No One Could Have Predicted…

/ The Old Crank

Turns out that making adult education more expensive and less accessible reduces enrollment:

In the four months since Florida began charging tuition for adult education programs, enrollment has dropped dramatically, prompting concern from some lawmakers that the Legislature may have gone too far.

Since requiring not only tuition, but also documentation to determine residency, enrollment in adult education classes offered at colleges has dropped 45 percent and enrollment offered through some school districts has dropped 38 percent, according to preliminary data by the state Department of Education.

The one possible silver lining here is that it could provide an opportunity to learn more about which each of these additional requirements — the tuition fees or the residency documentation requirement — had more of an impact. I don’t know if anyone in Florida is collecting data to determine the answer to this question, but it would be useful for advocates and policymakers to know the answer. When this law went into effect, I suspected the residency documentation was a much bigger deal than the tuition, and some of my colleagues in Florida agreed with me. Immigrants who are legal residents nonetheless are often nervous about presenting the wrong documentation to persons in positions of authority. In light of current events in neighboring states, such nervousness does not seem irrational to me.

People assume this is an issue that only impacts immigrants, but that’s not the case. I know from experience that a surprising number of people have trouble coming up with the paperwork needed to prove residency (homeless individuals are an obvious — but not the only  — example). Folks attempting to enroll in adult education for the first time are often easily discouraged. I can easily imagine people showing up to enroll, and after being told they need to come back with residency documentation, never return.

And there’s this:

One unintended consequence has been the impact tuition has had on inmates in Florida’s jails, prisons and juvenile justice facilities. Because of new requirements that require documentation to prove residency, and the tuition, some inmates cannot register for or pay for the classes, lawmakers said.

Maybe unintended, but I don’t understand how this could not have been anticipated by those who supported the law.

UPDATE (11/22/11): Just for clarification’s sake, I should have noted that non-residents of Florida are not barred from enrolling in adult education classes in Florida — they just have to pay more. So if you don’t have the documentation to prove you are a Florida resident, you could just opt to pay the (substantially) greater fee. But I don’t think that lessens the chilling effect of having any kind of proof-of-residency rules attached to enrollment.

New Post on D.C. LEARNs’ Blog: What Does Adult Literacy Have to Do with Parent and Community Involvement in Local Schools?

/ The Old Crank

Earlier this week I posted an article on the D.C. LEARNs blog about the relationship between adult literacy and efforts to encourage more parents/caregivers to get involved with the schools where their children attend. Instead of cross-posting it here, I thought I’d just post the link.

The Skills Mismatch: What Employers Say vs. What They Do

/ The Old Crank

Speaking of Jared Bernstein, (who I quoted in my previous post), yesterday he weighed in on the skills mismatch debate. In short, he thinks employers are full of it:

[T]he consensus among economists tends to be that there’s a large skills mismatch between employers’ demands and the skills of the workforce.  I don’t buy it.  The data from the BLS on occupational skill demands now and in the future actually matches up pretty cleanly with the supply of skill, at least at the level of educational attainment.  Yes, employers constantly say they can’t find skilled workers, but that’s kind of the point… they constantly say it. If it were true, you’d see it in a more quickly rising compensation premium to workers with higher levels of education.  And you don’t really see that type of acceleration.  (Note: the emphasis on “acceleration” is important here—the fact that college workers are paid more than high workers isn’t the issue—unmet skill demands imply an increasingly rising premium, and the college premium has actually decelerated in recent years, as this slide from EPI reveals–it shows the regression-adjusted college premium as flat since the latter 90s for women and rising more slowly for men.)

He does think that increasing higher levels of educational attainment is good for the economy in general — in that smarter people are better workers in whatever job they are doing — but that’s not the same argument the skills mismatch folks are making.

Are Education Investments Enough?

/ The Old Crank

Yesterday, Jared Bernstein highlighted a new paper on income mobility by Katherine Bradbury, from the Boston Federal Reserve, which bolsters the argument that the rate of family income mobility—the ability of families to move up and down the income scale—has been gradually diminishing for the last several decades, while income inequality has grown over the same period. This is important, Bernstein explains, because there are some who argue that the increase in income inequality in this country is offset by greater mobility—in other words, they argue that while the gap between rich and poor is widening, at least more people are able to move up and down the income scale more quickly.

Bradbury’s paper has a great chart showing that this does not appear to be the case—that in fact, there appears to be a decline in the rate of mobility across the last several decades.

Bernstein believes the two are causally related. That, in his words, “higher inequality is itself driving a chain of events that leads to lower rates of income mobility.” He continues:

There are various links to this chain—and this is just a hypothesis at this point (but I’ll bet I’m right). The relationship between income concentration and political power is one important link. The austerity measures we are now contemplating, the regressive changes to the tax code, the sharp cuts in discretionary spending (a part of the budget that pays for, among other things, various investments in human capital targeted at less advantaged populations)—the general and pervasive view that we a) can’t afford the investments and social insurance we need, and b) can’t raise taxes to pay for them—is not an objective fact based on analysis. It’s a political call based on power.

Last night, Fareed Zakaria hosted a special on CNN called “Restoring the American Dream: Fixing Education.” On CNN’s web site, Zakaria writes:

I’ve been thinking about Occupy Wall Street, which is now occupying a number of other cities in America. What is it really about? The protesters don’t like bank bailouts; they feel the 99% have been hard done-by and they’re protesting what they see as unprecedented inequality.

His conclusion is that the lack of social mobility is what underlies it all:

I think underlying their sense of frustration is despair over a very un-American state of affairs: A loss of social mobility. Americans have so far put up with inequality because they felt they could change their own status. They didn’t mind others being rich, as long as they had a path to move up as well. The American Dream is all about social mobility – the sense that anyone can make it.

Zakaria also has stats. He notes this week’s TIME magazine cover story on social mobility, in which the author points out that if you were born in 1970 in the bottom one-fifth of the socio-economic spectrum, you had only a 17% chance of making it into the upper two-fifths.

From what I can tell, the terms “social mobility” and “inequality” used by Zakaria here are roughly equivalent to—or at least very closely tied to—the concepts of income inequality and income mobility discussed in Bradbury’s paper. In other words, he thinks (and I think he’s probably right about this) that people are frustrated because they see rich people getting richer while their own opportunities to get ahead are diminishing. (Although I’m not sure if this goes far enough—people seem angry about not just diminishing opportunity to get ahead, but about falling further behind.)

Zakaria’s answer, like others in the media, is education:

There are a number of reasons why we find ourselves in this predicament – but the most important of them is how much we have lagged behind on education. No other factor is as closely linked to upward mobility. Education is the engine of mobility (my emphasis).

Reading this after reading Bernstein’s article, I wonder if our education system really is the primary reason why we “find ourselves in this predicament.” After all, many of the Occupy Wall Street protesters are college-educated, as are many of the long-term unemployed. While I would imagine that most protesters would agree that equal opportunity for education is consistent with their message, what people appear to be most directly angry about is that despite having educated themselves and worked hard and done all the things they are supposed to do, economic opportunity is actually narrowing—and in some cases, drastically. (I also think many are focused more on immediate actions and less in long-term investments—but that is another discussion.)

Everyone agrees that investments in education make sense, but what is the degree to which these investments will actually impact family income inequality absent any other reforms or changes in our economic system? Is education still the primary engine of mobility that Zakaria claims it is? Do people believe that it is? Perhaps this is discussed during the program (which I have not seen), but in his introduction, Zakaria does not get into the issue of income concentration and political power that Bernstein raises.

In education we talk a lot about return on investment. You can’t get two sentences into a conversation with a pre-K education advocate, for example, before hearing about how x number of dollars invested in the system will result in y amounts of economic output. But the income inequality and mobility problem suggests to me that right now there may be a different, more relevant way to ask about return on investment in education: to what extent will our investments in education result in greater income equality and/or greater rates of mobility? If those investments are not going to do it on their own, what else needs to happen? In particular, I’m hoping that when people call for reform and increased investments in education as a direct response to these protests, they can address these questions.

I think these are especially relevant questions for those of us in the adult education field. Clearly, a lot of adults who need help with basic skills are hoping that improving those skills will lead them to greater economic opportunity. One thing for sure: we tell them that all the time. But for adult learning to lead to greater economic opportunity, there has to be a reasonably equitable economic playing field for them to enter once they upgrade those skills. What if students decide that this is no longer the case—that whatever effort they put into improving their skills, they will end up right back where they started? There is a line in Bradbury’s paper that suggests this is not an unreasonable position: she writes that “families’ later-year incomes increasingly depended on their starting place. (my emphasis)”