No silver bullet?

From the LA Times: Californians will get the first chance to comment on President Obama's proposals to make college more affordable during a public forum this week at Cal State Dominguez Hills, officials said. The Wednesday event is the first in a series of four public sessions held around the country — and the only one in California — to gather input on the president's recently announced agenda to develop a college ratings system to help students select schools with the best bang for their buck...

The ratings score card would be developed for the 2015 school year using such measures as the percentage of low-income students receiving federal Pell grants, average tuition and student debt, graduation and transfer rates, and graduate incomes. Other proposals would award more financial aid to students at higher-rated colleges and provide incentives for new cost-saving approaches such as three-year bachelor's degrees and online programs. The ratings system has elicited concern among some higher education experts who question the reliability of graduation rates and other data that would be used.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan acknowledged the difficult road ahead during a news briefing Wednesday.  "We know there is no silver bullet or easy solution," Duncan said.

Full story at www.latimes.com/local/la-me-1103-college-afford-20131103,0,6252218.story

No silver bullet?  How can he say that?:

It does no good but we'll say it again...

From time to time, we have complained about newspapers that feel compelled to print public payrolls - pay and names - on the grounds that the information is available.  We have noted that with some exceptions for top executives, such publication is an invasion of privacy and invites identity theft.  The newspaper answer is always some combination of a constitutional right - freedom of the press, etc. - plus the fact that the info is public.  Yes, the info has been public all along but before the internet came along, it was de facto private in that you had to do some digging to get the info and a mass dump was not possible.  As it is, UC employees' pay by name is routinely published.  (The same problem arises for pension payments.)  I have challenged newspapers to print their own payrolls - they have a constitutional right to do so and the info is clearly available to them - but so far there have been no takers.

Recently, because of a case of ID theft that became part of a court record, a newspaper found what a member of a particular Indian gaming tribe was getting per month.  The individual had his ID stolen and the thief was caught and tried.  The paper printed the name of the victim and his monthly payment.  See:
http://blog.pe.com/crime-blotter/2013/01/02/temecula-identity-theft-reveals-amount-of-pechanga-tribal-payments/

If you look at some of the comments by readers, you see the same kinds of questions raised including the issue of why the newspaper doesn't reveal its own pay rates.  Note that whether we are talking about public payrolls or payments from an Indian tribe, the info could have been published without naming the individual involved.  Public payrolls could be summarized by job title with nice charts and distributions without naming names.  Whatever point someone wants to make about public pay practices could be made that way.

After the recent Connecticut school shootings, a news source printed names of all those in the region who had gun permits with addresses.  There was an outcry about that decision which, like all the others, was defended as constitutional and based on public info which had long been available.   The fact is that there is a lot of info which is public but which newspapers choose not to print even though they have a right to do so.  Names of rape victims are obvious examples.  The right to publish also includes the right to decide not to publish.  And, as noted above, so far all newspapers that publish public payrolls have exercised their constitutional right not to publish their own payrolls.

More on Posting of All UC Salaries

In an August 8th op ed entitled “Our Next Governor Must Weigh in on State's Right to Shield Personal Data” in the Sacramento Bee, senior editor Dan Morain reports on attempts to protect Internet privacy. Basically, the piece notes that high-tech firms take the position that the state should not get into the business of providing regulatory protection. Instead it should be left to the federal government so that there will not be 50 different regulatory schemes.

You can read the op ed at http://www.sacbee.com/2010/08/08/2943054/dan-morain-our-next-governor-must.html

Morain takes a sympathetic view of the need for privacy and notes that the California constitution has privacy protections:

“In California, privacy is a fundamental right. This state has a constitutional amendment identifying privacy as inalienable. And for better or worse, legislators don't see themselves as potted plants. Some actually care about state law. All that means the next governor will grapple with privacy or lack of it right here in Sacramento.”

This position is rather ironic since the Sacramento Bee posts the salaries of all state employees by name, including those at UC, a potential aid to identity theft. If you have read previous posts on this blog, you know a) that LA City has begun posting salaries of its employees – but without posting individual names and b) that I questioned the Bee’s policy last October in an op ed in UCLA Today. I sent Morain an email yesterday, the text of which reads:

An interesting viewpoint in a newspaper that routinely posts the salaries of every state worker from the janitor to the governor. I had a fruitless email exchange about this with another Sac Bee editor over my op ed in UCLA Today. Time for a re-think? See
http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/documents/areas/fac/hrob/bee-post.pdf

And I got back:

Thank you for your note, Mr. Mitchell. I will pass it to the person who decides about the data base.

I am waiting patiently to be surprised.

Posting Salaries

As is well known, state salaries are posted on websites available from such sources as the Sacramento Bee. You can go to the Bee website and find salary by name of a particular employee, including UC employees.

Last October, I wrote an op ed for UCLA Today asking why the Bee thought it was a good idea to publish state salaries by name which could encourage identity theft or other abuse. The Bee could have alternatively provided the basic information using just job titles, pay distribution charts, etc., that would not identify individuals. See http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/documents/areas/fac/hrob/bee-post.pdf I asked the Bee why it would not choose to publish its own payroll by name of employee. Surely, readers would be curious to know what this or that reporter or columnist earned. There was a back and forth exchange with a Bee editor. Note that the issue was not whether the Bee was legally entitled to publish state salaries by name but whether it was a good idea to do so. (Of course, there is no legal bar to the Bee publishing its own payroll info and it certainly has easy access to the data.)

Those who have been following the City of Bell scandal - see an earlier post if not - know that the state controller has now ordered cities and counties to publish public salary data. There is now such a database for LA City at http://www.contact.lacity.org/controller/lacityp_011220.pdf What is interesting is that it does not identify workers by name. Thus, for example, you can learn at the top of page 522 that there was a "gardener caretaker" working for the City who earned $47,836.08. But the name of that particular gardener is not reported. Thus, if you think it is a scandal for the City of LA to pay that amount to a gardener - either because it is too much or too little - you now have the information you need to be righteously indignant. Or if you are just curious about what a City gardener makes, you have that information. Of course, some top city officials, e.g., the mayor, can be identified by just knowing their titles.

Just an observation.

Database on Higher Ed Including UCLA

The database described below should get an award for being user-unfriendly. However, it does include UCLA and I did succeed (somewhat) in obtaining some data from it. I invite anyone with more patience to see what might be uncovered. Follow the directions as best you can. The database is at:

http://www.tcs-online.org/Reports/Report.aspx

An excerpt from a description from Inside Higher Ed:

Follow the Money
July 9, 2010

In a sea of often bewildering data about college spending practices, a small island of clarity is emerging.
In conjunction with its third annual “Trends in College Spending” report, released today, the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability provides a publicly available database that allows journalists, policy makers and anyone curious about higher education an opportunity to decipher where college funding comes from and where it goes.
While the Delta Cost Project has for years provided broad overviews of spending practices at various types of institutions, the new database’s groundbreaking feature is that -- fasten your seatbelts -- it allows for an analysis of the budget priorities of individual institutions. Jane Wellman, the project's executive director, hopes that the new data will stimulate conversations about spending priorities and cost containment -- or the lack thereof -- that generally aren’t happening now at the national, state or institutional level. Such conversations, she adds, are long overdue.
“I think we’ve got a lot of habits to break in higher education,” she says.
While there’s much to pore over in the Delta Project’s new report, it is necessarily limited because the federal data on spending the project draws on are now available only through 2008. Consequently, the recession that is now crippling many colleges and universities is barely captured in the current report -- and some of the big spending it meticulously documents happened in what history will likely regard as the heady days of higher ed.