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For Prisoners, The Benefit Of Higher Education Is Both Enormous And Intangible

For Prisoners, The Benefit Of Higher Education Is Both Enormous And Intangible

The college degree is on probation.

Debate over student debt and its forgiveness — whether it will come through or not — has borrowers asking whether their degrees were good deals.

Pundits in different places have prompted these doubts. The New York Times “Your Money” columnist Ron Lieber appeared on the Detroit Today show on Detroit’s National Public Radio station on August 17 and admitted that certain degrees might not be worth it. On the June 4, 2021 episode of his HBO show, Real Time with Bill Maher, Maher’s editorial “New Rule: The College Scam” told audiences “the answer isn’t to make college free, the answer is to make it more unnecessary, which it is for most jobs." Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative organization Turning Point USA, wrote a whole book on it, arguing that higher ed is a government-backed flim flam.

Even Congress is on the game. While it hardly accuses post-secondary schools of being a racket, the College Transparency Act would require colleges and universities to collect data on student enrollment, transfer, and completion so that applicants and their families know exactly what they’re paying for. Earlier this year, the House of Representatives amended the bill to another one that passed. The Senate version has bipartisan sponsorship.

Much of this data already exists and underwent a tough crunch by a former executive director of College Scorecard, the Department of Education’s online tool that allows prospective students to evaluate the cost and value of education at colleges and universities in the United States.

A fellow at the think tank The Third Way, Michael Itzkowitz culled an entire database from the Scorecard to demonstrate the return on investment of bachelor’s degrees using data from the College Scoreboard. Itzkowitz thinks the best way to measure college education’s value is to look at its Economic Mobility Index, or how it helps low income students to climb out of poverty. He says many schools have low Economic Mobility Indexes that compromise their value.

It may be a coincidence that we’re debating the utility of a college degree right before access to higher education is poised to expand exponentially for people who’ve been specifically excluded from it for more than a quarter of a century. It’s almost as if prisoners’ access to education diluted its value.

On December 21, 2020, Congress lifted the 26 year old ban on federal student aid for prisoners as part of an omnibus spending bill.
In less than one year, all incarcerated individuals across the country will be able to apply for Pell Grants. Experts anticipate a 27-fold increase in the number of eligible students; the Second Chance Pell Experimental Sites initiative, a pilot program instituted by President Barack Obama in 2015 has serviced about 28,119 inmates since 2016.

Congress created the Basic Educational Opportunity or Pell Grant Program in 1972 (they were renamed in 1980 after their champion, the late Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell) to pay tuition for students who couldn’t afford it; these grants don’t necessarily need to be repaid. From the start, the program included inmates. Within 10 years of creation, 350 post-secondary education prison programs had developed. Another 10 years later, 800 programs were at work in over 1,300 facilities.

But in 1994, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act blocked inmates from receiving this type of aid and the number of educational programs plummeted to eight in three years. That drastic reduction in offerings was bad news for everyone; the RAND Corporation conducted the seminal study on the effect of post-secondary schooling and found that higher education lowered recidivism rates by 43 percent. Without those programs, recidivism rates didn’t decrease as prison populations ballooned 500 percent.

Before the value of higher education behind bars undergoes similar scrutiny, we should know why prison education reduces recidivism so effectively. And it has little to do with post-prison employment prospects and the American obsession with credentialism.

Higher education improves the chances of employment but not as much as it should. Some college-educated prisoners still struggle to secure employment. Often the collateral consequences of a criminal conviction effectively offset any advantage that college education provides.

Education works to keep people on the straight and narrow because it changes prisoners' identities, not in the sense of identity politics, but in the sense of understanding themselves as someone other than society’s definition of them. Enrollment in a college course turns shoplifters and solicitors into scholars and students. It’s a new descriptor that doesn’t invite shame.

The late sociologist Jack Mezirow developed a theory of transformative learning and said adult education amounts to “becoming aware that one is caught in one’s own history and is reliving it.” There’s probably no more apt way to describe rehabilitation.

A dearth of research and evidence on the transformative power of higher education in prison persists in the United States, but scholars in the United Kingdom have caught onto the reasons why prison education is effective and found that it’s the shift in self-perception that reduces reoffending.

Twenty-five years ago, Anne Marie Reuss, a prison educator, wrote her doctoral dissertation at the University of Leeds. Reuss divided inmates’ lives into periods of pre-institutional identity and institutional identity. The institutional identity will develop, Reuss wrote, sometimes as a survival mechanism. Higher education in prison can intervene in that process and assure that institutional identities aren’t more anti-social than the identities inmates rode in on.

Other researchers found similar changes. Even a distance learning course, one with no formal classroom education, helped inmates in England and Wales become “part of a wider community of learners which helped them to replace their prisoner identity.”

Just because researchers in the United States don’t concentrate on the shift in self-perception among incarcerated students doesn’t mean it’s not understood. Daniel Karpowitz, an assistant commissioner in the state of Minnesota’s Department of Correction and former director of national programs for the Bard Prison Initiative, wrote in College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration:

“Every student is also an “inmate”, “offender” or “prisoner” in their own eyes or in the eyes of those surrounding them. In no small part, the struggles around these contested and competing identities define the milieu of the college in prison.”

Most of the research on education and identity is ethnographic because it’s hard to assess these shifts quantitatively. That’s probably why advocates for the restoration of Pell Grant eligibility concentrated so much on recidivism; it demonstrates improvement in measurable ways and with benefits that accrue to society, not only to the students themselves.

A college degree does pay financial dividends. Someone who has graduated college will earn about $1 million more in a lifetime than someone who did not.

But focusing narrowly on education's return on investment, particularly for prisoners, eclipses its ability to reframe their lives for them and society. Even with over 700,000 inmates eligible for Pell Grants next year, prison education might not be able to prove itself; its value can’t be fully gauged -- at least not in ways we are ready to understand.

Chandra Bozelko did time in a maximum-security facility in Connecticut. While inside she became the first incarcerated person with a regular byline in a publication outside of the facility. Her “Prison Diaries" column ran in The New Haven Independent, and she later established a blog under the same name that earned several professional awards. Her columns now appear regularly in The National Memo.

New York Governor Proposes Free Tuition Plan At State Colleges

New York Governor Proposes Free Tuition Plan At State Colleges

NEW YORK (Reuters) – New York Governor Andrew Cuomo proposed free tuition at the state’s public colleges for students from low- and middle-income families on Tuesday, seizing on an idea that became a rallying cry for many Democrats in last year’s presidential election.

Under Cuomo’s plan, which he called the first of its kind in the nation, the state would cover tuition for any student from a family earning less than $125,000 a year by 2019, a means-tested benchmark that coincided with one proposed by Hillary Clinton in her failed presidential bid.

“College is a mandatory step if you really want to be a success,” the Democratic governor said as he announced the plan, which requires approval by the state’s legislature. Cuomo is widely seen as a potential future presidential candidate.

About 70 percent of jobs in the state now required a college education, he said. He described graduating with thousands of dollars of debt as “like a starting a race with an anchor tied to your leg.”

The cost of higher education and the burden of student debt emerged as a major issue in the race between Clinton and Bernie Sanders to become the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in 2016.

Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont and a Brooklyn native, joined Cuomo for the announcement at the LaGuardia Community College in the New York City borough of Queens, and he repurposed familiar talking points from his campaign.

“The Democrats and Republicans and independents understand that technology has changed, the global economy has changed,” he said to a crowd of Queens students who had been chanting his name minutes earlier. He said a college degree was virtually mandatory in a way that a high-school diploma had been in previous decades.

From the start of his presidential campaign in 2015, Sanders promised to make tuition free for everyone who attends state colleges. The promise helped draw huge crowds of young people to his campaign rallies and pressured Clinton, who was promising in less sweeping terms only to reduce student debt, from the left.

After Clinton had all but secured the party’s nomination last summer, she announced a means-tested variant of the Sanders plan last July in what was seen in part as a gesture toward bringing the party’s more liberal, left-leaning flank back into the fold.

For undergraduate students who hail from New York, tuition for a bachelor’s degree costs $6,470 per year at the State University of New York’s colleges, and $6,330 per year at the City University of New York’s four-year colleges. Other expenses such as room and board, which can cost up to $12,590 at SUNY colleges, would not be covered under the plan.

Cuomo said his proposed Excelsior Scholarship would cost about $163 million a year, although he did not specify how the state would cover this cost. He said it would potentially benefit some 940,000 families with college-age children in the state.

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen; Editing by Andrew Hay)

IMAGE: New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo speaks at Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s New York presidential primary night rally in the Manhattan borough of New York City, U.S., April 19, 2016. REUTERS/Adrees Latif 

Clinton’s Education Proposal Shows Promise For Sanders’ Influence

Clinton’s Education Proposal Shows Promise For Sanders’ Influence

Hillary Clinton announced a new initiative Wednesday to make higher education more affordable, marking a significant shift to the left and possibly hinting at further concessions to Bernie Sanders’ young, progressive supporters.

 The past few weeks have not been kind to the notoriously stubborn Vermont senator. Reports say that he was booed by House Democrats in a meeting with them this week, and party insiders have expressed frustration that Sanders has still not endorsed Clinton — or, for that matter, formally ended his campaign.

But Clinton’s announcement, of a plan which would make in-state schools tuition-free for students with annual family incomes under $85,000, marks a clear shift in direction for Sanders’ legacy. As Clinton looks to unify the party and attract his young, liberal supporters to her side, he’s holding out to push her platform a little further to the left.

During the primary, Clinton criticized Sanders’ proposal for free tuition at all public colleges, “College for All,” arguing that its opt-in nature would be costly and create discrepancies from one state to the next. Instead, she called for more limited policies that would calculate tuition based on family income and create “debt-free” education.

Clinton’s new plan isn’t identical to Bernie’s ambitious vision, but it’s not far off, either. By raising the cap on annual family income over the next four years to $125,000, this proposal may apply to an estimated 80 percent of families. Indeed, the Los Angeles Times reported that the idea is the product of negotiations between Clinton and Sanders.

Her platform on higher education also includes a three-month moratorium that would allow young people to delay payment of their student loans, as well as year-round Pell Grants to fund low-income students taking summer classes.

Sanders praised Clinton’s free tuition plan, calling it “a revolutionary step forward” and “very, very significant” idea that combined the best of both their ideas.

It’s a far cry from the argumentative nature of their policy debates during the primary season, whenSanders slammed Clinton as a representative of “establishment politics and establishment economics.”(Meanwhile, she once countered the pro-Sanders protesters who interrupted her rallies by telling them to “read the fine print” regarding the comparative cost of their proposals.)

Sanders’ views may have more influence over education than other topics given his base’s youth, but it’s unclear how many more of his progressive policies Clinton will adopt before November. Wednesday’s proposal certainly points towards the left, though.

The stakes weren’t lost on Sanders either. Persistent as ever, he told the Wall Street Journal that despite the merits of her education proposal, “this is one issue — there are other issues.”

 

Photo: Democratic U.S. presidential candidates Senator Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton wave before the start of the Univision News and Washington Post Democratic U.S. presidential candidates debate in Kendall, Florida March 9, 2016.  REUTERS/Javier Galeano

Starbucks As Citizen: CEO Schultz Acts Boldly On Social, Political Issues

Starbucks As Citizen: CEO Schultz Acts Boldly On Social, Political Issues

By Angel Gonzalez, The Seattle Times (TNS)

SEATTLE — When Starbucks hosted the cream of Wall Street analysts and investors at the coffee giant’s headquarters here in December, the company did not kick off the gathering by highlighting its growing profits or its strategy for global conquest. It chose instead a video about the woes faced by the returning veterans of America’s Middle Eastern wars.

“I realize that the video you just saw and the expression and our involvement in this issue is probably an unconventional way to begin an investor conference,” CEO Howard Schultz told the audience. “But in fact, for all of us at Starbucks, it’s who we are and what we believe in.”

Such displays of social and political concerns are becoming increasingly common at Starbucks. Driving that is Schultz, a registered Democrat whose office is decorated with photographs of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy.

As one of the largest and most profitable employers in the world of food retail, says Schultz, Starbucks has the heft to make its views carry influence.

“The size and the scale of the company and the platform that we have allows us, I think, to project a voice into the debate, and hopefully that’s for good,” Schultz said in an interview.

“We are leading (Starbucks) to try to redefine the role and responsibility of a public company,” he said.

While many companies talk extensively about issues that directly affect them — some energy companies, for example, like to dwell on the environment and global warming — Starbucks stands out because many of the causes it’s addressing have nothing directly to do with its core business.

In December, amid widespread angst about racial tension in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York, Schultz held an impromptu forum with staffers in Seattle to talk about race relations and followed up with a letter to all employees encouraging similar dialogues across the company. Since then open forums about race have taken place at Starbucks locations in Oakland, California, St. Louis, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. On Sunday, the company took out a full-page ad on the back of the front section of The New York Times that asked readers “Shall we overcome?” — a reference to an emblematic song of the civil-rights movement. Schultz is expected to devote a portion of his remarks at the annual shareholders meeting on Wednesday to race relations in the U.S. Similarly, in recent years the company has come out in favor of same-sex marriage and against political gridlock in Congress, and has dipped its toe into the red-hot gun-ownership debate by asking people not to openly carry guns into its stores. It also has sought to attract attention to growing income inequality.

So much for free-market economist Milton Friedman’s maxim, embraced by corporate America in the 1980s, that a company’s sole social responsibility is to make money for its owners without breaking the law.

Schultz acknowledged that the causes he takes on sometimes stress Starbucks staffers.

“I can tell you the organization is not thrilled when I walk into a room and say we’re now going to take on veterans (issues),” just a month after decreeing that “we’re going to do something no company has ever done before, we’re going to create college education for people,” Schultz said.

Of course, many of those political stands are easy to support and hard to oppose, running little risk of alienating most customers.

Republicans and Democrats alike can rally behind veterans, and most people hate political gridlock too. The same can be said for racism.

In many cases, too, Schultz’s pleas — such as asking politicians to set aside their differences, or asking staffers to openly discuss race — fall short of proposing concrete solutions.

“I don’t know where this will go,” Schultz said during the employee forum on race relations in Seattle. “But I don’t feel, candidly, that just staying quiet as a company and staying quiet in this building is who we are and who I want us to be.”

Starbucks’ engagement does draw considerable attention to these issues and helps position the company in the eyes of customers and actual or potential employees.

It also prompts questions about whether Schultz’s ambitions go beyond the corporate sphere. In early February, Schultz was on the cover of Time magazine, which asked whether he intends to run for office. “I don’t think that is a solution,” Schultz told Time.

Devoting considerable CEO time and company resources to societal issues that have no direct bearing on earnings goes against decades of American corporate history and Wall Street’s clamor for ever-improving quarterly earnings.

Schultz, however, says Starbucks can do both. Its size and enormous visibility make it a particularly noticeable player in what experts say is a growing trend. Some even say it may influence others to follow and give American capitalism a new flavor.

“At Whole Foods we call it conscious capitalism,” says Whole Foods co-CEO Walter Robb, a friend of Schultz’s for more than a decade. “Government has shown its limits, and its inability to act in many cases; it’s really incumbent on business to step up to a broader view of responsibility.”

To be sure, Starbucks’ well-developed sense of righteousness is a double-edged sword. It creates expectations that companies can’t always meet, says Nancy Kahn, a Harvard Business School professor who has long studied Starbucks.

“You’re going to open the door to all kinds of people holding you up to all kinds of different standards,” she said. “Very small things can trigger great rage.”

Starbucks often draws fire for not meeting various critics’ standards: not using organic milk, crowding out independent coffee shops, not paying its baristas enough. (Starbucks recently increased starting pay across the board for store staffers and contends that it offers benefits that are rare in the retail industry, such as health care for part-time employees, 401(k) plans and stock options.)

The company got a real zinger last August when a New York Times story described the stressful life of a Starbucks barista harried by unpredictable work schedules that were created with the help of software.

That story triggered quite a bit of embarrassed soul-searching at Starbucks, Schultz said. “We are better than that, and we care more.”

As the story was hitting the newsstands, the company announced it would change its scheduling system to give workers more advance notice of their hours. “We are not perfect, we have a lot going on, and that was an area of weakness,” Schultz said.

Schultz, whose father held unsteady, poorly paying jobs, has always contended that businesses’ concerns should extend beyond the bottom line.

But Starbucks’ political and social activism intensified after Schultz, who had stepped down as CEO in 2000, retook the helm of the company in 2008 in the midst of the global financial crisis.

In a few cases, the company’s activist initiatives have shown some quantifiable results.

In 2011 the company helped launch an initiative to create and retain jobs threatened by the financial crisis — which yielded $105 million in loans to small businesses that saved 5,000 jobs, according to the company.

That summer, as bipartisan bickering about the federal budget deficit raged in Washington, D.C., Schultz urged his fellow captains of industry to stop campaign donations in order to pressure lawmakers into reaching a debt deal and get the American economy out of “a cycle of fear and uncertainty.”

The move drew the support of more than 100 business leaders, according to Schultz, who listed 25 of them — including the CEOs of AOL and J.C. Penney — in an open letter. It didn’t redraw the political landscape — but it brought attention to the role corporate money plays in politics, and to the frustration of businessmen with the D.C. stalemate.

Some other initiatives undoubtedly generate more press than pressure.

In December 2012, as congressional bickering went on, Starbucks launched another campaign — with baristas writing “come together” on customers’ cups in Washington, D.C.

Sometimes a measure intended to strengthen Starbucks’ own workforce is also a very public broadside on a charged social issue — such as when it decided last year to subsidize college for its U.S. baristas, in a well-publicized deal with Arizona State University.

The move served as a vehicle for Schultz to air concerns about growing inequality of opportunities and what he called the “fracturing of the American dream.”

ASU President Michael Crow said he worked hard to vet Schultz in order to make sure it was not a self-serving scheme.

“In his case it comes from a very, very deep interest in making sure every person has an equal chance of success,” Crow said. “Most corporate leaders, they believe the path to success is the narrowing of their calculus. Howard takes the opposite view.”

Perhaps no issue has been embraced more tightly by Starbucks in the past two years than the well-being of the returning U.S. veterans.

Schultz says he first began thinking about the issue when giving a speech at West Point a few years ago, and his interest grew as former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates joined the Starbucks board.

Last March, Schultz committed $30 million of his personal fortune to research on post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury, as well as initiatives to help veterans transition to civilian life, such as Team Rubicon.

Starbucks has vowed to hire 10,000 veterans and military spouses by 2018. So far, it says, it has hired 3,300.

Schultz also wrote “For Love of Country,” a book about veterans with Washington Post journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran, published last year. Last month Chandrasekaran announced he would quit The Washington Post to found a media company in Seattle that would partner with Starbucks in order to tell stories about social issues, starting with veterans.

“If you can tell me somebody else has done more, I don’t know who they are,” said General Peter Chiarelli, the former Army Vice Chief of Staff, who took Schultz to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, last year.

Schultz is not the only CEO of a huge publicly traded company to dedicate a considerable amount of personal time — and company resources — to social responsibility. Unilever CEO Paul Polman is also an outspoken advocate for corporations standing for something other than profit.

Former Costco CEO Jim Sinegal, who has weighed in on the side of Democrats on issues such as economic inequality, said being a CEO “doesn’t mean you have to abdicate your citizenship. You still have a right to voice your opinion on things. As a matter of fact, you have an obligation to voice your opinion on things.”

What gives Starbucks, Costco Wholesale, and other companies the leeway to be outspoken is above-par results. Starbucks shares have outperformed the S&P 500 index by a factor of six since early 2009.

Schultz calls that performance “the price of admission” to be able to tackle policy issues and to pay for above-average perks.

Wall Street so far seems to accept that a Starbucks investment comes with a dose of political agitation.

“Everyone knows Howard Schultz has a view on a lot of things,” says Andy Barish, an analyst with Jefferies who was present at the investor meeting in Seattle. The company has been doing well, said Barish, and “at the end of the day that’s the most important part.”
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HOWARD SCHULTZ SPEAKS OUT

  • On taking stands:
    “The divide between profitability and doing the right thing is collapsing…I also think there’s a seismic shift in what an employee wants from a company today.”
  • On Rudy Giuliani:
    “I find Rudy Giuliani’s vicious comments about President Obama ‘not loving America’ to be profoundly offensive to both the president and the office, and yet another example of the extreme rhetoric that continues to divide our country.”
  • On gay marriage:
    To a shareholder critical of the company’s support for same-sex marriage: “Sell your shares.”

Photo: Ken Lambert via Seattle Times/TNS