tv Key Capitol Hill Hearings CSPAN June 30, 2015 7:00pm-8:01pm EDT
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new jersey governor chris christie announces he's running for the republican presidential nomination becoming the 14th gop candidate. you can see his comments at 8:00 eastern today. here on c span 3 we're taking the opportunity while congress is on break to show you some of the american history tv programs that are seen on the weekends. at 8:00 eastern will show you william f buckley. at 9:25 the discussion of james baldwin's significance in american political thought. at 10:45 p.m. eastern, princeton university eddy glod on race in america. we return to the conversation of what minorities face to get into college. this hour long panel looks into the pell grant program and other campus programs.
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>> before i swear you in for the purposes of identification i will introduce you all. you have seven minutes to speak. green go yellow you get two minutes to wrap up three red we will then begun to our first panelist this afternoon is miss megan mclean. our second panelist is dr. richard vetter. with the center of college affordability and productivity. and our third panelist is elizabeth baylor for the center of progress. mr. good is not here yet, we'll continue, and when he arrives, we'll introduce him. i want to ask the panelists to raise your right hand and swear and affirm to the best of your knowledge and belief, the
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information that you're about to provide to us is true and accurate. is that correct? >> yes. >> okay. mr. mclean, you have the floor. >> thank you. >> you're welcome. >> good afternoon to the members of the commission. >> your microphone? you need to press the button there. should've mentioned that. >> we'll try again. good afternoon and thank you for inviting me to speak today on behalf of the national association of student financial aid administrators or nasfa. we represent more than 3,000 public and private universities and trade schools across our nation. collectively, nasfa members serve 90% of all student aid recipients. focusing specifically on the title 4 federal student financial aid programs, a central tenant is to advocate for public policies that increase student access and success in post secondary education for low-income students. we know that financial aid has an impact on access and persistence as just under 75% of pell grant recipients had a
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family income of less than $30,000. we also know that we need to do a better job of enrolling and supporting traditionally underrepresented students. as they continue to represent a small portion of enrollment compared to white students and baccalaureate granting institutions. knowing this context, we should be considering improvements to the federal financial aid programs with an eye to how they may best serve students most at risk. in the short time i have with you today, i'll share with you policy concerns and recommendations related to two different areas of the federal student aid programs. first, the federal pell grant program and second, the federal campus programs. the pell grant program is widely known as many of you know taz the corner stone of the federal student aid programs. today, though, there's a need to examine the program with an eye toward making sure the program is meeting its original and intended goal. for example, according to the pell institute, in its first full award year 1976 '77, it
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covered 72% of the cost of attendance at a four-year public institution. starkly, the maximum pell grant for this current academic award year is $5,730 representing only 36% of the cost of attendance at a four-year public institution. the decrease in purchasing power is dramatic. although the program has seen increases over the past several years for which we are grateful, covering only 36% of the cost of attendance at a four-year public institution no longer provides access to that four-year post secondary education for the lowest income students. while the program generally provides adequate funding for a community college, we should be focused on how to make direct access to four-year institutions an option for qualified low income students. we are hindering opportunity, economic mobility and growth and our nation's national competitiveness. in addition to recommending more funding for the program, we also recommend making the pell grant program more flexible. particularly for nontraditional learners. the legislation and regulation
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currently governing the pell grant program are very much geared toward the student entering college at 18 years of age at a traditional four-year brick and mortar school and program. we know that many low-income students did not fit the traditional mold. for example, some don't start right after high school. some begin or return as adult learners and some are not able to enroll continuously due to financial or family obligations. we have a series of recommendations that would make the program more flexible and tlrb increase success for low income students. i'll briefly outline two of them. the first one is called the pell well. this pot of funds or pell well would be available for students to draw down from as needed until the student completes the academic program or runs out of pell funds rather than allotting a certain amount of pell dollars for each award year. a student attending a college continuously through the fall, spring and summer semesters would temporarily run out of pell funds at a certain point
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because there are only certain amount awarded per award year. and that so called gap semester before the eligibility resumes, the student is faced with turning to student loans, attempting to work and attend school simultaneously or perhaps even stop out. the pell well would help to mitigate these negative consequences. the second proposal is providing a federal pell promise. a pell promise would act as an early commitment program for the pell grant program. would teach students as early as ninth grade by notifying by how much they will be able to receive in the future and a guarantee of that amount if they complete high school successfully. we believe strongly that making the pell grant program more flexible and continuing to advocate will help this country move the needle for low-income and at-risk students. i will now talk about the federal campus based programs which are a critical piece of student financial aid and include the federal supplemental educational grant.
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federal work study and the federal perkins loan program. all need based. these are deemed campus based because even though they are federal funds, the funds are allocated directly to participating institutions based on a formula. and the institutions then determine using federal guidelines which of their students receive the funds as well as those award amounts. the formula, the place where many believe the inequity exists is based on two principles. first the fair share portion of the formula, which primarily calculates the amount of funds an institution receives based on the relative need of their students. and second, a base guarantee that ensures that participating institutions receive at least as much as received in prior years. as a result of the latter, a portion of the funding is dedicated to maintaining traditional funding levels at specific institutions and does not necessarily reflect the national need. this has the effect of some institutions receiving higher allocations simply because they have been in the program longer.
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this funding pattern does not reflect growth or shifts among students or across institutions creating a situation where underresourced institutions often have fewer access to those dollars than institutions that have more resources. consequently, nasfa has made the following recommendation to change the way the program are allocated to institutions so they will become more targeted to low-income. we propose an elimination of the base guarantee and rely solely on a fair share funding model. this would eliminate the current model that is historic ly based in part on historical allocation and introduce more fairness into the program by basing the allocation on the institutional need instead. in closing, i want to thank you for the opportunity to discuss some of these programs and challenges that exist, particularly for low-income students. we're happy to provide additional information and, of course, to work with the commission in the future. thank you. >> thank you. >> yes. thank you.
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>> i'm technologically inept. i only have a ph.d. this oral presentation is expanded somewhat in an accompanied written statement. it is conventional wisdom that greater participation and higher education is necessary for social economic achievement and achievement of the american dream. and it's true that on average, americans with four-year degrees earn dramatically more than those with a high school education and that the college earning differential is a good deal larger today than it was at the time that the civil rights act of 1964 passed. that said, however, my message today is that higher education is no panacea for eliminating disparities in income and wealth between individuals based on group characteristics such as race and gender. a fervent drive to increase educational attainment among minority groups will likely lead to disappointment. as in some sense, it already has.
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let us look at african-americans. in 1970, for every hundred whites enrolled in american colleges, there were 11 blacks. by 2013, there were 25. a dramatic growth in educational access by african-americans. yet, the narrowing of income differentials between blacks and white have been very modest. for example, black household income rose rose by 2% to 5%. for maybe 60%, 65%, for example. eliminating 10% or 12% of the differential. the fact remains that increased educational attainment among blacks has succeeded in eradicating only a very small proportion of racial income differentials. and the future prospects of doing so in the future do not appear to be particularly good. and the question is why is this so?
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and, first of all, the evidence is clear that the proportion of minority groups like african-americans and hispanics entering college that actually graduate within six years is below the already abysmal national average of about 60%. schools under pressure to admit minorities often accepts students with low prospects for success. special remediation, education programs have had relatively low success rates. we had many urban universities with high minority participation where far more students drop out than graduate within six years. a contributing factor, no doubt, is the generally inferior quality of the inner city public secondary education leading to students being admitted to college who are at best marginally qualified. colleges brag about high minority enrollments but often are guilty of luring students with very low realistic probabilities of success.
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they gain bragging rights in tuition revenues, but leave many students deep in debt with no degree or high-paying job. second, merely graduating from college provides no assurance of a good future income. growing evidence shows that a large proportion of recent college graduates are underemployed, performing jobs were a majority of job holders have high school diplomas. a study found that 1/4 of college graduates are living with their parents. two years after graduation. in a majority receive some financial support from their parents. moreover, as the proportion of adult americans with bachelor's degrees or more approaches 1/3, the receipt of a degree no longer indicates a person with above average skills and abilities. employers are becoming more particular. the high college earnings premium still applies to the
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graduates of the elite, mostly private schools who get good managerial and professional jobs. but those are far less to graduates of schools. of lesser reputation. schools where minority representation is historically very high. moreover. earnings college graduates vary considerably with a major field of study. some minorities disproportionately measure in fields who have low post graduate earnings. so too many students are unaware of the risks associated with college attendance. i think the law of unintended consequences has operated as an outgrowth of public policies and ways that have hurt low-income persons with minority status. for example, the dukes power of supreme court case emanating from the '64 civil rights act unintentionally increased the value of college diplomas by reducing the ability of firms to
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use alternative ways of certifying worker competency. thereby allowing colleges to raise fees more aggressively as did the various federal student financial programs emanating out of the higher education act of 1965. the fasfa form. the hated fasfa form enacted to help disperse aid has turned off minority group members bewildered by the complexity. i worry that burdening african-americans and hispanics by overselling the gains and understating the risks associated with going to college. colleges should have skin in the game. sharing in the adverse financial consequences associated with college dropouts falling delinquency on large amounts of college debt. noble intentions were behind the civil rights act of 1960s. and arguably some real gains have occurred.
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for example, with respect to gender equity, it has men not women who are underrepresented in colleges. but putting aside past accomplishments, an honest appraisal suggests to me that an unrealistic promotion of college participation may now do minorities more harm than good. thank you very much. >> thank you, members of the commission for inviting me to be part of this discussion. i'm the associate director of post secondary education of policy center for american progress or c.a.p. is an independent, nonpartisan policy institute. and we are dedicated to creating new policies with bold, progressive ideas. we believe access to quality, affordable education beyond high school is a critical part of
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enabling our citizens to have economic mobility and to make sure our economy grows with sort of shared prosperity. today, i will describe our policy ideas for improving the higher education system and particularly how it serves people of color. the three policy areas that i'm going to discuss are increasing the federal and state investment in public colleges. guaranteeing that students will receive financial aid for -- enough financial aid to pay for college up front and making sure that students are prepared to do college work when they enter college and receive support from their institution to meet their academic goals. first, i'd like to set the stage a little bit. this might not be news to you as this is the last panel of the day. but since 1970, the 1970s, we've made significant investments in pell grants and student loans to make more americans able to pay for college. these programs have paid dividends.
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the college going rate has increased by more than a third since 1970s. and particularly for low income, middle income, and students of color. at the same time, our higher education system is becoming more diverse. in 1976, people of color were 16% of the higher education system. today, they are happily 40%. part of this increase is because our citizenry is becoming more diverse, but also because of the increased participation rates among people of color. but at the same time, there are troubling signs that people of color are not able to access some of our most well-resourced universities. research universities as categorized by the carnegie classification system are some of our most well-resourced and academically rigorous programs. during the fall of 2012, students, undergraduate students of color were 37% of the degree
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enrollment. but at these research universities, they were 29%. and students of color were 41% of the students at two-year colleges. so you see a disparity there. and overall, of the research universities only nine of them are institutions that have a specific mission of serving communities of color. hispanic serving institutions, tribal colleges and historically black colleges. so the first step for addressing some of these inequities is to look at the cuts that have happened to public education. after the recession in 2008, many state governments had to cut back their funding for colleges. our research has shown that 29 states decreased their overall total investment in higher education. and 44 states decreased their investment on a per student basis.
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we also found that institutions that served a higher proportion of students of color were particularly hard hit in these -- with these cuts. so one of the things that c.a.p. has proposed to sort of address this situation is a program we call the public college quality compact. this would be a federal matching program that would jumpstart a reinvestment in state colleges. we believe that it is -- without this kind of reinvestment, we're not going to see the gains that we need. under our proposal, states would be eligible for federal matching funds if they invested at least as much as the maximum pell grant per student. and we would give extra bonus funds for serving students, pell grant students and g.i. bill students. this provision would be explicitly aimed at increasing the investment in institutions that serve students of color.
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the second piece that i wanted to talk about is our college for all proposal. we want to make the funding guarantee for going to college much more certain. we think that education beyond high school needs to be universally available. and that needs to cover tuition and fees, living expenses and making sure that students know going into high school that this award aid will be available to them. very similar to the pell promise. we think that's important because students will know in high school that college is available to them, and we want to see more high school students taking a college preparatory curriculum. and finally, i'd like to talk about what happens once a student gets to a school. it's really important that students receive support from the institution that will make it less risky for them to attend.
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that includes bridge programs that have shown to boost student progress and student success. and the other piece we think is really important are communities, which are interventions where students have shared values, shared work, and they know that other people are participating in the program with them. they have students to interact with. they have professors who are tracking their progress. in conclusion, i thank you again for having me. and i'm happy to provide follow-up. >> mr. vetter? >> i read and then listened to you with great interest on what you conclude, what your position is. and very similar to what mr. claig said yesterday as did steven thernstrom. and that is minorities, i agree there's individuals that may not want to go to college and may
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not be right for college. and there may be other opportunities for. you all tend to make these blanket statements as you did in your concluding remarks. minorities shouldn't really try for this. they're going to be disappointed. and you point to the fact that the wealth gap has not been narrowed for blacks and whites since the 1960s. and then you say they come to school -- they come to higher education not prepared because the system k-12 didn't prepare them well. you're blaming a community for a playing field that was set by discrimination in the past and discrimination in the present. as fabian fefr put yesterday on this point. the fact that wealth is such a huge divide, particularly with african-american communities is that up until the 1950s, they were prohibited from purchasing the asset of a home.
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which by and large is the main asset of wealth of minorities because of discrimination. they are based on schools and communities that have a tax base that is virtually nonexistent compared to the wealthier whiter communities. so they have schools that are underresourced. they have schools that don't have access to advance placement and college preparatory courses. to the extent the students may be hamstrung, it is because of a system that has been rigged that way in my estimation. and then to say they've only come from here to 25, they haven't reached 100, why even bother? it seems to be an inappropriate way to address this issue. if those are the concerns, we shouldn't be saying, you're never going to hit -- that seems to me to be closing off an opportunity for a group of people based on their status.
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you said minorities shouldn't even try. you must value your degrees. god knows i value my law sdreedegree from the university of michigan. i know that it opened doors for me that i had not had going to a more prestigious school. to say as a blanket minorities shouldn't try for the prestige, maybe i got more "bs" in michigan than if i had gone to a local school without prestige, maybe i would have come out of there a plus, but they would have never hired me if i hadn't come from a prestigious school. i think we're setting up the minority communities for something for failure. based on past failures of that the system has set them up for. >> again, you're misrepresenting. >> you will answer how i'm saying it or not. that's how i interpreted it. >> but let me -- well, let me
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say this. if my testimony came off, it's saying i don't think blacks or hispanics or whatever minority groups should try because -- something of that nature -- that certainly was not the intention, nor do i think it was expressed in my testimony. let's actually look at the -- i think the failure for minorities is a failure of public policy. i think public policy is hurting minorities in unintended ways. without using black, hispanic or names that might be inflammatory. let's talk about income. what percentage of college graduates today come from the bottom quartile. of the income distribution? and we know that the bottom quartile disproportionately includes minorities. let's not put it in terms of
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majority and minority. let's put it in terms of income. in the bottom 1/4 of the income distribution, in the last few years, about 10% of the graduates come from that group of people. that's 25% of the population but they're only 10% of the graduates. what was it in 1976, the first year of the pell grant was made. 12%. it was higher then than today. someone -- one of my colleagues said, well, gee, the pell grants haven't kept up. we've gone from 62% to 38%. in terms of funding. >> 72% to 36%. >> 72 to 36. but we also went from $1,400 to $5,700. in the real world, which is to say outside of higher ed, in the rest of the world, the price of bread tripled. the price of housing tripled. the price of food tripled. in real terms, the way the bureau of labor of statistics one mile away from here, less
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than a mile away from here calculated, the pell grant gone up 30%, 40%. well, why isn't it cover this much? it's because the colleges have raised their tuition. why aren't you looking at that? why aren't you looking at the producers of these services, what they're doing? they're exploiting people. they're taking these financial aid programs and raising fees. that hurts all people. but it hurts minorities more. it hurts blacks more. i'm not saying, gee, therefore blacks shouldn't go to college. no. i'm saying they're being ripped off more, relatively speaking. and that is the thrust of what i wanted to say. >> we are going to look at that because we actually did have some testimony on that yesterday. so that issue is going to be something we look at but that's not what i interpreted your remarks both written and oral to be. commissioner achtenberg? >> i wanted to talk with miss
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mclean about your observations regarding the campus-based aid programs. so you -- seog, as well as college work study, and there's a third program. >> perkins. >> perkins loan, yeah. could you talk about each of those in turn and whether or not the other two as well are ripe for reform and in the case of college work study not just the allocation but whether or not increases in college work-study might be a smart investment if our goal was to empower students in general who are already in college to achieve the baccalaureate and any observations you might have about whether or not there's
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anything pertinent in particular to persistence and degree attainment on the part of racial minorities. >> absolutely. i will start by saying something i didn't mention in my testimony is that many of you may know that campus-based programs are i think kind of on the chopping block as we approach this upcoming reauthorization so i want to state formally that we find them very valuable because of the campus-based nature. i think that's an important thing for me to say. i'll go through them individually as you asked. the first one, the supplemental educational opportunity grant, which is designed to supplement the pell grant program really is what it does, and that is a grant-based program and the aid administrator does have flexibility to sort of look at their pool of students and decide who gets those additional funds within federal parameters. so most institutions will try in some way, shape, or form to allocate those funds to pell grant recipients. i think that's a program that works very well right now.
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so in terms of it being ripe for reform i think we'd like to see more money in it but i think to the extent that it supplements in its grant dollars it's doing a good thing right now. the federal perkins program i think we could always look at expanding that program. right now it's a relatively small program. it's a $1 billion program. and we think about that in terms of the pell grant program, for example, that's very small. so i think what we might look at is expanding that program to get more institutions into it so that more can participate. and a federal work-study program, it is a program with a tremendous amount of good will both on capitol hill but with financial aid administrators and most folks in our community and i would say with that i would love to see more funding in that program and certainly that helps students as they get the paychecks throughout the semester. but you asked specifically about other benefits and there really has been research to show that it really does connect students to the institution if they can
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have a job they do to and they get kind of intertwined and have a supervisor there working with. so there's been research to say that. and certainly for a lot of students that's their first real job experience and they rely on that heavily when they graduate, on their resumes and trying to get their first jobs. >> we heard testimony on the part of chancellor white of the california state university that in particular college work study was a very important part of not only making the student connected to the university but also enabling the student perhaps to have an opportunity to do an internship inside the university or to undertake to become a lab assistant or something like that with college work-study funds, and that makes the person more likely to persist, to achieve, to graduate. so he was also an advocate of targeted work-study and -- so
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that's pretty consistent with his testimony. i'm wondering, miss baylor, if some of the recommendations ms. mclean is making ring true for your organization and if you could comment on that. >> absolutely. i agree that the work-study program should be -- connect students to universities and that it helps give them work experience to take to after school. we also would like to see an expansion of anything that would -- jobs that connect the student to their academic work. in particular to make sure that students who have economic need also have the time and the opportunity to, if they can't afford to do an unpaid internship that gives them a leg ahead, want to make sure there's an opportunity for them to do
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work that connects them to their academic work, related to fseog. our general recommendation is that we need to have more aid that is not paid back, right? especially for students at the low end of the income scale. we want them to understand that a college education is something they can attain. especially because the jobs in the economy require these skills. >> we heard testimony from king alexander regarding the funding formula for seog. and his observation was pretty consistent with yours when you said that one of the components is the sort of that hold harmless clause where you give their base -- you give them the base that they had the year before. so the older institutions that
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had need when the program was created and have been out paced enormously by newer faster growing institutions that the formula is outdated and tends to reward older institutions and give them more money. we heard in fact a statistic. all the ivy leagues combined receive $10 million in seog for 60,000 students whereas the california state university, which educates 400,000 students, receives $11 million and of their 400,000 students almost half of them are pell eligible, whereas the ivy leagues maybe under 15% are pell eligible. so a large amount of money's being invested in a very small number of needy students on the one hand and over here you have a huge number of needy students who are getting essentially
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nothing. now, perhaps that might be combined with some kind of outcome measurement. we heard earlier, and i'm sympathetic with commissioner kirsanow's concern, that solely the measurement is not where we want to be, particularly if our goal is to increase the attainment of the baccalaureate degree both in the aggregate as well as with regard to minority underachievement. but it seems to me that that seog, i hope it's not on the chopping block but it certainly might be on the redistribution block if equity is going to be more readily achieved. is that a conclusion that you would agree with or do you take
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some kind of -- is there something there that i'm missing? >> i think that's correct. >> mr. vedder? >> yeah. >> did you have an observation with regard to my statement? >> no. not -- i have no specific observation. except for one thing. the base -- what do you call it? the base. >> base guarantee. >> the base guarantee. everyone i know in higher ed with any -- it's a political thing. it's not -- it has no rational basis, any basis. i'm in complete agreement with the statements with respect to that. >> ms. baylor. >> i think one of the things we see systematically from state funding to this grant program is that institutions that are well resourced end up having more students succeed.
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and then you see these institutions that have prestige associated with them get more money and the institutions that are serving some of the neediest students seem to be facing the cuts first. we need to redistrict that. >> your federal matching program encouraging states to reinvest, one of the primary factors for the increase in tuition at least in state-funded institutions, i'm not saying it's the only factor but a primary factor has been the progressive disinvestment on the part of states on behalf of their state university systems. at least that's been the phenomenon in california, and i know that has been true in other states as well. how would a federal matching
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program work in terms of your proposal and how does that yield increased investment on the part of the state? >> so the way we would envision it is we would create a pot of money at the federal level that states would be eligible to access if they spent at least as much per student on a pell grant. in their overall statement investment in the public college system is equal as much as a pell grant for student, so $5,700. right now running the numbers we looked at it that 37 states are already over this bar and another ten states are within a couple hundred dollars of this bar. so we thought it was a bar that kind of pushed people -- pushed states a little bit but wasn't, you know, outside the realm of what seemed reasonable. and what we would say is if you participated in this program you'd be eligible for this extra funding for any money that you put back into the system, the federal government would match you.
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and we would create -- we thought that we wanted to make sure that the matching supported students from backgrounds that we wanted to see succeed, so we thought enrollment of pell-eligible students and g.i. bill-eligible students would be good measures to sort of redistribute this equity. >> may i add to my statement? you'd asked me a question. we give -- the federal government gives $50,000 per pupil, or student, or more aid to the elite private universities. the harvards, the yales, the princetons. when you take into account endowment subsidy, special privileges for people who make donations and so forth, these are schools with low pell participation. these are schools that have legacy admission standards that often discriminate against minorities.
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i don't know why you people -- you people. that's probably a wrong term to use. the commission doesn't look into this issue and take this up as a topic. i think it's something -- and it's something that by the way people on the conservative and liberal ends of the spectrum might find some agreement on. just a thought. >> commissioner narasaki followed by commissioner heriot. >> thank you so i have a couple of questions. so mr. vedder said a college degree is not a guarantee of employment. so but what i want to understand is from all of you is it seems to me that increasingly, though, it's becoming a prerequisite for many jobs. so is it correct to say that you will have many more
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opportunities for sufficient employment, paying a living wage or getting you into the middle class if you have a college degree versus if you don't? >> well, since you mentioned my name first, i would agree with that statement. college degrees, other things equal, that's an important qualification, are a better ticket to success than not having a college degree. so of course we want people to get college degrees. by the way, i'm the only one here who has actually -- except for some commissioners that actually teaches students. i'm in my 51st year of teaching. i've been teaching for 51 years. so i am a great believer in pushing college education. there is a payoff. but there is also a huge amount of risk associated with getting that degree. that was my point.
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we don't point that out. my wife's a high school guidance counselor. and we're the worst offenders. we tell everyone go to college, go to college, go to college. >> not everyone. >> i think that's what -- i think that's actually what the commission is exploring, is we are concerned that there are institutions who seem to be gaming students at the expense of students and not really concerned with them graduating and being able to use education. i'm glad you clarified that. that's very helpful. the other thing i've been concerned about really the last two days, there's been a lost focus on sort of the private good, what's in it for the student to get a college education which i think most of us agree, either college or some kind of advanced degree, whether it's vocational or something else, that these days in this global economy a high school
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degree just really isn't going to cut it for most people i think is the case. at least that's my personal observation. and i say that as somebody who has a brother who became an actor and defied all of the asian-american culture and said he wasn't going to college. and he's one of the smartest people i know. so obviously, you can succeed without a college degree. but it just makes it easier, i believe, if you have one. so what i'd like is some observations. we have some in our written testimony. what's the public good? aside from of course the hope that you will become someone who is making enough money to pay into the tax system and help drive the economy, what are some of the other goods that are associated with college degrees? >> so one of the first things i think of is greater participation in our society. right? you see people with more education beyond high school
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being better at civic engagement, and i think we'd like to see that across the board. i think that because our economy, we talk about the global economy and the 21st century economy and how close it is, it makes our country more competitive with other countries. that's not just the consumer angle that i have more tax dollars or i have more income to consume. it just makes our -- because job creators can move their jobs anywhere around the world. it's easier for them to move their jobs around the world. if we have the type of workers that they want to employ, they'll move their jobs to our shores. >> i would add to that as well. i think the engaged citizenry is a huge part of it, the national competitiveness. but also these might be more generalized as kind of the softer skills. but just the general tendency of
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college-going folks and graduates to be more open-minded and to leave having known what it's like to work with other people and to work in groups, and i think it really does a great, great thing for society as a whole. >> we actually in our hearing in new york on use of force, i asked one of the panel the question of what's the biggest link, what can we do to help law enforcement be able to make better judgments with use of force and one of the responses was the thing that correlated most with appropriate use of force was a college education, which i thought was really fascinating. the other thing -- >> mr. vedder i think wanted to answer your first question as well. >> can i finish? i'll let him answer. >> okay. i thought you were asking a second question. >> no, no. i just wanted to finish. the other observation is there's a lot of testimony here that the most likely predictor for kids to be able to successfully go to college and graduate is having
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parents who went to college. right? and i get concerned about the lack of value of having educated parents. and partly because when i was going to college i went to yale and my uncle said to my dad, why are you bothering spending all this money to help her go to yale? because she's only going to get married and you're wasting the investment. so i feel like there is an investment to having educated moms and dads, who can better help their kids not just have a better income but because they have bigger vocabularies and they're able to be more supportive of their kids growing up. i just wanted to say that. mr. vedder. >> you were asking about the public good. there are a couple of studies -- i don't know why proponents of higher ed don't look at more often by the national bureau of economic research that show that
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where you have more presence of college graduates in a work environment you get greater productivity than your non-college environment. that would be a pure public good kind of thing. there is, however, some evidence that there may be, as the late milton friedman wrote in an e-mail to me shortly before he died, that there are also some negative experiences perhaps associated with college in some cases. so it's very difficult to measure the -- it's an economics term. the experiment. another one that was often used is smoking. college graduates smoke less. that causes less secondhand smoke problems. although people that smoke die earlier and that lowers the medicare cost. you can -- i'm sorry. true.
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>> it's a somewhat grim view. i'm not sure i want to explore that one any further. i think i'll shift to the trio program. >> segue. >> yes. i'm a little sensitive on that one because my father died of emphysema. so on this issue of trio, so some of the stakeholders have suggested that there's not enough data to show that all of the programs are working as effectively as we'd want to given the investment. some have said therefore we should just end them. some have said perhaps we should remake them. maybe into more general grant program with a lot more accountability. so i'm just wondering what your recommendations, if you have any on that. >> very top level i would say don't get rid of them, right? because anything that we have, any programs that we have that are supporting students in
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school, whether or not -- i think that the idea that -- the idea of accountability is incredibly attractive in higher ed. it's something people are talking about a lot. but i think you can take accountability to every tiny -- to the point where you have very few returns. and i think the trio programs are designed to support students in college. more recently i worked for the senate help committee where we did work on for-profit colleges. and one the things that we looked at was the fact that when students came in the door they weren't getting support. and so one the most important questions is what are you giving this person access to? are you giving access to going through a door and not getting any help on the other side? that's what the trio program is there to do. so i think that measuring sort of interventions that work and saying hey, you should do this, is an effective way of calling for improvement within the trio programs.
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but sort of measuring every trio program and then ending them, you end up spending more time trying to like satisfy the you end up spending more time trying to like satisfy the accountability than you do supporting the student. >> i would agree with those remarks. i think the programs are so valuable because of the support that they provide and they're very unique in that way in terms of a federal program. so perhaps there's ways we can look at reforming them or make them better. we can always do that in public policy. but certainly eliminating the programs is not something that we would be in support of. >> okay. commissioner heriot? >> thank you, mr. chairman. >> you're welcome. >> i don't have a question so much as a request here. perhaps i should have mentioned this to some of the earlier panelists as well because they
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also brought up the topic, but i forgot. so let me try it on you. especially you, ms. mclean, because you're the one that mentioned this. i haven't been teaching quite as long as dr. vedder, but i have been teaching 26 years and i love my university. i love my colleagues. i love my colleagues at other institutions. but i also know that they have a funny habit of arguing things that are really good for them are also good for students. and so you've got to watch out there. so i'm a little bit wary of the claim that work-study is especially great because i know that work-study benefits me because i get free labor out of it and my colleagues get free labor out of it. but on the other hand, the arguments that have been made by panelists here make a lot of sense to me, the notion that keeping students on campus, you know, helps rather than having them work at the pizza parlor, they're actually feeling like they're part of the community, they might stay around longer. you mentioned there's some empirical evidence on this. could you cite that to me, send it to me when you get a chance? >> absolutely.
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i'd be happy to. >> great. >> any other questions? commissioners? commissioner kirsanow. >> thanks, mr. chairman. thanks to the panelists. dr. vedder, you had mentioned that because of griggs versus duke power the value of a college diploma has been for lack of a better term a credential that's almost a must-have credential because of the fact that in griggs versus due power a high school diploma was ostensibly used to bar certain people from employment even though it didn't have any job-relatedness. is there -- the title of this hearing is the effect of access to persistent attainment of college degrees on socioeconomic movement of minorities. do you see the credentialism that seems to be pervasive among colleges, grade inflation, the explosion of remediation courses as something that -- first of
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all, not all college degrees are the same. not all disciplines are the same. not all colleges are the same. do you see there being a dilution of the college degree and/or a reduction in social -- or socioeconomic mobility as the result of this kind of devaluing of the college degree? >> i do. i think it's -- the college degree at one time was an important screening device. it still is an important screening device for employers that provides a relatively low-cost way of differentiating what is on average a bright disciplined potential workforce, those are degrees as opposed to those without -- who on average are less bright, less motivated, less knowledgeable, less skillful and so forth, maybe less cognitive skills. i don't know about that.
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and as more and more people go to college, and many of them are getting degrees to pick up on an earlier panel discussion, where the amount of actual learning outcomes that have occurred are pretty dubious, that no longer is the bachelor's degree -- it's starting to lose its cachet. except, except at the elite schools. because the elite schools are still thought of as being the best and the brightest. so if you look at the earnings, in my testimony i took the earnings of 22 elite schools. i don't know if michigan made the list. northwestern did, commissioner. but the yuppie schools. 22 -- actually, i took all private ones, i think. 122 -- 22 private schools at the top using pay scales and 22 from the "forbes" ranking of colleges and universities, which i by the way do, in the bottom.
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randomly selected. i added a couple hbcus in the list to make sure there was a minority representation among the schools. the earnings were right out of the box 35% higher. in the elite schools. then the non-elite schools. so we can send you to a college or we can send you to a real college. and at mid-career the differential had widened to well over 50%. the kids that go to the elite schools not only make more to begin with. they get larger percentage advances. and you know, i think that's partly a consequence of this huge expansion of the system that has devalued the degree, it's led to credential inflation. now we have 115,000 janitors with bachelor's degrees. i'm waiting for my university to put a masters in janitorial science degree program in any day now. we've got to have more and more
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credentials. for what purpose? what's it serving? have we got greater income equality in the united states? what have we achieved from this? and i'd love to talk to you privately because i thought the questions you asked at the last panel were particularly poignant with regards to what are the outcomes? you know, what is it we're trying to achieve? and we don't have good information. do we know -- the united states government does not publish data on the graduation rates of pell grant recipients. now, we spend $35 billion a year on pell grants. we don't publish the data. if you call up arne duncan tomorrow and say we want the data, he won't give it to you. now, maybe you're the civil rights commissioner, maybe you've got more power. i don't know. but you don't have it. that is a crime.
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that is an absolute -- >> is it collected or do they just not publish it? >> the collect data on pell grants -- they do publish data by colleges. pell grant percent. but they don't publish it -- they publish what percentage at uva or college pell grant. we know that. but we don't know it by -- as a general statistic. >> any other questions? commissioner narasaki? >> i had hoped there would be someone from an hbcu testifying, and apparently they weren't able to come. so my understanding, i was talking to someone who had an hbcu down i think it was in alabama or mississippi. they were telling me that actually hbcus have a large percentage of non-african-american students attending.
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and the hbcus end up doing a lot of remediation support. so i'm just wondering if any of you have expertise to comment on the hbcu system. >> there is a general truth to what you say. there has been an expansion in the non-african-american component in hbcu enrollments. there's a broader problem with hbcus which is there has been a very significant decline in enrollments at a large number of schools in recent years. and this is -- it's getting to the very serious point. i could name specific examples. but it probably wouldn't be appropriate. >> i don't really have a lot of information. what is your exact question? i'm sorry. could you repeat it? >> i'm interested in the percentage of non-african-americans.
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>> i don't have that number off the top of my head. but i would imagine that it has grown, you know, from a really, really tiny percent to like a small percent. right? so i don't think we're seeing a sea change but perhaps megan can -- >> i don't have that information now either but that's something we can look up for you and get. >> thank you. >> well, that brings us to the end of the panel. i see no other questions from our commissioners. i want to thank you all for participating today. and i remind folks that the record remains open for the next 30 days. so any of you can supplement, and members of the public can also do that. and i'll remind you how you can do it. you can either mail it by regular mail to the u.s. commission on civil rights, office of civil rights evaluation, 1331 pennsylvania avenue northwest, washington, d.c., 20425. that's suite 1150. or you can send it via e-mail to
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public comments@usccr.gov. i want to thank my commissioners for participating so well today and engaging this topic. and again, thanks to our staff for organizing today, and thanks to c-span for being here all day. thank you very much. the meeting is now adjourned at 3:45 eastern time. it's 50th anniversary of a cambridge university debate with william william william f.buckley. first two contrasting opinions of race in the 21 gs century. then an examination of the debate performance and arguments. and later, princeton university professor of law in light of the debate 50 years ago.
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