Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell will deliver Northeastern University’s 110th commencement address on May 4, 2012. Northeastern President Joseph E. Aoun made the announcement via Twitter!

Fareed Zakaria, host of CNN’s  international affairs program “GPS," editor-at-large ...]]>

It's not even officially winter, and New England colleges are starting to announce their spring commencement speakers.

Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell will deliver Northeastern University’s 110th commencement address on May 4, 2012. Northeastern President Joseph E. Aoun made the announcement via Twitter!

Fareed Zakaria, host of CNN’s  international affairs program “GPS," editor-at-large of Time magazine, Washington Post columnist and author, will be the principal speaker at the afternoon exercises of Harvard’s 361st commencement, on Thursday, May 24, 2012.

Salman A. Khan, founder of the Khan Academy online educational organization, will deliver the keynote address at MIT’s 146th Commencement on Friday, Jun. 8, 2012

Hebrew College of Newton, Mass., announced it will be move its operation to Andover Newton Theological School in 2011 or 2012, contingent on the sale of its current building.

The college is facing debt of more than $32 million.

Hebrew College offers undergraduate degrees and several master’s degrees and certificates in Jewish Studies and Jewish Education.

Hebrew recently ...]]>

Hebrew College of Newton, Mass., announced it will be move its operation to Andover Newton Theological School in 2011 or 2012, contingent on the sale of its current building.

The college is facing debt of more than $32 million.

Hebrew College offers undergraduate degrees and several master’s degrees and certificates in Jewish Studies and Jewish Education.

Hebrew recently teamed up with Northeastern University to provide interested students with a doctoral program option.

The Newton campus was built less than a decade ago by world-renowned architect Moshe Safdie, and according to the Boston Globe, planned to become a “preeminent Jewish cultural center and academic powerhouse.” Yet the economic downturn, and consequently insurmountable debt has plagued the college and made the goal impossible. The college’s president, Rabbi Daniel L. Lehmann, is hopeful that the building sale will “reposition the college to continue operating—and growing—albeit in rented quarters.”

Rabbi Lehmann is optimistic that the new location will afford the opportunity to continue interfaith collaborations, a salient goal for both Hebrew College and Andover Newton Theological School.

While previous Hebrew College leaders had hoped that Boston’s considerable Jewish population combined with its rich academic culture would provide the ideal setting for a distinguished Hebrew College, financial constraints have inhibited this objective.

(This lively debate on the future demand for college-educated workers will continue in our Forum.)

“About every two years someone comes up with this story. There is absolutely nothing to it—it's simply not true,” Peter Capelli, Professor, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, commenting on the Georgetown's college labor supply shortage forecast.

(This lively debate on the future demand for college-educated workers will continue in our Forum.)

“About every two years someone comes up with this story. There is absolutely nothing to it—it's simply not true,” Peter Capelli, Professor, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, commenting on the Georgetown's college labor supply shortage forecast.

—“Prediction of Worker Shortage Has Critics,” The Press-Enterprise (Riverside, Calif.), April 10, 2010.

The recent response by Anthony Carnevale et al. to our analysis of the fundamental shortcomings associated with their predictions of widespread college labor shortages focuses on three areas. First, they suggest that we are educational Luddites by noting in the title of their response that we believe too many people have earned college degrees in New England. Carnevale et al. claim that we think, “New England is producing 35% more college degrees than are actually required for current and future jobs” because we recognize the real labor market problems that confront too many of our college graduates. We don’t think that New England colleges produce too many graduates, but we do find that a considerable number of recent and past graduates are malemployed and don’t get much of a financial return on their investment and that of society.

We simply argue that Carnevale exaggerates the size of the existing college labor market and overstates demand now - and therefore in the future - because he defines every employed college graduate as being in the college labor market. Why does he do this? Primarily, because he refuses to recognize the widespread problem of malemployment of college graduates, especially in the current, very difficult, employment situation confronting the nation. An even casual reading of numerous articles in the media and on the Internet on the labor market adjustment problems of college graduates, their rising debt loads, and increasing loan defaults would illustrate the situation.

We find that about 25% of all employed college-educated adults in the nation and closer to 40% of recent graduates work in non-college labor market jobs. Some voluntarily do so while others are trapped involuntarily. But, in either case, they receive a substantially diminished rate of return to their degrees compared to those who become employed in a college labor market occupation. We do not argue that these graduates should not have gone to college. Instead, we argue that colleges, employers and other labor market intermediaries need to develop strategies to reduce malemployment rates among college graduates and help them obtain better access to occupations that allow them to utilize their college skills. Otherwise, the expected size of the payoff to a college degree for them is not very high. Denying the existence of widespread and costly malemployment problems does not make this very severe problem go away. It simply diminishes the ability of our education and labor market institutions to effectively respond to the needs of college graduates who are stuck in low-skill, low-mobility and low-wage jobs.

The second issue Carnevale points to is the long-term rise until recently (2000) in the economic return to a college degree, suggesting that we think that college does not pay-off. Again, we have argued that college pays off on average and have written plenty of papers about this. The results of our recent multivariate analysis of the annual earnings premiums of college graduates in New England during 2009 summarized in the Chart 1 below reveal very large earnings payoffs to college graduates. However, the findings clearly reveal that, whether a given graduate’s degree pays off, depends on the success of the individual becoming employed in an occupation that has a substantial set of duties and tasks that utilize the knowledge, skills and abilities that they acquired in college. The estimated annual earnings advantages over and above a high school graduate for those who earn a degree and become employed in the college labor market were 55% for those with an associate degree, 71% for those with a bachelor’s degree, and 107% for those who earned an advanced degree. Among those graduates who were malemployed, however, we found very modest annual earnings advantages ranging from only 5% to 8%.

Source: American Community Survey, Public Use Data Files, analysis by the authors

Carnevale argues that we use a rigid set of “elite, traditional white-collar and professional jobs” to define the college labor market. In fact, we use a very broad-based set of occupations and an objective source of information that utilizes large-scale occupational analysis studies of the knowledge, skills, and abilities used at the workplace. This system was developed and regularly updated by the U.S Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration through its O*NET system. We readily admit that we exclude many occupations from our listing of college labor market jobs, and our argument is that if you include all occupations in the definition of a college labor market (as Carnevale does), then its usefulness as a measure of the demand for college-level skills has lost most of its utility. Including “everything” in your definition is hardly the basis of any classification system that could serve as a meaningful taxonomy of employer requirements around postsecondary knowledge, skills, and abilities.

The findings in Table 1 below provide estimates of the occupational distribution of the jobs held by recent college graduates under 25 who were malemployed during 2009. The table illustrates the kinds of occupations that we exclude when we define the college labor market. The data also illustrate the kinds of occupations Carnevale et al. include when they determine the size of the college labor market. These 15 occupations are dominated by waiter/waitress, bartender, cashier and retail sales jobs, and low-end service and clerical jobs. The inclusion of so many waitress, waiter, and bartender occupations gives a new meaning to STEM occupation. By the Georgetown authors’ reckoning, all of these are part of the college labor market.

Table 1:

Distribution of the Malemployed with a Bachelor’s Degree Only Under Age 25, by Occupation, Annual Averages, 2009, U.S.

What’s the rationale for including these occupations in the measure of the college labor market? Carnevale et al argue that college degrees generate positive earnings premiums whether graduates are employed as they put it as “insurance agents or a rocket scientist.” But this is a poor example of what they see as our exclusionary classification. We include both of these occupations in our current college labor market definition. We do exclude most clerical, blue-collar production, material moving, retail sales, low-level services and jobs like bartenders such as those listed in Table 1 where entry skill requirements are well below the college level. We suspect that most fair-minded observers would agree that these occupations do not require a bachelor’s degree to become qualified for employment. Nevertheless, the proof is in the pudding and this gets us to Carnevale’s third point.

Carnevale argues that college graduates working in these sorts of non-college labor market occupations earn more than their high school graduate counterparts who are employed in those same occupations—like bartenders or landscapers. As we noted in our initial article in NEJHE, we agree. College graduates who work in occupations outside the college labor market do typically earn slightly more than their high school graduate counterpart, but not much more, and a lot less than their fellow college graduates who did become employed in a college labor market job.

Our findings clearly reveal that in New England college graduates at the associate, bachelors and advanced degree levels employed in occupations outside of the college labor market had annual earnings that were only 5% to 8% higher than those of their high school graduate counterparts, a small but statistically significant annual earnings advantage. Based on other recent research by the Center for Labor Market Studies, we find that some of this advantage is associated with better literacy and/or numeracy skills, making these malemployed college graduates slightly more productive than their high school graduate counterparts—within the constraints of the task/skill requirements of their occupations. That is, being better at math may raise the earnings of malemployed college graduates relative to employed high school graduates—but not by much.

A malemployed college graduate’s earnings are constrained because their ability to use the college-level skills they acquired are limited by the job duties and work tasks associated with their occupation. Graduates of a rocket science program who work as bartenders gets bartender pay. However, their pay will rise sharply when they become employed in a rocket scientist occupation where they are able to engage in a set of job duties and work tasks that better capitalize on the knowledge, skills and abilities that they developed while earning their degree.

What is the evidence for this? As our regression results reveal, college graduates in New England who work in college labor market occupations had annual earnings premiums during 2009 that were about 10 times greater than those of their counterparts who worked in non-college labor market jobs. New England residents with associate degrees who worked in college labor market jobs had an annual earnings premium of 58% compared with just 5% premium for their graduate peers who worked in non-college labor market occupations. At the bachelor’s degree level, New Englanders who work in the college labor market had an annual earning premium of 78% compared to only 8% among those who were employed in jobs outside the college labor market. At the advanced degree level, those employed in the college labor market had an annual earnings advantage of 108%, compared with just 8% for those who worked outside the college labor market

Carnevale and his colleagues do a disservice to the nation’s higher education system by so dramatically overstating the size of the college labor market. The Georgetown projections exaggerate the demand for college degrees in the present and future while at the same time ignoring the large and severe problems of malemployment and even joblessness among college grads around the nation. The consequence is that it suggests that colleges should prepare for a labor shortage problem that is based on a false premise. The nation’s labor markets continue to struggle with unemployment rates that hover close to 10% and under-utilization rates closer to 20%. The Georgetown analysis also fails to recognize the collateral impact of malemployment among college graduates. As college grads move down the labor market queue into occupations dominated by those with less schooling, the employment rates among those with fewer years of schooling plunge. Added labor supply also depresses their wages. Especially hard hit are non-college-educated teens and young adults who can no longer find work as recent college grads crowd them out of the labor market. These displacement effects further erode the value of a college education. So the problem of malemployment among college grads creates additional problems of unemployment and underemployment among non college grads, especially teens and young adults.

The substantial earnings losses associated with malemployment of college graduates also reduce their tax contributions to federal, state and local governments in the form of lower income taxes, Social Security payroll taxes, and state sales taxes. Malemployed graduates are also much less likely to receive health insurance and pension coverage from their employers, further reducing the private and social return to their investments in college.

It is time to stop fantasizing about the future and to start addressing the severe malemployment and joblessness problems confronting college graduates in the present day. The nation needs a laser focus on creating college-related employment opportunities and upward mobility pathways in today’s job market. Right now, there are at least five unemployed workers for every vacant job, and our recent analysis of state job vacancy data suggests that the ratio is 8 to 1 when we focus on only full-time job vacancies and unemployed persons. The pace of new job creation in the U.S. has been sluggish at best. Indeed, at the current rate of growth, the nation won’t recover the entire payroll jobs lost during the Great Recession and its aftermath until the end of 2017. If the labor force continues to grow as projected, the pace of reduction in unemployment rates will be even slower. Higher education’s major challenge is not a labor shortage in 2018. Instead our task is helping our graduates find intellectually fulfilling and economically remunerative employment that provides upward mobility, and favorable economic returns on skills and abilities that all of us desired when we entered college.

________________________________________________________________________

Paul E. Harrington is associate director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. Andrew M. Sum is the center’s director.

The Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce has engaged in a highly publicized campaign claiming that the nation will face a very substantial deficit of college graduates by 2018 if the American postsecondary system fails to rapidly expand the number of college degrees it awards each year. Indeed, the employment ...]]>

The Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce has engaged in a highly publicized campaign claiming that the nation will face a very substantial deficit of college graduates by 2018 if the American postsecondary system fails to rapidly expand the number of college degrees it awards each year. Indeed, the employment projections developed by Anthony Carnevale and his colleagues at Georgetown University suggest that there will be a shortfall of 3 million college graduates by that year. Such a labor shortage, if it were to actually materialize, could result in an enormous amount of lost production, reduced incomes in the U.S. and a deterioration in our competitive position in the world economy. Firms unable to hire domestic college graduates might shift their production overseas or look to postsecondary institutions abroad for new sources of high-end labor supply to meet the shortfalls predicted by the Georgetown authors.

So what is the evidence of future labor shortages in college labor markets? Should higher education institutions place some bets in terms of organizational structures and resource allocation in response to this projection of a serious labor shortfall? These are important questions since the higher education system has been burned by faulty projections in the past. Perhaps, the most egregious example of this was the “college enrollment crisis” that was forecast by a number of observers in the early 1980s. At that time, some college analysts expected that by the end of the ’80s, postsecondary institutions would face large enrollment shortfalls, as the size of the high school graduate cohort was forecast to decline sharply through the mid 1990s as a consequence of the baby bust generation coming of age. While the number of graduating seniors from the nation’s high schools did indeed decline, no enrollment crisis occurred. Instead, higher education experienced a renaissance from its 1970s doldrums, with increased enrollments and sharp rises in tuition and fees-signaling the effects of a sharp increase in demand for college degrees as the economic gains from completing college rose sharply.

While decline, consolidation and merger were the watchwords of the "enrollment crisis" proponents, colleges and universities in fact prospered over the period when shortfalls in enrollment were expected. While the forecasters got the demographics right, they didn’t account for changes in the nature and magnitude of job growth that favored those with more years of formal schooling. Thus, they missed the rise in college enrollment rates that would take place among high school seniors and the sharp growth in college enrollments among adult women that occurred during that time period; both associated with sharp increases in the earnings advantages of graduating from college.

The Georgetown analysis begins with a rejection of the better-known and well-documented industry and occupational employment projections developed biennially by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). They argue that the employment projections of BLS sharply underestimate the future demand for college graduates. They note that when they compare earlier BLS forecasts of employment growth between 1988 and 1998 with projections based on their own method for the same time period, that

“The Bureau under predicted how many workers in the U.S. labor force would have associate’s degrees or better by 19 million. That projection was off by 47 percent. Our methodology for that same period over predicted post secondary educational demand by about 2 million workers or just 4 percent.”

They go on to argue that the BLS underestimates of projected college graduate demand “… encourage a consistent bias against investing in postsecondary education.”

Could BLS, the most objective, impartial and certainly data-rich observer of American labor markets, so grossly underestimate the projected demand for college graduates for such a relatively short time horizon? Our answer to this is no! Instead, after a careful review of their data and methods, we find that the Georgetown authors radically overstate the size of the college labor market and, in the process, ignore perhaps the most pressing problem facing college graduates in the nation today—malemployment. A concept used by Frederick Harbison in his 1973 book titled Human Resources and the Wealth of Nations, malemployment represents the inability of a college graduate to find a job that effectively uses the knowledge, skills and abilities acquired in college and relegates them to employment in low-skill and generally low-wage occupations that don’t utilize college-level proficiencies. Since the skills of the malemployed remain largely unused by employers, they experience considerable wage losses.

Unlike virtually any other analyst of labor market activity, the Georgetown authors define the size of the college labor market as equal to the total number of college graduates that are employed. BLS and most other college labor market analysts define the college labor market as essentially a set of occupations that most often require persons to earn a college degree in order to be fully qualified for employment in that occupations. As a rule of thumb, we could define the college labor market as being composed of professional, technical, managerial and high-level sales occupations (like bond and stock sales representatives or commodity brokers), although BLS uses a much more careful approach than this.

Perspectives on occupations

To understand the difference between the Georgetown and BLS approach, let’s compare data on two occupations: bartender and compensation and benefits manager—jobs that most readers have some familiarity with in either their personal lives or professional capacities. An analysis of the data provided in Table 1 (derived from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey) reveals that workers in both occupations have varying levels of formal schooling. But a closer look at the data reveals that most bartenders don’t have any type of college degree (only one in four bartenders report they have graduated from college). In contrast, compensation and benefit managers are much more likely to have finished college. More than six of 10 compensation and benefits managers have a college diploma, and nearly one in five have obtained an advanced academic degree.

Table 1: Mean Annual Average Percent Distribution of Employed Persons Ages 25+ by

Selected Occupation and Level of Educational Attainment, 2006, 2007 and 2008 Averages

Source: American Community Survey, 2006-2008 public use files. Tabulations by authors

When we look at existing data on the skill requirements needed to work in either of these occupations, we find similar disparities between bartenders and benefit and compensation managers.

The U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration’s O*NET system is a massive database compiled over the past 15 years on occupational skill needs in the U.S. economy. Developed and maintained for the express purpose of understanding the education, training and work experience requirements of different occupations found in the nation’s labor markets, it is designed to inform workforce development, education and training professionals, higher education leaders and the business community about the wide range of skills needs within hundreds of individual occupations in the U.S. labor market. An examination of the O*NET studies of these two occupations reveals sharp differences in education and skills requirements.

O*NET assigns the bartender occupation to job category two, while compensation and benefit managers are assigned to job category four. What the significance of these assignments? O*NET studies of the bartender occupation found that the fundamental educational qualification for employment is a high school diploma and that bartender skills are largely acquired though work experience (although there are training schools including Harvard University, where one can prepare for employment in the occupation). English language and math skills required for work in this field were assigned relatively low values. In contrast O*NET studies of the compensation and benefit manager occupation found that most employers require a college degree for initial qualification for employment along with a considerable amount of work experience directly in the human resource and compensation fields. The English language and math skill requirements for this occupation are considerably higher than those for bartenders and the occupation requires a high degree of specific knowledge of human resource principles and procedures.

Taking the data on the distribution of employment by occupation and the findings from the O*NET studies of the skill requirements of both occupations, it would not be difficult to conclude (as BLS did) that, while the compensation and benefits manager occupation should be considered part of the college labor market, the bartender occupation should not. Indeed, even without these two objective sources of information it would not be hard for the informed reader to conclude from their own experiences that becoming a bartender requires no college experience (other than the usual undergraduate extracurricular experiences of interacting with bartenders) while the gateway to becoming a compensation and benefit manager is by initial completion of a college degree. And there is the rub.

The Georgetown measure of the college labor market includes all employed college graduates, irrespective of the occupation in which they are employed. So for the Georgetown analysts, all the college graduates working as bartenders are part of the college labor market. Indeed, those college grads working in cashier, retail sales, clerical, health aide, moving and transportation occupations, landscape and janitorial services and the like are all part of the college labor market.

BLS analysts disagree. They would not assign any bartender employment to the college labor market because, although one in four bartenders are college graduates, these jobs do not typically utilize the knowledge, skills and abilities acquired in college. Most of us would agree that college graduates working as bartenders are not utilizing their college education. We would regard many, though not all, of these individuals as underutilized with respect to their education or what labor economists refer to as malemployed. Amazingly, in the current labor market environment characterized by a high incidence of malemployment among young college graduates, the Georgetown analysts argue this type of skills underutilization problem simply does not exist. Essentially, the Georgetown approach assumes a world where no under-employment or malemployment of college graduates exists. Indeed, they expressly acknowledge this choice and reject the idea that college graduates could become underutilized or malemployed. The authors explain the discrepancy by arguing that overeducation or underutilization of college skills is non-existent among employed college graduates:

“… BLS’ educational and training requirements data undercount postsecondary degrees by 22 million in 2008. This implies that 22 million workers are overeducated. The overwhelming consensus in the literature contradicts this”.

While reasonable individuals can argue about the specific degree of overeducation or surplus schooling or malemployment of college graduates, it is surely the case that even in times of near full employment substantial numbers of college graduates are malemployed and are unable to effectively utilize the proficiencies associated with a college degree on their jobs. And the labor economic literature has long recognized problems of overeducation in both the U.S. and in Europe.[1]

If malemployment among college graduates simply does not exist, as the Georgetown forecasters argue, then there should be little difference in the earnings among college graduates regardless of whether they were employed in college labor market occupations or not. We examined the issue of malemployment in greater depth using data on annual earnings of employed adults during the 2006 to 2008 period to determine if earnings varied systematically by our measure of college graduate malemployment. Not surprisingly we found very large and statistically significant difference in the annual earnings of college graduates based on their malemployment status. Specifically, we found that:

• At the associate degree level, those graduates employed in a college labor market occupation had expected annual earnings that were 60% greater than those of high school graduates, while their counterparts who earned an associate degree but were employed in a non-college labor market-related occupation had expected annual earnings that were just 10% higher than those of high school graduates.

• Among bachelor’s degree recipients, those who worked in college labor market occupations had expected annual earnings that were 88% higher than their high school graduate counterparts, while the earnings premium for those who were not employed in a college labor market occupation was only 15% higher.

Indeed, we find that at every level of college attainment and across all age groups, large negative earnings impacts were associated with failure to find work in the college labor market. These findings clearly suggest that most of the economic gains to a college degree are strongly associated with the ability to obtain employment in the college labor market in occupations that utilize the knowledge, skills and abilities developed as part of a program of study leading to a college degree. Despite the claims of the Georgetown researchers, the available empirical evidence overwhelmingly supports the view that the personal and social payoffs to a college degree occur largely when graduates have access to jobs within the college labor market and that gains to a college diploma are quite small when graduates are relegated to jobs outside of the college labor market.

This finding implies that the Georgetown researchers dramatically overstate the size of the college labor market by including a substantial amount of employment in low-skill occupations. Paradoxically, by including this low-end employment in their “college demand forecasts,” they actually produce a slower projected growth rate in the demand for college graduates than projections based on our definition of the college labor market, although the absolute size of their projected college graduate demand remains quite exaggerated.

The demand for college graduates would grow more substantially if the U.S. economy can get back on a sustained recovery track and generate jobs in key industrial sectors that hire relatively large numbers of college graduates. Whether a generalized labor shortage of college graduates will emerge or only spot shortages in a few technical areas is simply unknown at this time. The Georgetown study fails to provide any serious evidence of college labor shortages in the future. The study is fatally flawed by its methods and even by its interpretation of fundamental labor market concepts.

As we have shown, the economic gains to earning a college degree can be quite high and, thus, college completion can be a very important determinant of lifetime success in American labor markets. However, the existence of these returns is highly dependent on one’s ability to obtain access to jobs in college labor market occupations. Rather than responding to unsubstantiated claims about future shortages, education leaders should focus on the results of serious research and evaluation and improve higher education efforts to broker new graduates into college labor market jobs, to build stronger relationships with employers to help develop more college labor market jobs for graduates, and assist alumni to get them back into the college labor market when they re-enter the workforce or lose their jobs.

Today, labor market problems especially for our younger college graduates are associated with both relatively high levels of joblessness and especially malemployment. The personal and social costs of these malemployment problems can be quite severe in forms of decreased employment, lost earnings, diminished job satisfaction as well as real output losses to society. The higher education community should seek innovative  strategies to reduce the very real problems of unemployment and malemployment that plague college graduates today instead of relying on unsupported forecasts that their problems will be solved if they simply wait long enough. As the late John Keynes once forecast with 100% certainty, “In the long-run, we are all dead.”

________________________________________________________________________

Paul E. Harrington is associate director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. Andrew M. Sum is the center’s director.

Endnotes

[1]. For a review of the concepts of malemployment and overeducation and their costs to workers in the nation and the world, see: (i) Andrew Sum, Ishwar Khatiwada, Joseph McLaughlin, et. al., The Status of Teens and Young Adults (16-24 Years Old) in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts: Implications for State and Local Youth Development Systems, Center for Labor Market Studies, Northeastern University, Prepared for The Commonwealth Corporation, Boston, MA, April 2009, p. 90; Selected studies of overeducaton include: (ii) Richard R. Verdugo and Naomi Verdugo, “The Impact of Surplus Schooling on Earnings; Some Additional Findings,” Journal of Human Resources, Vol. 24, No. 4, 1989, pp. 629-673; (iii) Wim Groot, “The Incidence of and Returns to Overeducation in the U.K.,” Applied Economics, Vol. 28, pp. 1345-1350.(iv) Russell W. Rumberger, “The Impact of Surplus Schooling on Productivity and Earnings,” The Journal of Human Resources, Vol. 22, No. 1, 1981, pp. 29-50; (ii) Richard R. Verdugo and Naomi Verdugo, “The Impact of Surplus Schooling on Earnings;  Some Additional Findings”, Journal of Human Resources, Vol. 24, No. 4, 1989, pp. 629-673; (v) Nachum Sicherman, “Overeducation in the Labor Market”, The Journal of Labor Economics, Vol. 9, No. 2, 1991; (vi) David Mills, Overeducation and Earnings, Labor Economics Seminar Paper, Northeastern University, 1996; (vii) Paul Harrington and Andrew Sum, The Post College Earnings Experiences of Bachelor Degree Holders in the U.S.:  Estimated Economic Returns to Major Fields of Study, 1998 Conference on Higher Education and Workforce Development, Portland State University, March 1998; (viii) Steve Rubb, “Post-College Schooling, Overeducation, and Hourly Earnings in the U.S.”, Economics of Education, Vol. 11, 2003, Issue 1, pp. 53-70; (ix) Lisa Kahn, The Long-Term Labor Market Consequences of Graduating from College in a Bad Economy, Harvard University, Cambridge, 2006. Santiago Budria and Ana Moro-Esido, “Overeducation and Wages in Europe”, University of Madeira and Granada, January 2007

The College Sustainability Report Card 2011 is out today, revealing the profiles of 322 schools and their sustainability policies. The fifth edition of the report by the Sustainable Endowments Institute assesses 52 indicators, ranging from green initiatives to recycling programs, and uses an A to F letter-grading system to evaluate different colleges and universities nationwide.

Some ...]]>

The College Sustainability Report Card 2011 is out today, revealing the profiles of 322 schools and their sustainability policies. The fifth edition of the report by the Sustainable Endowments Institute assesses 52 indicators, ranging from green initiatives to recycling programs, and uses an A to F letter-grading system to evaluate different colleges and universities nationwide.

Some New England campuses made honor roll with A- grades, including Amherst College, Brown University, College of the Atlantic, Middlebury College, Smith College, University of New Hampshire, University of Vermont, Wesleyan University, Williams College, Yale University and Harvard University.

Others followed close behind with B+ grades, including Clark University, Colby College, Dartmouth College, MIT, Northeastern University and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

For more information, visit GreenReportCard.org.

The New England Council (NEC) will sponsor remarks by U.S. Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.) and U.S. Department of Labor Assistant Secretary for Employment and Training Jane Oates on strengthening connections between business  and postsecondary education for young adults in New England. The event will be held  Thursday, Oct. 21, at 8 a.m., at ...]]>

The New England Council (NEC) will sponsor remarks by U.S. Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.) and U.S. Department of Labor Assistant Secretary for Employment and Training Jane Oates on strengthening connections between business  and postsecondary education for young adults in New England. The event will be held  Thursday, Oct. 21, at 8 a.m., at Northeastern University.

The remarks by Tierney and Oates will be followed by an audience discussion moderated by Paul Harrington, associate director of Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies.

Evidence about the role that “soft factors” like student engagement and school environment play in influencing whether high school students go on to enroll in college is hard to come by. Over the past two years, the Center for Labor Market Studies (CLMS) of Northeastern University, with support from ...]]>

Evidence about the role that “soft factors” like student engagement and school environment play in influencing whether high school students go on to enroll in college is hard to come by. Over the past two years, the Center for Labor Market Studies (CLMS) of Northeastern University, with support from the Nellie Mae Education Foundation and the Rhode Island Board of Governors of Higher Education, has explored the impact of these and other factors on the college-going rates of recent high school graduates from Rhode Island public high schools.

This study is based on a unique database that CLMS painstakingly constructed linking institutional level data about high school students, teachers, parents and school-level characteristics with information on college-enrollment behavior of high school graduates from each public school in the state. The unit of observation in this study is the high school. The measure of student high school experiences in this study is defined here as encompassing not only the academic and social attitudes, practices and outcomes of students, but also the academic and social organization and climate of their high schools, and the involvement and experiences of their teachers and parents. The sets of measures developed for this study provide new insights into the role that these soft factors play in explaining differences in college enrollment rates across high schools in the state.

Summary of Key Findings

Student Academic Performance. Consistent with many other studies of the determinants of college enrollment, we found moderate to strong connections between alternative measures of academic ability and college enrollment. Measures of academic performance across high schools including the mean mathematics and verbal SAT scores, percentage of students scoring at the proficient level in the 11^th grade standardized test in English language arts and mathematics, and the graduation rate of the high school, all had a statistically significant association with a higher college enrollment rate.

Student Demographic Characteristics. Again consistent with many other studies, we found moderate to strong connections between socioeconomic status and college enrollment rates across high schools. The college enrollment rate is low among schools with higher shares of students with disabilities, Hispanic or black students, students from low-income families and students with poor English-language proficiencies. Schools with higher shares of students who access primary health care through community clinics or emergency rooms have lower college attendance as well. Conversely, schools with larger shares of children who access primary health care through a physician’s office have higher college attendance rates. Access to health care through community clinics or emergency rooms is more likely to occur among children from lower-income families, while children from higher-income families are more likely to use a physician’s office to access primary health care.

Student Behaviors. Schools with high dropout rates and high rates of turnover in the student body have considerably lower college attendance rates among those who graduate. However, consistent with our research in other states, we found that incidents of student suspension are not related to college attendance in Rhode Island. Student health risk behaviors such as illegal drug use, the use of tobacco products and alcohol have very modest connections to postsecondary enrollment, whereas student nutritional practices including consumption of fruits and vegetables and eating breakfast regularly have a fairly strong relationship to college enrollment in Rhode Island; we speculate this may also be closely related to socioeconomic status. Excessive television viewing (two hours or more per day) is fairly strongly related to lower rates of college attendance, whereas excessive use of Internet-based services (email, text messaging and chat rooms) is not related to college attendance in the state.

Student Engagement and Connectedness. Measures of student engagement with their teachers and connectedness and a sense of belonging in the school are found to be unrelated to college attendance rates of high schools in Rhode Island. Out of six variables measuring student engagement and connectedness, only one variable—how students get along with their peers—is modestly negatively correlated with the college attendance rate at the high school. Schools with a larger share of students who have trouble getting along with each other tend to have lower college-enrollment rates.

School Environment and Expenditures. The study uses a number of measures to gauge the school environment including the college-going climate, career-preparation activities, student safety and the availability of social support from teachers and staff members. Among the variables measuring the college-going climate in the high school, we found that attending a high school with many college-going peers and peers who engage in college-related activities like taking advanced placement exams and SAT tests is closely related to the college attendance rate. Access to teachers to discuss college does not appear to have a strong connection to college going rates. We find no association between college-going rates and career-preparation activities including career-exploration activities, field trips and career training in the classroom and through activities in the community. Social support from teachers related to family and personal problems does not correlate to college attendance, while academic support from teachers does. Student reports on the safety of the school environment are not related to college-going rates at Rhode Island’s high schools. The study found no relationship between per-pupil expenditures and college-going rates of high schools.

Teachers: This study examined the relationships between college-going rates at high schools and teacher quality, curriculum and instructional practices, teacher supports, and teacher engagement and connectedness. Our analysis found that only a few teacher-related measures are related to students’ college going rates. Teacher quality—measured by shares of teachers who are hired with emergency certification—has a weak correlation with the college-going rate of high schools in Rhode Island. Higher shares of classes not taught by qualified teachers is not related to the college-going rate of Rhode Island high school graduates. Only one factor out of the list of curriculum and instructional practices—regular instruction in writing skills—is found to have a moderate to weak negative relationship to college enrollment. Other teaching practices including examining student work to guide instruction, relating instructional material to student interests, as well as teaching students problem-solving and decision-making techniques are unconnected with college-going rates.

Teacher supports in this study are measured by the self-reported level of support in the form of professional development, curriculum development, support from colleagues and exchange of information with them, availability of sufficient preparation time and information about school improvement, decision-making opportunities and authority regarding management of student discipline and behavioral problems. Although teacher views of the level of supports that they receive vary sharply, these reported levels of support are not connected with the college enrollment rate of students. Teacher connectedness and engagement measured by teacher perceptions of their connectedness toward other teachers, students and their parents are largely unrelated to the college-going rates at the high school.

Parents. Three measures of parent engagement and connectedness with the school are found to be related with the high school’s college going rate. Higher college going rates were found at schools where large shares of parents believe that the community supports the school, the school promptly responds to their concerns and questions, and the school asks them to volunteer.

________________________________________________________________________

Neeta P. Fogg is senior economist at the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. Paul E. Harrington is associate director of the center.

The value of a college degree is well documented. College graduates earn at least 60% more than high school graduates. Beyond the economic value, college graduates show higher rates of civic participation, engage in volunteer work and even have a much higher likelihood of being “happy,” according to a 2005 survey by the Pew Research ...]]>

The value of a college degree is well documented. College graduates earn at least 60% more than high school graduates. Beyond the economic value, college graduates show higher rates of civic participation, engage in volunteer work and even have a much higher likelihood of being “happy,” according to a 2005 survey by the Pew Research Center. Students who drop out without attaining a college degree will forgo significant lifetime earnings and are likely to be saddled with debt that may impact their ability to buy a car, a house or even return to finish their education at a later date. And the consequences for failing are not just for the students who leave. Our economy, and many argue our democracy, depends on maintaining and building an educated workforce and citizenry. Most of our efforts over the past decade have focused on college access and we have made progress in preparing students to aspire to and apply to college. However, given our poor track record of graduating students, we have much work to do to help students attain a college degree. The data show that only about half the students who enroll in college end up earning a four-year college degree. This statistic has not changed much in over a decade. Yet the stakes have increased since President Obama took office. He has committed to increasing the number of high school graduates who enter and succeed in college, understanding that completing the degree is the prerequisite for career success.

The reasons for student attrition have been researched and documented and include: lack of finances, lack of preparation and poor fit between expectations and what students experience once they arrive on campus. An entire industry has been created to assess students and assess the campus environment, and the literature is abundant with best practices in student retention. My own campus employs many of them: early alert and mid-semester warnings, academic tutoring, peer mentoring, financial literacy programs and a first-year seminar to ease the transition to college. Despite all these efforts, we still lose more students than we’d like and are stymied about how to improve our retention and their academic success. We have developed a multitude of programs to focus on student success, but to some extent our approach is to do these for or to the student; too often the students themselves haven’t been true partners in efforts to help them succeed.

High school students may have a pretty good understanding of what they need to do to get into college, and of the importance of attending college for career and financial success, but they have an undeveloped and even unrealistic understanding of what it takes to successfully transition, persist and graduate from college. As I think about our students, I see a persistent and pervasive gap between what students are expected to be able to do in college and what students actually come prepared to do. Even those students who test into college-level courses—based on their performance on entering placement tests—seem to lack crucial academic knowledge and skills and appear ill-prepared for the demands of college-level work.

Students bring with them the habits and attitudes that may have been “good enough” to get by in high school but will not support their success in college where “passing” is not enough to maintain sufficient academic progress toward a degree. If they don’t get a C or better in developmental and foundation courses—also know as the “gatekeeping” courses—they cannot progress and lose time and money without reaching their goal. Too often students exert the minimal effort that they perceive will be good enough to pass the course. They seem more focused on getting through the course rather than learning the content and skills which can inform their work and lives. This is especially true when they don’t readily see the point of what they are learning—typically in their general education and developmental courses which they view as too much like high school.

Many of our faculty work hard to “meet students where they are,” allow for extra credit work, and encourage students to meet with them outside of class for further instruction or clarification. Still, too many students don’t take advantage of these opportunities and seem either unable or unwilling to seek assistance. However, I don’t believe that this is because they don’t want to be in college or they don’t wish to succeed.

The fact is that while many students have the expectations and aspirations to pursue their college dreams, they are unprepared for the work. Despite the reports stressing the need for a rigorous college-preparatory curriculum in high school, many high school graduates enter college lacking the academic habits and skills—including how to read a textbook and take notes as well as study and organizational skills—necessary to successfully transition to college-level expectations.

Beyond academic preparation, one explanation for the high school-to-college achievement gap is what Seton Hall professor Rebecca Cox calls “the college fear factor.” The students she studied know that a college degree is essential to their future success in life and careers but bring tremendous anxiety to the experience. Many bring past experiences with failure in an academic context. And typically, this gets reinforced on their first day of college where they have to “pass or fail” a placement test to see if they are deemed ready for college-level work. They come to college acutely aware of their past failures and lack of readiness and this feeds their self-doubts about whether they will be able to succeed.

So why don’t students reach out to professors who say that “their office doors are open” and they are “always available to meet with students”? Cox believes that students are afraid professors will confirm their academic inadequacy. Because of these fears, students end up not employing the very strategies that will help them such as meeting with professors outside of class, asking for help or asking questions in class for fear of being exposed as stupid. They don’t ask questions, seek outside help from faculty or their peers and may even skip class rather than risk seeming ignorant or slow. Unfortunately, these behaviors only exacerbate the problem. Students may be afraid to even admit this to themselves and usually have no one to turn to who can help them sort through these feelings. This is especially true for students who may be the first in their families to go to college. Finally, too few students see themselves as having some measure of control about their ability to succeed or fail. Those who struggle are more likely to attribute it to bad luck or factors they see as out of their influence. Students see themselves as passive recipients of their professors’ knowledge rather than viewing learning as an interaction between the professor and student. They typically rely on the faculty member to “teach them what they need to know” which usually translates to what will be on the test. This may be attributed to previous school experience or stage of cognitive development or possibly both. Helping students become active participants in their own learning requires skilled teaching, however this is almost never part of most faculty members’ graduate preparation. Research on Latino students by Laura I. Rendón, professor of higher education and chair of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Iowa State University, indicates that students who persist are actively engaged by key adults (who may or may not be their instructors) also known as “validating agents” who take an active interest in and provide encouragement for students and affirm their ability to do academic work. These are people who, in the words of one of our students, “… believed in me before I even believed in myself.”

Increasing student readiness for college is important, but we also need to improve our ability to better serve students. Instead of adding program upon program to the array of services we provide students, I believe we need to fundamentally rethink the first year of college for the increasing numbers of students who come to us who aren’t “hard-wired” for success. Vincent Tinto, distinguished university professor at Syracuse University and widely known expert on student attrition, suggests that unless institutions of higher education do something to reshape the prevailing educational experiences of students during their first year of college and address the deeper roots of their continued lack of success, then we should not expect to see results any different from what we have experienced over the past few decades. Imagine if colleges were ranked by how much students learn once they arrive rather than by how much they need to learn before they enter. While this requires a larger cultural shift, in the meantime, there are a number of systemic models for what a program or a college that is focused on student success might look like.

The City University of New York has come up with a bold plan for a new college structured to improve student success. The college will engage students at admission in developing an educational plan and establishing connections with faculty and staff who will advise, register and help students apply for aid. Beginning in a three-week summer bridge program, students will complete a variety of assessments to diagnose learning strengths and weaknesses and begin to develop the skills and strategies necessary to succeed in their courses. Students will take a required first-year core curriculum integrating liberal arts and professional studies which will lead to a second- and third-year program that places students in linked courses along with internships. Finally, advising and student support services will be “wrapped” around students, and students will work either on campus or in a setting with partner employers.

Another effort is the Foundation Year Program currently being piloted in Northeastern University’s College of Professional Studies. It entails a structured year-long full-time college-based program that begins with a six-week summer program followed by three 12-week quarters in the fall, winter and spring. An intensive five-day a week schedule includes both credit-bearing and noncredit academic courses as well as supported study time, college and career exploration and leadership, wellness and youth development programming. Additionally, in the winter and spring terms students spend two afternoons per week in internship rotations. The program provides a dedicated student advisor and four full-time faculty who offer writing and math instruction, tutoring and advising to a cohort of 40 students. Though in its first year, program participants are expected to continue as sophomores either at Northeastern or at selected partner institutions.

A well-known approach that isn’t institutionally based is the Posse Foundation’s model, which creates a “posse” or cohort of students who act as a support system for one another in order to succeed in college. Posse Scholars are recruited while still in high school and spend their senior year preparing for their college experience. They meet weekly in workshops that build skills around team-building and group support, cross-cultural communication and leadership. Once they have matriculated, Posse staff visit each university four times a year to meet with Posse Scholars, campus liaisons and mentors. Each mentor meets weekly with the Posse as a team and with each scholar individually every two weeks during the first two years of college. This program recognizes the importance of preparation prior to matriculation and support while in college and to arming students with the skills and tools to be active participants in their own success. It demonstrates that the transition to college needs to begin while students are still in high school and suggests that we might rethink the senior year of high school—especially the second half of the senior year—to focus not just on getting into college, but on getting through college. This could include opportunities for dual enrollment to enable students to experience college-level expectations and assignments while they are still in high school and early placement testing so that students can get information on their academic strengths and remediate areas in which they are weak so that they enter college prepared for post-secondary level work. High schools could also offer the equivalent of a college success course including time management, study skills, reading a textbook and writing a college-level research paper so that students do not have to learn these skills while simultaneously being enrolled in college courses.

Too often college access and success are viewed separately with secondary schools shouldering the responsibility for college enrollment and colleges being accountable for student persistence. The result is typically finger-pointing and blame: High school folks say that colleges need to do a better job of graduating their students while those who work at colleges say that their students would succeed if only high schools did a better job preparing them. The truth is we will never achieve the goal of raising college attainment levels unless we work across sectors to close the gap between high school and college preparation and performance to ensure that students successfully transition and graduate from college.

___________________________________________________________________________

Deborah Hirsch is associate vice president for academic affairs at Mount Ida College.