Samantha Stainburn

Q&A: A Hands-Off Approach

(Crain’s Chicago Business, 6 February 2006)

It’s been 33 years since Princeton University economics professor Burton Malkiel advised investors to fill their portfolios with index funds. Over time, he argued in his book “A Random Walk Down Wall Street,” passively managed index funds outperform actively managed mutual funds or stocks. Crain’s asked Mr. Malkiel, 74, why he’s still convinced that’s the way to go.

The message of your book can be summarized as, “You can’t beat the market average, so invest in index funds.” Is there more to your investment philosophy than that?
One ought to either invest entirely in index funds or, at the very least, the core of one’s portfolio should be in index funds. But I have some actively managed funds. I even own a few individual securities. If you think a particular stock is a great buy, then buy it. You can do it with a lot less risk if the core of the portfolio is indexed. And don’t just have stocks, but have some bonds and some money in real estate investment trusts. And your stocks shouldn’t just be domestic. The major growth in the world over the next decade or two will not be in the United States or Europe. It will be in places like China and India and some Latin American countries.

So, the fact that the S&P 500 index was relatively flat this past year shouldn’t deter investors from buying index funds?
The reason the S&P has been doing a little worse, particularly over the last five years, is that smaller companies have been performing better than the huge, big-cap companies. And that’s why the S&P, which is a big-cap index, has been underperforming broader indexes such as the Dow Wilshire 5000. Indexing, for me, is not just buying the S&P, but buying the total stock market. Of course, even the broad-index investor is going to lose money when the stock market goes down. But you don’t lose your shirt.

Why can’t fund managers beat the indexes?
Markets are pretty efficient over the long haul, and the active manager charges a big fee. You can now buy index funds with an expense ratio of 10 basis points or less, meaning the management fee is one-tenth of 1% or less. The active managers charge about 1.5%.

How do you explain, then, stock-picking stars like Warren Buffett?
If I had known 30 years ago when I first wrote my book that Warren Buffett was going to be Warren Buffett, I wouldn’t have given the advice to go buy index funds. I would have said go buy Berkshire Hathaway. You know what? There will be three or four Warren Buffetts over the next 30 years, but you don’t know who they are, and I don’t know who they are. It’s not that they don’t exist, but they are impossible to identify in advance.

Index funds are supposed to match the return of the index they are following. Are there any times when this does not occur?
Not if the index manager is doing what he or she is supposed to. There are things that are called enhanced index funds, where the manager tries to do a little better. But on a pure index fund, you get the index. There are a few index funds that charge very high expense ratios, over 1%, and they will underperform the index.

Does it matter which fund provider you go with?
Look for low cost. Basically, if you’re going to be in a fund, it means going to people like Fidelity Investments or the Vanguard Group. Vanguard has the largest selection, because they got into indexing first.

Q&A: The Numbers Game

(Crain’s Chicago Business, 22 August 2005)

Ask and ye shall receive? Not necessarily, says Field Museum Chairman Marshall Field V, who’s leading the charge to raise $200 million for capital improvements. Times have changed since he helped John Bryan collect all those $1-million checks for Millennium Park, says Mr. Field, who is also a trustee at the Art Institute of Chicago. Crain’s talked to Mr. Field, 64, about the art of fund raising during a donation drought.

What’s the climate for corporate giving in Chicago these days?
It’s worse than in past years. The museums and colleges all went crazy during the ’90s. You could raise tons of money then because everyone’s stock portfolio was going up so fast they didn’t know what to do with their money. Now, that’s all changed, so for the major institutions, there’s a reduced pile of money. Also, Millennium Park came in and took $150 million out of the market, and a lot of people are still paying that off.

Several prominent Chicago institutions have $100-million-plus capital campaigns going on right now. Is this a problem?
Yes. There are too many big campaigns going after a finite pool of dollars. The other problem is, all the institutions have gone to five-year campaigns. So, somebody just finishes paying out their five-year thing, and wham — there it is again. I think people are getting tired of it.

What’s your fund-raising strategy in this environment?
My strategy is to plug away. It’s just going to take longer and be more frustrating. And I think schools and museums are going to have to cut back on their plans.

Is desperation for dollars prompting organizations to come up with innovative ways of fund raising?
Organizations are trying to make the way they approach plugging away more sophisticated. So, for instance, at the Art Institute, the person who ran development has now been assigned to do nothing but go after big gifts, because that’s what he’s good at. Someone else will be brought in to do the lower gifts development.

What trends are you noticing in corporate giving?
Companies now want their gifts to work for the stockholder — promote the company and its business, almost like special advertising through donations.

How do you make your organization stand out in a sea of causes?
Make friends and bring them into the sphere. All of the big organizations’ boards now are 40-plus people, so they’re not really boards anymore, they’re talent pools, and the work is done at the executive committee level or by other committees. And that’s so potential donors can join the family, if you will.

Does the up-and-coming generation of philanthropists have a different approach to giving than their predecessors?
Younger donors aren’t satisfied with just writing a check. They want to get involved, they want to help the organization with what they feel are their own talents, so it’s a more complicated relationship than it used to be.

Asking for money can be awkward. How can you stand to do so much of it?
I don’t push people hard, unless they’re a board member who isn’t giving. As long as people give to some charity, I don’t fault them for having interests that may not be the same as mine. It’s a numbers game. If I call on a hundred people, 25 are going to give to me and 75 aren’t. So if I get three turndowns, fine — then I’m owed a “yes.”

The Price Families Pay

Ten years ago, when Beth Nielsen started her first business, a private school in Michigan, she left her husband in Chicago for days at a time and worked on the project during the weekends.

“We talked about it for a long time before I decided to pursue this,” she recalls. “He said he was fine with it, but when it actually happened, he wasn’t so fine with it.”

The marriage ended, and Ms. Nielsen moved to Michigan.

“There were other issues, but the business was the straw that broke the camel’s back for the relationship,” says Ms. Nielsen, 38. “He wanted to spend more time with me. He didn’t understand that this was my baby. At 2 o’clock in the morning, I could still be up because I can’t shut my mind down from all these ideas, things that need to get done.”

Ms. Nielsen’s experience is not unusual.

Most successful entrepreneurs would probably admit that, deep down, their first love really is their business. If love can be measured by time spent, the business would usually come in No. 1 (especially in the start-up phase), with spouses, kids, parents, siblings and friends running a distant second. This isn’t to say that entrepreneurs are heartless. It’s just that starting a business and shepherding it is enormously time- and energy-consuming — far more so than most non-entrepreneurs can fathom.

And that’s where discord often begins.

“Being an entrepreneur just takes an extraordinary amount of time and commitment, and there are also huge financial pressures that create conflict,” says Lloyd Shefsky, co-director of the Center for Family Enterprises at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “The owner wants to put more money into their business, and their spouse is saying, ‘I’d rather put it into our savings account.’ ”

Some of the nation’s most prominent entrepreneurs come to Mr. Shefsky’s classroom to tell his students about their rise to the top and “more of them are on their second, third and fourth marriages than on their first,” he says.

Still, small-business owners who can put family first at least some of the time can beat the odds.

Ms. Nielsen, for example, now helps run Waukegan-based Nielsen-Massey Vanillas Inc., a 102-year-old vanilla manufacturer with annual revenue of about $11 million that’s been in her family for three generations.

She also has a 1-year-old daughter with her partner, a chef who runs his own, separate business.

It helps that her significant other also is an entrepreneur and understands her drive. But, she says, their relationship works because they deliberately carve out family time, declining invitations to work events on the weekends and scheduling date nights at live music venues where it’s too loud to talk about business. Ms. Nielsen also makes an effort to meet her partner halfway. “I’m always conscientious about saying, ‘And how was your day?’ ” she says.

Building a life with an entrepreneur is not for the faint-hearted.

Andrew Keyt, executive director of the Loyola University Chicago Family Business Center, ticks off a few reasons why: “The entrepreneur is usually more comfortable dealing with risk than other family members. Life seems to revolve around the business, and kids often resent that. And it’s not uncommon for an entrepreneur to lack empathy for what the rest of their family is going through. The needs of their business can become all-consuming, and they just lose touch with what’s important for their family.”

Marriages involving workaholics are twice as likely to end in divorce, according to researchers at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

VACATIONS IN KANSAS CITY

With an eight-year-old business and 10-year marriage, Andrew Limouris, 37, is holding it together despite the challenges. His wife, Maria, and their family know the sacrifices of entrepreneurship firsthand.

The year he launched his health care staffing firm, Medix Staffing Solutions Inc., Mr. Limouris moved his family into his father-in-law’s basement to cut costs. Since he was devoting every waking hour to work, his wife was left to take care of their new baby largely on her own.

Then, the more offices Medix opened, the more Mr. Limouris needed to travel, stealing time from his wife and three kids. Today, Lombard-based Medix generates $30 million a year in revenue and has nine offices across the country.

Now, the recession is forcing Mr. Limouris to work twice as hard to keep sales up. “It’s not exactly the perfect deal for Maria,” he acknowledges.

But he works at keeping in touch. “If I get a phone call from home, I take the call,” he says. “If I miss the call, I call back. I don’t ignore communications throughout the day, because it’s a long day.”

In early April, Mr. Limouris canceled a family vacation to Sedona, Ariz., to spend a few days in the Kansas City, Kan., office — “I couldn’t say, ‘Guys we need to dig in and work harder’ and then go to Arizona for a week,” he explains — but he brought his family with him. He also took two afternoons off to explore the city with his brood, visiting a petting zoo and going to a “Disney on Ice” show.

The fact that he tries makes a difference to his wife. “I’d like for him to be home a little more, but I know the bigger picture is more important,” says Ms. Limouris, 31. “What he’s doing is his passion, and he’s good at it. We just try to savor the time we do have.”

A NEED TO SHARE

With their big dreams and boundless confidence, entrepreneurs often want to play the hero in their families’ lives as well as in their businesses, keeping bad news about declining sales and failed projects to themselves.

“Psychological isolation for the entrepreneur can be a real source of trouble, especially during high-stress times such as a recession,” says Michael Komie, a clinical psychologist and affiliate faculty member at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. They snap at their wives when they find receipts from Bloomingdale’s; they get grumpy when their sons talk excitedly about applying to private colleges.

While providing a sense of stability for children, in particular, is a noble goal, “it is not realistic to think that entrepreneurship is not going to impact the family,” Mr. Komie says. It’s important that entrepreneurs let their families know about business events that might affect their lives, he says. They may even help.

DUMPSTER DIVING

A few years ago, a storm ripped the roof off one of the warehouses owned by Laura and Robert Engel, 45, whose Chicago-based company, Angel Sales Inc., manufactures and sells “as-seen-on-TV” products like the Bible Search board game and the BraBaby, a gadget that protects bras in the washing machine. The company has annual sales of roughly $5 million.

Rain poured in, destroying hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise. The Engels rented two Dumpsters and spent the weekend throwing out their damaged products. They brought their three children along, and their two boys helped smash more cardboard into one Dumpster by jumping up and down on it.

“They were having so much fun, it actually made us smile,” says Ms. Engel, 43.

Accidental Entrepreneurs: Adjust Expectations

With 9% unemployment in the Chicago area and widespread hiring freezes, it’s no surprise that laid-off executives are going into business for themselves. If you’re one of these refugees from Corporate America, you very likely expect business ownership to change the way you work. But starting a business will also transform the way you and your family live. Here’s how:

1. You’ll have less time for family than before.

That’s because you’ll be doing more. In addition to designing products and making deals, you’ll need to create all the contracts and processes your business requires, keep on top of paperwork like filing taxes, and replace the toner in the copier — at least until your business can afford employees to do these jobs. You’ll spend time figuring out how to write press releases and update your Web site. And your customers will want to see you more than clients at your corporate job did because “you really are the brand,” says Art Stewart, president of Alexandria, Va.-based Stewart Strategies Group LLC, a consulting firm that works with family businesses.

2. Your high-wire act will make your family anxious.

It’s unavoidable, even if your spouse agrees with the financial gamble you’re taking. “Your family has different perspectives on all of this,” says Lloyd Shefsky, co-director of the Center for Family Enterprises at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “You’re doing something new,” and that can make them nervous. Take the edge off their fears by keeping them updated on your progress so they know how you’re coping with your new role. “Also, as you get people to buy your product or service, it’s not bad if your family meets those people so they get to see others have confidence in you,” Mr. Shefsky says.

3. Your family will judge you based on your business.

Your employer doesn’t pay you a bonus this year because the economy is slumping? Not your fault. But if weak sales at your business mean you have to dip into your kids’ college fund to cover payroll, your spouse may question your competence. “There are probably not too many spouses haranguing their husbands about losing their job at General Motors,” says William “Marty” Martin, an associate professor at DePaul University’s College of Commerce. “There’s a heck of a lot of spouses haranguing their entrepreneur husbands about ‘How did you let it get this way?’ ” What’s more, business setbacks can reactivate problems from the past. A couple may have worked through a husband’s extramarital affair, he says, “but now the business is crummy, the wife pipes up and says, ‘If you hadn’t spent that money on her, we’d have it now.’ ” Defuse the situation by inviting your family to help you find solutions to the problems your company’s struggles are causing at home, such as checking out honors programs at state colleges if private colleges are out of reach.

Interview: Clothes-Minded

If, as Mark Twain once quipped, clothes make the man (his reasoning: “Naked people have little or no influence in society”), does it follow that the right attire can help a kid do better at school? Contrary to popular belief, the answer is no, says sociologist David Brunsma. The University of Missouri assistant professor recently published The School Uniform Movement and What It Tells Us About American Education: A Symbolic Crusade, which discusses the conclusion he’s reached after almost a decade’s worth of research and analysis of new federal data: School uniforms have no impact on student achievement or social behavior.

Brunsma never wore a school uniform himself, so this isn’t a personal vendetta against polyester and the people who made him wear it. He says he was motivated to conduct a scholarly investigation into the effects of uniforms because he was concerned that schools were changing policies based on anecdotes alone. Currently, about 23 percent of public elementary schools have mandatory-uniform policies.

Teacher Magazine recently spoke with Brunsma about why the idea of dressing for success is a myth that public school officials don’t want to give up.

Q: In spite of what your research shows, many educators swear that their students are better behaved and more focused on their schoolwork when they wear uniforms. Are these teachers delusional?

A: Perceptions aren’t reality. Perceptions sometimes are important interpretations of reality, but often they can mask deeper issues. Because teachers know this policy is being implemented from the top down and they know the desired outcome, it’s like putting on rose-colored glasses. You’re trying to make it work, so you’re going to say it works, and you’re going to see the good things. In some districts, there may be a real iron-fist approach to uniform policies and a climate where you can’t really say anything bad about it.

Q: Are people not swayed by research?

A: In Waterbury, Connecticut, the ACLU [of Connecticut] asked me to present my findings on the school district [in the 1999 court case Teshana Byars et al. v.City of Waterbury et al., which challenged the district’s school uniform policy]. If I found uniforms were a positive influence on the outcomes of interest in Waterbury, Connecticut, I would have presented those findings. But I didn’t find that. After I finished, I went back and sat in my seat and proceeded to watch the superintendent of the district say, yes, school uniforms are effective. Where I had to do a PowerPoint presentation [and] a year’s worth of analyses, this administrator could just stand up and say, as an individual who hasn’t really looked into it, ‘I think uniforms are great.’ [The policy was upheld.]

Q: Why have school uniforms appeared in public schools at this point in American history?

A: If we go back to very early in the 1980s, there were a select few incidents of violence over designer clothes and shoes, and this led several people, from Mayor Marion Barry in D.C. all the way up to President Clinton some 15 years later, to make the call for public school uniforms. It was also during the ’80s that the educational research was quite focused on the comparison between Catholic schools and public schools. I think implicitly what was registering in people’s minds was, OK, if Catholic schools are outperforming public schools on average, what’s different about Catholic schools? Maybe it’s this uniform idea. That’s the climate in which all this stuff started coming to the forefront.

Q: Your research shows that uniforms have no effect on academic achievement or behavioral problems, but do they provide other kinds of benefits?

A: One of the classic arguments is that parents have an easier time in the morning because there are no decisions to be made. If that’s why the district wants to pursue this, to make their parents’ morning time easier, then OK. However, there are potential ramifications. Some of the more affluent parents buy multiple uniforms per kid so that the uniforms stay crisp and clean, whereas poorer parents can’t afford it. If that child has one uniform throughout the school year, that uniform is going to look pretty different by mid-semester than the more affluent kids’ uniforms, and so we’re back to the distinction that uniforms are trying to erase. … I remember a black mother outside of Houston who couldn’t afford the school uniform, so she was forced to go in front of the board of education and prove her disadvantage. This is disturbing to me.

Q: How do school uniforms compare to other uniforms in our society, such as sports team jerseys, doctors’ scrubs, or prison jumpsuits?

A: These uniforms distinguish an “us” from a “them” and symbolically create visual cues for who’s marked with authority and who is marked with subordinate status. Advocates say [uniforms] will indirectly affect achievement through producing a more level playing field, a more positive school environment, school unity, school pride, and so on. However, there’s no evidence that they do.

Q: Why is the movement growing, then?

A: One, on the surface, this appears to be a common-sensical, low-cost reform effort, and people are interested in those. Two, people have increasingly become afraid of the diversity of our public school student bodies. Every time there’s a school shooting, we see a blip in adoption of uniform policies. Uniforms have increased as an attempt to assert some kind of control in the face of uncertainties. [Then, there’s] this increasing corporate influence in our public schools. Some of these corporate clothiers are providing incentives for schools to buy their uniforms.

Q: You found that school uniforms are more likely to be adopted in public schools with a higher percentage of students who are low-achieving, minority, poor, and urban and where there are low levels of parental involvement. What does it say about our educational system that it is these schools that are embracing uniforms?

A: It was shocking to me. Growing up, I remember seeing pictures of Native American children dressed in frontier clothes. And I’m thinking, OK, so we’ve taken away their land, we’ve decimated their culture, and we’re going to dress them up like us to make them feel in some way that they are a part of the American dream when it’s been stripped away from them. We’ve done the same thing to African Americans, Latinos, and Chinese Americans. We don’t know what to do with those groups of people. For all our talk of diversity, we don’t like the work behind the word, which is to actually make diversity a strength. It could potentially be seen as a racist and classist policy. But them’s fightin’ words.

The more affluent parents—white, largely—in their suburban districts are voting these things down [and] abolishing [programs] that they set up five years ago because they recognize that it’s nothing more than a Band-Aid.

Q: So the symbolism of school uniforms has changed?

A: Oh, yeah. It’s no longer a marker of elite status. It’s become a marker of disadvantage.

Q: Still, we’re just talking about clothes here. Is believing that uniforms will boost the educational atmosphere of a school, whether it does or not, really that problematic?

A: It’s fairly problematic because it’s diverting our attention from much more fundamental aspects of public education. I mean, we have a funding problem. We’ve moved away from civic engagement in this country. We’re so concerned with our own kids’ success, but what about other people’s kids? The disadvantage of one child in my kid’s kindergarten class affects my kid, too. These are social issues, not educational issues per se, but they’ve become educational issues as we have, for the last hundred-plus years, expected the school to solve all of our social ills. What we really need to do is look outside. If you want to level the playing field in school, you have to level the playing field outside of school.

Vol. 16, Issue 06, Pages 14-15

Where’s Hot, Where’s Not

(The New York Times, 30 July 2006)

Some states suffer student brain drain while others are magnets. Tuition, state policies and even skiing conditions factor into the collegiate popularity contest. A new report from the Department of Education shows how many first-time students left—and how many entered—each state to study for a degree or certificate in fall 2004.

ARIZONA

Students in: 15,369 Students out: 4,195

Indications that cactus is the new ivy: 11,200 more first-time students entered Arizona than left. The appeal? Great weather, a hot economy and relatively low tuition (at the University of Arizona, $4,764 for residents, $14,970 for non). Students who reside in one of the 15 states participating in the Western Undergraduate Exchange pay only one-and-a-half times the in-state tuition.

CALIFORNIA

Students in: 32,057 Students out: 23,588

”The University of California attracts the best and the brightest because it was designed for the best and the brightest,” says David A. Longanecker, executive director of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. So a large proportion of Californians stay home. But while the number pouring into the state in 2004 remained high, it was down 47 percent from 2000. The state has coped with a budget crisis and overcrowding with a series of increases in out-of-state rates, to about $25,000 a year at Davis, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz and Los Angeles. That matches private college prices.

CONNECTICUT

Students in: 9,722 Students out: 14,580

Students in the state with the second highest median income–$86,000 for a family of four, slightly less than in New Jersey—can shop the nation for the perfect college, then load their books into their BMW’s and go. What about Yale, you say? About 350 Connecticut undergraduates enrolled at Yale last school year, half as many as from New York. ”Some students just want to get away from home and try to fly on their own,” observes Edward M. Elmendorf, an official with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.

FLORIDA

Students in: 25,525 * Students out: 12,513

The average high temperature in Gainesville in February: 70 degrees. The average number of sunny days per year: 210. Any more questions?

* The report says in-migration is 32,299; the state says that number is based on incorrect data it submitted.

ILLINOIS

Students in: 13,380 Students out: 23,841

A lack of choices drives out Illinois students, says Diane R. Dean, an assistant professor at Illinois State University in Normal and a principal investigator for a state study on student migration due out this fall. ”Everything revolves around Chicago or Champaign-Urbana.” Also, she says, ”There is a steadily declining number of choices for the average student, because institutions below the top tier are increasing their selectivity to increase their rankings, and students aren’t getting in.” Neighboring states actively recruit Illinois’s average students, and some offer tuition reciprocity, Ms. Dean says. In May, the University of Illinois at Urbana dropped a plan to let in more out-of-state students after parents and guidance counselors objected to taking places away from Illinois students.

MASSACHUSETTS

Students in: 27,300 Students out: 18,499

Iconic colleges like Harvard and Wellesley don’t go out of style, making Massachusetts—a state that educates more students in private than public colleges—a perennial importer. But it’s not the Athens of America any longer. ”We do not have as many students from other states coming to private colleges here, and it’s in part because of what some of those other states are doing in keeping students home,” says Richard Doherty, president of the state’s Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island have improved their grant aid, while Massachusetts has done the opposite, prompting its own to defect to other states, he says.

MISSISSIPPI

Students in: 5,010 Students out: 2,247

Mississippi holds onto 93 percent of its students, the highest percentage in the country, partly because the median income for a family of four is $46,570, and many can’t afford to leave. Fifteen community colleges and eight public universities around the state offer rock bottom tuition ($4,110 at Ole Miss) and live-at-home opportunities, and educate about 70 percent of resident students.

NEW JERSEY

Students in: 5,624 Students out: 32,208

Geography may be responsible for the sound of students being sucked out of New Jersey, in the largest outflow in the country. With hundreds of colleges on its fringes, out-of-state institutions can be closer than in-state ones. The University of Delaware captures most of New Jersey’s departing high school seniors, followed by New York University, Drexel, Penn State and Boston University. Not everyone is alarmed. ”A lot of people don’t feel it’s a major problem because we are among the highest in the nation in the number of bachelor’s degrees” held by residents, explains Jeanne M. Oswald, deputy executive director of the New Jersey Commission on Higher Education. ”It’s not as if we don’t have a highly educated workforce,” she says, noting that there’s no shortage of graduates wanting to live and work in New Jersey or commute to Philadelphia or New York. All this might be just as well considering that the state university system is bursting at the seams. Last year, about 20,000 students applied for 10,000 slots at New Jersey’s public colleges. Montclair State University and William Paterson University have had to house students in motels. The State Senate is considering a $2.7 billion bond initiative to finance expansion at both public and private colleges.

NEW YORK

Students in: 36,633 Students out: 30,816

In the 1990’s, two factors helped New York outstrip Massachusetts as the state that attracts the most out-of-state students. ”’Sex and the City’ and ‘Seinfeld’ basically said that if you’re not in New York City, you’re nowhere,” says Abraham M. Lackman, president of the state’s Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities. And Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s cleanup efforts emboldened college-seekers. ”People started to look at New York as an out-of-state destination,” Mr. Lackman says, ”and when they went to the Barron’s guide, they discovered the Hamiltons, the Colgates, the Marists.” New York’s 147 private colleges absorb most of the surge, awarding 57 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in the state and about 70 percent of all master’s and doctorates.

NORTH CAROLINA

Students in: 16,716 Students out: 6,856

Local colleges with national recognition like Duke and Wake Forest draw out-of-staters. Cheap public tuition–$4,600 a year for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—keeps North Carolinians home. ”Many states have provisions in their constitutions that say that tuition should be as close to free as possible,” says Travis Reindl, director for state policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. ”Nobody takes it seriously anymore except North Carolina.”

OHIO

Students in: 14,238 Students out: 15,458

Turn-offs to would-be Ohio students: steadily increasing out-of-state rates ($19,018 for its flagship university) and Ohio’s image as an old economy state struggling to find its way in the 21st century (read: a poor location to begin a career). Some 8,000 fewer out-of-state students enrolled in 2004 than in 2000. Yet 87 percent of residents stay for college because, says Darrell Glenn, director of performance reporting for the Ohio Board of Regents, ”we’re a big state, and you don’t have to leave to see something different.” Internal enrollment is actually increasing slightly as two-year colleges grow and Ohio State improves its academic reputation.

PENNSYLVANIA

Students in: 31,880 Students out: 19,034

This popular state has something for everyone: 102 private colleges (elite ones like the University of Pennsylvania and Swarthmore, or mid-tier liberal arts cocoons like Allegheny College and Ursinus College), 19 state colleges, 14 community colleges and 16 theological seminaries.

TEXAS

Students in: 17,624 Students out: 19,081

Out-of-state enrollment is down in a big way: 38 percent fewer first-timers in 2004 than in 2000. They may have been deterred by tuition increases of almost $7,000 at flagship campuses, thanks to budget cuts and legislation in 2003 that made public colleges free to set their own prices. More Texans are leaving, too. Graduates in the top 10 percent of their high school class get first dibs at state schools. That means less room for strong students from good schools who rank lower—or at least the perception that their chances are diminished.

VERMONT

Students in: 4,336 Students out: 2,849

With about half of all Vermonters originally from somewhere else, locals think nationally when it comes to selecting a college: 58 percent go out of state. How does under-populated Vermont lure replacements? ”Skiing is one thing,” says Donald R. Vickers, president of the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation.

Read this article at the New York Times.

How Can We Reform Science Education?

(The Hechinger Report, 26 January 2011)

Ask a scientist in their mid 50s or older where they were in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy spoke to Congress about the urgency of sending a man to the moon, and chances are they’ll remember.

After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite, into space in 1957, competing against the Russians in science and technology became a national obsession. The federal government poured money into improving science education, sponsoring summer institutes on college campuses for K-12 teachers and awarding grants to science education experts to develop cutting-edge textbooks and curricula. The American students who studied science during this period went on to invent the artificial heart, the personal computer, rockets that have flown to Mars and two-in-one shampoo.

In the years since, however, enthusiasm for science has faded. Teachers stopped turning on the television for space shuttle launches, and the federal government declared other national priorities, such as fighting terrorism at home and abroad. Hollywood and the news media once treated people in science, like John Glenn and Carl Sagan, as rock stars.

No longer.

While American students do better in science than they do in math on international comparisons, over time, science scores have not improved, while math scores have risen, and other countries have caught up. Eighth-graders’ scores on the on the 2007 Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS), put the United States in the middle of the pack in science achievement, behind nine other countries, including Japan and Russia.

The United States also does not have as high a percentage of top science students as those countries do. Ten percent of American eighth-graders hit the advanced benchmark on TIMSS 2007, compared with 32 percent of students in Singapore and 13 percent of students in Hungary.

In the first seven years of the 21st century, the number of people entering science and engineering jobs grew at the smallest rate since the National Science Foundation began tracking the data in the 1950s. Foreign scientists have filled the jobs left open by Americans who lack the interest or ability to do them—25 percent of all college-educated workers in U.S. science and engineering jobs in 2003 were born abroad—but they can’t work on national defense projects and may be tempted to return home as the aerospace and pharmaceutical industries take off outside the U.S.

At the same time, scientific illiteracy is high. According to a 2009 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, only 52 percent of Americans know that stem cells can develop into many different types of cells, and 65 percent know that carbon dioxide is a gas linked to rising temperatures. Only 47 percent of adults know what percentage of the earth’s surface is covered by water, a 2009 California Academy of Sciences survey finds.

Results on the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress in science, released in January 2011, show that American students have a long way to go to improve their science skills. The 2009 test was revamped to keep up with scientific developments, so can’t be compared to prior tests, but experts were generally dismayed.

About two thirds of fourth- and eighth-graders performed below proficient on the test, and high school students did worse. Only a fifth of 12th graders were proficient or better on the test. Southern states did worse than northern states, and black and Hispanic students scored significantly lower than white and Asian students.

The state of science education is troubling because, increasingly, making personal choices, like whether to vaccinate children or how much energy to use, requires an understanding of science, educators say. In the political sphere, “there are only two possible outcomes to science illiteracy,” says James Trefil, a physics professor at George Madison University and author of “Why Science?” “The decisions get made by an elite or they get made by a demagogue.”

He blames some science educators for shutting students out. “There’s this idea that if you’re not going to be a physicist, if you can’t do the math, we don’t want to talk to you,” he says. “That sends the message that science is something for only a small elite. It’s not. It’s something everybody can understand.”

Presidential priorities

In 2009, President Barack Obama launched a new campaign to boost science education, called “Educate to Innovate.”

“Yes, improving education in math and science is about producing engineers and researchers and scientists and innovators who are going to help transform our economy and our lives for the better. But it’s also about something more,” he said. “It’s about an informed citizenry in an era where many of the problems we face as a nation are, at root, scientific problems.”

Educate to Innovate has assembled a group of companies and nonprofits that will use private sector dollars to develop television programming, public service announcements and Web sites to drum up interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) activities.

Other signs that the Obama administration has science education on its radar: In the Education Department’s Race to the Top competition for $4.35 billion in education grants, states got bonus points for strategies to improve science learning; the winners of the first round, Delaware and Tennessee, both earned the maximum number of points. The president has asked for $1 billion in the government’s fiscal year 2011 budget to improve K-12 STEM education, an increase of 40 percent over the previous year. The request includes $300 million for professional development and evaluating what programs work.

The administration has also taken a stab at making science seem cool by hosting events like “Astronomy Night” for middle school students on the White House lawn.

Science educators say they need every scrap of support the Obama administration can throw their way to make up for time lost during the George W. Bush era. President Bush’s signature education law, No Child Left Behind, threatened to withhold funding from schools that failed to make progress on reading and math tests, so many elementary schools replaced science with extra reading and math prep.

“There was more damage done to science education in this country than was ever thought possible because No Child Left Behind did not talk about science,” says Jan Morrison, executive director of theTeaching Institute for Excellence in STEM, a Baltimore-based nonprofit that designs STEM education programs for schools. “For years we’re going to suffer from that.”

Many also believe positions that Bush administration officials took, including questioning theories that are not controversial among scientists like climate change and evolution, misled the public on what science tells us about the natural world. In contrast, Obama’s advisors have been lauded by the scientific community for their discoveries. White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director John Holdren is a past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science who’s studied the causes of climate change; Eric Lander, co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, is one of the principal leaders of the Human Genome Project; and Harold Varmus, the other co-chair, is a former head of the National Institutes of Health who won a Nobel Prize for identifying genes that can lead to cancer.

The Obama administration’s focus on reforming the American school system as a whole—the four changes it’s pushing are higher common standards, new ways of paying and retaining teachers, using data to inform decisions and turning around low-performing schools—may do as much to improve science education as the STEM-boosting initiatives the government is funding, says Michael Lach, a special assistant for STEM issues at the Education Department.

“A lot of the work in the past has thought that we can reform STEM education without really tackling the existing education system,” he says. “You can’t.”

Reform agenda

Science educators and researchers consider these four areas particularly ripe for reform:

Standards

There’s a growing consensus that students study too many science topics, but not in enough depth. “Many existing national, state and local standards and assessments, as well as the typical curricula in use in the United States, contain too many disconnected topics given equal priority,” a 2006 report from the National Research Council found. The NRC recently launched a project to write a new set of national standards with the National Science Teachers Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and other groups that will identify a more manageable set of essential concepts that students must understand. The NRC’s previous science education standards, published in 1996, have strongly influenced state standards.

Elementary education

Sixty-five percent of scientists and science graduate students said their interest in science began before middle school, according to a study in the March 2010 International Journal of Science Education. Women were more likely to report that their interest was sparked by school-related activities, while most men said trying experiments at home and reading science fiction inspired them.

Curriculum

STEM education experts want to see more inquiry and problem-solving in science classrooms, especially at the high school level. The College Board is revising its AP science courses, beginning with biology, to reduce emphasis on memorizing facts and promote understanding of the scientific process through inquiry-based laboratories. In districts where in-school time is consumed with reading and math, after-school programs that give students opportunities to experiment can provide a similar boost, says Shirley Malcom, head of education and human resources programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “It does not substitute, but in a pinch, it’s better than nothing,” she says.

Teachers

Not enough science majors teach science. Forty percent of fifth grade students in 2004 were taught math and science by teachers with a degree or certificate in those fields, federal data show. Only about one-third of high school physics teachers have a major in physics or physics education, the American Association of Physics Teachers reports. The National Science Teachers Association has long pushed to pay science teachers more than teachers in other subject areas to attract science majors away from industry jobs. “We need to get more scientists more connected to the teaching community,” says the Malcom of the AAAS. “The teaching community has not been perceived as the front lines of the scientific enterprise, but it is.”

Read this report at the Hechinger Report.