Research: Controversial Research and Its Critics

Abstract

Academic research, it has often been charged by educational critics, including the editors of this magazine, is so often irrelevant to the practical needs of policy makers that much of it seems unnecessary. But even when pertinent research findings do occur, if they are contrary to the expectations of specialinterest groups, the resulting public notoriety may so distort their meaning that their influence on public policy may be negligible. My recent experience provides a good example. Three years ago, the Berkeley Center for Research and Development in Higher Education launched a study, funded by the National Institute of Education, to test the effectiveness of training offered by public and proprietary schools at the postsecondary level. We hypothesized that all things being equal, graduates of proprietary schools would have greater success in the labor market than graduates of public schools. We theorized that proprietary schools would have to place graduates in jobs for which they were trained, or students would stop enrolling. Public schools, which depend on taxes to survive, would rely more on creating a favorable political climate. The study was designed to test this principle and to provide a profile of public and proprietary students while in school. Due to limited funds, we could not design a sample that would represent all public or proprietary vocational schools. More important, no one quite knew (and no one knows yet) the universe of proprietary schools. We constructed a sample design that purposely built in differences, so that our findings would not be typical of just one geographic area, one occupation, or one type of school. We randomly selected 50 public and proprietary schools in the San Francisco Bay area, and the Chicago, Boston, and Miami areasfour metropolitan areas that are distinctly different from each other. We sampled students from a wide range of occupationsfrom higher-level accounting, programming, and electronic technician training, to lowerstatus secretarial training, dental assisting, and cosmetology (hair dressing). We followed each graduate of these programs from the years 1970, 1971, 1972, and 1973. The National Opinion Research Center of the Univer ity of Chicago interviewed 85 percent of them, 2,270 people, a remarkably high response rate. Paradoxically, we found the least dvantaged students enrolled in local proprietary schools where they paid fees from $450 to $3,000, bypassing the nearby public community colleges or technical schools, where the same training was offered virtually free. We think these students, who had not been very successful in high school, were actively recruited by the proprietaries, which offered them a new chance outside the system. Many were also probably attracted by the proprietaries' small size. Interestingly, we found no difference in the achievement motive between the two groups of students. When we followed the 2,270 graduates into the labor market, we found that the proprietary graduates did as well as the public graduates, although the costs of instruction in the proprietaries averaged 35 percent less, even without considering that most proprietary teachers are on 12month contracts, and most public teachers are on 9month contracts. The fact that the proprietary programs were half as long served to offset their high tuitions. For example, the proprietary dental assisting student paid an average of $1,066 for her course of study, compared with the public student, who paid almost nothing. But because the proprietary course averaged four and onehalf months, compared with one year at the public schools, the proprietary student was in the labor market sooner, earning more than enough to make up for the $1,000 fee. We found that graduates of minimum-length courses performed as well as those who took the longer public school training. Only in upper-level courses, designed to seem more like college courses, was the proprietary student's competitive edge lost, because he was in school almost as long as his public counterpart. Although this aspect of the research was limited, we found no differences in personal growth between the public graduates who had general education and the proprietary graduates who did not have it. Our hypothesis was partially confirmedthat with fewer resources and shorter courses the proprietary schools achieved the same results as the public schools. WELLFORD WILMS is project director of the Center for Research and Development in Higher Education of the University oT California at Berkeley.