Poll: State higher education is too darn expensive

Good morning! TGIF. Californians are concerned over the cost of the state’s public colleges and universities, just as two of the state’s three higher-education systems are considering tuition increases.

In fact, only 13 percent of Californians say it’s not a problem, while 57 percent say it’s a big problem, according to a poll released Thursday night by the Public Policy Institute of California. 

Just below half of Californians think affordability is the biggest issue facing California’s higher-education systems, while only 15 percent think quality is the top problem. 

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• “President Obama has decided to side with Sen. Barbara Boxer and California environmentalists in their battle with Sen. Dianne Feinstein and House Republicans over Golden State water policy,” writes CalWatchdog. 

• “Following the election, Baird, a leader of a longstanding and improbable effort by several Northern California counties to secede from California, warned fellow property owners about water-related environmental policies he feared ‘are going to heat up’ in the spring. Meanwhile, Baird was preparing to sue the state over its dearth of lawmakers representing rural, sparsely populated counties. The effort is a longshot, but the sentiment underpinning it reflects lingering discord between California’s heavily Democratic population centers and more conservative, rural areas of the state. As California marches on Trump, Republicans in the state’s interior are hunkering down.” Politico has more. 

• “Monday’s legislative swearing-in ceremonies made it official: Democrats had restored their two-thirds supermajorities in both houses of the Legislature. The achievement rested heavily on millions of special-interest dollars moving to and from political party campaign committees, state filings show, effectively avoiding candidate contribution limits and obscuring the true source of the money.” The Sacramento Bee has more. 

• “For decades, some Malibu property owners have made it hard for the public to reach public beaches. On Thursday, the California Coastal Commission fined two of those property owners more than $5.1 million for denying surfers, sand castle builders, kite flyers, sun bathers, yoga enthusiasts and other beachgoers access to the sand that is theirs by state law.” The Los Angeles Times has more. 

Legislature:

• Gone till December. 

Gov. Brown: 

• No public events scheduled. 

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The move to get a new accreditation plan in place could take a decade, while the state’s 2.1 million community college students look for guidance in a complex system.

The fatal action for the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges was its challenge to City College of San Francisco. The commission in 2012 began raising concerns about financial and governance practices at the college and at one point threatened to revoke the college’s accreditation, landing the two parties in court.

City College has acknowledged its precarious financial position and its revolving door of administrators. The school has pruned expenses and tightened its finances, according to a bond filing issued earlier this year.

Which leaves the state with a black eye in terms of accreditation of community colleges. Is the accreditation commission being punished for doing its job? Or was it unfairly severe in its application of standards?

Need for Accreditation

Accreditation is crucial for most institutions as it is required to access federal student loan money.

The state’s community colleges have seen a decline in enrollment over the past five years and faced an $18 million revenue decline in 2014, although state legislation propped up the San Francisco Community College District — of which the City College is part of — through additional funding last year.

The commission has been on the radar of the California Community Colleges Board of Governors for over a year.

In a report issued by a review committee from the community colleges board, the fate of the accreditation board was sealed.

From the report:

“Between 2009 and 2013 the ACCJC issued 143 sanctions out of the 269 accreditation actions it took. This sanction rate is approximately 53 percent, compared to approximately 12 percent sanction rates within the other six regional accreditors. The quantity and frequency of sanctions issued by the ACCJC, in conjunction with other controversial actions and practices of this accreditor, have led to frequent calls for reform of the accrediting process from member institutions of the ACCJC.”

The accreditation commission responded with a four–page announcement of new practices and noted that as of 2014, there were 30 percent fewer benchmarks required for approval.

“The new standards will be the basis for comprehensive institutional evaluations for reaffirmation of accreditation beginning spring, 2016,” a spokesman for the commission said.

The commission also announced it would host annual conferences for schools to receive input and answer questions about the accreditation process. The first conference is to be held in October 2016.

RELATED – State agency struggling to police for-profit colleges

The commission is part of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, one of six regional groups in the U.S. that are charged with ensuring higher education institutions adhere to standards that begin at the federal level. The accreditors are overseen by administrators at the U.S. Department of Education and a board called the National Advisory Committee on Accreditation and Institutional Eligibility.

In addition to angering the state community college board of governors, the accreditation commission in California has drawn the ire of teachers unions and their powerful allies. The California Federation of Teachers filed a lawsuit against the commission to keep the San Francisco City College open and registered a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education against the commission.

The American Federation of Teachers said the commission has “failed to focus on improving learning and academic achievement.”

Democratic U.S. Reps. Nancy Pelosi, Jackie Speier and Anna Eshoo called the ACCJC’s actions “outrageous.”

The commission is accused in one complaint of “extensive financial and political relationships with advocacy organizations and private foundations representing for‐profit colleges and powerful student lender interests.”

The commission accepted a $450,000 grant from the Lumina Foundation for Education, a group that has endeavored to change community college education and create a more universal accreditation system. Some onlookers have noted what they call the libertarian roots of Lumina.

But the practice of accreditation stems from federal regulation, which has increased in recent years. Community colleges in the U.S. collectively spend up to $6 billion to keep in compliance, according to a Vanderbilt University study. The study also listed 29 categories that colleges and universities are subject to monitoring and reporting.

Community colleges are subject to review every six years.

Steve Miller can be reached at 517-775-9952 and avalanche50@hotmail.com.

A bill working its way through the Legislature would open up the accreditation process for California community colleges to ensure greater transparency and require more consistent application of academic standards. Assembly Bill 1397 by Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, would require community college accreditation meetings to be open to the public, force accreditation teams to adopt new conflict of interest guidelines and ensure that sanctioned colleges have a clear path to appeal their cases.

“We need education to be the great equalizer in our society but that role is compromised when education standards are enforced unfairly, arbitrarily, and in secret,” Ting said in a press release. “We need these reforms to end abuses of power from our accreditor. Sweeping change is needed that put the needs of our students first.”

CA’s community college accreditation process

Technically, anyone can start their own college or university in California. However, education officials limit federal student aid and scholarship funds to accredited schools.

“Accreditation is the recognition that an institution maintains standards requisite for its graduates to gain admission to other reputable institutions of higher learning or to achieve credentials for professional practice,” the U.S. Department of Education explains on its website. “The goal of accreditation is to ensure that education provided by institutions of higher education meets acceptable levels of quality.”

Neither the state nor federal education departments directly handle accreditation, rather independent non-profit entities, often consisting of college professors and administrators, step in to review colleges. That makes the accreditation process an almost quasi-governmental function: the review, which is mandated by law, is frequently guided by public employees, but is formally governed by the guidelines and rules of a private organization.

Consequently, California’s 112 community colleges are dependent on accreditation by the Accreditation Commission on Community and Junior Colleges to receive state funds. If a community college is not granted a seal of approval by the ACCJC every six years, it loses most of its funding. In recent years, the ACCJC has come under fire from the California State Auditor, the U.S. Department of Education and a California Superior Court for its practices.

Controversial decision to revoke CCSF’s accreditation

Asm. Phil Ting

Critics of the accreditation process say that officials use their non-profit status to evade public scrutiny and enforce their demands on public colleges.

In 2014, the Bureau of State Audits published its audit of the accreditation process, which had been requested by the Joint Legislative Audit Committee. According to a legislative analysis, the audit’s findings included:

• Inconsistent application of the accreditation process with some colleges granted more time to address problems;
• Deficiencies in the appeals process with colleges banned from presenting new evidence during an appeal;
• Lack of transparency in accreditation decision-making.

The audit was driven in part by the ACCJC’s controversial decision in 2013 to revoke City College of San Francisco’s accreditation. Its accreditation team found CCSF deficient in a dozen areas, ranging from seemingly trivial issues such as failing to “revise the college’s mission statement” to serious questions about the college’s ability to accurately report financial information.

Yet, the ACCJC’s decision-making itself raised questions as students, faculty and even members of the media were excluded from the committee meeting to decide the college’s fate.

“Accreditation should be about protecting our needs while going to college to get ahead,” said Shanell Williams, who served as a student trustee at City College of San Francisco. “When accreditation decisions are made in secret, our voices are silenced and our futures are put at risk.”

CCSF’s accreditation ultimately led to litigation, which concluded with Superior Court Judge Curtis Karnow ruling that ACCJC broke the law. Among the court’s findings: The committee failed to adequately address conflicts of interest by commissioners, did not include enough academics on its site visit and violated federal regulations on accreditation.

“The state has the authority to regulate accreditation processes, and the recent CA Superior Court verdict confirms this fact,” wrote Timothy Killikelly, president of the American Federation of Teachers, Local 2121, the union of professors at City College of San Francisco. “AB1397 proposes reasonable reforms to the community college accreditation process to ensure that the values of fairness, objectivity, consistency and transparency guide accreditation procedures.”

AB1397 brings more transparency and accountability

Those problems led Ting to introduce AB1397, which he says will “bring the community college accreditation process into compliance with state and federal laws.” Specifically, the legislation will:

• Ban evaluation teams from including anyone affiliated with the commission or the college under review;
• Adopt a legal right of appeal for sanctioned colleges;
• Require public access to ACCJC meetings and guarantee that meeting minutes are posted online.

Ting’s legislation has received support from educators that have long sought reforms to the accreditation process.

“The accreditation process should ensure that the ACCJC is basing their decisions on accurate information,” said Mike Claire, president of the College of San Mateo, who has experience with the college accreditation review process. “Thus, our system of peer-based accreditation should welcome transparency in the decisions regarding the accredited status of our community colleges.

He added, “Ironically, what we ask of our students in the classroom and of our colleges is neither encouraged nor desired by our accreditor when assessing a college to ensure it meets accreditation standards.”

Conservative college subject to accreditation review

Larry Arnn

Earlier this month, the bill passed the state Assembly on a 61-18 vote, with a majority of Republicans opposed. Although California Republicans are largely opposed to Ting’s accreditation reforms, conservative-leaning higher education institutions could ultimately be beneficiaries of a more transparent college accreditation process.

Hillsdale College, a private college in south-central Michigan, has shunned all federal funds – including financial aid and grants – to secure its independence. That independence is currently being threatened by the college accreditation process.

“In the ’60s the federal government designated them (independent accrediting agencies) as the pathway to eligibility for the federal money,” Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College told the Wall Street Journal. “None of that means beans to us, but now the accrediting agencies are living under standards the Department of Education gives them.”

By Stan Brin

Some of us are good at math, some of us struggle merely to get through it.

Whether we’re good at it or bad, few of us will ever again use anything we learned in calculus or trigonometry class ever again, not even once. After graduation, few will even be able to recognize such general terms as sine and cosine, much less be able to explain what they mean.

For those who want to become engineers, scientists or economists, math is the foundation of their careers. It’s vital, not to be questioned.

For the rest of us — and I include technicians and medical workers* among the rest of us — math is, more often than not, a painful and soul-breaking ritual that we are forced to endure if we hope to have a decent life.

The official line is that lots and lots of math is supposed to prepare us for work. It’s supposed to teach us to think logically. It’s also supposed to help America compete against Asian Tiger economies that are eating our national lunch.

These assumptions may be mistaken. For many, if not most students, math education, at least as taught in this country, is little more than a cruel and expensive obstacle course designed to force large numbers of them to fail.

Even wore, this torture machine produces generations of Americans who graduate utterly unprepared to tackle real-world studies.

Consider the following sample problem that all students bound for higher education are expected to understand:

Explain how the unit circle in the coordinate plane enables the extension of trigonometric functions to all real numbers, interpreted as radian measures of angles traversed counterclockwise around the unit circle.

This requirement, taken word for word from page 60 of the California Common Core standards, is among the norms used by 45 states and the District of Columbia to determine what every student should know. There are many, many, more examples, all equally opaque.

Obviously, somebody in 45 states and D.C. really thinks that all of us common folk really, really, need to know how to “traverse counterclockwise around the unit circle” or we won’t be able to think logically, as if mathematicians are known for their logical thinking. (Ted Kaczynski, Paul Erdos, Lord Bertrand Russell, John Nash, and Sir Isaac Newton come to mind — all of them brilliant, all of them mentally handicapped in various ways.)

During my career, I’ve written thousands of articles on subjects as varied as boxing and physics, I’ve designed software products that won two Editor’s Choice awards, but I’ve never had occasion to “traverse counterclockwise around the unit circle,” nor even to traverse it clockwise. Not once.

Nor did I ever have to understand “how the unit circle in the coordinate plane enables the extension of trigonometric functions to all real numbers.” In fact, I don’t even know what a unit circle or a coordinate plane is, or why anyone would want to traverse one. I’ve looked it up, and I still don’t know, other than the unit circle has something to do with a radius of a circle being equal to “one.” One what, no one says, at least not in English.

Of course, I’m sure that some people actually need to know all about the unit circle. I would include among them such truly and honest-to-gosh smart people as scientists, engineers, economists and artillery officers.

My brother, for example, needs to understand the unit circle. So does his wife. They’re both astrophysicists. They study the paths of comets and asteroids, and how to send space probes to meet them, what is known colloquially as “rocket science.”

Brainy folk like my brother — his face is familiar to the millions who like “history of the planets” shows — may account for 1 percent of the entire population. To that 1 percent, let’s add people whose work requires them to talk to scientists, engineers, economists and artillery officers, and we may have another 1 percent of the population. Let’s add another two percent for people who marry scientists, engineers, economists and artillery officers and those who know how to talk to them. Let’s also add another percentage point for math hobbyists who are actually interested in traversing the unit circle for its own sake – and we have a total of 5 percent, one out of 20.

And that’s being extremely generous.

The rest of us, 19 out of 20, are force fed higher math for up to four years. All college-bound students are required to pass three years of it. Vast numbers drop out in frustration, others manage to barely get by– and swear that they will never enter a classroom again.

And a day after our last finals, all of us who passed immediately forget absolutely everything. Meanwhile, very, very, few of us are taught how to use math to solve real-world problems, such as how to calculate the amount of wood needed to build a house, or how much concrete is required to pave a patio.

The average homeowner doesn’t have much use for the unit circle, but knowing how to buy just the right amount of materials, how to have it delivered on time and how much it will cost down the line, would save a lot of time and money.

But that’s not as important.

Blame History

There are those who believe that degrees are pointless scraps of paper. I disagree, but Peter Thiel and others have a point: We force young people to suffer obscure and useless subjects as a ritual — because it’s the way things are done, and the way things have always been done.

These obstacle courses — and that’s what they are, obstacles disguised as courses — exist because our grandparents and great-grandparents endured them, and if they learned to traverse the unit circle, well, by jiminy, today’s young whippersnappers had better learn to do it as well. We may no longer be expected to learn Latin and Classical Greek, thank Almighty Zeus, but the struggle with theoretical math still holds a mystical, untouchable holiness among well-meaning educators.

And yet very few young people study computer programming in high school, and those who do, don’t learn enough to obtain an entry level position. Think about it, 35 years into the PC age, and most kids put on their blue caps and gowns without ever learning Boolean logic, conditional loops, variables and arrays, terms that should actually mean something to the average, reasonably educated person.

Why? Because the starched-collared, monocle-wearing worthies who invented secondary education curricula for the unwashed masses, back in the olden days of bustles, shirtwaists, handlebar mustaches and buggy whips, didn’t think that practical subjects were as important as the skills they mastered at their exclusive private schools — such as translating Ovid or Caesar’s Gallic Wars.

Nevertheless, by 1900 times had changed. According to Professor Mark Ellis of Cal State Fullerton, a specialist in the history of math education, “The turn of the 20th century was the first era of large cities with diverse populations. Child labor was banned. Kids had time to go to school.”

The result was a vast increase in demand for secondary education, but the idea that students born of farmers or immigrant shopkeepers should study bookkeeping instead of Pericles’ Funeral Oration was difficult for academics from privileged backgrounds to understand.

Still, courses such as “shop” and “home economics” managed to infiltrate the system. Boys used to learn how to saw lumber, and girls learned how to cook. Perhaps, these days, boys and girls should study both subjects, or at least learn how to operate a microwave. Instead, they’re cramming math, yet falling even further behind international standards.

Latin and Classical Greek are now out of fashion, praise Jove and all the others. A few might want to study these languages so that they can name new species of slugs and jellyfish. (These days, dinosaurs are mostly given Chinese names.)

But California law still requires three years of higher math, including calculus from anyone who wants to go to the University of California or Cal State to study marketing, public administration or even history.

This doesn’t mean that that there are any monocled, pointy-bearded men and pince-nez wearing women out there eager to paddle the daylights out of nineteen out of twenty students with wooden rulers for failing to traverse the unit circle. Far from it. Their modern incarnations, such as Gerardo Loera, executive director of curriculum and instruction of the Los Angeles Unified School District, mean well. They just don’t get it.

“It should be as embarrassing to say ‘I can’t do math’ as it is to say ‘I can’t read,’” Loera says, which would make sense in a perfect world. “I still believe that math skills, such as critical thinking and problem solving, will transfer to other areas and are important even for liberal arts. Even if students don’t take any more math.”

Yet Loera, a fine and decent man who proved remarkably open and generous with his time, couldn’t cite any facts or figures to back up that belief. I asked him if calculus and trigonometry are useful in, say, journalism.

He sighed, and admitted that “I can’t cite any research that higher math helps journalists.”

Precisely my point.

 The Asian Solution

One reason why Asian countries seem to be eating our lunch appears to be an understanding of a basic fact of the human brain: Only so much stuff can be forced inside.

So they teach math from staple-bound booklets less than a hundred pages long. Only the most important topics are covered, but students are given time to actually understand them. Contrast those books to the dangerously heavy bricks California students are forced to lug home every day, and skim through because there’s no time to really understand what’s in them.

Everyone involved in teaching mathematics admits that the situation is ridiculous and self-defeating. According to a famous paper by Prof. William H. Schmidt of Michigan State University, the math curriculum in the United States is “a mile wide and an inch deep.”

Everyone involved in math education that I’ve talked to, including Cathy Seeley, a past president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, agree with Schmidt: High schools are trying to cram too much into kids’ heads.

Courses cover too many topics in too little time, the teachers have to move on before the kids have time to absorb anything, the lessons are so abstract that they mean absolutely nothing, and in the end, the students will forget absolutely everything.

Some people claim that the problem isn’t topics — Singapore students, we are told, study more math topics than American students and do better on standardized tests.

But Singapore is an island city state. It has a small, rigorously conformist and highly disciplined population that accepts a single-party dictatorship without complaint. Singapore also famously produces university graduates who haven’t the slightest idea where babies come from. Even worse, chewing gum is illegal there.

It is also one of the countries whose students are expected to brutally cram for admissions tests. Once admitted, Asian students find that university studies are less rigorous than they are in North America, hence the vast numbers that come here for post-secondary education.

There are those who still believe that narrowing math standards in high school — and adding flexibility to the system — will cause California and the rest of the country to go to hell in the proverbial hand-basket. These should remember that American high schoolers have been doing poorly, by international standards, for decades, yet our universities are still the envy of the world.

An American Solution

I would never say that higher math is only for nerds, or that it is unnecessary for those interested in fields that build on its foundations, nor would I ever say that students shouldn’t know what trigonometry is, and why Newton invented calculus.

But instead of frying their brains trying to traverse the unit circle counterclockwise, perhaps students should be given a year of natural history. Instead of trying to solve useless, abstract puzzles, they should try to plot the orbit of a Mars probe, or how much energy would be required to send an asteroid hurtling to Earth to wipe out the dinosaurs. Or how scientists were able to use math to analyze regular mutations in DNA, proving that we are all descended from a single woman who lived some 200,000 years ago.

Or how King George III used calculus and astronomy to test the first practical longitudinal chronometer. (Yes, King George was the villain of the American revolution, but ancestors of most Americans arrived on this continent in reasonable safety, and at a much lower cost, because that very odd King was able to prove that the longitudinal chronometer actually worked — and convince others that it did.)

Students would find these examples more interesting than anything in the Core Curriculum. They might not be able to traverse that unit circle counterclockwise when they were finished, but they would know a few more things that they might remember past prom night.

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* Note: Doctors and nurses don’t need higher math. Perhaps some doctor might like to throw a quarrelsome hypochondriac from a window and calculate the time it takes him to land — that would be higher math. But in the real world, they mainly need to know the metric system and be able to keep its infernal decimal points in the right place. They have too much to learn about the infinite frailties of human anatomy to be bothered with traversing the unit circle. Try asking your surgeon a trig question, and you might as well be speaking Latin or Classical Greek, but he or she is still required to learn higher math as a way of demonstrating an intelligence sufficient to remove an appendix.