Mike Urmeneta, Ed.D.

Author Archives: Michael

Year in Review: Exercise

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During the pandemic, I committed to exercising regularly. Here’s a simple snapshot of a year’s worth of data. The dropoffs happened after Thanksgiving and right before my dissertation defense. Need to work on maintaining the habit during the holidays and periods of stress.

Takeaways from The Social Dilemma

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A year ago, I tweeted about #TheSocialDilemma. I figured I should also create a post about it https://twitter.com/michaelurmeneta/status/1307853103430066176

  • “For the last 10 years, the biggest companies in Silicon Valley have been the business of selling their users” – Roger McNamee
  • The classic saying is that “If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product” – recounted by Tristan Harris
  • “Its the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behavior and perception that is the product” – Jaron Lanier
  • “There are only two industries that call their customers “users”: illegal drugs and software” – Edward Tufte
  • “…we have a digital pacifier for ourselves that is kind of atrophying our own ability to deal with (when we’re uncomfortable or lonely or uncertain or afraid).” – Tristan Harris
  • “Processing power has increased a trillion times. Nothing else has evolved that fast. Cars are roughly twice as fast. Our brains have not evolved at all.” – Randy Fernando
  • “What people are missing is that AI already runs the world today right now.” – Tristan Harris
  • “AI is a metaphor” – Justin Rosenstein
  • “We’re all looking out for the moment when technology would overwhelm human strengths and intelligence. When is it gonna cross the singularity, replace our jobs, be smarter than humans? But there’s this much earlier moment when technology exceeds and overwhelms human weakness.” – Tristan Harris
  • “This point being crossed is at the root of addiction, polarization, radicalization, outrage-ification, vanity-ification, the entire thing. This is overpowering human nature and this is checkmate on humanity.” – Tristan Harris
  • “There’s an MIT study that fake news on Twitter spreads six times faster than true news.” – Tristan Harris
  • “We’ve created a system that biases towards false information. Not because we want to, but because false information makes the companies more money than the truth. The truth is boring”. -Sandy Parakilas
  • “What we’re seeing is a global assault on democracy. Most of the countries targeted are countries that run democratic elections… We in the tech industry have created the tools to destabilize and erode the fabric of society in every country all at once everywhere.” – Tristan Harris
  • “The manipulation by third parties is not a hack. The Russians didn’t hack Facebook. What they did was they used the tools that Facebook created for legitimate advertisers and legitimate users, and they applied it to a nefarious purpose.” -Roger McNamee
  • “We are allowing the technologists to frame this as a problem that they’re equipped to solve. That’s a lie. People talk about AI as if it will know truth. AI’s not gonna solve these problems. AI cannot solve the problem of fake news – Cathy O’Neil
  • “If we don’t agree on what is true or that there is such a thing as truth, we’re toast. This is the problem beneath other problems” – Tristan Harris
  • “There’s no fiscal reason for these companies to change and that is why I think we need regulation…. tax these companies on the data assets that they have. It gives them a fiscal reason to not acquire every piece of data on the planet” – Joe Toscano
  • “We have almost no laws around digital privacy” -Sandy Parakilas
  • “Notice that many people in the tech industry don’t give these devices to their own children.” – Tristan Harris
  • “What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable too that we’ve ever come up with. And it’s the equivalent for a bicycle for our minds.” – Steve Jobs
  • “The attention extraction model is not how we want to treat human beings. The fabric of a healthy society depends on us getting off this corrosive business model. We can demand that these products be designed humanely. We can demand to not be treated as an extractable resource. The intention could be: “How do we make the world better?” – Tristan Harris

Financial Aid Optimization Process 1 of 2 – Overview

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I have worked with Ruffalo Noel Levitz, Maguire Associates, and Hardwick Day (now EAB). They all follow a similar process.

  • Start with the big picture
    • Take 3-5 years of data and look at the numbers in the aggregate
    • Calculate the highs and lows
    • Do a Monte Carlo simulation to determine the most likely data ranges (80% or other acceptable confidence level)
  • Perform scenario planning using the above as upper and lower bounds
    • So it in person
    • Include all necessary parties

Embedding a Tableau Dashboard – Veteran cohort example

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An Analysis of Tuition Discounting – Benefits and Limitations

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The cost of attending college has been a major concern for the last several decades now.  Every year, tuition has continued to rise unabated, far outpacing the rate of inflation.  During that time, the sticker price of our institutions has become much greater than most students are willing or able to pay.  Cost remains a significant barrier to educational access in the United States (Kelchen, Goldrick-Rab, & Hosch, 2017).  The divide between the haves and the have-nots continues to widen.

Tuition discounting is the practice of offering scholarships and grants to offset the sticker price of attending colleges and universities.  The fact that the average discount rate is 50% across the country (Caskey, 2018) indicates how widespread the practice is. This means that in general, students are only paying half of a school’s advertised price.

Offering discounts in the form of scholarships and grants allow schools to attract qualified applicants that may have opted to go elsewhere, thereby increasing enrollment numbers and educational access   In addition, tuition discounting is a way for institutions to help increase overall revenue.  Ideally, this should be a win for all involved.  In practice, the situation is not so simple.

Benefits of Tuition Discounting

Caskey (2018) identified three benefits to tuition discounting: (a) to serve students who cannot afford the costs of college, (b) to attract high-quality students who would not have enrolled otherwise, and (c) to offset low enrollment. Additionally, Jalal & Khaksari (2019) identified that tuition discounting: (a) enhanced budgetary surpluses, (b) increased admission yield, and (c) reduced drop-out rates. 

Discounting allows schools to broaden their reach. The overall supply of traditional college-age students has decreased in certain parts of the country.  This adds increased pressure for institutions looking for qualified students.  Price is oftentimes the determining factor. Through the application of financial aid in the form of scholarships and grants, colleges can make themselves more attractive to prospective students by making the institution look affordable despite high sticker prices.

Merit-based scholarships allow for colleges to compete for academically gifted students who have the option to enroll elsewhere (Rine, 2019).  The increased quality of students then benefits the institution in national rankings which in turn increases the prestige and desirability. The high sticker price also gives the impression of prestige, while high scholarships give families of students something to brag about.  In addition, need-based grants additionally give students and their families the impression that they are getting a “good deal” (Rine, 2019) which further incentivizes families to enroll. 

Private institutions that are tuition-dependent may use tuition discounting as a tool to increase overall institutional revenue.  However, colleges cannot afford to discount too heavily. This requires the strategic deployment of financial aid funds.  Companies like Ruffalo Noel Levitz, Maguire and Associates, and EAB Hardwick Day offer financial aid leveraging models to enrollment services offices that seek to maximize (a) student quantity, (b) student quality, and (c) overall institutional revenue.

Limitations of Tuition Discounting

One of the limitations of tuition discounting is that it promotes the artificial inflation of college pricing (Rine, 2019).  We are already seeing the effects of this as educational quality and return on investment are being called into question in the public sphere. Additionally, once this happens, the cost of providing education becomes detached from the price a student pays. Instead, education just becomes another good or a service that can be gotten by the best deal.  Private colleges that are not subsidized by government funding or have large endowments can find themselves in a precarious financial position as they seek to compete on price alone.

Over time, tuition discounting has forced institutions to compete on the basis of price as opposed to quality of educational services (Martin, 2004).  Rine (2019) goes on to explain that price can start to overshadow considerations of outcomes, personal growth, employment, and further educational attainment.  This commoditization of education changes the way students choose their colleges and it can reduce the promise of education as a public good. 

Furthermore, price competition alone will not cure all institutional ills. Tuition-dependent institutions will not be able to sustain this for the long haul.  As these schools offer more merit-based aid, we start to come to the situation where certain students will effectively start to subsidize other students.  Another downside to the high price, high aid model is that it is not sustainable for tuition-dependent institutions as it begins to tap into operating revenue.  Eventually, students will realize that they are paying high prices for effectively lower levels of service and will seek education elsewhere.  This can create resentment among current students that can have a negative ripple effect throughout the institution.

Finally, many students may cite financial reasons for not attending institutions. The initial sticker shock may actually turn away the very students that colleges and universities are trying to attract.  Part of the problem of rolling out a high-price, high-aid model is students who only see the high price.  Some may unaware of the high aid or discouraged altogether to apply to opt for lower price models up-front.

Conclusion

The cost of higher education will continue to be a major concern for families that are just struggling to keep afloat.  If done incorrectly, the high-price, high-aid model (Rine, 2019) of tuition discounting can seem like accounting sleight of hand to stroke the egos of students and their parents. 

It does appear though that prestige is associated with the cost is one reason why schools appear to have little incentive to reduce sticker price (Caskey, 2018; Rine, 2019).  It is the perpetuation of the idea that expensive things have more inherent value.  When we couple the ego boost that a large scholarship provides (Caskey, 2018), it is difficult to disentangle from tuition discounting completely.

As much as I don’t think there is an easy answer to this, I also don’t think we can maintain this situation for much longer.  Institutions must be careful not to sacrifice the institutional mission or the student’s educational experience for the sake of additional revenue.

References

Caskey, J. P. (2018). Tuition discounting in liberal arts colleges. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 50(6), 52–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/00091383.2018.1540830

Jalal, A., & Khaksari, S. (2019). Effects of tuition discounting on university’s financial performance. Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, 52(2), 439-466.

Kelchen, R., Goldrick-Rab, S., & Hosch, B. (2017). The costs of college attendance: Examining variation and consistency in institutional living cost allowances. Journal of Higher Education, 88(6), 947–971. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2016.1272092

Martin, R. E. (2004). Tuition discounting without tears. Economics of Education Review, 23(2), 177–189. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2003.08.001

Rine, P. J. (2019). The discounting dilemma: Institutional benefits, unintended consequences, and principles for reform. Christian Higher Education, 18(1–2), 16–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/15363759.2018.1543242

90% of data modeling is data cleansing. Here is a sample done with Python

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This is a particularly hairy example of comparative program performance that needed to take into account: (a) program consolidations, (b) shifting departmental oversight, (b) school name changes, (c) sliding test score ranges, (d) and a host of other data idiosyncrasies. This code takes a days-long manual cleaning process and reduces it to about 5 minutes. It’s a non-destructive process that maintains the original file. Additionally, the entire process is documented within the code.