Civil Rights and Federal Higher Education

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Dr. Nicholas Hillman and Dr. Gary Orfield. Dr. Hillman is professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he's also a faculty affiliate with the Institute for Research on Poverty and the La Follette School of Public Affairs. Dr. Gary Orfield is distinguished research professor of education, law, political science, and urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he's also co-director of the Civil Rights Project he co-founded at Harvard in 1996.

[00:45]

and together they are the authors and editors of Civil Rights and Federal Higher Education, which we're here to talk about today.

[00:54] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:57] SPEAKER_01:

Dr. Hillman and Dr. Orfield, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:59] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you.

[00:59] SPEAKER_02:

Thank you.

[01:00] SPEAKER_01:

Let's set up, if we could, a little bit about the nature of this book. I understand this is an edited volume where you've written some of the chapters and you've also had other contributors speak to various issues around civil rights and federal higher education. Take us into that a little bit, like just kind of the structure of the book and kind of the convening that you did to bring it together.

[01:18] SPEAKER_00:

Nick, why don't you take over?

[01:20] SPEAKER_02:

Sure, sure. The convening, my goodness, this, Gary, was probably in 2018, if I'm recalling correctly. And maybe you could share more details about the convening itself and how it came to be. But this has been a long time in the making. We had, first of all, this Hill briefing, the convening we're referring to. where we got some of the original ideas out there to share and get some feedback from staffers and policy folks up on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

[01:46]

But then in the subsequent months, and it turns out years that followed, we also rounded that out with some new contributions that didn't necessarily present at that briefing, but we knew needed to be included in that volume. And so over the course of quite a long period of time, we were able to keep the momentum going. And so we Of course, COVID changed a lot of everything, and we were navigating the electoral politics at the time. We wanted to be sure that the book was both timely, but also timeless. So we wanted to capture a lot of the ideas that would be, you know, carrying through for years to come, while also capturing some of the more urgent issues that we were hearing about in 2018 and still today.

[02:31] SPEAKER_00:

I think for public school folks and educational administrators in general, the important thing about this book is that, as everyone is increasingly aware, finishing high school isn't enough in our society anymore. Post-secondary education is essential, and it's really essential that people in both the elementary and secondary schools and colleges think about how to make this transition work and why it has failed so badly for most of our students of color, which is a fundamental focus of this book. How can we fix that?

[03:06] SPEAKER_01:

Well, let's set up some of the civil rights issues, if we could, because I think when it comes to federal policy and maybe some of the history, I think probably our audience is not super familiar with that. Let's talk, if we could, then, about the historical context and the relationship between between, say, the Higher Education Act, the policy that's set at the federal level, and what actually happens for students when they attempt to or plan to go to college. Because, you know, as educators, we want our students to be prepared for college, but kind of what happens after they leave the K-12 world, it's a little bit of a black box to us. So set the stage for us, if you would.

[03:44] SPEAKER_02:

I would start it from this angle, and it's not going to totally answer the question. When I think about the federal context for higher education, certainly has its roots in the 1965 Higher Education Act and the civil rights movement of mid-1960s. I kind of fast forward and I think about the policy conversations today that are happening in higher education. They might be the same policy conversations that were happening 20 years ago or 30 years ago in K through 12 policymaking at the federal level, or at least there's a lot of common DNA. And so in many respects, we want to be learning in the higher education side From some of the mistakes, some of the successes, and some of the sort of unfinished agendas that have been occurring in K-12 policymaking, but also we see it coming in higher ed. And so certainly the origins are still tied to a common place, a common time.

[04:37]

But I think higher education tends to be, it seems, about 20 years or so behind some of the developments that have been happening in K-12. So, Gary, I don't know if you would agree with that assessment, but it might set up some of the origins there.

[04:50] SPEAKER_00:

I think one of the things that's interesting for people who are in elementary, secondary schools is that You know, where we form federal education policy was in the middle 1960s. Up until then, the federal government was a bit player in public schools and not really critical for higher education either. And what happened in that period was a coming together of an anti-poverty movement with the war on poverty and the civil rights movement and a decision that If we were going to have the educational system work decently, either in our public schools or in our higher ed, that we had to make provisions for our history of exclusion of the people of color from our education system.

[05:43]

and our failure to address the special needs of poverty. So in higher education, that's expressed by creating a system of financial aid, the first big financial aid system in the history of the country for poor kids to go to college. And the Civil Rights Act, which said that the 17 states in our country that were legally segregated up until the Brown decision had to change. It had to change fundamentally how race was treated. Those things came together in a progressive time. And if you look at the history, they kind of got reversed in important ways as the conservative movement surged, particularly in the Reagan administration.

[06:25]

where we cut back the resources and we cut back the civil rights enforcement, and we changed our courts in a more conservative direction. And since then, we've been living in the aftermath of that period. One of the key decisions in that period was to shift the burden of paying for higher education substantially from the state governments to the individual students and their families. And it was a burden that many of those families couldn't bear. And that led us to a lot of decisions about loans and college debt and so forth that really exploded in the 2020 election as central issues for millions of students all over the country. And as we do this recording, we're waiting for a decision by the president about canceling some of that massive debt that students have acquired as a result of those decisions that really date back to the 1980s.

[07:22]

Because we shifted towards relying on students and families, and since they didn't have the money, they had to borrow it. And that created a huge political problem for the country.

[07:34] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, let's talk about that, a little bit of that history of financing higher education, because I think for a lot of our listeners who are kind of my age, college has always been something that you borrow money for, maybe get some scholarships, maybe get some financial aid, but it has fallen largely on the individual and their family to pay for higher ed. And we've heard stories, we hear people, maybe my parents' age, talking about when college was $50 or something. like that. And it just seems like, no, that can't possibly, you know, you're pulling my leg. This can't possibly be the case. What was the situation with states and funding higher education prior to the 1980s?

[08:11]

Because I think that is important context.

[08:13] SPEAKER_02:

One of the big parts of the context prior to the 1980s era was that the higher education systems that we had largely enrolled white students and students who had a lot of economic privilege. And what we've seen over time, even with college getting less affordable, we've seen a wider array of students come to higher education that are increasingly students of color and first generation college students and lower income students. And so the profile of students is changing. And the politics of this is really fascinating. We've got a chapter in the book that gets at this a little bit, where at the exact same time when the college population is becoming less white is the exact same time that policymakers, many of them white, white are deciding to disinvest from public higher education. And so racial politics certainly plays into this, but also issues of values and priorities of who to support, how to support them.

[09:08]

And these are timeless questions that when we have policies that are kind of neutral to these inequalities that are baked into so many of our systems, then our policies aren't going to do much to address those inequalities. And so I think that's one of the big tensions. We have a changing landscape in many ways, and the policy solutions and the policy apparatus isn't really keeping pace or doing enough to fulfill some of the original intents of these civil rights reforms.

[09:36] SPEAKER_00:

You know, what you talk about was older people remembering a different world. When I went to college at the University of Minnesota, my tuition was $100 a quarter.

[09:51]

My first research project as a student was a research project to see how many of our students would have to drop out if it was raised. And we actually defeated that. tuition increase in the state legislature as a result of that. But the costs that exist now are almost unintelligible to older people in our society. They've increased overwhelmingly faster than family incomes, four or five times as fast as family incomes. And it's unsustainable for many families and for students who want to acquire skills and credentials they know are essential in the job market and in their future.

[10:35]

So it's a big national problem. And we've been kicking the can down the road now for decades without facing it directly.

[10:45] SPEAKER_02:

And we have also the origin story of the loan system in particular was basically carbon copied out of the way we pay for mortgages. And it was never, as I understand it, designed to be the primary way to finance human capital or finance an education. And so it's a very sort of, in some cases, accidental way to pay for college. But in other cases, just a very unplanned way. And one of the chapters in the book is really eye-opening to me. And I've been studying the student loan issue for quite some time.

[11:14]

And this chapter was one where I just think about it often, where the author, Jaleel Mustafa Bishop, puts this racial lens on understanding student loan debt and says, essentially, You cannot take race out of the picture when thinking about these investment decisions and the origin story of where the loans came from was sort of race neutral. And that was an okay financing strategy for like white middle-class families that needed a little extra money, but to then blow that up and have it apply to all families to pay for college, it just doesn't fit. And so that context I think is really needed in these conversations.

[11:50] SPEAKER_00:

One of the worst things that happened, and we do describe it in the book, is the explosion of for-profit colleges that just existed to extract the total students. federal loan and federal grant money from students, oftentimes without any preparation for college and without any understanding of the system. And a lot of those students never finished. They never got a degree or they got a degree from a program that was so weak that they couldn't get a job. So they could never pay off the debt. This created a huge scandal.

[12:27]

Congress investigated. The Obama administration crunched down on it. The Trump administration hired people who loved that system. And the Biden administration is trying to straighten it out again to some extent and has forgiven a lot of the debt that was acquired in the worst of these schools. But that system soaked up huge amounts of federal money and created huge debts and didn't offer typically the students much in return.

[12:59] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I remember that being something of a complex debate because there was an argument for access, that these are innovative programs financed in innovative ways that are creating access for people that otherwise wouldn't have access. And it started to sound a lot like subprime mortgages, eventually, that we're saying this is maybe not a great idea to push people into these massive amounts of debt and these very expensive but questionable higher education programs. Do you see other parallels between, say, the 2008 financial crisis and what's happened in higher ed financing?

[13:38] SPEAKER_02:

I see one big parallel and it doesn't necessarily have to do with financing so much as it has to do with the trust in the institutions themselves. Banks are perceived to have such negative perceptions publicly. These big institutions that are ripping people off are not immune to higher education. Colleges and universities are also kind of on the list. When you look at the Pew surveys of public opinion polls, they put big banks and big universities sort of like neck and neck in like the least trusted institutions, at least from a conservative's perspective. And so there's a big culture shift, a big political shift happening where trust in institutions has eroded.

[14:17]

Gosh, Gary, even since the time we started this book, I think public perceptions of trust of institutions has eroded in ways. And I think that that's also part of the civil rights discussion to be like, wait a second, if we want to have collective solutions, we've got to invest in our institutions themselves. And so to really reconcile those things, I think is a big stretch. But that's a common theme, I think, between banking and higher ed that

[14:41] SPEAKER_00:

If you think about the parallels with the Great Recession and the housing market collapse in 2007 and 2008, many people lost their homes. They were foreclosed. Many others weren't able to buy homes. But you could resolve it. I mean, eventually you lost your home or you were able to keep it. In student loans, it's even worse because you can't get out of them from bankruptcy without enormous difficulty.

[15:11]

Congress has passed laws that make student loans the hardest things to get rid of, which is really unfair, deeply unfair to students. Why should we say it's okay, you can declare bankruptcy because you've done foolish things about investments? But you can't declare bankruptcy if you were earnest and you tried to pay your way back and you got into an impossible sinkhole from the student loan system. It's one of the issues that we need to face as a country, straighten out the bankruptcy system, give people a chance if they're in an impossible hole to restart. That's what bankruptcy is intended to do.

[15:53] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and let's talk if we could about the whole sequence of things that needs to go right for higher education to be the engine of social mobility and equity that it's supposed to be, right? The idea is that we don't just want you know, the children of rich people to go to college and become the next generation of rich people and everybody else just kind of stays where they are and is excluded from that system. Like we want this higher education to be an engine of equity and social mobility and, you know, kind of fulfilling the American dream. But for that to happen, obviously as K-12 people, we're concerned with preparing students for college. Students have to be ready academically to do the work that college demands. Take us through the rest of that sequence, or if I've left anything out that needs to happen earlier.

[16:40]

For higher education to do what it's really supposed to do for American society, what else has to happen and where are we falling short?

[16:49] SPEAKER_00:

One of the places we've really fallen short is the lack of communication between high schools and colleges. And the fact that particularly for students of color and students in very poor areas, they're in high schools that simply don't prepare them for college. And we treat that as if that's fair enough, but it isn't fair enough. We have to think about that. Every child having a right, either in their own school or in a school they can transfer to easily, to have the full range of college prep. And for the colleges to reach out to all the high schools, not just those high schools where they know the students are well-prepared and where they always send the recruiters.

[17:28]

We have to make this system work. And it's very important to think through the connections between high school, community college, and four-year college, because these are not, it's not just a pipeline that leaks. It's a pipeline that isn't very well connected at all. And to make it work, these pieces have to be connected. And they are connected for students in upper income neighborhoods that go to a high school that by default prepares them for a good college and that is in close communication with college. And then at the other extreme, we have high schools that don't have any reasonable preparation and are basically ignored by the higher education system.

[18:09] SPEAKER_01:

Since this is just a podcast and we get to say whatever we want. If you could wave a magic wand and connect those pipelines a little bit better, what would we be doing? Because it does seem very much that as K-12 educators, we hope that students go to college, but we don't really do anything to directly plug them in. When you go from middle school to high school, you're assigned to a particular school, you are told when to show up, and there's pretty much no opportunity to drop off there. from high school to college, you're kind of on your own. So if you were redesigning our system, or if you've looked at systems that do work the way that you have in mind, what would some of the changes be?

[18:48] SPEAKER_00:

Well, on the high school side, I would say students need to understand what's necessary to go to college.

[18:57]

I did a study of Indiana years ago, and what we found is all the kids and their families plan to go to college, The ones whose parents had been to college knew what to do. Most of the rest of the kids and their families didn't know what to do. It seems to me one of the things that we have to have happen is for both the colleges and the high schools to inform people earlier and much more strongly about what you need to do to prepare and give them reports back. We see your son and daughter haven't registered for geometry. That means you don't want them to go to college. Is that correct?

[19:38]

We need to have some default systems because The information that you get if you've been to college and you live in a neighborhood where everybody goes to college is deep, profound, connected. The information you get in a poor neighborhood with extreme concentration of poverty schools with very few families that have been to college is almost non-existent. And we can't assume that it'll just happen automatically. It has to be a basic responsibility of these institutions.

[20:12] SPEAKER_02:

I think something I'd add is maybe on the sort of post-college side. So even when you look at all the college options around the country, once a student leaves high school and now goes to college, there's just such a wide array of institutions they could choose from. And what's really surprising to me is that most students stay 50 miles from their homes. they go to college and that should be a surprise i think to a lot of people because we have this thing in our mind of like you know students sort of moving all across the country or going far and wide to college and really only about 10 percent of students go to the super highly selective schools and so community colleges local local broad access regional comprehensive universities uh these are really the like engines of opportunity in in higher ed that are really underfunded under resourced and you know the demand is

[21:03]

there more than anywhere else. And so I think that that's where we see a lot of the inequities are in the institutions themselves that are sort of doing the work in their communities and oftentimes serving students of color, but they're doing it with the least amount of resources. So I think that that's a challenge when it comes to thinking about going to college. It's oftentimes the one in your own backyard that's the most important one.

[21:25] SPEAKER_01:

So this is not mainly a challenge of getting more students to Harvard. This is about getting more students to the local colleges, community colleges, state universities that they're most likely to go to by far.

[21:35] SPEAKER_02:

That's right. And for those institutions to make sure that they really have the resources to serve students well, I think that's the key.

[21:42] SPEAKER_00:

One of the examples of things that could be built on is the experiments in many parts of the country with... during high school, you know, where you have middle college high schools, for example, where they're connected to a community college and students take college courses during high school. We have that in many places, but unfortunately, the more privileged students are much more likely to get it and use it than the students who really need it. It could be a really valuable resource for the students in really weak high schools to have that kind of experience, because there are people who can go to Harvard at any neighborhood in our country if their talents are developed.

[22:26]

And if they're in a high school that can't do it, maybe the community college could turn them on, connect them. We really should think about ways to get disadvantaged students connected to programs like that, disadvantaged students in weak high schools, rather than just make that an additional acceleration for students who are already on the superhighway to college.

[22:52] SPEAKER_01:

I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the issue of students not being prepared, right? I mean, colleges are constantly complaining that high school is not preparing students to do college level work, that students are having to take multiple remedial classes just to be ready for those 101 level classes. How can we think about that issue of preparation? Because certainly if we're sending students off into the world and telling them go to college, but then they're not prepared to succeed, they're taking out massive loans and then, you know, spending a couple semesters and tens of thousands of dollars on college and not walking away with a degree. You know, we heard lots of cases recently where people are worse off for having attended some college than they would have been if they had just not borrowed the money and gone into another field. But how do we think about this issue of preparation and getting kids ready for college level work?

[23:38] SPEAKER_00:

I think that one of the things that we think about is that we assess high schools based on a couple of standardized tests, the reading and language arts. We don't really assess them on whether they've given students some of the basic essentials for college work. Have they learned how to write an analytic essay? Have they learned how to do any research? Have they learned how to use math in actual problem solving? Those kinds of skills make all the difference in the world when you get to a college.

[24:10]

And we need to think more broadly about how to assess what we're doing. It's not just about how you score on a standardized test. It's how you learned how to learn. And, you know, when we get obsessed with a high stakes assessment system that just is about getting training people in the skills to take those state tests. We often lose concentration on things that really are important. How do you learn to think?

[24:41]

How do you get to the next level of problem solving? How do you learn how to be a self-motivated learner who can deal with a stack of textbooks that you get when you hit the college? How do you get comfortable with reading, serious reading? All of us who teach college get frustrated with the fact that we get some very smart students who don't have the habit of reading and don't know how to write an essay, even though they obviously have the intelligence to do that. They haven't been challenged to do it in their high schools.

[25:16] SPEAKER_02:

I would add that if public colleges especially aren't doing more to help with those transitions, whether that's redesigning the curriculum, designing what are called guided pathways, or really doing proactive support to be ready for students, no matter where they are, if public colleges aren't doing that, then the for-profit colleges that we were talking about earlier are going to suck them all up. And so in that case, the social consequences will be even worse. And so I think that's part of the value of investing in these efforts is that it does probably pay off in the long run, even if it's inefficient in the short run.

[25:50] SPEAKER_00:

One of the things that we do in many of our states is we provide funding for community colleges at much lower levels than four-year colleges, even though they have a more complicated job to do because they get so many students who don't have the basic pre-collegiate skills and so forth. Then we just pay them about their enrollment. We don't pay them on the basis of whether they actually prepare their own students for transfer. We need to think about this whole huge community college system in a different way. That's one of the chapters in our book is about that, how community colleges become a dead end for a lot of students who go from weak high schools into weak community colleges and never get any degrees of any sort and have very little possibility of transferring. So we need to think about each element of this pipeline

[26:45]

with much more focus on how well is it working? What could we do to make it work better? Not just about how do we fund all of these institutions and keep these buildings functioning.

[26:56] SPEAKER_01:

If we're talking about creating access for more students and making higher education the engine of opportunity that it's supposed to be, community colleges have to play a big role in that. We're not talking about sending twice as many students to the Ivy League. We're not talking about sending twice as many students to the state universities. It's really the community colleges where the big opportunity lies, right?

[27:18] SPEAKER_00:

Well, a big opportunity also lies with the open access for your colleges. the former teachers colleges that have become public secondary level four-year colleges. Those are extremely valuable institutions because students who go to those are many times more likely to get a degree than a student who starts at a community college. So we need to build on those institutions and expand them considerably, I think, That would be one of the priorities I would have if I were thinking about how to increase access, because we have quite a few community colleges that almost nobody transfers successfully from into four-year colleges. So we need to look at that system and think about whether it's strategically more important to expand open access for your colleges. or community colleges, or we put more community colleges on the same campus with four-year colleges.

[28:13]

We want to think about a lot of creative ways of doing this because it's not working very well right now.

[28:19] SPEAKER_02:

And to piggyback on that one, we've got a chapter on minority-serving institutions. There's a federal designation in the Higher Education Act for MSIs and to support these institutions that are oftentimes community colleges and broad-access colleges serving disproportionate shares of students of color. And a lot of times they need the additional federal support because they're not getting from their state, or there's funding inequality locally. And then the federal government helps support these institutions. But again, there hasn't been a huge federal agenda around MSIs, a lot of federal investment in MSIs, but that's a great opportunity to have a civil rights origin story of supporting MSIs really needs to be actualized, like be invested in and supported, especially now.

[29:01] SPEAKER_00:

And one of the things that's distinctive, and certainly you guys in the South are well aware of this, is that if you look at the African-American students, for example, who are going into STEM, a disproportionate number of those come from the African-American colleges. That shows two things. One of them is that those are a valuable resource. And the second one is we need to learn some lessons from them for the other for the flagship universities, because they're too often taking really talented students of color and bunking them out in the first class in a science sequence or something like that, where we need to support them through that because they have the ability, but they haven't had the preparation.

[29:46] SPEAKER_02:

The last time the Higher Education Act was reauthorized in any comprehensive way was in 2008. And when it was introduced in 1965, Congress was on a pretty routine schedule of reauthorizing the act and doing comprehensive reforms to it. has fallen out of priorities. And it's had a lot of what one of the chapters calls policy neglect and driven in part by polarization and a number of other reasons. But without a comprehensive reform of the HEA, we really won't see big changes in any of the programs, any of the priorities. And we'll see a lot of the status quo, which means we're seeing more inequality.

[30:25]

And so when the Higher Education Act is finally going to be comprehensively reauthorized. We have to hope that it occurs under administration that's positive about higher education, has some promising solutions on the table, because otherwise, they'll probably do more harm than good.

[30:41] SPEAKER_00:

We're operating this huge, expensive, complicated system in ways that perpetuate inequality. that don't provide the mobility that we all hope for and our congress has been so dysfunctional that it's gone for a generation of a generation of huge changes where whites have become the minority and the whole generation of college students without addressing issues in any serious way i believe that there's a opening in the country for real breakthrough as if we could get past the political gridlock that we've been locked into for so long.

[31:22] SPEAKER_01:

Very well said. So the book is Civil Rights and Federal Higher Education. Dr. Hillman and Dr. Orfield, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.

[31:32] SPEAKER_00:

Pleasure to be with you. Likewise.

[31:33] SPEAKER_01:

Thank you.

[31:34] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.