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My daughter is sixteen and, in my unbiased opinion, brilliant. The mix of sixteen and brilliant means that sometimes she draws patterns from very small samples of life data, not having much life data on which to draw. It happens.
On a walk last night, she complained that nothing important happens anymore. When I asked what she meant, she indicated that with so much social media and instant communication, it’s hard to sustain focus on one thing long enough to make a meaningful change. I pushed back on “meaningful.” She distinguished meaningful change from policy change. Yes, policy change can happen, but it’s minor and easy to miss. Big change has become impossible, drowned out in the noise.
I did the math in my head. She has been vaguely aware of politics only for a few years now. I mentioned that when I was her age, not only was same-sex marriage unrecognized legally, it wasn’t even mentionable in polite company. In my adult lifetime, it went from extreme to edgy to controversial to popular to settled. In the periods when things seem extreme or unmentionable, it can be useful to do the work of shaping proposals so you have them handy when the political winds shift. When they shift, they shift quickly, and if you wait for that moment before doing the hard work, you’ll miss it.
In jazz, players will refer to “woodshedding,” or long periods of intense and isolated practice. (The saxophonist Sonny Rollins is the paradigm case.) The payoff for woodshedding happens when it’s over, the musician emerges, and the audience marvels at their seemingly instinctual command. Instinct has nothing to do with it. The work happens behind the scenes, in the woodshed.
In that spirit, I read Kevin Carey’s proposal for a new national college funding plan in the Washington Monthly as the policy equivalent of woodshedding. It’s obviously going nowhere with the current Congress, but when the political winds shift, it will be good to have already done the work of developing a plan. It’s necessary work, and this is a great time to do it.
Carey’s proposal is worth reading in its own right, and I strongly agree with most of it. Yes, it’s absurd and counterproductive that the colleges with the neediest students get the least money. Yes, that largely tracks along racial and class lines, as any student of American history would suspect. The amendments I offer here are in the spirit of making a good proposal better, and they’re largely borne of frustrated experience in the community college sector.
First, drop the “per FTE” measure. Use headcount. Using FTE penalizes community colleges and colleges with large populations of part-time students. A part-time student often needs as much advising (or more than) a full-time student, for example, and advisors cost money. Simple credit proportionality doesn’t capture that.
Second, don’t lose sight of local funding. Four-year public systems are usually run at the state level, but in many states, community colleges draw on local funding, too. (Not all, of course. In Massachusetts, the state provided funding and the counties didn’t. In New Jersey, the counties provide more funding than the state does. Michigan uses “millages,” or dedicated local property taxes. Gotta get the unit of analysis right.)
The key here is avoiding perverse incentives. Absent some coercive mechanism forbidding it, many states or localities would take increased federal funding as an excuse to cut their own support. The short-term political incentive to do that would be powerful. Yes, by all means, bring on the federal funds, but structure it to avoid local gamesmanship. Otherwise, they’ll just redirect their money elsewhere, thereby defeating the purpose.
Third, if you must include performance measures, be sure to tie them to budgetary and demographic predictors. (“There’s no such thing as a good college where a vast majority of students drop out…”) Otherwise you wind up punishing the colleges with the riskiest students. Also, be sure to define your terms carefully. Every year, hundreds of students leave us after a year, transferring to a four-year college from which they subsequently graduate. They got what they wanted from us and parlayed it into a successful educational career, but they show up in our figures as dropouts. Conditioning a game-changing policy on a measurement error like that is unlikely to end well.
Finally, and most importantly, don’t forget the passage of time. This is why I get uneasy around proposals based on round numbers. $10,000 per year per student is a great place to start, but if you don’t index it to something, you’ll get enormous regional disparities at the start, and erosion by inflation over time. My own college’s operating funding from the county is less now than it was ten years ago, and that’s before adjusting for inflation. If you don’t build some sort of automatic momentum into the program, it will suffer the death of a thousand cuts. I’d encourage tying it to something like the cost index for the service sector. That way, you don’t die of Baumol’s Cost Disease.
All of that said, there’s much to like in the proposal as it stands. Simplified and guaranteed credit transfer is obviously welcome, though the devil is in the details. Tuition parity and funding parity among sectors would be a boon here. More basically, recognizing that austerity is not a fact of nature but a political choice that could be made differently is welcome.
The metaphor on which I settled with TG was of a dam breaking. It happens slowly, and then all at once. When it does, your fate will depend on what you were doing before it broke. At the national level, I hear creaking; this is the time to do the work, so we don’t get swept away.
