I know I’m competing for your attention this week. The World Cup is happening. We’re one of the host countries, so I suspect a few of you are reading this with a match on in a different tab. I may or may not have written it under similar circumstances. Just one piece this week about a new federal dashboard that claims to reveal less than it does and why I think that to be true.  

A quick programming note. The HEat Index will be taking next week off for the July 4th holiday. We’ll be back in your inboxes in two weeks.  

A Dashboard Built to Alarm 

From A new site tracks foreign gifts to colleges. Is it misleading? | Higher Ed Dive 

The Department of Education has a new dashboard to show Section 117 data. 

Our Thoughts  

The Department of Education has launched a new foreign funding dashboard, so naturally being a dashboard nerd, I had to go take a look. It starts with a rather substantial number front and center—$72.1 billion dollars in gifts. Wait, what? That number seems awfully high for the 559 institutions the dashboard claims to report on for this year. If I combined all of the expenditures they reported to NCES, would it even total that amount? My dashboard spidey-sense is tingling.  

It turns out that they were tingling for good reason. The $72 billion dollar figure isn’t this year. It’s a cumulative total, reaching all the way back to 1986 with gifts and multiyear contracts piled together and provides the dashboard user with no way to see year-over-year breakdowns or anything to compare it to. To me, once you realize that, this large number doesn’t scream problem; instead, I see four decades of ordinary university operations added together to make something.  

This is where I want to camp out, because the trouble with this dashboard isn't really political, at least not in the way the hot takes are going to play it. It's a data problem, and a basic one. I've built dashboards like this. If you'd asked me to put together a view of our enrollment yield, or our retention, and I'd handed back a single figure that stacked up every year going back to whenever we first had electronic records, I'd have been sent off to do it again, and rightly so. Nobody walks into a planning meeting wanting the all-time cumulative yield since the Reagan administration. They want this year against last year, this program against that one, us against our peers. A figure with no time frame and no denominator doesn't really answer anybody; it just leaves room to read into it whatever you walked in already believing.  

Sarah Spreitzer at ACE caught the specific sleight of hand here: the data is cumulative, but it's presented as though it were a single year's worth. Qatar's $8.8 billion sounds enormous standing alone. Spread across forty years, dozens of institutions, a branch campus, sponsored-student tuition, and research contracts, it might be completely unremarkable, or it might be worth a hard look. Unfortunately, the dashboard is built so you can't tell which is which. A version that let you tell, one with dates and purposes attached, would produce a smaller and frankly duller number, which is no good to anyone whose goal is to make people gasp. 

None of this means the disclosure itself is a bad idea. I’m all for transparency, especially as it relates to higher education finances. Section 117 has been on the books for close to forty years, passing with support from both parties, and there are real cases of schools taking large foreign sums and reporting them late or not at all. The compliance hawks aren't wrong that this matters, and even ACE concedes that the main thing the dashboard demonstrates is that institutions are, in fact, reporting. So, I'm not arguing the money should stay hidden. I'm arguing that a wall of context-free totals doesn't deliver the transparency it advertises. Instead, it delivers something else, which you can intuit by seeing who is publicly using the data first.  

Within days of the portal going live in January, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party was already citing its figures to push new legislation. The four Section 117 investigations the department has opened since last year landed on Harvard, Penn, Berkeley, and Michigan, which we know from earlier issues isn't what a representative cross-section of American higher education looks like. Even more, the ED’s own announcement about the tool led with a swipe at "years of neglect by the Biden administration," which isn't how you announce the launch of a neutral reporting tool. Ultimately, it leaves me with the feeling that the missing context wasn’t an oversight as a calmer, fuller dashboard would be more useful and less sensational.  

If you want to know what a tool is really for, it helps to know who built it and where the data goes. The department hired a firm called Monkton to build what the paperwork calls a "Section 117 Information Sharing Environment," with Palantir, the data-analytics company you know from its Pentagon and ICE work, brought in underneath as a subcontractor. The deal put $9.8 million on the table against a ceiling north of $61 million, several times what it cost to modernize ed.gov. Then in February the department signed an agreement with the State Department giving it structured access to the full underlying submissions, not just the slices the public sees. Secretary McMahon didn't hide this arrangement, saying the data ought to be readily available to the government's national security experts. However, Jeremy Bauer-Wolf, investigations manager for the higher education program at New America, named a large concern with this arrangement: move Section 117 into a department run by political appointees and you've built the on-ramp for the same kind of weaponization we've watched in other corners of the government. The public dashboard with its big round numbers is the part they want you to see. The pipeline feeding institutions' full disclosures over to State is the part that actually changes the game. 

So, I guess I’ll leave this by saying that institutions should devote a little more resources to understanding their Section 117 reporting and control the narrative around their numbers. Make sure what you've filed is accurate and on time, since late and sloppy disclosure is the exact thread every one of these investigations starts pulling. Add the context yourself to your numbers somewhere public. Finally, pay attention to the DETERRENT Act, which would drop the reporting threshold from $250,000 to $50,000 and sweep a lot more institutions into a system that, the way it's built right now, is better at generating scary totals than honest ones. The better and more public you make your story, the less power this dashboard will have over your institution. 

Sparks 

• OPINION: The real college crisis isn’t enrollment. It’s completion, and it’s time to start asking why (The Hechinger Report) - Emmanuel Lalande, senior vice president of enrollment strategy and student success at Columbia College Chicago, argues that it’s time to seriously tackle our college completion challenges. Having worked in student success roles for over a decade, I agree with him and believe there’s still work to do. 
• Is the Diploma Divide Really a Gender Gap? (The Chronicle of Higher Education) - Karin Fischer looks at the data to see how the diploma gender gap influences society. I found this to be an interesting read and worth some consideration, especially as it relates to enrollment.  
• Judge Tosses ED’s ‘Professional’ Degree Definition, Likely Aiding Student Borrowers (Inside Higher Ed) - A federal judge has paused the current definition of professional degrees for student aid borrowing limits. This could be good news for graduate programs and their enrollments.