Thursday, May 23, 2013
Three Dollar People
The New York Times reports that instructional spending at research universities has risen much more quickly over the last decade than at community colleges.
In 2009, community colleges spent $9,300 per student on educational resources, virtually unchanged from 1999 once inflation was taken into account. Public research universities spent $16,700, up 11 percent from 1999, and private research universities spent $41,000, an increase of 31 percent.
Community colleges often receive substantially less money per student than elementary or high schools, said Sara Goldrick-Rab, a University of Wisconsin professor who served on the 22-member committee that wrote the report.
By an absolutely astonishing coincidence, the more expensive settings are just about as white as they ever were, and more affluent than they’ve been. Meanwhile, community colleges are far more diverse, and their students more economically downscale, than ever.
Between 1994 and 2006, the white share of the community college population plummeted from 73 percent to 58 percent, while black and Hispanic representation grew from 21 percent to 33 percent, in part reflecting growing diversity in the population as a whole. By contrast, the change was much less dramatic at the most selective four-year colleges during this time period, when the white share dipped just three percentage points (from 78 percent to 75 percent) and the black and Hispanic shares barely moved (from 11 percent to 12 percent).
Funny how that happens.
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A few months ago, Tressie McMillan Cottom did a post about the sorting function of different tiers of American higher education, in which she quoted some students at a fairly elite place saying that for-profits were “not for people like them.” (I did a response piece here.)
It reminded me of a piece I read in the late, lamented Ann Arbor News in the summer of 1990. The Detroit Pistons were in their glory at that point, but tickets to games were expensive and hard to come by. So the Pistons broadcast their away games to their home arena and sold tickets to those, well, screenings, for three bucks. The idea was to give fans from Detroit (as opposed to its suburbs) a chance to have the experience of rooting for the team in a crowd.
The article quoted a vendor at the arena who wasn’t happy about the broadcast attracting the wrong element. The line has stayed with me since then. “When you sell three dollar tickets,” he sniffed, “you get three dollar people.”
And the three dollar people could see their team, but only when the team wasn’t there.
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Technology has changed since 1990, with paradoxical effects on cost. Now the very wealthiest institutions are tripping over each other to give away their teaching for free. As with the 1990 Pistons, the great unwashed finally get to see the stars, except that the stars aren’t actually there. If you want presence, you go to your local community college.
America has a long history of valuing institutions or programs based on the people they serve. That’s how we could “end welfare as we knew it” in 1996, and yet have transfer payments occupy an ever-larger share of the federal budget; in the American mind, transfers to “deserving” people don’t count as welfare. Section 8 rent subsidies are politically suspect, but the mortgage interest tax deduction is sacred. Food stamps are questionable, but farm subsidies are beyond dispute. Flagship research universities -- and their football teams and alumni associations -- get respect in its most concrete form. Community colleges are told to keep doing ever more with ever less.
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This isn’t a new story, of course. But it isn’t inevitable, either. We’ve had periods in American history in which the economic classes got closer. At its best, America has taken positive steps to expand the ranks of the “deserving.” It still does in certain ways; I’ve seen major progress in my adult lifetime in the ways that it’s acceptable to treat gays and lesbians, for example. But we restrict equality, increasingly, to non-economic areas. Be as equal as you want, as long as it doesn’t cost anything.
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Community colleges, at their audacious best, are institutional realizations of the egalitarian side of America. Their recent fate has tracked the fate of that egalitarian side.
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On a moral level, of course, that’s awful. But it’s not just about morality. People who have something to lose act differently than people who don’t. That’s true even when the “something” is as abstract as a chance.
Last night I was privileged to attend the annual scholarship award ceremony at HCC. Donors who had funded various scholarships attended and saw the students they had funded. We all got to hear the success stories of the students -- some single Moms, some recent immigrants, some people in suits and some in painter’s pants and sad-looking sneakers. Many of the students had already made plans to transfer to some pretty impressive four-year schools, and they were grateful for the chance.
It’s a gratifying event, and I was happy to be there. But at some level, no matter how generous the donors, it was only possible because of the strength of the underlying institution. Hollow out the community college, and the transfer route will close. Take away enough operating funding, and all the scholarships in the world won’t matter.
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Some of the three dollar people will surprise you. I never get tired of the success stories. They’re tributes to hard work, of course, and to the sacrifices of families, friends, and children. But they’re also affirmations, however unintentional, of the nobler, more inclusive side of American culture. A side that remembers that you can’t always tell who has the next great idea just by looking.
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I’ve got nothing against research universities; I got my doctorate at one. But it would be nice if we could shift the public discussion a bit from the “climbing walls” and luxury dorms of residential universities. More American undergrads attend community colleges than research universities. The funding issues here aren’t about out-of-control costs. At some level, it’s hard not to think they’re about writing off the three dollar people.
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Credits and Credit Hours
Sherman Dorn asked a great question earlier this week. In response to the growing wave of enthusiasm for “competency-based” degrees, as opposed to credit hour-based, he asked why we couldn’t achieve most of the good that “competency-based” would achieve just by dropping the “hours” from “credit hours.” Since the standard objection to credit hours is that they’re denominated in units of time, and are therefore impervious to productivity improvements, why not just drop the “time” part, keep the “credit” part, and call it good?
I’ll have to dust off my old 90’s notes for this one. (Let’s see...Kurt Cobain? No...Winona Ryder? No...Floating signifiers? That’s it!) Because then “credits” become floating signifiers, attached to no particular meaning. They could mean anything, and would therefore mean nothing.
That matters because of online degrees and for-profit providers.
In my DeVry days, we were careful with the weekend program -- which was specifically geared at working adults -- to keep the number of classroom hours congruent with the requirements for the number of credits given, even when it became inconvenient. The idea was to avoid the suspicion that fell upon certain competitors, who made a habit of awarding outsize numbers of credits for various courses to both make it easier for students to complete programs and to keep their own labor costs down. Give students eight credits for a three hour class -- that is, charge them for eight hours, but only pay the instructor for three -- and everybody wins: the students finish faster, the faculty at least have work, and the institution makes out like a bandit.
If we just declare that credits mean whatever a given provider says they mean, then there’s no basis for denying federal funding or regional accreditation to a college that awards twelve credits for a three-hour class and a paper. And now that many of those classes are online -- in which the entire conceit of “seat time” becomes vaporous -- there would be nothing at all to put the brakes on a given college twisting “credits” to mean whatever is convenient at the time.
Historically, the redeeming feature of the “credit hour” was that it was at least based on something. The fatal flaw was that it was based on the wrong thing.
That’s the appeal of competencies. Let the students demonstrate that they’ve picked up a skill, and let them move on. Where they picked it up doesn’t really matter. Some will move faster than others, and probably most will vary their speed depending on the task at hand.
Yes, the documentation aspect of competencies is a bear. The European project of “tuning” wasn’t done in a day, and doing it here isn’t easy, either. SNHU’s College for America -- the first fully competency-based provider that received DOE approval for federal financial aid -- handles the issue of documentation by keeping it entirely in house; it doesn’t accept transfer credits. For a student moving from, say, a competency-based college to a credit-based one, the transfer evaluation component is largely uncharted territory. That’s not to be discounted.
But it’s the best and fairest way to break Baumol’s cost disease without just surrendering to a Wild West of credits meaning whatever anyone says they mean. The great appeal is twofold: break the cost chokehold while maintaining academic integrity. I haven’t seen a better way to do both. Is there one?
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
A Different Measure
“What if we published the number of registered voters / voting record average for colleges?” -- Susanna Williams (@SusannaDW) on Twitter
I love this question.
College “scorecards” are all the rage now. Many states -- possibly soon including my own -- either are or are planning to base funding on performance scorecards. Right now the popular measures include graduation rates, employment rates upon graduation, transfer rates, and success in addressing racial gaps in student success. None of those is without issues, especially as currently measured, but it’s easy enough to grasp the idea behind the measure.
What if we judged colleges based in part on voter participation rates by recent graduates?
As with any other measure, it would have to be constructed carefully to avoid gaming the system. If we only measured voter registration rates among current students, then a college could make voter registration almost impossible to avoid. In the absence of any other measure, that probably wouldn’t lead to much increase in student engagement in politics, so we’d defeat the purpose. And I’d argue for weighting by student demographics, so that a college with a large low-income population that gets its students voting at, say, ten percent higher rates than their peers, would get more recognition than a college full of rich kids that doesn’t move the needle at all. It’s about value added.
But if it were constructed to reflect, say, a few years after graduation, then we might have something. We’d have an incentive for colleges to encourage civic engagement among students.
This is not an entirely new idea. The term “liberal arts” is a reference to the “arts of liberty,” or the skills that free people need to function as self-determining citizens. The idea of “rhetoric” as a necessary skill for politics goes back at least to the sophists, if not earlier. (Modern readers will think of “sophistry” as a dark art, but it’s also the root of “sophisticated.”) In a sense, measuring higher education by its capacity to produce engaged citizens is returning it to its roots.
But with a healthy twist. Higher education is more inclusive than it used to be. At this point, women outnumber men among American undergraduates, particularly at liberal arts colleges and community colleges. (A few years ago there was a spate of stories about exclusive liberal arts colleges practicing affirmative action for male students, just so the dating pool on campus wouldn’t get too skewed. Young women had so thoroughly outpaced young men academically that the only way to establish balance was to put a thumb on the scale.) Racial and economic gaps remain -- in some ways, the economic gaps are widening -- but there’s an argument to be made that encouraging civic participation among the least advantaged could help reverse those trends. Right now senior citizens vote at much higher rates than do 20 year olds, and our political priorities reflect that. If the 20 year olds caught up, I’d expect to see political priorities shift, too. The Great Republican Evolution on Immigration that occurred, seemingly spontaneously, last Fall showed what can happen when voting patterns shift.
Coming from a liberal arts background as I do, I always cringe when I see purely instrumentalist measures of higher ed gain currency (no pun intended). Yes, of course, it’s important to be able to make a living. I take that as given, and have no argument with it. But college shouldn’t only be about that. It should also be about preparing educated citizens to take leadership in the shared project of democracy.
Public colleges and universities will focus, to some degree, on what their state funders tell them to. What if their state funders told them to make sure that students paid some attention to the state?
Monday, May 20, 2013
Reading Beyond Headlines
Investigative reporting is great, when it makes the story fit the facts. It’s a lot less great when it simply ignores facts and tells a story that has nothing to do with them.
The New England Center for Investigative Reporting fell into the second category with its story this week, in which it loudly proclaimed that “Massachusetts universities and colleges that say they’re trying to hold down costs have increased their number of administrators three times faster than their number of students.”
The story goes on at some length to suggest that the primary driver of cost increases for students is administrative bloat, which combines a proliferation of positions with high salaries. To make the case, it includes a chart showing changes in the number of administrators at colleges throughout Massachusetts from 1987 to 2012, coupled with changes in enrollment over the same period. It’s sprinkled with quotes from Benjamin Ginsberg, the Goldwater Institute, and Bain Capital. (Bain’s is particularly choice: ““In no other industry would overhead costs be allowed to grow at this rate—executives would lose their jobs,” analysts at the Boston-based financial management firm Bain & Company wrote, in a July white paper, of administrative spending in higher education.”)
It’s a familiar narrative -- even a bit shopworn -- and people who know the catechism can recite it. The story includes the familiar shots at government employees, such as one would expect from Bain Capital and the Goldwater Institute, In a halfhearted attempt at “balance,” it includes a few quotes from college officials gamely trying to explain that, say, campus IT demands in 1987 simply were not of the order of magnitude that they are now, or that you can’t build dorms and not hire people to run them.
But then, there’s the chart.
The chart is where the entire argument falls to pieces. It’s worth checking.
If the argument of the article -- sorry, the “investigation” -- held water, then we would expect rates of tuition increase to run roughly parallel to rates of administrative increase. If administrative bloat is what drives costs, then surely colleges with more bloat would have greater increases, and colleges with less bloat would have less. Hell, the several colleges with administrative shrinkage should have gotten cheaper.
Nope. Not even close. That’s probably why the chart doesn’t include costs from 1987 to 2012.
Just for fun, let’s start with my own institution, Holyoke Community College. Using the chart’s numbers, from 1987 to 2012, “total administrators” (full and part time) increased by 14 percent. Over that same period, enrollment increased by 49 percent. Which means that the number of students per administrator actually increased. Using the raw numbers on the chart, in 1987 HCC had one administrator for every 73 students. By 2012, HCC had one administrator for every 96 students. How that constitutes “bloat” is beyond me. If the “bloat drives costs” argument were true, then, HCC should be cheaper for students in real terms in 2012 than it was in 1987.
Um, no.
Maybe community colleges are a special case, and I should look at private colleges instead. (That doesn’t help the “government employee” narrative, but whatever.) Take Smith College, a well-respected private women’s college just up route 91 in Northampton. Surely an elite college such as that has lined the pockets of its management!
Again, no. According to the chart, its administrative ranks have decreased by 37 percent, even as its enrollment grew by 9 percent. Surely, it must be cheaper now!
Nope.
Well, maybe it’s a Boston thing. (We in Western Mass sometimes get overshadowed.) Let’s look at Northeastern University. It’s one of the more expensive universities in the state, obviously driven by its negative 76 percent change in the number of administrators.
*headdesk*
Look, if you want to do propaganda effectively, don’t include a chart in your own story that discredits your entire narrative. This is just shooting fish in a barrel. Alternately, if you actually want to style yourself an investigative reporter, start by investigating your own effing chart. It’s not that hard. I did it between innings at a Little League game.
The simple fact is that the “administrative bloat” hypothesis is badly overblown, when it isn’t entirely fictitious. That’s how we can have uniform cost increases across an entire industry, even while some colleges’ administrative ranks grow dramatically, some remain flat, and some shrink dramatically.
The real issues aren’t about fat cat administrators building empires. (Admittedly, I enjoy the irony of Bain Capital calling out fat cats.) Cost drivers include Baumol’s cost disease, the rise of IT, various unfunded compliance mandates, and public disinvestment. Among elite privates, replace “public disinvestment” with “status competition.” If you want to get a handle on costs, address those. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to work; there aren’t as many of us per student as there used to be.
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Thoughts on a Manifesto
Sean Michael Morris’ “Manifesto for Community Colleges, Lifelong Learning, and Autodidacts” is getting some traction, and it’s easy to see why. Morris argues that we’re in the midst of a massive transformation of higher education, in which students are left much more to their own devices than they once were. As Morris puts it,
The new culture of learning is one where learning takes place all the time, everywhere, and according to learners’ own preferences and motivations. Disappearing quickly are the rigor, expectations, and outcomes provided by the structures of a traditional education; and coming to the fore is an autonomous learner, who is her own authority on what’s relevant, germane, vital to her own education. Wide and resounding is the call: “The learner has changed! And so has learning changed!” And it follows that if they wish to survive, institutions of learning must change, too.
Backwards run the sentences until reels the mind.
Although the argument is a bit slippery, Morris eventually settles on the claim that among the existing variations on colleges and universities in the U.S., community colleges are the best suited to work with the new learner. Community colleges’ relatively clear focus on the needs of learners -- as opposed to the production of cutting-edge research, high-profile sports, or self-referential status competition -- allows them to respond more quickly and creatively to the changed environment than their more hidebound counterparts. All they need is “bravery.”
As a piece of writing, it’s a bit of an inkblot test. The “manifesto” conceit suggests a call to action, although it’s not entirely clear what the desired action is, or by whom it should be taken, other than that it should involve “bravery.” Morris opens with his bona fides as a child of academe -- been there -- and includes both techno-skepticism and an acknowledgement of the obvious failings of the traditional lecture, so readers can find something that appeals to them. The shout-out to community colleges is heartening, if a bit opaque. MOOCs get a couple of paragraphs. It has something for almost everyone.
As a community college administrator, my first thought was that his acknowledgement of the obstacles facing community colleges was far too glancing. The “accountability” movement is based on “measurable results,” which means, among other things, raising the cost of experimentation. The measures to which community colleges are increasingly being held are reductionist at best, and often so blunt as to create perverse incentives on the ground. Worse, since many of the costs we face are effectively fixed, and state funding is much lower than it once was (after inflation, and sometimes even before), there’s far too little slack in the system to survive a failed large-scale experiment. In this context, “bravery” can entail having the courage to be patient, instead of giving in to the temptation to fire before aiming. Grants help tremendously, but by definition, they’re of limited length and purpose.
But that reaction, while true enough on its own terms, misses the larger argument. Morris is taking the emergence of the autodidact as a fact of life, and asserting that colleges have to fundamentally remake themselves to address these empowered new high-flyers.
Color me wary.
It’s certainly true that new technologies offer new possibilities in terms of geographic location. I don’t have to be in Cambridge to watch a Harvard lecture anymore. And those of us who remember -- or even now endure -- the 300 person lecture hall can attest that its only reason to exist was institutional convenience. It’s also true that some students come to college now having had access to the means of cultural production at a level that was simply unthinkable back in the paleolithic era when I was in high school. There simply wasn’t a 1980’s equivalent of Jenna Marbles, even though her Rochester accent brings back memories. The space did not exist for her shoulder-padded forerunner to capture an audience.
But even granting all of that, most students don’t arrive at community college having already produced ample portfolios of work, just looking for a credential to certify what they’ve already done. Most show up unable to add fractions. Many bring with them long histories of spotty academic performance, undiagnosed learning disabilities, and self-defeating habits that never got corrected. These are not young Steve Jobs-es who are put upon by distribution requirements. Most need help not only in building academic skills, but in navigating the institutions and culture of the professional world.
And that’s where community colleges, as institutions, are part of the solution.
Community colleges, as with other eleemosynary institutions, exist to protect the weak against the strong. That is their core purpose. They provide academic skills and credentials that can give students an economic and cultural foothold in society, and do it on the cheap -- by design -- so that students don’t leave with terrible overhangs of debt. They don’t screen out the students whose high schools didn’t prepare them well, and they don’t deliberately put gaps in financial aid offers to keep low-income students out. They’re open-door, by design.
It’s hard not to notice the comorbidity of the DIY and edupunk and MOOC enthusiasm with a continued assault on the welfare state. “You’re on your own” has an obvious appeal for the powerful, for whom taxes are a felt burden and rules feel restrictive. In public higher education, we’ve seen a decades long pattern of never quite recovering from the last recession’s cuts before the next one starts. A pattern of two down, one up, two down again has had predictable consequences. Now some of the folks who’ve driven the ideological assault on the public sector generally are leaping on technology as a fig leaf to abandon the weak to their own (electronic) devices.
I’d much rather see public higher education follow the lead of, say, Southern New Hampshire University, and experiment with ways to harness new technologies in the service of, rather than as an alternative to, a mission of access. Use MOOCs and OER and whatever else to fulfill the existing mission more effectively. That will involve some internal tensions, yes, and some room to move. But it’s not about assuming that the student has changed. It’s about doing what we do better.
Students are still students, and they still need the support of institutions that, Coase teaches us, lower the transaction costs of bundling services. To the extent that institutions can do a better job with students by harnessing technology, by all means, go for it. (I’m currently supporting a systematic look at OER on my own campus.) But let’s not pretend that tech can replace institutions. Community colleges exist to empower the weak. Replace them with youtube clips, and the weak will stay right where they are.
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Career Services as Educational Appetizers
I have to confess some bias when it comes to career services, since my Mom directs the career services office for the MBA program at Drexel.
That said, I was a little disappointed in this piece from IHE about recommended changes for career services offices on campus. As provocative as the title was, the content struck me as, if anything, tame.
The traditional model for career services offices involves a few counselors who see students on a drop-in basis, usually at the end of their academic careers, and who try to coach the soon-to-be grads on search and interview skills. In more progressive places -- hi, Mom! -- they’re involved in co-ops and internships.
The idea behind the traditional model is that soon-to-be grads are already pretty much good to go; they just need to learn some etiquette points to get past the initial interview. It’s assumed that students will figure out for themselves that they need the help, so just run a few workshops on resume writing and interview basics and call it good.
Over the past few years, I’ve seen a welcome trend take hold. Instead of waiting until the end of a student’s program and then trying to retrofit a student for what’s out there, now some colleges are building career counseling into the first semester. The idea is to help students identify their own interests early on, with the goal of improving motivation for degree completion. Students with clear goals are likelier to stick around through the hard times than are students who are just drifting through. “Interest inventories” and the like are supposed to help students figure out where their particular strengths and passions are, the better to find the right fit.
Going farther, I would love to see a more thoughtful discussion between the career services folk and the future starving artists. You want to be a painter/photographer/artisan furniture maker? Okay. You should probably take a course on how to start your own business. How, exactly, do freelancers handle marketing, taxes, and budgeting? For people who want to make a living with their art, these are not trivial matters. In this case, arts education and business education aren’t oppositional; the latter enables the former. Some perfectly wonderful artists have come to grief because they did not know how to handle those things, so they wound up either not handling them, or being taken advantage of by the people to whom they turned for help. And while local employers aren’t necessarily clamoring for more artists, people with passion have a way of making their own breaks. As Richard Florida has documented, a thriving arts community has a way of paying off for everyone else. If students with a passion for music learn how the economics of it work, they’ll stand a much better chance of being able to make music for a long time.
Early exposure to career services can also help in some of the more traditional academic disciplines. When I taught at DeVry, students who saw themselves as future LAN technicians used to ask me why they had to take my gen ed classes. I told them that their tech skills would get them their first job, but their communication skills would get them promoted. Hearing that same message early on from the career services people would have helped.
And it’s not just rhetoric. I go to plenty of employer advisory boards, in a host of fields, and I always hear the same thing. Yes, technical skills matter, but so do the “soft skills” of deriving meaning from ambiguity, communicating clearly, and knowing the difference between making an argument and having an argument. (I know educated adults who struggle with that one.) If students could hear that early, from people who don’t have an obvious vested interest -- which is to say, the instructor of the course in question -- it could save a lot of unnecessary struggle.
I suspect that the “afterthought” status of career services, on many campuses, is a holdover from the time when it was assumed that college-educated people already had the cultural capital upon arrival to navigate the work world; all they might need would be a few last-minute pointers. But that’s just not true anymore, if it ever was. For students who really don’t know the score upon arrival, waiting until they’re leaving is just too late. Better to get to them early, so they can appreciate what the academic side of the college can offer before it’s gone.
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Ask the Administrator: How to Dissuade a Determined Dean
A flustered correspondent writes:
I chair a mixed social sciences department in a four-year campus of a large university system. Our campus is devoted primarily to business programs and my colleagues and I largely agree that providing a good arts and sciences education to business students is a worthwhile thing to do. Our dean (who has been here four years and will, we expect, soon be on his way onward and upward) has been pushing us for several years now to create a second major in one of the disciplines. No one in the department, especially those in the discipline, think this is a good idea. There’s little if any demand on our campus, and even our sister campuses with a major in the field have few enrollments; developing a major would also call for adding lines in fairly specialist areas that we don’t otherwise need.
This question is about dealing with a dean who can't seem to believe a department would not want to create a new major. After I explained the reasons for our lack of interest and showed him the data, he convened a meeting of the department, apparently thinking that I was misrepresenting my colleagues’ views. We were unanimous in our opposition. Now, though, we’ve just gone through an external review and learned from the review team that he charged them with trying to uncover hidden support for the new major. Again, they found none. I have every reason to suspect it’s not going to end here. How do we deal effectively with a dean who wants us to create a major where none is called for? We can divine no reason beyond his own vision, which simply isn't persuasive enough for us to do something we deem quite counterproductive. We’re trying to fathom his mindset so that we can turn him aside, but none of us quite understands his thinking. Who can provide us some insight into how we might end this stalemate?
I don’t usually like to assume ill motive, but the reference to the external review team’s charge certainly suggests an agenda that goes beyond curiosity. The point of external review teams is to offer unbiased feedback; if the feedback is predetermined, then the team is just window dressing.
Unfortunately, people in administrative roles whose primary interest is in advancing their own careers -- and no, that’s not a tautology -- will sometimes look to create “tentpole” achievements to which they can point. If the tentpole collapses a few years later, that’s the next guy’s problem. Tentpole achievements look great on cover letters and lend themselves well to interviews. Sometimes they even lead to useful publicity. Sometimes they happen to succeed for all involved, but that’s more of a happy accident than a reflection of purpose.
If that’s the issue, then you may be able to swing the dean’s view by offering a different tentpole. If he’s focused mostly on his own career, and you can offer him an easier alternative for getting what he actually wants, he may very well take you up on it. He’s probably not actually trying to do harm; he’s just trying to help himself. Offer him a way to help himself that also helps you -- or at least doesn’t hurt you -- and he may jump on it.
Alternately, he may be one of those people who’s simply incapable of admitting a mistake. With each new criticism comes a stronger resolve to do it anyway.
That’s a hard one to work around. Distraction can sometimes work; as Richard Rorty put it, sometimes progress occurs simply by changing the subject. Attacking the dean’s proposal keeps his proposal in the spotlight, where he feels compelled to defend it. But changing the subject to something else can remove the pressure to defend it. After a while, he may either lose interest and move on, or decide that, now that nobody’s looking, it’s safe to retreat.
The beauty of distraction is that it can lead to a better situation all around. If you can find something shiny and new -- ideally, something you wouldn’t mind seeing come to fruition -- you may be able to change the subject.
If all else fails, of course, there’s always the passive-aggressive option. That can mean foot-dragging -- comply, but do so poorly and slowly -- so the new project becomes so awful so quickly that he’ll wish he had never pushed for it. Be warned, though, that even insincere sex can lead to pregnancy. A year from now, the dean may have moved on, and you’ll be stuck with a bad idea, poorly realized.
Or if foot-dragging is too depressing, you can go for full-on irony through “malicious compliance.” It’s a sort of work-to-rule with a supercilious grin. It’s a variation on Mencken’s line that the job of the government in a democracy is to give the people what they want, and give it to them good and hard. He wants an idiotic program? Give it to him good and hard.
As with foot-dragging, though, you may find yourself stuck with the “solution” long after the problem has left. I don’t recommend it. It makes for glorious satire, but awful reality.
Those are some first thoughts, anyway. I’m confident that my wise and worldly readers will have some useful perspectives to add.
Good luck. I don’t envy you this one.
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Inigo Montoya and Graduation Rates
Last weekend, fed up with being the only card-carrying Gen X’er in America who hadn’t seen The Princess Bride, I watched it with The Girl. We were both charmed by it, predictably enough, and I finally found the source of a number of lines I’ve heard repeatedly over the years. (“Inconceivable!”) My favorite, from Inigo Montoya, only came once: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
I was reminded of that line in starting Jeff Selingo’s new book, College (Un)bound. I haven’t finished it yet, so I’ll save a full review for a later post. But Selingo’s opening anecdote includes a common, and fundamental, misuse of a statistic that leads well-meaning people to faulty conclusions.
From page viii of the Introduction:
What Dietz failed to examine was Fairleigh Dickinson’s graduation rate. In 2006, only 38 percent of its students graduated within six years, a rate well below all the other schools she had considered...Though Fairleigh Dickinson was giving Dietz a boatload of money, her chances of emerging at the other end with a degree were pretty dismal.
Smart people keep using the graduation rate that way. I do not think it means what they think it means. And I won’t even go into differing goals, part-time attendance, or the well-known flaws of the IPEDS definition of a graduation rate. Let’s pretend those don’t matter. There’s an even more basic flaw at the heart of the argument.
A college’s graduation rate is not evenly distributed among its students.
For example, on most campuses, gender is a consistently strong predictor of success: female students outperform male students in every racial category, and sometimes across categories. (On my own campus, in any given semester, Latina women and white men are neck-and-neck for pass rates in developmental math.) Students who arrive without any developmental placements graduate at notably higher rates than do students who need remediation. Students who take Honors courses graduate at higher rates than students who don’t. Students in tight cohort programs graduate at higher rates than students in larger programs with less regimentation. Students either right out of high school, or over thirty, do better than students in their early twenties. (That one is a head-scratcher for me, but there it is.)
If we wanted to improve our graduation rates, and didn’t want to change how we do business internally, we could just tweak our outreach and admissions to skew our population to more 18 year old white women who score “college ready” on placement. They do amazingly well here. And we’d tell 25 year old men who need remediation that gee, we seem to have lost their paperwork.
We don’t, since that would fly in the face of the open-door mission. But selective colleges do that all the time, by design. They actually brag about it.
A college’s graduation rate reflects, in considerable part, the profile of its student body. The Harvards of the word screen out anybody who looks high-risk, and they get results consistent with that.
Last week I took issue with a piece by Michael Petrilli in which he claimed that colleges could save a ton of money -- Selingo’s “boatload” -- by just excluding students who weren’t likely to succeed. I argued that we don’t have the epistemological foundation to do that. In other words, we don’t know in advance who will make it and who won’t. We have probabilities, but we can’t move with confidence from probabilities to individuals. Therefore, the most ethical approach is to treat everyone as potentially successful, and then let them tell us with their own performance what they’ve got.
So in saying that the composition of a student body will affect its graduation rate in predictable ways, am I contradicting myself?
Nope. The key is in recognizing the difference between aggregate probabilities and individual cases. It’s pretty clear in the national research, for example, that young men of color graduate at lower rates than do upper-income young white women. But that tells you nothing about what any given student will do. If an upper-income young white women attends a college with a more diverse student population than her other options, its graduation rate may well be lower, but her chances should be unaffected. The college’s overall graduation rate does not equal her personal chances of graduating.
In saying that, I’m not at all dismissing the obligation to do a better job by all students. That’s a given, and one that I and my colleagues focus on relentlessly within the budgets we have. And yes, a graduation rate well above or below what local demographics would lead you to predict can reveal something. But when you look at state-by-state comparisons of community college graduation rates, it’s hard not to notice that states in which students have relatively few options tend to have much higher rates than states with robust private college sectors. That’s because in states with few options, more of the high achievers attend the community colleges. That goes beyond any given campus, or even any given state.
Disclosing graduation rates to the public may serve some sort of purpose, if we can get the usual IPEDS flaws under control. (The current measure would do no good at all.) But to assume that a graduation rate equates to a given student’s chance of success is simply false. It does not mean what many people think it means. And if we act as if it does, we will systematically punish the colleges that reach out to the people who need college the most.
Monday, May 13, 2013
Ask the Administrator: Old Dogs and New Tricks
Ask the Administrator: Old Dogs and New Tricks
An exasperated correspondent writes:
So I have one of the most interesting adjunct problems known to man...my adjuncts are too good.
I have tried to cultivate an environment of academic excellence in teaching for the last couple of years in my position. And it is catching with some of my part time instructors; however, my full time folks (who do not have tenure) won't move off center. How do I help my full timers see the wonderful work of some of the adjuncts in such a way that they won't want to string me up?!?
Enrollment in some of the adjunct taught classes well out paces full time folks. They are missing the boat, or rather, they are missing the dock with our students in the boat on which they are captain.
As a second to this....why when exposed to the same impetus for change are my adjuncts doing so much better at adapting than the full timers? I don't want to believe that it is routine, complacency, or laziness, but the cards are beginning to read otherwise...
There isn't much at stake for the full-time faculty. We don't have tenure, but as long as they don't rock the boat too much they are pretty secure in their jobs (as evidenced by the long list of retirees that have worked for the district for over 35 years who are steadily leaving the ranks).
Most of my full-time faculty have taught their courses the same way for many years. That is what I mean about "moving off center." They are using the same instructional techniques, no integration of technology, standard assessments as evidenced by the use of the same or similar tests that they have been using for years, average student evaluations. ...and lots of sitting around complaining about under-prepared students.
I have attempted to provide professional development, research, books, articles, sending folks to teaching workshops, sharing successes, patterning though examples, etc. The pattern for this intervention seems fall into three phases, surface level acceptance of intervention, contemplation or completion of task, and resolution usually accompanied by a variation of, "Yes, this is fantastic! How do we get adjuncts to do this?" I have tried mediocre reviews on average performance evaluations, I share success of those who are touching students, I even tried an online resource center. All to no avail. Success rates for full time folks still hover around 70% where part-timers are up above 76%. And it is not because they are easier. I sit in the classrooms.
In a nutshell, most of my adjuncts are superstars hitting over .350, and most of my full-time folks are bench players hitting only .260. I feel like I should be relying on full-time folks to blaze the trail and be exemplars in the classroom. I am beginning to wonder if those expectations are misplaced.
I’d start by stepping back from the immediate frustration and taking a broader view. Assuming your depiction is largely accurate, bad habits didn’t develop overnight, and they won’t be fixed overnight. And it’s safe to assume that any progress you make will be partial.
Instead, I’d look at it as an issue of climate change. Too many people have checked out, so they’re doing the minimum. That’s why they aren’t even actively opposed to new ideas, since active opposition takes energy. They’ll just smile, shrug, suggest that someone else do it, and go back to doing (or not doing) whatever they were doing before. In a way, that can be even more frustrating than direct opposition. At least with direct opposition, you know what you’re up against. But a pattern of amiable nods with no follow through can take a while to discern. And while you’re discerning it, it’s getting stronger.
A frontal assault is unlikely to work. It would be like punching a cloud. Instead, I’d start with a trek to my grantwriting office.
Routine is the enemy here; you need to engage your people in some new tasks. In the absence of resources, that can be nearly impossible. But with grant money, strategically applied, you can provide the time (in the form of course reassignments) and/or funding to pay people to do something different.
The key is in being relatively directive on the goal and the measures, but hands-off on the means. Since you mention pass rates, which are easily measured, you could start with projects to improve student success in some gatekeeper courses. There’s no shortage of literature on that right now, and a well-conceived project can have a realistic shot at funding. Use the funding to buy some faculty time, and have the faculty use that time to develop alternative approaches in key courses. But let them figure out what those approaches should be. Commit to piloting at least one, if not more, of the approaches they endorse, whether or not you personally would have done it that way.
Interrupting the routine can provide a wake-up call, and having resources at hand will both convey that you’re serious and help get past the initial skepticism. Committing to piloting something will mean there’s something at stake. And keeping your hands off during the formative stages will show respect for your people, and for academic freedom.
You’ll probably have some early adopters, which are great, and some who will never give it the time of day, which is just the way of the world. But if you get multiple projects like this going, and some of them start to work, you may find a wonderful contagion effect among the middle group. Success is popular, and sometimes even viral. To the extent that “checking out’ is a symptom of either boredom or fatalism, new success can have an energizing effect. And if some formerly-fatalistic types tell their friends, sincerely, that they’re actually excited about something, then you have a real shot at changing the culture in a positive way.
That’s one approach, anyway.
Good luck!
Wise and worldly readers, what do you think? Does grantsmanship offer a potential way out, or is there a better way? Alternately, is he just stuck?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Sunday, May 12, 2013
Last Call
Last call has changed since grad school.
The Boy won the spelling bee in his class, so he advanced to the school championships, which were on Friday night. Each class sent its champion, grades four through six, and each class champion battled it out for the town championship for that grade.
The bee was surprisingly well attended; the auditorium was more than half full at the beginning. The fourth graders went first, followed by the fifth graders and then the sixth graders. TB is in sixth grade, so we stayed for the whole thing.
If you haven’t been to a public spelling bee in a while -- or ever -- they’re more suspenseful than you might think. Watching someone struggle to spell a word can be compelling, especially when the long pauses start. The audience is told upfront not to do anything that might provide a clue while a student is spelling, so there’s no obvious way to release tension while the kid is wrestling with a word.
It crossed my mind during the bee that English is probably better suited to spelling bees than most other languages. Our spelling rules are so inconsistent -- I suspect it’s a result of a dual lineage of Latin and German -- that the only way to know many words is just to know them. One kid put an “x” in “eccentric,” as if he were spelling “excellent.” If you hadn’t seen the word before, that would be a perfectly plausible guess. The difference between “premier” and “premiere” is pretty subtle, at least by fifth grade standards. On the way to the bee, TB and I quizzed each other, and I realized that I’m so accustomed to the British spelling of “endeavour” that “endeavor” looks weird to me. Why that is, I have no idea.
Girls dominated the bee, per usual, but this year the boys put up a good fight. One boy showed up straight from baseball practice, still wearing his cleats. That’s the fourth grade version of a renaissance man. He lasted several rounds.
Several of TB’s friends were also in the bee from their own classes. One friend of his, in the fifth grade, stuck around to watch TB and see how he did. I couldn’t help but notice how the same faces pop up every year, and how many of TB’s friends were there. There’s no “honors” track yet, but the kids find each other.
The Girl sat in the audience with us, silently spelling the words with the kids when she wasn’t transfixed by her friend’s iphone. We asked her later if any of the words were difficult for her. She allowed that some of the sixth grade words were. She didn’t seem braggy about it; she was just stating a fact. I like her chances next year.
When it was over -- TB didn’t win, but he did well -- several families went out for ice cream. We took over a small local place and celebrated the various triumphs, even though nobody in our group actually won. The banter was happy, supportive, and unapologetically nerdy. References to Star Trek and Minecraft flew fast and furious, and nobody seemed to think twice about it. I don’t remember nerdiness being a bonding experience at that age, but something seems to have changed in the intervening decades, and for the better.
We actually closed the ice cream shop. The owners threw us out just as nicely as you can throw people out. That’s what “last call” looks like these days. It’s better. Even if it comes at 9:30...
