Compounding Educational Debt

To add a quick note to yesterday’s post about the MLA’s statement regarding academic debt, Alex Gourevitch argues that debt has become a central plank not just of the American economy, but of how we organize that economy from the federal level on down. This only emphasizes that reigning in the costs of higher education and student debt demands federal as much as local action. Academia needs to work to make these national, as well as institutional and state-level issues.

(And on an unrelated note, Matt Yglesias suggests that Humanities majors, who it turns out are some of the hardest-working and best prepared students at universities, should probably receive more credit in the society at large. Yawp!)

MLA Statement on Student Debt

I’m glad the MLA Executive Council has issued a formal statement addressing the problem of student debt. Nothing could be more timely. They suggest three main avenues of address: adjusting financial aid to reduce the proportion of loans, holding tuition in check, and decreasing time to degree. I wonder how much impact we can have if we focus on working within departments and even institutions to address these problems; an increasingly competitive job market combined with uncertain job prospects outside academia both serve to increase pressure to stave off graduation and lengthen time on the market and, as a result, increase long-term debt.

More generally, it is at least as important that we broaden our focus beyond the university and even state legislatures. As I mention in a previous post, increases in tuition and an increased reliance on student loans have been shaped by a long-term shift in federal priorities away from direct funding to the state and toward federal subsidy of student loans. This encourages states to spend more money on medical care (which triggers federal matching funds) and less on education, at the same time that slack is taken up by student debt that is federally financed. The net effect is that federal money that used to indirectly subsidize universities through the states is now indirectly subsidizing education through student loans. This hardly seems like an optimal solution

Both the increase in student debt and the increase of the costs of higher education in general put particular pressure on the Humanities. Many of the recommendations advanced by the MLA were put forward last year by Peter Conn (a colleague here at Penn), in a lengthy and detailed editorial for the Chronicle. In addition to making specific recommendations to reduce the number of graduate students enrolled in Ph.D. programs, Peter emphasizes what is perhaps the core challenge, to communicate that the humanities “are not merely ornamental and dispensable. They lie near the heart of mankind’s restless efforts to make sense of the world.” As MLA Pres. Berman notes in a letter that accompanies the MLA’s statement:

[T]he liberal arts celebration of an education not linked to professional preparation has existed alongside the promise that higher education would open the door to a fulfilling career. This gap between the appeal of the liberal arts, on the one hand, and the dismal job market, on the other, persists and puts pressure on the MLA’s mission: promoting the study of language and literature.

I still think that we need concrete ways to define the value of a liberal arts degree in the face of a weak economy. Even our intuitions regarding the economics of the liberal arts are often wrong. To take two examples:

(1) Yale University released a report last year that analyzed the cost of graduate programs and found that graduate students in the humanities were far more expensive that those in the sciences; the net cost of a six-year humanities Ph.D. was $143,000 compared to $17,000 for the natural sciences. At the same time, the calculation only includes the cost of grants, benefits, and teaching fees that are paid to those graduate students — not the course tuition that is paid by the students they teach. In other words, the core financial value that humanities graduate students return to the university, their teaching, was excluded (at the same time that the study subtracted grant money supporting graduate students in the sciences). At a school like Rutgers, where I earned my Ph.D., the number of students we taught over the course of six years was considerable (I estimate I taught approximately 150 students in stand-alone courses, excluding TAships that supported other faculty). Even taking this into account, I’m willing to assume that a humanities graduate student is more expensive that a graduate student in the sciences.

(2) But this imbalance stands in an inverse relationship to the value of undergraduate tuition in both fields. I was talking yesterday to a member of the science faculty who attended a lecture, presented by Penn’s financial team to the science faculty, which explained that tuition for science coursework does not cover the expenses of establishing science labs — which are in fact subsidized by humanities courses. This confirms what I’ve read and heard elsewhere about the cost versus value calculations that universities use for the sciences and humanities. I would even be tempted to link these two observations, by suggesting that the increased cost of humanities graduate students is in part a product of their greater teaching value to the university.

The Value of a Humanities Degree

Inline with my ongoing discussion of the costs of higher education, I’ve noticed a lot of recent discussion that tries to evaluate the value of different college degrees. On the one hand, I think that humanists lose the argument when we try to fix the value of a degree in monetary terms. But as a practical matter, the economic environment and the skyrocketing costs of higher education demand we engage the question.

In an article just published for Bloomberg, Peter Orzag, the Obama administration’s recent director of the OMB, notes that we can expect current economic conditions to depress wages for college graduates as much as ten percent after ten years. Orzag makes a pragmatic case that decreased wages imply we should make a college degree less expensive, particularly at public universities already squeezed by tightened state budgets and higher medical costs. But this also implies that students will be shopping more carefully for degrees regardless of the public vs. private university path they choose. Yesterday, Kevin Drum posted a WSJ chart that purports to break down unemployment rates by profession and degree. Drum highlights the top-paying careers, which are heavy with engineers. But unemployment tells a different story. Engineers seem to be about average, with around 5.1% unemployment. Holders of science degrees fare a little worse, with 5.2% unemployed. It turns out the sector you really want to be in is education — only 4% unemployment. (An engineer might argue that this marginal difference in unemployment is compensated by economic value — their median salary is $78,000 versus $43,500 for teachers.)

Continue reading

Higher Education and Medicaid Costs

Sarah Kliff has a new post up about the relation between rising Medicaid costs and decreased funding for higher education. Briefly, a drop in federal funding for health services encourages states to reallocate funding for things like universities toward healthcare (particularly because Medicaid spending activates federal matching funds). Per my post the other day, you can see how this leads to a round robin effect: less Federal money at the state level encourages less funding for universities and more student debt, and in turn, more federal outlay on student loan programs. If on top of this, students are working in part to secure private healthcare, any impact that Federal legislation has on access and affordability of healthcare in the short term should help relieve financial pressure on student families. And in the long term, student access to a single payer public health plan would probably help reduce financial burdens all around (for state healthcare budgets, for universities, and for the students themselves).

Yesterday we observed a 99-minute work stoppage in support of Occupy Philly and the Occupy Wallstreet movement. One of the questions that emerged was how to encourage Penn to increase its activity in the movement. It seems to me that, given the vast amount of expertise that Penn students and faculty have to offer, one thing we might be able to do would be to draw connections like these. If there is enough discussion in public forums, I’d expect some of it to filter into the national conversation about OWS and the 99%.

Network Analysis of R. L. Stevenson and the ’45

I’m starting to work on my talk for the Seattle MLA on Stevenson, Oliphant, and Victorian constructions of the Scottish “Rising” of 1745. Of particular interest is the seven-year gap between Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Catriona — a sequel that picks up Kidnapped at the instant it closes. They are vastly different novels — the protagonist in each, David Balfour, is catapulted from a Highland Bildungsroman to a sensational romance and political intrigue novel, complete with radically different characterizations of David. I thought one way I might take a look at this is to examine the network of characters in each novel, as a way to focus upon large structural differences. (I used Gutenberg ebooks, translated into TEI xml using the XSLT transformations described in an earlier post, and the Meandre OpenNLP and Protovis implementations to perform entity extraction and produce the force-directed graphs, linking characters that appear within three sentences of each other):

Characters in Kidnapped (1886); Force-Directed Network Graph

Continue reading