The College Access Index: A Promise to Critics

Once the land of socio-economic class mobility, the U.S. is now the most class-stratified of the wealthy democracies, the escalator barred by underfunding of higher education. The U.S. leads the world in elite universities but the 100 million underclass is almost entirely shut out with the chance of a high performing poor elementary school student reaching university is far less than that of a mediocre student from the top income decile.
While the U.S. leads in higher education, it also leads in child poverty, and privation in childhood has lifetime consequences, all of them bad.

"If you’re a parent, a college applicant or a taxpayer interested in a college’s commitment to enrolling students of all economic backgrounds, you basically have two choices today. You can look at the Pell and net-price data — and learn a lot."

Or you could read the Common Data Sets -- and learn a lot more.

There is no index or set of metrics that can provide a comprehensive assessment of something as complex as a college education or where to live or where to work.

But metrics can be helpful in avoiding life altering decisions like attending a college with a low probability of graduation and a high probability of lifelong debt and default.

The great tragedy of higher education is that for-profit institutions pumped money from government backed loan programs and victimized lower income families and veterans who had little experience with higher education.

This started to change in 2010 with the move to direct student loans by the Obama Administration. I look forward to the day when the "payday lenders" of higher education wither away.

Thank you, New York Times. This is the kind of reporting and analysis that exposes unproductive behaviors for readers to make better decisions, but also can lead to fundamental improvements in policy. Better practices by universities will help everyone in the long run.

The College Access Index is a step in the right direction but largely useless for low and moderate income students making college decisions. It's largely composed of selective private schools with small entering classes. According to my count there are, at most, 32 public institutions among the 179 schools--or 18 percent (not sure about a few). Six of the 32 are branches of Cal and most of the rest of the publics are state flagships or selective technical colleges.
The vast majority of students of modest means attend less selective public institutions. Among those are some schools that graduate students at much higher than expected rates given the students' entering academic performance, and some that do much worse. We need to start paying the same attention to the performance of the schools that matter most to poor and middle class kids (and adults). Especially now, when kids and their families are taking burdensome loans, they need to know what they're buying.
How about highlighting the institutions that are serving large numbers and/or shares of low-income students and doing it well (better than expected grad rates) and without high rates of student debt? There are some fine institutions that deserve recognition.
There IS one important piece of information needed to enable better comparisons. Federal rules require colleges to collect their graduation rates for low-income students (i.e., Pell recipients). The feds should also require them to make those data public.

College administrators contend the data misrepresents, yet they present no data to back up their claims. The mere fact that they prefer to operate in the dark leads to two conclusions:
1) Their data may confirm conclusions made from the "available data" and in fact may even bolster those conclusions.
2) Colleges have become bloated with parasitic administrators, sapping resources that could be better used for education. Numerous NYTimes articles have reported on this problem, and additional data would make it painfully clear.
I suspect some administrators fear the latter because it could (and should) lead to a sizable reduction in administration positions.

If a college can't rid itself of these money-sapping parasites, the rest of us should resist attending and even funding that college. Thanks to the excellent data provided by the government (thank you Obama), we now have an idea of which colleges are healthy and which colleges need to be restructured.

We just dropped off our youngest at a small private college. We learned the hard way that being admitted to a school wasn't enough. When my son was applying, we looked at ranking, but we also gathered net cost data by visiting each school's website and using the same numbers. Even among schools with similar tuition figures, the net cost varied widely. This held true when the financial aid package arrived. We couldn't send our son to his first choice college in rural Vermont when we weren't offered any aid.

Most selective colleges now say that they meet "100% of the student's demonstrated need." The operative word is "demonstrated." Schools use different formulas to figure out what this means and in most cases, we found, there is a huge gap between "demonstrated" and actual need. FAFSA and most schools use national average cost of living, which can be good for some but terrible if you live in a city whose cost of living index is 177 like ours. Making $130,000 in Berkeley, CA is about the same as making $79,000 in Albany, NY, yet our financial aid is calculated using $130,000. We're not dirt poor, but we're definitely not swimming in cash. Well, we might be dirt poor by the time our son is finished with college.