ISU can be proud of how it helps students succeed

Previously published in the Terre Haute Tribune-Star, 5 February 2017

In a Sunday Review in the Jan. 18 New York Times, titled “America’s Working Class Colleges,” I learned of an effort to rank “all” of America’s colleges and universities by how much mobility flows from them for working class students, measured by their parents’ household incomes. Working class students are those students who come from a household in the bottom 20 percent of the household income distribution. The study comes from The Equality of Opportunity Project (www.equality-of-opportunity.org). And, in a true spirit of scholarship, they share their data. I downloaded it to examine Indiana colleges and universities. This is a working class state, so how do we do at helping those students achieve economic mobility?

I was able to find 10 four-year Indiana colleges and universities and two two-year universities. Not all Indiana colleges were listed; Saint Mary-of-the-Woods and Marian University were not listed.

I was, of course, interested in how well ISU did, because ISU, as long as I have been here, (into my 31st) year, has had the reputation of a “blue-collar university.”

The data is highly quantitative and perhaps this essay will prompt the Trib-Star to look into the report and create some easy-to-understand charts from the data, but such graphics are not the “stuff” of the opinion pages.

Data were taken from students who graduated between 1980 and 1991 and then their individual incomes between the ages of 32-34. One measure is median household income of all students during the study time period. ISU ranks last among the four-years and third when VU and IVTCC are added. ISU’s median student family income was $82,600 while the highest family income is Notre Dame at $165,400 twice as much as ISU.

Ranking median student individual earnings at age 32-34, ISU ranks ninth of the 12 institutions at $37,800. The lowest was IVTCC at $25,900 and the highest is $83,600 at Rose-Hulman.

What proportion of the institutions’ student body comes from low-income households? Not surprisingly, the two-year schools have the highest proportion but among the four-year schools, ISU is number one at 6.7 percent. The lowest proportion is Notre Dame at 1.4 percent. Certainly these numbers confirm ISU’s reputation as Indiana’s four-year working class institution.

Just for fun we can examine the share of students who come from the top 1 percent of the income distribution. ISU ranks last, at 0.5 percent, among the four-years and is very similar to the two-years with 0.3 percent. Running away from the field, at 11.0 percent, is Notre Dame.

Also, we can infer an institution’s de facto mission by looking at the change in percent of students admitted from the bottom quintile of the income distribution. Six of the 10 four-year schools decreased the proportion of students admitted from the bottom 40 percent, three were essentially unchanged, but ISU increased its share as did the two-year schools.

The key measure, according to the “Equality of Opportunity Project” is the “mobility rate,” the percent of children who come from the bottom 20 percent and reach the top 20 percent of the income distribution. Here, ISU is tied at third, at 1.1 percent, among the dozen Indiana institutions. The highest is Rose-Hulman at 2.2 and the lowest, USI, at 0.6 percent.

Those who work at ISU, I hope, can take some pride in this accomplishment. I do. However, the working-class university that ranks number one in the U.S., at 9.9 percent in the mobility rate, is California State University at Los Angeles. The U.S. average is 1.7 percent. Only two Indiana colleges are at the national average or above. VU reaches that U.S. average mark of 1.7, and Rose-Hulman exceeds it at 2.2 percent. Indiana’s average, based on my calculations, is 1.1, so while ISU ranks high in Indiana, it is just average and below average nationally.

Regardless of what anyone might think of the numbers, for those students who come from humble families to experience such mobility in a short period of time, 10 years, is a significant and life-changing impact in their material existence. Many who work at universities, especially the faculty, hope they have a positive impact on their students’ lives. In Indiana, a working-class state, ISU makes a difference for working-class students. 

Personally, I’d like to see more of our efforts couched in these terms and use metrics like this to demonstrate our success.

Social media content may not be what it seems

Previously published in the Terre Haute Tribune Star, 5 October 2014


Thursday, Sept. 18, was an unprecedented day at ISU with a heavy police presence in response to a statement made by an ISU sophomore about a shooting on campus that day. What her motivation was we might find out, if she even knows.


This essay is not about someone yelling fire in a crowded theater to just yell fire, or about ISU’s response. Rather, this essay is about what I have been reading and hearing about the social media site, Yik Yak, where the statement was made. I have not perused Yik Yak or entered its environment. For nearly a year, however, I have been participating in other similar sites, ever since I read that the under 25s are abandoning Facebook for other more anonymous sites (that their parents aren’t present on).


The responses I’ve read and heard about Yik Yak strike me as “ethnocentric,” that is, a response to a different culture’s (there are generational cultures) practices that are unfamiliar, and because the practices are unfamiliar they are deemed inferior and wrong. Some of the critics’ claims are quite strong: That the space is evil, atavistic, immoral, dangerous, racist, sexist, out of control, mean, and the list of negative descriptors goes on and on. Even a psychiatrist has deemed such social media, Yik Yak in particular, “dangerous.”


Yet, none of the critics I’ve read or spoken to have asked members of that “culture” what they think about it. I never heard of Yik Yak until Wednesday evening when the ISU Rave Alert mentioned it. I heard quite a bit of criticism from “nonparticipants” by noon on Thursday.


So, I have been asking ISU students if they ever use Yik Yak and what they think of it. Their responses fit with what I had come to understand about the “culture” of other versions of Yik Yak. First, not all I spoke to used it, but all were aware of it. Those who used it said that you had to use a lot of filters (not technological but mental), that there is some pretty raunchy stuff on it but also some really funny stuff, serious conversations, just about anything you might want. So, those who are familiar with the culture of these kinds of sites see it differently. They understand the need to filter the material. Those of us who did not grow up with social media are used to having our material filtered for us, leaving something of a false impression that what we read and see is representative or at least “respectable.”


But those days are numbered as there is a different culture now, with a lot of the “adults” cluck clucking about what they don’t understand. I don’t think the older generation criticism of these kinds of sites differs much from the “generation gap” between adults who didn’t grow up with television and their children who did.


One aspect of cultures like Yik Yak is that it allows others to indicate whether they like someone’s posting or not, to respond publicly or in private. In my meanderings on similar sites, I find them to also be wide open. Of course, it is easy to be distracted by the raunchy, racism, sexism, jingoism, practically any ‘ism” conceivable. Notwithstanding the grotesque, there are very serious conversations that occur. One of the best I had regarding Ferguson, Missouri, was on such a site, with people mostly under 30. One thing I’ve had to learn is to filter the “provocateurs.” That is my term for what is a common activity on these sights, posting provocative and outrageous statements to just get a response. I’ve communicated with individuals who bet others as to who can get the most responses over a specific time period.


One site, Whisper, even has a “popular” page where users definitely try to craft messages and sometimes clever “tricks” to get others to respond. Enough responses and your “Whisper” gets on the popular page. Without that understanding, indeed, the discourse looks “uncivilized.”


Later in the day on Thursday, a threatening note was found in an ISU restroom signed “Jihad.” I’ve neither seen nor heard anything critical of the medium of an anonymous note left in a bathroom. Had it been posted on Yik Yak, I suspect it would have evoked more “ethnocentric” responses about the lack of accountability on such sites as though the medium is the culprit.


As I teach my students, the first wisdom of sociology is that things are not always what they seem. Investigate, don’t pontificate.