.

 Via the New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

John W. Hennessey  Jr. lived a remarkable, full life as a professor, as a leader in his field of management and business, and moral, ethical leadership, and as dean at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business and provost at the University of Vermont. He was extraordinary on many fronts, a great man who lived in tumultuous times marked by world war as a young man, later as a graduate student and then professor and dean during the massive social and culture changes wrought by the 1960s and ‘70s. He was ahead of his times in ways that were noteworthy then, but now are even more so as we look retrospectively at his life. He died Jan. 11 at 92. 

Hennessey was part of “the greatest generation,” those who were teenagers as a horrific war broke out, served as young men and women, and then came home to continue college careers and get on with their personal and early professional lives. Following his recent death, an article about his life in The Boston Globe captured Hennessey’s early-on bewilderment and criticism of the many discriminations of his time.

Of particular note for him were the barriers  that many institutions, among them our most elite, constructed against women, including his wife. After graduating from the Harvard Business School, Hennessey wondered about whether attending there made him complicit in Harvard’s discrimination policies. After all, his wife who wanted a law degree, could not even apply to Harvard’s Law School. Those personal lessons, coupled with the feminist activism of his mother as a suffragette at Vassar College and a similarly inclined sister at Vasser decades later, were in Hennessey’s gestalt as a young faculty member at the Tuck School.

When in 1968, Dartmouth’s president, John Dickey, approached Hennessey to become the dean of the Tuck School, his response was clear. Hennessey's quid pro quo: He would become Dickey’s dean only if he agreed to permit Hennessey to accept women to the Tuck School, which at the time, like all of Dartmouth College, was an all-male institution. Dickey agreed and the first women came to Tuck three years before Dartmouth decided to admit women undergraduates and four years before their arrival on campus. Hennessey was graduating his first women from Tuck before Dartmouth made the move to co-education in its undergraduate ranks.

But he was by no means done with that stroke. While making those commitments for women in business, he was also actively involved both at Tuck and with business school colleagues across the country to recruit racial minorities and opening doors for them into the business and corporate world. He invented the case-study approach to teaching business ethics, led the Tuck School to growth and expansion, and was an enormous influence in the leadership and wisdom of Dartmouth.

A fellow alumnus from the late 1940s at Princeton, John Kemeny, was Dartmouth’s president, in the 1970s. Kemeny turned to Hennessey repeatedly for advice and counsel. When Kemeny left the presidency, in 1981, many a rumor at Dartmouth had it that Hennessey was on the short list of successors. That did not turn out to be the case, one might say sadly for Dartmouth. Here was maybe the greatest man not to become a college president.

Hennessey then went on to a distinguished career as provost at the University of Vermont and for a short time acting president there.

What are the testimonies from this distinguished life in the halls of the academy? What does his forward-looking leadership and vision for higher education and society say to us today?

First, we need to be ever ahead of the curve. Hennessey did not wait for the civil-rights legislation of the 1960s and '70s, affirmative action, Title IX and all the rest to animate, motivate and move him in the direction of equality and equity. It was in his gut and in his heart, and he had the courage to give voice to those principles. Our colleges and universities today need to witness this legacy and build on it. That includes issues and contentions that Hennessey would have thought  that we had conquered, yet today continue to require revisiting and conquering anew.

Second, and more critically, check your ego and your self-righteousness at the door. It is easy for those who aspire to promote change to do it with their chests out. John Hennessey was as reserved a man, as he was an intelligent and forceful leader. But leadership was not about him, and more importantly even the good that he sought to do was not a testimony to his goodness.

The Globe piece quotes him in words that stand on their own and form a coda about the life of John Hennessey. As the undergraduate wave of women of Dartmouth began to take courses at the Tuck School, Hennessey commented late in his oral history that his upper-level administrative colleagues didn’t realize the ways in which they were “being paternalistic and fatherly.” As said noted, “The idea that it can all be done with good intentions and with ‘good old boys’ simply being gooder, isn’t going to work. And you’re going to have to listen to wise women.”

John Hennessey enriched the halls of academe, the quest for the life of the mind, and for lives well-lived.

Stephen J. Nelson is professor of educational leadership at Bridgewater State University and Senior Scholar with the Leadership Alliance at Brown University. He is the author of the recently released book, The Shape and Shaping of the College and University in America: A Lively Experiment. Nelson served on the student affairs staff at Dartmouth College from 1978-1987. He is currently working on a biography of John G. Kemeny, Dartmouth math  and computer-science professor and president, 1970-81.

Training New England's students for jobs in the Digital Age

Visualization of a portion of the routes on the Internet.

See this video from the New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE.org) on education for students soon to enter the digital economy.

NEBHE says:

"NEBHE’s Dec. 4, 2017 Summit included a session on "Educating Workers for the Digital Economy." Companies are looking for qualified applicants who have 'digital' skills. The challenge for educators is to find ways to integrate the current digital skills needed into the curriculum while teaching students to be agile in adapting to ever-changing technologies.''

Daniel Regan: The benefits and challenges of 'Early College' programs

Bentley Hall at Johnson State College, with the Sterling Mountain Range in the background.

From The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

JOHNSON, Vt.

Look around your campus this semester for some students who look unusually young, eager and attentive. It may not be, as faculty sometimes say, that “the students are looking younger every year” or that you yourself are aging rapidly. They may be students in an “Early College” program. Less evident at first gaze may be the multiple types of students within the ranks of Early College goers, as well as the challenges they, their parents and their colleges face in sustaining and navigating their academic endeavors.

Several factors have increased the popularity of these programs, though a proactive push from higher education to expand them has not been a primary one. The impetus for the growth of such programs has come from legislators as well as from high school students and their families, for reasons that will surprise no one: concern about the cost of a college education; national publicity about student debt at graduation; and questions about the quality of U.S. secondary education and thus college readiness.

A form of dual enrollment

Traditional Early College has long existed in the form of dual enrollment, in which high school students get a jumpstart on college, by taking a few courses on campus, online or at their high school (but taught by instructors certified as equivalent to part-time or adjunct college faculty). A growing trend is for colleges and universities to host full-blown freshman years for high school students, most often seniors. At least 28 states possess versions of these full-time programs, whose genesis in the U.S. traces back to 2002 with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among others. Such programs make it possible for students to earn a high school diploma along with college credits. The students spend their school day at college, as full-time students, and may go to their high school for selected events, services and activities.

Vermont’s Legislature passed its version of Early College in 2013, as part of Act 77, “An act relating to encouraging flexible pathways to secondary school completion.” In the legislation, one of several “flexible pathways” is an Early College Program, which simultaneously serves as a student’s senior year of high school and provides a full year of college credit. For each accepted high school senior, the State of Vermont pays 87 percent of the tuition rate to an approved postsecondary institution, which accepts the amount as full payment.

Early College has proven popular. My own college exceeded its quota in the first year of the program, and was forced to seek supplementary legislation to redirect and gain seats unused elsewhere in the state system. Our local legislators provided strong and effective support.

Who are the students?

Several types of students may be part of an institution’s Early College population. Some programs began with a specific emphasis on attracting underserved, first-generation or low-income students. Otherwise, an Early College program’s earliest recruits will tend to be academic high flyers. They are the high performers who make for happy professors and delight in their campus’s outreach to high schools. At my institution, for instance, they help account for Early College students’ consistently outperforming the general student population, at least by the measure of GPA. In a recent fall semester, for instance, the average GPA for Early College students was 3.6, while for all freshmen, it was 2.9. As the latter group includes Early College, the actual difference is greater still.

Although academic high flyers may be in the first wave, they are not the only Early College constituency. Other student participants may prove similarly rewarding, though perhaps in different ways. Economic pragmatists—some academically proficient, others less so—may also be early adopters. In this era of academic cost-consciousness on the part of education “consumers,” these students and their families know how to spot a good deal. They quickly grasp that tuition for Early College courses is generally borne by the school system, not the individual family. Good high school advisors also play a major role, helping students from modest (and other economic) backgrounds become aware of opportunities to earn college credits inexpensively.

Besides academic high performers and economic pragmatists, there are secondary students who seek a new learning environment different from the one in their high schools. And finally, there are those who simply want to get out of their buildings. Early College programs would seem particularly good places for those high school students who, after a while, grow tired of fighting identity battles over issues such as sexual orientation or gender identity. Trading a high school classroom or lunchroom for a college or university campus can come as a relief.

Building credits and confidence

That these programs are likely to succeed will come as no surprise. They convey many benefits. Students earn transferable credits and build confidence in their college-going capacity. (According to one report, 86 percent of Early College students enroll in college the semester after high school graduation.) They enhance their readiness for higher education through early exposure to the intangibles of collegiate culture: getting used to few class hours and lots of homework (instead of the reverse, as in traditional high schools), learning how to read a syllabus and how a college class is conducted, even how a college dining service works. The institution benefits from enhanced professorial satisfaction and good will in the community. An unanticipated benefit--the retention of some students after their Early College year—may be a godsend for tuition-driven institutions, in some parts of the country, that are struggling to maintain a critical mass. Even the high schools that have surrendered these students get to proclaim their commitment to individualized instruction. They also avoid the problem of accommodating bored seniors who have maxed out what their high school can offer them.

Several problems remain, however, and are fairly predictable. While none negates the value of an Early College program, each deserves consideration and may merit a concrete solution, especially in the interests of ensuring equity of access.

Costs: Parents and students will face costs that, while routine for college, will be unprecedented for most high school families. Although tuition is free, fees may attach to particular courses. Even when communications are crystal clear, in the excitement of the Early College opportunity, parents will likely ignore the fine print and be surprised by course and activity fees. College books will be an additional expense. Then there is food, during the days on campus. In my local high school, for instance, half the students qualify for free or reduced lunch; none of that transfers to Early College. (Luckily, the director of our food services recognized the problem and created a cost-effective option for program participants.) Students may have to cover other costs, too, including health insurance and parking permits.

Commuters vs. residents: Transportation may be a concern, either the cost of public bus or train service or the commuting distance to campus for students from multiple high schools. These are generally 17-year-old drivers. Given Vermont’s long winters and snowy roads, we felt compelled to offer Early College students a residential possibility.

Staffing: Even in situations where space is available and room costs are bearable, youthful dorm residents may pose special challenges to the college or university that hosts them. Certainly, these students will require additional staff time and supervision, however academically prepared they may be. Additional staff resources may also have to be expended on recruitment and admissions work as well as on academic advising. And college advisers will have an additional responsibility: making sure that students are poised to satisfy all their high school graduation requirements. “What about that gym class that Sabrina needs to satisfy state requirements?”

Balancing act: It requires a deft touch for colleges and universities to address the unique needs of Early College students, but not segregate them from the general student body. Modest steps to create an identifiable cohort would seem advisable—perhaps, for example, an ice cream social at the start, followed by occasional meetings throughout the first semester (at least). A recognition event at the conclusion of the Early College year provides a good opportunity to celebrate their achievement.

Assurances: Considerable time may be required to devise an Early College Program, complete the paperwork and provide the assurances that state Departments of Education will likely require.

Transferable credits: Early College students are unlikely to be concerned about the acceptance of Early College credits at their eventual degree-granting institutions; but if they are not, they may be in for a surprise later on. Transfer credit policies and practices vary widely. Courses accepted for graduation credit, but not toward particular requirements—which is sometimes the case—may not accelerate the pace of college graduation, which is a key promise of Early College.

Time management: Also from a student perspective, a new kind of time juggling will be at a premium: how to perform in your high school play, play on the soccer team, all the while carrying a full roster of college courses as well as extra- or co-curricular involvements on campus?

High school concerns: From a secondary school perspective, there are a number of concerns. Administrators may be understandably reluctant to lose these students. They may be giving up significant public funding, computed per-capita, to surrender some of their best students. Even teachers’ work schedules may be affected, if they no longer have a sufficient number of students to teach a smaller, more advanced class they were counting on. And beyond all that, is exiting the building any real solution to deficits in secondary education, especially the senior year?

Despite these challenges, Early College programs provide very positive experiences for many participants, satisfaction for their families, benefits to the host colleges and universities, and the ability for sending high schools to claim—rightly so—a commitment to individualized learning.

Daniel Regan is accreditation liaison officer and former dean of academic affairs at Johnson State College, in Vermont.

Carolyn Morwick: It was supposed to be a quiet year in Vt. Legislature...

The Vermont State House, in Montpelier -- the smallest state capital, with only about 7,900 residents.

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a unit of The New England Board of Higher education (nebhe.org.)

From January to April, there appeared to be an unusual degree of cooperation among legislators and newly elected Vermont Gov. Phil Scott. The House and Senate passed a budget with minor differences. Up until this point, some legislators were characterizing the session as “boring.” All that changed on April 20, when Governor Scott proposed that the Legislature adopt the Vermont School Boards Association’s plan for a statewide teachers’ health-insurance proposal that would save Vermont taxpayers $26 million. Scott campaigned in earnest for his proposal and told legislators that he would veto their budget, which included their version of a teachers’ health insurance savings proposal.

No headway was made despite several meetings between the governor and legislative leaders. In the early morning hours of May 19, a budget was passed and the Legislature adjourned.

As he had promised, Scott vetoed the state budget and a bill for setting property-tax rates. Lawmakers returned to the capitol on June 21 for a special session where the budget stalemate was finally broken. A compromise was achieved which required school districts to find $13 million in savings and create a commission to study a statewide teachers’ healthcare plan. The $13 million will come from school budgets that voters have already passed. Rep David Sharpe, chairman of the House Education Committee, noted that insurance premiums are expected to drop by $75 million next year, giving school districts some leverage to negotiate plans for their employees while saving money.

On June 28, Scott signed the Fiscal 2018 budget, which does not raise taxes or fees, including property taxes. The budget includes a $35 million bond for housing, which state officials expect to generate $100 million investment in affordable housing.

On July 21, Scott and legislators learned that revenue for the FY18 base operating budget would be short by $28 million. A rescission plan to cut $12.6 million from the budget was proposed by Scott and approved by the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Committee.

Legislation Passed, Signed Into Law

Immigration

SB. 79 An Act Relating to Freedom From Compulsory Collection of Personal information

Prohibits Vermont officials from sharing information with the federal government that would be used to establish a registry based on religion, immigration status or any other personal characteristics.

Retirement Plan

SB.98 An Act Relating to the Public Retirement Study Committee

Creates the Green Mountain Secure Retirement Plan—voluntary retirement option for employers with 50 or fewer employees, none of whom have a retirement plan.

Economic Development

SB. 135 An Act Relating to Promoting Economic Development

Improves the Employment Incentive Growth Program. Lifts the cap on Tax Increment Financing (TIF) Districts and adds additional TIF districts.

Oversight of Race, Criminal Justice

HB. 308 An Act Relating to the Racial Disparities in the Criminal and Juvenile Justice System Advisory Panel

Voids any aspect of the Vermont fair and impartial policing policy that would conflict with federal law, requires all police agencies to adopt every part of the revised policy. The legislation also sets up a panel to make recommendations about how to reduce racial disparities in Vermont’s criminal and juvenile justice system.

Mental Health for Minors

HB 230 An Act Relating to Consent by Minors for Mental Health Treatment

Allows LGBTQ teens to seek counseling to discuss their sexual orientation without their parents’ approval.

Legislation That Failed

Marijuana

SB. 22 An Act Relating to Eliminating Penalties for Possession of Limited Amounts of Marijuana by Adults 21 Years of Age and Older

A last-minute compromise passed by lawmakers legalized the recreational use of marijuana. The governor subsequently vetoed the measure. Other states have approved similar measures by ballot questions including Maine and Massachusetts.

K-12 Funding

Scott proposed freezing funding for K-12 budgets.

Higher Education Funding

According to Patricia Coates, of Vermont State Colleges, the system’s FY18 budget ends several years of budgets stressed by low state support, a decline in the number of Vermont high school graduates, increased competition from New England and northeastern regional colleges through tuition discounting, and increases in health insurance costs. This year, Vermont college presidents submitted budgets that reflected strategic management of resources, which resulted in a balanced VSCS budget that realizes savings through a new, systemwide approach to business processes.

The fiscal year 2018 budget was buttressed by several significant initiatives:

A $3 million increase in the base appropriation from the state

$880,000 in state support for the unification of Johnson State College and Lyndon State College into Northern Vermont University, which followed $770,000 in FY17

$1 million in savings consolidating the administrations of Johnson and Lyndon in FY18

$2.6 million from a major debt refinancing and restructuring

Over $1 million in savings from business process efficiencies, benefit changes and spending reductions.

Carolyn Morwick directs government and community relations at NEBHE and is former director of the Caucus of New England State Legislatures. .

Pooja Patel: N.E. institutional leadership for illegal-alien students aided by DACA

Via the New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

A Massachusetts resident, Faustina began working on her college applications last August. In the beginning, the process was going well. However, as she began receiving acceptance letters and financial aid award letters, things became difficult. As an undocumented student, Faustina did not have a permanent residency card, which most colleges need in order to provide financial aid. Unwavering in her efforts to pursue a higher education, Faustina hoped to receive financial support from private institutions but, often, they could not meet her need.

As a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) beneficiary, Faustina was ineligible for federal financial aid and, in most cases, state financial aid. Signed under the Obama administration, DACA grants a working permit to those who entered the U.S. before age 16, allowing students to enroll at institutions of higher education and join the military. This month,  the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, John Kelly, said that the DACA program would remain in effect, however, the long-term viability of the program remains unknown. While DACA allowed students like Faustina to come out of the shadows and apply to college, there is a long way to go to ensure that all academically qualified students have access to a quality and affordable higher education.

Undocumented students are ineligible for federal financial aid programs such as the Pell Grant, work study and government loans. As a result, these students rely almost exclusively on state support. Twenty states offer some form of financial aid to undocumented students, and most extend in-state tuition to undocumented students.

Nationally, six states provide both in-state tuition and state financial aid. In New England, only two states offer financial support. Connecticut and Rhode Island extend in-state tuition to undocumented students if they meet certain criteria such as having attended a state high school for two or more years and graduated. Connecticut State Colleges and Universities President Mark Ojakian has taken a personal interest in the matter. “We support all students’ educational goals and dreams, not only because it is the right thing to do, but because investing in all our students improves the sustainability of our communities and the economic competitiveness of our state.”

Legislative action in New England

In Connecticut, the Higher Education and Employment Advancement committee, chaired by state Rep. Gregg Haddad (D.-Mansfield), has introduced An Act Equalizing Access To Student-Generated Financial Aid, HB 7000. The bill allows students to have equal access to institutional financial aid regardless of immigration status. “Institutional financial aid” includes tuition waivers, tuition remissions, grants for educational expenses and student employment.

“The dreamers [undocumented students] themselves have been pushing this [legislation],” according to Haddad. Members of the CT Students for the Dream—an organization devoted to advocating for the rights of undocumented student—have played a crucial role in propelling the legislation, Haddad said. “They’re here, they have study-ins in the capital. They lobby extensively. They are unbelievably unafraid to identify themselves as undocumented residents.”

In addition to the students, “institutions in Connecticut have reacted so differently than institutions elsewhere” reported Haddad. For instance, in fall 2016, Eastern Connecticut State University admitted the first cohort of Opportunity Scholars. These scholars come from seven “locked-out” states—states that deny in-state tuition and, in some cases, bar undocumented students from enrolling—as well as 13 different countries. According to Eastern President Elsa Núñez, “no public funds are being used to support Eastern’s Dreamers, and no in-state students are being denied admission because of the program.” Instead, the 42 scholars in the cohort, in addition to five DACA students from Connecticut, are being funded by the Dream.US Scholarship program. In regard to continuing the program, “applications are already being accepted for fall 2017, and Eastern will likely enroll another 75 Opportunity Scholars,” according to Núñez.

There is a moral and an economic imperative to Connecticut’s support of undocumented students. The state faces a major budget deficit and struggles with the lack of an urban center that draws young people, putting the state’s vitality at risk. Therefore, Connecticut hopes to attract young people of all backgrounds.

While the leadership of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities, and Eastern in particular, is admirable, more needs to be done at the legislative level to ensure that undocumented students have access to affordable education. HB 7000 is a step in the right direction but its future remains uncertain. The bill did not come to a vote during the 2017 legislative session but Haddad hopes to bring the bill back when the Legislature reconvenes. As Haddad continues to persist, Massachusetts state Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz (D-2nd Suffolk District) hopes to pave new ground in her state.

Massachusetts has the highest number of DACA beneficiaries in  New England region, with 7,258 individuals benefiting from the executive action. Still, Massachusetts has not passed legislation extending in-state tuition. Aiming to change the status quo, Chang-Diaz introduced An Act Providing Access To Higher Education For High School Graduates In The Commonwealth, S. 669.

The bill extends in-state tuition and eligibility for state-funded financial assistance to any person who has attended high school in the Commonwealth for three or more years and has graduated from high school or has a General Equivalency Diploma (GED), with stipulations such as providing an individual taxpayer identification number (ITIN) in lieu of a social security number and signing an affidavit stating that the person has applied or will apply for citizenship or legal permanent residence within 120 days of eligibility. If passed, this bill would remove a major financial barrier to higher education for undocumented students, allowing them to enroll at a Massachusetts public institution with a more affordable price tag.

Survey results

To better understand undocumented students’ access to affordable higher education in the region, the New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE) conducted a survey of undergraduate institutions in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Out of 144 bachelor's-degree granting institutions in these three states, 50 institutions responded to the survey. The majority of the survey respondents were 4-year private, nonprofit institutions followed by 2-year public and 4-year public institutions, respectively.

Of the institutions that responded, 72 percent reported admitting undocumented students in the 2015-16 admission cycle. Although because of the response rate, the results overall have no statistical significance, the responses reveal a broad range of attitudes toward undocumented students.

Three 2-year public institutions admitted between 1-9 undocumented students in the 2015-16 admission cycle with one institution admitting more than 20 undocumented students. Given the financial challenges facing this group of students, this trend is not altogether surprising. Undocumented students tend to come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and 2-year public institutions often provide a more affordable education than other alternatives. Comparatively, 11 4-year nonprofit private institutions admitted between 1-9 students and one reported admitting 10-19 students. Again, given the financial constraints facing this particular group of students, a 4-year nonprofit is more likely to offer them the financial support they need than a 4-year public institution.

Of the institutions that responded to the survey, the majority do not identify or track undocumented students (Figure 2). For institutions that do identify these students, they use a wide array of classifications ranging from “domestic student” to “non-eligible non-citizen” to being designated as a part of a “cohort.” One institution tracks these students as “DACA eligible” for in-state tuition purposes.

Forty-six percent of the institutions that answered the survey said that they provide resources specifically designated for undocumented students such as legal aid, student organizations focused on immigration and staff members whose mission is to support undocumented students. One institution formed an “Undocumented Student Task Force” focused on identifying barriers and developing solutions. Another—a private institution located in Massachusetts—created a list of alumni who are willing to offer legal and social service support to undocumented students and their immediate family members.

This institution also fully covered undocumented students’ health insurance. Due to strong institutional support, the net cost of yearly attendance for the undocumented students was between $1 and $4,999. However, not all institutions have the resources to be able to serve undocumented students in this capacity. For instance, another private institution in Massachusetts reported admitting undocumented students and providing financial aid of $35,000 or more but the net cost for the student was still $20,000 or higher.

Of the responding institutions that admitted undocumented students, 52 percent reported providing financial aid. Financial aid in this case includes in-state tuition, grants or scholarship. A majority of colleges and universities offer institutional grants and scholarships, with some in Connecticut and Rhode Island relying on in-state tuition. Both responding Rhode Island public institutions provided financial aid in the form of in-state tuition. Of two Connecticut public institutions that provide financial aid, one offered in-state tuition while the other provided foundation-funded scholarships such as TheDream.US aid program. Conversely, no public institutions in Massachusetts provided financial assistance to these students.

Overall, the survey results shed light on the powerful impact of institutional leadership. Absent affirmative legislation or state policy in Massachusetts, individual institutions have taken it upon themselves to provide support for undocumented students. A subsection of Tufts University’s admissions page is specifically geared towards undocumented students, stating that “undocumented students, with or without DACA, who apply to Tufts are treated identically to any other U.S. citizen or permanent resident.”

Recognizing that undocumented students are ineligible for federal financial aid, Tufts provides institutional financial aid, meeting 100 percent of the demonstrated student need. While not all institutions make information available online, often, private nonprofit institutions do assist undocumented students by providing institutional aid and connecting them with private scholarships. While this is admirable, not every institution has the financial means to support undocumented students. Given such disparities, legislation plays a crucial role in bridging the gap to ensure all qualified students have access to quality higher education.

The face of DACA

Faustina was fortunate to have the support of her school counselor. “She was determined to send me to college … you are going to college.” she said. She gave me hope which was something that I needed most at the moment.” Faustina’s school counselor was unwavering in her support—contacting everyone from her personal friends to people in the mayor’s office. Fortunately, Faustina was able to receive support from Clark University and plans on enrolling in fall 2017. Even with a college acceptance in hand, Faustina's concerns about affordability are far from over. “Now that I am about to attend Clark, my only concern is finding a co-signer for my loans. I am still waiting to hear back from scholarships but so far I have a gap of $12,510 per year which is not bad considering my circumstances.”

“I am not embarrassed to tell people my immigration status because at the end of the day, I know that it does not determine my future or who I am. There is always going to be another way to reach my goal and get a higher education.” Faustina hopes to pursue actuarial science or computer science, at Clark. “I am just grateful to get the support that I needed from people who wanted to help [and] give me a chance at life and higher education.”

Faustina’s story is that of resilience and hope. Students like Faustina are the future of New England —we need to continue doing our part in making the higher education dream a reality for all students. While institutional leadership will continue to play a large role in enrolling, retaining and graduating undocumented students, state policy or legislative action is crucial to laying the foundation for extending financial support to these students.

Pooja Patel was a policy research intern at the New England Board of Higher Education (nebbe.org) during academic year 2016-17 while she pursed her master's degree in education from Boston College. 

Candace Williams: Number of new high-school grads in N.E. seen falling 14% by 2032

Marker commemorating the first location of the Boston Latin School, on School Street, founded in 1635 and the first public school in what would become the United States.

By 2032, the number of new high school graduates in New England is projected to decline by 22,000 to a total 140,273, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education’s (WICHE) most recent ''Knocking at the College Door'' report.

New England’s challenge with an aging population and falling birth rates has been well chronicled. With fresh projections and an ever-changing political climate, the number of high schoolers expected to graduate in the region – from a public or private high – warrants a much closer look. So does the changing demography of the graduating class, with the number of white high school graduates projected to fall by 25%, while the number of minority graduates rises significantly

Overall, the number of new high school graduates in New England is projected to decline by 14%. Within the region, Connecticut and New Hampshire face the greatest declines, with the number of new high school graduates in both states expected to decrease by 20% by 2032. The majority of graduates, currently 87%, of high schoolers in New England, attend a public high school. However, a greater share of students attends private school in this region than the rest of the nation. Whereas a projected 7% of students will graduate from a private secondary school nationally by 2032, nearly 12% of New Englanders will.

Fewer white students being born in the region can explain much of the decline in graduates in New England. During the period 2016-2032, the number of white high school graduates is projected to fall by 25%. Over that same tperiod, the number of minority graduates will increase significantly—by 46% among Hispanics, 7% among blacks , 2% among American Indian/Alaska Natives and a 37% among Asian/Pacific Islanders.

Nationally, for every 10 white graduates lost, eight minority graduates are gained. In New England, this is not the case. For every 10 white students lost, just four minority graduates are gained. Nonetheless, by 2032, 45% of high school graduates in the region will be minority.

The implication of fewer high school graduates pose real challenges to higher education institutions, both public and private, as well the regional economy. The region’s population decline has other implications including fewer congressional representatives, who have often been champions of public higher education.

Candace Williams isassociate director of policy & research for the New England Board of Higher Education, on whose Web site, nebhe.org, this piece first appeared.

Joseph W. Ambash: Unionization of grad students will hurt education

The recent decision by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in the Columbia University case granting students who serve as teaching or research assistants at private universities the right to unionize dealt a major blow to private higher education as we know it. The NLRB’s cavalier disregard for the complexities of a university education is breathtaking.

In a long-anticipated decision, the NLRB ruled that any student who performs services for an institution, under its control, for compensation, is a “common-law” employee entitled to unionize under the National Labor Relations Act. The NLRB’s sweeping decision lumped together undergraduates (who may serve, for example, as graders and discussion leaders), master’s degree candidates and Ph.D. candidates in its definition of employees. The decision ignored that many students must serve as teaching assistants or research assistants as part of their master’s or Ph.D. degree requirement, even if they would otherwise not want to do that “job.”

The decision’s lone dissenter, Republican Philip A. Miscamarra, anticipated that the strikes and other economic weapons that often accompany collective bargaining “will wreak havoc” and may have “devastating consequences” for higher education, particularly for the students who are trying to earn their degrees.

His dire prediction is not a case of crying wolf. Experience tells us that the adversarial process that is baked into the structure of collective bargaining will profoundly change the culture of campuses whose students are organized by unions. Unlike public-sector collective bargaining that is governed by individual state laws that typically prohibit strikes, the National Labor Relations Act anticipates that the process of collective bargaining will be fraught with adversarial positions that, if not settled amicably, often lead to strikes, lockouts and the replacement of workers.

The U.S. Supreme Court long ago stated that that “the principles developed for use in the industrial setting cannot be ‘imposed blindly on the academic world,’” because the interests at stake in the academy are different than those in an industrial workplace. Despite this observation, the NLRB ruled that the industrial model of the National Labor Relations Act is appropriate for private-sector campuses.

The consequences of this decision cannot be underestimated:

For the first time in our nation’s history, students at unionized campuses who are given the opportunity to teach or do research as part of their degree program or university experience will have to join a union or pay an agency fee in order to obtain their degree. This will transform an educational experience into a mere job.

Also for the first time in our history, research assistants—virtually all of whom in the hard sciences are required to engage in research and produce original results in order to write their dissertation—will be considered employees whose wages, hours and other “terms and conditions of employment” will be subject to bargaining on unionized campuses. This will transform the very purpose of their education into a job about which an outside union can insist on bargaining.

Disputes about what constitutes “wages” will require years of litigation, since the NLRB’s decision identified the stipends typically awarded to graduate students at elite institutions as wages where the requirement of teaching or research is embedded into the curricular requirement for such students.

The identification of proper subjects of bargaining will produce lengthy and complex litigation that will typically last far beyond the tenure of the students affected by those disputes. Will issues such as how many papers a teaching assistant has to grade; who will be awarded assistantships; and how many students should be in a section be considered “terms and conditions of employment” that must be bargained with a union?

The distinction between mandatory subjects of bargaining and the strictly academic issues about which universities would not have to bargain will test the limits of universities’ academic freedom. The often-Byzantine rules imposed by the NLRB on employers will now be engrafted onto unionized campuses. The NLRB has aggressively invalidated typical work rules, such as civility rules, because they allegedly chill employee rights to engage in “concerted” activity.

NLRB decisions also routinely find that employees may lawfully insult and demean their supervisors and managers as part of concerted activity. As a result, many standard campus rules may become unlawful if applied to unionized student assistants. Identification of who is an “employee” will inevitably morph into claims by unions that members of sports teams on scholarships, members of orchestras who receive stipends to go on tours, and similar student groups should be entitled to bargain about their stipends and terms and conditions of employment because they are “common-law employees.” Although the NLRB sidestepped this issue in 2015 when it declined to assert jurisdiction over Northwestern University football players, the Columbia University decision is broad enough to encompass these activities.

Private university administrators have a new, unfortunate landscape confronting them. Hopefully the NLRB’s decision will eventually reach the courts, who may bring common sense to this misguided result. Congress also may have a role in limiting the harm that will likely result from the decision. But make no mistake: This stunning decision will, if unchecked, forever change our private universities. Like it or not, applicants will no longer be “admitted” to unionized institutions; they will be new hires, no different in many respects from hourly workers in industry.

Joseph W. Ambash is the regional managing partner of the national labor and employment law firm Fisher Phillips. This first ran in the Web site of the New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org).

Jay M. Brotman/Thomas Carlson Reddig: Colleges thinking small on housing students

Looking at the housing and living challenges facing U.S. communities, one thing is clear: Smaller things are coming our way. Even in regions where open space is plentiful, living quarters are shrinking as more people simplify and economize. New houses are being built that are strikingly small, with some totaling less than 500 square feet, about a fifth of the average 2,600 square feet for American single-family homes. Some new apartment units are even smaller.

This growing trend, often called tiny living, is driven largely by two very different demographic groups: Millennials and retirees. Both are sensitive to the cost of living and respond positively to dwelling arrangements with a focus on shared social spaces and amenities. The broad-based movement offers a reexamination of the essential aspects of housing and home life. The trend toward micro-housing is also coming soon to a university near you.

As the national discussion about the affordability of U.S. higher education has become a pressing social topic, more university leaders are considering ways to reduce debt burdens and even tuition for today’s college students. Housing is a big contributor and often an influence on cost increases for campus life. According to the College Board, the average annual cost of housing, transportation, books and fees at four-year, in-state public institutions is more than twice that of tuition itself.

As universities are looking to more affordable approaches to student housing, an increasing number see value in reducing the footprint of housing or increasing the density of residential buildings.

This has led to a nascent movement among some innovative universities of applying unique and often unexpected approaches to housing. These schools emphasize quality over quantity and focus on creating places for activities, rather than underutilized rooms.

Examples include the Gault Schoolhouse adaptive-reuse project at Ohio's College of Wooster, where an old schoolhouse has been converted into student housing that flips the usual arrangement: sleeping areas are located toward the building interior, while social spaces are placed along the building’s exterior wall and big windows. The sleeping pods with built-in study zones are as small as is practical (and allowed by codes)—about 7 feet wide by 12 feet long—while the living rooms are ample, open and shared.

The initial reaction from parents is typically concerning, but when they see their children’s positive reactions to the sleeping pods and the added benefit of larger, well-lit living rooms that build community, their concerns are somewhat allayed.

They see that smaller, more carefully crafted and designed can be better than larger and generic. One parent told his daughter at Wooster that “she better enjoy it because when she graduates, she likely won’t have a place as nice.”

While the design is economical, green and resourceful, it also reflects the institution’s beliefs in education and residential life. “This is probably the finest, most interesting college residential space that you are going to find on any campus, anywhere,” says Grant Cornwell, president of College of Wooster. “The design fosters our mission.”

This is not to say that quantity does not matter; to the contrary, providing sufficient beds to accommodate the student population is critical. When South Carolina's College of Charleston faced the challenge of updating its Rutledge Rivers Residence Hall in order to meet code and ADA compliance, initial studies projected a 15% to 35% net loss in the number of beds. When the project team introduced a tiny living model for the upgrade, the project actually gained six beds, increasing the number from 103 to 109.

The design used lofted built-in single and double bedrooms as well as custom-designed sleeping pods to maximize space. Apartments accommodating four to six students each include a private bath, a living room and a kitchenette. In some cases, the pods are located on interior walls to borrow light from the living space—a strategy that decoupled the limit on the number of beds from the number of windows in the existing structure. Meanwhile the design team was able to program shared amenities on the ground floor that were not in the original building: a large community space, a laundry room, a public bathroom and a resident assistant's program room. The update not only represents a way to increase the number of beds, but is a model for an enhanced student living experience.

Many others have begun testing the tiny living concept, too. In 2019 the University of British Columbia in Vancouver will debut a residential project with 70 units of 140-square-foot, single-occupancy student apartments—fully furnished, with a small kitchen and a bed that converts into a desk—at about CDN $675 to $695 per month. This beats their on-campus average of CDN $1,000, and is half the typical rent for a Vancouver apartment. European schools have also led by example: In Lund, Sweden, a 94-square-foot residential unit has been tested and the pilot is now expanding to 22 units, although they will expand to about 110 square feet each. Facing a national shortage of university housing, Sweden exempted the “BoKompakt” project from legal minimum size requirements. The units rent for about $375 a month.

In the U.S., cost is just one factor. More institutions see tiny living as an answer to changing demographics and a way to be more sustainable. And as at College of Wooster, the concepts can energize student life. In fact, the benefits of student micro-residences have inspired new conversations among housing officers and university life leaders, many hoping to adopt the ideas to simply boost overall enjoyment and quality of campus experience.

In New England, the organization University Student Living has projects with efficient-sized units in planning or underway, as part of its national rollout. One project is slated for Boston University.

In fact, one way to incorporate these new housing initiatives is to partner with developers or to encourage private builders to create more compact and economical off-campus housing. These models carry advantages for both the property developers and the universities, while simultaneously tapping an adjacent market: short-term renters. In fact, micro-units can address gaps in local rental housing markets as well as for student housing. A five-story example currently under construction in New Haven, Conn., has been conceived by Mod Equities to offer fully furnished, 400-square-foot studios that can be leased for any length of time—from one day to a full year.

An alternative to options like hotels, unfurnished apartments or on-campus rooms, flexible-term furnished micro-apartments can offer an enhanced experience for off-campus students at a reasonable rent. The Mod Equities building also offers high-quality shared amenities including a communal kitchen, fitness center and roof deck, encouraging exploration and informal interactions. Some developers and higher-education leaders are looking to similar models for off-campus housing, especially when the future campus populations might swing up or down.

The New Haven project is designed to accommodate graduate students and international students who come for fellowships and other academic programs. These students are sometimes older and may have spouses that have employment in other locals and do not want to make the major move to a new city. Residents will not have to buy a whole new set of household items for their short term residence—they only need to arrive at the beginning of the term and leave when their studies are complete. They don't need to go to eBay or CraigsList to buy and then sell. In addition, for many universities have a large number of fellows, postgraduate researchers and visiting faculty who also are interested in such accommodations. As for the graduate students, the full-service model serves their needs as they will continue to maintain their primary residences.

So how should a university or college approach the question of whether to consider a tiny housing experiment? The first consideration is the demand for beds measured against the budget. Administrators may also want to consider the university's stated commitments to sustainability and reduction of energy and resource consumption, as well as the availability of land for building new housing. Last, the institution must find new ways to be responsive to students struggling with housing costs or seeking alternatives to conventional dormitory models. Not only are they looking for better and more stimulating campus experiences, but they are also watching their costs.

Jay M. Brotman, AIA, is managing partner of the global architecture, art and advisory firm Svigals + Partners, based in New Haven, Conn. Thomas Carlson Reddig, AIA, LEED AP, is community global practice leader, with the international firm Little Diversified Architectural Consulting, Charlotte, N.C. This piece first ran on the Web site of the New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org), where the overseer of New England Diary, Robert Whitcomb, used to serve on the editorial board.