From the New England Council's Weekly Washington Report Higher Education Update, Oct. 24, 2011. NEBHE is a member of the Council and publishes this column each week.

Founded in 1925, the New England Council is a nonpartisan alliance of businesses, academic and health institutions, and public and private organizations throughout New England formed to promote economic growth and a high quality of life in the New England region. The Council's mission is to identify and support federal public policies and articulate the voice of its membership regionally and nationally on important issues facing New England. For more information, please visit www.newenglandcouncil.com.

On Wednesday, the House passed a bill (H.R. 2433) authored by Veterans' Affairs Committee Chair Jeff Miller (R-FL) to provide job training for unemployed veterans. Under the bill, 100,000 jobless veterans between the ages of 35 and 64 would be eligible to apply for Montgomery GI Bill benefits, including up to a year of training in a high-demand field like healthcare or technology. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), who chairs the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee, is advancing her own bill (S. 951) targeting employment opportunities for older veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Sen. Harkin wrote a letter urging the Super Committee to refrain from cutting funding to several key programs, including Pell Grants for college students. "Cutting the maximum award level or reducing student eligibility for Pell Grants could put a college education out of reach for millions of American families while harming the competitiveness of our nation over the long term," he wrote. He also cited critical job-training programs under the departments of Education and Labor as worthy of preserving because they "provide individuals with opportunities to gain the skills that they need to fill current job openings," as well as ensuring "that our workers will be able to compete in industries of the future."

From the New England Council's Weekly Washington Report Higher Education Update, Oct. 18, 2011. NEBHE is a member of the Council and publishes this column each week.

Founded in 1925, the New England Council is a nonpartisan alliance of businesses, academic and health institutions, and public and private organizations throughout New England formed to promote economic growth and a high quality of life in the New England region. The Council's mission is to identify and support federal public policies and articulate the voice of its membership regionally and nationally on important issues facing New England. For more information, please visit www.newenglandcouncil.com.

While the creation of the Grievance Board might have superficially scaled back sexual harassment on campus, events in the past decade have illuminated the problem again. In 2005, Yale fraternity members stole T-shirts from the Clothesline Project, a program started on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, which serves as “a vehicle for women affected by violence to express their emotions by decorating a shirt.” Three years later, Zeta Psi fraternity members were photographed outside the campus Women’s Center holding a sign with a misogynistic epithet.

Then in October 2010, during a Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity initiation, members shouted a harassing chant that encouraged rape behavior in front of an all female dormitory. On March 15, a formal Title IX complaint was filed against the university on the grounds that such behavior creates a hostile environment for female students. And on March 31, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights announced it would be investigating Yale’s handling of sexual harassment and sexual assault cases.

Yale has a history of being tight-lipped about sexual harassment and sexual assault allegations that arise on its prestigious New Haven, Conn. campus. Criticized for handling such claims “quietly and internally [with a] tendency to shy away from disciplining the perpetrators,” Yale failed to suspend or expel the DKE fraternity men who participated in the misogynistic chants, stating that because the victims failed to move forward with charges, the university would take no further action.

Not surprisingly, this decision on the part of the university was not acceptable to many, thus the pending suit against Yale brought by 16 complainants. The underlying motivation for the suit is not any particular monetary compensation, but rather change on the campus. The plaintiffs hope to “fundamentally overhaul” how Yale deals with sexual harassment and sexual assault allegations, ensuring that perpetrators are properly penalized for such atrocious acts. As the Yale Herald asked: If students are expelled for plagiarism, shouldn’t students also be promptly removed for harassment, assault, or rape?

It’s time, instead, to ask some serious questions about the type of indicators being produced and cited, the quality and presentation of these indicators, the taxonomies and aggregations on which they are based, their inclusions and exclusions and whether other indicators could guide us better.

It’s time, too, to put the stage lights on the critical background tapestry of demography, since comparisons of the progress of national systems absent trends in population is like flying blind.

We fly that way all the time.

So let’s start with demography—and your fourth-grade mathematics. When countries are compared in terms of participation in higher education, degree completion, and proportions of students following paths of science, technology, engineering and/or mathematics, the issue of supply—current and future—is critical to the interpretation of what we see. In case you haven’t noticed, by 2025, Japan is on track to lose a quarter of its youth population, Korea 20%, Russia a third, Poland close to 40%. The Japanese have already merged 11 universities in anticipation, the Russians have threatened regional universities with the same fate, and the Koreans are in line to close more than 100 postsecondary institutions.

Now for your fourth-grade math: What happens to a fraction, hence a percentage, when the denominator falls dramatically and the numerator declines as a more modest rate (oh, you need a demographic lesson here: the numerators of specific behaviors in a population always lag trends in the denominator)? The proportion of Japanese, Korean, Russian, etc. youth participating in higher education will rise to stratospheric levels without any system reforms whatsoever.

Note that, among the 31 OECD countries, only four show fertility rates at or greater than replacement, and net migration greater than 4%. The U.S. is one of them, and that one also shows the fourth-highest projected growth in the 25- to 34-year-old population to 2025 (and more than 75% of that growth will be Latino and Asian). Now, fourth-grade math again: What happens to a fraction, hence a percentage, when the denominator rises faster than the numerator? The proportion of our youth population participating in higher education will decline without any system reforms whatsoever.

Bottom line: In terms of population ratio indicators of participation in higher education, the U.S. is going to look worse in comparative data by 2025, no matter what we do. It’s all in the pipeline now. Comparative graduation rates will follow suit—and for the same reasons.

But let’s turn to what are known in international circles as “cohort survival rates.” We get these from OECD’s Education at a Glance in one of the most statistically outrageous tables (A4.1) you will ever read in a publication from a putatively respectable organization. What one sees here are what we would call “graduation rates” for 24 countries, and of course the U.S. looks terrible at 56%, compared to Finland at 72%, for example What OECD tells you only in an online “Annex” that nobody reads is that the U.S. rate is the only one of the 24 that is confined to graduating from the first institution of attendance, and that if a system graduation rate were used, ours would be 63%. OECD then tries to minimize this better news in the footnote by judging the starting date for our system completion data of 1995-96 to be “older,” even though the same starting years are OK for Denmark and Sweden in table A4.1. If I judged OECD’s presentation of U.S. data to be purposefully prejudicial, I would be kind.

Now, there are a lot of other problems with this table, but one leaps off the page right away: Nowhere does OECD tell the reader for how many years the student cohorts were tracked. It turns out that that wonderful 72% graduation rate for Finland is based on a 10-year tracking; the Netherlands’ 65% is based on seven years, as is France’s 64%. Our true matching percent of 63% is based on six years. Ask yourself a simple question: Are there any real differences in this beauty contest?

While the answer is a no-brainer, the more basic critique is that, by excluding the temporal reference point for “survival rate” this table is unacceptable for publication under anyone’s statistical standards! Of course, we don’t care because we love to be told how badly we do compared with others. I have never seen this table challenged in either public statements or the academic literature in the U.S.

Are there other, and potentially more enlightening comparative indicators addressing common challenges in higher education among advanced, postindustrial democracies? May I suggest two easy ones: inclusion and system flexibility. What do they mean?

We have different terms for “inclusion,” but it translates as participation in higher education of all segments of a population, if not in a direct percentage of their proportion among secondary school graduates, then as close as you can get. What populations? Not merely by race/ethnicity or family income (the reflex ways we deal with the question), but also by isolated rural, by combinations of community economy and housing stock, by disabilities, by parents’ highest level of education. All of these terms of analysis come from other countries, and it’s about time we tried some of them out. Geodemographic analysis will take us a long way to targeting populations: We will at least know where to drive our car when we go out to address the challenges. Inclusion is a policy objective of just about every OECD country.

System flexibility is related to inclusion because it translates into metrics of flow-volume: of students into and through higher education by nontraditional means and paths. Some of these are obvious; some less so: part-time status, on-line delivery, assessment of prior experiential learning, re-entry bridge programs for adults, better use of what other countries call “short-cycle” degrees (our associates) as system pivot points. Comparative indicators on this policy playing field will encourage sharing of strategies and interventions. That too will be a lot more productive than beauty contests.

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Cliff Adelman is a senior associate with the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP) who served nearly 30 years as a senior research analyst at the U.S. Department of Education. Adelman's monograph, "The Spaces Between Numbers: Getting International Data on Higher Education Straight," can be found in both short and extended versions at www.ihep.org/research/GlobalPerformance.cfm