The drop-out crisis (II)

We've talked about "wicked problems" before -- problems that involve complex social processes, multiple actors, and murky causal pathways (link, link). A particularly important example of such a problem currently confronting the United States is the high school dropout crisis. The crisis is particularly intense in high-poverty areas, but it is found in all states and all parts of urban, suburban, and rural America. (Here is an earlier discussion of these issues; link.)

The consequences of this crisis are severe. More than a million high school students a year drop out of high school. Over 50% of these dropouts come from fewer than 20% of high schools. These young people have virtually no feasible pathways to a middle class life or a job in the 21st-century economy. And this in turn means a permanent underclass of unemployed or underemployed young people. This in turn has consequences for crime rates, social service budgets, incarceration rates, and a serious productivity gap for our economy as a whole. So the problem is an enormously important one. (The Alliance for Excellent Education is a national organization devoted to tracking this issue; link. Another important resource is Building a Grad Nation ((link) from the America's Promise Alliance.)

Changing this current situation requires change of behavior on the parts of many independent parties -- teenagers, parents, teachers, principals, elected officials, and foundation officers, to name only some of the most obvious participants.

There are many social actors who have an interest in this problem and a commitment to trying to resolve it. Teachers, principals, school boards; mayors and governors; non-profit organizations; foundations; universities and schools of education; citizens' groups -- there are committed and concerned actors throughout the country that are highly motivated to attempt to solve the problem.

But it is very, very hard to marshal these actors into effective attacks on the causes of this crisis. One part of the problem is strategic -- what are the interventions that can work on a large scale? How can a school system introduce changes in behavior and organization that really change the outcomes in a measurable way?

Another part of the problem is a coordination problem. How can we succeed in gaining commitment and cooperation across this range of actors, even if we have some credible strategies at hand? It often seems that every actor has a different theory of the problem, and often it is difficult to gain concerted action across diverse actors. A foundation has one strategy; a school board has a different theory; and the teachers themselves work on the basis of a different understanding of the problem as well. All are well motivated; but there is a clash of efforts.

In this context the Diplomas Now initiative is particularly encouraging. It is focused on a national initiative to target the "drop out factories" through a clear theory of how to create turn-around schools. It is referred to as a civic Marshall Plan. It is based on careful empirical research. It has developed a clear theory about how interventions with children through the schools can impact persistence through graduation. It has mobilized a strategic group of partners -- CityYear, Communities in Schools, and Talent Development at Johns Hopkins. And it has an ambitious and effective national strategy that is already being implemented.

And the most impressive fact is that Diplomas Now is beginning to work. There are DN schools in some of the toughest urban contexts in America; these schools are showing real measurable progress; and the example is spreading to other cities and systems. Concrete evidence of these successes is highlighted by a wide range of committed leaders, academics, and corps members at the CityYear National Leadership Conference in Washington (link).

So maybe we can have some cautious optimism that our wicked problems can be solved, with sufficient commitment and persistence from a range of actors.

University as a causal structure

An earlier post laid out a case for a modest social holism, in the form of a set of arguments for the idea that there are social forces and causal powers that are relatively autonomous from the features of the individuals who constitute them (link). These ideas parallel some of those offered by Dave Elder-Vass that were discussed in a recent post. I hold that this modest holism is compatible with the ideas of methodological localism (link) and the requirement that social causes require microfoundations (link, link). At the same time, it helps make sense of the fairly obvious point that social institutions, norms, and linguistic communities exercise powerful influence over the thoughts and behaviors of individuals.

The causal processes linking institution and individuals appear to be fully two-directional, with reinforcing feedback loops. The institution consists of a set of rules, processes, and role-players. The rules are both formal (laws, standard practice guides, by-laws) and informal (long-standing and widely recognized practices and norms governing specific kinds of activity). Some of the role players have the role of enforcing the rules and incentivizing the desired behaviors. These "enforcers" may act on the basis of a range of levels of understanding and commitment; so enforcement itself is variable. Ordinary participants within the institution are subject to the incentives and sanctions created by the rules and the enforcers; so their behavior is to some extent responsive to the rules. And ordinary participants in turn have internalized some understanding of the core processes and regulations of the institution -- and are (in varying degrees of involvement) prepared to encourage or sanction the behavior of their peers based on their understanding of the rules.

This description raises a number of theoretical issues. (1) What social processes establish the relative degree of continuity of the rules and practices of the institution? What prevents "drift" away from the rules of a given moment? (2) What social and agentic processes lead individuals to conform to the rules, and under what circumstances do individuals subvert or evade the rules? (3) What social processes ensure a reasonable degree of commitment by "agents" (officers, managers, directors) of the institution to its foundational rules and practices? How is an alignment between rules, agents, and participants established and maintained?

We might imagine that there are "tipping points" when it comes to adherence to the institution's norms, rules, and practices. When a sufficient number of agents or participants sincerely endorse the rules and adhere to them, this leads other agents to do so as well. When rule evasion is perceived to be common, this probably leads to a precipitous decline in rule adherence. So widespread conformance is itself a causal factor in the persistence of the rules into the next time period.

But how do we go beyond these general statements about structural causation? It may be helpful to think through a familiar example -- the ways in which a specific institution like a university both shapes and influences the behavior of many individuals, and the ways in which its own internal functions and culture are themselves constituted by the behaviors, beliefs, attitudes, and morés of the individuals who fall within its ambit. Here is a sketch of the functional organization of a fictitious university:

The diagram has place-holders for formal, explicit rules and procedures (by-laws and operating regulations) and informal norms and practices; it has a sketch of some typical processes and transactions within which actors need to make various performances (tenure evaluation processes, research account oversight, purchasing decisions); and it identifies core "enforcer and incentivizer" roles -- CFO, provost, dean, auditors ... The actions that take place within the university generally fall within the scope of one or more of these regulations and norms.  Actors (faculty members, front-line staff, administrators) are generally aware of the procedures that regulate their actions, and they either conform or deviate from the procedures.  If they conform, generally things go well for them; if they deviate (submit false receipts for travel reimbursement) they are often detected and punished.  So behavior of actors within the institution shows a measurable level of conformance with regulations and norms.  And there are direct forms of oversight, reward, and punishment that serve to reinforce compliance.  Finally, to close the circle -- the enforcers and incentivizers themselves fall within a circle of appraisal and accountability; so if their behavior deviates from what the standards and norms of the institution require, there is a likelihood of discovery and remedial action by others.

Outside the scope of the formal and informal norms of the institution, there are a variety of strands of institutional culture.  Faculty, for example, find themselves in specific social settings within the university -- department meetings, faculty clubs, research seminars, etc. -- in which they gain exposure to local attitudes and values.  And, as anyone who has spent much time in a university knows, these experiences often lead up to a fairly stable institutional culture among faculty -- in a department or division, or in the university as a whole (link).  The faculty in a liberal arts college have a rather different culture from that of the faculty at a large research university.  And liberal arts college faculties differ among themselves as well in this respect.

There is another kind of causal influence that is indicated in the first diagram above -- the fact that universities also have relations of influence with other universities.  So if University A is looking to refine or modify its employee benefits policies, it is likely to examine the best practices of University B and C as well; and it is likely to adopt a few of those best practices.  So the network of learning and emulation that exists across institutions is another form of causal influence at the level of the social structure.  Here again, it is not difficult to disaggregate this causal mechanism into specific individual-level actions -- attendance at an ACE conference, a site visit to University B by several representatives of University A, the drafting of a new policy by those individuals when they return home for consideration by a deliberative body, and the ultimate selection of the new policy by the president of the university.

So it isn't difficult to specify the ways in which the institution and its components exercise "macro" causal impact on the behavior of individuals within a university.  An organization develops specific arrangements to solve problems of coordination, incentives, and rule enforcement; and these social arrangements have a strong influence on the behavior of the individuals who live within the institution.  But likewise, it is not difficult to specify how these rules, norms, and enforcement mechanisms are embodied in the actions and mental states of a set of individuals.  The people who occupy positions of influence within this organization have been "trained" by the organization to do their jobs; the skills learned through this training (and through their experience in the position over time) are embodied in their cognitive systems as "managerial skills"; and their motivations and behaviors themselves are subject to a degree of institutional control.  (A dean who refuses to accept the responsibility of maintaining fiscal balance in his or her unit will soon be removed.) This causal system is indeed cyclical: both the organizational components and the participants have history and skills developed by past experience that allow them to function adeptly within the system.  The participants have learned their university "habitus" from prior experience of the university; and the university's rules, norms, and procedures are in turn embodied in the present in the habitus of the current members of the university, and the embodied traces of its norms and rules in the form of written regulations.

Education a leveler?

The role of education in social inequalities is difficult to assess, because it seems to have contradictory tendencies.  On the one hand, improving access to education at all levels -- from elementary school to graduate school -- levels the playing field because it enhances the ability of everyone affected to realize their human talents and to pursue their goals with a greater foundation of cognitive and mental skills.  Closing the literacy gap, the numeracy gap, or the technology gap across all of society gives the previously disadvantaged population a better chance to compete for success in seeking employment or creating other economic and social benefits for themselves and their families.  Traditional sources of social inequality -- positions of privilege in social hierarchies, privileged access to political benefits, disproportionate ownership of land and other forms of productive property -- are to some extent blunted by a greater degree of equality of access to good schooling and the knowledge and skills it provides.  So we might say that improving the quality and reach of a society's educational system should be expected to reduce existing inequalities.

On the other hand, access to education amplifies everyone's talents -- elite and disadvantaged alike.  And more importantly, education proceeds through specific, concrete social institutions -- schools and universities -- and the quality and effectiveness of these educational institutions varies enormously across the face of a complex society.  It is possible -- perhaps likely -- that these variations in quality will correspond to populations and neighborhoods in ways that align with patterns of prior advantage and disadvantage.  So it is likely that we will have high-quality, effective schools providing education to advantaged groups; and low-quality drop-out factories providing education to the disadvantaged institutions.  In this case, the education system might actually have the effect of deepening and entrenching the social inequalities that exist across groups.

I've put this point in hypothetical terms.  But we know that across much of the United States, this isn't simply a hypothetically possibility.  It is largely a fact on the American cityscape that schools vary in quality by race, poverty, and social status at the K-12 level.  Affluent people are often served by good public schools, and they have the financial ability to choose good private schools if they are unsatisfied.  Poor people are usually served by schools with severe disadvantages -- under-resourced, dilapidated, endemic management crisis, disaffected teachers and principals.  So it is hard to make the case that American public education is a powerful force for decreasing social inequalities.

So what about American universities?  Here the picture is more favorable.  High school graduates who have gained the intellectual abilities required for succeeding at the university level -- admittedly, often a minority of all graduates -- have a range of choices that can genuinely erase most of the disadvantages of birth.  A first-generation freshman from a low-income family can nonetheless gain a great engineering education or a great education in art history at an affordable public university; and this undergraduate success in turn positions him or her for future successes in graduate school or employment.  So American universities do in fact deliver much of the promise of the theory of democratic education: broad access without regard to status or income, and substantial enhancement of life prospects as a result.

That said, American universities continue to reproduce a more specific form of elite advantage.  Here is a January 2011 Newsweek review of America's elites and their university degrees.  The snapshot it provides is a familiar one; elite positions in our society are disproportionately held by graduates of elite universities.  Think of the number of US presidents and members of Congress with Ivy League degrees.  Plainly our political elite was disproportionately produced by an elite set of universities (link).  But similar results seem to obtain in the business world as well.  The same Newsweek story reports that elite universities also produced the largest bloc of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, with Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania leading the list, and Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio State providing a significant number of CEOs as well.  Put the point this way: entry into an elite university greatly increases an individual's likelihood of becoming a member of the political and business elites in America.  It is true, of course, that talented young people attend these universities, and it is predictable that they will be successful.  But there seems to be more at work here than simply "elite schools educate the most talented young people of their generation."

Rather, it seems likely that the pathways that lead to career success are themselves facilitated by the social resources created for the graduate by his or her university: networks of alumni, the prestige of the degree, and the classmates and their families whom they come to know.  The density of elite social networks seems to be a key part of the story; avenues into elite careers are facilitated by these contacts and social advantages.  Contacts in government, politics, journalism, business, and Wall Street are richly available to the rising elite university graduate.  An elite university provides a great reserve of social capital for the graduate. and this is unrelated to the actual level of achievement and talent that the graduate possesses.

Here are two empirical studies that complement these suspicions -- one in France in the 1960s and the other in the United States in the 1990s.  Both studies are interested in essentially the same question: to what extent do universities (French or American) provide equitable opportunities across social groups?  To what extent are the universities in these countries effective agents for bringing about greater social equality?

First, France.  One of Pierre Bourdieu's earliest works is a study (with Jean-Claude Passeron) of the social inequalities that are reproduced by the French educational system (Les Héritiers : Les étudiants et la culture, 1964).  Essentially Bourdieu and Passeron provide empirical data from 1961-62 that demonstrate that the population of French university students was highly unrepresentative of the social categories of the larger population.  The likelihood of attending university was many times higher for some economic classes than others.  Here is a graphic that captures the heart of Bourdieu and Passeron's findings:

In spite of the pre-Pixar graphics, I think Edward Tufte would approve; the graph displays very economically the fundamental relationship that the authors want to highlight in the data. The left panel of the graph represents the sizes of the populations associated with various social groups as well as the number of students whose background stems from the group.  The right panel aggregates these data by computing the percentage of students from each who enroll in a university. For children from the humble social categories, including workers and farmers, the likelihood of attending university was very small, ranging from .7% to 3.6%.  Higher social categories had substantially greater rates of attendance, ranging from 16.4% for the children of the owners of businesses to 29.6% and 58.5% for the children of lesser and higher civil servants and professionals.  From top to bottom, then, the disparity of odds for different social groups is staggering.  The children of professionals and high civil servants were 85 times more likely to attend university than hired farm workers, and they were 42 times more likely to attend than the children of blue collar workers.  They also look carefully at academic success and choice of professions by the social class of the students' parents -- a perspective which continues through the present.  Naturally, these findings are specific to a point in time -- 1961-62.  No doubt these disparities have narrowed in the fifty years since Bourdieu and Passeron did this research.  But they asked the right questions, and they established a perspective on French education that has continued to guide research in France.   

And second, the United States.  William Bowen, Martin Kurzweil, and Eugene Tobin provide a careful, empirically detailed and historically nuanced treatment of these issues in Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education (2005).  One chapter of Equity and Excellence is particularly relevant to the question here.  In "The Elite Schools: Engines of Opportunity or Bastions of Privilege?" the authors consider a large data set of admissions and outcomes at 19 selective colleges and universities (94).  It is a fascinating analysis.  

Their conclusion is a nuanced one:

By providing an increasingly straight path to entry and graduation for academically talented students from all socioeconomic strata, these prestigious institutions are fulfilling their historical promise to serve as "engines of opportunity." On the other hand, the disproportionately large number of graduates of these schools who come from the top rungs of American society indicate that they also remain "bastions of privilege."  Vigorous recruiting notwithstanding, the applicant pools of these schools contain only a small number of well-prepared students from families of modest circumstances.  This is the "controlling reality." (135)

They also find that students from disadvantaged socioeconomic origins are severely underrepresented in the elite institutions included in their study (parallel to the Bourdieu-Passeron findings):

Students whose families are in the bottom quartile of the national income distribution represent roughly 10 to 11 percent of all students at these schools, and first-generation college students represent a little over 6 percent of these student populations.... Both groups are heavily underrepresented at the institutions in our study.  ...  When we combine the two measures of SES, and estimate the fraction of the enrollment at these schools that is made up of students who are both first-generation college-goers and from low-income families, we get a figure of about 3 percent.  Nationally, the share of the same-age population who fell into this category was around 19 percent in 1992, making this doubly disadvantaged group even more underrepresented than students with just one of the two characteristics. (98)

This looks at the issue from the point of view of "probability of attendance" -- the focus of the Bourdieu-Passeron analysis.  What about the outcomes of students from different socioeconomic groups who have successfully graduated from the elite institutions that Bowen et al survey?  Does SES status influence career success?  Bowen and his colleagues find that it does.  First, a very crude measure: "The average income in 1994 or 1995 of a former student from the bottom income quartile was over $67,000; former students from the middle two quartiles had average incomes of between $73,000 and $75,000; and those from the top quartile had average earnings of nearly $86,000" (123).  And an even more telling statistic when it comes to the sociology of American elites: "Just under 2% of former students from the bottom income quartile had a very high income 15 years out of college, while almost 6 percent of former students from families in the highest income quartile were themselves already in the top income category" (123).  So socioeconomic background makes a difference all the way through; high SES graduates are three times as likely to have very high income than their equally qualified classmates from low SES circumstances.  This certainly suggests that elite universities fail in the democratic ideal of leveling the playing field for persons of talent.

So it isn't really possible to answer the simple question with a simple answer: do modern educational systems in democracies level inequalities or increase inequalities?  It would seem that they do some of both; they provide access to disadvantaged people who can then leverage success for themselves and their families, and they also create mechanisms of recruitment into elite organizations that are anything but egalitarian.

 

The global talent race

We have a lot of anxiety in the United States about the quality and effectiveness of our educational system, particularly at the elementary and secondary levels. And the anxiety is justified. A large percentage of our school-age population lives in high poverty neighborhoods, and they are served by schools that fail to allow them to make expected progress in needed academic skills, including especially reading, writing, and math. And we have high school dropout rates in many cities that exceed 25% -- leading to the creation of large cohorts of young adults who lack the basic skills necessary to do productive work in our society. So at a time when personal and social productivity depends on problem-solving, innovation, and invention, many of our young people in the US haven't developed their talents sufficiently to make these contributions.

How does this problem look from an international perspective? Other countries and regions seem to have taken more seriously the macro-role that education and talent will play in their futures, and are preparing the ground for superior outcomes on a population-wide basis. Here is one example -- Hong Kong. Though part of the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong retains a degree of autonomy in its social policies, and education is one of those areas where Hong Kong government can take special initiatives.

There is a pervasive feeling in Hong Kong that educational success is absolutely crucial. School children are strongly motivated, their families support them fully, and the city is trying to ensure that all children have access to effective schools. And there is a lot of civic focus on the quality and reach of the Hong Kong universities as well.  Business and civic leaders recognize the key role that well-educated Hong Kong graduates will play in the economic vitality of the city in the future. And university leaders are keenly interested in enhancing the quality of the undergraduate and graduate curricula  Here is a valuable survey report by Professor Leslie N.K. Lo, director of the Hong Kong Institute of Educational Research at Hong Kong Chinese University (http://www.hkpri.org.hk/bulletin/8/nklo.html). The report documents the priority placed on quality of education by the authorities, even as it raises concerns about the effective equality of education in the city. Here is a report on the state of education research and reform in HK (http://www.springerlink.com/content/gt11u17672j34372/fulltext.pdf).  The report raises the possibility that Hong Kong's educational system is skewed by income and language: low-income families attending Cantonese-speaking schools may not get a comparable education to that provided to middle- and upper-income families in English-speaking schools.  But it isn't easy to find detailed educational research that would validate this point.

One very interesting data point concerning the equality of access provided by Hong Kong education can be located in the distribution of family incomes among students in Hong Kong's elite universities.  Basically the data indicate that the Hong Kong universities are reasonably well representative of the full income spectrum of the city.  About half of students in the elite universities in Hong Kong come from families in the lower half of the income distribution (or in other words, the median student's family income is equal to the median family income of the city).  This compares to a markedly different picture in selective public universities in the United States, where the median student family income is at about the 85th percentile of the US distribution of family income.  In other words, universities in the United States are over-represented by students and families from the higher end of the income distribution; whereas the Hong Kong university student population is relatively evenly distributed over the full Hong Kong income distribution.  (These data are based on a summary report prepared by researchers at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.)  

This statistical fact gives rise to a suggestive implication: that students of all income levels in Hong Kong are roughly as likely to attend Hong Kong's elite universities.  And this contrasts sharply with the situation in the United States, where attendance in elite universities is sharply skewed by family income (Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education (Thomas Jefferson Foundation Distinguished Lecture Series)).  

The issue is important, because in the world-wide race for talent cultivation, those countries that do the best job of cultivating the talents of all their citizens are surely going to do the best in the economic competition that is to come.  Countries that waste talent by denying educational opportunities to poor people or national minorities are missing an opportunity for innovation, creativity, and problem-solving that can be crucial for their success in the global environment.  And if Hong Kong, China, and other East Asian countries are actually succeeding in creating educational systems that greatly enhance equality of opportunity across income, this will be a large factor in their future success.

The dropout crisis

The United States faces a huge dropout crisis. In some cities the high school graduation rate is less than 50% -- sometimes as low as 25%. And this means devastating poverty for the dropouts, as well as continuing social blight for their communities. We might say, though, that the graduation rate is only the symptom of the problem; the causes include high poverty neighborhoods and failed elementary and middle schools, and the effects extend far into the future.

So in a way, it is too simple to call it a dropout crisis; rather, it is a schooling crisis (extending back into the early grades) and a poverty crisis (extending forward for one or more generations for the young people who are affected and their eventual children). And it is a particularly serious national problem, at the beginning of a century where the most important resource will be educated people and talented creators. How can we be optimistic about the prospects for innovation and discovery in the American economy when we are wasting so much human talent?

The crisis itself is widely recognized (link). What we haven't figured out yet is a success strategy for resolving the current system of failure. Is it even possible to envision a system of public education in high-poverty cities that actually succeeds in achieving the 90-90-90 goal (90% graduation rate, 90% achievement at grade level, 90% continuation to post-secondary education)? Or are we forced to conclude that the problem is too great, and that 50% of inner-city children are doomed to lives of continuing poverty and social blight? If so, the future is dim for our county as a whole: rising crime, social problems, civil conflict, and increasingly gated communities are our future. And, inevitably, our economic productivity as a country will falter. So the whole country loses if we don't solve this problem.

The current environment for solving the schooling problems is unpromising. Urban school systems across the country face staggering fiscal crises -- a $300 million deficit in Detroit, $480 million in Los Angeles, and similar amounts in other cities. So school systems are forced into a cycle of cost-cutting, removing some of the critical resources that might have addressed the failure for their students. And the school systems themselves -- administrators, teachers, and unions -- are all too often resistant to change. The current Federal educational reform program, Race to the Top (link), is designed to stimulate new thinking and more successful reforms; but the jury is out.

The situation requires a whole-hearted commitment to solving this problem. Solutions will require the best available research on learning and schooling; they will require substantial resources; and they will require significant collaboration among a number of stakeholders. And the solutions can't be simply one-off demonstration projects; we need a national strategy that will work at scale. There are a million new drop-outs a year. We need to reduce that number by 80% in the next decade if we are to be successful.

These are pretty daunting challenges. So consider this proposed solution that seems to have the ability to satisfy each of these constraints. This is the Diplomas Now program that is becoming increasingly visible in education reform and the press (link). The program is a research-based strategy for helping children make academic progress at every step of the way. It recognizes the need for much more intensive adult contact for at-risk children. It acknowledges the need for providing a host of community services in high-poverty schools. And it places high academic standards at the center of the strategy.

The program is based on important research undertaken by Robert Balfanz at Johns Hopkins University (link). Balfanz finds that it is possible to identify high school drop-outs very early in their school experience. He identifies the ABC cluster of criteria as diagnostic of future high school failure: absenteeism, behavior, and course performance. Sixth-graders who show any one of these characteristics have only a 25% likelihood of completing high school. So, he reasons, let's use these early warning signs and intervene with children when there is still an opportunity to get them back on track. This requires careful tracking of each child, and it requires that schools have the resources to address the problems these children are having in the early grades. But Balfanz argues that the payoff will be exactly what we need: these children will be back on track and will have a high likelihood of graduating from high school.

So what does the strategy need? First, it needs a good and well-implemented tracking system. Second, it needs teachers and principals who have the professional development needed to allow them to assist the progress of their students. But it needs two other things as well: it needs a corps of dedicated young people who will function as fulltime near-peer tutors and mentors for at risk children. And it needs a set of wrap-around social and community services that are available to children and their families in the schools.

This is where community service and stakeholder collaboration come in. CityYear is a vibrant national youth service organization within Americorps (link). CityYear has always placed involvement in high-poverty schools at the core of its service agenda for the young people who give a year of their lives to change the world. Now CityYear has entered into agreements with the Diplomas Now program to support focused interventions in a growing number of schools in a number of cities. (Here is a CityYear report.) And Communities in Schools is a national organization that is able to provide the other piece (link). Communities in Schools provides several social work professionals and supervision for each DN school. Finally, the Talent Development program at Johns Hopkins provides training for DN teachers and administrators.

The Diplomas Now model has now been applied in a number of schools around the country, and the results are highly encouraging (link). Results for a sixth grade class in Feltonville School in Philadelphia are representative: from 2008 to 2009 absenteeism dropped by 80%, negative behavior dropped by 45%, and the number of students with failures in math or english dropped by about 80%. Participants and observers attribute the successes measured here to the synergies captured by the combined approach. But a key factor is the presence of caring young adults in the lives of these children. (video)

These are amazing and encouraging results. But we have to ask the question, what would it take to scale this solution for all of Los Angeles, Detroit, or Chicago? The answer is that it will require a major investment. But it will also return many times that amount in increased productivity and lower incarceration and social service costs.

Here are some estimates from CityYear planning for the challenge of scaling up the Diplomas Now solution. The goal the organization has adopted is an ambitious one: to have CityYear teams in all schools that generate 50% of dropouts in the city. In Detroit CityYear teams currently serve 8 schools and 4,600 students with 65 corps members. In order to reach the goal, CityYear Detroit will need to expand to 39 schools, serving 26,290 students, including 9,400 at-risk students, with 403 corps members. This expansion will be costly; federal, school, and private funding would increase from $3.8 million to $12.8 million. But the five-year return on investment is massive. A Northeastern University study estimates the benefit of converting one dropout into a graduate at $292,000, aggregating to a net social benefit of $686,000,000. The returns are enormous. Nationally the total annual cost of the CityYear program would be just under $200 million by 2016, with other program costs perhaps doubling this amount. But the value of success is a staggering number: net social benefits from reducing the drop-out rate estimated in the range of $10 billion.

So it seems that we now know that the skepticism that is often expressed about inner-city school failure is misplaced. There are intensive strategies for success that should work in any school. There is a cost to these programs. But there are many thousands of young people who are eager to pick up the responsibility. Their civic engagement and pragmatic idealism are inspiring. We need strong support from our government, foundations, and private sources in order to make school failure a thing of the past.

(Here are a couple of earlier posts on this topic; post, post, post.)

Revitalizing our cities

It is hard to think of an American city that is doing really well these days.  Dense urban poverty in the core, super-high rates of unemployment, failing schools for many urban children, high rates of crime, chronic and overwhelming fiscal crises resulting from too little public revenue for needed public services, and health outcome discrepancies that mark debilitating life disadvantages for urban people -- these seem to be fairly widespread features of cities from Miami to Cleveland to Los Angeles to Chicago to Detroit.

The most recent victim of the urban crisis in the area of publicly provided social services in my city, Detroit, is indicative; this week it was announced that Detroit's Neighborhood Services Organization would lose 2/3 of its funding effective immediately (link).  This program reaches out to Detroit's homeless people and provides transition assistance permitting 1000 people per year to return to housed status.  It is now forced to close down its operations entirely until October 1, since the program has already expended 1/3 of its budget for 2009-10.  No one disputes that NSO is doing great work and returning multiples of benefits relative to its budget; but the state's fiscal crisis has been passed on to this effective, people-oriented program.  (CEO Sheilah Clay was featured as a guest on the Craig Fahle show on WDET today -- one of the best parts of the urban Detroit dial.  Thanks, Craig!)

So cities are suffering from very significant structural disadvantages in the United States today.  And yet, as Richard Florida argues so persistently and so correctly, cities are crucial to the future of the United States and the rest of the world (link).  When they are healthy, they create a concentration of talent, innovation, and synergy that simply cannot be beaten.  So we need healthy cities and metropolitan regions if we are to thrive in the twenty-first century.

So what can be done, given that the deck seems to be stacked against our cities?  This evening Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation and former president of the University of Pennsylvania, gave an important lecture on this subject at Wayne State University in its Van Dusen Forum on Urban Issues.  Rodin is an ideal speaker on this subject, because the University of Pennsylvania developed very strong urban renewal strategies aimed at West Philadelphia during her tenure, and because the Rockefeller Foundation has taken urban revitalization as one of its core goals for quite a few decades. Rodin is the author of an important book about the process that unfolded in Philadelphia around the University of Pennsylvania (The University and Urban Revival: Out of the Ivory Tower and Into the Streets), and it is worth reading.  She estimates that there are roughly 50 "megaregions" in the United States -- Detroit Metro, Chicago-Land, ... -- and that these megaregions represent 65% of the population and a higher percentage of all economic activity.  So healthy development of American cities is enormously important. But likewise, the institutions that find themselves deeply integrated into the geography of these cities urgently need a future in which their cities begin to grow more habitable, healthy, and equitable.  Here is a memorable line from the speech -- "Blight of the city becomes the plight of the university."

What actors and strategies can help attain a positive trajectory of urban revitalization?  Rodin's central thrust is that universities and health systems can serve as "anchor" institutions in cities, and that they can design strategies that substantially improve the economic development and quality of life of the cities they inhabit.  (She calls these institutions "eds and meds".)  They provide very significant employment opportunities and purchasing power in the city; and more important, they necessarily make significant investments in real estate and infrastructure in the city.  So in principle, it is credible that the resources of these institutions could be used in ways that leverage positive change in the cities in which they live.

But Rodin draws several very important lessons from the example of Penn and Philadelphia.  There needs to be a broad and sustained institutional commitment to making strategic decisions around the goal of enhancing the process of urban development.  The strategies can't be "one-off" -- they need to be sustained and thoughtful.  Strategies need to be coherent and comprehensive -- not piecemeal and stop-and-go.  Third, she emphasizes that successful revitalization strategies require us to think innovatively.  Existing solutions haven't worked; we need to bring fresh thinking to the situations we confront and the outcomes we want to achieve.  And, finally, she emphasizes over and over the need for partnership and community participation in the plans that the institution arrives at.  Full, uninhibited partnership is essential if any of these strategies are to work.  So communication, partnership, and genuine collaboration with all stakeholders is essential to a successful strategy. Another memorable line -- "Urban revitalization can't be done for the community or to the community; it must be done with the community."

The examples that Rodin offered from Philadelphia largely had to do with neighborhood revitalization and investments by the university in stabilizing the neighborhoods surrounding it in West Philadelphia.  For example, the university bought dozens of homes and buildings in the neighborhoods, renovated them, and leased them back to residents and businesses; and, significantly, it did so at a loss.  The idea was to make attractive properties available to city residents and businesses, bringing housing, children, and consumers into once-blighted neighborhoods.  Another example -- she highlighted crime and safety on the streets as a key issue; so the university organized a program for street lighting in a number of neighborhoods.  The new lighting system invited people back into the streets; but more people in the streets in turn reduced the prevalence of crime.  A third example -- she talked about a mortgage incentive program the university offered to faculty and staff, to give them an incentive to live in the targeted neighborhoods.  In other words, through a targeted and sustained investment strategy in real estate and neighborhoods the university was able to help Philadelphia achieve meaningful change.

The upshot of these examples comes down to two basic causal ideas: invest in real estate in ways that invite people to live and work in the central city; and find ways of changing behaviors so that the neighborhoods will be increasingly attractive.  Crucially, Rodin suggests that the university's investment is a sizable one; but it is a small fraction of the total investment in these neighborhoods that eventually comes about as residents, business owners, and investors acquire more confidence in the safety and stability of the neighborhoods.  So the change of behavior is really essential to the whole plan; unless people begin occupying homes, purchasing in grocery stores and other businesses, and enjoying parks and cinemas in these neighborhoods, nothing fundamental will change.  No single institution has the resources to turn West Philadelphia into Back Bay, but early investments by "anchor institutions" may pay off through their ability to leverage many times those resources through other sources.

What Rodin didn't talk about so much in her lecture is how the research energies of the university can be a positive factor in urban revitalization.  But this aspect of the university's ability to contribute is crucial.  The social problems that modern cities face are "wicked" problems -- big, messy, complex, and multi-sectoral problems (link).  Everyone wants to improve the quality of urban schools.  But what interventions might actually work?  This requires a broad research effort, incorporating teacher training, pedagogy, curriculum, the cultural and social environments that poor children live in, school leadership, system bureaucracy and governance, and a host of other complex causal processes.  So 800-word editorials in the local newspaper won't be able to provide a guide to policy reform.  The remedies won't be simple.  Or take racial disparities in health outcomes.  Why are certain diseases so much more prevalent in poor neighborhoods?  Some of the answers are fairly simple; but overall, this is a complex phenomenon that requires careful, detailed applied research.  And schools of public health have exactly the right constellations of talent and expertise to help sort out the causal processes leading to these outcomes -- and the kinds of policy interventions that can reverse them.  Here again, the research capacity of a university is crucial to the solution or amelioration of the problems our cities face.

Another major impact that a university can offer a city is in the form of an engaged student body.  If students are motivated to support community service organizations, they can have an immediate impact.  If they are encouraged to take service-learning courses that give them a better understanding of the city, this will deepen their ability to contribute.  And both these forms of engagement will produce something even more important: adults who are prepared to extend themselves in forms of community service throughout their lives.  Learning the habit of engagement can be a lifelong change.

Significantly, a number of urban and metropolitan universities are adopting institutional missions that highlight the kinds of partnership, engagement, and urban/metropolitan impact that is described here.  In particular, the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities represents a group of universities with precisely those commitments.  Here is the Declaration that members of the coalition endorse.  Another important recent development is the establishment of a new Carnegie classification of universities, the classification for Community Engagement (link).

The finish line

Source: Bowen, Chingos, and McPherson, Crossing the Finish Line

For quite a long time the United States had a global advantage in its educated population. No more. The US now ranks low among OECD nations for percentage of adults with a baccalaureate degree. And the increases in this percentage witnessed in the United States in the 1950s leveled off in the 1970s. These facts have major consequences -- both for quality of life in the United States for individual citizens and for the ability of the US to compete globally in a knowledge-based economy.

William Bowen, Matthew Chingos, and Michael McPherson have completed another important piece of research on the current social realities of higher education in the US with Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America's Public Universities. This research goes significantly beyond the prior important work Bowen and his collaborators have done. Here Bowen, Chingos, and McPherson have shifted focus from the issue of access (the core issue in Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education) to degree completion, and they have shifted from elite private colleges and universities to public universities -- flagships and regionals. The book is mostly concerned with first-time freshmen, but also provides valuable data on the educational careers of transfer students. (Chapter seven looks at transfer student outcomes in particular.)

The heart of their research here is the creation of a pair of large databases of students that permit tracking the outcomes of a large student population over time. They have collected data on several hundred thousand students who entered universities in 1999. One data set is the "flagship" database including records of over 120,000 students enrolled in 21 leading public universities. The second is the "state systems" database with over 60,000 students enrolled in 47 regional campuses in four states.  Here is how they describe the two databases:

The Flagships Database was assembled between September 2005 and August 2006. The core of the database is an institutional file that contains detailed demographic, academic, and financial aid data on essentially every student who entered one of 21 selective public universities in the fall of 1999 (although most universities excluded from their data students who began their studies on a part-time basis).1 The institutional file is linked with secondary data files provided by the College Board, ACT, the National Student Clearinghouse, and the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI). Additionally, the home addresses of the students have been matched to their corresponding geographical codes (“geocodes”) and can be linked to census data down to the block level.

The State Systems Database, which covers a wider range of institutions in four states—Maryland, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia—was assembled between June 2006 and June 2008. This database, also on the 1999 entering cohort, includes institutional files from every public university in Maryland, North Carolina, and Ohio as well as every public and private college and university in Virginia.2 Additionally, we have data on every North Carolina student who was a high school senior in 1999. These files are linked with secondary data files provided by the College Board and the National Student Clearinghouse, and the students’ home addresses have been linked to their corresponding geocodes. (Appendix B, pp. 5-6)

(The authors and the publisher have posted a 150-page PDF document on the publisher's website providing extensive details on the data sets and chief quantitative results (link).)

A particularly important data source they employ is the National Student Clearinghouse (link), which permits tracking the same student from one institution to another. NSC now encompasses over 90% of undergraduates in the United States, so it serves as an existing national tracking system. It allows us to answer the important question, what happens to a student when he/she leaves a given institution?  Does she become a permanent dropout, or does she go on to graduate from another university?  Another large data source they employ is the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) of the 1992 high school class.

Using these databases they are able to probe for significant differences in outcomes based on SES, race/ethnicity, gender, parental education, and type of institution.  The outcomes they are particularly interested in are completion rates, time to degree, field of study, and grades. This represents a real breakthrough in empirical studies of higher education; no existing data source had the size needed to break out these sub-populations meaningfully.  The data permit the construction of a segmented national profile of college attendance and completion, and the data sets are large enough to allow for a significant degree of testing of causal hypotheses about differences across groups.

The logical structure of the questions posed in the research looks a lot like this:

• Are there significant differences across {demographic features -- e.g. ethnicity} with respect to {outcome feature -- e.g. completion rate}?
• how much of the observed variation can be explained by {readiness feature -- e.g. SAT/ACT score}?

Their approach to the second type of question is to control for the readiness feature(s) using a regression or other statistical technique and examine the residual differences in an adjusted data graph. Here is an example:

There are many striking findings in the research that speak to the profound effects of stratification on life prospects. Take bachelor's degree attainment broken out by family income (fig. 2.3a) and race/ethnicity (fig. 2.5). A young person from the bottom quartile of family income has an 11% chance of receiving a bachelor's degree, compared to a 52% chance for the person from the top quartile. There is also a major disparity between white and black young adults.  The data indicate strikingly different bachelor's degree attainment rates across race and gender: white males 29%, white females 36%, black males 10%, black females 21%. One way of reading these results is this: the cumulative disadvantages associated with poverty and race in the United States have permanent effects on the opportunities available to disadvantaged people later in life.  And our education system is not succeeding in erasing these disadvantages.  The research offered here can at least help to design institutions that are more successful in doing exactly that; and this is one of the key goals that Bowen and his colleagues have for the work:

We want to end this first chapter by reiterating that the purpose of the research reported in this book is not only to improve our understanding of patterns and relationships but also--as a high priority--to search for clues about ways to make America's colleges and universities more successful in moving entering students on to graduation. (19)

The German mandarins

Fritz Ringer's The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 is a key source on the content and social location of German academic and intellectual culture in a crucial period of its development, 1870-1933. The book appeared in German in 1967, and it presents a detailed intellectual and institutional history of the issues and actors.  The concept of mandarin is Ringer's shorthand for "influential educated elite."  Humanistically educated in a system that emphasized literature, classical languages, and philosophy, the mandarins played the role of the educated and powerful elites of late nineteenth-century Germany, as officials, professors, and other highly educated professionals.  These were men of letters who played key roles in German social and political life.  Ringer concentrates on one important segment of this elite group: Germany's professors and university leaders, primarily in the humanities and social sciences.  And Ringer's central finding is that there was a highly distinctive mentality and set of social emotions that pervaded this group, and these ideas and emotions had dramatic consequences both for the nature of their theories and the direction of their political behavior as Germany's crisis deepened in the twentieth century. 

Ringer's approach differs from other more internalist conceptions of intellectual history in several important respects.  First, he gives a great deal of attention to the social and political context of German academic culture, essentially implying a significant degree of social causation of thought.  And second, he tries to understand much of the thinking and action of this group in terms of a set of shared emotions towards the present and towards German culture.  He identifies the rapid processes of economic change, industrialization, and political upheavals as being key sources of impetus for the sense of intellectual upheaval that pervaded the period.  And the most important current of social emotion that he highlights is a progression from enthusiasm for a Romantic conception of education, to a profound pessimism and malaise about the current and future prospects for German culture in the face of mass democratization of society.

One way of reading this approach is to say that Ringer is functioning as a sociologist rather than strictly as an historian in his analysis of this period of intellectual history.  What makes Ringer's analysis sociological is his effort to locate the social position of the mandarin intellectual within a theory of comparative social and political development of early modern societies. His way of approaching the task recalls that of Karl Mannheim or Max Weber himself: situating an intellectual tradition within a broad and pervasive set of social circumstances. This approach leads to an understanding of a particular social segment -- the mandarin -- that is highly sensitive to changing social conditions: "Thus all will go well for the mandarins until economic conditions around them change radically enough to introduce powerful new groups upon the social scene" (12).

Key to the development of academic culture is the educational system, and Ringer shows how different Germany's educational institutions were from other European nations.  He provides a detailed treatment of the evolution of German educational institutions during the nineteenth century, including especially the elite gymnasium and the university. His treatment demonstrates how elite academic culture and the associated institutions incorporated the romantic and idealist strains of philosophy and literature through the theory of Bildung, or personal intellectual development.  The cultivation of the individual is the central goal of education. (This assumption has some similarity to the theory of liberal learning mentioned in an earlier post; but current ideas about liberal learning do not insist on a sharp separation between intellectual and practical activities.)

Ringer also documents the very sharp forms of social stratification that these educational institutions created within German society, particularly towards the end of the nineteenth century. So the academic elites were separated from the rest of society by the exclusive institutions through which they were educated and by an academic philosophy that was contemptuous of practical or utilitarian skills. The mandarins were defensive of German high culture, and they were hostile to the social processes of industrialization and democratization that seemed to threaten that culture.

Another distinctive feature of Ringer's treatment is his interest in providing a psychological account of how Germany's circumstances shaped the values and goals of its intellectual class. Contrasting "logical", "traditional", and "ideological" explanations of beliefs, he argues that German intellectuals were shaped by their "emotional group preferences" (4).  Ringer attempts to explain quite a bit of the development of social theory during this period in terms of the fit between a given theoretical position and the emotional perspective of the mandarin on current history.

Ringer's interpretations of the thoughts and values of these German intellectuals display a fascinating combination of assumptions about sources of influence on the character of an intellectual's thought. First, there is the fact of situatedness and limited perspective.  Ringer often characterizes a thinker's choices of theories and topics in terms of the unquestioned background assumptions of this particular historically situated group. The person who grows up surrounded by the unlimited, flat horizons of Illinois will probably think differently from the one who experienced the mountain villages of the Alps since childhood -- and likewise with unquestioned social verities that differ from epoch to epoch.  Second, there is the factor of self-interest. The mandarins favored a particular theory of education because it supported their positions of distinction within the university. And finally, of course, there is logic and the rational development of a particular line of thought. Ringer's presentation of Weber's exploration of the concept of the Protestant ethic is a case in point.

The first kind of intellectual influence is unconscious and invisible. The second is closer to being conscious to the thinker. And the third is analytical and intentional on the part of the thinker. These frameworks bear some analogy to the three perspectives mentioned above --  "logical", "traditional", and "ideological" explanations. But the correspondence is not exact. We might say that the three perspectives correspond to the three different ideas about how thought corresponds to the world: that thought reflects social reality; thought advocates for social position; and thought interrogates social reality. Ringer echoes this in his coda on Weber by suggesting that Weber was able to transcend the limitations of perspective and interest to some degree, permitting him to exercise some independent critical intelligence:

Max Weber and a few other leading social scientists in the modernist camp hold a special place in the intellectual history of the mandarin community.  They apparently shared some of the emotions with which the majority of their colleagues viewed the social transformations of their time.  But their intellectual response to these changes far surpassed the orthodox norm in subtlety, critical control, and precision.  Though never without a certain pessimism, they put their ambivalence at the service of analysis.  They became at least partly conscious of their own situation. (180)

What is particularly tragic in Ringer's account is how poorly this mandarin culture prepared universities and academics for the onslaught of National Socialism and antisemitism in the 1930s.  The nostalgia and pessimism that were the dominant themes of the mandarin social psychology left intellectuals unequipped for the struggle against fascism within the university and within German society.  Their ideas and emotions left them ready for "conservative revolution" during the Weimar period, and provided no positive basis for mobilizing society against fascism when the time came.

These differences of tone and emphasis played a role in the political struggles of the early 1930's, in which the National Socialists triumphed over their rivals among the enemies of the Republic. ...  Most academics realized at last that this was not the spiritual revolution they had sought.  It was too violent and too vulgar.  It declared itself the master of geist, not its servant. ...  The wrote in defense of historical continuity and tradition, as if they sensed that the minimal restraints of civilization were under attack.  Their tone was one of helplessness and pessimism.  In 1931 Karl Jaspers warned of a coming abyss of individual nullity and unfreedom.  Typically enough, he regarded the mass and machine age as the ultimate source of the approaching disaster. (436-7)

As a bit of contrast it is worth reading Arthur Koestler's autobiography, The Invisible Writing, in which he describes his experience as a radical journalist in Berlin in the early 1930s.  Koestler describes his own experience and that of other politicized European intellectuals in the face of the rise of National Socialism.  These too were intellectuals; but they were intellectuals who clearly perceived the deadly threat presented by the Nazi rise to power, and they were willing to fight.

Throughout the long, stifling summer of 1932 we fought our ding-dong battles with the Nazis.  Hardly a day passed without one or two being killed in Berlin.  The main battlefields were the bierstuben, the smoky little taverns of the working-class districts....  Among the Communist intellectuals who were prominent in pre-Nazi Berlin, my favourite was Hans Eisler, the composer.  His family belonged to the high Comintern aristocracy and deserves a brief description.  (29, 48)

(See an earlier post on Koestler's recollections.)

Defining the university curriculum

What is the purpose of a university education? And who ought to answer this question when it comes to the practical business of maintaining and reforming a university curriculum?

The second question is the easier of the two. In the United States university, the faculty generally have the responsibility and authority to make decisions about the curriculum -- from the content of a particular course to the requirements of a disciplinary major, to the nature of the general education requirements to the university's graduation requirements. To be sure, there are other significant sources of influence and constraint on this faculty-centered process. Accreditation agencies like the HLC (Higher Learning Commission), ACS (chemistry),  AACSB (business), and ABET (engineering) constrain various levels of curricular design at the university level and the professional or disciplinary levels. Schools of business, colleges of engineering, and chemistry departments are constrained and guided by the agencies that control their accreditation. But it is the faculty of a particular university, school, or department that fundamentally drive the process of curriculum design and maintenance.

It could have been otherwise, of course. Other nations have implemented more centralized processes where ministries of education determine the structure and content of a university program of study. And we could imagine vesting this authority in the hands of local academic administrators -- deans and provosts. But in the United States the role of the academic administrator is largely one of persuasive collaborator rather than authoritative decision-maker when it comes to the curriculum. And the reason for this is pretty compelling: faculty are experts on the content and structure of knowledge and it makes sense to entrust them with the responsibility of organizing the educational experience.

But let's go back to the harder question: what is our society trying to accomplish through a university education? Why is this a worthwhile goal? And how can we best accomplish the goal?

Most fundamentally universities exist to continue the intellectual and personal development of young people; to help them gain the skills and knowledge they will need to carry out their plans of life; and to help them fulfill their capacities as citizens, creators, and leaders. A university education ought to be an environment in which the young person is challenged and assisted in the process of expanding and deepening his or her intellectual capabilities.

We might put these ideas in more practical terms by saying that a university education should allow the student to develop the capabilities he or she will need to succeed in a career and to make productive contributions to the society of the future.

And what do these goals require in terms of a curriculum? What are those skills, capabilities, and bodies of knowledge that young people need to cultivate in order to achieve the kinds of success mentioned here?

This is the point at which there is often disagreement among various academic voices and non-academic stakeholders. There is a very career-oriented perspective that holds that there are specific professional skills that should be the primary content of a university education. On this approach, the specialized major needs to be the focus of the undergraduate's work, and the bulk of the student's effort should be directed towards acquiring these specific skills.

But there is also an approach that emphasizes the importance of breadth and pluralism within the university curriculum. On this "liberal learning" philosophy, the university student needs to be broadly exposed to the arts, humanities, mathematics, and the social and natural sciences.  Here the emphasis is on helping the student acquire a broad set of intellectual capacities, not tied to a particular professional body of knowledge.

The reasons offered for this answer to the question are pragmatic ones. A leader or creator -- in whatever career -- needs to have an understanding of the social and historical context of the problems he or she confronts. He/she needs to have a rich imagination as he confronts unprecedented challenges -- within a startup company, a non-profit organization, or a state legislature. He/she needs to have the ability and confidence needed to arrive at original approaches to a problem. And he/she needs a broad set of skills of analysis, reasoning, and communication, as he works with others to discover and implement new solutions. So a liberal education is a superb foundation for almost any career -- engineer, accountant, doctor, community activist, or president.

This picture argues for breadth in the undergraduate experience. It also argues for two other curricular values: interdisciplinarity and multicultural breadth. It is evident that the difficult problems our civilization faces do not fit neatly into specific academic disciplines. Climate change, mortgage crises, and the legacy of racism all pose dense, "wicked" problems that demand cross-discipline collaboration. And likewise, the advantages created for US society by the racial and ethnic diversity of our population will be wasted if our young adults don't learn how to see the world through multiple perspectives of different human circumstances. A university isn't the only place where multicultural learning takes place, but it is one very important place. And to date universities have only scratched the surface in creating a genuinely multicultural learning environment.

So these are a few leading values that can serve to guide decisions about what an effective university education for the twenty-first century ought to include: breadth, imagination, historical and social context, rigorous reasoning, and a genuine ability to live and work in a multicultural world.  And most great universities in the United States have placed their bets on some version of this philosophy of liberal learning.  This bundle of features should lead to flexibility of mind, readiness for innovation, preparation for working collaboratively, and a set of intellectual skills that support effective problem solving.  (Martha Nussbaum's Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education lays out a very similar educational philosophy; her book is worth reading by everyone with an interest in university curriculum reform.)

Comparative life satisfaction

We tend to think of the past century as being a time of great progress when it comes to the quality of life -- for ordinary people as well as the privileged. Advances in science, technology, and medicine have made life more secure, predictable, productive, educated, and healthy. But in what specific ways is ordinary life happier or more satisfying for ordinary people in 2000 compared to their counterparts in 1900 or 1800 -- or the time of Socrates, for that matter?

There are a couple of things that are pretty obvious. Nutrition is one place to start: the mass population of France, Canada, or the United States is not subject to periodic hunger, malnutrition, or famine. This is painfully not true for many poor parts of the world -- Sudan, Ethiopia, and Bangladesh, for example. But for the countries of the affluent world, the OECD countries, hunger has been largely conquered for most citizens.

Second, major advances in health preservation and the treatment of illness have taken place. We know how to prevent cholera, and we know how to treat staph infections with antibiotics. Terrible diseases such as polio have been eradicated, and we have effective treatments for some kinds of previously incurable cancers. So the basic health status of people in the affluent twenty-first century world is substantially better than that of previous centuries -- with obvious consequences for our ability to find satisfaction in life activities.

These advances in food security and public health provision have resulted in a major enhancement to quality of life -- life expectancy in France, Germany, or Costa Rica has increased sharply. And many of the factors underlying much of this improvement are not high-tech, but rather take the form of things like improvement of urban sanitation and relatively low-cost treatment (antibiotics for children's ear infections, for example).

So living longer and more healthily is certainly an advantage in our quality of life relative to conditions one or two centuries ago.

Improvements in labor productivity in agriculture and manufacturing have resulted in another kind of enhancement of modern quality of life. It is no longer necessary for a large percentage of humanity to perform endless and exhausting labor in order to feed the rest of us. And because of new technologies and high labor productivity, almost everyone has access to goods that extend the enjoyment of life and our creative talents. Personal computing and communications, access to the world's knowledge and culture through the Internet, and ability to travel widely all represent opportunities that even the most privileged could not match one or two centuries ago.

But the question of life satisfaction doesn't reduce to an inventory of the gadgets we can use. Beyond the minimum required for sustaining a healthy human body, the question of satisfaction comes down to the issue of what we do with the tools and resources available to us and the quality of our human relationships. How do we organize our lives in such a way as to succeed in achieving goals that really matter?

Amartya Sen's economic theory of "capabilities and realizations" supports a pretty good answer to these questions about life satisfaction (Development as Freedom). Each person has a bundle of talents and capabilities. These talents can be marshalled into a meaningful life plan. And the satisfying life is one where the person has singled out some important values and goals and has used his/her talents to achieve these goals. (This general idea underlies J. S. Mill's theory of happiness as well in Utilitarianism.)

By this standard, it's not so clear that life in the twenty-first century is inherently more satisfying than that in the eighteenth or the second centuries. When basic needs were satisfied -- nutrition, shelter, health -- the opportunities for realizing one's talents in meaningful effort were no less extensive than they are today. This is true for the creative classes -- obviously. The creative product of J. S. Mill's or Victor Hugo's generation was no less substantial or satisfying than our own. But perhaps it is true across the board. The farmer-gardener who shapes his/her land over the course of a lifetime has created something of great personal value and satisfaction. The mason or smith may have taken more pride and satisfaction in his life's work than does the software programmer or airline flight attendant. The parent who succeeded in nurturing a family in 1800 County Cork may have found the satisfactions as great or greater than parents in Boston or Seattle today.  (Richard Sennett explores some of these satisfactions in The Craftsman.)

So we might say that the chief unmistakable improvement in quality of life in the past century is in the basics -- secure nutrition, improved health, and decent education during the course of a human life. And the challenge of the present is to make something meaningful and sustaining of the resources we are given.

Rebuilding employment

The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago hosted a two-day conference in Detroit this week on the subject of work force adjustment (link). It was convened by the Federal Reserve Bank, the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, and the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program. This is one of the many efforts underway to attempt to address the unemployment crisis we now face in the industrial Midwest. Participants included state and federal jobs officials, foundation leaders, and a few academic specialists.

Are there strategies that a region can pursue that will result in significant jobs creation? To grow employment in a region there are only a couple of possibilities: to expand employment in existing companies, to stimulate the creation of new businesses, and to recruit relocation of existing businesses from other regions. In each case the business owner or entrepreneur needs to be confident that he/she can add marginal revenue to the company by hiring the additional worker. This requires that the worker has knowledge and skills whose use will contribute to a saleable product. The product needs to have features of quality and utility that consumers want. Finding the workers who have the right kinds of talent, skill, and knowledge is a key challenge for the business owner. And availability of talented prospective workers is a key aspect of the company's decision to locate or grow in the region.

So what options do these pathways suggest for policy intervention to increase employment? It might be the case that there is latent labor demand out there in existing industries, where employers would hire more workers if they could find people with the right qualifications. In this case, remedial and transformative training could lead to new jobs, shifting workers from old industries to new industries. Second, there may be identified areas of potential expansion of employment where there are specific skills missing in the workforce. Maybe specialized bakeries could sell more products if they could only hire more qualified pastry chefs. Here too it is credible that we could devise specialized training programs that fill in the missing skills. There are specific community college programs that were developed for this reason, responding to the specialized needs of existing employers. But third, we can imagine a region preparing itself for a new surge of business creation and job growth in new industries and sectors. And this requires raising the number of college-educated adults in the region. This constitutes a talent pool that will encourage the expansion of businesses and overall employment.

And sure enough -- this conference focused on "talent" and "entrepreneurship." The industrial Midwest needs more of both; it is pretty well recognized that revitalization requires enhancement of the talent base of the region, and it is recognized that recovery requires the creation of vast numbers of new small businesses.

But what I find interesting and worrisome is the level of skill development that gets most of the attention in these discussions. There is a very clear focus on training rather than higher education. Much of the focus in this conferences was on targeted jobs training at a pretty low level -- training programs that provide new skills for unemployed and underemployed workers, with emphasis on laid-off auto workers in Ohio and Michigan. Several speakers emphasized that training programs need to tailor their educational programs closely to the specific needs of regional employers. The key words are skills and training --not creativity, innovation, and the bachelor's or master's degree.

But this seems wrong-headed to me; surely the most valuable asset a region can have is a significant population of well-educated, creative, and innovative people who have been challenged and stretched by a demanding university education. So shouldn't there be a lot of priority given to the complicated challenge of sustaining high-quality universities and making sure that a high percentage of high school graduates attend them?

In fact, people like Richard Florida at CreativeClass sound a very consistent drumbeat when they talk about the twenty-first century economy, emphasizing innovation and the college-educated workforce. Creativity and invention are the central components of future economic success. But the jobs-training orthodoxy points in a different direction. They emphasize vocational training and community college programs -- the message conveyed by President Obama in his July announcements at Macomb Community College relating to investments in the US community college system. (Perhaps the President's position was influenced by the findings of the 2009 Economic Report to the President, which is worth reading in detail; post.)

It seems to me that Richard Florida is surely right about the medium- and long-term story: our economy needs to constantly move towards greater innovation and greater concentration on knowledge-based sectors. So the goal of increasing the percentage of baccalaureate-level adults in a region is a crucial element of our future economic success. The ability to offer innovative ideas, to provide new kinds of problem-solving, and to work well in nimble teams -- these are crucial "skills" that emerge most frequently from a college-educated workforce. And they are crucial for vibrant business and job growth.

This means that states really need to recognize the crucial role that their universities play in their economic potential for the future. And we need to work hard in seeking out ways of allowing talented young adults to complete their college degrees -- including those 25-34 year-olds who have done some college without completing a degree. Unfortunately, public universities are suffering from fiscal crisis almost everywhere in the country. This implies that we are likely to fall even further behind in creating the highly qualified talent pools that our regional and national economies need in order to thrive in conditions of global competition. And this in turn is likely to impede the growth of employment that we all want to see.