Agenda:
The scholarly forum was convened primarily as a response to findings published in a 1999 report by the Mayor's Advisory Task Force on CUNY, titled "The City University of New York: An Institution Adrift". The task force's report presented a pessimistic view of the state of affairs within the CUNY (City University of New York) system and focused on the broader societal implications. Ronald Kessimir, Program Director for SSRC's Program on Higher education coordinated the event. The forum was organized in sessions mainly along the same subject lines as the report. It was intended to be a balanced discourse of the issues raised in the report, to give the discussion of the report a fresh perspective, and also to ascertain what is and isn't known about the problems and proposed solutions in higher education.
Remedial Education
Reforming Postsecondary Remediation in the Classroom
Dolores Perin, Columbia University
The main points of the paper include:
- CUNY may not be unusual in the level of remedial need when compared with the public higher education system in Texas and the California State University system.
- Improvement in assessment procedures (for example, raising admission standards) needs to be accompanied by instructional reform in order to improve educational outcomes.
- Remedial education can be improved by contextualizing instruction, i.e., by linking remedial courses to subject-matter course work. This will require several types of institutional support including interdisciplinary collaboration among faculty members and involvement of part-time instructors (who make up the majority of the teaching staff in many remedial programs).
New York State Education Department Review of CUNY's Proposed Master Plan Amendment: Consultant Team Report
Robert Zemsky, University of Pennsylvania
The main points of the paper include:
- CUNY's proposed plan on eliminating remedial education at its senior colleges does not seem to conflict with CUNY's mission of providing both access and excellence.
- In implementing the plan, CUNY should set clear goals and conduct appropriate evaluation.
- Lessons can be learned from other states' remediation programs. For example, Towson State University's math remediation program (contracted with a private firm) was recently terminated due to ineffectiveness.
Standards, Standardized Tests, and Assessments
Educational Standards in America's Public Schools: The Promise and the Challenges
Julian Betts, University of California, San Diego, and Senior Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California
The highlights of the paper include:
- Recent international comparisons show that American students lag behind in standardized tests. American public schools need to have higher standards.
- Theoretical work indicates that raising standards will likely leave some students, especially the low-achieving ones, worse off.
- Many states have implemented more stringent standards. However, considerable variations in standards exist among states.
- Problems exist in defining and implementing education standards.
- Higher standards movement may fail due to political opposition, lack of incentives, and the existing large gaps between the achievement of students of different socioeconomic background.
Governance, Accountability, and the Financing of Higher Education
The Remedial Education Controversy at CUNY: Perspectives on System Design and Endemic Conflict
Patricia Gumport, Stanford Institute for Higher Education Research and National Center for Postsecondary Improvement, co-authored with Michael N. Bastedo
The highlights of the paper include:
- In the Mayor's Task Force report on CUNY, the proposed solution to CUNY's remedial education problem is to create a more differentiated system of institutions and increase stratification among CUNY colleges by creating a five-tiered system.
- The authors set the remedial education policy in some theoretical and historical perspectives to evaluate the possible consequences of a more differentiated system.
- The authors argue that simply increasing stratification within the CUNY system can not solve the problem.
- The future structural design of CUNY should ensure both access and excellence.
- One possible solution is for CUNY to work with the private sector so that the private sector (for example, Columbia, NYU) can provide access to low income, high ability students at a cost no higher than that at a CUNY college.
Stratification in American Higher Education, with Reflections on What National Trends in Financing and Affordability Imply for the Debate on the Future Direction of CUNY
Morton Schapiro, Dean of Letters, Arts and Sciences and Economics Department, University of Southern California, and Michael McPherson, President, Macalester College
The highlights of the paper include:
- The trend of financing higher education has gone through considerable changes.
- Statistics show that tuition has been replacing government spending in both public and private institutions in the past forty years.
- Most increases in financial aid in the past decade have been in non-need-based aid, which mostly benefits middle- and upper-middle income families. However, several studies suggest that the college enrollment rates of low-income and minority students are much more sensitive to tuition increase than those of wealthy students.
- College access – the gap between the enrollment rate of Whites and those of Blacks and Hispanics has widened.
- College choice – low-income and minority students make up nearly half of the entering students in two-year public community colleges.
- It seems that tuition makes up a large proportion of the revenue at CUNY (34% compared to a national average of 24%). Further, state and local appropriations account for 41% of the revenue at CUNY, compared to a national average of 51%.
- The proposed increase in selectivity of certain CUNY colleges may lead to more stratification among colleges, i.e., students at these selective colleges would be disproportionately White and wealthy.
- CUNY's problems also exist in the rest of the American higher education.
What's the Mission?: The Quest for "Excellence" and a Market Niche
CUNY: Finding the Appropriate Market Niche
Thomas Bailey, Columbia University
The highlights of the paper include:
- The study examines the impact of various inputs of higher education on graduation rates.
- Sample schools were separated into four groups based on their characteristics, for example, tuition, enrollment, expenditure per student, etc.
- Regression results suggest graduation rates increase with average SAT score and expenditure per student. Graduation rates decrease with percent commuter and percent part-time enrollment.
- Some CUNY colleges have higher actual graduation rates than the predicted graduation rates based on the coefficient estimates.
CUNY from a market perspective
Nathan Glazer, Harvard University
The highlights of the paper include:
- Much of the discussion of CUNY has focused on CUNY in general despite the fact that substantial variations exist among CUNY colleges, in both student characteristics and education outcomes.
- The quality of CUNY depends in large measure on the quality of the graduates of New York City public high schools, who make up the majority of CUNY's entering classes.
- CUNY's students are on the whole of poorer academic quality.
- Raising admission standards will likely discourage low-achieving students, who are predominantly Hispanic and Black.
Peer Effects: Student Interactions and Institutional Goals
Social Comparison and Peer Effects at an Elite College
George Goethals, Williams College
The highlights of the paper include:
- A classroom learning experiment was conducted at Williams College to show that peer effects are operative in college environment.
- Men and women were found to react quite differently to superior peers. Women were more likely to benefit from having superior peers than men.
- The results of the study can be placed in the context of relevant social psychological theory.
Student Peer Effects in the Economics of Higher Education
Gordon Winston, Williams College
The highlights of the paper include:
- In US, the price students pay for higher education is always less than the cost.
- Schools offer subsidies to attract students. The larger the subsidy, the more the "excess" demand for education, and thus the more student selectivity.
- CUNY needs to have a differentiated system in order to take advantage of peer effects.
Peer Effects in Academic Outcomes: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
David Zimmerman, Williams College
The highlights of the paper are:
- Random freshmen roommate assignment at Williams College is used as a quasi-experimental empirical strategy to identify causal relationship between peer group and students' academic outcomes as measured by grades.
- Using roommate's SAT score as a measure of peer group, he found small, yet statistically significant, peer effects in many models.
- Peer effects are almost always linked strongly with verbal SAT scores.
- He cautioned against generalizing the findings beyond the context of Williams College, which is a highly selective school.
