[NLA] Gut response for Art

[Thomas Sticht]

Art has asked for my gut response, intuitive feelings about why there has
been a large, unexplained drop in the number of enrollments in the AELS
since 1998. So here are my thoughts.
Over a year ago I brought up this issue with folks in the federal
government in Washington DC and got four hypotheses, most of which have
been brought up here on the NLA list in this ongoing strand of discussion,
and earlier last year in posts I made to the NLA list.
The four hypotheses include
(1). High employment rates have caused drops in enrollments.
(2). Work-first changes in welfare laws have caused drops in enrollments.
(3) Better record keeping in the NRS has reduced the numbers of duplicated
counts of enrollees and hence produced an apparent drop in enrollments.(4) Accountability requirements of the WIA/AEFLA as implemented via the
NRS in place at the time resulted in large numbers of CBO programs
withdrawing from the AELS, taking their students with them, and that
produced drops in the enrollments.
Hypothesis 1. Checking on the first hypothesis, I reported in a report in
1998 on the correlation between employment rates and rates of enrollments
in the AELS as best I could determine the relationship from available data
on employment rates in the Dept. of labor and enrollment data from the
Dept. of Education over a couple of decades. The relationship was
practically zero. A paper I produced, Beyond 2000, is available at
www.nald.ca under full text documents searched by S for my last name and
reports these data. So I am not too convinced that the higher employment
rates have made much of an impact in enrollments in the AELS in the last
few years, though there could be some mild effects here.
Hypothesis 2. Changes in welfare laws could have had some impact on
enrollments, but it is difficult to say how much of a change.
Interestingly, and contrary to what some people think, welfare recipients
have never made up the lion’s share of AELS enrollments. In a 1998 report
from the ED/OVAE/DAEL showing data for enrollments for five years for FY92
to FY 96 out of over 15 million enrollments, only some 2.2 million, about
14 percent, were on welfare. In five years 2.2 million is about 440,000
per year and the recent PY 1999-2000 report indicated that some 282,303
adults were on public assistance.  So while drops in AELS enrollments due
to changes in welfare laws are no doubt there, they are perhaps in the
neighborhood of drops of some 160,000 of the per year enrollments in past
years and so I don’t think they would count for the bulk of the recent
drops.
Hypothesis 3. The idea that NRS procedures have reduced multiple counts of
students is a fairly popular hypothesis about why drops in AELS have
occurred since the WIA/AEFLA accountability requirements have been in
place, and we have seen this in some recent posts on the NLA list. I
suppose that some of the drop in enrollments can be attributed to better
record keeping. But I am not too convinced that this would account for
much of the drop because, looking at the past history of the AELS, it grew
at about 100,000 per year for some 30 years and it does not seem to me to
be reasonable to attribute these sizeable annual increases to errors of
double or triple counting of people.  I doubt the NR is that much of an
improvement over keeping track of simple counts of people. And therefore,
better record keeping, while do doubt reducing false counts to some
extent, would not seem to me to make a big contribution to the decline in
enrollments since 1998.
Hypothesis 4. The idea that resonates a lot with me is that the
accountability requirements of the WIA/AEFLA as implemented via the NRS
resulted in large numbers of CBO programs withdrawing from the AELS,
taking their students with them, and that produced drops in the
enrollments. To check this out as best I could, I reasoned that if double
counting was a major problem, then this should primarily affect drops in
reported enrollments and would not necessarily lead to drops in personnel.
So I checked out the drops in personnel in the U. S. and, as I reported,
found that though there were some drops in both part-time and full-time
personnel, the total drop in volunteers was more than the combined part
and full time drops. This suggested to me that it was withdrawal of CBOs
who use lots of volunteers from the AELS that accounted for the largest
share of the decline in enrollments. I looked at states like California
and found that it accounted for some 87 percent of the AELS decline and it
had lost about 10 percent of part timers, 25 percent of full timers, but
an astonishing 73 percent of its volunteer personnel from 1998 to 2000. In
Texas, from 1997 to 2000 enrollments fell from 228,723 to 106, 516 and
personnel in the Texas system fell by 63 percent, with part timers falling
about 40 percent, full timers 65 percent and volunteers a whopping 98
percent from 2509 in 1997 to just 46 in 2000.  All these changes in states
like California and Texas are mind boggling and have received little
discussion at a national level. But the large drops in volunteers suggests
to me that a large share, and perhaps the largest share of the drops in
the AELS enrollments are due to CBOs pulling out of the system and taking
their students with them. This is also suggested by the fact that the 1998
OVAE/DAEL report said that "Approximately 4,000 grant recipients provided
adult education services." In the PY1999-2000 report it says that some
3500 to 4000 programs provided services. Could be a drop of some 500
programs-no?
Not all states have shown drops in enrollments since 1998, and not all
showed drops in personnel. But the impact of large states like California
and Texas cannot be dismissed as major contributors to the overall state
of the AELS in the recent PY 1999-2000 report to the Congress. And as I
have said, none of these data about the collapse of the AELS are discussed
in that report or in any other official documents that I have seen.
Tom Sticht




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