Return
to CSHPE ResearchThe Pipeline Problem: from K-12 to Higher Education
“The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences
will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”
The
words of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, author of the majority opinion
in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the University of Michigan
Law School’s affirmative action admissions policy, have attained almost
iconic status since they were written in June 2003. But as Lisa Navarrete,
vice president of the civil rights organization National
Council of La Raza,
said soon thereafter, “If all we do over those 25 years is affirmative
action, then we will still need affirmative action. 
”
The School of Education’s efforts toward averting such an outcome take several forms. One is the work already in progress by several faculty members—research, teaching, in-service assistance, advising with policy makers—to widen the pipeline to higher education by improving access for the historically underrepresented, whether due to race, class, geography, economic status or family history. Another is the recognition that what happens to students after they enroll can affect the nature of the pipeline just as profoundly as those other factors, thus positioning the school to more effectively study the implications of that insight.
A vivid example is a recent “cluster hire” by the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education. Joining the faculty for the fall term were Deborah Carter, from Indiana University, and Michael Bastedo, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Edward St. John, also from Indiana University, will start work here in January. Carter has focused on the psychosocial dimension of students’ transitions to college, especially minority students. Bastedo’s work, in both the academic and policy arenas, has been largely in the area of academic preparation. St. John’s chief interest is in how students finance their college education.
“We are taking on several initiatives to bridge that traditional gap between those whose focus is on K-12 and those whose focus is on higher education,” says Patricia King, director of the center. “This cluster hire gives us the impetus for a focus on K-16 education, which gets at that broader set of issues around what is the preparation for students to go to college, what are the factors that enable and encourage students, and what are the ones that discourage and make it diffi cult for students to either get to college or be successful there.”
King says she knows of no other place in the country where this approach is being used. “We’re so pleased about attracting these three individuals to initiate this K-16 set of integrated programs and research,” she says. “We’re hoping we can have some sustained partnerships with our Ed Studies colleagues around these issues.”
While the Michigan case was focused on race, there are many forms of inequity in the mix, and the diverse approaches to addressing them are reflected in the breadth of the work in progress in the School of Education, as well as in the interests of the new faculty.
“The problem
is not just race,” says St. John. “It’s locale, finance and
a number of other things. A rural person in the Upper Peninsula has a low chance
of going to college, so one would need to take into consideration the kind
of curriculum a child has access to in the U.P. in order to have a fair and
just way of doing admissions to universities. The Supreme Court case has everything
to do with how do you create just admissions in a time when sim
ple measures
like race are no longer appropriate. You can find appropriate measures.
”But where do the students find the money? “Minnesota, Indiana, and other states provide equitable financial access to their citizens,” he says. “Michigan does not. I’ve started to put things that starkly because we have moved backwards in this country on the equal rights of our citizens. We’ve begun to treat poverty as something that is attributable to laziness, when in fact we have created policies that create poverty, and education is not exempt from that.
“There needs to be a support structure for students academically in college,” he adds, “but there also needs to be a financial commitment from the state to insure that low-income, qualified students can afford to go to college without having to work so much that they don’t have time to study. There needs to be a better balance between the current emphasis on academic improvement and achievement, which is the preoccupation of policy, and the equal rights and equal opportunity concerns that have been de-emphasized. I’m not trying to discard 20 years of effort to improve quality, but I think if we focus on just one side of the balance we need, we won’t have a fair and just society or a fair and just educational system.”
Associate Professor Stephen DesJardins has devoted much of his career, both as a faculty member and administrator, to the financial piece of the pipeline puzzle. “Financial aid not only has an impact on enrollment behavior but also on application behavior,” he says. “We have empirical evidence that expectations of aid have an impact on who applies to your institution. What kind of information is available out there for people? What I have always stated is there are information asymmetries, so the policy question from my perspective is how do we get information about college costs and college in general to people who haven’t in the past had that kind of information or who have had inaccurate information.”
Michael Bastedo predicts that information asymmetries will be “a hot area for research over the next 10 years,” and cites a study done while he was a graduate student at Stanford University showing that while all high school students overestimated the cost of a college education, those with fewer resources overestimated it much more.
But Bastedo’s chief bailiwick is policy. Before resuming his academic career, he worked for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Operations and the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education. “I don’t overestimate it because we’re talking about a few years,” he says, “but I didn’t go straight to graduate school and then get an academic job. In the policy realm, especially, having some experience in the making of it as well as the studying of it is very useful.”
Having toiled in both vineyards,
it’s his view that “the political context is part of the pipeline
problem. Various policies like admission standards and remedial education serve
to either deny students admission to the university or cascade them down the
levels of the system, which can have a direct impact on their life chances
because there are different outcomes associated with attending different types
of institutions. Institutions and legislators have very different conceptions
of what state policy should be doing in that area, what it really means to
provide access. People in the policymaking realm tend to see access to the
whole system of higher education as being equal opportunity, whereas people
in higher education tend to think more in terms of equity.”
Bastedo would
frame a different debate, one that evidences his interest in the K-16 concept. “We’re
so concerned about what you have when you come in and so unconcerned about
what you have when you leave,” he says. “I think that’s really
where policy needs to go.”
The split between K-12 and higher ed has not been limited to academe. “There were no bridges between the systems,” says Bastedo. “The faculties never interacted, even at the local level, and that’s had pretty strongly negative outcomes for students.”
“The next piece of this is to learn a lot more about how what happens in K-12 impacts this whole search and retention and graduation structure,” says Stephen DesJardins. “We’ve been working on the latter two pieces for 10 years and now we’re backing up into the pipeline to better understand this process.”
DesJardins has written a proposal for a study of K-20 behavior in Florida, “a state that has a really good tracking system,” he says. “They know a lot about students from the time they’re in kindergarten through graduate school.” The data include information about their social as well as educational outcomes, in addition to their quarterly earnings and, to some extent, whether or not graduates stay in the state. “These are huge policy issues,” he says.
John C. Burkhardt, professor of higher education, was appointed last spring by Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm to the state’s newly formed Cherry Commission on Higher Education and Economic Growth, chaired by Lt. Gov. John Cherry. One of its charges is to double the number of the state’s college graduates in the next 10 years.
“I think something that distinguishes this Cherry Commission from some similar commissions in other states is that we’re moving toward a serious consideration of the cultural transformation that will be necessary to achieve the governor’s vision,” Burkhardt says.
Sadly,
a recent news story illustrates why this matters. Twelve years ago, a group
of philanthropists “endowed” a
classroom of 20 first graders in Detroit, guaranteeing them the funds for college
when they finished high school. When the Detroit Free Press began work on an
article tracking their progress, it couldn’t even find five of the students, “which
says something about the mobility and fragility of the social infrastructure
within our cities,” says Burkhardt. “More to the point, of the
15 students they could find, only two were intending to go on to college. Now,
everyone believed that if we could eliminate the financial barriers to college,
students would take the quote-unquote rational course and prepare themselves
to attend, but economic rationalism only carries us so far. There are other
profound social and cultural and educational circumstances that constitute
leaks in the pipeline, not merely problems with finance or gaps between institutions
but a whole environment, a whole milieu of attitudes, beliefs and values which
translate into behaviors, ultimately, that are pertinent to understanding what
needs to be done.”
One School of Education faculty member who is directly concerned with “the whole milieu” is Associate Professor Elizabeth Moje. Part of her work on culturally responsive teaching is to “follow kids around outside school,” she says. “I go to the mall with them, go to the movies, go to their homes. I try to see how they’re using texts outside of school because that gives us the ability to help them learn how to navigate across these discourse communities.”
Teaching such students what discourse communities are, how they function, and how to function within them are among the tools for broadening the pipeline, in Moje’s view. “I’ve been working with these kids for five years now, and it’s really amazing, the things they talk about, the goals that they have,” she says, “but there’s so much they need to know that they don’t know in order to navigate university spaces.“
I try to help kids understand not just the text of content areas, but also some of the assumptions and epistemology that undergird the writing in those areas. The beauty of that is when they enter their next science class or next history class, they have some sense of that community as having certain standards, which carries through when they go to the university.”
The School of Education’s approach to what some have called, inelegantly but tellingly, “roto-rooting the pipeline” encompasses policy as well as research, K-12 as well as higher education, schools as well as the culture in which they are embedded, and an unhappily sizable array of inequities. It is as broad and pervasive as the problem it confronts.
“We have convinced people of the value of higher educa-tion,” says Burkhardt. “Ninety percent of U.S. families say that they want their son or daughter to go to college, and 80% of eighth graders indicate their intention to go to college after completing high school. But here are the seeds of revolution, from my standpoint: less than half do, and only about half of them graduate. So here’s a formula for social dissatisfaction: Tell everyone that college is essential, put them on record as aspiring to go to college, and then leave barriers in place that make their likelihood of success smaller than it should be.”
by Jeffrey Mortimer
Published in the Fall 2004 Innovator
