University of Wisconsin - La Crosse Office of Institutional Research's posterous

By any financial measure, this fiscal year is a terrible one for public higher education. And while that's no surprise to anyone working at a state college or university, new national data document the extent of the loss of state support.

Total state support for higher education for 2009-10 -- including federal stimulus dollars -- is $79.4 billion, which is a decline of 1.1 percent from the prior year and 1.7 percent from the year before that. This represents a dramatic shift from the three-year period of 2005 to 2008 when state support grew 24 percent, to $80.7 billion -- without federal stimulus dollars in the equation. Without the federal stimulus contribution, which is now over, state support this year would have been down 3.5 percent over one year and 6.8 percent over two years.

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"Student success" programs of various types -- learning communities, first-year experience programs, and the like -- have proliferated on college campuses, driven by the reality that it's easier to keep current students than recruit new ones. The programs are popular, but as is true of just about all campus efforts these days, they are open to scrutiny about their effectiveness -- and their cost effectiveness.

Given that climate, many student affairs officials would probably be wary of looking too closely at what their programs cost and whether they provide a meaningful return on that "investment," for fear that the data, if they don't look good, might be used against them in the fight for resources. But putting those trepidations aside, 13 colleges -- as part of a project sponsored by Jobs for the Future and the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity and Accountability -- agreed to examine both the full costs of first-year retention efforts focused on first-generation and low-income students, and the extent to which their success in keeping students enrolled produces revenue to help pay for themselves.

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New Higher Education Data Web site: College InSight
The Institute for College Access and Success launched a new Web site in November to provide information on college affordability, student debt, economic and racial diversity, and student success. Information can be browsed for over 5,000 schools and compared across institutions, institution types, states, and other custom groupings. http://college-insight.org/.

Data for this site is from IPEDS, Pell grant files and FISAP files from the Department of Education, and the Common Data Set as reported to Peterson's.

This cartoon illustrates how a work-free year is interpreted as lazy and irresponsible if you’re a working class person and a well-deserved treat if you’re middle class or better.

Found at The Ongoing Adventures of ASBO Genuis, via Missives from Marx.

A Washington-based investigative journalism organization said in a report issued Tuesday that it found a "culture of secrecy" surrounding sexual assault cases on university campuses across the U.S.

The report by the Center for Public Integrity showed that nearly half of the 33 female students it interviewed in the past year about being raped were unsuccessful in pursuing criminal charges.

That left the campus judiciary system as their only recourse. But victims who take that route "face proceedings that are shrouded in secrecy, where they encounter mysterious disciplinary proceedings, where they themselves are shut out of the hearing process," Kristen Lombardi, lead reporter on the nine-month investigation, said during a news conference broadcast Tuesday.

Nearly a third of the 33 victims said school administrators discouraged them from pursuing complaints, and about a dozen experienced confidentiality requirements "sometimes followed by threats of punishment if they were to disclose any information about the case," Lombardi said.

The 33 students interviewed for the study represent only a fraction of the sexual assault cases at campuses nationwide. The U.S. Department of Education's office of post-secondary education said there were 2,532 forcible sex offenses in campuses in 2007.

A 2005 study by the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the U.S. Justice Department, found that one in five women on a college campus will be the victim of rape or attempted rape by the time she graduates.

The Center for Public Integrity did not reveal where the 33 victims went to school or where the clinics and crisis-services programs were located, citing confidentiality.

The center's study revealed that fewer than 5% of sexual assault cases are reported to authorities. Victims who do report an assault on campus face a "litany of barriers," said Bill Buzenberg, the center's executive director, including "confidential agreements and off-the-record negotiations with administrators and guidance counselors uninterested in the victim's plight altogether."

Another key finding by the center was that the campus judicial system resulted in lenient punishment. Expulsion is a rarity, Lombardi said.

Michele Cole, a victim advocate with Ball State University's office of victim services who is consulted every time a sexual assault is reported, advises victims about both the criminal system and the campus judicial system.

"If they're going to file one (complaint), I encourage them to file the other," Cole said. "My function is to break down those barriers so that the victim doesn't feel like they have to be silenced."

I'm a little dubious about extrapolating their results nationwide based on a sample of 33 students, especially as they don't reveal any information about the schools (type, location, size, etc.) at which the students are/were enrolled, however it is worthwhile taking a critical look at our own policies to ensure we're not perpetuating a similar "culture of secrecy" at UW-L.

The UW System is joining about two-dozen colleges and universities in pledging to improve graduation rates for two specific groups of students. They want to cut achievement gaps for low-income and students of color in half by 2015.

A new report this week shows that collectively, 45 percent of such students earn a bachelor’s degree within six years, compared to 57 percent for other students enrolled at the schools.

Jennifer Engle is a researcher for the Washington-based Education Trust, which released the report. She says if participating schools access and success gaps were already cut in half, they would have had a 20-percent increase in enrollment and graduation of low-income and minority students. That would be 16,500 more graduates today.

For the UW System, there’s a 12 percent difference in graduation rates for low versus higher income students, and a 29 percent difference between minority and white students. Spokesman David Giroux says these are very real problems, and one strategy is early intervention. He says the Wisconsin Covenant is important, getting 8th grade students to sign a pledge that says they will take steps to get a higher education by taking challenging courses, saving money, and staying in school.

Giroux says a new statewide data system is being set up that would track individual students from kindergarten to graduate school. It’s hoped that case studies could reveal what makes some students stumble and others succeed. He says helping guide first-generation college students through the registration and financial aid processes can also help close the gap.

College and university leaders are regularly criticized for making too little information available or presenting only the data that show them in the best light.

No such statement can be made about the leaders of 24 public college systems that on Thursday -- as part of a two-year-old initiative aimed at boosting college completion and closing racial and socioeconomic gaps in enrollment and graduation -- released extensive data about their performance on those fronts.

The data collected by Education Trust and the National Association of System Heads, as part of the Access to Success initiative, represent a breakthrough of sorts, in that they suggest a path to improving on the existing federal graduation rate and other data that are widely acknowledged to be inadequate (that's the polite term). By including part-time students and those who transfer in and out of a system's member institutions, they nearly double the number of students covered by the existing federal graduation rate measure.

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American colleges have ratcheted up the number of sub-baccalaureate degrees they award -- but not nearly enough to approach the aggressive college completion goals that President Obama and others have set for the country.

The Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics published a report Wednesday that zeroes in on associate degrees, certificates and other credentials below the bachelor's degree -- credentials that often get short shrift in discussions of higher education policy, but that are increasingly seen as crucial to the country's ability to produce not only a skilled work force, but an educated citizenry.

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It is important to understand how President Obama's goals fit with Wisconsin's recent Educational Attainment initiative planning, particularly as some aspects may work at cross purposes with respect to 4-year institutions recruiting transfer students from 2-year institutions.

Johnny R. Williams, 30, would appear to be an unlikely person to have to fret about the impact of race on his job search, with companies like JPMorgan Chase and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago on his résumé.

But after graduating from business school last year and not having much success garnering interviews, he decided to retool his résumé, scrubbing it of any details that might tip off his skin color. His membership, for instance, in the African-American business students association? Deleted.

“If they’re going to X me,” Mr. Williams said, “I’d like to at least get in the door first.”

Similarly, Barry Jabbar Sykes, 37, who has a degree in mathematics from Morehouse College, a historically black college in Atlanta, now uses Barry J. Sykes in his continuing search for an information technology position, even though he has gone by Jabbar his whole life.

“Barry sounds like I could be from Ireland,” he said.

That race remains a serious obstacle in the job market for African-Americans, even those with degrees from respected colleges, may seem to some people a jarring contrast to decades of progress by blacks, culminating in President Obama’s election.

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Over the past two decades, community college honors programs have found a niche among students who were turned down by increasingly selective state universities and didn't want to pay private-college tuition. Enrollment grew steadily until the recession. Then, it exploded.

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