Media

This week, for the first time in ages, I cleared my email backlog. Much of the correspondence in the queue was questions for this column--several of which, fittingly, dealt with email etiquette. Herewith, a brief return to our Q&A advice format, answering some of your inbox conundrums. I receive anywhere from five to 15 pitches from PR reps every day....

by Marian Wang

As we detailed last week, many public universities, suffering from state budget cuts or hungry for prestige, have made it a priority to attract out-of-state students, who pay higher tuition, and those who will help boost the schools’ place in college rankings.

But a newly released survey by Inside Higher Ed of admissions directors directly about their priorities, allowing them to respond anonymously. The survey, of course, is of admissions directors -- so it’s focused more on what type of students schools are going after in the recruitment stage, and less on the students who gets financial aid as a sweetener to prompt enrollment.

Still, it’s a reflection of some of the same priorities -- including a strong interest in out-of-state students and international students, who typically bring in more revenue, even with modest discounts.

For instance, 80 percent of admissions directors surveyed at public four-year universities agreed or strongly agreed that they were likely to increase their efforts to recruit out-of-state students. The percentage was slightly lower -- but still 66 percent to 72 percent, depending on the type of public institution -- for international students.

The survey also has some telling results about the popularity of so-called merit aid, which universities use to give discounts to particularly appealing students.

About two-thirds of admissions directors at public universities said that they would likely increase their efforts to recruit students with merit scholarships. Most also said they didn’t see a problem with using institutional resources on merit aid -- even though as we noted, investing resources in merit aid often means giving it to students who don’t need it, and not having much left over for those who do.

Over the long term, state schools have been giving a growing share of their grants to wealthier students, and a declining share to the poorest students, as we reported. They’ve also been serving a shrinking portion of the nation’s needy students, leaving community colleges and for-profit colleges to take on more of that responsibility.

Asked about first-generation college students, the responses from admissions directors indicated that they were also a target population, though perhaps less so relative to out-of-state or international populations: 62 percent of admissions directors at public research universities said they’d likely increase recruitment efforts for first-generation populations, and that figure was 55 percent for master’s/bachelor’s degree public institutions.

For a look at the full report, head to Inside Higher Ed. And if you’re admissions director who’d like to chat more, why don’t you send us an email?

SANTA BARBARA -- It was June 2009, and the Santa Barbara News-Press imbroglio that had begun three years earlier was still playing out. A panel discussion on the future of journalism in Santa Barbara drew an audience of some 200 people, but a fair amount of the discussion focused not on the future but the past, particularly as it related...

Today's must-read is this Pittsburgh Post-Gazette column by Daniel Kovalik of the United Steelworkers on the death of an 83-year old adjunct professor who had taught at Duquesne University for a quarter century. In poverty after years of abysmal wages and no benefits from Duquesne, Margaret Mary Vojtko faced Orphans' Court after someone called authorities to say she couldn't take...

At first glance, the Fed chairperson's race is one for the textbooks: a classic case of spin and counterspin, mostly emanating from unattributed anonymice. This is the spin cycle in its purest form. First it was Yellen vs. Summers and that other guy, the third tenor. Then it was Summers. Now, it's not Summers, and probably Yellen, we think....

A piece of medical news made the rounds last week with the kind of fodder that makes Web editors dance for joy: the kind of material that demands some choice, search-engine friendly punning in the hed. "Choose Dads With Smaller 'Nads," was the title of a Time Healthland post covering a study released earlier this month demonstrating an inverse correlation...

A couple of weeks ago, British GQ put on its annual Men of the Year gala, where it hands out awards for things like Breakthrough Menswear Designer Brand alongside honors for, Politician of the Year, "Oracle," and Hugo Boss Most Stylish. The TV personality award this year went to Piers Morgan and the Achievement of the Year went to a...

It's time to move beyond the wonk studies that showed up all summer, which concluded that maybe the much-awaited rate shock (for insurance premiums on the state exchanges) is not in the cards. Reports from the consulting firm Avalere Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, RAND Corp., and Kaiser Family Foundation have fueled the notion that premiums next year will...

by A.C. Thompson

A federal judge on Tuesday overturned the convictions of five New Orleans police officers tied to the shooting of unarmed civilians during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, finding that prosecutors in the case had engaged in “grotesque” misconduct.

In a blistering and meticulously detailed 129-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt found that federal prosecutors in New Orleans had anonymously posted damning online critiques of the accused officers and the New Orleans Police Department before and during the 2011 trial, a breach of professional ethics that had the effect of depriving the officers of their rights to a fair trial.

The judge granted the officers’ request for a new trial.

“Re-trying this case is a very small price to pay in order to protect the validity of the verdict in this case, the institutional integrity of the Court, and the criminal justice system as a whole,” Judge Engelhardt wrote.

The judge’s decision nullifies – at least temporarily – a key success in the U.S. Department of Justice’s half-decade effort to clean up the troubled New Orleans Police Department. Four of the five officers had been accused of firing on a group of civilians on or near the Danziger Bridge on Sept. 4, 2005, killing two people and seriously injuring others; a fifth officer had been charged with covering up the shooting.

The judge’s ruling excoriated two former top attorneys in the federal prosecutor’s office in New Orleans, as well as a lawyer in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division who had played a role in the case. The prosecutors posted comments about the Danziger case on NOLA.com, the website of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, as the case was still unfolding. The comments included a variety of attacks on the police department, calls for guilty verdicts and encouragements to other anonymous commentators to take apart the defense being offered by the five officers.

Engelhardt wrote that he was unaware of any other case in which “prosecutors acting with anonymity used social media to circumvent ethical obligations, professional responsibilities, and even to commit violations of the Code of Federal Regulations.” He called the behavior of prosecutors “bizarre and appalling.”

The Justice Department, in a statement, said it was disappointed in the judge’s action.

“We are reviewing the decision and considering our options,” the statement said.

Judge Engelhardt’s ruling sets the stage for another round of trials for former detective Arthur Kaufman, who was charged with directing an extensive cover-up, as well as former officers Anthony Villavaso, Kenneth Bowen, Robert Gisevius, and Robert Faulcon, who were accused of firing on the civilians. Judge Engelhardt had overseen the trial and sentenced the officers to prison terms ranging from 6 to 65 years.

Lawyers for the officers subsequently asked the judge to overturn the conviction, saying the prosecutor’s office had “engaged in a secret public relations campaign” to inflame public opinion against the officers and to secure their convictions. The judge did not find evidence of an organized campaign, but said the conduct of the individual prosecutors had wound up having the same effect.

Two of the prosecutors involved in the online posting, Sal Perricone and Jan Mann, resigned after their conduct became known. The D.C.-based Justice Department lawyer implicated in the scandal, Karla Dobinski, is a veteran of the Civil Rights Division. It is unclear whether her employment status has been affected by the revelations.

News that some federal prosecutors in the New Orleans office had improperly posted comments online first broke in 2012, and ultimately cost Jim Letten, the office’s top official, his job. The Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility launched an investigation.

But Judge Engelhardt’s ruling called into question just how vigorous and comprehensive a probe that has been.

Like most newspapers around the country, The Seattle Times has cut staff and shaved resources in recent years to balance the ever diminishing budget of the modern newspaper. But unlike many of its counterparts, the Times has managed to continue publishing strong science coverage, maintaining both a science and an environmental reporter and producing impressive enterprise work, like last year's...

"Should you worry about the NSA? Eh, maybe," was the title of the night's first slide, when the Hacks/Hackers New York group led a session on encryption and security on Monday. The event was meant to get journalists familiar and comfortable with several of the free, basic tools that can help them protect their own work-in-progress and their communications with...

by Cora Currier

The U.S. spent roughly $25 billion last year on what’s loosely known as security assistance—a term that can cover everything from training Afghan security forces to sending Egypt F-16 fighter jets to equipping Mexican port police with radiation scanners.

The spending, which has soared in the past decade, can be hard to trace, funneled through dozens of sometimes overlapping programs across multiple agencies. There’s also evidence it’s not always wisely spent. In Afghanistan, for instance, the military bought $771 million worth of aircraft this year for Afghan pilots, most of whom still don’t know how to fly them.

Last year, legislators in the House drafted a bill that would require more transparency and evaluation of security and all foreign aid programs. The bill was championed by an unlikely coalition of Tea Party budget hawks and giant aid groups such as Oxfam America.

But the Obama administration successfully pushed to have security assistance exempted from the bill’s requirements, according to a letter obtained by ProPublica and interviews with Congressional staffers.

The Pentagon wrote that it “strongly” opposed last year’s bill in a statement to Congressional staff laying out its “informal view” last December. “The extensive public reporting requirements raise concerns,” the letter said. “Country A could…potentially learn what Country B has received in military assistance.” Foreign governments would also “likely be resistant” to monitoring and evaluation from the U.S.  Staffers say the State Department had also resisted the bill’s increased oversight of security assistance. (The State Department declined our requests to discuss that.)

Two weeks later, the House passed a version that covered only “development assistance.” The bill never made it to a vote in the Senate.

The State and Defense Departments, which handle most security assistance, “really are scared,” said a House staffer who worked on last year’s bill.  “They’re afraid of transparency about what the money is funding, where the weapons are going, who is getting training.”

As it is now, the staffer said, “some reports come two or three years after the fact, and the data is not easily manipulable.”

Increased oversight of security assistance is needed, said Walter Slocombe, former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, who recently led a government-sponsored study on the issue. The problem is that “a lot of these programs have been developed ad hoc,” he said. “There’s not much coordination among agencies, though often they are trying to do more or less the same thing.”

New versions of the bill have been reintroduced in the House and Senate. This time, the administration’s stance isn’t clear. A spokesman for the National Security Council declined to comment, as did the Pentagon.

This year’s bill has a loophole for security spending: a waiver allowing the Secretary of State to exempt such programs if he deems it in the “national interest.”

Still, including security programs in the bill at all is “going to be a bit more difficult,” said an aide to one of the House bill’s co-sponsors, Gerry Connolly, D-Va. The exemption requires the State Department to tell Congress which programs it isn’t including, and why.

Lauren Frese, a State Department foreign assistance official said, “We support Congress’ objectives with the bill. It’s more a matter of making sure we’re not legislating something that isn’t aligned with what we’ve already got going on.” As the White House points out, it has already required agencies to be more transparent about spending on foreign aid.  Agencies must upload budget data to a central public dashboard, foreignassistance.gov, though the site’s data is currently incomplete and information from the Defense Department is available only in generic categories. The bill would turn such directives into law.

The legislation also goes further. It would require the State Department to develop guidelines for monitoring and evaluating aid’s effectiveness across agencies.

In a hearing in April, the House bill’s co-sponsor, Ted Poe, R-Texas, said that “Americans want to see [whether] the money that we're sending to NGOs, the governments, et cetera is working or not working.”

Representative Connolly hopes the bill will help the public “better understand the rationale for aid, and the context: what a small, small part of the government’s budget it represents,” he told ProPublica. Indeed, foreign aid makes up only about 1 percent  of the federal budget.

Supporters of the bill say excluding security assistance would leave a huge gap.

In January, an independent advisory board to the State Department recommended comprehensive reform of the whole concept of security assistance, calling for concrete objectives, better long-term monitoring, and a greater emphasis on non-military programs, such as programs to strengthen justice systems. (A few months later, the White House issued a policy directive that pledged to take on many of the same issues.)

“Nobody looks at it systematically,” said Gordon Adams, who worked on national security and international affairs for the Office of Management and Budget in the 1990s and has argued for a reduced military role in security assistance. That’s in part a reflection of how the landscape of programs has grown and fragmented in recent decades. Security assistance grew 227 percent between fiscal years 2002 and 2012, to a peak of $26.8 billion, according to data collected by the Stimson Center, where Adams is a fellow. That growth comes largely from programs in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are beginning to be scaled back. This year’s budget still allocated more than $20 billion across State and Defense.

State officially oversees all foreign aid, including many programs traditionally thought of as “military,” like weapons sales, but the Pentagon expanded its portfolio of “military operations other than war” and special operations in the 1990s. After 9/11, Congress also legislated new programs related to the “war on terror,” such as the Combating Terrorism Fellowship Program and the Coalition Support Fund. With its Afghan programs, the Pentagon accounts for more than half of all security spending – not counting covert operations.

Last year, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta promoted training and aid to partners as “low cost and small-footprint approaches” to military objectives.

The Pentagon’s increased role in foreign aid highlights a long-standing tension between the State Department and the military, which always has more cash on hand. “If you’ve got a $600 billion budget it’s easier to squeeze in a few million dollars here and there,” said Slocombe, who chaired the study for the State Department.

Countless examples from Afghanistan illustrate the problem of lack of both long-term planning and cooperation between agencies. In 2010, ProPublica and Newsweek documented the failures of the police training program, which had by then cost $6 billion. Responsibility shifted between agencies and contractors, and State and Defense squabbled “over whether the training should emphasize police work or counterinsurgency.” Last year, in one police facility built by the Army Corps of Engineers, the inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction found a well building being used as a chicken coop. Another encampment, designed for 175 police, was occupied by just 12. The men didn’t even have keys for many of the buildings.

Other reports found the military paid $6 million for vehicles that were destroyed or hadn’t been seen in years, and that $12.8 million in electrical equipment was sitting unused, as Defense and USAID each expected the other to install it.

Afghanistan is an exceptional case, given the scale of the spending and wartime conditions. But it also has the scrutiny of a special inspector general and a large U.S. presence. Security assistance to other countries has far fewer eyes on it – or a clear idea of what the objectives for the aid are. Empowering local police and armies can have more severe political and human rights repercussions than digging wells. “It engages us with a bunch of countries where our interests are at best opaque,” said Adams.

Some programs are designed for political and diplomatic reasons (as was long the case with arm sales to Egypt), while others are meant to build up a country’s ability to help the U.S. in its aims, such as countering terrorism or drug-dealing. In other words, giving a country what it wants, versus what the U.S. thinks it needs. (In fact, the Government Accountability Office found that branches of the military differ on which programs are supposed to do what.)

In a February testimony, the GAO said that few of the military’s training programs had looked carefully at long-term impacts. “Reporting on progress and effectiveness,” had in some cases “been limited to anecdotal information.” For example, while Yemen has received over $360 million from two of the military’s new counterterrorism programs, due to security concerns the Pentagon has yet to evaluate whether that money’s had any effect.

The House bill’s sponsors believe it could help with these problems of planning and communication. The bill “is not designed to be hostile or adversarial for the Pentagon and State Department,” said Representative Connolly. “It’s designed to provide them with a more cogent rationale for these programs.”

Ever wonder why the very rich pay so little in gift and estate taxes, which are intended in part to prevent dynastic wealth from hobbling economic growth? Bloomberg's Zachary R. Mider had an excellent piece last Thursday that used the Waltons--heirs to the Walmart fortune--as a case study to explain how it's done. Reporters who want to understand how the...

The question of whether women can "have it all" has been the source of many a polemic. The discussion is focused around the struggles of educated, upper-middle-class, heterosexual women to juggle demanding jobs, child rearing, and maintaining a sex life and marriage. Anne-Marie Slaughter kicked off the debate's most recent incarnation with her 2012 Atlantic piece on the inflexible hours...

by Christie Thompson

Public universities have a vital public mission — backed by decades of public investment — to provide access to an affordable education for students. But faced with dwindling state support, many state universities have shifted their financial-aid dollars to attract students who will help schools generate more tuition revenue or move up in the rankings.

As Marian Wang’s recent investigation found, public universities have been giving a growing share of grants to the wealthiest students, and a shrinking share to the poorest students. A rising sticker price and a drop in available aid means many of the lowest-income students are being squeezed out of an affordable public education.

What should be done about how schools are using their financial aid? With budget cutbacks, how can public schools mind their bottom line while staying accessible for the lowest-income students? We had higher education experts weigh in on Reddit on Thursday. Here are some highlights:

Jerry Lucido, head of the University of Southern California Center for Enrollment Research Policy and Practice: 

I have made the argument in a recent Center for American Progress report that all institutions could cut back non-need based aid (of all types) in favor of need-based aid without impact on rankings and for the public benefit. Public institutions, as the article notes, should certainly do so, but private institutions are also held in the public trust as "non-profit" entities and should not be left off the hook. Institutions could reduce non-need based aid an agreed upon fixed percent per year, moving it to needy students, but one institution will not do it if all do not come along. Department of Justice concerns about "price fixing" make this cooperation difficult. The DoJ and others should not consider this fixing prices, given that competition will remain the same. Overall costs would drop for needy students if this were permitted.

Anthony Carnevale, Director and Research Professor of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce:

What can be done? In combination, both race- and class-based affirmative action can at least ensure that highly qualified African-American, Hispanic, and lower-income students gain access to well-funded and selective colleges that lead to elite careers. But affirmative action is not enough to make more than a dent in the larger systematic racial and class bias in the core economic and educational mechanisms at the root of inequality. Affirmative action, whether it is race —or class-based— or some combination of the two can help out those who strive and overcome the odds, yet does relatively little to change the odds themselves. There are always African-American, Hispanic, and working class strivers who beat the odds, but for the mass of disadvantaged people it is the odds that count. The odds are stacked against African-American, Latino, and low-income students. Disadvantage, like privilege, comes from a complex network of mutually reinforcing economic and educational mechanisms that only can be dealt with through a multifaceted economic and educational policy response.

Richard Kahlenberg, author and senior fellow at The Century Foundation, where he writes about a variety of education issues:

Marian Wang's terrific article shows that between 1996 and 2012, public institutions moved scarce resources away from low-income students to wealthy students. This makes little sense from a public policy standpoint. The reason taxpayers support financial aid is that our whole society benefits when more people go to college and get a great education. Wealthy students will go to college with or without aid. So federal policies should provide an incentive (sticks and carrots) for states to redirect non-need merit aid to need-based grants. We need to focus on on those students for whom the funds will make the difference in their decision of whether or not to attend college.

Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe, Research Director for the The Research Network on Racial and Ethnic Inequality at Duke University:

Does anyone even know what "more affordable" means? It is important to remember that taxpayers are not a homogeneous group. So I can imagine that some high earning taxpayers (often mistaken for the middle class) see public colleges in the same way they see public K-12 schools - make them better and more competitive so that I am not "taxed" twice to educate my child. As for moving resources away from low-income students to wealthy students, one could argue that it is a return on investment decision. The value added to the low-income child, even if they don't graduate, may be higher than the value added to the wealthy child. But the wealthy child is more likely, and their parents probably have resources now, to make gifts to the college.

Zakiya Smith, former White House Senior Policy Advisor for Education:

What if the federal government incented states to ensure that at least public college financial aid was going to low-income students? States that did a better job could get more federal aid, or perhaps colleges that skew their aid to more low-income students could get bigger breaks on some regulatory burdens?...some of the nation's most elite colleges ONLY give need based aid. But, they have big endowments and aren't in competition with anyone else. Places like Berea college in Kentucky are totally free to all students and have a high proportion of Pell eligible students. The data available on the College Navigator that ProPublica used to identify these negative trends could also be used to identify colleges that are doing this the right way. 

I think the ratings system recently proposed by President Obama would actually discourage, rather than encourage, this sort of behavior, because it would (he says) be based on the value-add of college and include factors such as how well they serve low-income students. That would discourage colleges from creaming top kids and provide incentives for them to recruit and successfully serve more disadvantaged students. Of course, designing the right weights/measures/etc is difficult, but it seems like we all acknowledge that the current institutional prestige incentives are doing us no favors.

What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments below. 

DETROIT, MI -- The Ann Arbor News was back on newsstands last week, four years after Advance Publications closed the 174-year old daily that once boasted of being older than the state of Michigan. The revival of the bygone print brand (though not the daily frequency) was one of two moves Advance recently announced for its Ann Arbor publication; the...

GOOD, the earnestly liberal magazine that folded and turned itself into a "social network for social good," is now partnering with the US military to create better killing technology, a turn of events that's up there in the annals of Greatest Sellouts of All Time. BuzzFeed's John Herrman flags a jaw-dropping press release touting its alliance with the military to...

by Mike Webb

Last week, Megan Twohey of Reuters published a major investigation about how American families use Internet message boards to abandon difficult children adopted from other countries. Twohey showed how exasperated families use Yahoo and Facebook groups to find new parents for the children they swore to take care of. And far too often, these children end up in homes where the guardians have not been approved to take care of children, where they can be sexually abused or put in surroundings that are dangerous for their well-being.

ProPublica reporter Marshall Allen sat down with Twohey to get the story behind the story of piecing "The Child Exchange" together. Asked to describe how she got started, Twohey said, "One of the most valuable things I think about this project is I worked with our database team. We basically did a deep dive on one of the Yahoo groups where this - it's called re-homing - activity takes place. And we scraped all 5,000 messages going back five years and built a database where we were able to quantify what was going on. We logged every single offer of a child that was being made over a 5-year period and we found that on average a child was being offered up once a week."

Twohey added, "It's interesting to note too that the term ‘re-homing’ was first used to describe people seeking new owners for their pets. And some of the ads read remarkably similar to the ads that you'd see for people trying to find a new home for their pet. Some of the ads would describe kids as being obedient, eager to please, or talk about them being pretty."

Read the five-part investigation at Reuters.com and you can listen to this podcast on iTunes and Stitcher.

English has many prefixes that make a word into a negative or opposite: Add "non-" to "profit," for example, and you have something that doesn't aim to reap financial rewards for personal gain. Add "dis-" to "invite," and you're not going to that party any more. Usually, you can remove the prefix and see what the "positive" is. But some...

"How Detroit Went Broke," published Sunday in the Detroit Free Press, is a superbly reported, written, and illustrated investigative project that shows how simplistic narratives about the Motor City bankruptcy miss the real story. Every reporter covering government finance will benefit from studying this package. Free Press business reporters Nathan Bomey and John Gallagher pored over more than a...