Piecing It Together

Faculty in the Institute of Higher Education are examining major issues confronting postsecondary education. And their findings are often surprising.

Today, more than three-quarters of college teachers work off the tenure track, often with no job security, low wages and few prospects for advancement. Taking a closer look at the history of higher education, TIM CAIN suggests it was always so.

 Roughly three quarters of college teachers work off the tenure track, often with little job security, low wages, and few prospects for advancement. The contingent labor force is highly diversified, but many struggle to make a living wage and lack the support necessary to fully serve their students, much less undertake robust scholarly careers. Graduate students are likewise key academic laborers, though ones who are often mistreated and devoid of adequate job opportunities for the future. This pattern of academic staffing is often decried as the “new normal,” but it is not new. As I recently argued in Thought & Action (http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/e-Cain_SF.pdf), it is the normal state of the American faculty.

These issues date to the beginning of American higher education, when Harvard College’s first master nearly beat to death his assistant teacher on the latter’s third day of work. Things, of course, improved for college educators, but remained quite challenging. For much of the next 200 years, the typical instructor was a tutor, usually a transient position with little power.

The creation of professorships in the 18th century improved conditions for some, but further diminished those of tutors, who remained in the majority into the 1800s. The position lingered for another half century as one of limited opportunity and degraded status. And, while the new professors held a more advantageous place, retrenchment was common and salaries were both low and often withheld altogether. Moreover, no modern notion of academic freedom existed. Faculty could be and were dismissed for their views on politics, slavery, religion, and other controverted issues. Even those who were not suspect were in precarious positions as most worked on yearly contracts with no guarantee of continuation.

We think of the post-bellum years as a time of change and expansion in higher education, though historians recognize that the change was not as sweeping or rapid as earlier scholars  claimed. By the end of the century, though, faculty had developed new professional identities, some of it earned through conflicts over academic freedom, especially in the social sciences. This is often viewed triumphantly as the beginning of the creation of the modern professoriate, but there remained significant challenges for faculty. The process was fraught, as the professoriate agreed to police itself, removing the most troublesome in exchange for greater freedom for those with the “right” tone and temper.

Just as importantly, by the turn of the century a highly stratified faculty had returned. Part of this was tied to an early disinclination to having more than one professor in a department, leading to the creation of assistant and associate professorships as positions that prefigured the current ladder faculty, although with greater limits to advancement. Yet the ladder system was not merely a means for efficient organization. It was also a way to disenfranchise what would soon become the bulk of the faculty, locating significant power in the hands of the few—power that could be used to make or forestall careers.

More problematic was the substantial increase in assistants and instructors. In the May 4, 1909 edition of Science, Stanford University professor Hugo Marx reported that they made up between 50 and 65 percent of the staffs at leading institutions, with low status and few opportunities for long-term positions. Marx was also concerned about graduate students. In a paper published in the proceedings of the Association of American Universities’ 1910 conference, he highlighted “the deplorable effect of the system of scholarships, etc., which do not entirely support the recipient, but act as bait and encourage him to go on with graduate study, while piling up an indebtedness which, under prevailing conditions, will ride his shoulders like a veritable old man of the sea.” He continued, “The manipulation of fellowships for the purpose of ‘building up a strong graduate department’ lies dangerously near the immoral; and this is doubly true when the fellowship carries with it burdensome teaching duties which make of it but a disguised underpaid instructorship” (p. 19).

The 1915 formation of the American Association of University Professors was a significant step for college faculty, but not at first for all faculty. At its founding, its membership was restricted to elite faculty at leading institutions and its early efforts were disproportionately for that constituency. And, of course, the sub-faculty—sometimes derisively referred to as the “scrub-faculty”—remained and, at some institutions, expanded. At the University of Washington in 1925, for example, more than half of the instructional staff was on the sub-faculty, including more than 80 percent of the women. At the University of Wisconsin, assistants and instructors composed 80 percent of the staff in some departments, although some departments had none.

The Great Depression only worsened the situation for many of these instructors, even though some institutions did keep them around at cut rates so as not to cast them adrift. As Walter P. Metzger wrote in the Summer 1990 issue of Law and Contemporary Problems, “the competition for nontenure positions tended to turn new PhD’s into scramblers for openings that demanded heavy workloads at cut-rate pay, and turned the currently employed into supplicants for continued favor” (p. 69). Indeed, the “plight of the academic underclass” (p. 71) informed the 1940 Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure, its claims for academic freedom, and the creation of an up-or-out tenure system.

The several decades after World War II are often considered a “golden age” for college faculty. The acceptance of a tenure system, expansive job opportunities, and significant salary increases are often recalled. Yet the “golden age” was tarnished. The faculty workforce remained highly differentiated with one-third of college instructors working part-time in the early 1960s, not including the roughly 15 percent who were graduate students. The widespread discrimination based on gender, race, sexuality, religion, and politics necessarily further undercuts this notion of a triumphant and glorious era for the faculty. And as the turn toward unionization in the late 1960s highlights, to whatever extent it existed, the “golden age” was short-lived.

The modern situation is dire for many who are training or have trained to be faculty members, with real consequences for those who work and learn in colleges and universities. What is often missing from considerations of mass contingency, though, is that the current conditions would seem too familiar to the generations of teachers who preceded them. The new normal is, in fact, just the normal.

Timothy Cain’s work explores modern and historical issues involving faculty and students in American higher education. He has written about academic freedom, unionization, student protest, and learning outcomes assessment. He is the author of Establishing Academic Freedom (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and, along with colleagues at the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, Using Evidence of Student Learning to Improve Higher Education (Jossey-Bass, 2015). He is currently writing a book on the history of faculty unions.

KAREN WEBBER’S analysis of job satisfaction expressed by today’s postsecondary faculty reveals some gender differences, but she believes further exploration is needed to understand the underlying causes.

Although job satisfaction is a well-studied topic in organizational literature, understanding satisfaction for today’s postsecondary faculty members presents uncharted territory. Spurred by my previous work on faculty roles and productivity, I am beginning an examination of faculty satisfaction using restricted-level data from the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE). So far, I’ve found two interesting results: 1) the work environment seems to be a more important contributor to satisfaction for women; and 2) in general, women are more neutral in their reported level of satisfaction—they are less likely to be highly satisfied or highly dissatisfied than male peers. Is this because women have traditionally been socialized to not ask for or expect too much? Are they hesitant to speak up? Or do they have a better outlook on the balance of work and avocation?

Academic professionals are drawn to the professoriate for their desire to produce new knowledge and to share that knowledge with others through instruction, collaborative research, and/or community engagement. Recent economic constrictions resulting in workforce reductions, little or no cost of living salary increases, and/or work furloughs have contributed to low morale and reduced satisfaction for faculty members. Understanding satisfaction for nontenure-track and women faculty is especially important in light of their disproportionate representation in today’s professoriate, continued leaks in the pipeline, and limited options for job mobility.

My initial exploration is guided by Linda Serra Hagedorn’s framework for job satisfaction, and makes use of 2011 and 2012 data for over 22,000 full-time faculty members in nearly 100 U.S. colleges and universities.

A number of factors contribute to faculty member satisfaction, including relationships within the department, salary, success in achieving tenure, and work-family balance. Although male and female faculty report similar levels of satisfaction in select areas, some previous studies found women faculty to report lower satisfaction than male peers. Part of the reason for women’s lower satisfaction may be due to feeling less informed about time and performance expectations, having fewer mentors, and feeling stress for work-family balance more so than male peers. In addition, women are traditionally reinforced for not speaking out and for not asserting their opinions. According to long-lasting stereotypes, married women who work outside the home are perceived to be secondary workers, not needing the same salary nor promotion as male spouses.

As a signal of achievement and future potential, salary serves as a perception of fairness and a factor in job-related satisfaction. In some of my previous work, I found that on average, doctoral recipients who are employed in the education sector earn about 20 percent less than peers in business and industry, and there is much literature showing a wage gap in academia by gender (e.g., scholars such as Ron Ehrenberg, Laura Perna, Jack Schuster, Martin Finkelstein, Rob Toutkoushian, and Paul Umbach). Studies by these authors report that average faculty salaries for females fall short of male peers by 15 to 22 percent.

According to Hagedorn, job satisfaction has complex nuances. Significant life events such as changes in life stage, family, rank  or tenure, or emotional state serve as triggers that affect or are affected by personal characteristics, achievement, recognition, salary, collegial relationships, and perceptions of the work climate and culture. Life stage and change in family, work roles, or personal circumstances guide satisfaction along a continuum, and subsequent triggers may prompt the individual to cycle back to different points on the satisfaction continuum.

We also know that complexities of social structures, labor markets, and individual choice are important factors that help provide a more comprehensive explanation of satisfaction, career opportunities, and salary differentials. Ted Youn’s work on structural theory suggests that salary inequities are caused, in part, by the way in which employment positions are structured in an organization. Youn believes that academic labor markets are unique because they are segmented by academic discipline, institution type, job task (teaching, research or administration), and job status (academic rank and time status).

Because current market conditions have decreased tenure-track faculty appointments, there is greater competition to earn a position. Women in dual-career couples face additional challenges resulting from limited mobility, which may result in acceptance of non-preferred employment positions offering lower salaries and fewer benefits. Together, these events and structures perpetuate gender inequality, as women receive lower pay than male counterparts. As women hit this glass ceiling, it seems logical that they would become less satisfied with their employment.

The majority of respondents in this preliminary study were tenured faculty members (66 percent) or tenure-track (25 percent). Two-thirds were employed at public institutions. About the same number of males and females were on tenure-track, but twice as many men were tenured. In the preliminary analyses, women reported lower satisfaction with the time they spent on teaching, research and service, and were less satisfied with how equitably committee assignments were distributed across all faculty members in their department.

Women reported lower annual salaries; however, there was no significant difference in satisfaction with salary. In fact, proportionally more women said they were “highly satisfied” with their annual salary than male peers. Furthermore, overall satisfaction was not different by marital status, age, nor when having children under age six. Is it that women are less willing to speak up or do they have a more positive outlook on their faculty role and satisfaction? I need to delve further into the data.

Along with differences in satisfaction with salary, a second finding is also interesting. For both male and female faculty, environmental factors (e.g., perception of fit in the department, good communication from the department head) positively contributed to satisfaction. Preliminary analyses found the beta coefficients for women higher than those for men, indicating that environmental factors contribute to female faculty satisfaction more so than for male peers. This finding affirms previous studies that support the value of providing clear and detailed information to young faculty on expectations held for promotion and tenure. Perhaps this finding also indicates that women achieve satisfaction through conditions and events beyond salary alone.

In some instances, my findings parallel previous literature (e.g., satisfaction is correlated with salary), but in other instances they depart (women with young children did not report lower overall satisfaction). It is noteworthy that environmental factors were strongly related to satisfaction for both men and women, but more so for women. What is it about the environment that is so important for women? This finding will push me to deeper inquiry.

My findings of limited difference by gender may indicate that women are being seen and treated more equitably, or that they have a more positive outlook on their employment. However, it could also mean that women are less willing to speak up and/or are willing to accept lower income and roles, perhaps with lesser status. I look forward to exploring this topic further.

Karen Webber is working on projects broadly related to institutional effectiveness that include faculty satisfaction and productivity, institutional research, assessment of learning outcomes, and student outcomes through undergraduate research. Recent publications include an analysis of graduate student educational debt, gender differences in doctorate recipients’ salaries, career effects of postdoctoral research, and the globalization of institutional research and planning in higher education.

ROB TOUTKOUSHIAN revisits human capital theory as a framework for understanding how students make decisions about whether to go to college/where to enroll and argues for modifications of this concept.

Countless studies in our field have tried to examine how students make decisions about whether to go to college, and if so, where to enroll. Academics frequently rely on human capital theory as a theoretical framework to guide these studies. In fact, it is nearly impossible to find a study that looks at issues such as access to college or college choice that does not use human capital theory as an explanation for how students make these decisions. In some work that I have been doing, however, I call into question whether human capital theory is sufficient to explain these types of decisions by students, and if it isn’t enough, then how it could be modified.

Human capital theory originates in the field of economics. The phrase “human capital” refers to the skills and attributes possessed by a person that enables him or her to be productive in the labor market. Education is seen as a way for individuals to gain human capital because students presumably acquire skills and knowledge when they are in college that help them after graduation. Accordingly, academics frequently talk about going to college as being an investment in a person’s human capital. In this model, going to college is an investment much like purchasing a stock or bond because the costs are paid upfront and the benefits are received in the future.

Drawing on this theory, academics frequently assert that students compare the financial benefits that they expect from going to college with the costs they would have to incur, and then decide whether and where to go to college based on whether the financial benefits exceed the costs. Many studies–including my own work–have tried to measure these financial costs and benefits, and in general they have found that on average the financial benefits greatly exceed the financial costs. Human capital theory would therefore predict that most students would opt to go to college, and would select institutions and majors where the expected financial payoff is the largest.

The problem, however, is that when we look around at students, we see them making postsecondary decisions that seem to contrast with the predictions of human capital theory. Many students end up not going to college even though the expected financial payoff is positive. Even among those who go to college, some choose to attend less prestigious institutions than they could attend (see the recent discussions about “college undermatching,” for example), or they decide to major in subjects where the average financial payoffs are low relative to fields such as business, engineering, and some of the hard sciences. Is human capital theory wrong? Does this mean that students are irrational? Or is there something else at work here?

These are the types of questions that I have been exploring with a colleague (Mike Paulsen at the University of Iowa) as part of a book that we are writing titled Economics of Higher Education: Background, Concepts, and Applications. In the book, we reconsider the model of how students make decisions about postsecondary education, and have found a number of ways of enhancing the model beyond the human capital framework.

First, we note that the model of student choice is actually based on the happiness (or utility) students receive from their choices and not simply the excess money that they can earn from going to college. Each choice that students make–such as whether to go to college, whether to apply to the University of Georgia, and whether to major in economics–brings with it not only expected financial costs and benefits, but also utility. Although utility is a component of the human capital model, it is frequently overlooked, and researchers tend to focus solely on the expected financial gain from student decisions.

Second, although going to college is an investment, it can perhaps be thought of as being more similar to investing in a rare painting than it is to investing in a stock or bond. When people purchase a mutual fund, the only benefit that they get out of it is in terms of how much they can sell it for later. Actually possessing the mutual fund gives the purchaser no enjoyment, and in fact the person who buys a mutual fund rarely gets to even see it–it is a pure investment good. In contrast, if a person invests in a painting, he or she not only gets value from selling it later at a higher price, they also get value from looking at the painting as it (hopefully) appreciates in value. Economists refer to this extra value as a “consumptive benefit.” Rare paintings, therefore, give the purchaser both an investment and a consumptive benefit.

There are many ways in which students receive consumptive benefits as well as investment benefits when they go to college. These benefits may include the enjoyment that they get from attending sports events on campus, taking part in extracurricular activities, eating at various food establishments on campus, living in nice residence halls, and visiting places within the vicinity of the campus. In addition, consumptive benefits from college may be obtained from simply making friends and learning to live independently.

Expanding the student choice model to include consumptive benefits also may help explain some of the anomalies that we observe in the real world. For example, if these consumptive benefits are much larger at College A than they are at a more prestigious (and financially lucrative) College B, the student may rationally choose to attend College A.

Our hope is that our book will help the field of higher education add to human capital theory and develop a better understanding of how students make choices about postsecondary education. Human capital theory isn’t wrong, and students are not irrational–but there is more at work here.

Robert Toutkoushian is an economist whose work focuses on the ways in which economics can be applied to problems and issues in higher education. Recent studies of his include the economic returns to college, and the costs and effects of state policies (such as state appropriations and financial aid programs) on higher education enrollments. He is a recipient of AIR’s Sidney Suslow Award.

 

JIM HEARN investigates the assertion that the liberal arts and small liberal arts colleges are in danger of extinction, and reports on how some institutions are responding.

Sometimes the conventional wisdom gets it wrong. In the early 1980s, the higher education press was filled with dire predictions on the fate of small liberal arts colleges. After all, the reasoning went, the aging of the “Baby Boomer” generation would surely mean declining college enrollments. In the context of the demographic shifts, the enrollment-sensitive small liberal arts college sector could be decimated.

Many of those colleges, however, adopted data-driven strategic enrollment management techniques to help them to more effectively and efficiently target their academic programming and recruitment. Those efforts contributed to rising college-going rates across all age groups and, as it turned out, surprisingly few small colleges failed in the 1980s and 1990s. The forecast crisis never arrived.

Now, however, several decades later, the conventional wisdom once again questions the future of those same colleges. Need- based student-aid funding has stagnated, threatening to put college financially out of reach for many. The associated rise of student loans has encouraged students to pursue “real world” studies perceived to have superior financial payoffs compared to the traditional curricular offerings of liberal arts colleges. Some policymakers have even argued for cutting governmental funding for students in the humanities and social sciences. This past year, the announcement by Sweet Briar College trustees that the historic Virginia institution would be closing brought matters to a boil, prompting a frenzy of media commentary.

Certainly, there are troubling current signs for the liberal arts, and for the colleges most closely associated with them. But should we buy into the conventional wisdom? My sister, my cousins, and I were the first in our families to earn college degrees, and all of us focused on the humanities and social sciences. Some of us attended liberal arts colleges. So, following my contrarian instincts, I’ve initiated some research aimed at getting beneath the surface of the “impending death” meme.

Immediately, I’ve discovered that there are some problems with the familiar storyline. In recent years, humanities enrollments in the U.S. have stabilized in proportional terms and actually grown in raw terms. What is more, not all small colleges are threatened, and not all are abandoning their curricular roots. It’s certainly true that the proportion maintaining a strong liberal arts focus has fallen notably, but many have stayed “committed to the core.” As Alexander Astin, David Breneman, and others have observed, private baccalaureate colleges closely resembled one another a century ago, but they now arguably constitute the most diverse sector of U.S. higher education.

For a Journal of Higher Education article, IHE doctoral student Andrew Belasco and I set out to investigate changes in the curricular heart of the traditional liberal arts college: the humanities. We asked what factors appear to be driving some institutions to abandon their traditional academic focus, while others stay the course. We found that the variations in humanities production among institutions are not random: older schools, more selective schools, and schools with stronger financial resources were more likely than others to stay true to their historic humanities orientation. What is more, over recent decades, religiously oriented schools have moved from being positively to negatively associated with humanities-degree production, and colleges’ proportional female enrollments went from being a neutral to a negative factor in humanities production. Thus, contrary to traditional patterns, a religiously affiliated school with high women’s enrollment in the 2000s was likely to grant an especially high proportion of non-humanities degrees.

In another project funded by the Council for Independent Colleges, I’ve worked with IHE doctoral student Jarrett Warshaw to explore more directly the nature of adaptation and innovation in small independent colleges. Our survey of CIC institutions’presidents revealed strikingly frequent and varied innovative activity.

Nearly every responding CIC president reported to us that their institutions were pursuing some form of cost containment and reduction or some form of revenue enhancement and diversification, and 92 percent of respondents reported pursuing both. Specifically, notable majorities reported leaving faculty positions unfilled, freezing salaries, and restructuring academic programs. Strikingly, 83 percent reported creating new undergraduate programs, 74 percent reported creating new graduate programs, and 64 percent reported creating new online programming. Substantial majorities also reported revamping their admission standards, financial-aid policies, and fundraising approaches, as well as expanding athletic investments and international recruitment efforts. The typical small-college president, at any one time, appears to oversee a wide variety of initiatives in the cost and revenue arenas.

Presidents predominantly viewed these innovations as congruent with their institutions’ existing missions, and reported largely favorable acceptance of their change efforts among different constituencies. Clearly, the heightened marketplace vulnerability of many of these institutions is creating powerful incentives for change. Leaders are not merely waiting passively for an inevitable tide to wash over them and their colleges. Whether they’ll be able to steer clear of the looming dangers remains unclear, but our project findings suggest that few will be blamed for a lack of trying.

Of course, larger questions remain. Many observers worry about the sparse enrollments of lower-income students in highpriced selective private colleges. Enrollment patterns increasingly suggest growing stratification in our higher education system. Observers also wonder about the future of religious higher education, as we see widespread movement of religiously affiliated colleges away from their historically dominant commitments to the humanities and other liberal arts. Further, to the extent one values the liberal arts for nurturing intellectual and social development, critical thinking, and the consideration of moral and ethical issues, it is hard not to be troubled by some current trends. There are no guarantees that the ongoing adaptations will serve the larger public good.

Still, I’ve been pleased by the empirical support for my initial contrarian instincts about the conventional wisdom. The liberal arts and their most closely associated institutions are not as sickly and moribund as some popular commentators would have us believe. I look forward to further explorations in this arena.

James Hearn examines organization, governance, and policy in higher education. Most recently, he has focused on organizational change in colleges and universities, policies influencing college affordability and access, and the development of state higher education policies. Hearn received the 2014 Excellence in Public Policy in Higher Education award given by the ASHE Council on Public Policy in Higher Education. He also serves as associate director for IHE.

 

ERIK NESS examines the connections—or lack thereof—between policy scholars and policy makers, and argues that “suppliers” may need to be more assertive in delivering information to those who could use it.

A year ago this summer, I arrived early to interview a state legislator in the South Carolina statehouse. The main lobby was a bustle as high school football championship teams, nurse practitioners and midwives, and shrimp and grits cook-off organizers were guided to the well of the House chamber as resolutions passed recognizing their accomplishments. Although the legislature was in session, our research team was assured that the legislator would have time for an interview about the use of information in state higher education policy.

After waiting for more than an hour, I conducted an often-interrupted, audio-recorder-in-hand, 11-minute interview just steps outside the House floor. I asked about the role of various policy organizations on college completion efforts in South Carolina, such as the Southern Regional Education Board, to which he replied, “They are more into K-12 than higher ed.” Are you familiar with Complete College America, I asked? “No, I’m not.” Then about halfway through our interview, he interjected, “Well, you keep asking me about information, and I told you when we started talking that we are focused on doing action.”

This scene seems to come straight from Robert Birnbaum’s classic, “Policy Scholars Are from Venus; Policy Makers Are from Mars.” Indeed, at the mid-point now of a Grant Foundation-funded project to examine the role of research in state-level college completion, our research team, including Jim Hearn and IHE graduate students, has identified much more evidence of the gulf between policy makers and researchers.

Following the work of others analyzing research utilization, we have focused on the supply of information and the demand for information. Most often researchers consider the noun forms of this classic two-way relationship. That is, “the supply” of information: the inventory or stock of research on a given topic. For higher education completion policy, this stock would include scholarly journal articles and books, reports by policy organizations and foundations, raw data by campuses and state systems of higher education, and so on. “The demand,” on the other hand, would include the collective and individual preferences of policymakers for the various types of information available.

The crux of the research-policy divide is that there is a surplus of “the supply” of information that researchers deem relevant and that we still know far less about “the demand” for information. Our research has been framed with this dilemma in mind and we have collected data with the express purpose of understanding better “the demand” for information and the connections between “policy scholars and policy makers.”

In my South Carolina interview, for example, when I asked about a half-dozen information sources from the supply-side, the legislator responded that these either were not relevant or that he didn’t have the time to consider them. As he reminded me, “higher education is 1/20 of our job, not even.”

Given the lack of time and attention policy makers can pay to any given issue, it seems that suppliers of information need to be more active. Perhaps the noun forms of supply and demand do not tell the whole story. The verb forms may be far more interesting and offer more insights into the research-policy connection. For example, leaders of policy organizations and state higher education agencies commented on their efforts “to supply” information to policy makers. This included not only distributing information through outlets ranging from websites, printed and mailed reports, and social media, but also holding workshops, symposia, conferences, and small-group consultations with key policy makers. These boundary-spanning efforts serve to bring together policy makers and researchers. And, we have found that many of these intermediary organizations are far from meek in doing so.

One Complete College America leader said in an interview, “we’re not a think tank, we’re a do tank.” This jibed with what we observed at various CCA events in Georgia during which the sup- plying of information could be seen in the form of testimonials, best practice recommendations, and vendor booths offering various analytic services. This supply activity goes well beyond contributing to “the supply,” which may or may not reach the policy-making community. A campus leader in Texas compared CCA’s active approach to “a burr in the saddle, but in a way that causes us to take a look at our policies and our processes and make change. So while they are somewhat confrontational and to a certain extent adversarial in their approach, they cause us to reflect and to refine what we’re doing, which is a good thing.”

Our interviews with government officials and state higher education leaders in Georgia and Tennessee reveal similar impressions of CCA’s supply approach. We also learned that this led governor’s offices “to demand” more information and more guidance in crafting their states’ completion efforts. This is not to say that Georgia and Tennessee are implementing each of CCA’s five “game changer” solutions—or any of them exactly as CCA recommends. The point is that CCA is actively engaging with elected officials and higher education leaders. Regardless of whether CCA leans more heavily toward policy makers than policy scholars, we think that examining the dynamic role of organizations like CCA, SREB, and many other organizations will reveal much more about the supply-demand relationship of research use.

In closing, consider another statement from my interview with the South Carolina legislator, “I don’t go to the XYZ think tank in Omaha, Nebraska and say let me do some studying on this issue, per se. I mean, if there’s information available to me, I’ll get it and use it, but we’re more in the action mode versus the professorial mode.” Our project suggests that many XYZ think tanks are playing a much more active role. As a result, the use of information is not dependent on an elected official “demanding” information. Instead, the calculated and assertive “supplying” of information by intermediary organizations may ultimately merge the action and professorial modes.

Erik Ness continues focus on the use of research evidence in the policy- making process. This essay draws on his current project funded by the Grant Foundation, which examines how various organizations influence college completion policies across several states. He recently concluded a Ford Foundation-funded project with the Tennessee Higher Education Commission that analyzed four public campus responses to Tennessee’s new outcomes-based funding formula.

 

MANUEL GONZÁLEZ CANCHÉ looks closely at the role community colleges play in the production of doctorate recipients in STEM fields and argues the federal initiatives can unintendedly weaken this role.

Current federal initiatives have aligned to strengthen the community college sector’s role in the college completion agenda. Is this a wise strategy for the U.S. considering that the production of college graduates has never been of greater importance to any country aspiring to remain competitive in scientific production worldwide? The answer to this question is, “It depends....”

An analysis of over 50 years of literature and research on the sector effects of community colleges on educational and labor-market outcomes indicates that if the federal emphasis is placed on producing short-term credentials and vocational careers, then this increased presence of the community college sector is not problematic. Research has to a great extent shown a positive effect of this sector on employment outcomes and wages. Conversely, emphasizing the public two-year sector as “the gateway” to a baccalaureate degree could be problematic if no other structural changes are implemented. The literature indicates a lower likelihood of attaining a four-year degree for students starting in the two-year sector. The question then is: Are community colleges truly thwarting students’ educational attainment beyond the two-year degree, as higher education research over several decades seems to suggest, or are their effects on further educational attainment somewhat less dire?

In a recent study, I relied on data gathered by the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Doctorate Recipients (SDR) and observed that about 10 percent of doctorate recipients in STEM fields reported beginning their post-secondary education in the two-year sector. This finding is interesting as it makes problematic more than 50 years of research that depicts the community college sector as an engine designed to maintain the status quo in this country. The next step for me was to ask who these scientists are and to what extent they are similar to or different from their counterparts who started college in the four-year sector.

Research has consistently shown that community college entrants tend to be minority students and come from lower income back-grounds compared to their four-year counterparts. Thus one can say that if the two-year sector successfully closed the achievement gap, then “CC scientists”—Ph.D. holders in STEM sciences who formally enrolled in the two-year sector—should also be more ethnically diverse and of lower socioeconomic status than their non-CC counterparts (who started college in the four-year sector).

To my surprise, the results were mixed. The vast majority of CC scientists across samples were White (85 percent compared to 72 percent of non-CC scientists). Nonetheless, compared to non-CC scientists, CC scientists were more likely to be first-generation in college and tended to rely more heavily on student loans to finance their education, which indicates that they indeed came from lower income backgrounds than non-CC scientists. Considering these two pieces of information, can we claim that the two-year sector helped to perpetuate the system of privilege based on ethnicity while at the same time helped to close the socioeconomic status gap across CC and non-CC scientists?

I argue that neither of the two claims would be correct. The samples analyzed are configured by professionals who navigated the entire postsecondary system to achieve a Ph.D. in STEM fields. Although it is true that CC scientists had a longer and less direct path, we cannot attribute the success or the blame to this sector alone. Students who transferred to a four-year degree were immediately exposed to that four-year institution and from the moment they attained a four-year degree and started their journey to grad school, isolating the effect of the two-year sector on this journey would be practically impossible.

This fact is important because almost all studies reviewed comparing two- and four-year entrants faced a common issue (referred to as confoundedness): the effect of the two-year sector was also influenced by the control condition (four-year sector). Consequently, the outcome of community college participants is subjected to the effect of the two conditions, rather than just one. Going back to CC scientists then, the right conclusion would be “the lack of a more diverse CC scientist body in terms of ethnicity is the result of both the two- and four-year sectors.” A similar logic can then be applied to the finding related to disparities in socioeconomic status.

This discussion does not mean that nothing can be done to boost the stepping-stone role of the two-year sector. On the contrary, it is evident that we need more research on the paths and experiences followed by CC-scientists in an attempt to make this route more structured and hopefully reproducible. It is also worth highlighting that an institution or sector can only do so much in closing gaps that result from the ways in which society as a whole is currently structured. Underrepresented students in higher education tend to face additional challenges that are not only based on academic performance, but also stem from issues that extend well beyond classroom activities and that existed long before students experienced college.

Regardless, I do believe that CC scientists’ stories of success should not be isolated events based on “luck.” Rather, more concerted efforts should be placed on normalizing these paths. Considering the increased competition in science and technology production, the country cannot afford to miss the contributions of potential scientists who for a variety of reasons started in the two-year sector.

Current federal policies and initiatives like Complete College America, however, may potentially limit the function the two-year sector has served in this process by primarily focusing on its role as a producer of credentials and terminal or two-year degrees rather than on its ability to encourage transfer and continuation  to a four-year degree. Common sense suggests that in the society of knowledge and information, producing scientists would have greater rates of return than short-term degree production if America is to retain its competitive edge in scientific production. A sound investment then would be to promote initiatives that strengthen the two-year sector’s stepping-stone function by improving two-and four-year articulation agreements, as their existence and efficiency have so far been supported more by mythical beliefs than by empirical evidence. In conclusion, I do not believe that community colleges are perpetuating stratification of opportunities, but they do face challenges in regard to providing the means for upward academic mobility.

Manuel González Canché is employing advanced methods from geography, statistics, and information sciences to study college attendance patterns, academic networks, student loan debt, language issues in education, and the utility of geostatistical analysis in studying influences on institutional and student behaviors. He is also examining alternative approaches to improving the academic achievements of second-language speakers.