Demographics - Ignore Them at Your Peril: An Interview with Harold Hodgkinson

TL;DR: Harold Hodgkinson as discussed by the authors has been the leading educational demographer for 35 state demographic profiles on subjects ranging from special education to diversity, from Asian immigrants to Hispanics and secondary school principals.

Abstract: Data really can clarify issues and help to predict the future, as evidenced by Mr. Hodgkinson's long and successful career. HAROLD Hodgkinson, since 1987 the director of the Center for Demographic Policy at the Institute for Educational Leadership in Washington, D.C., is the nation's leading educational demographer. Over the past 20 years, Hodgkinson has done 35 state demographic profiles on subjects ranging from special education to diversity, from Asian immigrants to Hispanics and secondary school principals. He has worked on assignments for 600 colleges and universities and dozens of public and private schools and school systems, in addition to federal agencies and such commercial organizations as Bank of America, IBM, the Association of American Publishers, and Hallmark. The work that Hodgkinson does is scientific, statistical, and far more certain than subjective surveys, to be sure. However, it does not end with the numbers, tables, graphs, maps, and flow charts. "Basically, I present not just numbers, but what those numbers mean. That's been pretty successful. People actually change what they do based on what I've presented to them. I really live for that." Harold Hodgkinson's predictions about the future, based on careful research, reveal some fascinating facts and trends. We have probably all read, for example, that early in the 21st century at least half of the public school students in the United States will be nonwhite. "But in Maine, that figure will be 9% and in California it will be 68%," Hodgkinson says. With reasonable certainty, Hodgkinson can look 10 or 15 years out and say which students in which communities will do poorly on the new standardized tests. While some communities in California will struggle with youngsters who are just learning English and come from as many as a dozen foreign language backgrounds, in North Dakota the problem will hardly exist. Should states like Maine and North Dakota, then, pay little attention to the national trend toward growing diversity? "Their students are going to live in other places and must learn about diversity. North Dakota, for instance, has the highest percentage of youngsters graduating from high school and going on to college. They're not all going to live in North Dakota. Every year 43,000,000 Americans move, and a strong trend is to move out of the Northeast and the Midwest. North Dakotans will often move to areas where people have more skills than they do in how to live with people from different backgrounds." From his early childhood in a small town outside of Minneapolis during the Depression, Hodgkinson was attracted to the idea of certainty. Young Harold's father was a physics teacher in a private school and often talked to him about the principles and facts that guided his field. As Hodgkinson grew through adolescence and young manhood, he was powerfully attracted to symmetry and relationships and data with predictive value. He loved the regularity of Mozart's music, heard frequently in his home on records and during rehearsals of his father's string quartet. He saw that "economists could not predict the next day's Dow Jones average, but demographers could predict 15 years out with great accuracy." Even in high school, his papers were about "showing that the ankle bone connected to the foot bone," analogous to the very sophisticated work he would do many years later showing the interrelationships among education, health care, housing, and transportation. After completing his education at the University of Minnesota (B.A.), Wesleyan University (M.A.T.), and Harvard (Ph.D. in education and sociology), Hodgkinson accepted the challenge in 1958 to create the first School of Education at Simmons College. After four years as the dean, he left Simmons with "a thriving School of Education" to become dean of Bard College, at the time one of the most progressive colleges in the country. During his six years at Bard, Hodgkinson helped create a governance council of students, faculty, and administrators before such structures became a national trend in the very late Sixties. …