Confusion about privilege, income, culture, and other confounding issues

This is, in many ways, a very heartening article, Who Gets to Graduate? by Paul Tough. Regrettably it starts out as if it were any of your usual sad sack laments about the unfairness of the universe as illustrated by the trials and challenges of a young African-American woman at the University of Texas, Austin. If you stick with it though, it shifts gears and reports in some detail on the early results of some apparently quite constructive and successful intervention programs undertaken by UT Austin.

It is striking how progressive and innovative Texas is despite how often it is characterized as a neanderthalic small government state. In addition to the innovative work reported here, they are also the university system working on the $10,000 university diploma.

With regard to the programs reported on in this article, the cynic has to counsel that most educational claims of material achievement on minimal program investment end up being non-replicable. But this report has the ring of some legitimacy and we can only hope that they have indeed begun to crack the code of achievement. Interestingly, what they are doing is much more focused on behaviors and personal expectations than it is to do with study skills and knowledge, an experience consistent with the very interesting research in Teaching Adolescents To Become Learners The Role of Noncognitive Factors in Shaping School Performance: A Critical Literature Review by Camille A. Farrington, et al.

Beyond the fact that Tough's is the first materially hopeful report I have read in a long time on efforts to close performance gaps, there are several other interesting aspects of the article.

For a long time, we have been struggling to deliver on the simple goal of ensuring that all who can successfully gain admittance to university do indeed attend and do indeed graduate. UT Austin seems to be making progress towards that goal. But in doing so, it raises numerous other interesting issues.

I like that they are customizing their interventions to very specific details of individual need. I regret how long we have suffered under the tyranny of imposed groupings such as race, gender, class, etc.

One question that the report raises is the longer term one of brand. Specifically, universities to a great extent serve as a screening program for government, business and society. It is assumed that with degree in hand you are in some general ways certified. It is great that UT Austin is spending the money to boost the graduation rate of 1,200 incoming freshmen (out of a total of 7,200) who are most at risk of not graduating despite being able to do the work. Currently, enterprises looking to hire new employees use graduation from university as some elemental screening mechanism on the reasonable expectation that graduation means that you have at least some minimal cognitive capacity and non-cognitive capacity to succeed. You must be smart and have worked hard. The more rigorous or august the institution's reputation, the stronger the assumption.

But that assumption can only work if the brands are reliable, and they can be reliable in two ways. The most competitive, largely private, universities basically screen admittances so thoroughly that anyone gaining admittance is almost certain to graduate under their own capacity.

State institutions are challenged by being more directly supported by the taxpayer and therefore more subject to accepting a wider range of students. They can still maintain a brand for quality students by allowing a winnowing process to occur, i.e. maintain standards and equal process for everyone and shed anyone unable to compete. Harsh but effective and still useful to the future employers.

But what happens now if 17% of your graduating student body were only able to graduate with targeted interventions and on-going support services. What happens when employers start experiencing higher turnover rates because the degree holding students are not able to achieve without the infrastructure of support? Ideally, and I think this is what UT Austin is seeking to accomplish, the interventions are rare, early and once-off. If those selective interventions lead to a student who not only graduates but is equally robust and capable as their colleagues, then there is no issue. But if the interventions are successful only in achieving the surface goal of graduation but do not address the underlying issue of personal productivity, capability, non-fragility, then future employers are going to be blindsided by employees that buckle without a support infrastructure.

I think there is a real risk of institutional brand degradation and decline if the interventions are only palliative and not transformative.

A second question is about ethics. At the university level we are speaking of adult citizens. Is it right that the extra costs of rehabilitation for individuals should be borne by the taxpayers and that the other students should have to compete against favored classes that are receiving all sorts of assistance? This is the mirror to the equally legitimate question about the unfairness of the underprivileged having to compete with the privileged.

I think that within some established band of variance, everyone admitted ought to be able to anticipate graduation. What UT Austin is doing is admitting many who cannot anticipate graduating for a variety of reasons. UT Austin is then investing taxpayer money to provide a range of services that help increase the likelihood of graduation. As above, this then also means a dual track of graduates, those that are self-reliant (perhaps owing to more privileged backgrounds) and those that need assistance. University education is societally expensive. You don't want to send people there that can't do the work or who can pass only with expensive interventions.

What this really prompts is the question, how do we prepare high school graduates so that, if admitted, they can succeed on their own without differential militating investments? Can these university level interventions be moved down to middle and high school? That would have two benefits, 1) increasing the candidate pool of potentially capable high school students able to seriously consider higher education and 2) reduce the cost of the university system by ensuring that all admitted are capable of graduation.

One of the interesting things in the article is that there is pervasive confusion about privilege, income, culture, and other confounding issues. Everyone seems to be predicating the justification of their actions on the grounds of the differential impact between the haves and have-nots, that those most at risk of not graduating are at risk because they are poor.

My suspicion, given the type of interventions they are finding effective, is that the correlation is probably less to do with income than it is to do with familial structure. We know that intact families also tend to have higher incomes. They also tend to have children who have higher graduation rates, education attainment, etc. So is the root cause of low graduation low income or is it that the students from low income families are also from fragile or fractured families and therefore have not received the type of support, encouragement, role models, prodding, expectations, etc. of those from intact (and therefore higher income) families. I think there is a fair probability that familial structure is the driver rather than poverty.