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Financing community colleges: an economic perspective
Book Reviews
In its entirety the collection covers a tremendous amount of ground. At its very least, it is immensely informative in its descriptions of what the relationships between schools and communities have been. are now and will continue to be like unless we devise new alternatives. After reading the essays one could conclude that we are doomed to an unproductive union between schools and communities. But it is that very conclusion that generates excitement and makes the book useful to educators, policy-makers and social scientists. The essays forcefully remind us to change the ways the borders between schools and communities are organized by our social and economic structures. The article by Seeley and Schwartz is testimony to the fact that schools cannot simply reorganize themselves and have the society reorganize with them. John Dewey proposed the same idea in his School and Sociefy when he wrote, “Let us then ask after the main aspects of the social movement; and afterward turn to the school to find what witness it gives of effort to put itself in line” (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1904, p. 4). The book’s final message is a clear and important one. Schools cannot simply establish productive and effective relationships with their communities; communities must organize and reorganize and then their schools will follow suit. SHELLEY V. GOLDMAN College for Human Services
Financing Community Colleges: an Economic Perspective. DAVID W. BRENEMANand SUSAN
C. NELSON. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institute, 1981. pp. 222. $22.95 (cloth) and $8.95 (paper). MOST literature on financing community colleges is limited to descriptions of institutional expenditures, budget formulas and revenues or general rhetoric. Objective analysis is difficult and scarce, and for that reason the Breneman and Nelson book is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the problems and issues of financing community colleges. Their purpose is to evaluate the issues through economic analysis. However, one must not look to this, or other objective analysis, for definitive answers to questions about education policy for community colleges. There are few such answers and, in most case instances, the answers to financing questions depend upon underlying values concerning the appropriate mission of community colleges. Thus, with much disagreement over what the proper role of community colleges should be, there is continuing disagreement over how community colleges should be financed. The contribution of this book is in (1) providing information about enrollments, students, costs and community colleges, useful for its own sake and useful for discussing finance issues, and (2) sorting out some of the implications for financing community colleges which flow from adhering to various educational objectives. The first chapter provides an overview of the development of community colleges and their current status. The
251
information on enrollments, sources of revenue, tuition and fees, diversity of programs. and characteristics of students, often for the 50 states, is valuable reference material. The authors observe that data are often not available or, if available, often ambiguous because of varying definitions. A conventional example is defining and counting students. Although a simple task at first impression, it quickly becomes mired in issues such as whether part-time students ‘count’ as much as full-time students, whether non-credit students should be included and whether certain institutions should be classified as community colleges. The problem is not easily resolved. Breneman and Nelson conclude that the only generalization that holds for community colleges among the states is that they are diverse - in ail aspects of their mission, finance and governance. The diversity, as a reflection of different objectives and philosophies of community colleges, is the reason that more definite statements are not made regarding how community colleges should be financed. Chapters two and three deal, respectively, with the efficiency and equity of financing community colleges. Determining the efficiency of an educational enterprise is difficult. Efficiency is defined in terms of output achieved with certain inputs and their accompanying costs. Inputs of the educational process include students and their attributes, faculty and institutions. These resources can be combined in an infinite number of ways; the allocation of financial resources affects certain inputs more directly than others, but no comprehensive relationship of inputs to outputs is well understood. The racial mix of a student body at an institution is an example of an input that is expensive to modify through public finance policies and the full range of a student’s abilities is difficult to define and measure. The same ambiguity exists for outcomes. What is a college or university supposed to produce? Breneman and Nelson, like authors before them, were able to undertake only a partial examination of the efficiency issue. Caught in the predicament that has bothered researchers and educators for decades, Breneman and Nelson rely upon the standard practice of basing their evaluation on what is easily measured, primarily the number of students and their progression through college. The issue of efficiency is narrowed to an examination of numbers of students and their enrollment and graduation. While it is understandable that the authors felt compelled to undertake some type of analysis and while they also recognized the shortcomings of their approach, the criticism of taking too narrow a perspective is more justified in dealing with community colleges than with four-year colleges because they are more diversified in scope of inputs and intended outputs. The authors recognize well their own dilemma: The most serious obstacles to a resolution of the tension between mission and finance involve the mission, not the finance, of community college activities. If a consensus existed on the distribution of benefits and their value relative to other public and private endeavors, an efficient financing system could be readily devised (p. 5-t). Without that consensus, they focus on a limited measure of outcomes. Perhaps, consequently, conclusions are self-
apparent: for example. only about one-quarter of the “students were more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree by starring in a two-year rather than a four-year college” (p. 74). The chapter on equity is one of the best chapters. After making a good case for viewing equity in terms of current financial benefits received by students. they review tuition prices. student financial aid and instructional costs. and conclude that. with respect to equity considerations. (I) a low tuition policy cannot be strongly supported and (2) community, college students are nor at a marked disadvantage m terms of the local and state subsidies provided to various sectors of public higher education. If chapter three is one of the two best chapters of the book. chapter four is the other one. The role of the federal government is examined in terms of students attending different institutions and receiving student financial aid. They provide four types of evidence by comparing (1) student financial aid and enrollment: (2) aid and college costs; (3) the likelihood of receiving aid; and (4) the fraction of costs covered by aid. and conclude that community colleges and their students are reasonably well semed. The popular allegation that community colleges are not receiving their fair share of aid is not substantiated by the author’s bindings. Chapter five is a presentation of the pros and cons of various elements in financing schemes for community colleges. The authors do not advocate any particular financing plan but explain how the appropriateness of a particular financing policy depends upon the educational objectives sought. They agree with others in this field that there is no ‘best’ way to finance communitv colleges. The last chapter contains a short statement ok the changing factors outside the educational system that arc altering the environment in which the educational system operates. These factors - inflation, the inherent value of education, the type of education desired. taxpayer resistance to Tovernment growth, and attitudes about work and learning m the life-cycle - are affecting many dimensions of higher education. A pessimistic and an optimistic scenario are profiled by the authors: how well a community college farrs will depend largely upon the priority it receives in its state and what individual, institutional action it takes. This book appears at a critical time. The extensiveness of and objectives of community colleges have been expanding for the last several decades. Many community colleges are now being forced by their own financial circumstances or by those of state legislatures to examine their activities and funding levels. As never before, the open access philosophy of community colleges is confronting practical limits of the availabilitv of financial resources. Breneman and Nelson have do& an excellent job of clarifying several of the complex public policy issues of financing community colleges. WILLIAM
Education
Commission
HYDE
of rhe States
Design for a Study of Entry into Careers. Volume I: Entry into Career Series. LUTHER B. OTTO, VAUGHX R.X. CALL and KENNETH I. SPEENER. Lexington. MA: Lexington Books, D.C. Heath and Company, 1981. pp. xvi + 233. $20.95. AS ITS subtitle indicates, this is the first in a projected series of books based on an ongoing program of research at the Boys Town Center for the Study of Youth Development. Two subsequent volumes are available. This research attempts to link the individual and structural approaches to the study of work. The concept proposed to accomplish this linkage is that of cnreer lines. The authors distlnguished between careers. Lvhich are individual phenomena. and career lines. which are patterns of job changes regularly made by people over the course of their job histories. Career lines record the job sequences that people follow with calculable predictability. Career lines are social-structural phenomena (p. 3). The proposed approach of the research program is to identify career lines and then to determine howLindividual vanables influence the career lines that workers enter. This volume discusses the theoretical background underlying this approach. the procedures and data used to construct career lines and the collection of data on individuals. The next step, the analysis of career lines using these individual data. is not presented in this volume, but some of the research questions that will be addressed are raised. To construct the career lines the authors drew upon the Public Use Samples from the 1970 census. Individuals who were age 18-57 in 1965 and who reported working in codeablr occupations and industries in both 1965 and 1970 were selected from these tapes. Even with these restrictions thcrc were almost two million cases. These cases were divided into five-year age cohorts (18-22. 23., 53-j-i) and the jobs held in 1965 and 1970 7-7. compared. Synthetic cohorts were constructed by linking the separate five-year cohorts together. The probabilities that individuals within 38-l defined occupation-industry categories would be in the same or different categories at five-year intervals were then calculated. This approach obviously involves several critical assumptions that the authors acknowledge and discuss. To obtain data on individuals. a follow-up was conducted of 6729 respondents who were first studied when they were juniors and seniors in high school in 1965 1966 in the state of Washington. The data from these respondents are referred to as the Career Development Study. Over half of this volume is devoted to a description of the conduct of this study and copies of its instruments. The respondents were contacted in 1979. 13 years after they had participated in a separate study. Through a variety of techniques. which are described fully in Volume II of this series. current addresses or telephone numbers
In its entirety the collection covers a tremendous amount of ground. At its very least, it is immensely informative in its descriptions of what the relationships between schools and communities have been. are now and will continue to be like unless we devise new alternatives. After reading the essays one could conclude that we are doomed to an unproductive union between schools and communities. But it is that very conclusion that generates excitement and makes the book useful to educators, policy-makers and social scientists. The essays forcefully remind us to change the ways the borders between schools and communities are organized by our social and economic structures. The article by Seeley and Schwartz is testimony to the fact that schools cannot simply reorganize themselves and have the society reorganize with them. John Dewey proposed the same idea in his School and Sociefy when he wrote, “Let us then ask after the main aspects of the social movement; and afterward turn to the school to find what witness it gives of effort to put itself in line” (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1904, p. 4). The book’s final message is a clear and important one. Schools cannot simply establish productive and effective relationships with their communities; communities must organize and reorganize and then their schools will follow suit. SHELLEY V. GOLDMAN College for Human Services
Financing Community Colleges: an Economic Perspective. DAVID W. BRENEMANand SUSAN
C. NELSON. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institute, 1981. pp. 222. $22.95 (cloth) and $8.95 (paper). MOST literature on financing community colleges is limited to descriptions of institutional expenditures, budget formulas and revenues or general rhetoric. Objective analysis is difficult and scarce, and for that reason the Breneman and Nelson book is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the problems and issues of financing community colleges. Their purpose is to evaluate the issues through economic analysis. However, one must not look to this, or other objective analysis, for definitive answers to questions about education policy for community colleges. There are few such answers and, in most case instances, the answers to financing questions depend upon underlying values concerning the appropriate mission of community colleges. Thus, with much disagreement over what the proper role of community colleges should be, there is continuing disagreement over how community colleges should be financed. The contribution of this book is in (1) providing information about enrollments, students, costs and community colleges, useful for its own sake and useful for discussing finance issues, and (2) sorting out some of the implications for financing community colleges which flow from adhering to various educational objectives. The first chapter provides an overview of the development of community colleges and their current status. The
251
information on enrollments, sources of revenue, tuition and fees, diversity of programs. and characteristics of students, often for the 50 states, is valuable reference material. The authors observe that data are often not available or, if available, often ambiguous because of varying definitions. A conventional example is defining and counting students. Although a simple task at first impression, it quickly becomes mired in issues such as whether part-time students ‘count’ as much as full-time students, whether non-credit students should be included and whether certain institutions should be classified as community colleges. The problem is not easily resolved. Breneman and Nelson conclude that the only generalization that holds for community colleges among the states is that they are diverse - in ail aspects of their mission, finance and governance. The diversity, as a reflection of different objectives and philosophies of community colleges, is the reason that more definite statements are not made regarding how community colleges should be financed. Chapters two and three deal, respectively, with the efficiency and equity of financing community colleges. Determining the efficiency of an educational enterprise is difficult. Efficiency is defined in terms of output achieved with certain inputs and their accompanying costs. Inputs of the educational process include students and their attributes, faculty and institutions. These resources can be combined in an infinite number of ways; the allocation of financial resources affects certain inputs more directly than others, but no comprehensive relationship of inputs to outputs is well understood. The racial mix of a student body at an institution is an example of an input that is expensive to modify through public finance policies and the full range of a student’s abilities is difficult to define and measure. The same ambiguity exists for outcomes. What is a college or university supposed to produce? Breneman and Nelson, like authors before them, were able to undertake only a partial examination of the efficiency issue. Caught in the predicament that has bothered researchers and educators for decades, Breneman and Nelson rely upon the standard practice of basing their evaluation on what is easily measured, primarily the number of students and their progression through college. The issue of efficiency is narrowed to an examination of numbers of students and their enrollment and graduation. While it is understandable that the authors felt compelled to undertake some type of analysis and while they also recognized the shortcomings of their approach, the criticism of taking too narrow a perspective is more justified in dealing with community colleges than with four-year colleges because they are more diversified in scope of inputs and intended outputs. The authors recognize well their own dilemma: The most serious obstacles to a resolution of the tension between mission and finance involve the mission, not the finance, of community college activities. If a consensus existed on the distribution of benefits and their value relative to other public and private endeavors, an efficient financing system could be readily devised (p. 5-t). Without that consensus, they focus on a limited measure of outcomes. Perhaps, consequently, conclusions are self-
apparent: for example. only about one-quarter of the “students were more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree by starring in a two-year rather than a four-year college” (p. 74). The chapter on equity is one of the best chapters. After making a good case for viewing equity in terms of current financial benefits received by students. they review tuition prices. student financial aid and instructional costs. and conclude that. with respect to equity considerations. (I) a low tuition policy cannot be strongly supported and (2) community, college students are nor at a marked disadvantage m terms of the local and state subsidies provided to various sectors of public higher education. If chapter three is one of the two best chapters of the book. chapter four is the other one. The role of the federal government is examined in terms of students attending different institutions and receiving student financial aid. They provide four types of evidence by comparing (1) student financial aid and enrollment: (2) aid and college costs; (3) the likelihood of receiving aid; and (4) the fraction of costs covered by aid. and conclude that community colleges and their students are reasonably well semed. The popular allegation that community colleges are not receiving their fair share of aid is not substantiated by the author’s bindings. Chapter five is a presentation of the pros and cons of various elements in financing schemes for community colleges. The authors do not advocate any particular financing plan but explain how the appropriateness of a particular financing policy depends upon the educational objectives sought. They agree with others in this field that there is no ‘best’ way to finance communitv colleges. The last chapter contains a short statement ok the changing factors outside the educational system that arc altering the environment in which the educational system operates. These factors - inflation, the inherent value of education, the type of education desired. taxpayer resistance to Tovernment growth, and attitudes about work and learning m the life-cycle - are affecting many dimensions of higher education. A pessimistic and an optimistic scenario are profiled by the authors: how well a community college farrs will depend largely upon the priority it receives in its state and what individual, institutional action it takes. This book appears at a critical time. The extensiveness of and objectives of community colleges have been expanding for the last several decades. Many community colleges are now being forced by their own financial circumstances or by those of state legislatures to examine their activities and funding levels. As never before, the open access philosophy of community colleges is confronting practical limits of the availabilitv of financial resources. Breneman and Nelson have do& an excellent job of clarifying several of the complex public policy issues of financing community colleges. WILLIAM
Education
Commission
HYDE
of rhe States
Design for a Study of Entry into Careers. Volume I: Entry into Career Series. LUTHER B. OTTO, VAUGHX R.X. CALL and KENNETH I. SPEENER. Lexington. MA: Lexington Books, D.C. Heath and Company, 1981. pp. xvi + 233. $20.95. AS ITS subtitle indicates, this is the first in a projected series of books based on an ongoing program of research at the Boys Town Center for the Study of Youth Development. Two subsequent volumes are available. This research attempts to link the individual and structural approaches to the study of work. The concept proposed to accomplish this linkage is that of cnreer lines. The authors distlnguished between careers. Lvhich are individual phenomena. and career lines. which are patterns of job changes regularly made by people over the course of their job histories. Career lines record the job sequences that people follow with calculable predictability. Career lines are social-structural phenomena (p. 3). The proposed approach of the research program is to identify career lines and then to determine howLindividual vanables influence the career lines that workers enter. This volume discusses the theoretical background underlying this approach. the procedures and data used to construct career lines and the collection of data on individuals. The next step, the analysis of career lines using these individual data. is not presented in this volume, but some of the research questions that will be addressed are raised. To construct the career lines the authors drew upon the Public Use Samples from the 1970 census. Individuals who were age 18-57 in 1965 and who reported working in codeablr occupations and industries in both 1965 and 1970 were selected from these tapes. Even with these restrictions thcrc were almost two million cases. These cases were divided into five-year age cohorts (18-22. 23., 53-j-i) and the jobs held in 1965 and 1970 7-7. compared. Synthetic cohorts were constructed by linking the separate five-year cohorts together. The probabilities that individuals within 38-l defined occupation-industry categories would be in the same or different categories at five-year intervals were then calculated. This approach obviously involves several critical assumptions that the authors acknowledge and discuss. To obtain data on individuals. a follow-up was conducted of 6729 respondents who were first studied when they were juniors and seniors in high school in 1965 1966 in the state of Washington. The data from these respondents are referred to as the Career Development Study. Over half of this volume is devoted to a description of the conduct of this study and copies of its instruments. The respondents were contacted in 1979. 13 years after they had participated in a separate study. Through a variety of techniques. which are described fully in Volume II of this series. current addresses or telephone numbers