TOO MUCH OF THE WRONG KIND OF CAPACITY? A number of Inside Higher Education posts from last week are not inconsistent with that hypothesis. Start with "Documenting the Shift to Merit" on September 12.

A new study by the College Board, “Tuition Discounting: Not Just a Private College Practice,” lays the practice bare. The study, by Sandy Baum, an economics professor at Skidmore College and senior policy analyst for the board, and Lucie Lapovsky, former president of Mercy College and now a consultant, shows just how much public colleges — including community colleges, which are generally seen as bastions of the needy — are joining their counterparts in the private nonprofit sector in handing out significant proportions of their financial aid without regard to students’ financial need.

“We find that only about 40 percent of the institutional grant aid in the public four-year sector fills documented financial need, while more than 60 percent of the institutional aid in the private sector and the public two-year sector is need-based,” the authors write.

That finding, they write, “raises serious questions about the extent to which institutional aid funds are being used to enhance access to and choice in higher education. Not only are significant amounts of institutional aid in the public sector being distributed based on criteria other than need, but a high proportion of dollars are allocated to students whose financial circumstances would permit them to enroll without these subsidies.”

William E. (Brit) Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, is troubled by the findings of the College Board study. “I think higher education has lost its way, frankly, when it comes to the management and distribution of financial aid,” says Kirwan. “Institutions have been investing disproportionately, and these data show this, in merit-based aid at the expense of need-based aid.” The situation is compounded by the fact that state programs like the Georgia’s Hope Scholarships emphasize merit over need.

How horrible: somebody who might be able to pay full fare at Johns Hopkins gets a full ride at Georgia as long as he or she maintains a B average. (Leave aside for the moment the Nash equilibrium in grade-grubbing and grade-inflating. Focus on the Spielberg effect: lifetime earnings of people who were accepted at Hopkins but matriculated and graduated elsewhere are indistinguishable on average from Hopkins graduates.)

The article goes on to bemoan the existence of enrollment managers who have learned something from the airlines, where the value of a good reservation and seat-pricing system exceeds the value of the aircraft of a major carrier.

Despite those caveats, the researchers say they were struck by the proportions of financial aid at public institutions that is not need-based. The high figure at four-year non-flagship institutions “means that public four-year institutions are using the significant majority of their aid to ’shape’ their classes,” they write.

Which from the perspective of the column is a bad thing.

“There are a significant amount of dollars out there going to students that could be redirected,” Baum said. “The major public policy question out of this study is: Do we want public institutions to be using their dollars to be attracting ‘better’ students or do we want them to help needy students?”

Note the scare quotes. It's not occured to Professor Baum that the implicit redefinition of higher-education-as-special-education disguised as access is sapping faculty morale, or that without some high achievers in the classroom, the retention pond stagnates, and employers only come-a-calling just before the economic expansion peaks?

A companion column, "Grappling With the Access Problem," reinforces my point.

Thomas G. Mortensen, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education who has made a career advocating, through research, on behalf of the underserved in higher education, had mixed feelings as he listened to the proceedings at Chapel Hill on Monday.

He credited UNC and other elite institutions with doing something meaningful to try to help low income students — especially since the colleges have in many cases paid too little attention to these students in the past — and said that “any movement” in that direction is valuable. But he noted that “all of these kids would be going to college someplace else,” he said, and said that much more needs to be done to truly expand the pipeline to help the huge numbers of students who are not only financially needy but also left underprepared for college by their poor elementary and secondary educations.

"Going to college someplace else." Where a more docile faculty can be mau-maued into giving college credit for managing eighth-grade theme-writing and sixth-grade arithmetic? The failing rests with those primary and secondary schools, or perhaps with a failure of the public culture (if there is such a thing) to reinforce the habits of highly effective people, not with admissions officers identifying people who have a serious chance at finishing a meaningful degree.

Californians are catching on. A September 14 column suggests the community colleges are Raising the Bar.

Starting in fall 2009, students seeking an associate degree will have to go a course level higher than they currently do in both mathematics and composition. The mathematics requirement currently is to pass elementary algebra, equivalent to what is taught in many high schools in the ninth grade. Under the new requirement, students will have to either pass or place out of intermediate algebra as well. In composition, students currently must pass a course that is one level below freshman composition. Under the new standards, associate degree graduates would need to pass a freshman comp course.

Public higher education ought to be public higher education.

The rule change originated with the faculty (note: not with Governor Schwarzenegger, not with the trustees, not with the chamber of commerce.)

The push for the increased standards came from the faculty. The Academic Senate of the system has been working on the issue for several years, lobbying the statewide board to approve the tougher requirements, which happened on Monday.

Ian Walton, the Senate’s president and a mathematics instructor at Mission College, said that professors view the issue as one of setting standards that graduates need. “Students need more analytic capacity in math and English” than the current minimums assured, he said.

Walton also said that the current standards sent the wrong message to students in high schools (where high school level work was being required for an associate degree) and universities (which require higher level courses than the current standards for transfer admission).

“Our requirements seemed completely out of line,” he said.It took a long time to gain support for the measure, Walton said, because of concerns that some students would be denied associate degrees. But among the tools available to professors pushing for higher requirements was publicity, he said.

There's also reality. The American Economic Review is not obligated to publish my paper just because I sent it in; the editors are not even obligated to provide me with constructive criticism. But if I enroll at Mission College, there are some professors who feel obligated to grant me an associate's degree?

Professor Walton is made of sterner stuff.

Walton said that faculty members who pushed for the higher standards did hear such criticisms, and he said they came in two categories: Those who said that for vocationally oriented associate degrees, the higher standards weren’t needed, and those who said that the higher standards would exclude certain groups of students.

To those making the vocational argument, he said that from a career perspective, the current standards are far too low. “They track people into dead end jobs,” he said.

As to the argument based on demographics, he said, “we do have groups of students with a history of lower success rates in math and English courses, and no one wants to put up barriers. But when you see groups with lower success rates, you shouldn’t assume that those students don’t need higher standards.”

Indeed.

But not everyone has gotten the word. Some institutions of allegedly higher education are dealing with problems filling their entering classes, particularly with men of ability, by Using Football as Bait.

It is well known that many major universities use football as a marketing tool and as a stimulant to alumni giving. With a bit of a twist, small schools have started doing the same. As documented in a recent article in The New York Times, colleges that have traditionally had a difficult time attracting males are turning to football to bulk up their enrollments and to sculpt more diverse student bodies.

The Times reports that during the last decade, approximately 40 football programs have been instituted or reinstituted in the non-scholarship ranks. Administrators agree that football seems to act as a magnet for students in related activities such as band, athletic training, and cheerleading.

Tell me, again, why full rides to young men and women who can grasp chemistry and calculus and accounting are a misallocation of resources.