>> back to calls, we'll go to brian, texas. william is watching us there. go ahead, william. >> yes. i would like to ask mr. linder how the philosophy of the mentality that would establish several in the early -- 100 years ago has changed. it was originally organized to support the agricultural area or the agrarian society. how has that changed and is the change in the right direction? >> well, the university of nebraska was established in 1869 and i think by all measures we still function as a land grant institution, and i think by all measures we still function as land grant institution to provide substantial support for the agriculture efforts in nebraska. we have the institute for ag and natural resources that has many faculty working to develop

better agricultural techniques throughout the state and throughout the world. and this is part of the food, fuel, and water initiative that i mentioned earlier. the scope of a land grant institution has certainly increased. so in 1902 the medical center joined the system. so the activities have grown as society needs have increased, but we still focus on agriculture as one of the core missions at the university of nebraska, lincoln, and actually our agricultural programs showed the second highest increase in enrollment this year. >> we're talking with dr. james linder, the interim president, university of nebraska, lincoln, part of c-span bus' big ten college tour. we kicked that off this week. month-long series of interviews here on the washington journal with university presidents. on friday the bus will be at the university of iowa and we will talk with the president there,

sally mason, on friday. this morning, though, dr. james linder aboard the c-span bus in lincoln, nebraska. charles in south sioux city, nebraska, a parent there. charles, go ahead with your question or comment. >> caller: good morning. i have a question. i have two grandsons going to your university in the ag department, and i was just wondering why is it so difficult to find scholarship or any kind of money to go to school. if you don't do the right research, you end up getting none. >> well, at the university of nebraska, lincoln, there are a wide variety of need-based scholarships and in fact at unl 3,000 students attend the university with no tuition charge.

there are also other academic-related scholarships depending on what field the student is in. very few student scholarships are actually focused on the potential research that a student might be interested in doing. unless, of course, they are a graduate student -- and we have extensive support for graduate students who are pursuing master's degrees or ph.d. degrees. >> dr. linder, schools get more money for out-of-state students. do these students get preferences? >> in my experience out of state students do not get preferences. we enjoy bringing students to nebraska to both diversify our student body and to hopefully create a student who will stay as an employee of a nebraska-based company. we would appreciate if those costs of bringing students in

could be lower, but that wouldn't be fair to the citizens of nebraska who are paying taxes to support the in-state students. but we do try and look at students from outside nebraska to diversify our student body. this current year is probably the most diverse student body we have relative to ethnic minorities in the history of the university. >> how many slots are there for foreign students? >> in terms of slots, we really don't think that way. we evaluate students based on their academic activities, and each campus at the university has a different number of foreign students. there are several thousand that are studying here, and they come from countries around the world. we have exchange programs with brazil, with china, with eastern

europe, and it's fascinating to walk across the campus and see students from nebraska natively interacting with a student who may have come from brazil, teaching them about our culture and learning about the culture from another country. >> do they pay the full price of college tuition? >> yes, they do. they pay a nonresident rate. >> charles -- excuse me, bill in florida. bill, good morning, you're up next. go ahead. >> caller: good morning, greta, >> good morning. >> caller: i'd like to know if you have any affiliation with monsanto and with what they're doing with the foods with their new techniques and all that and how does such a -- >> so the university of nebraska, lincoln, has had research relationship with a variety of companies that are seeking to improve both crop

yields and to develop crops that are resistant to pests, and that includes monsanto corporation. >> here's a tweet from a viewer asking, president linder, with respect college sports have become big, no, huge business. why should it be treated as such? why should it not be treated as such? >> i think that the question is the use of revenue that comes from college sports, if i understand it correctly, and at the university of nebraska that's largely to support the athletic programs. but there's also some strong benefits to the academic mission of the university. for example, on our east stadium of the football stadium, we have

two important research activities. one is the nebraska athletic performance laboratory, which looks at motions that athletes might have and tries to optimize their performance. but it also ties into research studies done on gate disturbances that people with neurologic problems have -- and as well. the center for brain biology and behavior is studying concussions that can occur in sports but is looking at developmental abnormalities in children. so it's not just a business. it's integrated into the academic experience. for the student athletes, and i again emphasize students, they get valuable experiences. i had the pleasure of teaching some of the former university of nebraska football players when they were in medical school. and these are individuals who

have learned time management, they learn how important it is to get tasks done, and they're very motivated. >> "the columbus dispatch" reporting in june that big 10 presidents and chancellors proposed four major reforms for athletics, guaranteeing four-year scholarship regardless of whether or not an athlete is able to compete on the playing field, maintaining a scholarship even if he leaves college early and consistent medical insurance for players and athlete scholarships cover the full cost of attendance as defined by the federal government. dr. linder, why do you think these reforms are needed? do you think they are needed? >> i do think these reforms are needed, and they reflect the deep commitment that student athletes do make to being both a student and athlete. and they address some of the concerns that have led to the current discussion of how students are treated when they are athletes.

so i think they are very fair, fair to the student and help ensure their chances of success in their academic roles in life. the vast majority of student athletes are not going to compete at a professional level, so we want to make sure they have the financial security while they are in school so they can complete their degree program. >> we have a few minutes left here to discuss higher education issues with dr. linder, aboard the c-span bus as part of c-span bus' big ten college tour. by the way, "the washington times" this morning with this story, americans are saving more for college. the college savings plan network found the average college savings, or 529 plan, is now worth $20,671, almost double what these accounts were worth during the dog days of the recession. william in st. paul, minnesota. go ahead. >> caller: yes.

i just wanted to kind of touch on a question and it's kind of a two-part question concerning american citizenship versus financial aid. the reason i'm asking this, me and my wife, we barely make a buck, $90,000 together. my daughter's first year didn't qualify for pell grants or scholarships. why is it that foreign students -- american citizenship qualification, are you required to be an american citizen to get a pell grant? >> okay, william. we'll leave it there. dr. linder? >> i think the question was are you required to be an american citizen to receive a pell grant. and that's a question if it came across my desk i would call the director of financial aid and learn what the rules are. i can't give you an accurate

answer right now. >> dr. linder, how much support in money does university of nebraska get from the federal government? >> well, you would have to look at the different categories of support that the university of nebraska gets from the federal government. there is a large research enterprise that receive grants from the national institutes of health and from the national science foundation. systemwide, that approaches over $400 million. those moneys come into the university of nebraska and then they are spent on research that benefits both the faculty and the students who are involved in that research. then there are financial aid dollars that come into the university. counted as part of our budget but then those are distributed directly to the students, including the loans and pell grants.

so that's part of that aggregate budget of $1.2 billion that you mentioned earlier. it's really money flowing through. >> midland texas. good morning. >> caller: good morning. i have a question for dr. linder. i've been to nebraska, really love the state, omaha and worked in omaha and lincoln. omaha is a beautiful city. but i felt like dr. linder had dodged the question earlier and i would like to hear a little bit more why if you're giving an engineering agree you have to have history, which adds a lot of cost to your tuition. thanks. >> if you're pursuing an engineering degree, should you learn anything other than engineering? should you take a history course

or english course, take an english course or history course? i think education in the humanities, including history are essential for all citizens to have, there was an extended political discussion that occurred before i came on the air, and if our citizens don't have an understanding of world history, how can they properly vote in elections and understand the issues that face their communities? i think it has to be balanced between your degree program and the things that round you out as a human being. but i do think those programs are essential. they shouldn't be duplicated, which was i think one of the concerns of the other caller, in that she had already had exposure to history and then was asked to take it again at the different university, which is why the transfer of credits is important. >> dr. linder, another issue for universities is campus safety. vice president joe biden did an interview with nbc yesterday talking about domestic violence,

the ray rice video, the nfl, and he had this to say. the next challenge is to making sure ironically we get college presidents and colleges to understand that they have a responsibility for the safety of women on their campus. they have a responsibility to do what we know from great experience works, bringing experts and provide people and give young women the support she needs, psychological support, medical support and if need be the legal support. societal change is taking place, it takes time, but i believe it's taking root and we have an obligation to keep pushing it. dr. linder, do you agree? and what does the university of nebraska do on this issue of college safety? >> well, i agree with vice president biden, and clearly this is an issue that is front page on the news right now. we have always had the good fortune of having a safe environment at the university of nebraska, lincoln. as attention to the issue has

grown, we doubled down on efforts to make sure that students are aware of their responsibility to treat each other in a respectful manner, to avoid situations such as may occur with binge drinking that could lead to unfortunate behavior. we want to make sure there are counselors available for our students so that this is handled in the proper manner, including law enforcement when necessary. a lot of the bad behavior on campuses has been targeted toward athletes who have been maybe cut a break at the university of nebraska. if there are any allegations against athletes such as have occurred on other campuses, it's not handled by the athletic department. it's either handled by the separate part of the university or by local law enforcement. so we take this very seriously. our regents passed new policies in may for student and employee conduct. we'll do our best to make sure

it's a safe campus. the new website for the university of nebraska, lincoln, that just became live in the last couple weeks has a link on there called tip, and it provides any student, parent, or citizen the opportunity to report what they believe to be an unsafe situation that we can address. >> a couple of other tweets for you here, dr. linder. this one from our viewer who wants to know, across the nation there is a movement to privatize parts of state colleges. are you on the privatize it bandwagon? and then james says, have the for-profit businesses affected you in any way? >> these are two tweets that address a very important issue in american education. if you look at the current number, which is a trillion dollars in student loan debt, 13% of those students who have

been at for-profit colleges account for a third of that debt. and this is driving a lot of the crisis in higher education. so i think that privatization and for-profit activities have to be carefully scrutinized and watched to make sure they are fulfilling the core mission of education, which is to benefit the students, not the shareholders of the company. >> mike, rockford, illinois, parent. go ahead, mike. >> caller: good morning, c-span. my question is, to the foreign students that are accepted compared to the state of nebraska students who aren't accepted, what do you have to say to the local students who are not accepted? like you mentioned, you have thousands of foreign students, and we know with the new laws we have for employment, a lot of them are getting the first

chance at jobs and for lesser pay. let's say engineering, of $65,000 for a foreign national student. >> okay, mike. dr. linder? >> so, any qualified student who is from nebraska is guaranteed acceptance into the university of nebraska. in no situation would a qualified student be te nighed a seat in our classrooms because we had a relationship to bring international students into our program. we're very aware of our role to educate first and foremost our citizens. we believe that the international students that come here -- and most of them do go back to their home country -- simply add to the cultural experience that we have on campus. >> dr. linder, if there's one thing you could change about higher education, what would it be? >> oh, wow, that's kind of like the if you get a wish, what could it be? i think the awareness of both

the students as they pursue entry into college, of the citizens and the united states of what the role is of a college experience, and then the interaction between the employers and the students as they come out. so awareness is my answer and it's a broad answer, but i firmly believe that if you achieve understanding of a problem and situation, you can really get to the optimal situation you want to be in. there's a lot of misunderstanding, misawareness that currently is surrounding many of the discussions in higher education. >> dr. james linder is the interim president at the university of nebraska, lincoln,

part of c-span bus' big ten college tour. coverage continues tonight with the new hampshire senate debate between senator jean shaheen and scott brown. here's a look. >> in some ways i approve and some things i don't approve. >> they don't have that check on the button. >> like most questions that we deal with as policymakers, there aren't simple answers, yes or no. >> well, let me put it this way. you have said that you're the candidate for the citizens of new hampshire. scott brown often says that you vote with president obama 99% of the time. because obama's approval ratings are at an all-time low in new hampshire right now, 38% to 40%, how does your voting record sort of jibe with serving the citizens of new hampshire? >> now, i work for new hampshire. and scott brown talks a lot about one survey and 99% of the time that i voted with the

president. but the numbers i'm proudest of are the 359 -- 259 people who are nower working at the berlin prison because i was able to get the prison open after it sat empty for two years. it is the 1,200 people being foreclosed on their homes that our office worked with to keep in their homes. it is the 129,000 veterans who can now get care close to home because of the legislation we got into the veterans reform bill. what we need is a senator who is going to work for new hampshire, who's going to make sure that we address the concerns that we hear from our constituents, who's going to be willing to work with democrats, republicans and independents, anybody in washington who can help us get the job done for this state. >> senator brown, you get 45 seconds. >> well, she just described me, because i was the most bipartisan senator in the united states senate. every survey that's come out has senator shaheen as being one of the most partisan senators.

she has in fact voted with the president over 99% of the time. and what does that mean to people in new hampshire? it means she was the deciding vote for obamacare. she did vote against every ability for us to keep our doctors, our hospitals, our care facilities that people trusted and loved. as a result, deductibles are going up traumatically. costs are going up. care and coverages are going down. she's also voted to put in place a system where we have more and more gridlock by voting with her party over 99% of the time. that's part of the problem right now. we need to have an end to that gridlock. >> the new hampshire senate race listed in some polls as a toss-up and it's one of the races that could determine control of the u.s. senate. see the debate tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. then at 9:00, the first and only debate for oregon senate between incumbent jeff merkley and republican monica webby.

at 10:00, a large group faces off. vance mcallister is running for a second term, having won a special election last year. he'll debate republicans harris brown, ed tarpley, ralph abraham, zack dasher, clyde holloway and jamie mayo for the state's fifth district seat tonight on our companion network, c-span. be part of c-span's 2014 coverage. follow us on twitter and like us on facebook. to get debate schedule, video clips of key moments, debate previews from our politics team. c-span is bringing you over 100 senate, house, and governor debates and you can instantly share your reactions to what the candidates are saying. the battle for control of congress. stay in touch and engage by following us on twitter @c-span and liking us on facebook at facebook.com/c-span.

now a discussion about the difficulties minorities face getting a college degree. it's part of an event hosted by the ucla civil rights project. this is 40 minutes. >> the data we use out of a state administrative database in texas attracts students from kindergarten through graduate school down to in the workforce and between. what we find is what contributes to the gap in college by race, actually much of that happens before the student ever enrolls in college. two problems or two issues frame the texas college success or lack of success in texas. the first is growing -- the growing latino demography and the general population but also the public school where is latinos now comprise the

majority of all public school students. the problem is not that there's a growing latino demography. the problem is the growth in latino high school graduates is not translating to enrollment in colleges and universities. with black students it is a slightly different story. we have seen an increase in college enrollment for the black population. that is worth praising but this enrollment has not translated into completion. far from it. it is a very clear example of how success on one side of the pipeline does not translate to the other side. instead we see that from my analysis in a previous paper said black students are going to community colleges as a first choice institution which is likely to decrease their odds of college completion. next slide, and you can click through the arrows opinion there is a racial achievement gap. but college completion gap in texas. and you see here for students --

six-year completion rate is the difference between white and hispanic students is 14.1%. with black and white students 21.9 percentage points between white and black students. next slide. we then start to examine students who do enroll in a four year college what is the racial and ethnic composition and key factors that influence college completion. we present three here -- economic disadvantage, academic preparation and percent minority in a high school. in regard to economic disadvantage, black and latino students are much more likely to be economically disadvantaged but hispanics represent the group with highest disadvantage. we use trigonometry which is a signal for college completion. not as large of a difference between white and hispanics. look at the difference between black and white students who take trigonometry. considerable difference. 23 percentage points to big problems in academic preparation.

in terms of minorities in high school we know that racially segregated environments are much less likely to lead to increased student achievement than integrated environments. we see white students attend a high school where there are only 32% black and latino students with hispanics compromising groups attending the most racially concentrated schools. we ask more directly, what contributes to the college completion gap by what we call the racial completion gap by precollege characteristics and postsecondary factors? we use literature in the data set to guide the analysis. the precollege factors i can talk in more detail for questions of what they are. they represent individual characteristics, high school context choices in curriculum. so forth. postsecondary factors you can imagine institutional resources.

we use a nonlinear variance decomposition method where the differences in the probability of college completion were decomposed into explained variation represented by the precollege and postsecondary institutional characteristics. we explained approximately 94% of the model. next slide. this is what we find. there are large differences between precollege and post secondary factors. we find precollege characteristics 61% of total variance in explaining for both hispanic and black students as compared to white student counterparts. that is more than half of the completion gap is explained by precollege characteristics. we then sought to explain the gap among the precollege characteristics. next slide. i won't spend too much time on this slide. what we see here is the

different factors -- economic, academic preparation, high school context and that compared to postsecondary factors. what we see here, the lesson is that for hispanic students economic disadvantage seems to be driving the gap. whereas with black and white students academic factors is driving the gap in college completion by race. this signals a different precollege factors may be influencing different groups. it signals the role of finances for latinos. while finances matter for black students academic preparation represents by far the greatest gap in resources with their white student counterparts. much of our work included the role of msis. texas has a diverse landscape of hsis and hsbuus. our previous work -- not yet, it is a surprise. our previous work looked at graduation rates of hispanic and black students at msis compared

to non msis. this paper is different. it compares black and hispanic graduation rates to white students. so we are going to see a different outcome. next slide, please. our results for this question using the decomposition method indicate there is a negative contribution of the msi in postsecondary factors explaining gap in college completion. this is important and alarming. msis under rating system are likely to show that they are negatively contributing to graduation when many factors may have occurred well before enrollment. for this cohort we see 12.9% of total variance explained alone 37% of the post secondary context is by hsi status. the contribution is 9%. 28% is explained by hbc status. these are 2002 numbers.

previous cohorts show that hsis negative contributions has lessened. the analysis doesn't allow us to explore the detailed treatment as the identity and mission of implementation are difficult to capture in our data set. however, a critical problem is illuminated when we compare graduation rates of black and hispanic students to that of white students who have considerably more advantages, resources and choices in postsecondary institution, not only texas but nationally. so what can we learn from these analyses if we are to move forward? did you show the -- show the msi slide. you already did. all right. what can we learn from the analyses if we are to move forward with a national college rating system? to be clear our paper does not suggest that we are against accountability or there is no place for accountability in higher education. however, we do recommend there be much more clarity on the

contributions to disadvantage, systemic inequities and likely hoods in outcomes of educational circumstances that are not likely to change before the rating system is put in place. as such, we leave you with the following recommendations. again, college completion is not just a postsecondary story, especially if you ear underrepresented minority students. failing to account for this result will penalize institutions in large numbers of minority students. finally, given the role of economic disadvantage and academic preparation explaining the gap, policy interventions aimed at financial aid and developmental education are warranted. and really finally, the use of varied and innovative data systems to accurately disentangle with where the odds of completion are most challenged is highly recommended. what we mean by this is that the ncs has wonderful data sets that are useful in understanding gaps

in -- racial achievement gaps and college completion gaps, but there are state databases that can also inform this question much better than our federal data sets. so we recommend some form of partnership in which we get the best data to get the best research to form the best policy results that we can in this day and age. thank you. >> thank you, professor flores. now we're going to turn to marybeth gasman. >> good morning, everyone. thank you to everyone for coming, and thanks to all the sponsors and gary as well. so this paper was written by myself and two of my research assistants, ty quinn and an undergraduate student named danny corelle. what we tried to do in our paper was provide a landscape of the nation's msis, institutions that educate 20% of our college students. oftentimes people forget that. so these institutions, as we know and as most people have

been saying today, have a proven track record with first-generation students, low-income students, and students of color. if you could flick the slide, please. so this will just give you a few numbers that give you an idea of what's going on in the msi landscape. one thing i want to point to is the pell grant percentage. 50% of students at msis are utilizing the pell grant, which is really important. msis are known for their family-like environments, they're known for success in developmental education even though developmental education gets kind of kicked around a bit. there are many examples of msis of its success. they're also known for their same-race profiles which empowers people of color. so msis are deeply vulnerable because of their financial situations as some of the presenters have explained and also due to the risks that they take. sara talked about this extensively as did some of the

other presenters. the risks that they take in enrolling many of the students that other institutions don't enroll. and these risks result in uneven outcomes for msis. what we do in our paper is we urge policymakers to consider the unique contribution of msis especially in three critical areas that i want to highlight. so you can go to the next slide. right. so one of the things that i noticed recently when i was reading the "my brother's keeper" report issued by the obama administration is that there was only one line related to minor-serving institutions in the entire report. and msis were pretty much left out of the report. so what i want you to do is just look for a minute at the role that msis are playing in educating men of color. so 36% of men of color with full-time enrollment are enrolled at msis. if you look a little bit deeper, you can see the percentages

across the various racial and ethnic groups that are enrolled full time at msis. then if you look at the part-time enrollment, nearly 50%, 48.6% of men of color with part-time enrollment are at msis. and then if you start to look at the awarding of bachelor's degrees you see that 24% of all the bachelor's degrees to men of color come from msis and 22% of all the associate's degrees to men of color, but they only ended up with one line in the "my brother's keeper" report. so we found that problematic, and we really want to point to the contributions that msis are making with men of color. next slide. another area that we pay particular attention to is teacher education. and another thing that we've been hearing, especially from the department of education

under this administration is an emphasis on the need for an increase in teachers, especially teachers of color, and how important that diversity is to young students of color. so one of the thins that we've noticed is that msis are doing -- are making considerable contributions in teacher education. the bulk of these degrees are due to hispanic-serving institutions, and that's important to point out, but we do want to also point out the conferral of degrees by msis in the teacher education area. and we also in the paper talk about the fact that many of the teachers that are educated at msis end up going back to the communities from which they came. so they go back to urban and rural communities and msis are collecting data on those teachers who go back to those communities. and those are communities that have high concentrations of

students of color. next slide. another thing that we talk about in the paper is the contributions of msis in the s.t.e.m. area. these are fairly well-known. 1 million s.t.e.m. workers and we need much more diversity in the area of s.t.e.m. we know -- there have been countless papers. sylvia hurtado here has done work in this area as well. that shows us that many msis are doing a disproportionate job in the s.t.e.m. area. we don't necessarily know exactly what they do, and my project is working on things related to that, but we point out in the paper these contributions that they are making in the area of s.t.e.m. and what i want to stress here is for us, these are three critical areas that are being talked about widely across the country. right? we hear a lot about the shortages of teachers, how can we make teaching a career that more people want to get into. we hear much about men of color,

especially right now. and we also hear about our great needs in the area of s.t.e.m. and what we'd like to urge people to do is when they're thinking about how institutions are funded, to think about how msis contribute in these critical areas. and so we had a variety of recommendations for policymakers. so i'm just going to go over three. and these include -- so for policymakers, one of the things that i think we find most disturbing is the way that msis are left out of discussions and how their contributions are not included in major national reports and discussions. and we see this over and over. even though there are many, many people in this room who try adamantly to get the -- these discussions -- the contributions of msis into these national discussions. so what we say is that we don't think that these national reports should be issued or that legislation should be put forward if msis are not part of that discussion.

we also recommend for msis that institutions not only larger, overreaching organizations, which are already doing this, but institutions work together in coalitions across the various msi sectors. and this can easily be done within states. it can also be done in a variety of other ways, institutions that have similar programs, similar curricular issues, similar financing. we urge msis to work together because in silos their strength is really zapped. but when you have nearly 600 msis in the country and they're educating 20% of college and university students, you have a lot more strength. then another thing that we recommend for researchers and policymakers is to focus on what works and what's successful. so a long time ago when i was a brand-new professor, my mentor was asa hilliard. i'm sure some of you know who

asa was. a child psychologist. he passed away a few years ago. but one of the things he told me is, you know, we really know what works, but we just don't pay attention. and i believe that. and i think that one of the things that msis can show us is what works with low-income students of color and first-generation students. we have many, many examples of what's successful, and i think that we should look to msis for how to be more successful rather than the way that we tend to approach msis which is to see what we can do for them. i think that we should look at msis and see what they can teach the rest of the nation. thank you. >> thank you very much. first i turn for a response to

deborah santiago from excellencia, one of our partners. >> can everyone hear me? yeah. thank everyone for all the hard work in putting this together. i want to frame my responses to stella's piece specifically with more of a policy lens. i think what her paper and her colleagues have done is twofold. one, acknowledge what we in public policy know, that the train has left the station on the issue of accountability. we're not going to get away with just saying we're different, we have a critical mass of students that have additional needs so don't hold us accountable. i think none of us want that. and the second part what i appreciated they put together was looking at how do we identify a fair assessment and evaluation of these institutions that have a critical mass of students enrolled.

that becomes a challenge figuring how do we take the good analysis done and operationalize it in a manner in public policy where we prioritize simplicity over accuracy? and we all have a certain measure of adhd in terms of what our priorities are in the moment, and if we can't put it in a bullet, if we can't make it concise, then it's a difficult thing to implement. and that's the kind of pragmatism we do in trying to translate really good research into public policy. so i was thinking a lot about it. i wanted to push the researchers a little bit, but also add -- >> we shouldn't enact sound bites? >> yes, i will. i have five minutes, right? three minutes now. so, yes, simplicity accuracy scale. what if we took the existing information and data that's being bantered about in d.c. and other places and try to weight it by the issues that are raised in the paper that stella put together? the reality is we don't want two different forms of accountability. that's not the way to approach this. we have to approach it in a manner that doesn't let the institutions off the hook either

for enrolling a high concentration of students that have income needs and have college readiness needs overall. so how do we make sure that to stella and her team's point, we create a fair system? so how about if we took a look and so i'll offer this as a suggestion, with the data recurrently collect, ways to weight what is in some ways a relatively perverse way of looking at institutional efforts at hsis and pscus. what we made sure that completion rates -- not graduation rates, completion rates -- add information on part-time and transfer students? that's not included, and so many of these students have a high concentration of low-income needy students and aren't given the credit for what they're doing with transfers and part-timers. national clearinghouse has data on this. there are ways that we have to focus on from a public policy perspective to collect the data to make sure that happens. what if we looked at financial

aid, which the paper raised is critical for latinos but the economic disadvantage is a factor and we weighted what we put together in an accountability system by the percent of students who are receiving pell or financial aid? we took a look at the college and structures and what kind of quality is provided and weight it based on that? for college readiness, critical for african-americans and those at hpcus we look at the percent remediation, the percent that are retained, and those who drop out as factors. that doesn't mean only for these institutions, but i can assure you if we look at these factors, multiple measures, we are going to get a more balanced approach. perfect? no. that doesn't really exist in our world and education. we owe it to these students of institutions who have taken on the challenge of getting it to those of most need to make sure they get the quality of

education they deserve and our workforce overall. these are all data that are currently collected, not perfect but they are collected. and the last is that, you know, we do collect information on institutions that have a high enrollment of needy students and low general expenditures. there's a way to the financial component of these institutions in a way i don't think we're thinking significantly about that can address accountability. what we can't do is let the k-12 system off the hook. we can't let institutions of higher education off the hook and say, well, because we have students of need that we lower expectations of the students or the institutions that enroll them. >> thank you very much. we'll turn now to my ucla colleague sylvia hurtado. >> thank you. i'm commenting on marybeth gasman's paper and her colleagues. if you haven't read the paper, you should read it. if you do not know very much about the different minority-serving institutions, it's a good, easy, fast, descriptive analysis of what mint-serving institutions are.

and more importantly, i think, the focus of diversification in the workforce in areas of national importance are a key in terms of really having all that data in one place. it's a great paper in that regard. and i want to say also that they really focused on key national areas of importance, that teacher education, s.t.e.m. degrees, which we know for individuals, that's where the highest paying jobs are going to be in the future. and also that's what we already nationally have indicated is going to be a key area for enhancing american competitiveness. then the issue of minority males. in all those instances, the data in this paper show that if there are anything to impact either the financing of these institutions or the financing of their students, that we would see serious drops in terms of the representation of various

minorities, low income and first generation students and teacher education, in s.t.e.m. and, of course, in the completion rates of minority males. i think the important pieces that she also brings into the paper are first that the stories of minority-serving institutions are still not entirely evident to the nation and, in fact, we still have to educate publishers and editors about what these are. all the time we try to put some of our publications out. and so sometimes are left out of the discussion, as she well points out in terms of national reports, though they can be severely impacted by any decisions that are made nationally. one of the things that i think probably we need to talk more about is understanding the research capacity of these institutions because i think both marybeth, myself and several of us on this panel have been really looking at minority-serving institutions and trying to really tell the story, but i think really each

institution also has to help develop its own research capacity in the way early in the earlier session dillard began to show how they were doing their own studies. our work with minority serving institutions has indicated that very often they don't have the institutional research staff, the data are very hard to gather and particularly tribal colleges have a huge deficit in terms of being able to pull together the resources to not only report the data but also do and monitor and track the students. and this is very important because it points to an institutional research issue. second, i think the paper really shows an important point in terms of the accomplishments are evident even with fewer resources. these institutions are doing something for the nation. and i think i value, for example, for the first time i've seen the contributions of two-year institutions that are minority-serving institutions documented in this particular paper, and i thank you for doing that analysis.

the third point -- and it's sort of something that's obscured in the paper and i want you to talk a little bit more about -- is diversity should be part of the metric. i think that's what deborah santiago was beginning to say, how do you incorporate that into the metric? and i want you to t little bit more about, is diversity should be part of the metric. i think that's what deborah santiago was beginning to say, how do you incorporate that into the metric? one size fits all is not going to result because challenges are different for these institutions, their resources are different and also they are still making contributions. so i want to kind of open it up, if we could speak more about how diversity might be part of a metric, a national rating system, and deborah's talked about a possible rating component, but also that the notion of social equity and diversity has to be a consideration in all of this. >> thank you very much, sylvia. now, if there are questions, there are three microphones right up here in the front. please come up right away. we rushed everybody along to save time for your questions. go right ahead. >> good morning. thanks so much to the panelists. i'm in awe of the research presented today.

my name is robin liam from a higher ed consultancy. with the competing interests that higher ed has now in regard to enrollment, needing to enroll a lot of international students, out of state students, et cetera, per se, regarding fundsing, how might the focus stay on closing the racial college completion gaps at msis and hsis? >> stella? >> so, i think that's a very good question. you know, my perspective comes from not only looking at the post-secondary sector. so, again, the part of what comprises a racial completion gap is not only what happens at the institution. and so this doesn't preclude us from enrolling more students from other countries or more diverse students.

but again, i'm going to keep pushing to talk about the racial completion gap, it's not just what's occurring at the institution. so this idea that the high schools in particular, k through 12 can be let off the hook so more collaboration, more conversations of if we're going to keep our graduation rates up, this is not a conversation that should only stay within higher ed. >> yes, can i just respond to that, too? look, we make choices every day, right? and institutions of higher ed, because they're getting less public support, are having to find means. they have to enroll international and out of state students to make the bottom line. and does that squeeze out the very time latinos and african-americans are becoming the majority in the college population? i think so. i think the reality is it doesn't have to be that way. we're making those choices because of expediency and facility and reaching back to our core as to why we are institutions and what it is we

do is, i think, primary for us to consider who it is we're enroll, why we're doing so. and then why are we holding institutions accountable if we're going to a process that is students that we haven't educated in our system. that's not to say we shouldn't enroll international or out of state opportunities but the reality is if we're putting primacy to the bottom line financially and not who we're serving and finding that balance the new way, then i don't think we're doing a service as public institutions. >> you know, at our campus at ucla, we get less than 10% of our budget from the state of california. so this year there will be 30% of students from outside california on our campus, which is basically a survival strategy, but if we had a higher education act that gave recognition -- because we have a very high level of pell grants and there's a lot of diversity on our campus, it would give universities a different incentive if they were given an additional recognition or

funding as a result of those kinds of enrollments rather than being punished for them by cutting their budgets. >> thank you. >> hi, dora from the american dental education association. my question is for marybeth gasman. thank you, first of all, for the slides because that's primarily our interest. the question i have for you is, when it comes to msis on your own website, you distinguish between hbcus and other institutions. our predominantly black institutions, i understand it's not the same as hpcus, are they being left out when you're giving statistics about black students at hpcus? and should or should they not be included? this is more of a clarifying question. thank you. >> historically black colleges and institutions are different entities than predominantly black institutions.

if you're doing research on historically black institutions which are institutions created with the express idea of educating black americans prior to 1965, right? that research is typically not going to include pbis unless you include them. so with our center, we do -- we do pay attention to pbis, but if our research is on hbcus -- like we have a big s.t.e.m. project funded by the helmsley trust. one thing i would say there is that the outcomes in s.t.e.m. for pbis are different than they are for hbcus. they're just two different pots. leslie leads an organization that represents both. so i do think that pbis need attention because they are growing in similar ways, not at

the same rate, but in similar ways to hsis, right? but they are two separate groups. and they have very, very different histories. pbis used to be majority institutions, so -- in fact, some even have separate alumni groups. they're just very, very different. but we want to do research related to both kinds of institutions, but i would say that pbis get a lot less attention. >> okay. so just -- there's a lot less research on pbis? >> a lot less research. there's hardly any research on pbis. >> thank you. >> any of you out there looking for a good dissertation? >> you know, one thing i would say is that they're very frustrated by that, too. i often have presidents of pbis that call and say, why doesn't anyone care about our institutions? why doesn't anybody want to do research related to our institutions? so it is a ripe area and they're looking for attention. >> yes.

>> hi, andress enriquez with the national science foundation. i'm still formulating my question. but two things first. i'm delighted that the workforce issue came up, particularly the issues around s.t.e.m. and my question is for stella and for deborah. you know, we have this huge policy shift taking place in the k through 12 area of schools which is called the common core in the next generation science standards and the analytics on that in terms of minority students and in particular english language learners is that the number of dropouts is going to increase significantly. and those that are prepared for college is going to really shift. and i'm wondering in terms of the precollege piece, what can we do to -- we know some of those issues in terms of

identifying youngsters who are going to be struggling getting into college from the work. and i'm wondering what we can do. and, deborah, i'm wondering if the data points or the analytics that you're thinking about in terms of the data set that you need should not start at college but way beforehand, if that makes sense? >> so i think you bring up some very good points. let me start with this idea of access to -- i'm kind of reframing your question -- to rigorous courses and ell students. we actually use this database to look at the success of ell students, their college access success, and we found something very important. and that relates to the timing in an ell program. and we actually found latino

students that participate in an ell prime minister for three years are actually likely to do better than latino students who wavered out of any program participation although qualified for it. so what we're seeing in texas is that some program participation for ell students does not hinder their college access rates but more than that leads them down a different path. and the biggest point of mobility here for those students and this translates for other groups is access to the rigorous course work in high school. so how common core will play out? well, texas is a different story. with the common core they've got their own version. but we do know that rigor matters and ell students are more likely to have access to those courses, so as we look forward -- ell -- we've got to reframe ell as not just exiting the program and learning english, but entrance into the rigorous course work for college access.

>> you know, i'll -- >> i'll take the second half. the second half of the question since i think stella did a good job answering the first part. in the paper, there is a clear reference to looking at k-20 databases and that's what the data are based on so that they presided in their analysis. so i think that reinforces your point about the data overall. i would say that while not identical, those that i -- those data points that i raised are collected in some manner in k-12 as opposed to present pell. we have students participating in free and reduced lunch. that's kind of our, you know, basic proxy at the federal level for income level. so we do have some ways in k-12 to track it. the challenge is we don't see a great deal of variance on the very thing the paper that stella raised and others are -- we don't see great changes in economic mobility at the k-12 level and that's often where we look in financial aid and say,

you can apply and have a year waiting and you won't see big differences. so the challenge becomes how do we create public policy that intervenes given the date that we currently have? i think the data are there. we're not using them and making sure whether it's at the k-12 or higher ed level, that we're weighting it appropriately for these populations is what we have to do a better job of. >> let me end real quick with, the latino-white preparation gap while still big, frankly, i was surprised, not as big as i thought it would be. the biggest gap of concern in academic preparation and this will translate to however common core ticks out, is the there's something happening in schools where la tebows may be getting more access to rigorous core work and that's one of the biggest differences that we see in racial participation and rigorous course work. and that's a real point of concern when we see differences in racial participation in rigorous course work. >> thank you very much. very good question. i'll just take a second at the end to say, some of this panel relates to other work that we're doing.

well, let me take your question, if it's a quick one. >> yes, thank you so much. janelle george with the naacp legal defense and educational fund. i have a quick question for ms. santiago in terms of assessment. and i understand your point about not making a double standard, having two different assessments and looking more towards weighting different factors. how would you factor in and weight the preparation k through 12, lack of preparation or remediation issues with minority-serving institutions? and if i can sneak in one last question to ms. gasman, if you can talk about the impact of minority-serving institutions on women of color as well as men of color? thank you. >> sure. so i'll try to be fast so you can get in there, too. how to weight the k-12 preparation college readiness. so things that i identified, so

there is a lot of statistical approach. we do it with a lot of ncs date to to weight the data that's out there. i won't get into the complicated part of that. we do have elements in what percent of students in an institution are taking remediation. we know that. that's a proxy at the college level for academic preparation at the k-12 level. we can do something with that. that's something i would definitely weight. the concentration of students who don't complete what we call the gateway courses, the 101 courses. that's clear. we know those data. we should be able to use them, and looking at what institutions are doing. if you have a high concentration of latin americans and african-americans that don't get through, that's to be weighted when you're looking for completion. completion is the goal, enrollment is the necessary component. you can't complete if you haven't enrolled but looking at the profile of the students that are enrolling is going to be weighted by the concentration mass of students with need, whether it's financial or academic. >> great. so, in this paper we did focus

on men of color because we tried to focus on three critical areas that the nation is calling out right now. in a previous paper i wrote with valerie lundy wagner at community college research center at columbia, and one of my former students, we wrote a paper that looks at the gains of women of color. it's specifically at black colleges. i haven't looked at that across all msis, but at black colleges, if i were to be completely frank, the success of black colleges is due to women of color. i mean, to black women. i mean, the success is much higher with regard to black women. it's especially high in the area of s.t.e.m. they're making really, really great contributions in that area. so i haven't looked across all msis. that's a great -- it would be a great thing to do. we definitely have that data and could look at that, but that's a really good question. >> i would like to add in our analyses in texas, black males

disproportionately, overwhelmingly choose to go to an hbcu over white -- over white -- over black females. so while the stories of black women obviously need to be present in the conversation, the hot spots of where black males are attending college, at least in texas, they overwhelmingly choose an hbcu. >> i just wanted to take a minute at the end before we thank the panel to just comment that you can find on the website of the civil rights project a lot of relevant studies that relate to precollege preparation. we've shown in our recent study of california, for example, segregating california's future that latinos used to be in predominantly white schools in california. they're now in 86% non-white schools, 75% poverty. african-americans are in very

similar situations but mostly as minorities in latino schools. these schools have much less availability of qualified teachers with experience especially in mathematics and science. they are very unstable schools in terms of enrollment in many cases. these are schools that are systematically segregated and unequal. if we take those students into colleges that are willing to take a chance at them and then punish the colleges for taking them, we'd be making one crisis into another and cutting off mobility in a very serious way. so it's very important that we think about all of these things simultaneously. i know it's hard in an environment of sound bites to do that. but it's essential that we keep those things in our mind. so now after these two intense panels, let me thank this panel very much for a very illuminating discussion.

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and to start working together at a higher level, seek -- seeking the best decisions for the american people. i'm to the point that when there's any type of political event, both republicans and democrats and any other party that wants to get involved should organize this, should start from the get-go learning to work together and at this event show their constituents and the american people that they can literally work together, reason together at a higher level, and on all the issues that americans are concerned about. and get the best decisions by reasoning together instead of it being based on power, money and votes, we win and you lose. >> i'm calling to say thank you for airing the debates. i just watched the vermont

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crat. it's time we started looking at others. thank you, c-span, for airing these debates. >> continue to let us know about the programs you're watching. call us at 202-626-3400, e-mail us at comments@c-span.org or send us a twe tweet @c-span #comments. join the c-span conversation, "like" us on facebook, follow us on twitter. now more from the ucla civil rights project conference on minorities in higher education. in this session university officials discuss the latest studies on the topic including how prospective students are evaluated by the admissions process. this is an hour and ten minutes. >> okay. well, i hope you're all refreshed and ready for an

intense final panel here. so we're going to have three presenters on this panel. sylvia hurtado, who you met before, nicholas hillman, ann-marie nunez. so, why don't we start at the end and put ann up first. >> thank you for the opportunity to be here. my particular paper is co-authored with wilda rodriguez at the university of michigan who could not be here today. we focused on how the shortcomings of a post secondary ratings system could lead to shortchanging hispanic-serving institutions and their outcomes. so as today's research and other research indicates there are well documented differences in student and institutional characteristics between hsis and non-hsis that would lead hsis to

have lower graduation rates on average than non-hsis. and so our analysis at the beginning of this paper -- in the previous session we talked about the possibility of adjusting for some of these student and institutional characteristics. and so in fact at the beginning of our paper, we find that when we account for student characteristics, financial resources of institutions, policies at institutions that might influence completion, whether or not an institution has an open admissions policy, that the gaps in graduation rates, since that's the most commonly used measure being discussed right now to measure institutional performance six-year graduation rates, that the gap in graduation rates between hispanic-serving institutions and non-hispanic-serving institutions disappears. this is consistent with what stella was talking about in the last session. so another topic that came up was the idea of a possibility of

adjusting for these differences. so if we were to calculate a ratings system with the data that we have available in data sets like the integrated post secondary education system or ipeds, that's really the only data system that's national that has data on all of the post secondary institutions in the u.s. we'll talk in a minute about how there's problems with missing data, but it has the most comprehensive data. so what some have talked about is using the method of regression adjustment to level the playing field in terms of assessing institutional performance of minority-serving institutions and non-minority-serving institutions. >> is it something like what deborah santiago was talking about? >> exactly what deborah santiago was talking about. and so in regression adjustment, the idea is to predict a graduation rate based on what we

would expect given the student and institutional, financial characteristics, perhaps policies to promote college completion, admissions policies, and compare it with the actual graduation rate. and so if the expected graduation rate was higher than the actual graduation rate of an institution, that institution might be seen as underperforming, but if the graduation rate that was expected was below what we saw to be the actual graduate of that institution, it might be interpreted as overperforming. one of the takeaways that's sort of been coming up is that msis and hsis are doing more with less. a lot of them may not be underperforming as they appear when we only look at outcomes as graduation rates but when we take into account these other factor, they may actually be doing better than we think. next slide.

okay. so we went ahead and once we sort of established that the gaps disappeared, we then went ahead and examined different ways of looking at regression adjustment. so one of the problems we initially came across with this data set ipeds is that we can only adjust for characteristics on which there are available data, so that regression adjustments may be especially useful for looking at groups, large samples of institutions and comparing them with one another like stella flores did in her analysis, but they may be a little less useful in terms of looking at the performance of individual institutions when we break it out. ipeds has a lot of missing data, especially for hsis and this is also the case of minority-serving institutions in general. there are a lot of reasons for that and we talk about that in

the paper. we also have statistics on it, but it's a significant amount of missing data. but perhaps one of the most important things we heard in the last session is that academic preparation, the course work that students take, how they perform in that course work in high school and stella flores uses math as an indicator which is often used as an indicator, that's that the most important predictor of college completion for students. and that data are not available -- those data are not available in ipeds. and so as stella flores was talking about college completion is not a college issue but we can't, with the current data available in ipeds, we can't necessarily take into account that as completely as we might like to yet. go ahead. so one of the things that we did

in this paper was we took -- we ran two adjustments where we -- in one of them we look at student characteristics, institutional characteristics, financial context characteristics and we took what we could best get at in terms of precollege, which was whether or not an institution had an open admissions policy. that may not sound like precollege but that was the closest we could get to and the most available data for hsis. then we also -- there's also a common measure of looking at student characteristics of incoming admissions test scores, so incoming smplgts s.a.t. scores and a.c.t. scores. we ran two, one including the open adjustments policy and the test scores policy. what we found was whether a college seems under or over

performing depends on the variables that are included in the model. so, in our analysis nearly 30% of the institutions changed direction between when we included the admissions policy variable and when we included the test scores variable. and so the fact that the -- that this calculation can change this much should raise red flags for the idea of tying financial aid to these results. we know that in 2015 the performance institutional ratings system is proposed and so we are trying to look at data issues, but if we go a step further and think about tying funding decisions to these ratings, that should really raise a red flag. next slide. and so this bring us to our recommendations. the first one is to collect more data known to be predictive of institutional performance.

and so what came up in our last session was the importance of academic preparation and characteristics. so that's one example. another example that was raised is being able to track students from institution to institution, and so right now the graduation rate measure used in ipeds is only students who begin at that institution and finish that institution and are full-time students. so -- and students who finish in six years. and so when we consider that a lot of the students we've been talking about, they may take longer to finish, they may not be full-time students and latino students in particular are more likely to transfer. those student are being left out of these conversations. so if it's possible to collect more data, i think one of the things that sylvia hurtado is going to talk about, too, is not only it is collecting data about

the inputs and also marybeth gasman, but rethinking what it is these institutions contribute. what other measures are indicators of institutional performance might there be that these minority-serving institutions and hsis are contributing? but the second recommendation is that we don't want to make this an unfunded mandate. a lot of these institutions don't have resources for data collection and reporting comparable measures, so providing capacity to do that would be a really good idea. i think part of this could also involve partnering with the national student data clearinghouse as deborah santiago mentioned, to be able to track students. that would be a good opportunity to track transfer students, for example, nationally, students who move institutions. resisting the temptation to implement high-stakes policies based on inaccurate data and

assessment is really key as well and an important takeaway from our analysis. finally, there are several higher education associations right now who are making efforts to find accountability metrics and to find reasonable ways of reporting them. and some of them involve bringing in measures like transfer students. so to build on what those institutions are already doing and involve them as partners and not reinvent the wheel, the work that's already being done with state longitudinal data systems at the national clearinghouse with these systems and higher ed leaders who are already trying to account better for institutional performance. thank you. >> thank you very much, professor nunez. and we're going to turn now to nicholas hillman, but before we do that, deputy studley is here and we want to make space for her at the table.

if you could just move down and grab another chair. >> there's a chair right here. >> okay. so i would turn to nicholas hillman for the next paper presentation. >> great. thank you for the opportunity to share my work here. a work in progress for sure. so i'd love to have conversations and ideas about where this could go next, but the central argument here for this paper, which is called the differential impacts of college ratings case of educational deserts. the central argument here is a very straightforward one, a simple one that gets overlooked but one that's critically important for thinking about the educations of a federal ratings system and especially tying funds to a college ratings and that's place matters. so often in research and policymaking on college access, we focus on the process of opportunity. questions like did the student take ap courses, did the student

apply for the fafsa, did they take the right steps in order to be prepared and enroll and persist in college? and procedural opportunity is obviously important. but there's also geographic opportunity and the geography of opportunity is something that matters here, and that's what's going to be explored in this paper. it draws on what we might be familiar with, this idea of food deserts which is part of a family of research which is on communities built environments. we have research in social sciences that show low incomes racially segregated and high poverty communities across the country happen to have built-in environments where, for example, they have limited access to public parks, they have high density to industries that pollute, they've got all these characteristics that define the community including access to healthy affordable nutritious

food in food deserts is what we might be familiar with, but we should think of community college as part of the built-in environment of our communities and on top of this moving away from the process of opportunity to the geography of opportunity will help us think about how people make choices about where to go to college simply based on their built environment. not everybody has the luxury to shop around for college, to search across the country or even across the state for places to go to school. and so there are places around the country that we'll explore in just a second and this paper dives into a little bit and i think we're only scratching the surface but there are places around the country where these opportunities are mostly constrained highly constrained and not surprisingly cut along the lines of race and class. so if we hop to the next slide, we can see -- hopefully, we can see a map of the united states and this is broken up into all of the counties, 3,147 counties. sorry anybody from alaska or hawaii, not included in this map.

but this gives us a mental image about spatial factors that could matter in choosing a college. so what i did in this study took all the counties, clustered them around what are called commuting zones. this is not something i made up. this is something people have been using for years to try to find the commuting patterns of counties. this means in memphis, tennessee, for example, people cross state lines, that would be captured in a commuting zone, which is a cluster of counties that kind of share common economies, share common commuting patterns for labor. so makes sense to me that people would also be more or less willing to also commute to school if they live in a common commuting zone. so what this paper does is it shrinks these 3,000 counties down into 700 commuting zones. commuting zones are the unit of analysis here. within each commuting zone i wanted to see how many public

colleges are even available? are there commuting zones that have zero public cleejs? are there commuting zones that have only one. because that's where most students enroll, it's their mission to serve the communities. and it's their higs to do so. and so if on the next slide this should appear, if we just take this four-county cluster in southwest texas. you have all the eagle pass. anybody from the area, i'd love to talk to you more and hear your thoughts. dr. nunez has more comments prepared. this area of eagle pass is represented by a large hispanic population. it is a community with high unemployment rates and low educational attainment rates. and this community, set of four counties, has about 100,000 people thatly there. on the next slide you can see

that a student who wanted to shop around for college in the eagle pass commuting zone, if they follow the logic of our federal policymakers, they could go to this website, college navigator, put in their zip code, do a search for what xindz of colleges are nearby, and this is what they would find. you can't see it, sorry. they would find, you enare the your zip code on the left and you can say within 100 miles of my zip code, how many schools are there? there's four schools. the first two are two for-profit colleges, the same institutions, the third one is southwest texas junior college, the fourth one is also for-profit college. so a student who lives in this community is probably going to be place bound and if they're looking for colleges, have one of two options, go to the public community college or go to this for-profit school. so we have to really think about how people make choices in these communities. if we advance to the next slide,

this just takes a quick snippet of some of the details that might be interesting to us in terms of the differences in these two different institutions. apologize for turning around. but we can see the middle group is the community college, its largest program is general studies, has about 5 hss this student most underrepresented minorities also high proportion receiving pell lower net price than the other school, the for-profit college that serves a tiny handful of students, a few dozen, mostly in cosmetology. if you're not interested in cosmetology and you live there, you really don't have any choices of where to attend. here's the tricky part. and there are several. and this actually opens up a whole slippery slope about our ratings system. one of the criteria that would probably be included in a federal rating system, i would imagine, because it's a thought experiment at this point, is the co-hoertd default rate. the percentage of students who borrow in a school and default on their loan within three years of repayment.

30%, if you hit 30%, you're going to be on notice, if you do that for three years you lose access. that's a current policy. this community college is at 24% already. and so if cdrs get included in a rating system, this college is at a pretty high risk of being rated poorly. we can play this logic out pretending that aid is eventually tied to a colleges rating that would probably mean that this college would lose access to aid or have it constrained in some way or another. and so a student, one of the 5,000 students who are attending the institution, if they're trying to find a better place to go, where are they going to go? and on the next slide we can see this is not just a problem in southwest texas. and you advance one more slide. it's across the country. there are commuting zones that have a similar built environment to that i just described. in the paper i use this data set -- i'd be happy to share and explore other questions you may be interested with this data,

but i've run a regression just to get a simple count of institutions in each of the commuting zone, according to the commuting zone's economic profile, unemployment rates and several other characteristics that might matter and be interesting to be able to find some patterns in what these institutions -- i'm sorry, what these communities are like. ideally there would be no patterns. this would be completely random. and it's not at all. these commuting zones are drawn a line -- along the lines of race and class just like the built environment in inequalities are drawn the lines between race and class in other ways. so one in ten people in the u.s. live in one of these commuting zones, about one in five colleges, public colleges, i'm sorry, are located in serving these communities, and these communities tend to have growing hispanic populations. they tend to have what i'm assuming is going to be intergenerational poverty, intergenerational inequality

because they are communities with low educational attainment levels already. when we thing about policy context and the college navigator example started helping us to think about the implications, we think about the implications here, is it an unintended consequence if that's educational deserts because it could have a deficit connotation to it but we've got to call it something and realize that the built environments differ, and the opportunities differ sdpoengd where you live. if a policy is going to accidentally affect colleges that are serving these communities, it's also by virtue disproportionately affecting communities and communities that are working class and have already low levels of educational attainment. so we have to think about the role of place and that place matters and that the current discussion around college

ratings is so focused on consumer information and consumer choices. my hunch is it's dominated by people who maybe don't have a lot of experience living in these communities or having institutions represented in their frameworks. and so what we ought to think about is the role of place and geography in maybe even giving colleges waivers if they're serving one of these communities or at least identifying which ones they are. thanks. >> thank you very much. professor hillman. we're going to turn last -- for our last presenter of the morning to sylvia hurtado. >> thanks for having me here today to talk about some ongoing research at the higher education research institute. for some of you who have been talking about weighted kinds of measures about looking at graduation completion, we've been doing this for institutions who participate in our national surveys for almost 20 years. we've been working with campuses to create student input adjusted

graduation rates providing them equations and more recently calculators so they can understand how they're doing relative to the kinds of students they're recruiting. the other thing that we've been doing is really using now more all of the national databases to really look at what we call efficiency scores. so i'm going to talk about work related to those two areas. let me just start with the work we've been doing on metrics for understanding graduation rates and degree completion particularly in s.t.e.m. fields. both of these shs are vital to the economy and serving institutions are vital to the u.s. economy and revitalization of the diverse communities. i think nicholas' work is actually beginning to say where you have a college is very important but where they're located is also very important in terms of the communities they serve. the second thing i want to say is any national ratings system must be fair to students and fair to institutions that serve many low income, first generation and underrepresented groups.

by underrepresented i mean african-american, latino, native american and asian-american groups. what we know for those particular groups of students, those targets low income first generation underrepresented, they are less likely to graduate from any college that is they are more likely to graduate from some colleges, they're more expectative obviously taking only those they know will succeed. but when we control for a whole range of factors we know those students are still less likely to graduate. let me get to the metrics and before i move to first slide let me talk a little bit about them because i'm just showing results. the raw graduation rates are not as effective in really identifying the real challenges of educating large numbers of these target populations that stand the most to gain from college. our work is to identify what we

call engines of social mobility to help them understand where they are and relative to peers and also how they might move forward in terms of improving their degree completion. but what we know, we know that we need metrics that take into account the types of students institutions recruit and the types of resources that are available. so one of our metrics -- i'll start with student inputted adjustment measures. using our freshman survey, one cohort year, there were about 700 institutions that usesed this data and combine that with the national clearing house data. so we're able to then produce predictors of graduation. and that institution, for every institution we're able to give them a score in terms of actual versus predicted. one of the projects we've just recently completed is really looking at those institutions at the highest performers in terms of student input adjusted measure.

what we found of 356 institutions that we had all that data on, about 108 were doing better than expected on all three groups. low income, first generation and underrepresented groups. of course, they varied in terms of their resources. but the first metric does not take into account resources. the actual versus expected on the first slide, danny, i have basically three institutions that are 10 to 20 points higher doing higher than expected in terms of actually completing students. now we put a 50% line graduation rate kind of at the center so you'll see some institutions are below 50% but doing 10% to 11% points higher in terms of completion. there some are institutions that are expected to be below 50% but are doing above 50%. and some institutions, the top one is a public university that

actually is started above 50% and they actually increase that rate. so in a way we're looking at some talent development that's happening with these institutions. so let me -- let's go to the next slide. all right. so we took of the 356 institutions, 108, we tried to predict what was the characteristics of those institutions that were doing better than expected. and so the key predictors are those that you see on the slide. those institutions with -- that actually had lower selectivity, that is they were broad access. the amount of financial aid for first-time students and also the instructional expenditures per capita. in some ways that's as it should be. students should be well supported. if you have large numbers of low income students. and also your instructional expenditures if you have more low-income, first generation, underrepresented groups you need to direct your resources toward those types of students. so that's sort of one way to

look at it. another way to look at it is we use the time ratings. if you've gone online, "time" has a rating system, a ranking system based on graduation, affordability and accessibility. then they have a holistic rank that combines all three. so you can see which colleges came up highest. so we used the "time" ratings, if you can go to the next slide, to compare our institutional performance indices. and, really, what you see is for the 16 campuses that we identified that were actually had an -- had an expected rate that was, well, let's -- they had an actual rate that was 10 to 20 points higher for low income, first neration and underrepresented students, that they -- a lot of them do rank higher on the "time" graduation rank, but usually those with the higher proportion of minority students are going to be ranking lower. so, we know that msis, even though they're doing better than

expected, that is 10 to 20 points higher than what they're expected given their student body, they're going to be -- any kind of similar rating system. the next slide is really using the "time" holistic rank which is by using access, graduation and also affordability. you see then that there's no relationship between our performance index using -- for underrepresented minority students and also this ranking system. but there are a new institutions that are very high on both, ours and also the holistic rank. one particular one, hispanic-serving institution turns out to be very high on their holistic rank as well as others. but for the most part, others are going to be ranked lower. the other thing that you find is those at the top 16, they rank lower on these and graduation because they're probably less affordable and less accessible. that is to the top 16 that are doing well. so they might have very small

numbers of low income, first generation students. the next one -- the next one really looks at our s.t.e.m. efficiency. it's focused an first time, full-time freshman. we used the data including transfers using five years of ipeds dating, looking at transfers, using five years of ipeds date to to not completion. we used what's called frontier modeling which compares similarly situated institutions based on resources. faculty labor, student enrollment and expenditures per student. in a way, this is another way of identifying top performers. one of the things we found and that's a much longer paper and there's several papers you can actually access online, is that for the most part, and most of

the analysis, private institutions come out looking better on most kinds of rankings. but what we find by using these efficiency scores, public institutions are more efficient. we compare the s.t.e.m. completion rate with efficiency scores. we find that minority serving institutions, particularly hbcus and hispanic serving institutions are more efficient at producing smplgts t.e.m. degrees for black and latino students respectively. the other thing is because these particular efficiency scores have not controlled for input, that's different kind of measure, is selectivity -- more selective institutions do better than expected -- well, in terms of efficiency. but what we've done is really then broken down the selectivity so you can take into account access to find actually the most efficient kinds of institutions. what we're doing next is trying to visit these institutions. so, what's the bottom line here? any metric should take into account the characteristics of students, particularly focusing on degree completion of first

degree, underrepresented minorities as well as institutional resources. both karats help to identify top performers in social mobility and i'm hoping that a rank organize rating system nationally would actually be used for that. not necessarily to basically just limit financial aid. because these financial institutions, and i want to reiterate what others on the panel have said, are serving as agents of social moekt. even though their rates may not look that hot, but we're able to see what they're doing with their students is quite amazing. one of the questions that came up earlier, what do we do? how do we handle the input? how do we handle some of these things? for a large part now -- these are only four-year institutions we looked at -- was that two-year institutions are really doing the bulk of this work. so, that's additional areas to look at in the future. >> thank you very much. we have a number of respondents. i'm going to turn to lorelle

espinosa representing a.c.e. >> let's play musical chairs for a minute here. thank you, gary. and on behalf of a.c.e. center for policy research and strategy, i do want to thank the authors, the other respondents and those in attendance today for contributing to this important dialogue. turning to the paper by my colleague behind me, ray anyway nunez and her co-author, i applaud you for taking the lead on attempting to do what many have said would be a good approach to the president's ratings plan, which is to rate institutions based on estimates of how they should be performing compared with how they actually are performing. as you'll see when you read the paper and i hope everyone can while a perfectly reasonable approach in theory as your

analyses bear out, the approach is flawed and, in fact, sheds light on how other analysises that may attempt to do something similar will run into the same danger. and that is that the very data collected by the department of education, particularly the ipeds data was used in the paper is, in fact, wholly inadequate for the purpose of rating institutions. now beyond the missing data that you cite as problematic, and it is, and beyond the instability of the regression adjustments, given a limited number of data points that fail to capture complex environments, as is also born out in the paper, there's really another underlying data reality, which is not new. i know for many people in the room, but it's something that is worth addressing here. and that is that the ipeds data, and again if that is used to, you know, rate hispanic-serving institutions in particular and other minority-serving institutions, is really not

reflective of the students that attend those institutions. now we at a.c.e. have done some looking at the national post secondary student aid study which is another data source out of the department that's very robust. nationally representative but is not a census data as is ipeds. and we see to illustrate my point that 49% of latinos are enrolled part time. that's half of latino students. these students are not going to be represented in the outcome measures in ipeds since ipeds does not currently track outcome measures for part-time students. 36% of latinos delay postsecondary enrollment. that's another group that won't be recognized. so this further means that hsis and other institutions that i said that serve these students well will go unrecognized. now building on the first and second recommendations in the paper, i want to caution against the need to collect more data. what we need, and i'm certain

that the authors would agree, is to collect accurate data. and, yes, this absolutely includes a better accounting of academic preparation given its relationship to retention and to completion. so the arguments in the paper, in fact, raise another issue, which is central for consideration. and that is how the department and other agencies, and this was referenced by a speaker earlier, can actually empower and incentivize institutions. and i know ann-marie raised this as well, to not only report out data but to actually utilize their own data to improve studentout comes. so, this means that in addition to the department needing to rethink its census data. the department and other agencies actually have within their power to assist institutions and doing a better job of utilizing data to identify performance and resource impapz and to

meaningfully act on that information through institutional policy and practice. and this really means allowing institutions the capacity as was mentioned to have more institutional research efforts within their very own walls. i just wanted to say a couple more things. i really applaud nick's paper for addressing environments. and we have some work coming up at the center for policy research and strategy to look at how state context really influences institutions and regional context as well. and i just want to say quickly, we know that institutions of the same sector can reveal vastly different characteristics, you know, depending on the strength of the k-12 system that surround those institutions, the makeup of their community, the students they are serving, the policies around transfer, around undocumented student access to higher education, and i really want to applaud a point made earlier. i think it was by stella flores, to look at state data and for the federal government, in fact,

to partner with states and incent states to use their data to also allow for some accountability measures. a final point, i'm almost out of time, i do want to let people know that we have a paper that came out earlier this year that looks at the college choice behavior of low-income students. and there's a paper forthcoming for the white house initiative on educational excellence for hispanics which actually shows the way that hispanic students choose colleges. if we believe that the ranking -- excuse me, the ratings system is a de facto ranking, which i, in fact, think it will become, then we know hispanic students don't actually use rankings. in fact, around 16% of latinos cited in harry's own data, that rankings were an important factor in their choice process. so congratulations again to the authors on their paper, particularly nunez and rodriguez. and thank you for having me. >> marybeth?

>> all right. let's see. i guess i need a microphone. >> okay. so i'm responding to silvia hurtado and her colleague's paper. i'm going to be short and sweet here because i am short and sweet. [ laughter ] just thought i would get that in there. so i really enjoyed sylvia's paper. i wanted to -- i think -- it's really important that you read this paper for a number of reasons. one -- one of the things i like the most is that in the very beginning of the paper sylvia talks about how they wanted to use metrics that were fair to students and institutions. and i really like the use of the word fair. because i think all too often when we see research and when we see a lot of national reports, we don't see kind of the fair use of metrics. and another thing that i thought was really interesting about the paper is that she does a really,

really good job of reminding us of how long researchers have been calling for measures that consider student input as well as institutional input. it's been so long. and yet we have all of these efforts that done consider student inputs. we have all of these ways of looking at institutions that don't take into account who the students are that attend the institutions. yet, we have been asking for so long for this to not happen. and i guess i'm wondering when policymakers are going to start to listen to that. maybe we could just stop it right now. right? that would be great. the other thing that i thought was really important is that the work that sylvia and her colleagues are doing, it helps us to look at msis and really dig a little bit deeper and try to figure out why they are achieving greater efficiency and

success at many of these institutions. i was glad you said you are going to visit them. right? because we do know that there is success taking place at a variety of different msis. but we don't really dig deeper. and your point about the institutional research that you brought up earlier, which i think -- at some larger hsis it's not as big of a deal. but it is a large problem at many under under resourced travel colleges and some smaller hsis, that it's very difficult to collect institutional data. so i think that's really important. two things that i thought of when i read the paper. i hope that people won't take your very, very good research and start using it as a litmus test. so i really worry about that. i i hope that you will caution people against that. because i could see people taking it and saying, well, it's not efficient. what i would love to see happen to the institutions that

aren't -- that don't come out as being efficient is that perhaps they are given a mentor institution that is of a similar type or size or maybe within the same sector that can work with them to become more efficient. so i hope that that will be one of the recommendations in all that you do. because i can just imagine someone coming along and saying, well, sylvia said -- so that would be the one thing that i would really want you to think about. but thank you. great work. >> sara? >> so i'm going to make some comments across the papers. but in particular, my colleague nick hillman's paper, which i want to recommend that you look at in full. i think it an important and different analysis. he was able to give you a taste of it just now. one of the most important findings actually in dr.

hurtado's paper is that the inputs actually matter. she shows this in the paper. and it's kind of remarkable that we lost sight of it. in this discussion about accountability for higher education, the question should therefore be, what is this policy effort going to do to help ensure that more students get access to those sorts of resources? if those inputs matter, what is accountability going to do to increase the likelihood that the students who need those things in order to graduate are going to get them? will it bring new resources to the institutions that don't currently have them? will it create better matches between students who need to be educated in high resource settings and institutions that actually possess the resources? is there any indication that that, in fact, is going to occur?

i don't think so. it's extraordinarily doubtful. in fact, what looks like is going to happen is that the institutions that don't have those things, that don't have much instructional spending for their students, or that enroll large numbers of disadvantaged students will be poorly rated and cut out. so where is that going to leave us? does it mean that disadvantaged students are going to know because an institution was badly rated that they should avoid it? they are unlikely able to do anything about it. are you going to close the poorly rated institutions and leave them with no options? is that a better examiscenario? these seem like pretty fundamental and basic questions to ask. but they have no answers. and they haven't been addressed. we know within k-12 schooling that we close some failing schools. we called them failing. parents still wanted to send their kids there.

why? because they're the schools in their neighborhoods. where are they supposed to go? just because someone declares the school bad because it has a lot of black and brown kids in it doesn't mean that it is, in fact, a bad school. the problem with this accountability movement is not its interest in institutional responsibility. it takes a starting presumption with the idea that schools don't care about the outcomes of their students. i don't think i have been to a school, public, private or for-profit that actually doesn't care. there are some. but for the majority , they do. the problem is this pre-empts any effort to give equity among schools. it's the worst part of our system right now is how risky it is for somebody with disadvantage to enter the system and how likely they will end up with debt and no degree.

i think that if we want to experiment with this accountability, we should start in a safe place. we ought to start with schools that have high resources. and are using substantial federal funds. there are more than 500 private institutions today with an average endowment of more than $100,000 per student who are using federal tax dollars to cover their costs of attendance which are over $43,000 a year. students attending these expensive schools are using federal financial aid to cover 20% of their cost of attendance. what's the national return on that investment? let's start our grand experiment in those settings. where those students are at no risk of non-completion but we have significant concerns about the resources that we are spending. why not begin there rather than in a place where we are experiments with the poor and disadvantaged students? >> thank you. anne-marie?

>> i'm just going to comment briefly on nicholas hillman's paper. this particular paper is the importance of geography in terms of student's college choice, that as he states about seven in ten students in the u.s. choose to stay close to home and how important a local post secondary option is. and that 10% of the u.s. population lives in an education desert. as we have heard, such institutions are more likely to cefareceiv receive lower scores or they would in an accountability system. penalizing these institutions for low scores by awarding them less funding could strain their capacity to further serve their

students and in some cases could lead them to close. this would hurt students and families for whom that may be only or one of a few options. one of the things that i would encourage us to all consider and for hillman to develop is to emphasize that part of the limitation of post secondary options in certain geographic areas is influenced by the historical context of those areas and as lorelle exposed, state context, local policy. this includes historical segregation and discrimination in areas such as texas and other areas of the south. mexican americans and african-americans have been concentrated and often have had few post secondary institutional options. so at the federal level, the land grant act in 1862 sought to

bring post secondary options to less settled area of the u.s. the frontier at the time. but many states continue to bar the enrollment of african-americans in their colleges and universities. so the establishment of a second land grant act was required to encourage those states to build separate institutions for african-americans. subsequently, funding from the higher education act of 1965 was also -- was also awarded to those institutions in order to continue their important work. but one of the things that is also important is to consider legal context. so the legislative bills in history and also legal context. and in the institution where i work at has been directly impacted by this in the late 1980s. there was a legal case ruling that