Financial difficulties in obtaining community college certificates

Credit:  CarbonNYC

Community colleges are famous for offering second chances to people who have had disadvantages and set-backs.  Community colleges have been the institution most responsible for expanding college access to disadvantaged youth, and today about a third of college students under age 25 are enrolled in community college.

Certificates seem to be more attainable than degrees because they require fewer credits while offering real job skills; I'm currently doing research on that topic.  The NY Times just published a story about how financial aid is often unavailable to students seeking non-degree certificates.

The story is comprehensive, and I won't rehash it here, but parts of it surprised me.  I knew that employers required certificates in many new areas where there was no tradition of training employees on the job, such as information technology.   I had not realized how many traditional jobs --- police officers, fire fighters, and machinists --- had stopped training employees and required potential employees to obtain certificates in advance.  These employers are not social service agencies, and it may make financial sense for them to cut costs by outsourcing employee training to an outside entity.  Until funding for certificate programs becomes available, the most disadvantaged people are prevented from entering these fields. 

The reason that the government doesn't offer financial aid for certificate programs is because of the presumption that certificates don't prepare students for jobs.  Now that we know that some certificate programs prepare people for good jobs --- some of which are higher paying than BAs --- we ought to give financial aid for the programs.  But which programs?  All programs?  Carnevale in this article suggests that, given our limited funds, funding should go to job-relevant certificates instead of to 4 year English bachelors degrees.  While sensible, that rule may not be practical to implement.   How could a bank or the federal government determine which credentials might lead to good jobs, and which ones will not?

Federal educational loan default rates are extremely low, under 10%.  The government may even make a small profit on its educational loan program.  The federal government could easily cover the cost of expanding its loan program to cover certificates, and provide information about certificates similar to what it publishes about degree programs.  Expanding federal financial aid to community college certificates would be a worthwhile investment in our country's human capital, and also help disadvantaged adolescents and young adults transition into the labor force.  

Exam strategies and meta-education

The humor site Cracked has a good exam study strategies article. When someone posted this piece on facebook, several faculty members mentioned that they often accumulate more materials than they read.

How many students learn how to learn? Would we have better exam outcomes if we taught students explicitly how to study?

I recall that research shows that such study strategy courses pay off in students doing well in their other courses, but still few students have the opportunity to take such meta-education courses: courses in how to study, learn, and benefit the most from coursework. Instead, students are left on their own to figure out by trial and error and possibly wasting the courses where they do less well because they aren't sure what to do. I know students find these types of courses to be tedious, or they feel like they ought to already know this material, so they act blase about learning the material. I remember feeling that way about Freshman Advisory class in high school, where they taught us how to study before our first exams as we rolled our eyes. The usual tips like don't study in front of the TV or in bed, but the tips stayed with me and every time that I tried to study in bed, I would remind myself that probably it would be a better idea to move to my desk. Although I wouldn't always.

Debunking miracle schools

Diane Ravitch addresses the phenomenon of miracle schools succinctly:

The subtext [of the concept of 'miracle schools'] is that poverty and resources are not actually problems for urban schools; if they could just test more often and fire more teachers, the corporate reformers imply, then test scores would soar. This analysis suggests that schools enrolling the neediest students do not need more resources, and it rationalizes the current trend of draconian budget cuts for public education.

Apparently there is a blog evaluating the claims of miracle schools and finding that really they aren't.

Americans like the idea of "miracle schools" for the same reason that we like movies about the underdog baseball team winning or the guy in the mail room running the company. Probably not unrelated is how appealing Americans find the concept of achievement without hard work. In reality, resources matter. Giving too much credence to the ideas of miracle schools because we like the narrative could end up depriving >99% of disadvantaged children of the chance to learn and advance, just because we like the narrative of the <1% who succeed despite the bad odds. And it's way cheaper in the short run, even if more expensive in the long run.

The Chicago Tribune is unprepared for college

The Chicago Tribune published today an article with a plausible headline --- public high school students are unprepared for college --- but their logic is suspect. A state law required public universities to publish the average freshman year GPAs for students from each high school, and the Tribune has published their interpretation of the data. For each university, the Tribune plotted the high school grade point averages (GPAs) of incoming students versus their average GPA in colleges. They conclude that if students have a lower GPA in freshman year of college than high school, that implies that students were unprepared.

It seems obvious to me that college GPAs are lower than high school GPAs. About 50% of Harvard students were ranked 1 or 2 in their high school graduating class, and probably over 80% had a GPA of 4.0, and yet college GPAs are way lower. Further, college GPAs come from a wide variety of courses, so they're even harder to interpret than high school GPAs. Engineering students have lower GPAs than humanities majors, so a really good high school that sends most of its students to major in engineering might look worse than a mediocre high school that sends most of its students to major in humanities. If college GPAs weren't lower than high school GPA, I would think that the students weren't challenging themselves enough. Finally, high schools with disadvantaged students can be expected to have lower college GPAs not because the students are poorly prepared by their high schools but because the students were disadvantaged.


The report itself is more useful, and it provides a good comparison of the students from each high school that tend to attend each school. Not a comparison of the high schools themselves, of course: enormously confounded by the which students from each school tend to attend the state universities. It does break down GPA by subject. A high school that sends its best students to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will look like a better high school who sends its best students out of state. Still interesting.

The Tribune's assumption that having a lower GPA in freshman year of college than high school implies that students weren't prepared conflates many issues in an illusion that a few numbers can summarize a high school without any statistical assistance. Is this a reminder that a weak attempt at evidence-based decision-making is worse than none at all?

Rediscovering second wave feminism

My college friend Jonathan Liu wrote an incredibly inspiring piece about the sacrifices he made by choosing to be a stay-at-home dad that also applies to making any life decisions: once you make a decision, don't keep looking at all the decisions because "the grass is greener where you tend it." (I'm sure he's not the first to say it, but I've never heard it before, and it's a wonderful saying and a vital point for anyone making any decision.)

His piece was in reaction to another piece by a mother who went part-time in her career after becoming a parent, but who divorced and now wishes that she had been more active in her career. The trend of the last decade for highly educated women to become stay at home moms was treated as a third wave feminist phenomenon --- the trope went that second wavers overemphasized career at the expense of family, but third wave feminists can be confident in their position enough to take time out of their careers to raise their children. (Likewise, some third wavers thought that second wavers were too sexually conservative, and thought that the circumstances had changed enough that it was safe to be promiscuous, but even setting aside questions of the sexual double standard, third wave feminism hasn't erased the economic factors at play in the sexual marketplace, which I've discussed in previous posts about hooking up.)

The third wavers certainly have a point --- some latch-key kids of the past wish their parents had been around for them, and the third wave stay at home phenomenon tries to rectify this. But truly this article just points to where the second wavers were right: economic forces can't be ignored. Women who have prestigious and/or well-paid careers outside the home in addition to children have a more secure position if their marriages fail, as many marriages do --- marriages don't have a 50% failure rate as many say, and everyone has to work to make their marriage as good as possible to avoid divorce, but divorce is certainly common enough to be worth thinking about. And it might even be that women who work outside the home in good jobs might even be less likely to get divorced. I'm not aware of the research on that point, but my knowledge of the research says that they are better off on a range of other metrics.

None of this is to say that anyone's choice is right or wrong. That's an individual decision. To the contrary, as Jonathan said, everyone has to be aware of the true costs of their decision, rather than believing that one choice or the other is an optimal choice. There is no optimal choice in general, but each individual has to figure out what is best for them. Second wave feminism is not a religion, and there's no virtue in adhering to its foundational "tenets" out of blind faith. But there are reasons why stay at home moms of previous generations were not content to stay at home and put their careers second. Many circumstances have changed, every family is different, and so on, but these reasons have certainly not expired. The modern world has made so many things possible, but widows and divorcees are still worse off than married women, working women with good careers are still better insulated from hardship, and second wave classics like the Women's Room are still relevant.

Could quantitative students bypass premed requirements?

Mt Sinai medical school has a program that admits non-science majors who have not taken the traditional premed curriculum, but instead have majored in the humanities and social sciences. These students do just as well, are more likely to spend time doing research, and are twice as likely to become psychiatrists than regular track students.

It's interesting that they limit the exceptions to humanities and social science majors. What about quantitative majors? Is there a med school who will take math, physics, and computer science majors who have not taken all the premed courses? Many science-smart students like learning hard material and are turned off from the grade-conscious nature of premed courses. If you are required to be grade conscious, you don't take risks by taking hard classes: the course that I learned the most from during my freshman year was a full-year math class where I got one of the bottom 2 grades in the 55 person class during the first semester and my advisor urged me to drop the class, but the second semester I was in the top third of the course. It was a trial by fire that helped me in theoretical graduate school statistics courses, and I wouldn't have taken it if I had been afraid of that first semester B-. And if I'd moved up from the 2nd percentile to "only" the 40th percentile, that would have also been a victory. The happy ending is that I learned how to write proofs, or in a pinch fake them reasonably well.

By contrast, I took a premed biology course during my first semester of college, and I loved the material. It was totally fascinating, as were the dissections (though the calves heart smelled), and I think my A- was good enough that I could have been premed if I'd wanted to. The difficult part was keeping my lunch down when my classmates continually asked what was going to be on the test. After half a dozen memory-based quizzes, I was so pleased when a quiz actually asked us to figure something out for ourselves. Finally: thinking! Some of my classmates protested this question because "it wasn't in the textbook!" Someone who spoke that way in a math or physics course would be ridiculed, and an instructor wouldn't even see the need to defend the question. Of course students are required to use critical thinking. In this premed class, memorizing the textbook seemed to be an accepted part of the culture.

From the other side of the lectern, at least in a biostatistics course, premed students were a complete joy to teach. In graduate school, I was the only TF for a 53 student biostatistics class that was 90% premed, and they were some of the nicest and most interested students that I taught. Perhaps they were fun students to teach because only the most intellectually curious premed students self-selected into biostatistics, or because all of the material was highly related to actual medicine rather than abstract science, so they saw the immediate relevance, or because of the way we taught the class with lots of handouts and everything in the textbook and being very clear about expectations.

So I don't mean to stereotype premed students. But as a math and physics undergraduate, the prospect of taking orgo and p-chem was not appealing just because of the culture that I perceived there.

A bigger argument for a quantitative track to med school is that the quantitative fields of study absorb just as much time as the intensive humanities majors: it takes (at least) as much time and coursework to learn to do proofs, derivations, program computer operating systems, and analyze complex datasets, as it does to read, write, and speak foreign languages and write a 200 page senior thesis.