Higher Ed Watch

Welcome to the first edition of the Syllabus, a weekly guide that provides insight into what’s happening in higher education.

Read:

The Next Affirmative Action, Kevin Carey
Washington Monthly

In the January/February issue, Carey, Director of the Education Policy Program here at New America, argues that minority students need a much broader reform agenda. Since most students don’t attend colleges with admissions rates below 50 percent, affirmative action only affects the small percentage of students who are qualified to attend elite schools. Instead, we need to re-balance public resources toward those less-selective institutions that enroll the lion’s share of minority students in higher education. Then we should hold them accountable for student outcomes like graduation rates. “Those who set the national education agenda need to look past the handful of universities that graduate the ruling class,” writes Carey, “And focus on improving the neglected institutions that educate the future minority school teachers, scientists, doctors, and engineers.”

There is an abundance of free resources available to students and families to learn about the college-going process, but they haven’t been vetted or organized in a practical way. Over the next few months, Higher Ed Watch will be reviewing these resources to help students, families, guidance counselors, college access professionals, and others choose the ones that meet their unique needs. Read more about this initiative here. 

Welcome to a New Year and the commencement of financial aid season. The 2013-14 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is now available, and students and families are already logging on to complete the application. Since almost every college uses the FAFSA to determine aid eligibility and financial aid packages, millions of current and prospective students fill one out every year.  But due to the complexity of our federal financial aid system, the process for learning about and applying for financial aid can be intimidating and overwhelming. This year a new U.S. Department of Education web resource—studentaid.gov—provides students and families with clearer information about federal financial aid and the financial aid application process.

I was one of the many people who failed to watch Friday Night Lights when it was first broadcast on NBC in 2006, despite increasingly desperate pleas from critics who believed it to be a kind of masterpiece. Mea culpa. Thanks to the miracle of DVD binge-watching, I’ve now watched all five seasons and can attest to its greatness. Moreover, FNL offers an important lens on the way Americans understand higher education.

America is, of course, a nation of immigrants. Much our collective narrative follows the arc of departure and assimilation. FNL dramatizes a specific, modern version of that story: the vast, ongoing, internal migration from small towns and cities to the urban centers of cultural and economic vitality. Football is just the vehicle; the subject of FNL is how people are driven from places like Dillon, Texas even as such places become, unalterably, a part of their soul.

But because the FNL story engine was built around high school football players and their peers, higher education plays a critical role in that drama. College is the first port city on the other side of the cultural and economic ocean between Dillon and the new world. The vision of higher education portrayed in FNL is, I think, a very accurate representation of how most people understand college today. Parts of that vision are very accurate. Others are, in fact, quite wrong. So it’s worth considering what Friday Night Lights tells us about higher education in America, and what that means.

The results from our sixth annual Academic BCS are in, and we have a Cinderella story that rivals any BCS bowl game. If Academic BCS had a title game, Northwestern University would match up against… Northern Illinois University. Talk about an upset.

The Bowl Championship Series games, which pit the top-ranked football schools against one another, are great to watch. But it’s worth taking a step back to examine the darker side of NCAA football: too many elite football schools are doing a dismal job of graduating their players. Most of these players won’t make it to the NFL, which means that while the school has profited from them, all they can walk away with is a college degree. The trouble is that the graduation rate for football players is often much lower than it is for the rest of the school.

To focus on the student side of collegiate sports, the Education Policy team at the New America Foundation developed the Academic Bowl Championship Series rankings for Higher Ed Watch. Here’s how our formula works:  We calculate the difference between the entire football team’s graduation rate versus that of the male students at the university; the graduation gap between black and white students on the team versus the same gap among the overall school’s male population; and the gap between the graduation rate of black football players versus the black males at the school.* We also factor in the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate (APR).**

We only rank the top 25 BCS teams, thus the winners of our Academic BCS have displayed prominence both on and off the field. For a full explanation of the formula, click here. For the full breakdown of scoring for this year and past years, click here.