Friday, July 03, 2009
Gone Fishin'
The gang and I will be off galivanting at an undisclosed location next week.
I don't get to galivant nearly enough, so when the opportunity came along...
Hope you all have a great Fourth of July, and that summer is treating you well.
I'll be back in the saddle on Monday, July 13. To the sunscreen!
I don't get to galivant nearly enough, so when the opportunity came along...
Hope you all have a great Fourth of July, and that summer is treating you well.
I'll be back in the saddle on Monday, July 13. To the sunscreen!
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Staff Teaching
My college is grappling with this issue now, and I’m wondering how others have handled it.
We have some twelve-month professional staff – counselors, librarians, etc. – who would like to be able to teach the occasional class during their regular workday as part of their regular workload.
We have a longstanding practice of allowing staff to teach on an adjunct basis outside of their regular work hours, just like people who work off-campus. If your workday ends at, say, five, and you stick around one night a week to teach an evening class on an adjunct basis, I don’t see the conflict. Nobody has taken issue with that, and it has worked fairly well. But some folks who want to teach don’t want to have to stick around into the wee hours, and are asking to be allowed to teach during their usual workday.
A few considerations:
How many hours to allot for, say, a three-hour class? Faculty teach fifteen hours a week and get credit for a full week. By that standard, a three-hour class should equate to one full workday. Faculty have service commitments, but so do staff. If we only allot the actual class time, what does that imply about faculty workload? If we allot proportional class time – that is, one full day for each three-hour class -- then we’re placing some heavy burdens on the staff who don’t teach, who have to step in and pick up the slack for the missing colleague.
How to account for different workload over twelve months? Faculty salaries are based on teaching in the Fall and Spring semesters. Staff salaries are based on working twelve months a year. (Faculty who teach summer classes get extra pay for that.) An unscrupulous administrator, given the chance, could simply allow staff to teach as part of their regular load twelve months a year, and save the extra cost of paying faculty for summer teaching. Not that we’d ever think of such a thing.
Of course, there’s also the pesky matter of tenure. If you can get around tenure simply by classifying people as ‘staff,’ and get around summer teaching costs while you’re at it…
I’m just sayin’.
One compromise proposal has staff making up their missed hours after hours. But in that case they’re effectively doing extra work for free. If they’re willing to stick around after hours anyway, they’re better off at least getting the adjunct pay. And some staff positions really don’t lend themselves to after-hours work – the demand is there when it’s there.
Wise and worldly readers of mine, I seek your counsel. How does your campus handle the question of full-time staff teaching during regular workdays? Have you found a reasonably elegant solution that seems to satisfy most people?
We have some twelve-month professional staff – counselors, librarians, etc. – who would like to be able to teach the occasional class during their regular workday as part of their regular workload.
We have a longstanding practice of allowing staff to teach on an adjunct basis outside of their regular work hours, just like people who work off-campus. If your workday ends at, say, five, and you stick around one night a week to teach an evening class on an adjunct basis, I don’t see the conflict. Nobody has taken issue with that, and it has worked fairly well. But some folks who want to teach don’t want to have to stick around into the wee hours, and are asking to be allowed to teach during their usual workday.
A few considerations:
How many hours to allot for, say, a three-hour class? Faculty teach fifteen hours a week and get credit for a full week. By that standard, a three-hour class should equate to one full workday. Faculty have service commitments, but so do staff. If we only allot the actual class time, what does that imply about faculty workload? If we allot proportional class time – that is, one full day for each three-hour class -- then we’re placing some heavy burdens on the staff who don’t teach, who have to step in and pick up the slack for the missing colleague.
How to account for different workload over twelve months? Faculty salaries are based on teaching in the Fall and Spring semesters. Staff salaries are based on working twelve months a year. (Faculty who teach summer classes get extra pay for that.) An unscrupulous administrator, given the chance, could simply allow staff to teach as part of their regular load twelve months a year, and save the extra cost of paying faculty for summer teaching. Not that we’d ever think of such a thing.
Of course, there’s also the pesky matter of tenure. If you can get around tenure simply by classifying people as ‘staff,’ and get around summer teaching costs while you’re at it…
I’m just sayin’.
One compromise proposal has staff making up their missed hours after hours. But in that case they’re effectively doing extra work for free. If they’re willing to stick around after hours anyway, they’re better off at least getting the adjunct pay. And some staff positions really don’t lend themselves to after-hours work – the demand is there when it’s there.
Wise and worldly readers of mine, I seek your counsel. How does your campus handle the question of full-time staff teaching during regular workdays? Have you found a reasonably elegant solution that seems to satisfy most people?
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Strong Basis in Confusion
As someone integral to the hiring process at a public institution, I take particular interest in the New Haven firefighters' case, Ricci v. DeStefano.
I don’t want to address the specific facts of the Ricci case, since specific facts aren’t what Supreme Court decisions are (supposed to be) about. I want to try to figure out, based on this case, what employers are supposed to do when they use a criterion – any criterion – that may have a ‘disparate impact’ on minority candidates.
According to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (as amended in 1991), there are two varieties of unacceptable discrimination: disparate treatment and disparate impact. "Treatment" is the straightforward kind of discrimination that announces itself clearly, the "we don't serve your kind" variety. Treatment is assumed to be intentional. "Impact" refers to outcomes that may or may not have been intentional, but that have the effect of disadvantaging one group as against another. The Act stipulates that criteria that have disparate impacts are presumptively invalid, unless and until the employer can show 'business necessity' and a lack of better alternatives. (The employer also has to show that the business necessity is not 'pretextual' -- in other words, that it's not just a fig leaf to mask another agenda.) In this case, the City of New Haven threw out a written test it used to determine promotions within the fire department, on the grounds that the results of the test showed a disparate impact on minority candidates. The City feared that it would be held liable under the 'disparate impact' standard, so it threw out the test after it had been administered. Some white candidates who had done well on the test sued, claiming disparate treatment based on race -- arguing that whites were singled out on purpose -- and won, 5-4.
As Justice Kennedy correctly put it in the majority opinion, "[O]ur task is to provide guidance to employers and courts..." (p. 20) Exactly so. I'm looking for guidance. Let's say that I want to comply with the law, as delineated by the Court. What would compliance look like?
Justice Kennedy holds that actions taken to remediate disparate impact are themselves disparate treatment. Drawing on 14th amendment rulings -- although at pains to say that this case wasn't about the 14th amendment -- he allowed only a "strong basis in evidence" threshold for exceptions. In other words, unless you can show a "strong basis in evidence" that you're guilty of disparate impact, you can't engage in disparate treatment to remedy it. (As Justice Scalia correctly notes in his concurrence, Kennedy's opinion doesn't address whether 'impact' trumping 'treatment' can ever make sense in the first place.)
He doesn't define "strong basis in evidence," but it must be a pretty high threshold. I know that because the majority decision didn't remand the case for reconsideration under the new rule. Instead, it simply declared that the city couldn't possibly meet the standard, so it declared a winner and closed the argument. If you know already that the threshold couldn't possibly be met, it looks less like a threshold and more like, well, a pretext. After all, appellate jurisdiction isn't supposed to be about weighing the evidence. Since I have to assume that the Court knows that, I can only conclude that it decided that no amount of evidence could possibly suffice, by definition. It's pretextual.
The point of the pretext, as near as I can tell, is to render the Civil Rights Act unenforceable without actually overturning it. This becomes clear in the application. Let's say that my college does a search, and the applicant pool turns out to be almost entirely white. What, if anything, can the college do about it? If anything remedial amounts to disparate treatment by definition, and if the threshold for an exception is so high that no amount of evidence could possibly suffice, then what, exactly, is left?
I'm at a loss.
It gets worse. Later in the opinion Kennedy makes a point that the "strong basis in evidence" standard that might satisfy the Civil Rights Act, "we...do not hold that meeting the strong-basis-in-evidence standard would satisfy the Equal Protection Clause in a future case." (p. 25) So even if you somehow manage to thread the needle of the pretextual standard, the Court reserves the right to yank that away, too, using a different argument. The precedent is allowed to lean only in one direction.
Justice Ginsburg's dissent is a mixed success, but the line that jumps off the page is her confident, if somewhat resigned, declaration that "[t]he Court's order and opinion, I anticipate, will not have staying power." (p. 2 of dissent) To the extent that the Court's job is to provide "guidance," a declaration that the guidance won't have staying power doesn't inspire confidence.
As a hiring manager, I literally don't know what to do with this. I'm compelled by law to ferret out disparate impact, but forbidden by law from doing anything about it. Pre-emptive compliance with disparate impact will fail to meet the "strong basis" standard, since I can't prove I'd lose a lawsuit until I actually lost it. (As Kennedy put it, "[f]ear of litigation alone cannot justify an employer's reliance on race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions." (p.33) I can't just be afraid of losing; I have to actually lose.)
Left unaddressed, tellingly enough, is whether the reverse would also be true. Could I defend a disparate impact claim by asserting a strong basis in evidence that I'd get nailed for disparate (compensatory) treatment? Who knows?
As a citizen, I have my preferred outcome, but that's secondary. As a hiring manager, my primary need is clarity. If I'm going to be held accountable for following the law, I need to know what the law is. I need guidance. At that -- at the first task of the Court -- this decision is a manifest failure.
I don’t want to address the specific facts of the Ricci case, since specific facts aren’t what Supreme Court decisions are (supposed to be) about. I want to try to figure out, based on this case, what employers are supposed to do when they use a criterion – any criterion – that may have a ‘disparate impact’ on minority candidates.
According to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (as amended in 1991), there are two varieties of unacceptable discrimination: disparate treatment and disparate impact. "Treatment" is the straightforward kind of discrimination that announces itself clearly, the "we don't serve your kind" variety. Treatment is assumed to be intentional. "Impact" refers to outcomes that may or may not have been intentional, but that have the effect of disadvantaging one group as against another. The Act stipulates that criteria that have disparate impacts are presumptively invalid, unless and until the employer can show 'business necessity' and a lack of better alternatives. (The employer also has to show that the business necessity is not 'pretextual' -- in other words, that it's not just a fig leaf to mask another agenda.) In this case, the City of New Haven threw out a written test it used to determine promotions within the fire department, on the grounds that the results of the test showed a disparate impact on minority candidates. The City feared that it would be held liable under the 'disparate impact' standard, so it threw out the test after it had been administered. Some white candidates who had done well on the test sued, claiming disparate treatment based on race -- arguing that whites were singled out on purpose -- and won, 5-4.
As Justice Kennedy correctly put it in the majority opinion, "[O]ur task is to provide guidance to employers and courts..." (p. 20) Exactly so. I'm looking for guidance. Let's say that I want to comply with the law, as delineated by the Court. What would compliance look like?
Justice Kennedy holds that actions taken to remediate disparate impact are themselves disparate treatment. Drawing on 14th amendment rulings -- although at pains to say that this case wasn't about the 14th amendment -- he allowed only a "strong basis in evidence" threshold for exceptions. In other words, unless you can show a "strong basis in evidence" that you're guilty of disparate impact, you can't engage in disparate treatment to remedy it. (As Justice Scalia correctly notes in his concurrence, Kennedy's opinion doesn't address whether 'impact' trumping 'treatment' can ever make sense in the first place.)
He doesn't define "strong basis in evidence," but it must be a pretty high threshold. I know that because the majority decision didn't remand the case for reconsideration under the new rule. Instead, it simply declared that the city couldn't possibly meet the standard, so it declared a winner and closed the argument. If you know already that the threshold couldn't possibly be met, it looks less like a threshold and more like, well, a pretext. After all, appellate jurisdiction isn't supposed to be about weighing the evidence. Since I have to assume that the Court knows that, I can only conclude that it decided that no amount of evidence could possibly suffice, by definition. It's pretextual.
The point of the pretext, as near as I can tell, is to render the Civil Rights Act unenforceable without actually overturning it. This becomes clear in the application. Let's say that my college does a search, and the applicant pool turns out to be almost entirely white. What, if anything, can the college do about it? If anything remedial amounts to disparate treatment by definition, and if the threshold for an exception is so high that no amount of evidence could possibly suffice, then what, exactly, is left?
I'm at a loss.
It gets worse. Later in the opinion Kennedy makes a point that the "strong basis in evidence" standard that might satisfy the Civil Rights Act, "we...do not hold that meeting the strong-basis-in-evidence standard would satisfy the Equal Protection Clause in a future case." (p. 25) So even if you somehow manage to thread the needle of the pretextual standard, the Court reserves the right to yank that away, too, using a different argument. The precedent is allowed to lean only in one direction.
Justice Ginsburg's dissent is a mixed success, but the line that jumps off the page is her confident, if somewhat resigned, declaration that "[t]he Court's order and opinion, I anticipate, will not have staying power." (p. 2 of dissent) To the extent that the Court's job is to provide "guidance," a declaration that the guidance won't have staying power doesn't inspire confidence.
As a hiring manager, I literally don't know what to do with this. I'm compelled by law to ferret out disparate impact, but forbidden by law from doing anything about it. Pre-emptive compliance with disparate impact will fail to meet the "strong basis" standard, since I can't prove I'd lose a lawsuit until I actually lost it. (As Kennedy put it, "[f]ear of litigation alone cannot justify an employer's reliance on race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions." (p.33) I can't just be afraid of losing; I have to actually lose.)
Left unaddressed, tellingly enough, is whether the reverse would also be true. Could I defend a disparate impact claim by asserting a strong basis in evidence that I'd get nailed for disparate (compensatory) treatment? Who knows?
As a citizen, I have my preferred outcome, but that's secondary. As a hiring manager, my primary need is clarity. If I'm going to be held accountable for following the law, I need to know what the law is. I need guidance. At that -- at the first task of the Court -- this decision is a manifest failure.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Lunch on the Lam
There was a time when I faithfully brought lunch to work. It was economical, and it saved driving, and it seemed vaguely virtuous. But I noticed, gradually, that never leaving campus made me batty. It felt like house arrest.
On the days when I leave campus for lunch – and honesty compels me to admit that that’s most days now, except for days with lunch meetings – I don’t get that ‘trapped’ feeling. Even the cafeteria doesn’t really do the job, since I’m still very much on stage there. I have to actually get in the car and drive someplace physically separate and distinct. Just changing scene – even if it’s only a mile or two away – keeps me sane.
Sanity is good – the world could use more of it, frankly – but money is money (and calories are calories). I can’t really bring a bagged lunch into a restaurant – they get kind of picky about that – and outdoor settings (parks) are weather-dependent. Since it’s been raining for what seems like years now, anything outdoors is either soaked or steamy. Neither particularly lends itself to going back to the office. And eating in the car is just sad.
As a card-carrying introvert, a little alone time at lunch helps me recharge the batteries. I know it’s anathema to admit that in a culture that uses ‘network’ as a verb, but it’s true. I’m more balanced and more sane in the afternoon when I’ve had a brief respite in the middle of the day.
So, a question for my wise and worldly readers. Surely some of you have faced similar dilemmas. Have you found good places for bringing lunch on the lam?
On the days when I leave campus for lunch – and honesty compels me to admit that that’s most days now, except for days with lunch meetings – I don’t get that ‘trapped’ feeling. Even the cafeteria doesn’t really do the job, since I’m still very much on stage there. I have to actually get in the car and drive someplace physically separate and distinct. Just changing scene – even if it’s only a mile or two away – keeps me sane.
Sanity is good – the world could use more of it, frankly – but money is money (and calories are calories). I can’t really bring a bagged lunch into a restaurant – they get kind of picky about that – and outdoor settings (parks) are weather-dependent. Since it’s been raining for what seems like years now, anything outdoors is either soaked or steamy. Neither particularly lends itself to going back to the office. And eating in the car is just sad.
As a card-carrying introvert, a little alone time at lunch helps me recharge the batteries. I know it’s anathema to admit that in a culture that uses ‘network’ as a verb, but it’s true. I’m more balanced and more sane in the afternoon when I’ve had a brief respite in the middle of the day.
So, a question for my wise and worldly readers. Surely some of you have faced similar dilemmas. Have you found good places for bringing lunch on the lam?
Monday, June 29, 2009
Umps and Academics
I just finished Bruce Weber’s new book, As They See ‘Em, which is about professional umpires. As a longstanding baseball fan, it’s a hoot, but I couldn’t help but notice a few, oddly-comforting parallels to the academic world.
Take, for example, this excerpt from an interview Weber did with Pat O’Conner, who was at the time the chief operating officer of Minor League Baseball. He was in charge of negotiating contracts with the minor league umps’ union. Minor league umps make ten to twenty thousand dollars a year.
This rings a bell…why does this ring a bell…think, think…
The book goes into tremendous detail about the long, hard path to the majors that umpires have to follow. Something about this passage sounded vaguely familiar, too:
Hmm. A paucity of full-time positions leads to a backlog of very qualified and very frustrated applicants, making hiring for diversity even more politically charged than it otherwise would be. I’ve heard of that happening somewhere before…think, think…
Much of the book is primarily of interest to baseball fans, which is to be expected. (For fans of a certain age, there’s a laugh-out-loud funny explanation of the George Brett/Billy Martin ‘pine tar’ home run incident from the early 80’s.) But the collision of an overly long and inhumane training period with a clogged pipeline for good jobs was eerily familiar.
There’s even a variation on an academic freedom dispute. As longtime fans know, the strike zone defined in the rule book exists only in the rule book. In the early 90’s the strike zone the umps actually called on the field started to change, getting both shorter and wider. For a period in the mid-90’s, a pitch could be six inches off the plate outside and still get called a strike. (For my money, this was part of what drove hitters to go steroid-crazy in the late 90’s. They had to level the playing field.) Although the umps routinely denied that the zone had moved, they also rebelled mightily against any encroachment by the front office on how the strike zone was to be called.
The conflict came to a head in the early 2000’s, when Major League Baseball enlisted QuesTec, a computerized system for determining balls and strikes. Umpires were assessed on their outcomes; umpires who get ‘bad’ scores on QuesTec -- that is, whose calls differed from the computer the most – were pressured to toe the line. (Interestingly, MLB had rejected a high-tech pitch simulator – like a flight simulator, but for calling balls and strikes – as part of umpire training. The use of QuesTec was punitive, rather than formative.) For several years, a war of attrition waged between the umps, who took the position that they know better even if they all disagree with each other, and the league, which insisted on a uniform zone.
Here, too, the parallels were striking (no pun intended). Outcomes assessment was resented by the longtime practitioners, who asserted unaccountability as a prerogative of their station. The league used assessment in a hamhanded and even backwards way, giving credibility to some of the worst fears of the practitioners. Over time, an uneasy truce evolved in which the very worst excesses on both sides were curtailed, but nobody could really say anything was better.
Hmm. I can’t put my finger on it…
If nothing else, it’s comforting to see that some of the more persistent and annoying dilemmas of academia aren’t unique to academia. At least we don’t have our mistakes replayed endlessly on national television.
Take, for example, this excerpt from an interview Weber did with Pat O’Conner, who was at the time the chief operating officer of Minor League Baseball. He was in charge of negotiating contracts with the minor league umps’ union. Minor league umps make ten to twenty thousand dollars a year.
“They are the first line of defense for the integrity of the game,” O’Conner said to me. “I respect the hell out of these guys. They’re doing something I couldn’t do.”
In that case, I said, why are they paid so poorly?
They aren’t, O’Conner said; there is simply a difference of opinion about their stature (sic) as employees. That is, the umpires think of themselves as being on a professional career path [to the majors], and the minor leagues consider them to be neither full-fledged professionals nor full-time employees. Rather, their time in the minor leagues, he said, is an apprenticeship; their contacts are for seasonal work.
“Our program is not designed for them to be able to live on their salaries for twelve months a year,” O’Connor said. “To want to change that is to change the financial underpinnings of the entire minor league system. That being said, not many employers pay seasonal workers what we pay them.” (p. 130)
This rings a bell…why does this ring a bell…think, think…
The book goes into tremendous detail about the long, hard path to the majors that umpires have to follow. Something about this passage sounded vaguely familiar, too:
Jimmie Lee Solomon, baseball’s executive vice president, who is himself black, acknowledged that the paucity of black umpires is a problem he’s determined to solve, though that won’t be easy. As of the 2008 season, in terms of seniority and experience, the next several Triple A umpires [the highest level of the minor leagues] in line for major league jobs were white, including at least three – Chris Guccione, Rob Drake, and James Hoye – who have worked more than five hundred games each in the big leagues [as subs]. If Solomon were to promote a black umpire ahead of them, several umpires – white umpires – told me, the resentment would be fierce. (pp. 296-7)
Hmm. A paucity of full-time positions leads to a backlog of very qualified and very frustrated applicants, making hiring for diversity even more politically charged than it otherwise would be. I’ve heard of that happening somewhere before…think, think…
Much of the book is primarily of interest to baseball fans, which is to be expected. (For fans of a certain age, there’s a laugh-out-loud funny explanation of the George Brett/Billy Martin ‘pine tar’ home run incident from the early 80’s.) But the collision of an overly long and inhumane training period with a clogged pipeline for good jobs was eerily familiar.
There’s even a variation on an academic freedom dispute. As longtime fans know, the strike zone defined in the rule book exists only in the rule book. In the early 90’s the strike zone the umps actually called on the field started to change, getting both shorter and wider. For a period in the mid-90’s, a pitch could be six inches off the plate outside and still get called a strike. (For my money, this was part of what drove hitters to go steroid-crazy in the late 90’s. They had to level the playing field.) Although the umps routinely denied that the zone had moved, they also rebelled mightily against any encroachment by the front office on how the strike zone was to be called.
The conflict came to a head in the early 2000’s, when Major League Baseball enlisted QuesTec, a computerized system for determining balls and strikes. Umpires were assessed on their outcomes; umpires who get ‘bad’ scores on QuesTec -- that is, whose calls differed from the computer the most – were pressured to toe the line. (Interestingly, MLB had rejected a high-tech pitch simulator – like a flight simulator, but for calling balls and strikes – as part of umpire training. The use of QuesTec was punitive, rather than formative.) For several years, a war of attrition waged between the umps, who took the position that they know better even if they all disagree with each other, and the league, which insisted on a uniform zone.
Here, too, the parallels were striking (no pun intended). Outcomes assessment was resented by the longtime practitioners, who asserted unaccountability as a prerogative of their station. The league used assessment in a hamhanded and even backwards way, giving credibility to some of the worst fears of the practitioners. Over time, an uneasy truce evolved in which the very worst excesses on both sides were curtailed, but nobody could really say anything was better.
Hmm. I can’t put my finger on it…
If nothing else, it’s comforting to see that some of the more persistent and annoying dilemmas of academia aren’t unique to academia. At least we don’t have our mistakes replayed endlessly on national television.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Friday Fragments
- I don't often get excited about amending forms, but if President Obama is able to simply the FAFSA in a meaningful way, I say, Hooray! The FAFSA is the form that students and prospective students have to fill out to apply for Federally-backed financial aid, and it's worse than the 1040. It's just horrible. Kafka would have considered it over-the-top. I'm not a believer in the "it should fit on a postcard" theory, but surely there's middle ground between a postcard and a dissertation. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a much simpler FAFSA result in more completed applications from first-generation students and students whose first language isn't English. You pretty much need a graduate degree to navigate the flippin' thing. And even for those who survive the present form, surely reducing their time spent on paperwork by a few hours is a good thing.
- TW and the kids are out of town for a few days -- not in Argentina, happily -- so I'm doing the temporary bachelor thing. It's amazing how quickly old habits come back. (She would probably use a term like "regression.") Having the house to myself is a lot of fun for the first hour or so. Then it starts to get lonely. I also hadn't fully appreciated the appetite-suppressant role the kids play. When they're gone, I eat like I'm preparing to hibernate. It's a good thing they won't be gone long, or I'd have to start buying all new clothes.
- Doing employee evaluations sucks. I will offer no further details on that.
- Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson were both major figures with other people my age, but neither of them meant much to me. She seemed harmless enough, but I was never a fan. (When she hit big, I was all about Lynda Carter.) And MJ went from 'oddity' to 'criminal' in my mind some time ago, when the pedophilia became too obvious to ignore. The only celebrity death I recall really affecting me emotionally beyond the initial 'that's too bad' was Kurt Cobain. I remember my Dad's reaction when Elvis died, and I remember a whole bunch of people around me being sad when John Lennon was killed, but those were both more salient to previous generations. Cobain and I were nearly the same age, and I remember really admiring the way he embodied the contradictory impulses towards both cynicism and hope that were very real to me then. He also had a contrarian sense of humor that I found refreshing. When Courtney Love read his suicide note over loudspeakers to a crowd outside their Seattle house, doing a running commentary as she read, I was riveted. Shortly after his death, I remember Andy Rooney dismissing his depression as a sort of affectation; that was the last time I paid attention to Andy Rooney. Since then, I've cut Courtney Love more slack than she probably deserves, but hey.
- Along the lines of age and generation, I've hit the age at which I'll hear baseball players' names and immediately recognize them as "that's so-and-so's kid." Last week I saw part of a Brewers game, and during the few minutes that TW watched with me, Prince Fielder came to bat. I let slip something like "he looks just like his father," which elicited a pretty good eye-roll from TW. I haven't yet hit the "get off the lawn!" stage, but it's probably inevitable.
- TB's end-of-year report card was a smashing success. Among the piles of school detritus he brought home were several notebooks' worth of stories he had written while waiting for others to finish assignments, and a pair of mash notes from girls in his class. He's mostly excited that now he gets to stay up later reading his books. We've got some summer stuff lined up, but we're building in some "figure out for yourself what to do" time, too. I suspect he's up to it.
- TW and the kids are out of town for a few days -- not in Argentina, happily -- so I'm doing the temporary bachelor thing. It's amazing how quickly old habits come back. (She would probably use a term like "regression.") Having the house to myself is a lot of fun for the first hour or so. Then it starts to get lonely. I also hadn't fully appreciated the appetite-suppressant role the kids play. When they're gone, I eat like I'm preparing to hibernate. It's a good thing they won't be gone long, or I'd have to start buying all new clothes.
- Doing employee evaluations sucks. I will offer no further details on that.
- Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson were both major figures with other people my age, but neither of them meant much to me. She seemed harmless enough, but I was never a fan. (When she hit big, I was all about Lynda Carter.) And MJ went from 'oddity' to 'criminal' in my mind some time ago, when the pedophilia became too obvious to ignore. The only celebrity death I recall really affecting me emotionally beyond the initial 'that's too bad' was Kurt Cobain. I remember my Dad's reaction when Elvis died, and I remember a whole bunch of people around me being sad when John Lennon was killed, but those were both more salient to previous generations. Cobain and I were nearly the same age, and I remember really admiring the way he embodied the contradictory impulses towards both cynicism and hope that were very real to me then. He also had a contrarian sense of humor that I found refreshing. When Courtney Love read his suicide note over loudspeakers to a crowd outside their Seattle house, doing a running commentary as she read, I was riveted. Shortly after his death, I remember Andy Rooney dismissing his depression as a sort of affectation; that was the last time I paid attention to Andy Rooney. Since then, I've cut Courtney Love more slack than she probably deserves, but hey.
- Along the lines of age and generation, I've hit the age at which I'll hear baseball players' names and immediately recognize them as "that's so-and-so's kid." Last week I saw part of a Brewers game, and during the few minutes that TW watched with me, Prince Fielder came to bat. I let slip something like "he looks just like his father," which elicited a pretty good eye-roll from TW. I haven't yet hit the "get off the lawn!" stage, but it's probably inevitable.
- TB's end-of-year report card was a smashing success. Among the piles of school detritus he brought home were several notebooks' worth of stories he had written while waiting for others to finish assignments, and a pair of mash notes from girls in his class. He's mostly excited that now he gets to stay up later reading his books. We've got some summer stuff lined up, but we're building in some "figure out for yourself what to do" time, too. I suspect he's up to it.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
A Real Forehead-Slapper
Why do so many states require only two years of math in high school?
In a discussion this week about the struggles we have with developmental math classes, someone mentioned that this state, like so many others, requires only two years of math in high school. That means that even many brand-new grads come to us not having done math in two years, and having stopped out before they even got to trig. Then everyone is shocked at low pass rates in developmental math.
We have anecdotal evidence that suggests that students who actually take math for all four years of high school do better in math here than those who don't. We also have anecdotal evidence that bears crap in the woods. Why the hell do the high schools only require two years of math?
In a discussion this week about the struggles we have with developmental math classes, someone mentioned that this state, like so many others, requires only two years of math in high school. That means that even many brand-new grads come to us not having done math in two years, and having stopped out before they even got to trig. Then everyone is shocked at low pass rates in developmental math.
We have anecdotal evidence that suggests that students who actually take math for all four years of high school do better in math here than those who don't. We also have anecdotal evidence that bears crap in the woods. Why the hell do the high schools only require two years of math?
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
An Unmarked Car
Many years ago, in one of those gender theory seminars, I remember a remark to the effect that men have the privilege of being able to choose to dress 'unmarked' in a way that women don't. The idea was that American culture had settled on several different uniforms for men, depending on the context, and that men have the option of wearing those uniforms if they want to fit in and not draw particular attention to what they're wearing. Since there isn't a similar understanding of a uniform for women, women have to make conscious decisions about how they dress (and others feel free to draw conclusions about them based on those choices). They don't have a 'default' option the way men do, and they don't have the option of not calling attention to what they're wearing.
(Whether that's still true for women, I'll leave to the collective wisdom of my wise and worldly readers.)
There was enough truth to that for it to stick with me. At work, I can wear, say, a gray suit, and be both situationally appropriate and utterly impersonal. On dress down days, the alternate uniform of tie-less Oxford and khakis (or a close variant) gets the job done. There's nothing terribly interesting about either ensemble, but that's precisely the point. I don't have to think about them, and neither does anybody else. They're like driving unmarked cars. I go where I want without calling undue attention to myself.
Except that they aren't. Over the last couple of weeks, on three separate occasions, I've run into people from the college out in the world, and they've all had the same reaction. "I didn't recognize you without the suit."
Hmm. If the markings were truly neutral, that wouldn't happen.
Uniforms carry meanings of their own, of course. Although it's somewhat dated, I still sometimes hear Administration referred to as "the suits." (For the record, academics don't wear suits quite the way businesspeople do. On the milder side, we blow off the "button-down collars are for sport jackets" rule, which is fine by me. On the more severe side, well, let's just say that some of us need Garanimals sewn into our clothes, and some have apparently never heard of 'ironing.') But even allowing for that, it's still striking to be told, repeatedly and in apparent sincerity, that the suit simply erases the person. I can't blame on it what I was wearing in civilian life, either -- it's not like I put on a spiky Goth number and pasted a Mohawk toupee over the bald spot. I was just dressed like a suburban dad, which, in fact, I am.
The civilian clothes carry markings of their own, admittedly. At TG's preschool graduation, I saw another Dad in a jumpsuit with his name sewn on a patch. I was doing the Oxford-and-khakis thing. It wasn't hard to guess who had the office job. But even allowing for that, it's not like I was somehow out of character when I wasn't recognized.
There's unmarked, and then there's unmarked. The late Mitch Hedberg once theorized that the reason all those photos of Bigfoot are blurry is that Bigfoot himself was blurry. Maybe the clothes carry meaning, and I'm just indistinct.
Hmm.
Wise and worldly readers -- has something like this happened to you?
(Whether that's still true for women, I'll leave to the collective wisdom of my wise and worldly readers.)
There was enough truth to that for it to stick with me. At work, I can wear, say, a gray suit, and be both situationally appropriate and utterly impersonal. On dress down days, the alternate uniform of tie-less Oxford and khakis (or a close variant) gets the job done. There's nothing terribly interesting about either ensemble, but that's precisely the point. I don't have to think about them, and neither does anybody else. They're like driving unmarked cars. I go where I want without calling undue attention to myself.
Except that they aren't. Over the last couple of weeks, on three separate occasions, I've run into people from the college out in the world, and they've all had the same reaction. "I didn't recognize you without the suit."
Hmm. If the markings were truly neutral, that wouldn't happen.
Uniforms carry meanings of their own, of course. Although it's somewhat dated, I still sometimes hear Administration referred to as "the suits." (For the record, academics don't wear suits quite the way businesspeople do. On the milder side, we blow off the "button-down collars are for sport jackets" rule, which is fine by me. On the more severe side, well, let's just say that some of us need Garanimals sewn into our clothes, and some have apparently never heard of 'ironing.') But even allowing for that, it's still striking to be told, repeatedly and in apparent sincerity, that the suit simply erases the person. I can't blame on it what I was wearing in civilian life, either -- it's not like I put on a spiky Goth number and pasted a Mohawk toupee over the bald spot. I was just dressed like a suburban dad, which, in fact, I am.
The civilian clothes carry markings of their own, admittedly. At TG's preschool graduation, I saw another Dad in a jumpsuit with his name sewn on a patch. I was doing the Oxford-and-khakis thing. It wasn't hard to guess who had the office job. But even allowing for that, it's not like I was somehow out of character when I wasn't recognized.
There's unmarked, and then there's unmarked. The late Mitch Hedberg once theorized that the reason all those photos of Bigfoot are blurry is that Bigfoot himself was blurry. Maybe the clothes carry meaning, and I'm just indistinct.
Hmm.
Wise and worldly readers -- has something like this happened to you?
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Delicate Cutters
Okay, I’m a little late to this one, but there’s a nifty exchange between Notorious Ph.D. and Historiann about the perversities of budget cuts at their respective institutions. The comments are worth reading, too. What starts as a fairly standard-issue set of complaints about budget cuts sort of backs into a thoughtful discussion of job expectations and reciprocity in the workplace.
Among other things, it makes me glad that I work where I work. We have our financial issues, God knows, but we haven’t done anything as drastic and destructive as furloughs or salary cuts, let alone layoffs. We’ve cut travel and release time, as well as a whole bunch of back-office expenses that faculty tend not to notice but that actually matter quite a bit. We have a salary freeze, which is annoying, but nowhere near as annoying as furloughs or cuts. (For the record, cuts are worse than furloughs. Future salary increases are percentages of base pay. Furloughs don’t affect base pay, but cuts do. You won’t see a difference at the time, but you’ll see it down the road.)
(Also for the record, while I’m at it, I recall that one of the selling points of the 401(k) or 403(b) was supposed to be dollar-cost averaging during market dips. With so many companies and some colleges suspending matching contributions to retirement accounts, that argument has been conclusively discredited. Averaging doesn’t help you if you don’t get the money to buy low. If you only get matching contributions during high times, then by definition, you’re buying high, which is a loser’s strategy.)
Working at a community colleges makes some dilemmas easier. Although we have a tenure system, we don’t have a research expectation. That means that cutting travel funding or course releases may be frustrating and annoying, but it doesn’t directly threaten anybody’s ability to earn tenure. Tenure is earned by teaching well and by doing enough college service to carry your weight. The cuts we’ve enacted, as distasteful as they’ve been, haven’t threatened either of those. The same could not be said of, say, eliminating research leaves for junior faculty while leaving the publication requirement intact.
Were I in a similar position at a college with a serious publication requirement for faculty, I’d advocate adjusting tenure expectations to match available resources. Research expectations for tenure have ratcheted so comically high for so long that a little downshifting wouldn’t hurt, and it would carry the added virtue of basic fairness. (At least, fairness within the confines of the tenure system itself, but that’s another post.) It would also allow some recognition, albeit unintentional, of the complete collapse of scholarly publishing. How, exactly, you’re supposed to get published when the presses are closing and you aren’t able to travel is beyond me. A belated recognition of reality is better than no recognition at all.
Here, my version of that is leaving class sizes alone. Even though there are obvious short-term savings to be had by stuffing the classrooms fuller, it strikes me as watering down our core function. Letting go of a special project is one thing; letting go of attentive teaching is something else altogether. So pet projects come in for more scrutiny than usual, and many good ones don’t make the cut. But English comp doesn’t get any bigger, and nobody’s quest for tenure is preemptively doomed. First things first.
Wise and worldly readers – have you seen cuts on your campus that strike at the heart of the mission, or that make tenure effectively impossible?
Among other things, it makes me glad that I work where I work. We have our financial issues, God knows, but we haven’t done anything as drastic and destructive as furloughs or salary cuts, let alone layoffs. We’ve cut travel and release time, as well as a whole bunch of back-office expenses that faculty tend not to notice but that actually matter quite a bit. We have a salary freeze, which is annoying, but nowhere near as annoying as furloughs or cuts. (For the record, cuts are worse than furloughs. Future salary increases are percentages of base pay. Furloughs don’t affect base pay, but cuts do. You won’t see a difference at the time, but you’ll see it down the road.)
(Also for the record, while I’m at it, I recall that one of the selling points of the 401(k) or 403(b) was supposed to be dollar-cost averaging during market dips. With so many companies and some colleges suspending matching contributions to retirement accounts, that argument has been conclusively discredited. Averaging doesn’t help you if you don’t get the money to buy low. If you only get matching contributions during high times, then by definition, you’re buying high, which is a loser’s strategy.)
Working at a community colleges makes some dilemmas easier. Although we have a tenure system, we don’t have a research expectation. That means that cutting travel funding or course releases may be frustrating and annoying, but it doesn’t directly threaten anybody’s ability to earn tenure. Tenure is earned by teaching well and by doing enough college service to carry your weight. The cuts we’ve enacted, as distasteful as they’ve been, haven’t threatened either of those. The same could not be said of, say, eliminating research leaves for junior faculty while leaving the publication requirement intact.
Were I in a similar position at a college with a serious publication requirement for faculty, I’d advocate adjusting tenure expectations to match available resources. Research expectations for tenure have ratcheted so comically high for so long that a little downshifting wouldn’t hurt, and it would carry the added virtue of basic fairness. (At least, fairness within the confines of the tenure system itself, but that’s another post.) It would also allow some recognition, albeit unintentional, of the complete collapse of scholarly publishing. How, exactly, you’re supposed to get published when the presses are closing and you aren’t able to travel is beyond me. A belated recognition of reality is better than no recognition at all.
Here, my version of that is leaving class sizes alone. Even though there are obvious short-term savings to be had by stuffing the classrooms fuller, it strikes me as watering down our core function. Letting go of a special project is one thing; letting go of attentive teaching is something else altogether. So pet projects come in for more scrutiny than usual, and many good ones don’t make the cut. But English comp doesn’t get any bigger, and nobody’s quest for tenure is preemptively doomed. First things first.
Wise and worldly readers – have you seen cuts on your campus that strike at the heart of the mission, or that make tenure effectively impossible?
Monday, June 22, 2009
Passages
Last week was a three-hanky special.
The Girl had two graduations: one from her gymnastics class, and one from her preschool. And I had my first Father's Day since Dad died.
The gymnastics class was easy. They had a little performance for the parents, complete with loud music and bright outfits. (TG rocked the blue tutu.) Parents were everywhere, wielding all manner of camera and video technology. (I brought the 'flip video' thing, which is about the size of a pack of cigarettes. I'm just old enough to think of James Bond when I use it.) TG did some balance-beam walking and a few tuck-and-rolls. Actual exchange:
The Wife: Why do they call it a tuck and roll? Why not just call it a somersault?
TG (slowly): Because first you tuck, and then you woll.
So that's that.
The preschool graduation was harder on the parents. They did a little slideshow of highlights from the year, complete with a soundtrack of sad ballads; by the end, the parents were reduced to quivering piles of jello. (The highlight for us was a picture from the day The Boy came in to read the class a story. He must have been memorable, because as soon as that picture came up, several other kids yelled “that's TB!”) The kids also did a few songs and skits, with construction-paper props and lots of percussion instruments.
Even at this age, you can see distinct personalities in each kid. One kid was the class ham. Another was utterly terrified of going up there. A few of the girls are already a little princess-y, and some of the boys were a little more rough-and-tumble than others. TG did her parents proud, holding her ground and not getting distracted. The teachers have commented before that she's the moral compass of the class, which I don't mind admitting pleases me endlessly.
The contrast between the parents and the kids was striking. For the kids, it was just another day, albeit with parents there. For the parents, it was tears and hugs and frantic exchanges of phone numbers. TG was more focused on the cake than on anything else. Bless her, she has no idea why we had such a hard time.
Father's Day was mostly lovely, with some sadness around the edges. The kids made crafts, which they presented while beaming with well-earned pride. TW took us out to brunch, and I got a couple of books I'd been looking forward to reading.
Over the last week or so, leading up to Father's Day, I couldn't help but think about Dad. It wouldn't be in long, focused ruminations, just the occasional thought that would give me pause.
The one that really threw me was when I realized that with both grandfathers and now Dad gone, I'm the oldest male in the family. I didn't expect that to happen just yet. Growing up, I had Dad, but I also had my Grandpa (on Mom's side) as a sort of role model. Now, it's just me. TB does have his Grandpa on TW's side, which helps tremendously, but this was the first Father's Day I didn't have to shop for.
That's not a crisis, it's not unique, it's not anything that plenty of others haven't gone through. I get that. It's just a little tough to reach the end of Father's Day and to realize, for the first time, that there isn't a phone call still to make.
Sorry to get maudlin. I'll get back to analytical/ironic tomorrow. I just couldn't do it today.
The Girl had two graduations: one from her gymnastics class, and one from her preschool. And I had my first Father's Day since Dad died.
The gymnastics class was easy. They had a little performance for the parents, complete with loud music and bright outfits. (TG rocked the blue tutu.) Parents were everywhere, wielding all manner of camera and video technology. (I brought the 'flip video' thing, which is about the size of a pack of cigarettes. I'm just old enough to think of James Bond when I use it.) TG did some balance-beam walking and a few tuck-and-rolls. Actual exchange:
The Wife: Why do they call it a tuck and roll? Why not just call it a somersault?
TG (slowly): Because first you tuck, and then you woll.
So that's that.
The preschool graduation was harder on the parents. They did a little slideshow of highlights from the year, complete with a soundtrack of sad ballads; by the end, the parents were reduced to quivering piles of jello. (The highlight for us was a picture from the day The Boy came in to read the class a story. He must have been memorable, because as soon as that picture came up, several other kids yelled “that's TB!”) The kids also did a few songs and skits, with construction-paper props and lots of percussion instruments.
Even at this age, you can see distinct personalities in each kid. One kid was the class ham. Another was utterly terrified of going up there. A few of the girls are already a little princess-y, and some of the boys were a little more rough-and-tumble than others. TG did her parents proud, holding her ground and not getting distracted. The teachers have commented before that she's the moral compass of the class, which I don't mind admitting pleases me endlessly.
The contrast between the parents and the kids was striking. For the kids, it was just another day, albeit with parents there. For the parents, it was tears and hugs and frantic exchanges of phone numbers. TG was more focused on the cake than on anything else. Bless her, she has no idea why we had such a hard time.
Father's Day was mostly lovely, with some sadness around the edges. The kids made crafts, which they presented while beaming with well-earned pride. TW took us out to brunch, and I got a couple of books I'd been looking forward to reading.
Over the last week or so, leading up to Father's Day, I couldn't help but think about Dad. It wouldn't be in long, focused ruminations, just the occasional thought that would give me pause.
The one that really threw me was when I realized that with both grandfathers and now Dad gone, I'm the oldest male in the family. I didn't expect that to happen just yet. Growing up, I had Dad, but I also had my Grandpa (on Mom's side) as a sort of role model. Now, it's just me. TB does have his Grandpa on TW's side, which helps tremendously, but this was the first Father's Day I didn't have to shop for.
That's not a crisis, it's not unique, it's not anything that plenty of others haven't gone through. I get that. It's just a little tough to reach the end of Father's Day and to realize, for the first time, that there isn't a phone call still to make.
Sorry to get maudlin. I'll get back to analytical/ironic tomorrow. I just couldn't do it today.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Ask the Administrator: Picking Winners
A new correspondent writes:
It's a great question; I wish more people would ask it. (Arne Duncan, I'm thinking of yoooouuuu...)
I'll admit to considerable uneasiness anytime I hear arguments like “X is the wave of the future. We need a program to prepare students for all those jobs!” Partially that's because I entered grad school in the early 1990's, prepared to capitalize on the Great Wave of Retirements; we all know how that wave turned out. Partially it's because I worked at Proprietary U during and after the dot-com boom, so I saw an entire industry go from “desperate for talent” to “desperate to survive” almost overnight. Partially it's because I'm seeing our Nursing grads suddenly struggle to find work, after many years during which new grads could write their own tickets. And partially it's because so many of the giant corporations of my youth are unrecognizable now, if they still exist at all. (Government Motors? Really?)
If I knew what the hot industry would be five years from now, I'd buy stock in it. I don't, and neither does anybody else. I read somewhere that at Clinton's economic summit in 1992, nobody used the word “internet.” (You'd think Al Gore would have!) Back then, Kodak thought its major competition was Polaroid. Remember Polaroid? Hell, remember Kodak?
At the root of my unease, I think, is the constant conflation of 'job training' with 'economic development.' They are not the same thing. In fact, they can actually be in conflict with each other.
'Job training' is very short-term and specific. It's teaching someone how to do basic tasks for a particular job, often with a particular employer. It usually leads to relatively entry-level work in industries that require more education to move up. The idea is to give people on the economic margins a quick path to a paycheck. It fits people for slots that already exist.
And that's where it hits its limits. It works only to the extent that it fits the jobs that actually exist. If the jobs aren't out there, the training doesn't amount to much.
Economic development doesn't result from filling pre-existing slots. It results from creating new ones.
Creating new ones requires people with initiative, some business know-how, drive, creativity, and great communication skills. It also requires time, access to capital, and some kind of safety net for failure. Although any given business can succeed abruptly, the payoff from an educated population accrues slowly and in the aggregate. It doesn't appear in statistics done six months after graduation.
Today I heard rumors of a forthcoming announcement from the Obama administration for more money for job training programs at community colleges. If anyone up there is listening, please please please keep in mind that the old training model doesn't fit large chunks of the new economy. In reality, the boundary between 'training' and 'transfer' is blurring, since more jobs require more education than they used to. And for long-term growth, as opposed to short-term patching, training isn't close to the answer.
Back at Proprietary U, we graduated gazillions of students into an industry that barely exists anymore. The only courses they took back then that are still relevant, oddly enough, are the general education classes. Industries come and go, but the basics – the ability to synthesize information, to connect the dots, to communicate – endure. Those are job skills. Let's not funnel the resources away from the source of actual long-term growth, in hopes of training more call center reps. Those can, and will, be outsourced.
My proposal for long-term prosperity: combine an educated population with national health insurance (since going without health insurance is a colossal barrier to starting a new business) and a focus on providing the kinds of public goods that lead to all manner of positive externalities – basic research, mass transit, that sort of thing. If that sounds a bit Scandinavian, well, Norway and Sweden aren't doing too badly these days. Iceland followed our model instead, and effectively collapsed. In places with plenty of smart people running around, where the cost of failure isn't so awful, it's not shocking that Nokias and Ericssons pop up. Here, we get Wal-Mart. We can train people to work at Wal-Mart, and there may be times when that's the least-bad short-term option. But it's not the same thing.
Now, to answer the actual question.
On the ground, we pick programs based largely on either needs expressed by local employers, or the availability of grants. Neither is perfect, but they're what we have.
Thanks for the question! I hope the Obama administration uses its initiative wisely.
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
With all this talk about green jobs and the more than usual
uncertainty about the shape of the future job market, I've been
curious of late about how community college deans, departments, and
counselors cope with the issue of occupational forecasting.
While I'm guessing CCs in Arizona are expanding their solar
installation programs and CCs in North Dakota focus on wind turbine
construction and maintenance, it strikes me that in much of the
country (I could be wrong on this) there may be a great deal of
uncertainty about where the jobs of the future will come from.
If that is the case, I'd be real curious as to how decisions are made
both within departments and across colleges as to which programs to
expand and promote to students and which to reduce and/or cut.
Any thoughts on this? Are there clear local occupational forecasts?
Is there a clear process as to how those decisions are made and
processed? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
It's a great question; I wish more people would ask it. (Arne Duncan, I'm thinking of yoooouuuu...)
I'll admit to considerable uneasiness anytime I hear arguments like “X is the wave of the future. We need a program to prepare students for all those jobs!” Partially that's because I entered grad school in the early 1990's, prepared to capitalize on the Great Wave of Retirements; we all know how that wave turned out. Partially it's because I worked at Proprietary U during and after the dot-com boom, so I saw an entire industry go from “desperate for talent” to “desperate to survive” almost overnight. Partially it's because I'm seeing our Nursing grads suddenly struggle to find work, after many years during which new grads could write their own tickets. And partially it's because so many of the giant corporations of my youth are unrecognizable now, if they still exist at all. (Government Motors? Really?)
If I knew what the hot industry would be five years from now, I'd buy stock in it. I don't, and neither does anybody else. I read somewhere that at Clinton's economic summit in 1992, nobody used the word “internet.” (You'd think Al Gore would have!) Back then, Kodak thought its major competition was Polaroid. Remember Polaroid? Hell, remember Kodak?
At the root of my unease, I think, is the constant conflation of 'job training' with 'economic development.' They are not the same thing. In fact, they can actually be in conflict with each other.
'Job training' is very short-term and specific. It's teaching someone how to do basic tasks for a particular job, often with a particular employer. It usually leads to relatively entry-level work in industries that require more education to move up. The idea is to give people on the economic margins a quick path to a paycheck. It fits people for slots that already exist.
And that's where it hits its limits. It works only to the extent that it fits the jobs that actually exist. If the jobs aren't out there, the training doesn't amount to much.
Economic development doesn't result from filling pre-existing slots. It results from creating new ones.
Creating new ones requires people with initiative, some business know-how, drive, creativity, and great communication skills. It also requires time, access to capital, and some kind of safety net for failure. Although any given business can succeed abruptly, the payoff from an educated population accrues slowly and in the aggregate. It doesn't appear in statistics done six months after graduation.
Today I heard rumors of a forthcoming announcement from the Obama administration for more money for job training programs at community colleges. If anyone up there is listening, please please please keep in mind that the old training model doesn't fit large chunks of the new economy. In reality, the boundary between 'training' and 'transfer' is blurring, since more jobs require more education than they used to. And for long-term growth, as opposed to short-term patching, training isn't close to the answer.
Back at Proprietary U, we graduated gazillions of students into an industry that barely exists anymore. The only courses they took back then that are still relevant, oddly enough, are the general education classes. Industries come and go, but the basics – the ability to synthesize information, to connect the dots, to communicate – endure. Those are job skills. Let's not funnel the resources away from the source of actual long-term growth, in hopes of training more call center reps. Those can, and will, be outsourced.
My proposal for long-term prosperity: combine an educated population with national health insurance (since going without health insurance is a colossal barrier to starting a new business) and a focus on providing the kinds of public goods that lead to all manner of positive externalities – basic research, mass transit, that sort of thing. If that sounds a bit Scandinavian, well, Norway and Sweden aren't doing too badly these days. Iceland followed our model instead, and effectively collapsed. In places with plenty of smart people running around, where the cost of failure isn't so awful, it's not shocking that Nokias and Ericssons pop up. Here, we get Wal-Mart. We can train people to work at Wal-Mart, and there may be times when that's the least-bad short-term option. But it's not the same thing.
Now, to answer the actual question.
On the ground, we pick programs based largely on either needs expressed by local employers, or the availability of grants. Neither is perfect, but they're what we have.
Thanks for the question! I hope the Obama administration uses its initiative wisely.
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Reality Show?
Several commenters have recently suggested a Dean Dad reality show. It's not gonna happen – the pseudonym would be pretty much shot, and cameras don't do me any favors these days – but it's fun to think about.
The pilot episode:
Opening shot – the family at dinner.
(Farting sound)
TB, TG: DADDY!
DD: I didn't do it.
TW: Yes, you did.
(Cut to individual interviews)
DD: I really didn't.
TG: Silly Daddy.
TW: That's disgusting.
TB: (guilty smile)
montage, pop song, commercial break
Sweeping shot of college campus, students milling around, etc.
Shot of DD staring intently at computer screen.
Other dean walks in.
OD: Do you have that list of programs that haven't done their annual reviews yet?
DD: I think so. Let me check.
Shot of DD typing intently at computer. Montage, pop song, commercial break.
Return from break. Shots of autumnal campus, attractive students, city buses.
Speeded-up footage of middle-aged people walking into meeting room. Repeat three times.
Speeded-up footage of us walking out. Speeded-up music on soundtrack. Commercial break.
Return from break. Emperor's Theme from Star Wars plays against shot of office.
Kim Kardashian enters.
KK: I'm Kim! I just decided spontaneously to show up here unscripted for no particular reason!
DD: Who the %&^#(*)% are you?
KK's cell phone goes off. Ringtone of current pop hit. She leaves.
DD makes Jim Halpert face at camera. Montage, pop song, closing credits.
Scenes from next week:
Other Dean: Could you believe that?
Cut to DD, looking nonplussed. Angry faux-punk soundtrack.
Yeah, that should work. There's nothing teenagers like more than watching balding middle-aged people in offices. What could possibly go wrong?
The pilot episode:
Opening shot – the family at dinner.
(Farting sound)
TB, TG: DADDY!
DD: I didn't do it.
TW: Yes, you did.
(Cut to individual interviews)
DD: I really didn't.
TG: Silly Daddy.
TW: That's disgusting.
TB: (guilty smile)
montage, pop song, commercial break
Sweeping shot of college campus, students milling around, etc.
Shot of DD staring intently at computer screen.
Other dean walks in.
OD: Do you have that list of programs that haven't done their annual reviews yet?
DD: I think so. Let me check.
Shot of DD typing intently at computer. Montage, pop song, commercial break.
Return from break. Shots of autumnal campus, attractive students, city buses.
Speeded-up footage of middle-aged people walking into meeting room. Repeat three times.
Speeded-up footage of us walking out. Speeded-up music on soundtrack. Commercial break.
Return from break. Emperor's Theme from Star Wars plays against shot of office.
Kim Kardashian enters.
KK: I'm Kim! I just decided spontaneously to show up here unscripted for no particular reason!
DD: Who the %&^#(*)% are you?
KK's cell phone goes off. Ringtone of current pop hit. She leaves.
DD makes Jim Halpert face at camera. Montage, pop song, closing credits.
Scenes from next week:
Other Dean: Could you believe that?
Cut to DD, looking nonplussed. Angry faux-punk soundtrack.
Yeah, that should work. There's nothing teenagers like more than watching balding middle-aged people in offices. What could possibly go wrong?
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
The Holding Tank
Our summer enrollments are breaking records, and anecdotally, that seems to be a function mostly of two variables: a lack of summer jobs, and a more transfer-focused student body. Both of those variables largely track the recession.
In discussions of the cost of higher education, 'opportunity cost' comes up a lot. Basically, it's the money you would have made during the time you spent taking classes, had you worked instead of taking classes. It's the cost of money you didn't make. The kid who goes straight to work at 18 is probably more flush at 21 than the kid who went straight to college, since he didn't suffer the opportunity cost. Over time, there will usually be a more-than-compensating difference in future earnings, but at the moment, it's no contest.
I've been hearing complaints of a terrible lack of summer jobs, at the exact same time that I've been noticing record enrollments in our summer classes. In a perverse way, the Great Recession has effected a huge discount in the opportunity cost of education. If the choice is between work and school, that's one thing. If the choice is between unemployment and school, that's something else.
While I'd like to believe that the major driver of new enrollments is a general cultural enlightenment, it seems likelier that the 'holding tank' function of college is what's really at work. What better time to get the sheepskin than when there aren't any real jobs to be had anyway? You aren't missing anything. And if you time it right, you might emerge with a credential just as the market picks up again, giving you a ticket to ride the updraft in a way you couldn't otherwise.
In the US, the way we count 'unemployment' doesn't always match real life. ('Discouraged' workers don't count, for example, even though their unemployment is the source of their discouragement.) But one way it sort of matches real life is with students. We don't consider students to be unemployed, even if they're looking for work, and there's some validity to that. Studenthood is a kind of economic limbo. It's neither employed nor unemployed; it's just sort of hovering outside the market. Even for people from relatively moneyed backgrounds, there's an acceptance of 'student poverty' as a life stage. It's a phase during which poverty isn't held against you culturally or psychologically. Being unemployed and poor at 30 may feel like a verdict; being a student and poor at 20 is just following the script.
(Graduate student poverty falls between the two. It's still 'student,' and still expected at some level. But it's also at a later stage of life, and what seems cute at 20 just feels sad at 27. By the latter part of my grad school trek, the economic gap between me and most of the rest of my age cohort started to get pretty depressing. TW and I met when I was in grad school. After we got married, she confided that when she first saw my Gradmobile, she started to wonder. I couldn't blame her.)
Trading unmoored poverty for student poverty makes a lot of sense, even if you're still basically broke. It's a different script, and it offers more hope for a happy ending. Besides, student loans are much better deals than credit card debt, and they come with deferments tailor-made for recessions. They even cover health insurance, unlike most entry-level jobs. As holding tanks go, this isn't bad.
I just hope the recession breaks soon enough for everyone to pay back those loans. If not, we'll be hearing about the student loan bubble in a couple of years.
In discussions of the cost of higher education, 'opportunity cost' comes up a lot. Basically, it's the money you would have made during the time you spent taking classes, had you worked instead of taking classes. It's the cost of money you didn't make. The kid who goes straight to work at 18 is probably more flush at 21 than the kid who went straight to college, since he didn't suffer the opportunity cost. Over time, there will usually be a more-than-compensating difference in future earnings, but at the moment, it's no contest.
I've been hearing complaints of a terrible lack of summer jobs, at the exact same time that I've been noticing record enrollments in our summer classes. In a perverse way, the Great Recession has effected a huge discount in the opportunity cost of education. If the choice is between work and school, that's one thing. If the choice is between unemployment and school, that's something else.
While I'd like to believe that the major driver of new enrollments is a general cultural enlightenment, it seems likelier that the 'holding tank' function of college is what's really at work. What better time to get the sheepskin than when there aren't any real jobs to be had anyway? You aren't missing anything. And if you time it right, you might emerge with a credential just as the market picks up again, giving you a ticket to ride the updraft in a way you couldn't otherwise.
In the US, the way we count 'unemployment' doesn't always match real life. ('Discouraged' workers don't count, for example, even though their unemployment is the source of their discouragement.) But one way it sort of matches real life is with students. We don't consider students to be unemployed, even if they're looking for work, and there's some validity to that. Studenthood is a kind of economic limbo. It's neither employed nor unemployed; it's just sort of hovering outside the market. Even for people from relatively moneyed backgrounds, there's an acceptance of 'student poverty' as a life stage. It's a phase during which poverty isn't held against you culturally or psychologically. Being unemployed and poor at 30 may feel like a verdict; being a student and poor at 20 is just following the script.
(Graduate student poverty falls between the two. It's still 'student,' and still expected at some level. But it's also at a later stage of life, and what seems cute at 20 just feels sad at 27. By the latter part of my grad school trek, the economic gap between me and most of the rest of my age cohort started to get pretty depressing. TW and I met when I was in grad school. After we got married, she confided that when she first saw my Gradmobile, she started to wonder. I couldn't blame her.)
Trading unmoored poverty for student poverty makes a lot of sense, even if you're still basically broke. It's a different script, and it offers more hope for a happy ending. Besides, student loans are much better deals than credit card debt, and they come with deferments tailor-made for recessions. They even cover health insurance, unlike most entry-level jobs. As holding tanks go, this isn't bad.
I just hope the recession breaks soon enough for everyone to pay back those loans. If not, we'll be hearing about the student loan bubble in a couple of years.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
The World Won't End in 2012
We're pretty sure it'll be fiscal year 2011.
This article struck a chord, since I've been hearing the exact same thing on campus.
State and local tax receipts have been plummeting for some time, and still are. (The rate of decline has slowed a bit, but in absolute terms, the trend is still downward.) For this fiscal year and next, we have stimulus money to cushion the decline. We're being cautious with how we use it, since we know it's non-recurring, but at least it's there to give us some time to think through what we're doing.
For FY 2011 – meaning, July 1 of 2010 – we're told the stimulus will be gone, at least from higher ed. And the odds of tax receipts having bounced back to 2007 levels by then are vanishingly low. I've been hearing phrases like “that's when the wheels fall off” and “that's when we hit the wall.”
I've seen three different reactions to the foretellings of doom, each rational in its own way.
One is simple denial. The future is unreadable, a year ago we thought we had money, who knows what might happen in another year? Besides, you people were all gloom-and-doom-y this year, and a pile of money just landed on us. All will be well, this too shall pass, so stop crying wolf. Use the stimulus money to compensate for this year's cut, and leave the future to the future.
Psychologically, it's understandable, but it's also incredibly dangerous. GM used this strategy for many years, and actually caught a few breaks along the way. But sooner or later the money fairy doesn't drop by anymore, and the truth hits. I'd like to avoid going the way of Pontiac.
The second I'd describe as “smoke 'em if ya got 'em!” I've heard some intelligent people argue that we should treat the coming year as a sort of Fat Tuesday, a last blowout before a long dry spell. (The article's mention of large numbers of administrators planning their own retirements to coincide with the end of the stimulus package strikes me as consistent with this. Stick around for the party, then go home.) If we're looking at several lean years to come, and possibly a lower baseline for many years beyond that, then let's fund sabbaticals and pet projects and Special Events while we still can. Get while the getting's good, because who knows when it'll be good again?
Again, there's some truth to this, but it strikes me as basically fatalistic. A year goes surprisingly fast – any parent of young children can attest to that – and then what? Squeezing off one more hit is not a plan.
The third, which I consider the best of a bad lot, takes the stimulus money as an opportunity to pay for things that lower the college's long-term operating costs. Money spent on, say, energy efficiency lowers our baseline expenses in future years, making it slightly easier to weather future cuts.
Psychologically, this is the eat-your-vegetables solution. It's unsatisfyingly pedestrian. Emotionally, it just doesn't match the scale of what we're facing. But it makes sense. Unlike the other two, it cuts future expenses. Better, it cuts them in ways that don't compromise our mission, and that can be sustained over time. If the predictions of gloom and doom turn out to be overstated, then the future windfall can go into cool stuff. If the predictions are spot-on, then the lower operating costs will at least cushion the blow. Unlike the other two, it doesn't rely on either luck or omniscience to bail us out.
Even if the third option works, though, the payoff in future savings won't be anywhere near the magnitude of the cuts we're hearing bandied about. This makes the sell harder, since even success would result in, at best, a mild palliative. Saving a couple hundred thousand is great, but if the state cuts several million, we're still in for a world of hurt.
I'm still hoping that the economy turns around faster than anyone expects, that tax revenues skyrocket, that we get the hell out of Iraq and realize the savings from single-payer health care. But the odds of all of that coming to pass before next July are not encouraging.
I'm too young to retire, so that's out. Maybe I can fall back on the relative safety of show biz...
This article struck a chord, since I've been hearing the exact same thing on campus.
State and local tax receipts have been plummeting for some time, and still are. (The rate of decline has slowed a bit, but in absolute terms, the trend is still downward.) For this fiscal year and next, we have stimulus money to cushion the decline. We're being cautious with how we use it, since we know it's non-recurring, but at least it's there to give us some time to think through what we're doing.
For FY 2011 – meaning, July 1 of 2010 – we're told the stimulus will be gone, at least from higher ed. And the odds of tax receipts having bounced back to 2007 levels by then are vanishingly low. I've been hearing phrases like “that's when the wheels fall off” and “that's when we hit the wall.”
I've seen three different reactions to the foretellings of doom, each rational in its own way.
One is simple denial. The future is unreadable, a year ago we thought we had money, who knows what might happen in another year? Besides, you people were all gloom-and-doom-y this year, and a pile of money just landed on us. All will be well, this too shall pass, so stop crying wolf. Use the stimulus money to compensate for this year's cut, and leave the future to the future.
Psychologically, it's understandable, but it's also incredibly dangerous. GM used this strategy for many years, and actually caught a few breaks along the way. But sooner or later the money fairy doesn't drop by anymore, and the truth hits. I'd like to avoid going the way of Pontiac.
The second I'd describe as “smoke 'em if ya got 'em!” I've heard some intelligent people argue that we should treat the coming year as a sort of Fat Tuesday, a last blowout before a long dry spell. (The article's mention of large numbers of administrators planning their own retirements to coincide with the end of the stimulus package strikes me as consistent with this. Stick around for the party, then go home.) If we're looking at several lean years to come, and possibly a lower baseline for many years beyond that, then let's fund sabbaticals and pet projects and Special Events while we still can. Get while the getting's good, because who knows when it'll be good again?
Again, there's some truth to this, but it strikes me as basically fatalistic. A year goes surprisingly fast – any parent of young children can attest to that – and then what? Squeezing off one more hit is not a plan.
The third, which I consider the best of a bad lot, takes the stimulus money as an opportunity to pay for things that lower the college's long-term operating costs. Money spent on, say, energy efficiency lowers our baseline expenses in future years, making it slightly easier to weather future cuts.
Psychologically, this is the eat-your-vegetables solution. It's unsatisfyingly pedestrian. Emotionally, it just doesn't match the scale of what we're facing. But it makes sense. Unlike the other two, it cuts future expenses. Better, it cuts them in ways that don't compromise our mission, and that can be sustained over time. If the predictions of gloom and doom turn out to be overstated, then the future windfall can go into cool stuff. If the predictions are spot-on, then the lower operating costs will at least cushion the blow. Unlike the other two, it doesn't rely on either luck or omniscience to bail us out.
Even if the third option works, though, the payoff in future savings won't be anywhere near the magnitude of the cuts we're hearing bandied about. This makes the sell harder, since even success would result in, at best, a mild palliative. Saving a couple hundred thousand is great, but if the state cuts several million, we're still in for a world of hurt.
I'm still hoping that the economy turns around faster than anyone expects, that tax revenues skyrocket, that we get the hell out of Iraq and realize the savings from single-payer health care. But the odds of all of that coming to pass before next July are not encouraging.
I'm too young to retire, so that's out. Maybe I can fall back on the relative safety of show biz...
