510 E. Peltason Dr, UC Irvine  

by Trevor Griffey, School of Humanities, UC Irvine

The idea of continuing education— sometimes also called “lifelong learning”— is old and venerable. It taps into some of the best humanist ideals of self-improvement and the democratization of access to skills and knowledge.

But the management of contemporary continuing education programs by many universities has shown the perils of for-profit models for education hosted by supposedly non-profit and even public universities.

Shutdowns are now spreading as fast as the coronavirus. On March 19, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered 40 million Californians to stay home, claiming that the infection rate puts the state on track for 25.5 million infections.  The order has no end date.  New York and other states and counties have since followed suit: by noon on March 21st, 75 million US residents were under some kind of lockdown.

In this post I'm going to talk about what I've learned during a sustained effort to apply analytical expertise to a topic outside of my normal subject areas, as I try to build a base for a series of citizen judgements about health policy, and also the related areas of educational and economic policy that I know more about.

This learning process has changed my mind about a number of Covid-related issues: for example, when I learned March 10th of UCSB's shutdown--at the end of my senior seminar, thanks to Jenna, multitasking on her email again!--I was a skeptic about the benefits of widespread closures. Now I'm a believer: I think that widespread social distancing is our only chance to avoid levels of infection that would overwhelm hospitals and clinics and lead to much excess death.  At the same time, I'm also more optimistic about reducing infections than I was a week ago.

The main part of this post close-reads the one published infection model that I've been able to find-Neil Ferguson et al.'s paper, from Imperial College London.  The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has not released its modeling, though it was discussed in a bootleg version by the New York Times.  My caveat up front is that the SARS-CoV-2 infection model I analyze does not offer any certainty about the future. But I will talk about the powers of the suppression regime we've entered into, and how the disease might be made less deadly than many of us now assume.

An overview:

• The policy of virus suppression does appear to reduce Covid-19's spread. I'll define this and other terms below, since terminology is all over the place in media reports. (The one journalist I've found to have interviewed Neil Ferguson--Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times--conflates mitigation and suppression.)  Suppression has worked well in South Korea, Singapore, and post-lockdown Hubei in China when social distancing is combined with mass testing. 
• The U.S. simply does not have the testing capability to do the most effective form of suppression.  (Santa Barbara County has brilliant and frequently exercised emergency services.  As of March 22nd it has 13 confirmed Covid-19 cases, a shortage of test kits, and 200 tests out whose results won't be in for awhile.) The U.S. has not been able to do contact-tracing, which would have allowed a much more efficient form of isolation than the mass version we're doing now.  In spite of some encouraging reports of new equipment coming on line, the U.S. is in the midst of what statistician John A. Ioannidis calls an "evidence fiasco," and its public health capacities have been downsized (personnel down 20 percent since 2008, according to David Himmelstein) to the point that we're likely stuck with the crudest, most disruptive, and most economically damaging form of suppression. 
• This has implications for rebuilding social and public capabilities that I'll save for a later post on how SARS-CoV-2 is putting neoliberalism out of its misery--and how to keep that from causing further misery for diverse publics.
• A theory point: public officials are using projections of high infection and death rates to install suppression regimes, but these suppression regimes are designed to invalidate the numbers that justify them (by producing much lower rates of infection and death).  Either you infect 81 percent of California by doing nothing, or you lockdown California and get a much lower infection percentage.  You don't do both.  I elaborate on this point because it's important for people not to think lockdown = death (regardless), but to think the opposite.  
• A policy point: public officials must not bullshit the public with exaggerated numbers, withheld models (CDC!), and mashup policies that will encourage cheating. Newsom did the right thing, but he didn't give clear, honest reasons for it.  That has to change.

To take the last point first: Where did Newsom get the number that he used to shut down most of the state economy without an end date? We don't actually know. The LA Times reports, "the governor’s office declined to provide an explanation of the state’s projection that 25.5 million Californians will be infected with this virus. Instead, a spokesman for the governor said the state’s mitigation efforts could lower that estimate."

The last part is true (though "mitigation" is the wrong word, as I'll explain), but the public should be told the source.  In the meantime, I'll guess that Newsom's people got that number from the now-famous pandemic modeling paper I mentioned at the top, Ferguson et al. Their baseline reproduction number (Ro) for the disease is 2.4--meaning each case typically goes on to infect 2.4 other people. You can get to 25.5 million Covid-19 infections by taking California's Covid infection count when Newsom spoke--around 1000--and giving it an exponent of 2.45.  (Updated: See Akos Rona-Tas's correction of this speculation below, under March 23.)

The Ferguson paper derived that Ro in part from from the spread of the virus in Wuhan, China, before the government began its many non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs)--forced quarantining, widespread testing, etc.  (Wuhan's Ro was previously reported as 3.11).  The projection that 56 percent of the California population will become infected appeared as a math error in Newsom's letter to Trump requesting a hospital ship: it's actually 64 percent, or alternately, 39.56 million Californians * 0.56 = 22.15 million inflections.  The point isn't the bad math but the need to offer credible numbers and explain clearly where they come from.  People will take honest, fully disclosed estimates more seriously.  Health policy needs to be open to establish the trust that government now desperately needs, to discourage cheating, and to allow meaningful democratic judgment about overall policy. 

Public officials, including Newsom, seem to be now focused on using big numbers to stampede the masses into social distancing, RTFN. This is understandable, since, in the suppression arsenal, social distancing is pretty much all we've got.  But one major effect of their statements is to muddle the difference between mitigating and suppressing a pandemics: the former allows infection rates like 55 percent. The latter slows growth rates and can put them into reverse.  Suppression also requires a rigor that people won't pursue if they don't understand the massive difference it can make.

To put this in the form of a question, could the U.S. and the European Union (and other regions) achieve suppression and thus decline in the number of new cases?  The current tracking in California is not good.

But look at  the South Korean case pattern.

South Korea had our hockey stick and has now bent it down into slower growth of new cases.  As is now widely discussed, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and now Wuhan have slowed the spread.  This is the effect of suppression strategies.  There's some important news here, which is that Covid-19 infections rates can be reduced, and its case-mortality rate can be kept low (not the 3.4 percent reported by the World Health Organization, but about 1 percent in South Korea, or 0.54 percent for cases under age 60).  Germany currently has a 0.3 percent case-mortality rate. SARS-CoV-2 kills people by doing horrible damage to their lungs (see the images around 0'30" in this Santa Barbara Cottage Health grand rounds lecture).  And yet the virus does so little to so many other victims that 86 percent of cases in China were undocumented prior to travel restrictions. 

On to the model: the Ferguson et al. paper draws on previous work with influenza pandemics to compare three responses-- doing nothing, mitigation, and suppression.  Doing nothing seems to have been the preferred option of the Boris Johnson and Donald Trump governments until about March 15th-16th  (Johnson, Trump), with the Johnson government allegedly working on a trust that infection would create "herd immunity" without disrupting the economy.  At least in the UK, they seem to have taken on board the Ferguson et al. calculations that "doing nothing" will lead to infection in 81 percent of the population (at  2.4 Ro), producing 510,000 deaths in the UK, plus 2.2 million deaths in the United States, both over a 2 year period.

With doing nothing now ruled out, the alternatives that Ferguson et al. modeled are mitigation or suppression. Suppression is China after January 23rd and South Korea, among others; Britain is moving to suppression with one escalating announcement after another (which may defeat the purpose).  Some parts of the U.S. are now doing suppression, including New York and California. The Ferguson paper divides these two strategies into two groups of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs).

 The most effective set of mitigation measures are:

• Case isolation in the home (CI): symptomatic cases stay at home for 7 days.
• Voluntary home quarantine (HQ): all members of a household with a case stay home for 14 days
• Social distancing of those over age 70 (SDO).

Note that this falls short of "lockdown," which includes social distancing for the whole population (SD) and, in most cases, closures of schools and universities.

Mitigation is the famous "flattening the curve." The serious cases that need hospital services are pushed out over time, with the goal of relieving some of the stress on the health care system. Mitigation is "predicted to reduce peak critical care demand by two-thirds and halve the number of deaths" (8).  Assuming the ratio of infections to critical care cases is constant, and that the syntax means mitigation yields 2/3rds of the "do nothing" infection rate, this leads to 54 percent of the population being infected, and to 1.1 million deaths in the U.S.  (When Kristof quotes Ferguson saying his best case is 1.1 million deaths, I think he ran Ferguson et al.'s two regimes together: in my view, the sentence should read, "his best case for mitigation" is 1.1 million deaths.

Clearly mitigation isn't good enough.  A million deaths in the U.S. is unacceptable, and the model suggests that under mitigation health care systems will still be overwhelmed (10). Since something like Italy's hospital crisis and high fatalities are the combination everyone wants to avoid, the UK, the EU, California, and now several other U.S. states have moved into suppression.

A side note: I would normally read the quotation to mean that mitigation reduces peak care demand (and infections) by 2/3rds, down to 1/3rd of their previous level, which is a 27 percent infection rate.  I don't know if that's what Ferguson et al. meant, but it's still more than double this year's seasonal flu rate (so far this season, flu has killed 22,000 Americans). 

Much of the U.S. is now following Italy, France, Spain, and other countries into suppression. The key benefit is that it reduces the reproduction number (Ro) to close to 1 or below, which China has shown is feasible.  Here's a nice stretch goal for the West.

 In the Ferguson et al. model, suppression adds to mitigation's measures:

• school and university closures (PC)
• social distancing expanded to the whole population (SD)

I've reproduced the table that shows the results. I'd recommend starting in column 1 with the baseline Ro of 2.4 (510,000 "do nothing" deaths) and look at the medium case of 200 (which means that the full suppression program is suspended when ICU cases fall below 200 in Great Britain, and are re-engaged when they rise above that number). (The paper does not have a similar table for the U.S.) 

California is now doing the full suppression program.  If you look at the right-hand column under Total Deaths you can see the results.  Deaths in Great Britain drop from 510,000 to 24,000, or by a factor of around 20.  The U.S. equivalent would be 110,000 deaths, not Kristof's 1.1 million.

Note two other features of this model.  The interventions all have finite periods: mitigation is modeled over 3 months (to mid-June 2020) and suppression over 5 months (to mid-August 2020).  They don't extend to the full 18 month "vaccine" period, nor are they open-ended.

Second, they are adjusted according to thresholds of infection and hospitalization that can be selected and monitored.  Governments have a great deal of agency here.  In other words, this new coronavirus is bad, but it is not an irresistible event like a giant asteroid hitting the earth.

A big catch is that the versions of suppression in South Korea, Taiwain, Hong Kong, Singapore, and China include mass testing.  Neither the US nor the UK have done this, nor do we seen to have the capability to ramp this up.  There's been much excoriating commentary on this point.  I had been hoping that UC Health could make a big difference to California public health. A potentially exciting March 14th headline, "UC has a solution to the national shortage of coronavirus testing," didn't, with our weak public sector, mean UC is gearing up mass testing for the public, but that it has a private test for its own patients.  I've heard ambitious UC plans--in this week's board meetings, one UC regent suggested for the installation of MASH hospitals on empty land that UC owns. But because of testing and equipment shortages, UC medical centers have to focus on protecting themselves (see 0'44"-0'49" or so in this very useful UCSF infectious diseases division' grand rounds). I'll end by adding a few items to the summary list above:

• The virus is going to be terrible for public health workers, who deserve not only massive sympathy and support but also personal protective equipment, which they may now have more hope of getting.  Mass testing also depends on cranking out PPE.
• Public health interventions in Asia have had enough success with suppression to give  credibility to the Imperial College model--most interestingly, its suggestion that deaths can be reduced by an order of magnitude. 
• On the other hand, hospital access remains a potential catastrophe.  Full suppression reduces ICU need to 1/3rd of "doing nothing."  In the bootlegged C.D.C.’s scenarios, "2.4 million to 21 million people in the United States could require hospitalization, potentially crushing the nation’s medical system, which has only about 925,000 staffed hospital beds. Fewer than a tenth of those are for people who are critically ill."
• Still, suppression seems to make a big difference even if it is leaky: the Ferguson et al modeling assumed incomplete success and still got major reductions (see Table 2 on page 6).
• The US has a weak health system (or no health "system" at all, as Robert Reich rightly observes). This is a big problem. But the US has some other advantages: a lot of really good, dedicated health personnel, lower population density than Europe's or East Asia's and, ironically, dependency on the self-isolating feature of private cars.  Our version of suppression might be more successful than we now expect.
• Officials should give expiration dates to the current suppression regimes. They can be extended later, depending on conditions.  As I noted, the Ferguson et al. model assumes a kind of regular adjusting depending on infection numbers. (Hong Kong has reimposed quarantine and testing on arrivals after an uptick in cases.) Indefinite lockdowns are bad for both people and the economy.  Once people are scared indoors, and the infection curve is bent like South Korea's, governments should throw the lockdown into partial reverse, lest they create another Great Depression x 2.4.

I'll move on to political, economic, and university dimensions in other posts.  From the Haley Street Bunker: stay well, and keep your distance! 
Monday March 23rd

Statistical chemist Michael Levitt hammers on one of this post's key points: "The virus can grow exponentially only when it is undetected and no one is acting to control it."  The media, he says, should focus not on total number of cumulative cases but on rates of growth of new cases. 
Speaking of which,  South Korea's number dropped again, so the chart looks a bit better today.

The coming U.S. health crisis will owe much to a social system that can't anticipate non-market public needs.   That's not what this WaPo piece says in so many words, but it has all the raw material--shortages of masks, gowns, tests, ventilators.  What aren't we short of Covid-wise?

This piece, by a Mass General physician, specifies how the market power of large hospitals will mal-distribute emergency equipment: "We are currently taking an every-hospital-system-for-themselves approach, in which some hospitals will surely say “we’ll take them all” while others will lack the capital to make such large purchases in advance and therefore will be reliant on FEMA, which will be forced to ration scarce, lifesaving equipment. These already cash-strapped hospitals serving poorer populations will soon be put in even greater jeopardy.

From Akos Ronas-Tas (Prof of Sociology, UC San Diego): How Newsom got his numbers (over half of Californians being infected) is a mystery, but it is surely not by raising 1000 to the power of 2.45. I am no epidemiologist either, but the Ro produces an estimate only if you specify how many generations of infections you count. So if the base (generation 0) is 1000 and Ro is 2.4 (used by Ferguson), the first generation will be 1000*2.4=2400, the second generation 2400*2.40 = 5760 and so on. The total number infected will be by then 1000+2400+5760=9160, adding up generations 0,1 and 2. In the Ferguson paper they use a 6.5 day generation time. The key here is that Newsom made his prediction for 8 weeks out. So he is counting roughly 8 generations. The number of newly infected in the 8th generation will be 1000*2.4^8=1,100,753. You have to add to this those from the earlier generations. That will give you the total number of those infected (roughly, 1.9 million). Some of them will have recovered by then and happily immune, others would have died. I don’t see how this adds up to 25.5 million, either as the number of all people who have ever been infected, let alone all people needing care at a certain date.  You would get to a cumulative 26 million in 11 generations with 15 million new infections. That is 71.5 days, 10 weeks, still only late May.

You can make the model more complicated. Ferguson assumed a variable R in each generation and it should also vary across generation as the number of people getting immunity increases.

Here is a nice calculator that adds a few other considerations.

The real scary numbers come from the healthcare system. There are only 74,000 hospital beds in California, and 6,300 in SD  county, only 32% of which are available. This is probably similar in the state overall. But what you really need is ICU beds (only 800 available in SD county). There are about 50,000 ICU beds in the entire US and about 100,000 respirators. And you also have to add to this that beds, even ICU beds are useless unless you have trained personnel attending to them. So if we suppose only 2 million people being sick at the same time in CA, and only 10%  (100,000) needing hospital beds and only 4% (40,000) ICU beds, we have a major catastrophe. 

Tuesday, March 24

On the duration of the shutdown, Jeffrey Sachs invokes the example of China. Their ironclad version of suppression, including mass testing, suggests the spread of SARS-CoV-2 can be stopped in 60 days.  Sachs says 60-90 days.

This is not what's happening in Italy, where exasperated mayors berate their citizenry.

Buzzfeed does funniest home videos for the Covid quarantine. 

As India's government orders a 3-week "total lockdown,"  nearly 60 percent of the U.S. population is not under stay-at-home orders or being mass-tested.  The U.S. is therefore not, overall, doing suppression, but mitigation of SARS-CoV-2.  Note that this predicts some "flattening of the curve" of infection--reducing but not eliminating the overload on health care-- but not reversing the spread of the disease (Ro stays above 1). Some red state politicians are actively resisting social distancing (Texas, Mississippi), as is POTUS himself.

Speaking of testing, California is way behind New York, working "piecemeal."

This piecemeal approach, said Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina, is a key problem with testing in California and nationwide.

“We have a decentralized healthcare system and we have no way to scale for government means,” Mina said. “Everything is privatized, everything is individualized in our country and it’s become our Achilles’ heel in this case.”

   
Wednesday, March 25  It's Bailout Day!

NYT summary.  Essential first take by David Dayen. Trigger warning: wow will this analysis not reassure you that any economic reforms are in the offing.

Yes we have no protection: "A very American story about capitalism consuming our national preparedness and resiliency"  Painful contrast between the American scramble for the most basic equipment and Germany's highly successful health system for radically minimizing fatalities.

Half-assed LAT reporting on the coming fiscal crisis of the state of California.  No real info, and other annoying stuff. How do you find the school lobbyist who will say this will be really bad for the schools, and then add, "under current law, it is likely that schools could withstand a total statewide revenue loss of around $5 billion. But more than that and schools will face significant problems."  So your own lobbyist just told the state that a 7 percent cut is fine. 

Where's higher ed in the stimulus bill? Inside Higher Ed's summary:

Six-Month Loan Deferment in Senate Bill
March 25, Noon. Student loan borrowers would be allowed to defer making payments for six months, without interest, through Sept. 30, according to a summary of the $2 trillion stimulus package Senate leaders agreed to at 1 a.m. Wednesday morning. The full bill is still being written and hasn’t yet been released.

But according to summaries of the bill making the rounds among education advocacy groups and obtained by Inside Higher Ed, the measure will also include changes sought by advocates such as not requiring Pell Grant students to repay money to the federal government if their terms are disrupted by the coronavirus emergency.

However, the bill is expected to disappoint advocates who had embraced Democratic proposals in the House and Senate, in which the federal government would have made the payments on behalf of borrowers, reducing their balances by at least $10,000. The summary did not mention any loan cancellation.

A separate summary contains $30.75 billion in grants to “provide emergency support to local school systems and higher education institutions to continue to provide educational services to their students and support.” That amount appears be about $29 billion less than what higher education institutions could potentially get in the bill proposed by House Democrats, but $21 billion more than what Senate Republicans had initially proposed, one higher education lobbyist said.  Associations representing institutions that were disappointed with the previous proposals were still waiting for the full bill before they commented on the level of funding.

The bill requires the secretary to defer student loan payments, principal, and interest for six months, through Sept. 30, 2020.

Thursday, March 26

Covid revealing America's rear guard place in the world 

Zero Hedge's mashup of hostility to the shutdown, mixing vulnerability of SARS-CoV-2 to treatment (it isn’t a superbug) with statistical problems (extensive) with lockdown’s effect on the economy (bad but unavoidable). Playing rural roulette because lockdowns are Democrat.

Suppression works, says none other than Neil Ferguson!!

He said that expected increases in National Health Service capacity and ongoing restrictions to people’s movements make him “reasonably confident” the health service can cope when the predicted peak of the epidemic arrives in two or three weeks. UK deaths from the disease are now unlikely to exceed 20,000, he said, and could be much lower.

But don't go back outside! Because, on the other hand,

This measure of how many other people a carrier usually infects is now believed to be just over three, he said, up from 2.5. “That adds more evidence to support the more intensive social distancing measures,” he said.

Special bonus for modeling fans: Oxford now has a model too. More on this coming soon.

Hope for a UK Covid-19 home test within two weeks.

And We're Number 1 - in Covid-19 cases.

The season's higher ed masterplot is easy to state: liberal arts education is a financial failure; financial success requires mega-universities.

Whatever the partial truths contained in these claims, nothing this winter provided actual evidence for them.  They also conceal the real factor that's undermining private as much as public higher ed-: the unnecessary obsession with its private funding.

Alleged proof of the liberal arts's fiscal demise is coming in the form of closed or closing liberal arts colleges.  These arrived on the heels of the closure of liberal arts programs last year (like Wisconsin's Stevens Point that we covered in two parts).  Stephens Point now appears to be the tip of the iceberg: In January, CHE announced a forthcoming Modern Languages Association finding that 651 language programs have closed in the last 3 years, without academia really noticing.  Meanwhile, with only local fanfare, 17 liberal arts colleges have closed in the last five years in Massachusetts alone. Moody's claims that 1 in 5 small liberal arts colleges are under stress.

The best known case is Hampshire College.  Forever young and poor, it epitomized the creativity ideals of the whole liberal arts college genre, tied to customized majors and the small, intense classes that underwrite the "active learning" we are all supposed to have.  But Hampshire's enrollments fell 17 percent between 2010 and 2017.  Most universities survive on enrollments, and Hampshire's small endowment meant it had to find new revenues. (How much money they had and what they borrowed is in dispute.)

But Hampshire didn't become a poster child for liberal arts failure until the president's bizarre January 15th announcement that Hampshire was "carefully considering whether to enroll an incoming class this fall." This was followed by a February 1 Board of Trustees decision not to admit a full freshman class--which, as sociology professor Margaret Cerullo noted in her excellent Nation piece, was an attack on their own revenue base.

And yet Hampshire's trouble doesn't prove anything about the innate unsustainability of the liberal arts if it is self-inflicted.  That is clearly the situation.  President Miriam Nelson's initial statement didn't really make sense, as she combined her declaration of emergency with the comment that, "at Hampshire our budget is balanced, our $52 million endowment has performed well, and the success of our educational model is confirmed by an array of stellar data. We continue to be among the top three percent of institutions whose students go on to earn a research doctorate." 

Instead, Nelson and the Board seem to have artificially induced Hampshire's crisis to court potential suitors, most likely to UMass-Amherst, which had just taken over failing Mt Ida College in Newton.

Instead of praise for making the tough call, Nelson and the Hampshire Board of Trustees got the harshest appraisals I've seen dished out to college management.  In her overview in the New Yorker, Masha Gessen wrote, "Secrecy and confusion remain the defining characteristics of the Hampshire crisis."  Since its founding, Hampshire College has raised the question of whether students and faculty could manage themselves without top-down administration.  The question is being raised again, this time by its managers' incompetence.

The college leadership has wrought disaster.  Gessen writes,

Nelson is expected to announce a second wave of layoffs, in April. She told me that the scale of the layoffs would match the loss of revenue resulting from admitting a much smaller freshman class—that is, around a quarter of the college’s operating budget. Hampshire faculty members, in keeping with the school’s education philosophy, are not protected by tenure—back in the sixties, the idea was that tenure encouraged passivity in academics, and its absence would motivate them to continue to grow and develop. Word among Hampshire faculty members is that half of them are likely to lose their jobs. According to Barskova, because Hampshire has traditionally fostered co-teaching, the looming layoffs will kill the academic program.

Nelson and her board may turn out to have destroyed the college rather than sold it, and for no good reason.

Other criticism came from Yale management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a specialist in higher education leadership.  He was writing in Fortune, which you'd expect to support this apparent example of disruptive innovation, except that just about everybody is sick of it and its regular failure to make things better.  Sonnenfeld noted a total failure of the Board to make use of the college's assets:

the college board’s executive committee framed this [matriculation] challenge as an existential crisis . . . and their actions have since created chaos. And rather than locate better ways to mobilize their own many assets—Hampshire’s distinctive mission, the Five College Consortium community, a strong alumni network, and a largely successful existence as an innovative education model—to a recovery, Hampshire’s leadership appears to have panicked.

Interestingly, Sonnenfeld tied this gross underestimation of the college's value to a failure of management to work with its wider community.

Over the course of the fall, Nelson never consulted her five living predecessors, faculty leaders, or other campus constituencies. Nor did she appeal to alumni about her dire assessment of Hampshire’s financial situation, a list which includes Stonyfield Farms chairman Gary Hirshberg, former CEO of Seventh Generation Jeffrey Hollender, renowned documentarian Ken Burns, and Pulitzer Prize winner Edward Humes. Gregory Prince, who was president of Hampshire College 16 years, envisioned tapping such alumni for a recovery plan involving various interconnected institutes. But in the panic, consultation—a cultural necessity in a liberal arts college founded on participation and engagement—simply did not occur and this important resource was overlooked.

Collaboration is in fact the foundation of intelligence in pretty much everything, but education managers only sometimes sees this.  Cerullo chronicles Nelson's failures on this front. Sonnenfeld cited former Hampshire president Prince calling for restored campus partnerships in Hampshire policy-making.  In spite of the insight of various individuals, higher ed admin culture has shifted in recent decades toward autocracy.  That has justified many a mediocre decision, including this one.

The inevitable New York Times mediation on the demise of communitarian ideals misses the point that Hampshire may close not because of liberal arts economics but because of the autocratic replacement of shared governance.

The liberal arts are often scapegoated for economic problems that come from the spread of the market model in higher ed.  Many, many people who can and should benefit from higher education cannot pay market price for it.  Markets fails to allocate higher ed efficiently--they give too much to the rich and too little to the poor.  Markets hand education out according to ability to pay, as they are supposed to do. But that isn't how societies allocate true public goods like quality healthcare, high school diplomas, and now bachelor's degrees.  Societies need relatively equal distribution of public goods that meet the same quality standard in all cases.  Such a distribution is always subsidized--where "subsidy" means society pays collectively for a just distribution through the tax system.  In other terms, capitalist societies are always partly socialist or they function very badly.  The key feature of neoliberalism--privatization of all interests and allocations--actually degrades the capitalism it seeks to expand.

In higher ed wea have this jerry-rigged system called student financial aid that offers selective subsidies without having to own market failure.  A college like Hampshire, which is private, typically uses endowment returns, gifts, and the full tuition of affluent students to subsidize poorer students.  Public colleges do the same thing with state appropriations (including direct aid to students).  Whether the college is private or public, its finances are now constituted by market failure. It needs the subsidy work-around from somewhere.

Private colleges are facing an artificial crisis borne of the national--wholly political--demand that they cover their very high quality educational operations entirely with private revenues.  Their students can't actually come up with this money: colleges are now discounting tuition in many cases by 50 percent in order to fill their classes.  This has nothing to do with the quality of the students but reflects the normal smart person's very limited personal wealth.  (The actual economics of public goods suggests that colleges should be discounting tuition anyway, since at least half the total value of a college degree is non-private, students should never pay actual cost in the first place (Stage 1)).

To function, Hampshire has to get a tuition subsidy for many or most of its students; enrollments decline because of insufficient subsidies that declining enrollments make even more insuffiicent.  The doom loop I describe in The Great Mistake applies to private as well as public colleges.  If President Nelson did in fact want Hampshire to be taken over by UMass, she was acknowledging (in a destructive way) that her private subsidy stream wasn't big enough, and could be fixed only with a bigger public one.

Let's pause to note that the thirty years propaganda war on the liberal arts, first for PCness and now for non-vocationality, has successfully scared customers away. But the liberal arts aren't only the most powerful rival of literalist, dispensationalist Christianity on the one hand and business autocracy on the other, but are the exception to college's problem with "limited learning," all of which happens in vocational majors (Figure 6).  The irony is that liberal arts colleges aren't just the most vulnerable sector of higher ed, but also its best.  The constant attacks on them are lowering overall college quality.  The attacks are enabled by the failure to understand public-good economics.

I drafted a Twitter thread on this a couple of days ago.  Liberal arts college quality comes from a combination of intense workload for students and small classes for active engagement with the material.   To make a crude contrast: a typical public college student takes 48 quarter courses for a 4-year BA. Of those 48 courses, how many will have 15 students or fewer?  Probably no more than 1 or 2, and quite possibly zero.  In contrast, at my alma mater, Reed College, I had only two courses with more than 15 students. The engagement difference adds up.

It costs much more money to do high-quality active learning.  Instead of facing this fact, the US is letting cost end the policy discussion rather than start it. The policy questions are: does the United States want to limit Hampshire-style quality to a small elite that can pay? Does it want to limit it to a group that is economically more diverse but still small (the high-tuition/high-financial aid model)? Or does it seek mass quality and see the liberal arts as something to scale up?

Politicians have been stuck in an anti-ambition mode for thirty years, catering to the tax revolt which is in large part a symptom of structural racism, which leads them not to want to pool public resources across racial lines. Operationally, this is moronic and self-destructive. it has lowered the quality of the entire national infrastructure, from roads to schools to housing.  The same is true of liberal arts colleges, public and private. Since they are more or less the best we have, refusing to fund them is tantamount to lowering overall attainment.

Liberal arts college leadership has been on the defensive for years, and is completely intimidated by criticisms of price. But the solution is not to let these colleges die so an even smaller elite gets to have their quality.  One alternative, mega-universities, with their dependence on charging significant tuition for online enrollment, are a way of kidding ourselves about quality as we give it up.

The key issue is that the whole ecosystem of higher education has been destabilized by shifting to a private cost structure that doesn't work.  Seeing colleges as private goods insures that society under-invests in them. A confident society sets goals for things like education and then figures out how to pay for it.  It does not downsize the goal to fit benighted leaders' ideas about the budget. The US has to decide if it wants real learning for all college students or just for the traditional, limited group.

If we do decide we want mass learning or democratic education, we're going to have to fix the business model. That will mean reversing privatization at private colleges too. Society and business will have to increase subsidizes to colleges and universities, not demand that universities subsidize society and business--which happens when we make students pay the cost of educational benefits that are actually half public. 

This social support for private college students will take the form of public funding for places like Hampshire.  This is a good year to start thinking about how to do it.

Photo credit: Katherine Taylor, New York Times

UPDATE. Both Hampshire's president and Board chair have resigned.   President Miriam Nelson's resignation letter can be read here.  It acknowledges that the secrecy of admin's deliberations was a problem while also trying to justify it as part of Hampshire's original charter.

Students, staff, and faculty are proceeding with the Renvisioning Hamphsire project. It's Facebook site is here.

We've gotten dosed this past week with some prime time smugness about how we don't need to do anything much to help higher education.  First was one of my favorite data journalists, David Leonhardt, rejecting loan forgiveness in the New York Times. He wrote,  "The fatal flaw of universal student-debt cancellation is that it’s not, in fact, progressive. It mostly benefits the upper middle class. 'Education debt,' as Sandy Baum and Victoria Lee of the Urban Institute have written, 'is disproportionately concentrated among the well-off.' The highest-earning quarter of the population holds about half of all student debt, according to Baum and Lee. Which means that universal student debt cancellation would be a giant welfare program for the bourgeoisie."

Actually by American standards student debt isn't very concentrated.   And Leonhardt misses some major problems with "manageable" student debt that forgiveness would fix.

I drafted the list of problems that Leonhardt misses (below), and then stopped to meet with a UCSB senior whom I didn't know.  We talked about a book in my Detective Fiction course, Black Widow Wardrobe, and this student's account of the book was really good.  At the end of her analysis of the ambiguity of a key Mexican national mythology the novel uses, I said, "that's a great summary of this issue, and," I half-joked, "it's something you could continue to work on when you go to grad school."

"I want to teach," she said, "nothing is more important to me.  I don't think I can go to grad school though. I don't have the grades."

"Why?" I asked, surprised.  She seemed to learn completely and to forget nothing. "What's your GPA?"

"In the English major I have about a 2.4."

"That's ridiculous," I said, "that's obviously not the right GPA for you."

"Well," she said,  "I'm off academic probation at least.  I've been on it four times.  I have to work a lot to stay in school.  I had some help from family my first year, but they couldn't keep it up and told me my education was mine to pay for now.  I work 12 hours a week minimum, and then when there's a break in midterms or finals I work 20.  My father also has a new baby and I spent weekends this term helping his wife, who couldn't get around. I'm first generation college--my father and mother only finished middle school and are so happy I'm at UCSB.  It's really important that I give back to them.  I need to take care of them."

"It's none of my business," I said, "but you also need to take care of yourself in school. You need to get through this with the grades and the learning that will help you go on."

"I'm excited about what I'm learning," she replied.

"Does your GPA bother you?"

"It bothers me a lot.  I think about it all the time."

"Then how can we help you to work less? You don't want to because it means loans?"

"Yes.   That's what the probation advisors said to me --take loans so you can work less.  But I can't have any debt.  I see the job market and it isn't reliable enough for me to be sure that I can pay it back."

This went on for a while, with me trying to figure out how to save her GPA from her justified fear of debt, with a family that can at most send her $20 a month for groceries.  I failed.

"Well you have to do well in my class," I said cheerily.

"I want to.  But I couldn't turn in the midterm paper-- I had to go home."

She'd worked a lower-points alternative out with the TA, but that means she's heading for something like a 3.0 or less for my class too, where she has obviously mastered the key concepts.  I offered to advise a senior thesis so if she does well I can write her a good letter for the next phase.  She's thinking about it.

In spite of constant wishful thinking, there's no escape from the fact that student debt--in this case its desperate avoidance--is a major cause of "limited learning" and narrowed future possibilities.

The #RealCollege movement has shone a spotlight on the fact that a third of US college students face food and housing security issues.  Organizations like Temple University's Hope Center are working to fix that.  So why are policymakers and journalists as informed as Leonhardt so complacent about the educational damage done by our financial aid system?

Here's my short list of the problems that Leonhardt omits.

• Fear of debt causes undermatching, in which lower-income students go to cheaper--and poorer--colleges than they are qualified for.  This reduces their chances of graduation and probably their learning. 
• Students manage future debt by working more than they should while studying.  As the case of my smart 2.4 GPA student illustrates, this is a structural source of the "limited learning" that Arum and Roksa documented in 2011 (which, it must always be said, was largely limited to  "vocational" fields).
• Loan repayment pushes students toward disciplines with higher future salaries, whether they want to study them or will do well in them.  Moving someone who loves history into computer science is inefficient as well as undemocratic, and yet debt makes this more likely.
• Much of this "reasonable" debt is held by low-income students who have no family resources to help pay it back.  (Low income students borrow on average as much as middle-class students do.)

There's so much stubborn inertness about student debt because of a philosophical mistake made as much by Democrats like Leonhardt as by Republicans:

• Means-tested loan forgiveness contradicts the public-good status of education.  With means-testing, the baseline norm is for everyone to pay for college out of their own pocket.  This treats college as a private good.  Then, since most people can't pay for college on their own, various kinds of state and private charity kick in--which maintain the private-good status.  Means-testing makes everyone focus on the income effects of college--as does income contingent repayment in the UK. It makes them forget the nonmarket, indirect, and social benefits of higher ed.  This in turn completely changes the psychological experience and effects of college.  Democrats supposedly don't think everything is about money, and yet they've set up a financial aid system that is only about money.  This is the system Leonhardt supports.

These market-ruled aid programs continue the Clinton-era suppression of the value of public goods. In reality, goods like clean air, sanitation systems, mass transit, vaccination, and education should be distributed according to individual need and general benefit, not according to ability to pay.  With these goods price signals don't work.  They give an oversupply to rich people and an undersupply--or much lower quality--to the poor.  This is why the Clinton-Obama market model of health and education has lost so much support.

In addition, the market-driven allocation of high-quality college is a main reason why US attainment has fallen steadily over the last 4 decades from first to about sixteenth in the world. It is also why college racial inequality persists.

Most of us feel somewhat badly about this unjust, unequal allocation and try to patch it with our high-tuition-high aid system, stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey with loans (2:1 loans over grants vs. the reverse 30 years ago).  We know it doesn't provide equal outcomes by race or class, or actually equal opportunity (for roughly similar educational quality).  Rather than putting financial aid on a market system, we should have put it on a public good allocation system.  Having contributed to the market mistake, Democrats should now stand for the public good correction.

Market failure is what the democratic socialist wing of the Democrats understands, and what the Clinton-Pelosi wing does not--yet.  In practice it would mean that society would set a goal of all students graduating debt-free, and then buy out my smart 2.4 GPA student's 20 hours a week of work so she can actually learn as much as she can and have the record that reflects her capabilities.   Debt-free college is economics that sets socio-cultural goals rather than isolating itself from them--substantively equal access, and outcomes that reflect individual labor and preferences, not grossly unequal prior conditions.

The crisis of financial aid appeared in the biggest higher ed story this week--Michael Bloomberg's $1.8 billion gift for student financial aid.  Unfortunately, it all went to one university.  The recipient was his alma mater Johns Hopkins, and the money will do the useful thing of converting all loans to grants that need not be repaid--for Hopkins students.  It's the right idea, but obviously needs to be applied to the 99.93 percent of U.S. postsecondary students who don't go to Johns Hopkins.

I don't need to point out the problems here: many commentators blasted the elitism of this version of affordability, from Sara Goldrick-Rab to Dylan Matthews, who called the gift a tragedy.  My Twitter feed was strongly bearish.  I don't think senior administrators realize how these megagifts make the university sector seem entitled, greedy, and cut off from the lives of regular people trying to get a good education.  Why pay taxes for these billionaires' BFFs?  A clear warning sign should have been Malcolm Gladwell's trashing of a hedge fund billionaire's $400 million gift to Harvard in mid-2015--followed by his celebration of obscure giving that helps advance everyday students (and takedown of the Knight-Hennessey scholarships at Stanford).

Bloomberg was unable to avoid lecturing the nation on the need for everyone to support financial aid at public universities as he was not.  I prefer my governments actually egalitarian, my tax brackets steeply progressive, and my billionaires plutocratic.

Dear President Napolitano,

You have now been the president of the University of California for nearly five years. You are one of a handful of people who speak for the entirety of the university system. You are the head of a slightly larger group (two or three dozen?) that decides UC policy.  You also have direct access to the mass media to explain the needs and benefits of UC. 

You represent a university that consists of hundreds of thousands of students as well as about 150,000 staff and over 10,000 faculty. Many of us have given decades of our working lives to UC. We have deep experience of the institution and highly developed expertise in our subject areas.  And yet with few exceptions, we have no way of bringing this expertise to the wider public.  As a group, our views are as unknown to the state at the end of our thirty-to-forty-year careers as they were at the beginning.  

This places an enormous moral responsibility on you to represent hundreds of thousands of silent people correctly. It imposes an enormous intellectual responsibility as well.

As the representative of the university, your intellectual responsibility is of course to tell the truth: universities that replace truth with politics and marketing steadily lose public trust, as they should. By "truth," I don't mean a fixed obvious fact we can kick. I mean the current state-of-the-art on a topic, created by open methods, testing, and debate, and subject to further revision as better data and interpretations arise.  The job of universities is to determine the truth defined as an issue's state-of-the-art understanding, which in all areas continues to evolve.  This means that university administrations are in the position of having to keep up with the state-of-the-art in relevant fields as generated by their students, staff, and faculty. 

One field that administrations must keep up with is higher education studies.  As a scholar in some of its most pressing subfields, I sometimes feel that senior administrators are running away from research findings rather than embracing and acting on them. 

A case in point is university philanthropy.  Last week you met with CSU Chancellor Timothy White "to discuss the future of public higher education."  The Daily Cal coverage ended with this:

Napolitano also discussed the role of philanthropic financial contributions in the UC’s financial model. 

“We have very generous donors, and if we look at the trajectory of philanthropy in the UC, we see a pretty steep upward curve over the last 10 years or so,” Napolitano said at the conference. “The point of fact is that public funding at the level it was at is unlikely to be restored, and we’re going to need to continue that upward trajectory in terms of philanthropy to support the UC.” 

This tells the audience that private donors have been and will continue to compensate for the decline in public funding. It accepts that the public funding will stay inadequate, which demobilizes the 62 percent of California adults who "say the level of state funding for the public higher education system is not high enough."  It states that fundraising, which has been a central UC fixation for at least 25 years, can grow indefinitely, and increase its share of UC's budget.  

These venerable beliefs are not correct.  But they have remained in place over many years because we have never had an open, research-driven, fact-based debate about philanthropy in which the need to increase fundraising was not assumed in advance, and in which administrators review and then follow data-based research findings.

For example, UC's most recent report on private support finds that annual giving has doubled over the past twenty years (1). That is a good thing: philanthropy funds many important specific projects that would otherwise languish.  But research has shown something you no doubt also know: philanthropy growth is not relevant to the public funding shortfall.

The basic problem is scale.  In 2006, my Senate colleagues and I showed this in a report that was transmitted to President Dynes in 2006 and presented to the Board of Regents in 2007; those slides are here).  We noted that the University, which was already down $1.35 billion in general fund allocation from 2001, would need a $30 billion gift to replace this revenue stream.  Our internal joke was that fundraising could fix UC's general fund problem-- if UC nationalized Harvard's endowment.  We are right to be proud that UC's generous donors now give $2 billion or so to UC every year.  That generates $100 million a year at 5 percent interest, which is about 3 percent of UC's current general fund revenues.

Another UC report this year, which the Board of Regents read at their recent retreat, confirmed this conclusion.

Philanthropy to the UC system and its campuses has risen by 50 percent since 2000, and now totals more than $2 billion per year. Virtually all of these funds are restricted and are not available to support general operating costs. Even if philanthropy to UC were to double in the next 10 years, the increase would nominally offset only a quarter of the decline in state funding per student since 2000, and the additional (private-interested) activities required by the philanthropic funding would lead to an even smaller offset for educational (and public-interested research) activities. Fundraising may help with capital costs, but it is much less likely to be a significant income source for ongoing educational costs. (39)

This new report supports fundraising but not as a replacement for public funding.

I'll belabor a few other issues that reduce philanthropy's net returns to the University.  Fund-raising cost indices suggest that the overhead for raising a dollar is about 20 cents, so initial net is perhaps 80 percent of the gross figures we publish.  Many gifts leverage matching funds from the University, so the true net after costs is quite a bit less than that, or even negative (UCLA's Luskin Center received a generous donation of $40 million for a project with overall costs of $162 million).   There are other subtractions: the doubling of UC fundraising needs to cover nearly 30 percent more students with inflation lowering the take another 20 percent over that ten year period.   There are institutional burdens: the donor model has spawned hundreds of school, program, and department-level fundraising programs across the UC system, whose costs in time, money, and loss of resources for the educational core have not been calculated.  More indirectly, talking up private funding may encourage the state not to rebuild public funding to 21st century requirements.  (This is a feedback loop that, given years of inadequate annual general fund increases, UC officials should consider seriously.)  And this is not an exhaustive list of issues.

As a true believer in universities, I am always sorry to find so much fault with our belief in a cherished source of revenue. But we can thank our generous donors, encourage new ones, and tell them the truth that we need to fight like mad to rebuild the public funding base that makes their giving valuable. 

I'll wrap up with a question: why are public universities competing with privates on our weakest (and their strongest) ground?  The source of UC Berkeley or UC Irvine's comparative advantage has been strong public funding.  The source of Stanford's and Cal Tech's has been great private wealth. Why don't we try to advance on our own terms?

You no doubt carefully reviewed the New York Times's major college access study a year ago.  Called "Top Colleges Doing the Most for the American Dream,"  its authors devised a College Access Index that ranked colleges and universities "based on a combination of the number of lower-and middle-income students that a college enrolls and the price it charges these students."  

Here are the top 10 places, where UC put in an astonishingly good performance. 

These figures make intuitive sense-- except perhaps for those in the final column, endowment per student. They show that UC campuses are simply not in the big endowment game. UCLA, the wealthiest UC, has a per-student endowment that is 1/50th of Princeton's. Access champion UC Irvine's endowment is 1/116th that of neighboring Pomona College. And so on. These are the results of 25 years of consistent UC fundraising focus.  They are also normal: public universities top out at $250,000 and $220,000 per student (University of Virginia and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) and the list plunges rapidly into the 5 digits (UT-Austin's oil money gets it to $72,500).

We should have a broad university discussion of the evidence and conclusions to draw from it. In the meantime, these are my inferences from the research.  First, mass access to high quality public universities is distantly related to a large endowment.  Second, this mass quality is closely related to non-private sources of income, meaning state funding: rebuilding that must be job 1 for public university presidents. Third, we should pitch mass quality to potential donors as the general public good that leverages and transcends the special good their gifts do for particular people and programs. Fourth, we should brag about our small per-student endowments. They show we are working on a grand scale, producing value for the entire public that lies behind us.

Even without a full-scale investigation of UC philanthropy, you could reasonably revise future statements on this subject to read as follows:

“We have very generous donors, and if we look at the trajectory of philanthropy in the UC, we see a pretty steep upward curve over the last 10 years or so. The point of fact is that public funding must be rebuilt to support the full benefits of these gifts.  We’re going to need to continue that upward trajectory in terms of philanthropy.  But it cannot support the UC on its own. We must work at a massive scale to get the state the million additional degrees its needs.  We need the whole population to help us with that.

The cost to the median taxpayer would be low--but this is enough for now.

Loyally yours,

Chris Newfield

In the aftermath of the failure of Milofest, the Berkeley Faculty Association has written an op-ed that raises important questions about the relationship between free speech, academic freedom, and political attacks on the university.  As the BFA notes:

Freedom of speech is one foundational principle of the public university. Academic freedom is another. Since 1964, when the UC Berkeley administration was successfully challenged by the Free Speech Movement to extend First Amendment protections to campus space, the university has had to balance the obligation to allow citizens’ speech against the commitment to academic freedom. As a public entity, UC Berkeley must respect the airing of diverse viewpoints; as a higher learning institution, UC Berkeley must protect its autonomy from political interference and harassment. Increasingly, the threat to the campus’ autonomy, on which academic freedom depends, derives not from government legislators—as in the era of the FSM, when former UC President Clark Kerr and former UC Berkeley chancellor Edward Strong were faced with adjudicating competing obligations to free speech and academic freedom. Rather, the threat increasingly derives from private interests hostile to the university’s mission of research and teaching.

You can read the entire statement at the DAILY CAL