Confessions of a Community College Dean

College in High Schools

2012-01-31T18:27:00.001-08:00

This one is really looking for advice from those among my wise and worldly readers who’ve found reasonably elegant ways to handle a particular situation.

Like many community colleges, mine offers some credit-bearing courses onsite in some local high schools that are just far enough way that it would be difficult for the students to commute. In some cases, we’re just renting space in the high school and teaching at night. Those cases are relatively straightforward; we pay a room fee and otherwise do what we would normally do.

But sometimes the school district wants a 100-level class offered to its students, on its premises, during its normal school day. The logic, which makes sense to me, is that rather than simulating college with an AP or IB class, why not just teach the real thing? Transcripted credits often do better in transfer than do, say, AP scores, which many colleges accept for placement but not credit. Even better, when they bring in a real college professor, they bring in college level expectations for the students. And the choices tend to be greater, since we offer classes in subjects for which AP tests don’t exist (as far as I know).

We’ve run into some logistical issues, though, and this is where I’m hoping some folks have found elegant solutions.

We knew, going in, that the semesters didn’t align cleanly. (For example, our classes end in mid-May, but theirs run well into June.) That’s an issue, but hardly a deal-breaker. High schools also generally prefer to run classes five days a week in bite-size chunks of time; again, not our preferred method -- especially from a staffing perspective -- but not a surprise, either.

Textbooks take some diplomacy. Students (and parents) in high school are accustomed to getting their books for free. Colleges are accustomed to referring students to bookstores to buy their own. When you’re running a college course in a high school, you need to address the book purchasing issue upfront. Will the district pay, or will the students? Do they have to go somewhere, will they be provided in class, or can they order online?

What we didn’t anticipate as much as we should have was the issue of placement tests. Many of our 100-level courses require eligibility for English 101 -- that is to say, the ability to place out of developmental English. A disturbing number of the high school seniors who are motivated enough to sign up for college courses don’t clear that hurdle. I say “surprising” in part because of the merits, but in part because of the timing; if the prospective students don’t get their results until shortly before the course begins, and find themselves academically ineligible, then we can find ourselves in the awkward spot of having too few students to run the class.

I’ve floated the idea of just setting aside some seats in some online sections of classes we’re running anyway. That way, I thought, we’d get around both the ‘travel’ issue and the minimum size issue. If, say, six students out of twenty-five in a given Intro to Psych class are high school seniors, the class can run just fine. I’d even argue that they’re getting a more authentic college experience, to the extent that their classmates are primarily 18 and older.

But that doesn’t always meet the needs of the high schools. For reasons of their own, they need to have students in prescribed places at prescribed times, with someone who is paid to teach/supervise them. Turning students loose for a while, with the expectation that they’ll eventually find their way to the course’s site, doesn’t meet the institution’s needs.

Finally, there’s the awkward fact that when high schools close, they close. Colleges typically have admissions staff, registration staff, and the like available for probably fifty weeks a year. That means that there’s nothing unusual about, say, administering placement tests in July and signing students up for classes in August. That’s just not the case in many high schools, so even if we can align (or get around the non-alignment of) teaching schedules, all the support services frequently crash into each other.

I’m wondering if any of my wise and worldly readers have seen this kind of arrangement -- a college teaching college classes in a high school -- done smoothly. What’s the trick? Is there something we’re missing?

“Value”

2012-01-30T17:54:00.001-08:00

President Obama used the term “value” in outlining the criteria he’d use, if he had his druthers, in allocating Federal funding to higher ed.

First, the obligatory disclaimer: he doesn’t get his druthers very often. He doesn’t quite seem to get that the Republicans have no intention of letting him succeed at pretty much anything.

That said, though, the idea of looking at “value” is suggestive.

I’d like to look at the “value” of continued wealth polarization. Let’s also look at the “value” of the highest incarceration rates in the developed world. While we’re at it, let’s take a long, hard look at the “value” of wars of choice, the carried interest tax deduction, and HMO’s. Higher education has its issues, but any objective barometer of “value” would suggest that there’s far more surplus value to be squeezed out of any -- let alone all -- of those than you’ll ever get out of educating people.

That said, though, I suspect some sectors of higher ed should be more worried than others.

I’ve suggested before that there are really four categories of colleges. Allowing for the obvious oversimplification, they are:

high prestige, high cost -- Harvard, MIT, Swarthmore

high prestige, low cost -- UC Berkeley, Michigan, UVA

low prestige, low cost -- community colleges, state colleges

low prestige, high cost -- innumerable little private colleges scattered hither and yon, for-profits

Even granting that these are very broad strokes -- I like to think that my own cc punches well above its weight in academic quality, and I have the transfer stats to prove it -- the first three categories strike me as passing the basic “value” test. The fourth, not so much.

A standard cynical response would argue that “hither and yon” could be rephrased as “in a host of Congressional districts,” and would suggest that localist political concerns would prevent any real harm from befalling the college in so-and-so’s district. There’s some truth to that, but it neglects the fact that most Federal financial aid is channeled through students, rather than sent directly to institutions. While that has predictable and sometimes pernicious effects, it does mean that a blanket change to Federal policy can happen without singling out any particular place. Lowering the cap on federal student loans, for instance, would hit any college or university that charges above the cap; students would have to decide whether the particular college was worth it.

Over time, I expect that the most viable survival strategy for the endangered sector is to start playing a different game. Instead of offering an undistinguished bachelor’s degree for a premium price, start experimenting with different kinds of credentials. (I’m intrigued by the “badges” craze, for instance, and I suspect that it’s just the beginning.) If I were high up at a struggling private college, I’d seriously consider starting some conversations with the Feds about alternative credentialing and financial aid. Yes, it’s a break from tradition, but if sticking with tradition involves a fast slide into oblivion, the argument for experimentation is easier to make. Add value where you can, even if it isn’t where you initially had in mind.

With cost becoming an ever-more-serious consideration, the only way I see that fourth sector surviving is by changing its value proposition. That may not be the intent of the “reforms,” but I’ll take a happy unintended consequence. If the veiled threat of oblivion spurs innovation in one sector, and that innovation spreads as it catches on, so much the better. It wouldn’t be the first time that a problematic idea had a happy outcome.

In the meantime, let’s talk about the “value” of those tax cuts for the one percent...

Accidental Productivity

2012-01-29T18:11:00.001-08:00

Work doesn’t always look like work.

Over the last week, I’ve had a couple of long, meandering conversations with professors as they’ve returned for the Spring. One was completely spontaneous, and the other was a focused discussion that quickly and thoroughly overran its purpose. They were the kinds of discussions that can only happen before the crush of classes gets fully under way -- deadlines aren’t looming yet, students aren’t hunting them yet, and everybody is still relatively well-rested. It’s a brief window.

In the moment, they both pretty much felt like goofing off. And I won’t deny that some of the discussion was basically shooting the breeze.

But they both helped me understand some issues that a more purposeful inquiry wouldn’t have.

I won’t violate any confidences by spelling out the issues, so I’ll give a parallel. For many, many years, I used to wonder why the Catholic church insists on teaching rules that it knows perfectly well don’t work, like the bans on contraception and homosexuality. Like the Unitarian liberal that I basically am, I could rattle off the perverse consequences of those prohibitions, and have wondered with frustration why the church continued to stick to its guns even in the face of mountains of evidence.

Then, a few years ago, someone explained to me that failure is the point. Failure brings guilt, which requires forgiveness and inspires a need for validation. (“Don’t make the same mistakes I made...”) The impossibility of actually following the rules was a feature, not a bug. In that light, my uses of mountains of evidence were either beside the point or actually counterproductive.

In both of the recent discussions, I came to understand that some issues on campus that struck me as obvious were only obvious if you took them literally. If you instead took them as “statements” indicative of “identity,” then suddenly my well-reasoned and empirically accurate objections didn’t quite stick. They weren’t “wrong,” any more than the evidence-based objections to banning birth control were “wrong,” but they answered a different question.

Getting to that realization, though, had to happen indirectly. People don’t always have fully developed explanations for why they think the things they do; sometimes you can only get at it indirectly and even accidentally.

That kind of planning for accidents -- making yourself accident-prone -- is hard to reduce to a schedule or a cost-benefit analysis. Some conversations lead nowhere, and it’s certainly possible to veer off into rants, hobbyhorses, or Grand Unified Theories of Everything. In practice, it’s often a fine line between “productive wandering” and “goofing off.” These useful moments came surrounded by moments discussing Tim Tebow, the ethics of the honey badger (“Honey badger don’t care! He takes what he wants!”), and what it must be like to work in the HR department on the Death Star.

Yes, I’m a little nerdy.

Moments like these strike me as both necessary and difficult to encourage. They happen when people have time, but are still physically around. They require a level of personal comfort, and a willingness to put in a chunk of time without any specific agenda or hope of payoff. They require enough slack in the system for people to be human.

As budgets tighten and accountability measures proliferate, I hope we’re able to keep enough slack in the system to allow smart people to have actual conversations without “action items” or “strategic goals” or “measurable outcomes.” Sometimes, the most productive moments happen in the gaps, by accident, precisely because nobody’s trying.

Friday Follow-ups

2012-01-26T18:19:00.001-08:00

A few follow-ups to issues that came up this week:

In response to the “rejection” post earlier this week, one commenter suggested that ageism is rampant in faculty hiring. S/he offered no particular evidence for the claim, but stated it as a sort of “everybody knows.”

Like many “everybody knows” claims, I haven’t seen it. Over the past several years, my college has hired faculty in their twenties and faculty in their sixties, with many in between. The processes for screening applicants are rigorous enough that it’s hard to imagine that kind of bias making itself felt very often. At my previous college, the same was true.

That’s not to say that my own experience is universal, obviously, but it does make me wonder about the pre-emptive certainty of the claim, and the purpose served by asserting it. Presumably, if the practice were ubiquitous, I would have seen it by now. Instead, the charge gets thrown around, but without proof. It’s hard to prove a negative, of course, but the charge feels a little like working the referee.

If anything, I’d think the valid concern would go the other way. With colleges adopting “tiered” benefits packages based on date of hire, newer employees will never get the level of benefits of their elders. That sure smells like age discrimination to me...

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In reference to yesterday’s post about cost (among other things), a commenter asked how I could assert ever-rising costs for colleges in the face of flat salaries for faculty.

That’s an easy one. Costs include much more than salaries.

The elephant in the room for any discussion of labor costs is health insurance. When the cost of employer-provided insurance goes up, then labor costs go up, even if salaries remain flat. The employee might not feel it, but the employer absolutely does. From the employer’s perspective, an increase in the cost of benefits is no different than a raise.

This is why I pull out what little hair I still have whenever I read the New Faculty Majority’s advocacy of the “Vancouver model” for paying adjuncts. Vancouver is in Canada. In Canada, health insurance is not attached to employment. If you don’t account for that, then you miss the point. Establish single-payer health insurance in America, and we can get a handle on the adjunct compensation issues. Until then, we use adjunct compensation to get a handle on health insurance.

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The IHE survey of provosts made for fascinating reading. The two findings that jumped out at me were the Lake Wobegon effect and the provosts’ views of unions.

The Lake Wobegon effect -- “where every child is above average” -- applied both to academic standards and the effects of funding cuts. Substantial numbers of provosts reported that grade inflation and declining academic performance are major issues, but only at other places. And funding cuts will reduce quality on their campuses, even though they haven’t yet.

Many commenters took those responses as evidence of denial. That may be, but there’s also a sense in which they have to give those answers. A chief academic officer with a conscience would resign if s/he thought that academic standards had declined on her watch. But if you don’t deploy the threat of decline in the future, it becomes hard to argue against further cuts. So you adopt a seemingly contradictory view.

The responses on unions were portrayed as negative, though I read that as a function of the question asked. If you assume that unions exist primarily to benefit their members, then the answers given necessarily follow. That doesn’t necessarily imply that unions are objectionable; it just means that their first priority is their membership. (The same argument holds about the claim that corporations exist primarily to make money. Of course they do. The relevant question is whether they accomplish a broader social good anyway.) I don’t see the contradiction between saying that unions exist primarily to serve their members, and that they’re generally positive anyway. Are they helpful, or self-interested? Yes. Just like corporations.

On Notice?

2012-01-25T18:10:00.001-08:00

President Obama has put higher education “on notice” that if we keep raising tuition, we’ll get our public funding cut.

To which I say, huh?

We’ve had our public funding cut already. Since 2008, an uninterrupted series of cuts has been the direct cause of severe tuition increases for public higher ed. If you want to stop the tuition increases, the first thing to do is to require the states to restore and then maintain realistic funding levels. (When referring to a point in time, the usual term is a “maintenance of effort” requirement. Otherwise, it can be set as a “grant in aid.”) When the states have cut back, colleges have turned to the Feds through the indirect means of raising tuition, much of which is funded by Federal financial aid.

That would be the Federal financial aid that is coming under attack, by the way. This summer the six-month graduation payment deferment is supposed to go away, the interest rate on Federal student loans is supposed to double, and students who place into college through the “ability to benefit” rules won’t be eligible for aid at all. Why on earth you’d want to start dunning new grads for loan payments in the midst of a recession is beyond me, but there it is.

So the “on notice” thing strikes me as a bit late.

If they want to do something intelligent and effective about cost control, on the other hand, I have a few suggestions. Plagiarize at will, folks.

First, don’t make the classic mistake of looking at tuition increases as percentages. Loan payments are dollar amounts, so we should look at tuition increases in dollar amounts. For example, let’s compare Rich Kid U with Eastern Podunk Community College. RKU charges forty thousand a year, and EPCC charges four thousand a year. RKU announces that it feels the pain of its graduates struggling with student loan debt, so it holds the tuition increase to three percent this year. EPCC continues to reel from state cuts, so it raises tuition six percent. In percentage terms, it looks like EPCC is the problem.

But it isn’t. That three percent at RKU amounts to $1200. The six percent at EPCC amounts to $240. RKU is the problem. EPCC is part of the solution.

Second, kill the credit hour dead. I’ve addressed this many times before, so I’ll keep it short here. If you define your product in units of time, then you will never -- by definition -- increase productivity. Ever. Without productivity gains, cost increases in excess of inflation aren’t just predictable; they’re mathematically inevitable. (Economists call it “Baumol’s cost disease.”)

Third, resist the temptation to replace tuition with tithes. Out in California, Mark Yudof has generated some sympathetic press by proposing that students pay after the fact, using a set percentage of their post-graduation salaries. The humanitarian appeal is based on the fact that new grads usually don’t make much money, so using a percentage cuts some slack in the early years.

But the tithe model has serious flaws. First, and most basically, it decouples the amount of aid received from the amount paid back. Over time, that’ll start to smell like welfare, and we know what happens to welfare programs. Second, it assumes -- falsely -- that everyone who gets loans actually graduates. As annoying as loan payments are a decade down the line, they’re that much worse if you don’t even have a degree to show for them. Finally, Americans’ credit card habits suggest that “buy now, pay later” leads to overspending now. In the moment, the tithe model can resemble a blank check. This does not bode well for cost control.

The way to control costs is to cap aid upfront, and to require colleges that charge above that to make up the difference themselves whenever there’s demonstrated need. If aid is capped at, say, ten thousand a year for a full-time student, then EPCC can do its six percent increase without much issue, but RKU has to ask itself some hard questions.

Finally, we need to make a decision as a polity. Do we want to direct resources to students to use as free agents, accreting credits wherever and however they see fit? Or do we want high-quality, low-cost institutions? Because it’s one or the other.

The consumerist, “DIY U” model suggests funneling aid through students, and letting them choose what they want. As a consequence, institutions lose their own funding. They make up the difference through a combination of service cuts and cost increases.

If we want high-quality, low-cost institutions, we have to subsidize them. This is just a basic fact of life.

For evidence, look at the for-profits. They charge considerably more than the publics, and offer a good bit less. That’s what the absence of a subsidy forces. The ideologically-driven fantasy that the market will magically make everything better simply doesn’t work for public goods, like having an educated workforce and citizenry. That’s because they capture too little of the positive externalities they generate.

You want quality colleges at affordable tuition levels? Me, too. It’s not that hard. Break the credit hour, abandon the fantasies of market-driven bounty and/or titheing, and commit to subsidies that actually meet the need. Yes, there are some basic structural reforms within higher ed that would help -- longtime readers know a few of my favorites -- but first things first. If you want affordability, you have to spread costs around.

What you absolutely do NOT do is move to a consumer model. The last thirty years provide ample evidence of that. I know this isn’t popular in the culture right now, but institutions matter. Resorting to the quasi-libertarian fantasy of the almighty empowered consumer will result, inevitably, in systematically underfunded public goods. There’s a philosophical position that says “and a good thing, too...” -- let’s have that debate. But let’s have the debate that acknowledges the costs, rather than one presuming some sort of magical harmony of interest. If you tell public colleges to act like businesses, don’t complain when they act like the colleges that actually are.

Thoughts on Workforce Development

2012-01-24T18:09:00.001-08:00

What does workforce development look like?

The question is becoming more important as the term is gaining political steam.

Politicians like to offer workforce development as an answer to the recession. The idea is that if the folks without jobs had the skills to get the jobs that are going unfilled, then everybody would win. Which is true, as far as it goes.

But it’s dangerous to expect too much of the “train the unemployed” strategy.

Too narrow a focus on workforce development usually has the effect of neglecting the ‘transfer’ function of community colleges. Yes, community colleges can provide short-term training, but they can also provide the first two years of a four-year degree. For students who are concerned about their debt loads, this can be a very attractive option. The second word in “community college” is “college,” which is easy to forget when the political discourse reduces community colleges to training centers.

Some of us like to think that the transfer role is, in fact, a form of workforce development. When a student from a shaky background finds her footing at the community college and eventually transfers for the four-year degree -- and sometimes more than that -- she becomes eligible for jobs she never could have attained without the degree. That’s a potent, if slow, form of workforce development. Conceptually, there’s no reason that transfer couldn’t be considered a part of the workforce development role, but in practical terms it’s usually considered separately. That’s a mistake.

Still, even if everyone agreed on a broad definition, we’d still face some pretty serious issues.

-- The catastrophic increases in incarceration rates since the 1980s have done more than just starve public higher education of resources, though they have certainly done that. They’ve also generated a tremendous number of low-skilled adults with criminal records. Many of the jobs that pay a decent wage aren’t open to people with criminal records, even if they’ve completed a training program. While I certainly support a more discerning approach to criminal justice, it’s hard to know what to offer the folks who’ve already been snagged in the current system. Training them for jobs they can’t get doesn’t strike me as the answer, though.

-- Picking market winners isn’t easy. This year’s hot field is next year’s cold one; knowing in advance what will be hot is usually educated guesswork. I’m fairly sure that neurosurgeons and Ph.D. computer scientists will still do well, but that’s not terribly helpful at this level. The most predictable lower-level workforce needs are actually the skills we expect students to pick up in their general education courses: effective communication, the ability to see the big picture, enough quantitative skill to know when an answer doesn’t sound right. Those skills are evergreens, and like evergreens, they take time to grow.

-- Sheer numbers. Yes, there are fields in which a few local employers need some people quickly, and the work lends itself to relatively fast training. But most of the time, the first or second group through exhausts the available openings.

-- Adult Basic Education. In many cases, the workforce development that’s actually needed isn’t so much training on this machine or that process, but instruction in English for Speakers of Other Languages or Adult Literacy. This kind of instruction is usually separate from a college’s developmental track, since it isn’t necessarily geared towards getting the students into a degree program. Unfortunately, ABE programs are often run on a shoestring, and are even more precarious economically than community colleges are. If we really want to reach some of the hardest-to-place people, let’s start with the basics.

My free advice to any politicians reading this is simple: don’t let the fantasy of the simple, classic version of workforce development overshadow the big picture. If you want to improve the prospects of the local workforce, start with adult basic education, add short-term training programs, and beef up the classic academic offerings at community colleges for transfer. (While you’re at it, you might want to think about all that incarceration...) If you want the full range of jobs, you need the full range of preparation. Otherwise, you’ll just keep cycling people through training programs every few years, every time the economic winds shift.

And if you can come up with something practical for folks with criminal records, all the better.

Rejection

2012-01-23T17:24:00.001-08:00

This piece in the Chronicle occasioned quite a few comments, and for good reason. Non-superstar academics under the age of about 60 typically have plenty of good (and bad) rejection stories. This post is an attempt to look at rejection from the other side.

(That’s not to deny that I’ve had my own fair share of rejections, with varying levels of grace. But those stories are legion on the blogosphere; I’m hoping to contribute some clarity as to why they sometimes happen the way they do.)

As many places have, my college has purchased and used an online applicant screening system for the first cut. Applicants enter some basic information, and have to certify (or not) that they meet each of the minimum requirements stated in the posting. They also have the chance to self-identify as a member of one of the specified underrepresented groups, if applicable.

Applicants who don’t have the minima are immediately disqualified. If the ad says “Master’s degree or higher in xxx discipline,” and you have a bachelor’s, you’re out. Those notices are prewritten templates, and they’re quite impersonal.

At the next level, applicants who seem to meet the minima have their applications read by the search committee. Depending on the position, the level of selectivity at this point can vary tremendously. For faculty positions in, say, Nursing, the struggle is just to find a decently sized pool. For faculty positions in the evergreen disciplines, it’s much more about winnowing the pile down. The task at this point is to decide who to invite to campus for a first interview.

The role of affirmative action, at this point, is to ensure that any members of underrepresented groups who meet the minimum qualifications get first-round interviews. (That requirement gets refined when the numbers become unwieldy; we’re not doing forty first-round interviews for anything.) Those who don’t meet the minima don’t get interviewed.

Applicants whose packages get read, but who don’t get interviews, get impersonal rejections. That’s largely a function of time. For a typical faculty search, we’ll have 80 to 100 applications, of which probably 50 meet the first-level screen. (For English and certain humanities fields, double those.) There’s no reasonable way to craft personalized rejections for fifty different people. And it’s not at all clear, at this point, what the incentive to do that would be.

I know I’ll get flamed for this, but it’s the damn truth: there are people in this world who will attempt to use litigation as a weapon. A generic rejection offers no ammunition; a personalized one fairly screams to be used in court. It’s much safer to say something like “we received many excellent applications...best of luck in your future endeavors” than to say something like “other people had more relevant experience than you.”

The game changes slightly with the applicants who get interviewed. First-round interviews usually involve eight to ten candidates, of whom three or four will make it to the second round. For faculty, the first round is where teaching demonstrations happen. At this point, rejections can be slower to come, since some candidates will back out at the last minute and you want to have a full slate of choices. In essence, some candidates are forwarded, and others are held in reserve as fallback options. At this stage, fast rejections only happen when someone’s interview led to a “hell, no” response. Which sometimes happens.

Second round interviews involve higher administrators, including the hiring manager and the chair of the first-round committee. (For faculty, they include the VPAA and the relevant dean; for staff, they’ll typically include the relevant VP and director or dean.) This is the decision-making stage, and it can involve its own unique set of delays. Scheduling a new round takes a little while, as does reference checking. There’s also the wild card of the time that the first choice candidates takes to think it over. That can range anywhere from “I’ll take it!” to “can I have a couple of weeks?” If the first choice person winds up turning it down, which happens from time to time, then we start again with the second choice candidate. Repeat as necessary.

At least here, candidates who make it to the last round can expect a phone call one way or the other. But even there, the calls are -- and have to be -- pretty terse. The more said, the more sued, and that’s not because the truth is nefarious; it’s because some people are willing to use whatever is at hand to get what they want.

In a perfect world, it would be lovely to have the option of candor with rejected candidates, at least when they ask for it. (“Can you tell me what I could have done differently?”) But even if that were possible, most of them would find it pretty unhelpful. With exceptions, second round interviews aren’t usually decided by glaring mistakes. They really come down to casting. Given the folks we already have, who would add the most? Inevitably, some of that comes down to professional judgment. There’s no way it can’t. Hearing something like “you didn’t do anything wrong; someone else just had wider range than you” isn’t terribly helpful, even though it’s often true.

Some methods of rejection are certainly worse than others, but at some level, there’s no way to make rejection not suck. With many qualified applicants for each position, it has to happen. And with the legal climate we have today, meaningful candor from the institution isn’t going to happen. That leaves boilerplate. I don’t like it either, but it’s a rational response to the incentives that actually exist. The best I can offer is that none of it is designed to be offensive or demeaning, even when it feels that way. And when it comes down to it, it isn’t about you. It’s about the institution. Best to read it accordingly.

"Middle Skills"

2012-01-22T18:18:00.001-08:00

“
If you know what “middle skills” are, you’re nearly as nerdy as I am. They’re the hot new thing in discussions of both economic development and community colleges.

Broadly speaking, “middle skills” refer to workers who have some formal post-high school education, but who don’t have a four-year degree. That could mean a two-year degree and/or some sort of certificate. Jobs that require specific sets of “middle skills” include all manner of technicians, alllied health positions, certain kinds of office work, and even -- in some jurisdictions -- law enforcement.

This New York Times story about why the iphone isn’t built in America (even though it was designed here) takes the popular position that the deal-breaker for Apple was a lack of workers among the ranks of the middle-skilled. If only we had a ready supply of technicians, it suggests, Apple might have stuck around.

Well, yes and no.

Yes, “middle skill” positions have been largely ignored in the popular and political discussions of the economy, and that’s a mistake. It’s great fun to highlight the story of the up-from-poverty kid who became a cardiologist and established a charity to help others do the same, but the far more common story is of the up-from-poverty kid who got an associate’s degree in criminal justice and became a cop. And there’s nothing wrong with that; we need police (and nurses, and technicians...), and a solid working-class life beats the crap out of poverty. It’s an attainable goal, and one that community colleges in particular have helped millions fulfill. It’s reality, it’s welcome, it’s underappreciated, and it’s a real contribution to the public good.

But no, it’s not the entire story.

The Apple story refers to middle skills, but it’s really about the ability to make major changes quickly. In China, the entire logistics chain is already there, as are tremendous numbers of qualified employees. Perhaps more importantly, those workers have no meaningful workplace rights. They’re at the mercy of the employer at a level that Americans would find inconceivable. The wages are lower, but the real issue is the ability of the employer to stop on a dime and change direction as the market dictates. That’s just not culturally possible here, at least for now.

For a counterexample, take Kodak. It was so tied up in the life of its home city that it couldn’t bring itself to make difficult changes. Last week it finally filed for bankruptcy.

What killed Kodak wasn’t a lack of middle-skilled workers. It had plenty of those. What it didn’t have was the ruthlessness to say ‘no’ to internal constituencies as the market shifted from under its feet.

I’m happy to see community colleges get some recognition for the valuable work they do in helping prepare some vital parts of the workforce, and in providing a realistic and non-exploitative way for students from economically challenged backgrounds to get a foothold in the middle class. And it shouldn’t surprise anyone that I’d like to see more support for that role, especially as older options for entry into the middle class -- unionized factory work, for example -- fade away. Besides, some of these jobs need to be done here -- law enforcement, say -- and really can’t be sent to China.

But at the end of the day, as important as education is, it’s only part of the picture. Asking it to do more than it ever could is just setting it up for failure. I don’t want to see it get punished for not being able to do more than it ever should have been asked to do. Kodak didn’t fail because it lacked an educated workforce. For that matter, the economy didn’t fail because it lacked an educated workforce. The issues, and failings, were far more complex than that. By all means, let’s give the developers of middle skills the respect they (we) deserve, but let’s not mistake one good idea for the solution to the economy. It just isn’t.

Apple for the Professor?

2012-01-19T18:43:00.001-08:00

Apple’s latest foray into the education market caught my eye. It’s promising, but I can’t get past some sticking points.

As I understand it -- and I don’t claim to fully get it -- Apple is making several moves. It’s releasing a software package for prospective authors, to make it easier to format books to sell on ibooks. It’s partnering with several of the major textbook publishers to issue ipad-only versions of textbooks in several basic courses, complete with interactive bells and whistles. And it’s making available about 100 courses from name-brand universities, though it’s not entirely clear just what “making available” means just yet. It sounds like more than just podcasts of lectures, but how much more isn’t obvious.

First the good stuff. Textbooks age fairly rapidly, depending on the field. Scientific ones need to be up to speed with the latest discoveries, technical ones need to be conversant with the latest iterations, and political ones need to keep pace with changes in governments. (At my last college, well into the 2000’s, the pull-down maps in several classrooms still featured the USSR.) That’s hard to do with “dead tree” books; once they’re published, they’re published. But e-books should, in principle, be easy to update. They could easily contain “quiz yourself” widgets, touch-activated glossaries, active links to relevant sources, and the like.

That’s in addition to some of the cool and useful things that ipads can already do. They’re great for journalism classes, since they can record interviews, hold notes, and even scan police radios. The allied health folk are tripping over themselves to get ipads for students in clinicals, since that’s the route hospitals have already gone. And they’re kinda fun.

But I’m not there yet. Before supporting widespread adoption across the college, there’s a host of issues to address.

The most obvious is cost, which I suspect is a dealbreaker for k-12. The cheapest ipads start at about five hundred dollars, and they go up quickly from there. Apple touted the low price of e-textbooks, but if you need to first spend five hundred bucks before getting any savings, I don’t see that happening. Then you have to assume some level of loss, breakage, water damage, and the like. Unlike glass screens, textbooks don’t shatter when you drop them. And any parent of young children can tell you they’d get dropped.

At the college level, the argument might be a bit more convincing, if the cost of the ipad would be covered by financial aid. Even here, though, the savings only happen if the student is saving money on a whole bunch of courses. (The current offerings are few and far between, though I expect they’ll grow.) If you use the e-text for, say, Intro to Biology, but then switch to dead-tree versions after that, you come out behind.

E-texts also defeat the used book market, which has historically been the way for savvy students to take the edge off textbook costs. If you have to buy ‘new’ every time, then I understand why publishers are on board, but the advantage for the student diminishes further.

I have to admit being really bothered by the platform exclusivity. If e-books were available as websites with logins, then it wouldn’t matter (much) how you got to the website; ipads would be great, but laptops or android tablets or even desktops would get the job done in a pinch. But for a college to force all of its students and faculty to work with a single vendor puts a hell of a lot of trust in one vendor. Some of us have moved away from Blackboard and towards open-source solutions for the LMS precisely to get away from the single-vendor problem. I’d hate to fall back into it on an even larger scale.

And on a really basic level, ipads lack keyboards. Students who’ve gotten around that by buying macbook airs or netbooks or low-end laptops would suddenly be on the hook for yet another expensive device, and would have to have both of them at the ready for various tasks. (I’d hate to write a five-page paper on the onscreen keyboard.) Even within the single vendor, I’d expect Apple to at least make versions of the texts available on macs. If I had just bought a macbook air for school, I would be pissed.

The “courses” raise a host of other issues, but I don’t understand them well enough yet to comment. As they take shape, I’ll certainly be curious to see what they include. As potential study aids, they might provide helpful alternatives to the Gates Foundation/Kahn Academy model. (Even now, it comes down to Gates vs. Jobs...) But it sounds like they’re aiming higher than that. We shall see.

Wise and worldly readers, what do you think? Do you foresee assigning ipad textbooks next year?

The Girl, Amateur Chemist

2012-01-18T18:15:00.001-08:00

“Daddy, I figured it out!”

I never get tired of hearing that.

The Girl got a couple of chemistry sets for Christmas, and we broke them out and started tinkering with them over the long weekend. They have the basics you would expect: a few test tubes, some rubber pipettes with squeezable bulbs, a measuring spoon, and -- most important of all -- safety goggles.

With the goggles on, she looked like Snoopy in his World War One Flying Ace ensemble. She loved them.

Chemistry sets for kids are a little more sophisticated now than the ones I dimly remember. I recall a great deal of improvisation when I got a set somewhere around age nine, especially once my idiot friend and I figured out that putting chemicals on paper napkins and setting them on fire in the basement -- where the concrete floor wouldn’t burn -- was kinda fun. The experiments the set offered just didn’t seem all that interesting in comparison.

In my defense, I believed that if you already knew the outcome, then it wasn’t really an experiment; it was a demonstration. An experiment means you don’t know the outcome. We didn’t know squat, so we experimented. Admittedly, we were a little loose on details like “reasons” and “procedures” and “basic safety,” but hey, it was the seventies. Back then they put gas tanks right behind bumpers. We were just in tune with the zeitgeist.

My high school lab partner -- a faithful reader of the blog -- can attest that by the time I got to high school, any interest in chemistry was long gone. I treated it as a distasteful obligation to be dispensed with. I’m hoping not to pass that on to The Girl.

Since kids have a habit of doing what you do rather than what you say, I had to throw myself back into a discipline I hadn’t engaged in any serious way since the Reagan administration.

Luckily, The Girl was there to rescue me.

We set everything up carefully. We had newspaper on the kitchen table, paper towels at the ready, and safety goggles affixed. TG even briefly put her goggles on The Dog, just to see how they’d look. The Dog demurred. Science requires sacrifices.

Then we got down to business.

A word to the people who write the instructions for chemistry sets: clarity matters. The one set had a series of experiments in a pretty rigid sequence: experiment 7 required that you use the products of experiment 6, for example, and experiment 8 drew on both 7 and 6. Logically, then, a mistake in experiment 6 borne of an ambiguous phrase would render experiments 7 and 8 dismal failures.

Which, in fact, happened.

We went back to experiment six and tried again. TG conscientiously filled the test tubes with water to the correct height, added the right chemicals in the right amounts, applied the rubber stopper, shook gently, and watched as the liquid turned sort of pinkish. (The instructions suggested that it would be a deep red.) We walked through the instructions step by step, wondering why the next step that was supposed to result in the liquid turning blue resulted in, well, nothing. So we tried it again; still nothing.

At that point, I had to pick up The Boy from his friend’s house. I left, with TW still around in case anything exploded.

When I got back, TB in tow, The Girl beamed proudly and announced “Daddy, I figured it out!” TW denied any involvement.

TG had meticulously retraced each step, and interpreted each next step herself. As it happened, her sense of how it worked was more accurate than her fortysomething, PhD-bearing Dad’s. The test tubes beamed their bright, unambiguous primary colors.

She was proud. I was even prouder.

Rock on, TG. And pay no attention to the paper napkins on the table.

Handling Good News

2012-01-17T18:04:00.000-08:00

“How to Handle Good News” should be a handout given to every new administrator. It’s remarkably easy to handle it wrong.

Happily, I’ve had occasion to reflect on this recently. A couple of key projects are starting to bear fruit. These are projects that we’ve done the right way: specifics designed by faculty, assessment mechanisms built in from the outset, time and resources dedicated. If not for the requirements of pseudonymity, I’d devote serial posts to celebrating them. Pseudonyms being what they are, I’ll just say that it looks like we’re finally starting to make real progress on some longstanding and serious issues.

That said, it would be way too easy to kill them in the crib by celebrating them the wrong way.

The most obvious mistake is stealing credit. Anyone who has had the experience of the boss (or advisor) taking credit for their work knows how demoralizing that can be. It’s a pretty effective way of killing initiative, making the hard workers feel like suckers, and poisoning the well for years to come. I’d hope that anyone with brains and at least some sense of empathy, if not of ethics, would know that.

A more common one is reframing the project retrospectively to fit into an alien agenda. (“Alien Agenda” would be a great name for a band. But I digress.) If the folks who did the hard work feel like their efforts were hijacked for some other purpose, they’ll be wary of stepping up in the future. The trick here is knowing where the boundaries are. (This is where I’d expect admins who come from outside academia to run into issues. They wouldn’t have as clear a sense of the boundaries.) For example, trumpeting these projects as proof of the importance of outcomes assessment would probably strike many of the participants as betrayal. They’ve used assessment well, and that’s to their credit, but it wasn’t really the point. Turning it into the point after the fact would be bad faith.

I’ve also seen success celebrated in a really passive/aggressive way. “These folks did something terrific, unlike some people...” Don’t. Just don’t. Annointing some people as favorites leads to awful internal politics, perverse incentives, and tremendous misdirected energy. Praise the work, not the people who did it.

Good news calls for celebration, but it needs to be constructive. Notice success, ask questions, encourage more, provide resources, and for the love of all that’s good, don’t steal credit. Especially in public, praise goes to the work more than the worker. If Professor Jones did an amazing job on a course redesign, talk about how wonderful the course redesign is, not how wonderful Professor Jones is. Others can also do great work, but nobody else can ever be Professor Jones. Highlight verbs, not nouns.

The exact mechanisms vary by personality and context, but the principles shouldn’t. When success comes along, celebrate it in ways that might actually encourage more success. Let everyone get the message that they can be celebrated too, if they just step up.

And for the administrator, learn to celebrate vicariously. It takes some self-discipline, but it’s for the best.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen success turned into bitterness by being celebrated the wrong way? Alternately, have you seen an encouragement that really struck a chord?

Basing It All on Graduation Rates

2012-01-16T15:13:00.000-08:00

The Presidents of the Chicago area community colleges will keep or lose their jobs based on the graduation rates at their respective colleges.

This is an awful and great idea. I’d hate to be in their shoes, though.

The greatness of the idea is that it moves necessary changes from “gee, we really should...” to “we have to do this NOW.” The culture of higher ed is good at footdragging and terrible at saying “no” to incumbents. Some level of urgency is probably required if those cultural defaults are to be overridden.

That said, though, it could go wrong very easily.

It wouldn’t take much. Colleges could start outsourcing the most difficult students into Adult Basic Ed programs, cutting off second chances, and placing none-too-subtle pressure on faculty to grade generously. They could recruit from different (more affluent) areas, redefine ‘graduation’ by slicing degrees into cascading certificates, and give credit for life experience. Those would all result in relatively fast “gains,” though at considerable cost to the mission.

Getting good results the honorable way, though, will take years and resources. I don’t know how politically realistic that is, but it’s true.

Doing it the right way would involve beefing up full-time staffing among faculty, student support staff, and financial aid. (Delays in financial aid processing can be devastating.) This all comes at considerable upfront cost. On the curricular side, they’d have to take full advantage of the findings coming from the recent literature on shortening developmental sequences. (The CCRC website is a great place to start.)

Academic advising would have to become much more intrusive and consistent, with students sticking with the same advisor as they move forward. If experience is any guide, this may involve serious (and expensive) upgrades to their ERP system. It may require considerable staffing upgrades for advising, and depending on the current faculty role (and contract), there may be some contractual issues to address.

Then there’s the tricky issue of climate. Sustainable gains will require finding new ways to do things, which will require experiments. Experiments run the risk of not working; the idea is to run enough of them, with enough forethought put into design and assessment, that they don’t all have to work. If you have enough of them that you can afford to be candid in assessing results, then over time, you can build on successes and pare away failures. But that requires a few things upfront: resources for faculty and staff time; resources for assessment, IR, and cohort tracking; and enough internal trust that people won’t either flee the experiments or bury weak results in CYA obfuscation to avoid being identified with failure. If they fear that bad results will be held against them, you won’t get the candor you need to make real progress.

And that’s where intelligent management crashes headfirst into politics. The graduation measure they’re using is the 150 percent time IPEDS cohort; in other words, the percentage of first-time, full-time students who graduate within three years of starting. Assuming that any given intervention takes a year to get up and running, and then three years to show the first results, it would be a minimum of four years before the very first set of post-ultimatum data rolls in. In politics, that’s an eternity. And if you assume that some initial experiments won’t work, then it could be six to eight years before you get the kind of results on which it would be reasonable to base decisions.

If they’re serious -- which in the context of Illinois politics has to be considered a huge “if” -- they need to pony up some serious cash for the next several years and appoint some freestanding body to monitor progress over the next ten years or so. The kind of changes they’re asking for would be wonderful, but if they’re real they won’t be easy. (The old saying about home improvements leaps to mind. Good, fast, and cheap: pick any two.) My guess is that the impulse behind the new standards is a desire to cut funding, which doesn’t bode well for the results, but I’d be happy to be wrong.

Good luck, Chicago. If you take the high road on this, you could set a national example. If you take the low road, you will do the kind of damage that takes generations to fix, if it gets fixed at all.

Friday Fragments

2012-01-12T18:04:00.000-08:00

The blogosphere has been atwitter (can I say that?) about the latest study showing the economic damage to students of leaving underperforming teachers in place. Kevin Carey’s response strikes me as the most persuasive thus far. In brief, he makes the point that choosing not to change is, itself, a choice. Check it out.

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Sign on door of store downtown: “Saturday: noon to close.” Seems a bit abstract...

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I had high hopes for Now You See It, by Cathy Davidson. I’ve enjoyed her previous work, she writes well, and she has a great topic. And parts of it were quite good. (Her observation that students write better on their blogs than in their academic papers struck a chord; when I used to tutor in a writing center, I noticed that students who could write perfectly lucid notes or letters couldn’t write lucid papers. In both cases, the issue is less “writing ability” per se than fluency in an unfamiliar genre.)

Oddly enough for a book about “attention blindness,” though, Davidson doesn’t seem aware of the level of “look at me!” in her own writing. She positions the book as a counterweight to claims of cultural decline, which is fine and good, but the anecdotes she strings together are all variations on “I met someone wonderful in a wonderful location, and heard something great, and then I went somewhere else and did the same thing! Isn’t that great?” By the time she devoted part of a chapter to her ex-husband’s Mom, it became a real struggle to keep reading. I’m not sure what the writerly equivalent of “mugging for the camera” is, but that’s how it reads.

Frustratingly, the Peripatetic Pollyanna stuff gets in the way of a nifty argument. Davidson notes that we tend to see what we look for, and thereby to miss some promising possibilities. Worse, we get so worked up with unnecessary anxieties about change that we fail to nurture new developments when they most need it. Her history of cultural anxieties about “multitasking” is on-point, revealing, and witty; apparently, the hand-wringing over putting radios in cars in the early twentieth century rivaled the recent worries about cyber-distractions. (The best moments in the book echo Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You, which goes uncited.) When she gets out of her own way, Davidson can be engaging and incisive. Inside this often-annoying book is a brilliant kindle single screaming to get out. I just wish she could have seen it.

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The big news out of CES this year was “ultrabooks.” Aside from the cheesy name, these strike me as wildly wonderful if they cost about half of what they cost. For what they cost, not so much.

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Okay, this probably says more about me, but what SHOULD have been the big news out of CES was an actual replicator. Yes, it’s version 1.0, but damn. Give it a couple of iterations, and it could be a monster. Draw a design, pour in the plastic, and presto, you have a prototype! Add voice activation and a teakettle and I can do the full Picard. (“Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.”)

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That last one may have been a bit of oversharing.

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I heard a rumor this week that Congress is considering making students who arrive at community college under the “ability to benefit” rules ineligible for financial aid. (“Ability to benefit” allows students who don’t have a high school diploma or a GED a chance to test in.) My first thought was that we can finally stop coddling all those independently wealthy high school dropouts. Upon reflection, I guess the counterargument would be that they should get their GED’s first. If Congress is willing and able to fund a robust GED preparation system -- adult basic education for all who need it -- then I withdraw my objection. If not, I’m appalled.

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Poetry, by The Girl:

We sit on benches
we sometimes use wrenches
from our gear boxes
‘cause we’re hard-workin’ foxes!

She was completing a workbook assignment that asked her to use plurals that end in “-es.” I’d give full credit for that...

Growing Into the Role

2012-01-11T17:49:00.001-08:00

If you had to apply for the job you have now, under current criteria, would you be qualified?

Would you have been qualified for each job along the way?

These questions hit me earlier this week as I was reviewing job descriptions for some positions we hope to post soon. Over the years, the job descriptions have become ever more particular, and the drafts of the postings reflected that. Since our postings typically separate “required” qualifications from “preferred” ones, over time, many of the “preferred” ones have made their way over to “required.”

In a way, that’s good. Over time, we’ve become clearer on what the jobs actually entail, and have written descriptions and postings that reflect the background that we honestly think the right candidate would have. Any candidate who actually meets every condition in the current draft should surely be capable of doing the job well. But that person is probably looking for a job a level higher.

A tightly defined posting makes the first-cut screening easier, but it does so by rejecting some people who probably could have done the job quite well. Do we really need five years experience, or would three years do for the right person? If we require supervisory experience for first-level supervisors, how could staff in the area ever break through?

“Rigorous” and “rigid” can shade into each other if we aren’t careful.

This is becoming more of an issue as the generation that built community colleges retires. Years of minimal hiring and a certain amount of, um, how to say this politely, blocking of the pipeline, have left a thin bench. Frequently, the younger folks simply don’t have the levels of experience of their predecessors, since their predecessors were hired early when the barriers to entry were far lower.

That’s not a shot at anybody; it’s just a description of how things worked. I noticed it when I left Proprietary U; the ad to replace me listed a level of experience that would have ruled me out as a candidate. That wasn’t a backhanded criticism; it was just that they were trying to match the rules elsewhere. Had they made that move a few years earlier, my career would have been very different. Since plenty of other places already had, plenty of my cohort were shut out of the roles in which now they’re faulted for lack of experience.

Hiring for talent, rather than experience, brings some risk. Talent is necessarily a judgment call, and frustrated applicants (or frustrated members of a search committee) who decide to get litigious or political can always claim that the judgment call in question was really motivated by something nefarious. (Racism and/or excessive anti-racism are the usual favorites, but there are others.) Bright-line rules -- even overly rigid ones -- hold up well in court. The squishier the criteria, the harder they are to defend in a deposition.

Beyond the legal issues, though, there’s the need for real mentoring. Lean organizations often don’t have (or don’t think they have) the spare time and energy for meaningful mentoring in a new role. It’s easier just to hire someone who’s already fully formed and good to go.

But those folks are getting scarcer, and new perspectives are obviously necessary. That means taking a deep breath, trusting some judgment calls, and hiring some talented people who may need a little time and help to grow into their new roles.

What If Colleges Ran Attack Ads?

2012-01-10T18:48:00.000-08:00

The rise of Super PACs and the glorious display of democracy that is the Republican primary season got me thinking about attack ads in other contexts. What if colleges ran attack ads?

Western State says it has a “tradition of excellence,” but is this excellent? (shot of cafeteria food) Or this? (shot of long line at advising center) Call Western State, and tell it what a craphole it is.

Taylor believed St. Somebody would help her get a good job. How did that work out, Taylor? (shot of Taylor with “are you kidding me?” expression -- camera pulls back to show her working the register at fast food place) Would you like fries with that, or do you want a real degree?

With regional variations, it could get ugly. A red-state version:

Dave and Jill entrusted their daughter’s education to Dead Guy College. (picture of well-scrubbed nuclear family) But some tenured radical there introduced her to women’s studies (dramatic music, reverse-polarity image of daughter) Dead Guy College: Is it worth the risk?

Invariably, some smarty-pants types would launch viral attacks on youtube:

“I’m Mike. This is Rob. Say hi, Rob! (Rob waves) We’re gonna search for a parking space at Flagship U. Here goes! (several minutes of fast-motion gonzo footage ensue, in which our heroes are repeatedly frustrated in their quest to park) Wow! Sure is a good thing I don’t have to get to class! That’s because I take online classes at Nowhere U.”

I’d expect the elites to hit back with passive-aggressive snob appeal:

“(wasp-y baritone narrator) You could get an English degree from Midtier State. You could. You could make do with used cars, studio apartments, and your very own blog. Sure you could. Or, (stirring music swells) you could get serious. (handsome man smiles, climbs into Ferrari)”

Maybe we should stick with the optimistic autumnal stuff instead.

Rationing and Rationality

2012-01-09T16:44:00.000-08:00

Apparently, a few California community colleges have taken to rationing seats. Since their funding is entirely disconnected from their enrollments – astonishing, but true – the only way the colleges can make do on shrinking state allocations is to turn people away. While most campuses have resorted to the easy and time honored “first come, first served” method of allocating seats, a couple campuses have started consciously rationing seats, giving priority to entering students and/or students identified as likeliest to graduate.

At the same time, IHE reports that at the meeting of the Council of Independent Colleges, a gathering of private nonprofit colleges across the country, the discussion centered around programmatic rationing on campus. (I couldn’t help but notice that the story didn’t draw a single comment.) One President mentioned telling her Board of Trustees that this is exactly the kind of exercise that garners votes of no confidence in presidents, as faculty circle the wagons to protect their (and their friends’) curricular turf.

I’ll register a mixed reaction to these stories, which strike me as basically the same story. They’re both attempts to bring conscious thought to prioritizing the allocation of scarce resources. In the former case, the scarce resources are seats for students in classes; in the latter, funding for faculty positions. But at the end of the day, they’re really both about scarcity.

Off the top of my head, I can come up with several different ways to allocate scarce resources. And let me be clear that I’m not celebrating the fact of scarcity, especially in the case of California. I’m just assuming that scarcity will be a recurring condition, and it would make sense for colleges to decide consciously how they want to handle it. Obviously, windfalls of resources that make difficult choices moot are always welcome and preferable, but sometimes they just aren’t in the offing.

One method is inertia. Use “first come, first served” for student seats, attrition for programmatic cuts, and hope for the best. This is the default method, and it’s by far the most common throughout higher ed. The advantage of this method is that it’s politically easy, and it works well when the scarcity is mild and passing.

Another is pricing. This is how economists usually recommend dealing with scarcity. In the context of student seats, this would involve raising tuition and fee charges until demand falls naturally to the desired level. From an institutional perspective, this has the added benefit of raising considerable revenue.

Pricing doesn’t work as well for allocating internal resources, though. A close variation would look at the profit and loss generated by each program, and treat losses as costs. Pick the programs that cost the institution the most – that is, the ones that lose the most money – and eliminate those. The advantages of this method are that it offers the most bang for the buck, by definition, and it shifts the discussion from unanswerable questions (“which is more important, sociology or history?”) to easily answered ones. The obvious disadvantages are twofold. First, it tends to favor the students who have the most to spend. Culturally, we’ve decided that that’s okay for private goods, like ipads or jet skis, but it’s not ideal for public goods. Since higher ed partakes of both, it seems extreme to base the entire decision on one set of rules. The other disadvantage is that it can easily lead to programmatic incoherence, faddism, and a loss of mission. If we assume that students don’t always know what’s best for them – anathema to free market absolutists, but common sense to educators – then we have to assume that defaulting to the way students vote with their dollars is an abdication of professional responsibility.

Alternately, a college could make explicit, conscious decisions based on publicly announced criteria. This could be done autocratically, through administrative dictat, or inclusively, through open discussion and debate. (Obviously, I favor the latter, though I know that isn’t always easy.) Either way, the college would have to decide – explicitly – what it considers most important (and by implication, what it considers less important). It would have to spell out its rationale, and justify its rationality.

The downside of the explicit approach is that it tends to generate wildly disproportionate outrage. (Witness the excoriation SUNY Albany endured when it proposed eliminating a few departments last year.) Cuts by attrition feel neutral, which can be politically useful; cuts by deliberate design, whether autocratic or democratic, necessarily involve targeting. It’s unsurprising that the targeted take offense.

As much as I hate the idea of community colleges turning capable students away, I have to welcome the clarity that results from forcing a serious discussion about priorities. If we can’t do everything -- the old “comprehensive” model -- then what should we do? The answer will probably, and properly, vary from one setting to the next, but it strikes me as the right question. And I’d rather answer it honestly -- even to the point of having to name who loses -- than keep defaulting to institutional inertia. Democracy isn’t always pretty, but I’ll take it over denial.

Thoughts on "On Being Presidential"

2012-01-08T16:32:00.000-08:00

Just in case my nerd cred needed any burnishing, I devoted part of the break to reading On Being Presidential, by Susan Resneck Pierce. It’s about the challenges and rewards of being a college president, with some helpful hints for people considering the role. Its major recommendations boil down to self-discipline (for presidents) and self-awareness (for colleges). The difficulty of finding both of those at the same time says a lot.

Since the book doesn’t specify an institutional type within higher education, it’s hard to know how closely it reflects the realities facing presidents of community colleges. Certainly most cc’s don’t deal with high-profile athletics or dorms, so those issues are mercifully absent. They also don’t deal with denominational issues in the ways that religiously affiliated colleges do. Historically, they haven’t done nearly as much private fundraising as other sectors, though that’s starting to change.

On the other hand, cc’s as a sector are very much at the mercy of state (and sometimes federal or local) politics. In that context, presidents have to be savvy about balancing the need to create a sense of urgency with the need not to seem too needy. As with the private donors Pierce discusses, there’s certainly an “educate the legislator” role to play, but the issues around that can be much more complex, given that a single state can have many different campuses, each with its own local leadership.

I devoured Pierce’s advice about setting a leadership climate. Having worked under several different presidents in my career, I can attest that a few basic choices made upfront have substantial and unintended ripple effects. Leaders who like to pit subordinates against each other, like Donald Trump, tend to generate all manner of unproductive internal politics. When I was at Proprietary U, the president there enjoyed putting people on the spot, seemingly at random. He’d actually stop people in the hallway and hit them with his question of the day. (On any given day, he had one question.) He seemed to think that he was keeping everyone on our toes; the actual effect was mostly just annoying.

For me, the unintended highlight of the book was her observation that “[f]aculty, students, staff, and alumni all believe to varying degrees that they have primacy...” It’s a pretty good description of administration generally, in fact. Maintaining an upbeat equanimity in the face of such complicated, overlapping, and often conflicting demands -- without losing a coherent sense of self -- is the considerable challenge of being presidential.

The undercurrent of the book is that the success or failure of a president is largely a matter of self-awareness at the point of selection. A candidate needs enough self-awareness to pick the right opportunity, and not to oversell. Similarly, a college needs to understand its own needs so it can select the right person. When it doesn’t, it’s likely to fall under the spell of a charismatic leader who will generate unrealistic expectations.

Pierce rightly notes that the experiences people gain rising through the academic ranks --- faculty, department chair, dean, provost -- are increasingly poor fits for presidencies. That has always been true at private colleges, but it’s becoming true at community colleges now, too. In my daily role, I don’t spend much time fundraising, for example; as states and localities increasingly leave cc’s to fend for themselves, the fundraising role is becoming more important. In light of that change and of the advancing age of presidents, colleges will have to start attending more intentionally to succession planning and leadership training. Some will probably look outside academia, whether by choice or default, but that brings risks of its own. (And as she correctly notes, there’s currently no well-known program training people from non-academic backgrounds for academic presidencies.)

She makes the point -- not unique to presidencies, I’ll add -- that “fit” is a very real issue. Different colleges are at different points in their histories and have different needs; a candidate who gets shot down at one college could be very well-received at another. From a candidate’s point of view, then, the important thing is not to try to be perfect, but to try to be a well-scrubbed version of what you actually are. Give an accurate picture of what you have to offer, and trust that eventually a college will recognize its needs in you. The best outcomes happen when candidates have the self-discipline not to try too hard to get the job.

The most disheartening part of the book -- other than her repeated misuse of the term “fulsome” -- is the discussion of life in a fishbowl. Presidents are conspicuous figures, and frequently people will consider their private lives fair game for judgment, informed or not. That level of scrutiny is one of the most common cited reasons for vice presidents not pursuing presidencies. Worse, the fishbowl effect often extends to family members. It’s one thing to sign up for a role that brings scrutiny; it’s something else entirely to subject your family to it. And having to “be presidential” 24/7 is a tall order for anyone; we all need the chance to be human from time to time.

Self-awareness is neither common nor evenly distributed. But it’s a worthwhile goal, well worth the occasional reminder. Thanks to Pierce for spelling out the consequences for both individuals and institutions for not taking self-awareness seriously.

Friday Fragments, Chock-Full of Linky Goodness

2012-01-05T17:53:00.000-08:00

The Boy got a 1254 piece (honest!) milennium falcon Lego kit for Christmas. He disappeared into the basement at 2:00 on Christmas Day, and re-emerged six hours later with a fully built ship. This, after having spent the morning assembling two smaller Lego spaceships. Given that TB usually hates to be alone and almost never goes into the basement, this was pretty impressive. At this pace, by the time he’s fourteen I expect he’ll have a fully functional Lego nuclear reactor going in the basement.

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Kevin Carey’s piece on higher education in California is a must-read. His discussion of the relative impact of budget cuts on the various sectors, compared to the relative attention each has received, tells you much of what makes American politics so frustrating. Small cuts at the top generate national outrage; turning away tens of thousands of people at the bottom generates a shrug.

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The Girl continues to amaze with her preternatural poise. At one point, just before Christmas, the following conversation ensued:

TG: I wonder if Santa and the Easter Bunny know each other.

DD: Probably. I bet they share travel tips.

Grandma: They both have to cover the whole world in a day!

TG: Santa has a sleigh, but the Bunny just hops.

DD: How does the Bunny get across the ocean? Those are some big hops.

(pause)

TG: Maybe he hops on a ship!

I thought that was a pretty elegant explanation.

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This piece details what happens when you shut people out from community colleges, like California is doing. Simply put, many of the frustrated applicants turn to for-profits. From a taxpayer’s perspective, this is penny wise and pound foolish. The students will graduate (or not) with significantly higher student loan debts than they otherwise would have, and much of the cost of the inevitable defaults will fall on the taxpayers. Others will simply skip higher education altogether. Some will prosper anyway, but in the aggregate, the opportunity cost of missed productivity gains will snowball.

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Just before the break, I had a reality check in the gym. I was getting dressed after working out, as were a couple of other men. One of them was a regular there. I’d put him in his late sixties. He’s big and blustery -- he talks in ALL CAPS -- and prone to conservative political rants. He went off on a particularly spirited one, loudly opining that “we should just go down to DC and blow up the whole thing.” I let him vent, having learned over time that there’s no point in engaging. After he left, the other man, who looked twentysomething and probably Latino, looked at me and said matter-of-factly “if I said that, they’d put me in jail.” It brought me up short, because he was right.

There was a time when I would have disagreed. Now, I really couldn’t. It was a passing moment, but I haven’t been able to shake it off.

Something has gone very wrong.

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This piece on banking is one of the more illuminating, and disturbing, that I’ve seen in a long time. It basically argues that the opacity of the financial system is a feature, not a bug, and that too much transparency would destroy the entire economy. The intimidating complexity of the system conveys a false sense of security, thereby encouraging people to take on systemically necessary levels of risk that they wouldn’t take if they actually knew what they were doing. Depending on your taste, you could read the banking system as Socrates’ “noble lie,” or you could compare it to Tinkerbell. Or maybe the Easter Bunny, complaining about his taxes before hopping on a ship to St. Bart’s.

Writing in the Office

2012-01-04T17:55:00.001-08:00

I’m working on the executive summary for an annual report on a major grant. Much of the report involves importing budget numbers from wherever, and I have help with that, but the summary part is my own.

Which means I have to write in the office.

Intersession is the right time to do that, if it must be done. The interruptions-per-hour are fewer, and with fewer classes running come fewer emergencies. But it’s still difficult.

Some people deal with that by coming in on weekends, or staying into the wee hours of the evening. But with my childcare obligations, that really isn’t an option. (Besides, if I’m around, I’m found.) Some people take extended writing assignments home, but between family time, any errands, the blog, and the book, I just don’t have much left in the tank by the time I finally get to it.

So I play distraction slalom, swerving from this distraction to that one without falling down. Ideally.

Office writing lends itself well to emails, since they’re brief and usually either reactive or pro forma. (“The meeting has been moved to room 240” isn’t terribly taxing.) If I get interrupted in the middle of composing a three-sentence email, it usually isn’t too hard to reconstruct what I was doing. (Exception: the dreaded “drafts” folder. It serves the same function as the vegetable rotter drawer in the fridge.) But if it’s an extended and detailed piece with serious money hanging in the balance, I can’t just write it on the corner of my mind.

The same thing held true in my faculty days. I had always assumed that the office would be the perfect place to write, but it really wasn’t; there was just too much going on. Students would drop by, colleagues would drop by, hallway conversations would linger...

In a real pinch, I could always just shut the door and keep everyone out for a while. But I’m not wild about the message that sends, especially if I’m alone in there. I’ll close the door if I’m discussing a sensitive topic with someone, but closing the door when it’s just me just feels self-indulgent. I try to save that for the most extreme cases.

Wise and worldly readers, have you found tricks to make extended office writing easier?

The Uses of January

2012-01-03T17:51:00.001-08:00

I’m wondering if there are other productive ways of using January.

Like many, my college doesn’t start the Spring semester until after Martin Luther King day. (This year, it’s actually the week after that.) And the Fall semester ends before Christmas. The college runs a smattering of intersession classes, and the popularity of that format is growing, but it’s a small fraction of a semester’s offerings. I think there’s room for growth in intersession, and I’m happy to work on that, but I’m starting to wonder if there aren’t also other things to try.

(I’ll have to stipulate here that I’m writing in the context of a community college. We don’t typically send large contingents to the MLA or AHA conferences, which I know absorb a good deal of oxygen in other places. We usually send more faculty to TESOL than to the MLA.)

Has anyone out there experimented with running structured (but ungraded) review sessions in January?

I’m thinking particularly of courses that move in progressive sequences, like math. A student who limped across the finish line in, say, basic algebra may harbor a lingering doubt about being fully prepared for intermediate or college algebra. (Names change, but you get the idea.) For the student who escaped the Fall with a low passing grade and some lingering doubts, I’m wondering if a January catchup/review session might help them stay on track in the Spring.

(Alternately, for the student who failed but came close in the Fall, I could envision an intensive review leading to a second shot at a final exam in January. The benefit would be that the student wouldn’t lose an entire semester by retaking the course in the Spring.)

It’s a variation on the “summer bridge” idea, but somewhat looser. Rather than a graded course -- which requires a certain number of hours, a set of assignments, and all the usual trappings -- a noncredit review could be adjusted to meet demonstrated student need. If you only need, say, eight hours of review to get up to speed, good for you.

The academic in me likes the idea of using the otherwise-fallow January session to increase time on task. Having students who struggle with a subject get some time to focus intently on it seems like a pretty low-risk strategy, especially if the students aren’t charged for it. Worst case, they’re no better off than when they started. Best case, they move from “doomed” to “back on track.”

The devil, of course, is in the details.

Pay actually isn’t the major issue; our faculty contract sets out an hourly rate for intersession work. If the reviews became hugely popular, the cost could become a problem, but I’d hope we’d get at least some of it back in improved student retention (and therefore tuition revenue).

The question that jumps out at me, not having tried something like this on any major scale, is customization. Assuming that different students have different weaknesses, maintaining some sort of customization while scaling up could be a challenge. Presumably, technology could help to some degree, but I’d expect to see real limits on that, at least for now.

So a question for my wise and worldly readers: have you seen a relatively informal, but still successful, January review system? If so, how did it work? Anything constructive would be appreciated.

Progress and Cycles

2012-01-02T18:19:00.001-08:00

As a writer, I’m a little jealous of the folks who write business books. Most of them only need one idea to generate hundreds of pages. I have to generate five ideas a week just to blog!

That said, every so often one of those business books actually has something useful to say. Over the break I read The Progress Principle, by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, and I have to admit that it unintentionally shed some useful light on academia.

The one idea of this book is that the feeling of “progress,” even when small, is a powerful motivator. People who achieve little victories are far more likely to stay engaged with what they’re doing and put forth solid effort than people who don’t get those victories. The major advice of the book was to structure work (and management) to recognize the value of small victories, and to encourage a sense of forward motion whenever possible.

And then I thought about semesters.

It’s hard to get a sense of progress as a teacher when you have to start all over again every few months. Just when the students are starting to get the hang of it, they leave, and you have to face a fresh crop that puts you right back where you started.

That may be one of the major differences in faculty work between a community college and a research university. Research projects can take years, and they typically have little victories along the way. To the extent that your focus is on research, that sense of progress may not be terribly endangered by the semester schedule. But if your job is focused on teaching, then your entire work world resets every few months. Over the course of years, the sense of eternal recurrence can easily swamp any feelings of progress. Add to that a hostile external climate – by which I mean chronic and worsening funding issues – and I could see where a certain snarky helplessness could quickly become a sort of cultural default mode.

I grew up in a town with a minor league baseball team, which I followed faithfully for years. Following a minor league team is a very different enterprise than following a big league team. In the bigs, you hope that your team stomps everybody else and that the players on your team improve. In the minors, though, there’s a natural limit to that. When a player gets too good, he gets called up. Minor league playoffs are often terribly distorted by late-season callups; a team that played brilliantly in the early part of the year may be a materially different team by the end, since its best players got called up in the meantime. In the minors, you couldn’t get too attached to any one star, since the better the star, the briefer the stay. It was a more complex, and frustrating, style of fandom.

Teaching on the semester cycle can be a little like that. Just when the students really start to shine, they move on, and you start all over again. Everybody knows that going in, of course, but it still makes it harder to draw satisfaction over time.

The way I handled it as a fan was to separate the team from the players. (As Jerry Seinfeld later put it, I rooted for the shirts.) I’m hopeful that some faculty are able to do that. Experiments in curriculum and instruction can take years to play out. In some ways, that’s a bug, but it may also be a feature. Getting some sort of temporal orientation beyond the semesterly reset may help replace some of the frustration or sense of futility with a sense of legible progress.

The book didn’t focus on academia, and I don’t know if the authors would accept my reading or not. But it seems like a deliberate focus at the cc level on pedagogical and curricular experiments over time could pay off not only in the straightforward ways intended, but also in a greater sense of felt progress and continuity over time.

Wise and worldly readers, especially those with heavier teaching loads: how do you handle the lack of a sense of progress that attends the semesterly reset?

A Wish List for 2012

2011-12-22T18:08:00.001-08:00

1. The Girl actually -- and I am not making this up -- asked for her two front teeth for Christmas. As she put it, utterly deadpan, missing her front teeth “makes it hard to eat apples.” I thought she had a pretty good point.

2. Some successful hires at the college.

3. A year without hurricanes, earthquakes, microbursts, extended blackouts...

4. The state finally figures out that “workforce development” includes sending students on for bachelor’s degrees, and some funding follows.

5. We finally get real, viable competition among internet providers. Actual choice.

6. The Boy gets at least another year of relative immunity to the inevitable cruelties of early adolescence.

7. President Obama remembers that he’s a Democrat. He forgets sometimes.

8. My wise and worldly readers have a wonderful year.

Program note: the blog will take a brief break, returning on Tuesday, January 3. See you in 2012!

Let's Play...Spot the Contradiction!

2011-12-21T18:55:00.000-08:00

It’s time for another round of every administrator’s favorite game, “Spot the Contradiction.” See if you can isolate the double bind that drives good people around the freakin’ bend.First, there’s MIT’s move into open, free credentialing. According to the press release, the idea is to enable not only individuals, but entire institutions, to avail themselves of MIT’s subject matter expertise without shouldering the cost. It nicely combines a response to the Occupy movement’s concern with student loans with a nod to MIT’s historical status as a land grant university. Presumably, an enterprising college could choose to honor MIT’s certificates, and could even use its online offerings in lieu of traditional onsite or homegrown instruction. Those of us who want to give our students access to the very best, but who need to keep an eye on costs, suddenly have a new, exciting option.The very same week, AFT-FACE published this post arguing for an "instructional loss ratio" whereby institutions that receive federal student aid are required to devote a certain percentage of their budget to instructional services and support, including full-time faculty, counselors, advisors, and other key academic staff. The idea, cribbed from health care reform, is to cap “non-instructional” expenses as a percentage of overall costs. Presumably, given the source of the idea, the beneficiaries would be faculty. When you understand the appeal of both ideas, and yet see the contradiction, then you are ready for the exciting world of academic administration.Cost control is obviously necessary. And the adjunct trend is obviously objectionable.But the adjunct trend is motivated primarily by...wait for it...cost control. The MIT model lays the groundwork for replacing underpaid instruction with completely unpaid instruction. As a cost control measure, it’s brilliant. But as a labor measure, it’s objectionable in the extreme.Welcome to my world.The external pressures for cost control are chronic and increasing. And the internal pressures to increase spending are chronic and increasing. Navigating between the dog and the fire hydrant is the task of the academic administrator.Sometimes, we can get grants. But grants bring strings, and reporting requirements, and project managers, and expiration dates. Increasingly, they also bring “non-supplanting” requirements -- you can’t use the money for things you’d usually use money for -- and “sustainability” requirements, in which you pledge to keep using your own money for those things you wouldn’t use your own money for once the grant expires. And that’s assuming the grant programs haven’t been desiccated in the first place.Santa, you know what I’d like for Christmas? An operating budget that lets me actually pay for enough full-time employees to get the work done that needs to get done, without having to hire a brand-spankin’-new project manager for every couple hundred thousand. That would be nifty. If that won’t fit under the tree, then maybe at least a return to the levels of, say, 2008. Until then, I’ll just try to stop noticing the contradiction.

&#(^&# New Interface

2011-12-21T10:11:00.000-08:00

Dear Readers, I'm sorry for the hiccups on this page this week. The new Blogger interface is giving me fits. (Among other things, it's eating my formatting.) I hope to get back to some semblance of readability soon.

Free, If You Can Get It

2011-12-20T17:16:00.001-08:00

Is a free textbook a good deal? It depends. Textbook costs are a real issue for students at many community colleges. For the intro to biology sequence, for example, the textbook and lab manual combine to cost over three hundred dollars. That’s pretty close to the tuition and fees for the course. For students who are paying their own way, or who work at minimum wage jobs to get through college, that’s real money. Multiply that by several courses over a few semesters, and the impact on, say, loan burdens is no small thing. Some universities are experimenting now with programs to encourage faculty to draw their course materials from free online resources. The idea is to help offset costs for students and, more cynically, to make tuition increases easier to swallow. After all, from a student’s perspective, total cost is the key issue. If a student saves a few hundred bucks on books, a slightly larger than usual tuition increase suddenly doesn’t seem so bad. If a college can shift money from publishers to itself, why not? The devil is in the details. Most of the examples I’ve seen rely on electronic resources. E-books, databases, and even selected websites (i.e. Khan Academy) can often fill in for paper textbooks. But they all require internet access on a device with a big enough screen. We can’t always assume that. We have computer labs on campus, but they’re frequently full. We have wifi on campus, more or less, but it still requires that the student provide the device. And when students are off campus, the cost of internet access falls on them. Given that students often do their reading and homework off campus, this is a major issue. Mobile broadband seems like one possible solution, but in these parts, the coverage is spotty and maddeningly inconsistent. (Annoyingly, only one carrier has good enough coverage here to be a viable option, and even that one is flawed.) Dead-tree books have the clear advantage of portability. A book that’s readable in the library is also readable in the cafeteria, on the bus, or at home, and at no additional cost. It doesn’t require the student to invest in infrastructure beyond a backpack and maybe a lamp. Electronic resources aren’t quite there yet, at least for commuter schools. (I suppose a residential college could make this work, given enough connectivity on campus. But that’s not my world.) Which means that the cost savings offered by electronic resources are predicated on an already-existing investment. If you already have, say, an ipad, and you already have wifi at home, then the savings are real. If you don’t, they aren’t. (ADA compliance remains an issue with cheaper delivery systems. I don’t know if the Nook is ADA compliant, but I’m told that the Kindle still isn’t. Ipads are, but they cost much more.) None of this strikes me as necessarily permanent. If mobile broadband coverage finally hits a critical level of ubiquity and reliability, then I could imagine some sort of leasing program for ipads with 3G (or, ideally, 4G) connectivity. But we aren’t there yet. For now, freebies are only free if you can afford them.

Gift Cultures

2011-12-19T17:35:00.000-08:00

I don’t think of myself as Scrooge, but this time of year the endless questions around “secret Santas” and informal gift exchange always crop up. Lesboprof’s take is particularly thoughtful.Having worked in a few different places, I’ve noticed that cultural expectations around gift exchange are strongly local. Rules that seem inviolate in one place would seem utterly strange in another; the folks who move from one to the other are expected to just know.I’m not a fan of expected cross-rank gift-giving. Having worked in a place where it was effectively mandatory, I saw it as an ethical time bomb and a constant headache. How much gift is appropriate? If you receive a gift, are you obliged to reciprocate? What else does a gift imply? (Gifts to the person who does your annual evaluation strike me as obviously thorny.) And it’s hard not to notice that strict reciprocity in gift expectations fails to account for different salaries. The folks on the bottom wind up getting hurt by that.Larger cultural issues obviously intrude, too. Not everybody is Christian, and not everybody celebrates holidays at this time of year. (I’m told, too, that Chanukah isn’t nearly as central to Judaism as Christmas is to Christianity. Apparently, Passover is a much more important occasion than Chanukah.) Those who don’t shouldn’t be coerced into playing along, and/or subtly punished for not. That should be obvious, but the whole “put the Christ back in Christmas” movement has overlaid a layer of reactionary politics on the entire question. In this climate, opting out or playing it low-key can be taken as the equivalent of open hostility. (Similar issues arise around Christmas decorations. At a public institution, it’s fair to assume that some of the taxpayers whose money is being used don’t celebrate Christmas. But there’s always someone who insists on going over the top to make some sort of point about a perceived hostility to religion. I grant without argument that the issue may play differently at a religiously-affiliated college.)Some places have adopted the wonderful strategy of organizing gift-giving for some local charity, and/or for scholarships for deserving students. That way, people who would like to give have a constructive venue for doing it, and those who would rather opt out have the choice. Locating the beneficiaries outside of the workplace does wonders for the ethical issues, and restores some healthy progressivity to the impact. But some folks just can’t be content with that.The new-manager’s dilemma is in confronting long-entrenched practices that really don’t make sense. The first person to interrupt the circuit of cross-rank gifts is often considered the jerk, even if most people silently breathe a sigh of relief. (Actually, that’s a pretty good description of administration generally.) And getting the persecuted true believer to take it down a notch is always a risky endeavor.Wise and worldly readers, have you found productive ways to redirect gift cultures gone horribly awry? Alternately, have you found successful ways to get the most militant over-the-top decorators to tone it down without causing a huge issue?

What Do You Mean, I’m Not Graduating?

2011-12-19T02:45:00.000-08:00

It’s the end of the semester, which means it’s time for some students to figure out that they’ve taken the “wrong” courses for their programs.

This happens every single year.

When it happened at Proprietary U, I couldn’t really blame the students. PU had an odd habit of changing requirements annually, if not faster than that, so it was easy to lose track. (It wasn’t unusual to have three different versions of a curriculum running simultaneously. The scheduling headaches were awful.) Worse, Home Office used to change the requirements without paying attention to total credit hours. The ADHD culture led to all manner of confusion, with the students ultimately paying for it.

Here, that’s less of an issue. Curricula change much more slowly, and there’s no issue of people in one state making rules for people in another without looking at the relevant regs. But still, every year, some students profess themselves shocked to discover that whatever lineup of classes they chose didn’t add up to a program.

In my first few months of administration, I was surprised every time the question came up. Now, not so much.

Typically, confusion arises from any of several sources.

1. Curricular change. That’s still relevant when you have a student who started many years ago, took some time off, and returned, with the requirements having changed while she was away.

2. Inattention to advisement. “My advisor never told me” frequently translates to “I wasn’t paying attention when my advisor told me.”

3. Inattentive advisors. Yes, sometimes advisors get it wrong. The most frustrating cases are the ones in which they get defensive and try to explain that they’re actually right.

4. Procrastination. Some students will try to put off their math classes until the last possible moment, not noticing that they’ve placed into developmental courses. That means that instead of just needing the one class, they need a sequence of classes that can’t be taken together. There’s no elegant way out of this, once it happens.

5. Changing majors. Courses that counted towards the first major may or may not count towards the second. Students don’t always catch that, though.

6. Scheduling. This is usually the easiest to work around, assuming you aren’t in California. Sometimes a student will need a social science elective on a Tuesday night, but we don’t have one she hasn’t already taken on a Tuesday. In consultation with advisors, they can usually find an acceptable substitute. (For a business major, does “Early Modern History” seem like a viable substitute for “The Middle Ages?” I took the position that it did.) If they play their cards right, we just fill out “course substitution forms” and call it good. Of course, the substitutions have to be academically defensible. One literature elective for another is typically fine, but I’ve shot down requests to substitute literature for engineering.

Where this approach falls flat is where students can’t get anything resembling anything they need. In a case like California’s, in which colleges have waitlists thousands deep, there’s often no reasonable substitution available. Happily, that’s not my world.

My free advice to students and prospective students out there is to keep a checklist of course requirements from your very first semester forward. When you see your academic advisor, bring the checklist and go through it. It’s sooooo much easier to make adjustments to courses you haven’t taken yet than it is to find funding for an extra semester to make up for that one requirement you somehow missed.

And for the love of all that’s good, don’t put off your math. It won’t get any easier.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen other ways that students wind up with courses that don’t quite add up to a program?

Attendance

2011-12-16T02:05:00.000-08:00

I’ve never really come to terms with taking attendance in college classes. Maybe it’s me.

Yes, there are good pragmatic, and even academic , reasons to take attendance. Financial aid rules require noting a “last date of attendance” for students on aid who drop classes; you can only get that right if you bothered taking attendance. (“Dunno – maybe Octoberish?” won’t fly.) Financial aid is important enough to both colleges and students that one does not dismiss this lightly.

Attendance obviously matters for any class involving group work. If half the group doesn’t show up on a given day, that leaves those who did show up in a bad spot. (That’s especially true if you have stable groups over time, as in the case of group presentations.)

There’s also a reasonable argument to the effect that showing up for class on time is analogous to showing up for work on time. Yes, some workplaces are more flexible than they once were, but even that has limits. (In my observation, the flexibility is usually in exchange for more work – the old “you can work any sixty hours a week you want.”) We teach by what we do; if we want to graduate the kind of students who can be depended on, the argument goes, we need to inculcate the habits of promptness in the course of what we do. That means requiring students to show up for class.

More recently I’ve been confronted with arguments from social justice. This argument relies on data showing that attendance in class correlates strongly with passing grades – one of the great “no shit” findings of social science – and suggests that “attendance optional” policies wind up defaulting to pass rates that correlate too closely to economic class. If we want to raise the chances of the least advantaged, this argument goes, we have to push a bit. That means requiring everyone to show up.

I can concede some truth in each of those, but somehow, it still just doesn’t feel right. (Full disclosure: I have the same misgivings about “college success” courses.) At some level, especially outside of group-based courses, I can’t help but think of class as a resource that students are given access to in order to succeed at their courses. Students who take advantage of that resource will tend to do better than those who don’t. Figuring that out is part of the process. If some student is a gifted autodidact, I can’t help but shrug and say more power to him.

My ambivalence is compounded by online classes. What exactly does ‘attendance’ mean in the context of an asynchronous online course? It’s getting harder not to notice that the trend towards more prescriptive attendance policies for onsite classes is occurring at the same time as the explosion of online classes, for which there isn’t even a place to be.

Of course, attendance policies carry with them the inevitable haggling over “excused” absences. In my teaching days, I hated that haggling enough that I just banned it; instead, I gave the students a set number of “cuts” they could have without penalty, and I counted the top three out of four tests. My argument to them was that in any given workplace, nearly everybody got some level of benefit of the doubt, but that it was finite; miss too much, even for good reasons, and people just get tired of hearing it. The great relief of online courses, paradoxically enough, is that they curtail the perceived need for surveillance (i.e. excuse verification) even more; either you got the work done or you didn’t.

This may wind up being one of those cases in which I just have to swallow my own misgivings and roll with larger pragmatic considerations. (Certainly I have no intention of messing with Title IV.) But it still doesn’t sit right.

Wise and worldly readers, have you found a way to satisfy the need for Last Date of Attendance and suchlike without getting too infantilizing? Is there a better way?

Ask the Administrator: Easy Online Collaboration

2011-12-15T02:42:00.000-08:00

I love this question. A longtime reader writes:

I was chatting with a colleague yesterday. As we talked, a common theme emerged: neither of us has found a way to do the following
1) Easily and collaboratively share and revise documents or other materials on our college’s content management system
2) Easily and collaboratively share and revise documents or other materials on our college’s course management system (or on other open-source course management systems used on campus) e.g create a moodle course for a particular committee or task force and use this as a space to get some collaborative work done on a project.
3) Easily and collaboratively share and revise documents or other materials on an independent webspace such as a blog.
As this came to light in our conversation we also expressed the same argument: the ability to easily and collaboratively share and revise documents and materials is one of the key things that we need to do on campus in order to effectively and strategically get things done. Whether it be a new project involving faculty collaboration on the development of a new course or the writing of a program review report within an instructional department, sending back drafts and forth with changes tracked ain’t cutting it. Yet, say, uploading a google doc to a campus webpage is clunky and doesn’t work for all faculty based on my experience. Likewise, while we’ve been experimenting with the use of moodle and other systems for this type of collaboration, we haven’t yet found one which is satisfactory.
Have you or anyone else out there figured out a simple and effective way to do this type of collaborative authorship which has been, at least to an extent, institutionalized at your college?
Also, side note—I think that our need for this is somewhat specific to academia. For example, my husband works in the corporate world. His schedule allows the flexibility to schedule meetings to talk about drafts of presentations, documents, etc. Especially for folks who are teaching a full load of courses, scheduling a time where schedules don’t clash can be incredibly challenging. Unfortunately, in my estimation, this would then have a more pronounced effect on the ability of faculty who are primarily teaching to collaborative discuss or address issues connected to teaching and learning. Without an easily usable virtual space for dialogue and discussion, it is really hard to move forward with these types of projects because it’s often not possible to find a time to meet.

I don’t have a quick answer, but I need one.

On my campus, we’ve had many of the same issues. Venues like blogger require either openness to the world or a level of password/username specificity that quickly becomes clunky. Moodle seems more labor-intensive than a simple task warrants, especially for people who aren’t already teaching online. Google sites aren’t awful, but they’re pretty basic. It’s possible to ‘share’ google docs, but the functionality is pretty limited. I’ve heard people swear by wikis, but they’ve never really caught on locally.

I’ve seen potentially interesting collaborations die on the vine because nobody wants to learn an entirely new platform. (One of them memorably involved sending “yams” to each other. Seriously? Yams?) Given the half-life of social media platforms, the learning curve needs to be short or people just won’t bother. And it needs to be both reasonably secure and not a pain in the neck.

Wise and worldly readers, I seek your counsel. Is there a tool that lends itself to the kinds of online collaborations that faculty at teaching-intensive places actually need to do?

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.

Long Term, Short Term

2011-12-14T02:13:00.000-08:00

Why hasn’t the Great Recession triggered a massive restructuring of American higher ed yet?

By all rights, it should have. It brought to the fore long-festering negative trends in public support, student loan burdens, tuition costs, employability, and whatever else you care to mention. But so far, despite plenty of public discussion and no shortage of of public pressure, we haven’t seen basic structural change.

Part of it, I suspect, is the differing timelines at work in what is -- let’s face it -- a very mature industry. Most states don’t finalize their budgets until the last minute, and sometimes later than that. (California just announced another round of cuts for this academic year! “California -- putting the ‘fun’ in ‘dysfunction’!”) That means that public colleges won’t have reliable budget figures until shortly before classes begin, if they even have them then.

That’s a tremendous problem for a semester-based business. Once a class starts in September, its costs are fixed through December. And once an employee starts an annual appointment in September, those costs are fixed until next summer. Abrupt changes are impossible to handle elegantly when costs come in big, fixed chunks like that.

Theoretically, a college could always decide to maintain quality by sacrificing breadth, but the internal (and often external) politics of that are frequently prohibitive. SUNY Albany’s experience last year was instructive. Merely floating the idea of discontinuing a few programs set of a political firestorm across the country. Watering down programs across the board wouldn’t have even raised an eyebrow. If the cost of program paring is a year of heated internal politicking, a vote of no confidence, horrible press, and eventually having to back down anyway, it’s easy to decide that it’s just not worth it. Until the internal and external constituencies are ready and willing to understand that sacrificing breadth can sometimes be preferable to sacrificing depth, I’d expect to see very little movement here.

A decade ago, I expected to see the for-profits swoop in and become the radicallly disruptive force that would bring change. That looks considerably less likely now. The better for-profits -- I won’t even try to defend the worse ones -- got a few big things right, like junking the agrarian calendar. But they never actually solved Baumol’s cost disease. Now that student loan debt is a hot topic -- and rightly so -- they’re at a disadvantage.

In most industries, radical disruptions don’t come from incumbent players. Change is too painful to endure when it isn’t yet obvious that you have to; by the time it is obvious, it’s too late. Even when the disruptions come from within the incumbents themselves -- Xerox’s development of the GUI, say, or Kodak’s invention of digital photography -- it takes others from the outside to bring the potential disruptions to fruition.

My guess for the next big disruption is that it will involve a move away from the degree itself. Alternative credentialing is the logical answer to Baumol’s cost disease. If you insist on defining degrees in terms of time, but the real world cares far more about competencies, then it seems like there’s an opening for certificates defined in terms of competencies. Once you break the stranglehold of the credit hour, all things are possible.

But getting to that would require either a completely fresh start -- as in a new institution -- or an unprecedented flexibility of new funding. For example, the certificates would need to be eligible for financial aid, or they’re non-starters. And in the early stages, at least, they should be “stackable,” so that if someone wanted to, she could accumulate them towards a degree. (Ideally, that would eventually become irrelevant, but it would be a short-term necessity.)

In the meantime, faculty workloads, union contracts, financial aid guidelines, and cultural expectations are all calibrated on an inflexible measure. The pressure is building on that, but it hasn’t broken yet. To the first one who succeeds in breaking it will go the spoils of innovation.

I’m just sayin’...

Twelve Ways of Looking at a Lego League Meet

2011-12-13T02:49:00.000-08:00

The Boy’s team competed in the local Lego league championships last weekend.

A few observations:

1. If you ever want to feel better about your looks, spend some time at the Lego league. I usually lament my bloated, balding self, but compared to some folks there...let’s just say that regular bathing puts you in the upper echelon. TW stood out even more than she usually does.

2. Although TB’s team is all boys, the kids generally were pretty well mixed. Since TG is only a couple of years away from competing, I was glad to see that she’ll have some allies.

3. I couldn’t help but notice that TB has way more fun with his Lego league teammates than with his basketball teammates. Different kids. Couldn’t blame him.

4. No matter how positive and worthy the cause, any kid-related large gathering gets old by about the fourth hour. By the eighth hour, I was live-tweeting my boredom.

5. Organizations need to make choices. Either go the “trophies are for the victors” route or the “everybody gets a trophy” route, but don’t try to split the difference. The awards ceremony at the end dragged for a full hour, with musical interludes, so they could give a dozen variations on “most congenial.” TB’s team got skunked anyway. Losing wasn’t so bad; they knew going in that victory would be difficult. (They finished fifth out of 21 teams, which isn’t bad.) But to then sit through an hour of consolation prizes and still walk away empty-handed just felt mean.

6. The coach makes a huge difference. Last year’s coach was a disaster, and the year ended in a humiliating flameout. This year’s coach was positive, engaged, and dedicated, and I could see the difference on a daily basis. The kids loved practices, and they worked together well. They were still unmistakably energetic ten year old boys, with all that implies, but they never turned bitter or contentious. Even in defeat, they were gracious.

7. I don’t know when the “Cotton-Eyed Joe” song -- and dance -- came out, but apparently, every kid in America knows it.

8. If you’re going to ban outside food so you can capture the revenues from the concession table as a fundraiser, make sure you have the infrastructure to handle the entire crowd at one time. I’m just sayin’.

9. Having learned from experience, this year the league added an ethics category. Judges spoke to the kids separately from their coaches, asking a series of pointed questions to try to suss out the teams on which the coach actually did the work. Perhaps coincidentally, I noticed a significant dropoff in attendance this year.

10. At one point, when everyone was sitting on the bleachers, the emcee asked for a show of hands. “How many parents here today are engineers?” It looked like about half. I’m guessing that if so many engineers think this is good training ground for engineering, well, they probably know what they’re talking about.

11. I was far prouder of TB’s team’s finish than I ever was of any of his basketball outcomes.

12. Next year, we smuggle in lunch.

Punching Above Their Weight

2011-12-12T02:28:00.000-08:00

Yes, I know, sports metaphors are inherently suspect, since they’re culturally coded as ‘male’ and therefore patriarchal and they subtly resinscribe the very blah blah blah.

But sometimes they’re really useful.

In boxing, “punching above his weight” refers to a boxer whose strength is greater than you would expect for someone in his weight class. Since size and power are roughly related, a middleweight who hits with the power of a heavyweight is said to punch above his weight. It’s a compliment; in essence, it’s saying that you overachieve relative to your resources.

Kevin Carey’s recent piece on picking high-performing community colleges reminded me of this old truism. The best performing community colleges aren’t necessarily those with the highest graduation or transfer rates; they’re those that consistently punch above their weight.

In this case, I’d take “weight” to refer to a combination of student characteristics and budget. Given a student population of x demographic profile -- age, race, income, even gender -- and a budget of z dollars per student, in general we should expect your grad/transfer rate to be y. If you did notably better than y, you punched above your weight, and you must be doing something right. If you did notably worse than y, it’s time to ask some difficult questions.

In that formula, “y” will differ from college to college. For example, I’m not shocked to discover that community colleges in South Dakota have some of the highest graduation rates in the country. Given the paucity of four-year options out there, I’d expect that many of the higher-achieving high school grads start out at the local community college, since it’s often the only game in town. In the more densely populated Northeast, by comparison, four-year colleges are everywhere, so community colleges tend to draw more uniformly from the lower ranks of the high schools. That fact, all by itself, changes the “y.”

Sports fans have been doing this kind of math for years. In baseball, for example, it’s easy enough to add up a team’s aggregate statistics and develop an “expected wins” total. A team that’s well above its expected wins total is either clever or lucky; a team well below is either snakebit or inept. By that measure, it’s entirely possible to say that the manager of a third-place team did a far better job than the manager of the second-place team. If the third place team didn’t have much to work with, and the second place team underachieved relative to its gargantuan payroll, then just looking at wins and losses won’t tell the story.

I’d like to find the colleges that are consistently doing better than their expected wins, and find out how they’re doing it.

I don’t hold out a lot of hope for this to catch on, even though it seems like a no-brainer. The winners in the current system have no incentive at all to upend the rules, especially when they probably wouldn’t fare terribly well. (Put differently: let me swap the student body at my college with the student body at Swarthmore, and let’s see what happens to graduation rates at each.) But if we’re serious about improving the performance of the masses, we’re not going to achieve that by competing to see who does the best job of keeping the masses out. Given that nearly half of the undergrads in America are at community colleges, coming up with measures that are contextually relevant seems like an obvious good. If you have x percent of students in poverty, and y percent who don’t speak English, and z percent over the age of 25, and you do a far better than predicted job for those students, then you’ve really achieved something. I’d like to find out which colleges fit that profile, and what they’re doing that I can steal.

I suppose one could object that this amounts to a kind of profiling, but I’d argue that it’s much more realistic and useful than pointing out to someone in a low-income part of the northeast that racially homogeneous states without four-year colleges achieve higher grad rates. The point is not to remake every college into a racially homogeneous cluster of high achievers; too many would be left behind. Telling me I could improve the college’s numbers by changing its demographics doesn’t help me at all; telling me who does better with the same demographics at least gives me a place to start.

Every College's Nightmare

2011-12-09T02:33:00.000-08:00

My condolences, once again, to everyone at Virginia Tech.

Once again, we will stand with you and learn from you.

Sometimes, there are just no words.

Filtering Applications

2011-12-08T02:29:00.000-08:00

A longtime reader wrote me a mini-rant occasioned by frustration at an overwhelming pile of applications for a faculty position at his university. As he characterized it, the vast majority of the applications weren’t even vaguely appropriate for the position, and he resented the loss of time in filtering through them all. As he put it,

almost none of the applications we have received have come from people who have the qualifications to teach in the specialty for which we are searching. And none of them address this in their cover letters. In fact, reading their cover letters makes it clear that these letters have not been written specifically to us, and that the applicants have done no—zero—research on who we are or what we do (google is your friend—or should be).

It’s becoming obvious that new Ph.D.s are being told (or are assuming) that they should just apply for every position in the broader field. Indeed, I am hearing that graduate programs are even paying the postage for their letters (although, since we accept only on-line applications, that’s not an issue). In effect, for these applicants, the costs of applying are very low. So they apply for anything and everything.

He goes on to vent some spleen at a couple of graduate programs that sent several candidates apiece, each with nearly identical letters.

It’s a real issue, though it would be easy for someone who has been looking unsuccessfully for years to mutter some oaths at the very thought. “So what do you want from me?” I imagine the frustrated candidate asking. But this isn’t really about the candidates; it’s really about internal screening processes. Like it or not, search committee members’ time is valuable, and after people have gone through the wringer a few times, even finding people to serve on committees can be a major challenge. Given the importance of getting good people to pay serious attention to the most plausible candidates, it’s important for the institution to minimize the time spent on the ones who don’t have a realistic shot.

(When those unrealistic ones are internal -- long-serving adjuncts, say, or trailing spouses -- the “courtesy interview” rears its ugly head. Some people believe that certain candidates are automatically or ethically entitled to courtesy interviews, even if they have no shot. I don’t subscribe to that perspective; to my mind, if they have no shot, the interview just gives false hope and wastes everyone’s time. But I know that view isn’t universally held.)

The most successful (and legally defensible) strategy I’ve seen is to divide the screen into a few steps. The first step can often be delegated to HR. Draw up a clear, short list of “must haves” for a candidate to be considered. (You should already have this in the job description and/or posting.) Instruct HR that any application that’s a clear miss on the required minima doesn’t even make it to the committee. If you require a doctorate in hand, for example, anyone who tops out at a Master’s or ABD doesn’t even get past HR.

Then have a separate grid for the committee. Assign numerical scores to each of several desiderata. (That’s where knowledge of subfields comes in handy.) Depending on the clarity of the criteria and the level of trust, you may be able to delegate this to the committee chair.

Ideally, this should mean that the other members only bother with the candidates who meet the basic plausibility test. Yes, there will still be issues with cookie-cutter letters, and with candidates who just don’t match in person what they promise on paper, but at least you’ll be able to whittle down the time commitment.

The other advantage of breaking it down into steps is that it makes the implementation of affirmative action easier. It would go after the second step. The way we do it at my college, anyone from underrepresented groups who clears the second step is offered an interview. That way there’s no issue of unqualified applicants getting interviews.

The usable tip for candidates here, I think, is to make it obvious when you match the criteria, and to address it upfront if you don’t.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen a reasonably efficient and fair way to winnow down the pile to manageable size?

Overloads

2011-12-07T02:42:00.000-08:00

Reading the academic blogosphere, you’d think there were only two kinds of faculty: tenure-track (or tenured) and adjunct. But that’s not true.

Some other types are well-known. For example, many colleges and universities have “visiting” full-time positions. These are term-limited, full-time positions off the tenure track. They were originally intended as sabbatical or medical leave replacements, and sometimes they’re still used that way. Some colleges have full-time faculty with no clear expiration date, but without a tenure system. (That was my situation at Proprietary U.) Monday’s story about Grand Canyon University treats this as news, but honestly, I did that back in the 90’s.

But then there’s the full-timer, tenure-track or tenured, who teaches overloads.

At my college, as at many others, full-timers who teach overloads get adjunct pay for the extra classes. (I’ve also heard of pro-rating, though never in a community college context.) From a budgetary perspective, there’s really no difference between Full Professor John and Adjunct Jane picking up that extra class. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll refer to the Full Professor Johns of the world as “overloads,” as opposed to “adjuncts,” but that’s just a linguistic convenience; institutionally, they’re the same.

At some levels, overloads are wonderful. They allow faculty to earn some extra money, which some of them really need. We already know they’re good teachers, so the quality control issue isn’t so urgent. (Amazingly, some manage to maintain high levels of performance even with workloads I would have considered herniating.) They already have offices and they already know the college, so they can provide the kind of attention that we may not be able to count on at adjunct pay. (Some adjuncts go above and beyond and provide that anyway, of course.)

But overloads do raise a few issues.

The most basic one is workload. When I have professors who routinely teach, say, 24 credits in a semester, I have to wonder why others claim that 15 is humanly impossible. Their colleagues obviously don’t think so.

Then there’s the dicey issue of entitlement. When a professor gets those extra, say, nine credits a semester for years on end, she often starts to think of it as her salary. And she will defend her salary against any perceived threat, such as new full-time hires. This can lead to distortions over time.

With department chairs, the issue can get even stickier. The temptation to self-deal in scheduling, so that the chair gets every section she wants, can be hard to resist.

From an institutional perspective, there’s a further issue with human frailty. If someone teaching a standard full load goes out on medical leave, we have to cover 15 credits. If someone teaching several courses above that goes out on leave, the coverage hole is that much bigger. The more you rely on any one person, the worse off you are if that one person gets sick.

The overload issue also makes it difficult to answer a superficially simple question, like “what percentage of your classes are taught by adjuncts?” Before answering that, I need a definition. Is John’s sixth course considered adjunct or full-time? He could decide not to teach it without losing his full-time job, and it’s paid at the adjunct rate, so that would suggest that it belongs in the adjunct category. But John is full-time faculty, possibly with tenure and certainly with an office and institutional support; by that criterion, it seems like full-time. Given the number and level of overloads taught, this is not just a marginal quibble; it materially changes the answer to the question.

(In a collective bargaining setting, the issues get even more complex. We have to specify upfront which sections are overloads and which are regular load, so that when we do faculty evaluations, we look only at the proper category. I can’t base a full-timer’s evaluation on his performance in an overload section. Don’t ask.)

A few years ago I inquired about limiting the number of overload sections that full-timers could teach, only to be told by the college attorney that I couldn’t apply a differential quota to people who happen to have full-time jobs with the college than I could to people who didn’t. After I picked my jaw up off the floor, the attorney mentioned that even if I tried, in the brief interim before the inevitable legal challenge they would just go to other campuses. At least this way they’re here, and students aren’t losing their travel time that could have gone to mentoring.

I’m not sure why overloads are so invisible in the popular discussion, since they’re very real on the ground. If anything, I’d like to see a more robust discussion of them so we can start to come to grips with some intelligent policies around them. In the meantime, some professors will claim that their existing workloads are unconscionable and others will routinely do half again as much without breaking a sweat. And I have to believe both of them.

Administration and the Two-Body Problem

2011-12-06T02:39:00.000-08:00

In response to yesterday’s piece about the lack of generational turnover in college leadership, a particularly thoughtful comment deserved a post in itself. “Shannon” wrote:

I think one thing that gets overlooked in these analyses is the two body problem. Many faculty are part of dual career partnerships - both inside and outside academia. That tends to limit geographic mobility or put burdens on the non-administrative half of the partnership. DD - you often mention the rubber chicken dinners; attending those meant TW had to take responsibility for the kids. I also believe she left the work force for a while because of the demands of your career - right? I think some may feel that's a lot to ask of a partner. I'd like to enter into administration, but my husband is also a faculty member and we have small kids. So, I'll probably look locally so he can keep his career; luckily, there's a lot of options around where we live, but without a faculty fall back, that creates a lot of risk for our family - if things don't work out in a new position, our two body problem will come back. I'll also probably wait until the kids are older; this phenomena is similar to the one in politics where female candidates tend to enter the ring much later than male candidates. Unfortunately, administration doesn't lend itself to work/family balance, and I think that helps to dry up the pipeline somewhat.

A few thoughts, then I’d love to hear from my wise and worldly readers on this.

First, no, TW did not leave the work force because of the demands of my career. She chose to stay home with the kids because she wanted to; it was a positive goal, rather than a retreat. (The fact that nearly her entire paycheck went for daycare also played into it.) I know that not everyone experiences staying home that way, but that was how it played out for us.

That said, yes, her presence at home makes my work easier. When she went to work and TB got sick, we had to do the sick kid shuffle, which any working parent can tell you is a stress bomb. Now when the kids get sick -- like this week, in fact -- it’s less disruptive, at least at first. (It gets more disruptive with each passing day, though, since she has obligations of her own.)

But the larger point isn’t about TW and me; it’s about the two-body problem as limiting the availability of Gen X candidates for administrative positions. It certainly rings true to me.

When academics marry each other -- don’t do it!!! -- they set themselves up for some real challenges. Finding a tenure-track job you actually want to keep is a challenge; finding two of them within reasonable drives of each other is much more so. Once a couple finds that situation, it would take quite a bit to dislodge them. (That’s even more true if they’re underwater on their mortgage.)

Since many administrative positions don’t come with tenure, they carry real risk. For a couple that finally won the academic lottery, the prospect of leaving that for a job without the protection of tenure is a tough sell. And even if the administrative job comes with tenure in a department, the spouse may be left high and dry.

Administrative careers often require moving in order to move up. That’s just a fact of life. If you’re in a college-rich area, you may be able to switch institutions without actually moving, but most of the time, that’s not an option. So if one (or both) of the spouses wants to climb the ladder, they’re in for some hard decisions.

Spousal hiring is a topic unto itself, of course. Suffice it to say that the ‘softer’ solutions -- polite requests to neighboring colleges to find a spot for someone -- tend not to work. If, say, the history department gets its first hire in a decade, just how eager do you think it’ll be to spend it on a trailing spouse it didn’t choose for itself?

Exactly. Some of those hires turn out well, but the resentment is real. And in this market, where positions are few and far between, it’s a much harder sell than it once was.

I don’t really have an answer for this. To require colleges to hire spouses assumes a level of loose resources lying around that generally isn’t the case, and it also becomes de facto discrimination against single people and folks married to non-academics. Tenure and higher salaries for tough-to-fill positions would help, but would be politically toxic. Sometimes it’s possible to move up within a home institution, and that’s great when it works out, but counting on it is assuming a lot.

Wise and worldly readers, has anyone found a reasonably elegant way to handle the two-body problem in administrative careers?

Leadership Crises Ahead

2011-12-05T02:40:00.000-08:00

As an industry, we’ll be in serious trouble as long as it’s taboo to speak the truth. The responses to these two pieces suggest that we aren’t yet ready to come to grips with reality.

Jeff Selingo’s piece on the graying of college presidents met with the usual and ritualistic accusations of ageism, which both missed the point and attempted to foreclose further discussion. Which is a shame, because it’s a crucial topic.

Selingo notes, correctly, that the average age of college presidents and senior administrators has been moving dramatically upward for some time; at this point, it’s noteworthy to find a college president under fifty. (Notably, many of today’s senior leaders started younger than that.) The generation currently in leadership roles came to those roles with a tailwind, and has presided over a serious explosion of costs. At this point, senior leaders change institutions with some frequency in a high-stakes version of musical chairs. When the same faces keep trading seats, with interim appointments filling in the gaps, it’s difficult for anyone to come to grips with major structural issues. So they don’t, and the game of annual tuition increases and budget cuts continues unabated.

It’s hard to break the generational lock, though. For one thing, the pipeline is thin. Decades of replacing full-time faculty positions with adjuncts has thinned out the farm system, so there isn’t a ready cohort in the wings. And nobody gets in trouble for hiring experience.

That can matter for a whole host of reasons, but the most obvious ones are demography and unspoken assumptions.

Demography is relatively clear: each generation of academics is more racially diverse than the one before it. The more interesting reason, though, is what a generation has in common. The Gen X’ers started their careers in scarcity, and have lived in scarcity pretty much without interruption. They didn’t catch the demographic tailwind of their elders. That means that, in the aggregate, they’re more likely to be attuned to the climate of possibility now. There’s no temptation to try to recreate a golden age that occurred when you were in preschool. This generation is likely to be more attuned to the new normal.

This other article from IHE suggests, hamhandedly, what some of the next challenges may look like. I have my issues with the piece, especially around its proposed regional typologies, but at least it suggests that the next cohort of college leaders will need a willingness to tackle some key issues that the current cohort has postponed. The catch is that dealing with fundamental issues will necessarily generate conflict, and some Boards won’t touch anybody who has a history of conflict. The “conflict aversion” playbook is dogeared, but it’s dogeared for a reason. From the outside, it can be difficult to distinguish the brave teller of truth from the arrogant jerk from the idiot who just can’t handle conflict. (To be fair, there is some overlap...)

Too often, academe slides from “shared governance,” which is a good thing when properly understood, to a premium on “consensus,” which is far more problematic. In a democratic process -- even if modified -- it’s possible that some people will lose on an important issue. But in a consensus system, there’s not supposed to be such a thing as losing. When difficult choices require that somebody actually loses, the resulting conflict is sometimes read as a failure to generate consensus. It isn’t, really; it’s a cost of coming to grips with reality.

A fair reading of the last few decades would suggest that the trend towards adjunct instruction has been driven by the desire for consensus. By offloading economic shortfalls onto people who aren’t actually at the table, it’s easier to maintain peace among the people at the table. (The same argument could be made about tuition increases and financial aid; it’s easy to raise prices when the students don’t pay the increase directly.) When consensus is taken as a good in itself, “path of least resistance” solutions that dump the costs onto people who aren’t there at the time become particularly attractive. Let that dynamic roll, uninterrupted, for several decades, and you end up where we are.

If the Occupy movement has taught us anything, it’s that we’re reaching the end of the “dump the costs on the next generation” strategy. If higher education is going to remain viable as a mass phenomenon -- I’m not talking about the elites here, since they’ll survive anyway -- it will have to start making choices. That means that we can expect more open conflict, less consensus, and a need for leaders who are willing to make choices. I just hope that the unthinking, ritualistic excoriation that Selingo’s piece generated isn’t indicative of how far we are from being able to start having honest conversations. If we don’t come to grips with the new normal, it will assuredly come to grips with us.

Friday Fragments

2011-12-02T02:28:00.000-08:00

Lego League is in the home stretch. TB’s team has its big competition soon, so it’s ramping up the practice schedule. The team meets in the coach’s garage, in which he has a massive robot obstacle course where his car should be. The team consists of a half dozen boys, all around ten or eleven years old.

The boys spend the first hour and a half or so actually working on the obstacle course, and the last half hour shooting each other with improvised lego weaponry. By the time I come to pick up TB, the geek-chaos is impressive.

Just walking into the garage, the “we will never get dates” vibe is palpable. There’s no rule against girls, but they aren’t exactly breaking the door down. Part of me wants to shelter TB against diving too deeply into geek culture, for fear of the social cost he’ll pay soon, but part of me is proud that he’s so un-self-conscious about it. He just really enjoys building stuff, and really enjoys being around other kids who build stuff, too.

He gets much more excited about Lego League than about basketball. I enjoy that more than I probably should.

Here’s hoping that junior high schools now are more geek-friendly than they were in my time...

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Meanwhile, The Girl marches proudly to her own drummer, too.

A few days ago she went to her friend Jason’s house (not his real name). Jason is a sweet, but very energetic, seven year old boy. Since TG play-wrestles with TB, she can rough and tumble when she wants to, but Jason’s Mom didn’t know that. So when Jason and TG started rough-and-tumbling, Jason’s Mom interrupted them to scold Jason for wrestling with a girl. As Jason stood there, sheepishly listening to his mother’s scoldings, TG flying-tackled him from the side.

I think she’ll be fine.

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Although Spotify markets itself as a music app, it works really well with comedy albums. I’ve gone through about a half dozen of them in the last couple of weeks, during drives to statewide meetings. After a serious discussion of important policy stuff, there’s something therapeutic about listening to Amy Schumer or Patton Oswalt in the car on the way home.

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Shortly after Thanksgiving, I heard someone actually say this:

“I don’t want to just stand here and thank everyone for their hard work. I just want to thank everyone for their hard work.”

Words to live by...

Too Many Daves

2011-12-01T02:48:00.000-08:00

Meet Dave. Dave doesn’t exist, but his real-life counterparts do.

Dave was, well, let’s say a “casual” student in high school. He got through, but his efforts could be fairly described as uninspired. When he graduated, he had a sense that college came next, though his concept of college mostly involved beer, girls, and sleeping late. Dave’s long-suffering parents agreed that college comes next, but didn’t see much point in paying big bucks to send Dave off to Compass Direction State or St. Somebody-Or-Other, given the palpable risk that a hangdog Dave would drink his way through a failing semester and wind up back at their doorstep bearing nothing but student loan payments and a lot of laundry.

So Dave’s parents struck a deal with him. They let him live at home rent-free and helped him attend the local community college for a year, mostly taking gen eds. In return, the agreement went, Dave had to do reasonably well academically and show that he was taking college fairly seriously. If Dave got a solid year under his belt at the community college, they agreed, then his parents would foot the bill to send him where he really wanted to go for his sophomore year. Dave spent a year at the cc, did reasonably well, transferred to Compass Direction State, and lived happily ever after.

Dave showed up in our statistics as attrition. As far as the government was concerned, he dropped out of the community college, and the only possible explanation is that the community college didn’t do a good enough job. Perhaps some funding cuts will bring focus!

*headdesk*

We have a lot of Daves. And we pay a political price for it.

That’s why I was so heartened to see this story. Apparently, the federal Committee on Measures of Student Success will recommend to Secretary Duncan that community colleges’ “graduation” rates should be recalculated as “graduation and transfer” rates. We’ll finally start receiving due credit for all the Daves who spend time here on the way to graduating from other places.

Yes, yes, yes. If we’re going to base funding decisions on institutional “performance,” then let’s at least measure the performance reasonably.

If you ask Dave about his experience with the community college -- I’ve done this with Dave’s real-life counterparts -- you’ll hear good things. The cc gave him an affordable chance to get his act together, and to prove to his parents that he could succeed in college. It allowed him to start out living at home, so he could get a little more maturity before jumping into the temptations of dorm life. He was happy to use it as a springboard.

The comments on the IHE story raised a few useful caveats. In the absence of a unit record system, for example, it may not be possible to get aggregate numbers on how many Daves eventually graduated from their destination schools, as opposed to how many just bounced around. And as Cliff Adelman pointed out, some students never really enrolled in any meaningful way in the first place, so counting them as attrition is really a category mistake. I’d also suggest that we need to have much more thoughtful discussions about the relevance of the graduation measure for people who enroll in ESL or developmental courses for life/work purposes, rather than for graduation purposes, but can’t get financial aid for adult basic ed.

But those can come next. For now, I’m just hoping that we stop getting punished for having too many Daves.

Ask the Administrator: Texting and Teaching

2011-11-30T02:13:00.000-08:00

I suspect this one isn’t unique. A new correspondent writes:

I teach at a community college and find that many of my students text in the classroom. My policy, which is stated on my syllabus, is that I ask students who use the phone to leave the class for the day. This doesn't seem to discourage cell phone use. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

A few thoughts, before I open the floor to my wise and worldly readers, many of whom have been in the classroom more recently than I have.

First, it’s great that you have a policy stated in your syllabus. From this side of the desk, it’s easy to stand behind a professor who sticks to the rules she set out in the first place. My nightmare is the professor who changes the rules midstream or applies them with obvious selectivity. A blanket ban is clear, easy to describe and defend, and obviously well-suited to a smallish class.

That said, sometimes there’s a gap between what’s clean on paper and what works in class.

One issue may be clarity. Those of us of a certain age -- sigh -- may think of ‘texting’ as included in the phrase ‘cell phone use,’ but some youngish students may see the two categories as separate. To them, ‘cell phone use’ may imply voice calls or web surfing, whereas texting is texting. They may think of texting as a less intrusive alternative to calling. If that’s all it is, then a little clarification may help. (And just having a policy on a syllabus usually won’t cut it, since students tend not to read syllabi. Make sure you announce in class the parts you want to emphasize.)

If clarity isn’t the issue -- that is, if they know perfectly well that you don’t want them texting but they keep doing it anyway -- then things get trickier.

It’s tempting to try to channel John Houseman’s character from The Paper Chase, but outside of a few select settings, that’s just not realistic anymore. And given cell phone ubiquity, student solidarity, and the reality of limited political capital, adopting a hard line position may wind up being more trouble than it’s worth.

Instead, I’d recommend thinking through what you’re trying to achieve with the ban, and then sharing your thoughts with the class. Presumably, most of us would be okay with exceptions based on childcare or medical emergencies, and it’s increasingly true that students often have such complicated lives that just trying to define “emergency” can become neverending. But it’s also true that it’s hard to have thoughtful class discussions when half the class is distracted by little screens in their hands. (In our house, we have a “no technology at the table” rule during meals. We’re not Luddites by any stretch -- regular readers know that I enjoy my gadgets -- but family mealtime is human contact time.)

I’d recommend sharing your concerns with the class, and moving from “police” mode to “problem solving” mode. If it’s you against them, I don’t like your chances. I won’t go all Cathy Davidson on you and suggest incorporating texting into the class, but incorporating the students into the class as adults, rather than treating them as recalcitrant children, may get you about 80 percent of what you actually want. Share with them what you envision a great class looking like, and let them know you think they’re capable of achieving that, but you’re concerned that they won’t get there if they aren’t looking. See what they have to say about it. Best case, you avoid the “police state” atmosphere that can easily poison the class dynamic, and actually improve the class climate through some thoughtful reflection on what you -- and they -- are really trying to achieve.

Good luck! I know you’re not alone in this.

Wise and worldly readers -- especially those currently teaching -- what would you suggest? Is there a more effective way?

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.

States and Regions

2011-11-29T02:50:00.000-08:00

Culturally and economically, Buffalo is closer to Toledo than to New York City. But Buffalo is part of New York State, and its legal and political realities reflect that.

New York is an extreme case of a state in which a single city overshadows the rest of the state. It’s easy to come up with other examples, of course: Atlanta isn’t typical of Georgia, Baltimore isn’t typical of Maryland, and so on. (New Jersey has the unique distinction of being dominated by not one, but two, cities outside of its own borders.)

I was reminded of these intrastate imbalances in looking at Richard Florida’s recent series in The Atlantic about interstate mobility. Florida compares rates of native birth in various states, and notes correlations to economic class, physical health, religiosity, and the like. Broadly, folks in states with relatively little in-migration tend to be more religious, more extroverted, and less open to new experiences than folks in states with higher interstate migration rates. In a sense, he’s mapping the creative class/blue collar divide onto the states.

I have to concede his point as he made it, yet it doesn’t describe much of my daily reality. That’s because I’ve spent much of my life living in regions that tend to get overshadowed by major cities. Politically and economically, they get treated as afterthoughts.

When you’re in the Uticas or Rockfords of the world, it’s easy to regard statewide policies as stalking horses for the agendas of, say, the Manhattans or Chicagos. (I’d guess that many of my non-Northeastern readers would have an easier time identifying the mayor of New York City than the governor of New York State.) That gets even more true as the major metros experience significant in-migration, and the outlying cities don’t. Over time, it’s easy for policymakers -- both offficial and unofficial -- to conflate the large cities with the state as a whole. But what makes sense for Seattle may not make sense for Richland.

That can have real consequences for the overshadowed regions. Just because insurance is huge in Omaha doesn’t mean that it can be duplicated in Hastings, which presumably has needs of its own. Whatever efficiencies centralization might promise could easily be overwhelmed by deadweight losses caused by blindness to local conditions.

Even the folkways are different. I’ve found that it’s harder to break into social circles in areas with lots of people who were born there than it is in higher-turnover areas, just because people in the more settled areas already have what they need. They already have well-developed networks, so they aren’t particularly looking to expand them. That’s not meanness, even if it can sometimes come off as chilly; it’s just satiety.

Politics in the more settled areas tend to be much harder to shift, too. This year’s battles carry echoes of last year’s, which, in turn, were proxies for battles fought a decade before. When the same ruts get run year after year, they get pretty deep and hard to break. That can look like stabilty, or it can look like stasis. Worse, a sort of provincial chauvinism can arise as a defensive response to feeling overshadowed. That kind of insularity -- even if well-intended -- is actually a handmaiden of decline. Breaking that pattern is no small feat, but it’s a necessity if the overshadowed regions hope to rise anew.

Community colleges straddle an awkward divide in places like these. Most community college students intend to stay local after graduation and, in fact, most do. But in the afterthought regions, opportunities tend to be pretty limited; often the only way to move up is to move out. The afterthought regions often export their most talented young people to the metro cities, simply because the metros can offer things other places can’t. That “springboard” function serves a real social purpose, and I’m glad for it, but it can lead to some awkward political moments locally.

Statewide policies written with a single dominant metro in mind can do real damage to the rest of the state. Rochester isn’t just a smaller version of New York City; it’s an entirely different animal. It would be lovely if state lines matched economic and social lines, but they don’t. (Practically, they couldn’t; the economic and social lines move too often.) As long as they don’t, I just hope that the lure of economies of scale won’t tempt states to mistake single -- albeit important -- parts for the whole. Some of us live out here.

The Joaquin Luna DREAM Act

2011-11-28T02:25:00.001-08:00

This story makes my heart hurt.

Joaquin Luna, a high school senior in California, committed suicide on Friday. He wanted to become an engineer to provide a better life for his mother, but realized that his status as an illegal immigrant made that impossible. Despondent over the failure of the DREAM act to pass, he dressed up in a suit and tie, said goodbye to his family, and shot himself in the head.

Any parent knows, intuitively, that the death of a child is the single worst thing that can happen. My condolences to his family, and to all who knew him.

I’ll concede upfront that it’s impossible to know everything that was going on in someone’s mind. Many people face obstacles and disappointments and don’t respond the way he did.

But it’s hard not to admit that he had a point. That’s what makes the story even more wrenching than so many others.

The DREAM act offers legal status to people who came to this country illegally as young children, conditional on their attainment of a college degree or on performing military service. It gives people who simply came with their parents a chance to attain full membership in the society in which they grew up. Since many of the people covered by the act came across the border as toddlers or young children, the United States is really their home. K-12 districts are required to educate these kids, so many of these kids go all the way through and graduate, only to hit a wall at the end of high school.

I recognize that there are complicated issues around adult immigration. But around kids who come with their parents, I have a hard time seeing it. Joaquin saw, correctly, that he was essentially confined to a lower caste through no fault of his own. He got the message -- again, with some warrant -- that the United States didn’t really want him. And since he wanted so badly to be here and to work hard for his family -- values that, in other contexts, we claim to hold -- he just couldn’t accept a life sentence to being the working poor.

It’s fashionable lately for people with highfalutin’ degrees to ask whether college is necessary. But on the ground, it clearly is. Yes, student loan debt is a serious issue, but the basic truth still holds that you’re economically better off with a degree than without one.

Yes, there should be economically viable alternatives for people who don’t go to college. But that category shouldn’t be decided by the time a kid is six years old. The way to tamp down the student loan bubble isn’t to ban brown people from college; it’s to get costs under control and restore subsidies through progressive taxation.

Joaquin Luna was, I’m sure, a complicated, three-dimensional person. It would be a mistake to reduce his suicide to a simple political statement. But it would also be a mistake to ignore the message that he was apparently trying to send. He saw that his adopted country was willing to visit the sins of the father upon the son, and the burden was too great for him to bear. Now a family is grieving, and a country has lost a driven young man cursed with insight.

I hope that when the act comes up again -- and passes -- it bears his name. Let the Joaquin Luna DREAM act ensure that we never consign anyone to a lower caste because he followed his parents here as a child.

Wait for It...Wait for It...

2011-11-23T02:24:00.000-08:00

I was never much of a batter. I wouldn’t make contact terribly often, and when I did, I only ever hit down the third base line. If you’re a right-handed batter like me, that’s a sign of swinging too early.

Far too late to make much difference, I picked up a tip that helped. At the plate, I started actually saying the words “wait for it...wait for it...” before swinging. The reminder corrected the too-early swing at least some of the time, thereby opening up the other three-quarters of the infield. My swings may still be slow and weak, but at least they’re better timed.

I’m learning to apply the same forced patience on the job.

There’s a school of thought around strategic planning or project management that says that the way to plan is to draw up an outline at the outset, with subtopics and sub-subtopics, and to attach deadlines to each. The idea is to create legibility and accountability.

But the flaw of that model is that it assumes omniscience. It assumes that you know upfront what all of the relevant variables are, how they’ll interact, how long they’ll take, and what the outcome will be. That’s fine if you’re dealing with a mechanistic system, but it has a way of not working when the raw material is people.

Instead, it’s useful sometimes to build in gaps. My plans are increasingly looking like this:

1. Specify a broad, long-term goal.
2. Assemble the folks who could help achieve it.
3. Explain what you’re trying to do. Repeat step 2 if necessary.
4. Provide resources.
5. wait for it..wait for it...something good will happen...
6. Celebrate successes and tweak failures.

That crucial step five can’t be rushed or micromanaged. It’s the step during which you have to suppress the urge to swing.

Obviously, step five doesn’t always work. Some projects just don’t gel, for various reasons. But the most glaring successes usually come from an extended period of staying out of the way while creative people connect with each other.

That can be a difficult step to explain to people on the outside of the process. Grants, for example, prefer very specific timelines with pre-defined breakthroughs happening on an evenly-spaced schedule. Which would be lovely, if things worked like that. Academic calendars can be pretty rigid, too, especially at teaching-focused places. The trick is in using deadlines as tools, rather than rules. Any writer can tell you that nothing gets the words flowing quite like a looming deadline. The same is true of group projects, as long as the deadlines have some wiggle room.

I just have to figure out a way to write “sandbox time” into grant applications. How hard can that be?

Wise and worldly readers, have you found ways to build sandbox time into your institutional routines? I’m hoping there’s a way to honor and sustain a productive practice that gets too often confined to the interstices of the day.

(Program note: for the rest of the week, we’ll be on a multi-state Thanksgiving trek. Best wishes for a happy Thanksgiving, or, as my Canadian friends call it, Thursday. The blog will be back on Monday, November 28.)

“General Education,” Within and Without

2011-11-22T02:26:00.000-08:00

What do you expect a college graduate to know? What do you expect a college graduate to be like?

The questions are very different. They start from different assumptions, and are usually asked by different people with different goals. A good answer to one may not shed much light on the other.

Higher ed providers tend to look at “general education” as a body of knowledge (the traditional faculty view) or a set of competencies (the assessment-driven view). Either way, the assumption is that whatever the major, all college graduates should have a common base of knowledge and/or ability. Whether you look at it as a set of Great Books or the ability to think critically, there’s a shared sense that whatever else happens in college, students should come out with something specific and name-able that can be traced to a particular moment in the curriculum. It’s a sort of lowest common denominator that, paradoxically enough, draws on the highest traditions of Western thought. (The tension between the two is constant.)

In practice, general education is usually addressed through a set of either required courses, or distribution requirements for courses. Students freely discuss the imperative to “get their gen eds out of the way,” which speaks more to the “lowest common denominator” function than to the “highest traditions of Western thought” function. To students, gen ed requirements are the spinach they have to finish before they get to have dessert.

Having gone through yet another round of employer advisory boards, though, I’m consistently struck by how differently the non-academic world sees gen ed. Their expectations are dramatically different, which may explain why their suggestions (or complaints) are always the same.

I’ve never heard an employer complain that graduates hadn’t read a particular book or engaged a particular theory. That has never happened. I’ve also never heard an employer ask to look at our outcomes assessment rubrics.

Their feedback, regardless of the program, has been that whatever else graduates bring with them, they should bring basic employee skills. By that, they mean promptness, diligence, a positive or at least congenial demeanor, the ability to work with other people, and the ability to get the big picture. (To be fair, they also sometimes mention writing skills, though the version of writing they have in mind is usually grammatical correctness and basic clarity.)

The version of gen ed we use internally is content-based. The version employers seem to use is almost Calvinist. You are the kind of person who makes a good employee, or you are not. If you are, the specifics don’t matter that much; they can train you. If you aren’t, the specifics don’t matter that much, since a well-read screwup is still a screwup.

The vision the employers are using is a variation on cultural capital. It’s the idea that a college graduate is a particular kind of person, with a sense of how the world works and how to work within it. Their consistent feedback is that some graduates manage to get through the programs, sometimes even with decent grades, without quite ‘getting it.’

Even allowing for a certain amount of reverse ageism -- even the best-educated 22 year olds tend to be a little more volatile than the average 42 year old -- I have to admit there’s something to the complaints. Replacing this gen ed requirement with that gen ed requirement is unlikely to make headway on the sort of enculturation function the employers have in mind. I’m just not sure how to achieve that, especially in the setting of a commuter college with many students who haven’t grown up around that model.

Wise and worldly readers, have you found ways to bridge the two visions of gen ed?

An Open Letter to Chancellor Katehi of the University of California, Davis

2011-11-21T02:16:00.000-08:00

Dear Chancellor Katehi,

I imagine you’re feeling burned right now. You trusted the wrong people, and find yourself in a completely untenable position.

You know perfectly well that what the police did to peaceful protesters was beyond reason. There’s really no disputing that. The right to peaceable assembly is well-enshrined in American law, and for good reason. The videos speak for themselves.

Your people overshot. But you know that.

I’m not writing you to educate you about free speech or police brutality. I assume you’re smart enough to understand both, and to see clearly that the University was badly on the wrong side here.

I’m writing as a fellow higher ed administrator. Like you, I’ve been on the receiving end of smug tirades by people who don’t have to balance competing goods. It’s frustrating. And I’ve also had to deal with the fallout when people who report to me make decisions I wish they hadn’t. It happens.

Now you’re in that awful position where the protesters are right. It’s hard to swallow, but it’s true.

At this point, as I see it, you have exactly two ways to play this. You can resign, or you can jump out in front of the issue. The one thing you absolutely cannot do is be careful.

Resignation is obvious, and your hand may be forced, so I’ll leave it at that. The second option is admittedly risky, but with the egregiousness of the police conduct and the international attention being paid, the usual “let’s appoint a committee to look into it” won’t work.

The ground has shifted from under you. You cannot defend the police. You just can’t.

If you’re up to it, though, you can try to defend the purpose of the university. You can’t dodge this, but you may be able to lead your way out.

The way to do that would involve, first of all, admitting fault. You’ll have to eat a fair bit of crow, both privately and publicly. Then you have to admit that this has been a wake-up call.

The point of the university is the pursuit of truth through the open exchange of ideas. You need to admit -- even better, assert -- that the conduct of the police was directly antithetical to the purpose of the university. You need to prosecute the police involved, and replace the chief. You need to establish some sort of community board to monitor the police. The campus police will hate you for that, but it has to be done.

Then you need to take active steps to make UC-Davis a civil community in the fullest sense of ‘civil.’ That doesn’t mean ‘polite’ or ‘quiescent.’ It means a setting in which vigorous debate is actually possible -- and sometimes even encouraged -- with the shared understanding that we separate the speaker from the speech. I’d start by personally engaging the Occupy protesters on campus, and then by inviting speakers from all over to debate each other in public, both formally and informally. You need to attend those debates personally.

This can’t be delegated. You can’t ask your associate dean of whatever to handle it. As the chancellor, you have to get out there yourself. And you have to steel yourself emotionally for the vituperation that will come your way. You can’t take the bait.

Like it or not, the only way around this is through it. You have to own this, personally and publicly. You have to get out there yourself, take the risk of public humiliation, and change the way the university treats the people who get on its nerves.

If that’s too tall an order, just resign. But make up your mind quickly. Twisting in the wind will do untold damage to everything the university stands for.

Good luck. I’m glad I’m not you right now.

Sincerely,

Dean Dad

Black Boxes and Bumping

2011-11-18T02:39:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, I read a piece about airlines “bumping” passengers who had legitimate tickets. (I’ve never understood how it’s legal to sell the same seat twice, but that’s another post.) The article made the point that some central computer makes decisions that result in bumping, but that agents at counters have to deal with angry passengers, so over time, agents at counters started entering ‘dummy’ passengers with names like Mickey Mouse so they could outsmart the computer. Mickey Mouse wouldn’t yell at them if he got bumped. Over time, the computer compensated by overbooking even more.

The flaw there was that the folks who designed the central system never thought about the needs of the folks on the ground.

I’m watching a few state/national higher ed initiatives -- well-intentioned ones -- come to grief, and they all seem to be flailing for the same reason. They treat colleges as black boxes. They fail to grasp the motivations of the various actors.

Take transfer, for example. It’s one thing for a state to declare that its entire public higher ed system should be a coherent whole, with seamless transfer from each college to every other. And on paper, many of them have that.

But that doesn’t mean students escape having to re-take (and pay again for) courses they’ve already taken and passed.

That’s because while broad policy decisions may be made at the top, actual implementation occurs in the departments. And departments often have very different interests.

In the world of transfer, the usual evasion involves giving a course “free elective” status. The chair of the receiving school’s art department, for example, typically won’t raise an issue with accepting English Comp or Intro to Psych, since her own department doesn’t teach those anyway; the nits she’ll pick will be among the art classes. I’ve had chairs say, to my face, that they don’t want to “give away” too many credits. But if she’s under a mandate from above to accept credits in transfer, she can simply allow the transferring art credits as “free electives.” If her major doesn’t happen to have any free electives in it, well, tough luck. That way, her department gets to re-teach whatever it wants, while she still gets to claim compliance with the mandate. Her interest -- keeping the enrollment and funding levels of her own department high -- are at odds with the larger systemic interest in seamless transfer.

Now that states are starting to define college “performance” in terms of graduation rates, I can see a similar -- considerably more sinister -- version of the same thing on the horizon.

Graduation rates reflect any number of variables, including quality of curriculum and instruction. But those variables also include things like the student profile. To take an easy example, students who arrive at college with strong academic preparation in high school graduate at much higher rates than students who arrive with serious skill gaps. Nobody seriously disputes that. So the quickest and easiest way for a college to nudge its graduation rates upward is to become exclusionary. If you don’t let the higher-risk students in, they can’t drop out.

Some colleges build that into their missions, and that’s fine. If you need developmental math, MIT won’t take you. It’s a private university -- albeit a land-grant, oddly enough -- and it can choose its own path. But to compare graduation rates of places that can cherry-pick with places that take all comers is simply to load the dice.

My concern here is that unthinkingly adopting a single bottom-line standard will push the more accessible colleges to become much less so. They won’t necessarily want to, but if funding depends on it, they’ll do what they’ll have to do. If we assume the same kind of self-interest as in the case of the department chairs, it isn’t hard to predict either evasive or perverse maneuvers.

Those maneuvers could be overt -- admissions requirements, say -- or they could be sub rosa. Moving ESL and developmental classes onto a separate set of books, for example, would immediately elevate the graduation rate. Discreetly reducing outreach into the most disadvantaged communities would elevate the graduation rate. It isn’t hard to come up with ways to game the measure.

As with the airlines, I’d expect the people on the front lines to engage in evasive maneuvers to meet their own needs. The folks who would get bumped would be the most vulnerable students. Bumping is one thing if it’s Mickey Mouse, but something else altogether if it’s a kid from a shaky high school who’s trying to escape poverty. Colleges aren’t black boxes or agents of a single mind; they’re complicated operations with self-aware moving parts. Policies need to reflect that. If they don’t, entire generations will be left sitting on the tarmac.

Scenes from a Strange Week

2011-11-17T02:31:00.000-08:00

The computer club had a bake sale on campus. As I neared the table, one of the students called out “Save a nerd! Buy a cookie!” Impressed, I complied.

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TW called one afternoon to let me know The Dog had been skunked. (Since the storm did a number on the local trees, varmints of all sorts have been unusually public.)

The tomato juice bath was a nonstarter for any number of reasons, so I did some quick Googling and found a recommended mix of peroxide, baking soda, and Dawn. After getting home and changing, I mixed the ingredients in a bucket, took The Dog and a sponge out back, and did what needed to be done.

Apparently, peroxide works on fur like it works on hair. Now The Dog has subtle blonde highlights.

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Overheard in a meeting: “If you boil down the soup to the nuts and bolts...”

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Sign of a planetary alignment: at the end of a recent evening advisory board meeting, the chair (not me) proposed a follow-up meeting in six months. The group rebelled, saying it was too energized by the excitement of what it was doing, and it wanted to meet sooner and more often.

Over a decade in academic administration, and I had never seen that before. The Force is strong in this one.

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This week’s activities: basketball practice, music lessons, makeup trick-or-treating, lego league, PTO, swim lessons, leaf bagging. Anyone remember the argument that Americans didn’t have “social capital” anymore? We’ve got social capital coming out of our ears. Real capital, on the other hand...

Subscriptions and Attrition

2011-11-16T02:25:00.000-08:00

What if college got cheaper as you went along?

Because I am a Big Giant Nerd, I’ve been reviewing literature on financial aid programs in various states. Most of them are either need-based or merit-based, and they tend to fall victim to the predictable pathologies of either genre. The need-based ones can’t keep up with real need, and they’re hard to sell politically. The merit-based ones are easy to sell politically, but they tend to flow disproportionately to the most affluent. Worse, both tend to fall behind rising costs over time.

A few years ago I toyed with the idea of a graduation deposit, like a security deposit: you hand over a chunk of money when you enroll, and if/when you graduate, you get it back with interest. If you don’t graduate, you don’t get it back. While I still like the concept, it’s increasingly clear to me that it, too, would wind up being regressive. The folks who would most need the refund would be the ones least able to cough up the deposit in the first place.

Then I thought of subscriptions.

A typical magazine subscription offer will look something like this: $30 for one year, $50 for two years, and $65 for three years. The idea is to entice readers to commit for longer periods by making the marginal cost of additional years lower. If you want to go year-to-year, you can, but it costs more; by committing upfront to a longer run, you get a lower price.

And I thought, hmm.

In higher ed, we do the polar opposite. We charge by the semester or year, and each year costs more than the year before it. Then we wonder why students leave.

The magazine model comes closer to reflecting actual costs, in some ways. It costs more to recruit a new student than it does to keep a current one, for example. By the time a student is well-ensconced, use of services tends to be more routinized and less catastrophic. It’s the newbies who are the highest-maintenance.

The parallel isn’t perfect, obviously. Upper-level classes tend to be smaller than intro courses -- at least once you get past the remedial level -- so they have higher costs. But that’s really a function of attrition. If sticking around got easier, attrition might decrease, and the upper-level classes would be more fully populated (and therefore more economically sustainable).

Better, students could gradually decrease their paid work hours as they immerse themselves more deeply in a given subject. Unpaid internships and/or co-ops would be less exclusionary than they are now.

The major issue I could foresee would be transfer. If a four-year college adopted this model, it would basically ship its entire freshman class to nearby community colleges. The savvy students would load up on cheap cc credits, then transfer to the newly-affordable third and fourth years. The obvious way around that would be to treat funding for community colleges and state four-year colleges as a single system, and to put the funding where it needs to go for that to work.

Which would involve putting economic value on teaching.

The loss-leader model works well when the issue is attracting people in the first place. That’s not the problem that most of higher ed currently faces. Given the ever-growing wage gap between the college-educated and the high-school educated, I don’t foresee a huge dropoff in overall national demand anytime soon. (Regional dropoffs are another story.) The issue at this point isn’t generating demand or creating access; it’s turning prospective dropouts into prospective graduates. Our issue isn’t recruitment, really; it’s retention.

I’m pretty sure that an idea this big and hairy has some perfectly awful unintended consequences, but I’m not sure what they are just yet. Wise and worldly readers, what say you? What would happen if college got cheaper as you went along?

The Future of For-Profits

2011-11-15T02:12:00.000-08:00

I have a close, longtime friend who has lived the mixed blessing of getting what she has wanted, when she has wanted it. Luckily for her, she generally has good taste, but she has boxed herself into corners a few times when circumstances refused to conspire to save her from herself.

I’m thinking that the last couple of years are conspiring to save for-profit higher ed from itself.

Having worked in both the for-profit and community college worlds, I’ve been arguing for years that the right move for the for-profits is to go upscale. Apparently, they’re starting to figure this out for themselves, even if only as the result of newfound Federal scrutiny.

Historically, for-profits arose in the gaps of traditional higher ed, focusing primarily on the fields that traditional colleges either ignored or neglected. That made some sense at the time. But since then, the non-profits have greatly expanded their coverage, and the for-profits have greatly expanded their offerings to chase enrollments; at this point, the programmatic overlap between the sectors is substantial. Some for-profits have even earned regional accreditation (and others, horrifyingly enough, have bought it.)

Now that they’re offering many of the same courses of study as community colleges and the midtier state colleges of the world, the for-profits are finding it difficult to compete. For a while, many of them managed by taking all manner of ethical liberties with financial aid packaging and deceptive recruiting; the Feds, rightly, have made that more difficult.

They’ll never be able to compete on cost. Community and state colleges are subsidized and, just as importantly, untaxed; for-profits are taxed and unsubsidized. (Proponents of public higher ed rightly note that the subsidies aren’t what they once were, but they often fail to note that the tax exemptions remain.) Yes, for-profits can minimize the taxation issue with online offerings -- property taxes don’t apply to cyberspace -- but the publics can go online, too.

The way to compete is on value, as opposed to price. This is where the for-profits can escape the ethical and legal issues they’ve caused for themselves, set up a lucrative niche, and even expand.

That would actually mirror the way that privatization works in most other industries. Most of the time, “public” offerings are considered less desirable than private ones. Public housing, public transportation, and public schools are generally -- with exceptions, yes, but generally -- considered inferior to their private counterparts. I don’t see any obvious reason that for-profit higher ed couldn’t try the same strategy.

Granted, it would have a hard time competing on academic prestige, at least initially. But by combining programmatic focus with a year-round schedule and concierge-level staffing in career services, it could offer a pretty compelling value proposition. And by being selective, it could screen out the high-default populations and avoid the ethical traps into which the sector as a whole tends to fall. It’s one thing to object to boiler-room sales tactics and shoddy curricula; it’s quite another to object to specialization and good service.

In fact, a high end proprietary could become known for its high academic standards. If it could truthfully market its grads to employers as being among the best in a given industry, it would have a legitimate selling point for prospective students.

The ethics of it all are debatable, but to the extent that they actually chose to compete on quality, I’d argue that the rest of the industry would have to step up. Bottom-feeding is insane when you’re competing with institutions with built-in cost advantages, and you can only run on the boiler room model for so long. The way up is the way out. The for-profits are being forced to figure this out; the winners will be the ones who lean into the change.

Ask the Administrator: Starting a Faculty Senate

2011-11-14T02:52:00.000-08:00

A returning correspondent writes:

Our FT faculty are exploring the creating of a Faculty Senate and allowing adjuncts to participate. Actually, I'm the token adjunct allowed to participate -- on the "proposal writing team". This is just the proposal that I'm allowed to work on, so far.

Any thoughts on Faculty Senates in general? Purposes? Pitfalls? Examples to study? Roles of Adjuncts?

This is good news, and a great question. I don’t have a worked-out general theory of faculty senates, but I’ll offer some thoughts and ask my wise and worldly readers to contribute theirs.

The first question I’d have is context. Is this a response to a particular event or crisis, or is it long-germinating? Is there already a larger “shared governance” structure, or has the college been run pretty much from the top down? If there is a larger structure, how would the faculty senate fit into it? If there isn’t, what jurisdiction would the senate claim?

Getting the jurisdictional boundaries right will matter tremendously. Generally speaking, senates are ‘advisory’ to college presidents. In the case of a college senate, they could advise on any number of things, ranging from curricular proposals to campus smoking bans to the location and structure of the graduation ceremony. However, if you have collective bargaining, the turf of the union(s) and the turf of the senate can’t overlap. That means that the senate can’t deal with salary or job issues, and the union(s) can’t deal with curricular issues.

If you have a faculty senate, as opposed to a college senate, its jurisdiction is narrower still. A faculty senate could still appropriately deal with curriculum, for example, but would have no special say over a campuswide smoking policy, since that would also affect staff. And it couldn’t deal with salary or staffing issues, since those are contractual.

That said, I’ve found value in the faculty-only deliberative body my campus established a few years ago. (Here it’s parallel to the general shared governance structure. Where the all-college body reports to the president, the faculty group reports to the academic vp.) The most valuable moments in it have come through conversations that faculty have with other faculty, in which they sometimes discover that ideas that make perfect sense from the perspective of, say, the history department would be disastrous for the chemistry department. Those conversations actually move substantive discussion forward, because at that point, the history department can’t just blame The Administration for being bullheaded. It has to address some very real concerns that it simply hadn’t considered. (In that case, the question involved the academic calendar and how to compensate for Monday holidays. A solution that made perfect sense for classroom-based courses would have wreaked havoc with the lab sciences.)

If the goal of the faculty senate proposal you’re dealing with is to address staffing levels and/or working conditions, it’s the wrong vehicle; you need a union for that. If the goal is to work on proposals that affect the entire campus, it’s the wrong vehicle; you need something that includes staff and, presumably, students. But if it’s to address specifically academic issues, it makes sense, and it’s probably a good idea to include adjuncts. Given that the adjuncts are central to the delivery of the academic programs, it’s reasonable to include them in those discussions.

If the college really doesn’t have a shared governance structure in any meaningful way, and this is the first foray into those waters, then the primary concern isn’t so much overlap as not shooting yourself in the foot. Careful attention to jurisdictional boundaries, and some upfront discussion of civility and the rules of the road, could help prevent the kind of crash-and-burn that discredits the idea for a decade. If the senate gets taken over by hotheads, it will quickly reduce itself to irrelevance. Cast your net wide, and recruit people known for being grownups. If the senate can gain credibility, it can gain influence.

Good luck!

Wise and worldly readers, what would you add (or correct)? Anyone who has been involved in the recent creation of a faculty senate, what do you know now that you wish you knew then?

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.

Friday Fragments

2011-11-11T05:11:00.000-08:00

At dinner last night, TW saw a ladybug crawling on the wall. I was drafted to catch it and set it loose outside, but it fell to the floor and scurried under the rug. As I sat back down, I broke into song, to the tune of “Ladies’ Night.”

Oh it’s a ladybug
and it’s in the rug
Oh it’s a ladybug
Oh, what a bug
(lower) Oh, what a bug...

(pause)

The Boy (deadpan): That was unnecessary.

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A window into my world: let’s say you have a proposal for x dollars to increase the available hours for tutoring in the tutoring center, another proposal for x dollars to add supplemental instructors to some new courses, and yet another proposal for x dollars for the library. And you have 1x dollars to spend. On what basis do you make the decision?

This is where “evidence-based” or “data-driven” decisions are tough. I don’t know how to measure the bang for the buck of a few more tutors as opposed to more coverage at the reference desk as opposed to some more supplemental instructors. There’s no obvious value-added metric. And when the funding available is enough to do some but not all, then you have to base the decision on something.

On what basis would you make the call?

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Note to Zooey Deschanel: there’s such a thing as too much mugging. I’m just sayin’.

-----------

Note to my fellow bloggers: the Penn State scandal is the kind of thing that brings out the worst in many bloggers. While some of the larger issues are clear -- most notably around the dangers of excessive inbreeding and length of service -- many of the particulars are still murky. It may be worth getting some clarity before writing things that won’t help.

-----------

At dinner last night, TB and TG drew up a crossword puzzle. TG did an “across” with six letters, and the clue was “tonight I’m gonna get …” The answer was “funky,” spelled “funccy.”

Bless her, that was how she thought that sentence ended. And well it should. Even if they don’t like my rendition of the ladybug song...

Ask the Administrator: Professional Development for a New Dean

2011-11-10T02:43:00.000-08:00

A new correspondent writes with a seemingly simple question:

What professional development do you recommend for a newly appointed community college Dean of Instruction?

I like this question.

First, some context. Typically, academic deans at community colleges don’t have a primary focus on fundraising. That’s different at many research universities, where deans are judged largely on their skills at raising money. So I’ll specify that I’m referring here to community colleges.

Unlike many mature industries, higher ed generally doesn’t do much to train administrators. Worse, much of the culture holds administration in a sort of low-level contempt. (Benjamin Ginsberg’s The Fall of the Faculty is a pretty unfiltered example.) That makes it difficult to have candid conversations on campus about the dilemmas you’ll face. It’s disappointing, but try not to take it personally.

For present purposes, I’ll divide opportunities into the external and the internal.

Starting with the external, my personal Bible has been C.K. Gunsalus’ invaluable The Academic Administrator’s Survival Guide. It’s specific, concrete, thoughtful, readable, and spot-on. It isn’t specific to community colleges, but most of the content works perfectly well in this setting.

Conferences can be hit-or-miss. I’ve had pretty good luck with the League for Innovation in the Community College, which is held annually in the Spring. The American Association of Community Colleges also has a Spring conference, though to be candid, that one tends to be a bit stuffier and less helpful. (That’s the one where presentations frequently start with “back in ‘92, when I assumed my first presidency...”) The AAC&U has been weirdly obtuse about community colleges over the years, which I consider a missed opportunity. Given community college funding levels, you’ll need to be selective about your travel, so I’d recommend starting with the League.

Oddly, the blogosphere remains fairly sparse. I started this blog partially out of frustration that it didn’t otherwise exist; since then, it’s still kind of an outlier. There’s plenty of discussion of administration in the academic blogosphere, but it’s usually from disgruntled faculty painting all deans as variations on Snidely Whiplash or Dr. Evil. Reality-based discussions have been few and far between. I’ve found it terribly helpful to crowdsource solutions to some of the dilemmas I face, and honestly, I’d welcome the company.

Internal resources are often discounted when we talk about professional development, but they shouldn’t be. You just have to be intentional in how you approach them.

As a newbie, you have a short-term license to ask obvious and/or stupid questions. Use it. For the next few months, you’ll get a free pass when you ask the questions to which everyone thinks they know the answers. That can be helpful, since you’ll probably find that some of the assumed answers are, in fact, wrong. People generally don’t like looking stupid, and academics are especially sensitive to that, so it’s not unusual for folks to go on indefinitely without asking for clarity, even when they really don’t know what’s happening. For the next few months, ask away. Not only will you pick up all kinds of things, but you’ll also bring some much-desired clarity to everyone else in the room.

If your college has a faculty union -- or, like many colleges, multiple unions for different employee classifications -- then you’ll need to spend some quality time with the contract(s). If you’re in a nonunion setting, I’d advise doing something similar with the employee handbook. I was surprised at how many of the initial questions I got started with “what’s the procedure for...?” When you hit ambiguities, contradictions, or passages that simply defy understanding, ask around. A little time spent upfront can save a whole lot of time in grievances or litigation later.

If your college doesn’t have a forum specific to faculty, in which faculty can discuss matters of concern to them, start one. Attend regularly, and listen far more than you talk. It won’t always be fun, but you’ll learn quite a bit about how the college looks from different angles, and you’ll send a message by your actions that you’re actually concerned and paying attention. That matters.

Depending on location, your state or region may have regular meetings of your counterparts from neighboring colleges. I’ve found that particularly helpful, since my state has some, uh, let’s go with ‘quirks.’ Emails, phone calls, and regular meetings with my counterparts from elsewhere in the state have helped me get historical perspective and some useful how-to’s. If you’re willing to ask questions and actually listen to answers, you can pick up quite a bit.

Finally, respect the fact that you’re human. There will be people on campus who will set out to dehumanize you; I’ve seen good people fall into that trap. Do what you need to do to stay sane. Have a life outside of the college, and keep good boundaries. (For example, be aware that if you’re socializing with people who report to you, they still report to you; any interaction is necessarily layered at best. Old friends are crucial.) My kids have been incredibly helpful in that, since they neither know nor care what I did all day; to them, tonight’s Lego League meeting is far more important than anything that went on on campus. And in an important way, they’re right.

Good luck, and congratulations on the new job! I hope you’re able to wear it well.

Wise and worldly readers, do you have any suggestions for a new dean?

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.

Academic Advising

2011-11-09T02:44:00.000-08:00

Quick, what’s the most vexing aspect of academic advising at a community college?

a. turnover of students and adjunct faculty
b. the range of preferences that different transfer-destination schools have for electives
c. the confusion of advising with scheduling
d. shifting and/or inchoate student preferences
e. all of the above

Yup, it’s e. And it makes a conceptually-simple process maddeningly difficult.

In a perfect world, students who had clear ambitions would have sustained, focused conversations with professors who would help them understand how to get there from here. And that actually happens to a remarkable extent.

But circumstances conspire to make things complicated.

Sheer numbers are a major issue. Good advising is relatively personalized, but it’s hard to do that with a fifteen-credit teaching load and near-record enrollments. State finances being what they are, our adjunct percentage is higher than I’d like, and there’s always some churn in the ranks. That churn makes it harder for students to latch on to a particular professor. Some adjuncts stick around for years, of course, and become go-to people for particular programs, but with the pay being what it is, any stability we get there is really a bonus.

Students bring issues of their own, of course. Every time a student changes majors, a new round of advising is necessary, and sometimes a new advisor. Given the number of students who show up with no clear idea of what they want to study, some churn is built into the system. Since it takes time to build rapport and trust with an advisor, each switch carries a cost. That’s pretty much a cost of doing business, of course, but it does make it harder to provide continuity and a comfort level for the student.

The one that bugs me the most is the surprising variation of preferences among transfer-destination schools. This branch of the state college system wants its social work majors to take these two history courses, but that branch of the same system wants them to take two different ones. Multiply that by many more colleges and many more programs, and just keeping track of it all is a challenge. (Then add the times that the destination schools change their minds -- usually as the result of a key personnel change -- and don’t bother to tell us. Even good people get stabby when that happens.) A perfectly well-meaning advisor could inadvertently steer a student towards a course that won’t transfer, just because some new department chair at compass direction state has a different preference.

We try to work around that with articulation agreements, with varying degrees of success. But there’s a limit to the predictability you can build into a system with so many moving parts, each with its own imperatives. That’s especially true with private colleges, since they can pretty much do what they want. And even articulation agreements need regular maintenance as curricula evolve.

The tough nut to crack on campus is the conflation of advising with scheduling. It’s an easy trap to fall into. “History of Etruscan Snoods would suit you.” “But that’s full!” “Okay, let’s see what else there is...” Before long, you’re spending much more time looking for open seats than actually discussing substance. That’s especially true later in the registration periods, when the most popular timeslots and classes are already taken.

I really don’t know how to solve this one. With finite seats, it seems like a fact of life. But I’ve been doing this long enough to know that this is when some of the regrettable decisions get made.

Wise and worldly readers -- especially those at community colleges -- have you found or seen a reasonably elegant, sustainable, affordable way to do academic advisement well, given all of these moving parts?

Support and Context

2011-11-08T02:57:00.000-08:00

“I don’t really miss God, but I sure miss Santa Claus.” -- Hole

What does it mean to “support” a program?

I’m running into that question headfirst these days, since it’s time to review proposed budgets for next year. And I’m inundated with proposals for increases of 40 percent, 80 percent, and more. This in a context of flat-to-sliding enrollments and flat state aid.

I don’t think any of the requests are ridiculous, on their own terms. In many cases, they make perfect sense if you look at the one department in isolation. Even where they’re a little ambitious, that’s all they are; I haven’t seen any that I would call absurd or corrupt.

What struck me -- other than the magnitude of some of the numbers -- was the different sense of context.

From a department’s perspective, the relevant context is temporal. “We’ve been waiting for this position for years. We’ve been very patient. Now it’s time to support us.” (Or, more annoyingly, “we fought for this position.”) In some cases, there are references to positions lost years ago, with the implication that they’re somehow still there. The story told is of patience exhausted, combined with a not-subtle threat of political hell if their request is denied.

From my perspective, the relevant context is spatial -- I have to look across the departments. Given flat funding overall, a massive increase for department A can only come at the expense of a massive cut for department B. (The administration already gave at the office; we reorganized to reduce the number of deans first.) The temporal argument -- “we’ve been waiting” -- does nothing to change that. And I’ve literally never -- not once -- seen a budgetary proposal from a department that suggested another department to cut to pay for it. That has never happened, and I’m not holding my breath.

When I deny many of the requests, which the laws of mathematics dictate I have to, some of the departments will accuse me of not “supporting” them. And that’s where I take issue.

Support can refer to money, obviously. At some level, it has to. But it can also refer to truth-telling and empowerment.

Aristotle noted that the opposite of a friend is not an enemy, but a flatterer. That’s because both friends and enemies can bring out your strengths -- what he called “virtues” -- but a flatterer brings out your weaknesses. By telling you what you want to hear, rather than what you need to hear, the flatterer leaves you exposed to your own shortcomings.

In that light, I’m concerned that giving false hope and hollow promises is worse than saying no.
The problem is that some people like being flattered.

I’m hoping to shift the dynamic over time from “how much more can we get?” to “what are we actually trying to do?” I agree that more money would be great, and I vote accordingly, but any clearsighted analysis would have to conclude that waiting for the money fairy is a losing strategy. In the absence of the money fairy, we can stamp our feet and call each other names, or we can come to grips with the reality of the situation. In the second approach lies hope for actual progress.

And that’s where my definition of support comes in. I’m trying to nudge the campus culture. My theory is that we’ll make better decisions for the college as a whole if constraints are acknowledged as real, rather than simply ascribed to the sinister motives of individual administrators. Support, in this case, means support for coming to grips with reality. The default argument that “we’re already doing what’s best, so just write us ever-larger checks” just isn’t sustainable anymore.

Success would look something like this: noticing that it can’t do everything it wants to do with the budget it has, but also noticing that there aren’t exactly spare bags of cash lying around, a department proposes a small study of innovations taking place at comparable colleges. It suggests an experiment or two to try to improve student outcomes. And the support it looks for is reassurance that if the first (or second) pilot project doesn’t work, it won’t be punished; failure will be safe. Experimentation will be rewarded, and some failed experimentation will be acknowledged as a cost of doing business.

Whether or not the money fairy will eventually return when the Great Recession finally fades away, we’ll be in better shape if we’ve spent the intervening time honing our strengths. It’s a more sustainable strategy over time, and, in my mind, a more ethical one. But first we have to get past the idea that saying no to a 40 percent increase means that The Administration doesn’t support the faculty. Sometimes support means still being there after the fantasy of Santa has gone away.

Grading and Choosing

2011-11-07T02:28:00.000-08:00

You know that feeling when you’ve suspected something for a long time but couldn’t prove it, and then someone proves it for you?

This article had that effect. It’s about how student attrition in STEM majors is actually higher in more selective institutions than in less selective ones. It brought back vivid memories of my days at Snooty Liberal Arts College, and even of late high school.

The article is based on a study by the College Board that suggests that grading is substantially harder in STEM majors than in most others, so students who don’t immediately hit it out of the park in STEM classes tend to gravitate towards the more-welcoming liberal arts and business classes. But that tends to be less true at less selective colleges, oddly enough.

I like it a lot because it explains a number of disconnected impressions I’ve picked up over the years. For example, in my student days, I recall noticing that even though the STEM classes (we didn’t use that term then, but still...) were “harder,” they also had much flatter grade distributions. It was easier to pass a history class than a chemistry class, but easier to get an A in chemistry than in history. The history classes had bell-ish curves; the STEM classes had flat lines. They were easier to fail and easier to ace; the “squishier” subjects were the land of B’s and C’s. Even in my wheelhouse, I was the master of the A-minus; full A’s were basically unicorns. In physics and chemistry, the top students finished with GPA’s above 4.

So saying one is “easier” is kind of misleading. It’s easier to pass, yes, but harder to really nail.

(One underappreciated variable, I think, is the level of consensus in the field. As far as I know, there’s remarkably little controversy in the scientific community -- I’m open to correction on this -- about the material that gets taught in the first couple years of the undergraduate major. That’s certainly not true in the humanities and social sciences. When consensus is missing, it’s harder to definitively nail a subject.)

Students noticed. Those who didn’t much care what their degree was in, as long as it had the SLAC name on it, clustered into English or history. (SLAC didn’t have a business major.) Those who cared strongly about their own “squishy” specialties had the mixed blessing of a bunch of classmates who had taken the courses as second choices. The idea -- accepted as gospel by all -- was that you were either a science person or you were not. If you were, you stuck with it and did great; if you weren’t, you did something else.

(This was made explicit in Organic Chemistry, which was pitched unapologetically as the pre-med weedout course. Difficulty wasn’t a bug; it was a feature. The idea was to winnow the herd, and to leave only the truly worthy still standing.)

In the cc world as I’ve experienced it, that assumption isn’t widely held. Here the idea is that the community (broadly defined) needs more STEM majors, and it’s our job to make that possible. Rather than weeding out, the goal is to bring people in.

If you start with that assumption, then of course your approach will change.

It isn’t just about easier grading. It’s about the purpose of a given class, and therefore the approach to it.

If I were appointed guru of American higher ed, one of the edicts I would issue would be that theory should be taught inductively. It rarely is, which, I’m convinced, is why so many undergrads spit the bit. (This is probably why I bombed geometry, but never mind that.)

Theory is easiest to learn when there’s a context for it. When you know why you need to know something, you’re much more likely to get it. That’s partly a function of motivation, but it’s also a trick of memory. A theorem derived on a board by someone with his back to you is far less memorable than something that comes with the force of “eureka!,” solving a problem with which you’re engaged.

At its base, I suspect, theory is based on pattern recognition. And pattern recognition is easiest when you’ve seen a whole bunch of examples. If you can get a student to the point at which a theory comes as a solution, rather than as an edict, you’ve won. And if you can get students to test theories against each other, you’re raising the cognitive level of what they’re doing and engaging them much more fully.

Instead, science is too often taught from theory to application. Worse, in the selective settings, it’s taught with a clear goal of thinning the herd. At least at the community college level, we don’t consider ourselves to have failed if a significant portion of a chemistry class does well. At this level, we actually pay attention to the teaching itself. That’s not to deny that there’s much more work to be done -- no argument there -- but at least we’re attacking the right problem. The goal shouldn’t be to keep science pure by keeping the great unwashed out of the lab; it should be to keep science accessible by forcing it to be true to its radically democratic roots. Data are no respecters of rank.

If we’d like to direct more of our bright young minds into STEM fields -- a goal I find absolutely worthy -- the elites may actually have something to learn from the community colleges. Hey, Harvard: you’re welcome.

Notes from an Emergency

2011-11-04T02:54:00.000-07:00

We were lucky. We were only without power and heat for five days.

You'd be surprised just how quickly a house can lose heat. By the second day, we were in blankets from about five o'clock on. The fireplace rendered one room almost okay, but that meant that the four of us were stuck together in a dark and still-cold room every night with absolutely nothing to do. It was too dark to read, and all of the electronic gadgetry ran out of juice by the second day.

For the benefit of those who haven't been through something like that, and before I forget, a few notes to share.

-- For lack of other options, we got our information from local radio. On the second night, I remember noticing that the radio took on an apocalyptic tone. The patter was mostly about gas stations that actually had gas available – in a blackout, there's no electricity to work the pumps – and occasionally about ATM's that actually worked. Of course, with everyone getting the same tips at the same time, the effort was largely self-defeating. I drove past a gas line about 15 cars deep at one point. It felt like science fiction.

-- People with wells and septic systems were really in a tough spot. For them, no electricity means no water.

-- Even in a major blackout, there will be weird, isolated oases of power. In our town, the one oasis was a single block with one takeout pizza place. The guy who owned it said the phone never stopped ringing.

-- If you live in a town that does robo-calls for public emergencies, make sure they have your cell number. We get our phone service with our cable and internet, so when they went, it went. This rendered the robo-calls entirely useless.

-- The Girl was livid about not being able to go trick-or-treating. With lights out and wires down everywhere – some of which could be live – it just wasn't safe. But try explaining that to a seven-year-old with a cool costume and visions of fun size Snickers.

-- This weekend really made vivid the limits of the cloud, and of connectivity generally. It’s great, as long as you have electricity and a connection. Without those, you have nothing. Stores took only cash, since they couldn’t process credit card transactions. A family friend who has a rotary phone (!) was more connected than we were. If we’re serious about moving more systems online, we’d better make darn sure we have a reliable grid. Without some old technical holdovers, we would have been completely helpless.

-- The bright side, to the extent there was one, was plenty of sleep for the first couple of nights. But even that hit diminishing returns; after a couple of days of going to bed early, there just wasn’t much sleep to be had.

-- On campus, most of the talk upon returning was of who had power, and who didn’t yet. The sheer randomness of it was striking; you really couldn’t discern a pattern. Even within a given town, houses one street apart might be two days apart in the restoration of power. There’s something humbling in that -- you couldn’t buy your way out of chaos -- and also something democratic. But I prefer my democracy with indoor heat, thank you very much.

-- I usually think of online courses as immune to snow days, and they usually are. But when the power lines are down, so are the online courses. (Even when the servers come up, many of the instructors still lacked power or connectivity at home.) And I had to chuckle at the initiative of the student who called in to ask if he still had to do his homework for his online class when the campus was closed.

-- Make sure your phone trees are up-to-date, and have both home and cell numbers. When our phone finally got reconnected, we had 25 (!) voicemails, most of them relatively urgent and several days old. There was just no way of knowing.

We’re back, finally. No word yet on alternative trick-or-treating dates, but The Girl won’t let it slide. It’ll take more than a freakishly powerful storm to knock her down. She will have her Snickers, and that will be that.

Trading Papers

2011-11-03T03:59:00.001-07:00

(Sorry for the unscheduled down time. Mother Nature decided to knock out electricity for five days, just for the sheer fun of it. I wrote this just before the power went out.)

What if Professors Smith and Jones swapped papers for a semester? I’d be intrigued to hear from anyone who has actually tried this.

Anyone who has taught courses in which grading relies on judgment knows the delicate balance of both encouraging and judging students. You try to set the student up to succeed, but the result is dreadful; now you have to be the bearer of bad news. Since students don’t always understand the basis of the judgment, especially in the heat of embarrassment, it’s easy for them to default to some not-very-flattering assumptions about the instructor. Suddenly, you’ve got a psychologically fraught situation that does not lend itself to good teaching.

So a thought: what if Professors Smith and Jones traded papers for a semester? Obviously, I’m assuming that they’re teaching different sections of the same course, with enrollments close enough to equal that their workloads would not meaningfully change. If I grade your 25 papers and you grade my 25 papers, the workload adjustment is pretty much a wash.

The upside, I think, would be that the role of ‘coach’ and the role of ‘judge’ would be clearly separated. Now it’s not “try to psych out the teacher;” it’s “you and me against the guy behind the curtain.” With the roles more clearly demarcated, the instructor would be free to position herself as the student’s ally, which, in fact, she is.

It could conceivably make for more consistent grading, too. It’s easier to be objective when you don’t know the student. (At least, it’s less likely that personal likes and dislikes will enter into the judgment unconsciously.)

The major objections I’ve heard have been twofold, but neither strikes me as terribly compelling.

The first is the task of coordination. Yes, there would have to be some planning and communication between the instructors to keep things aligned. But this strikes me as the kind of thing that gets less true as you do it more. The first time out, I’d guess that the costs of coordination would be non-trivial, but by the fourth or fifth, they should be pretty minor.

The second is that the instructor would not get as complete a picture of student performance as she would if she read the papers herself.

There’s some truth to that, though it doesn’t strike me as a deal-breaker. I’m thinking that in a class with, say, four papers over the course of the semester, maybe the swap occurs in the final two. The professor gets to prep the students for the objective, outside judge. You’d still get a sense of who was who, but having that outside person come in later could help with the psychological dynamics of the class. That would be especially true if the grades on the later papers counted more heavily.

As with so many back-of-the-envelope ideas, the devil is in the details. So I’d like to hear from any of my wise and worldly readers who have actually tried this or something like it. Did it help? Did it harm? Is there a trick to getting it right?

Friday Fragments

2011-10-28T02:19:00.000-07:00

Last weekend we went pumpkin-picking, and then stopped for lunch. I ordered a Blue Moon with my burger, which, to my surprise, came with a slice of orange on the glass. I removed it without really looking at it, assuming it was lemon. TW asked why I removed the orange. I responded that I thought is was a lemon. Thinking she was helping, The Girl chimed in brightly, “suck it!”

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A couple of weeks ago I had a conversation with someone who works at Yale. He discussed this project and that project, all of which struck me as unthinkably expensive and ambitious. When he asked me about my world, I mentioned flat state funding, enrollment declining from its spike, and unfunded mandates. He looked puzzled and asked why we don’t just draw down more from our endowment. I mentioned that we don’t have an endowment, and that we aren’t allowed to use philanthropic money for operations. He looked at me like I had just grown antlers.

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This year’s Halloween costumes are a lego brick (TB) and a washing machine (TG). The kids chose them, and TW has spent the better part of a week building them. The washing machine is a front-loader, so there’s a window in the front with some socks in it. TW picked up some spare dials at a local appliance shop and put them on the back, and printed out an “energy star” insignia for the front. There’s also a bottle of Tide attached to the top, which is harder than you would think.

The kids chose the costumes themselves, and I couldn’t be prouder. TB’s involvement with Lego League is accelerating, so the lego brick makes perfect sense. And the fact that The Girl is completely indifferent to the usual fairies/princesses/tiaras strikes me as a moral victory. My favorite is still the veterinarian outfit, followed by the astronaut, but washing machine has to win for creativity. Her friend will go as a ninja, so they should make quite a pair. If you answer the door on Monday night to find a smiling washing machine and a cherubic ninja, you’ll know why.

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My modest proposal for immigration reform: give post-secondary degrees recognition as green cards. I honestly don’t understand what’s gained by making it hard to employ the best and brightest from around the world. If we aren’t going to fund our own public higher education system, we should at least be willing to import the educated from elsewhere. If the next Sergey Brin winds up in Canada or India instead of the U.S., we’ll only have ourselves to blame.

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Spotify is proving weirdly addictive. (It’s a streaming music service that lets you be incredibly specific.) This is kinda mortifying, but true: a couple of weeks ago, missing my Dad, I decided to re-listen to some of the music he loved when I was a kid. Juice Newton, The Carpenters, the Fifth Dimension, and the queen of his record collection, Anne Murray. Hearing “Snowbird” again brought a lot back.

Heaven knows it’s not my taste, but I can’t deny that it was part of my life back then. This won’t win me any hipster street cred, but for me, Anne Murray is “roots” music.

I don’t know which memories of me will mortify my kids when they get older, but I know some will. Beyond a certain point, they never really stop telling you to suck it. You can only hope that at some level, they don’t mean it.

What Else Is To Be Done?

2011-10-27T02:50:00.000-07:00

Lenin famously asked “what is to be done?” The relevant question now is slightly different.

I’ve taken heart in the Occupy Wall Street movement, even with its inherent vagueness. One of the clear messages coming from it is resentment of the pincer movement of high student loan debt and a lousy job market. If you’re in your twenties, fresh out of college with a five or six figure loan burden and no immediate prospect of a job that will pay enough to spare you from moving in with your parents, you have a right to feel betrayed. You followed the rules and still came up short.

(Generation X academics lived that movie back in the 90’s, but without the broader cultural support. In this, if in nothing else, we academics actually were ahead of the culture!)

My grandfather lived a life that’s almost unimaginable now. He dropped out of the ninth grade to go to work. He worked as a tree trimmer, then got a job as a lineman for the local electric utility. The job was unionized, and it paid enough (and offered good enough benefits) that he was able to own his own home in a decent neighborhood and send both of his kids -- including his daughter, my Mom -- to college. When he retired in his early sixties, he collected a pension and Social Security, and lived a secure existence right up to the end.

He respected education, and made sure his kids got it, but he didn’t have much himself. The world at the time didn’t require it. He was able to live a perfectly fine working-middle class life without it.

That option doesn’t really exist anymore. The kids who once would have signed up for unionized factory work out of high school can’t get it now, and in the rare cases when they can, they get a permanently lower “tier” of salary as a penalty for being born late.

Yes, there are exceptions, but the overall trend is clear: salaries for people without college degrees have taken beatings over the last few decades. Today’s high school grads are basically correct when they identify college as a de facto necessity. The path my grandfather followed is closed.

Since college is a de facto necessity, the students have taken on whatever debt they’re needed to to cover the cost. And between public disinvestment, Baumol’s cost disease, poor market signaling, and the various “arms races” for prestige, the level of debt required has increased far more quickly than the possibility of paying it back.

In their shoes, I’d be protesting, too. They’re really caught between the dog and the fire hydrant. Skip college, and absent family money or a remarkable bit of luck, you’re pretty much consigned to the economic margins. Go to college, and you have to take on debt that presumes a job market that doesn’t exist anymore. Anya Kamenetz can give all the TED talks she wants about DIY education; for the typical 18 year old, the relevant question about college is “what else is to be done?” If not college, then what?

I’m a huge supporter of many reforms within higher ed to make it more sustainable over time, and of a series of economic and political reforms that I think would make the economy both more equitable and more stable. But I hope that as the dialogue unfolds, we don’t make the mistake of missing the economic coercion underlying so much of the anxiety. Not everyone wants to go to college, and it shouldn’t be an ironclad prerequisite for a middle-class life. I’m all in favor of access, but at some level the access should be voluntary. Let colleges be colleges, which involves a certain amount of cost and, inevitably, telling some students that they just aren’t cutting it.

If we have a reasonable answer to “what else is there,” then it’s much easier to hold the line on academic standards. But if we’re the only game in town, then the economic pressures the students and graduates rightly resent will inevitably drag colleges down, too. A serious answer to the Occupy folk involves far more than some student loan relief, as welcome as that is. It involves ensuring that there are other ways to make a living. Colleges were never meant to be the personnel offices for the entire economy, and they’re straining under the task. The answer is not to keep watering college down until it’s cheap and ubiquitous. The answer is to make it genuinely voluntary. Until then, we’ll just keep shouting at each other as the bills pile up.

The Tortoise and the Hare

2011-10-26T02:25:00.000-07:00

As a veteran of many an industry advisory board meeting, this report really didn’t surprise me. A study from the National Bureau for Economic Research says that the income gains from specifically vocational majors (as opposed to liberal arts majors) peter out relatively early in life. By midlife, the liberal arts majors are actually out-earning the vocational majors, on average. The most dramatic fades occur in apprenticeship programs.

As always, “on average” covers all manner of sins. But still.

Data, intuition, and personal experience and observation all suggest that the liberal arts folks do better once they get past that first real job. The trick is getting that first real job. The vocational folks do much better at getting that first real job, but often have trouble moving up from it. (That’s especially true when the one job for which they’re specifically trained gets automated or outsourced.) The vocational degrees are the proverbial hares, quick out of the gate but fading over time; the liberal arts tortoises make a weak first impression, but have a way of winning over time.

The short term/long term distinction gets lost in much of the popular discussion, especially since the Great Recession started.

Entry-level positions tend to be relatively task-specific, and to reward some pretty low-level skills. But they also allow the opportunity to show higher-level skills over time. It’s one thing to be a good helpdesk technician with the ability to diagnose and fix computer problems; it’s quite another to know how to work with angry users, to prioritize tasks, and to handle difficult colleagues. Those skills won’t get you the first job, but they’ll get you promoted.

The challenge for the liberal arts folks is finding that first real job, where the softer skills get the chance to shine.

This report about STEM skills across the curriculum made the same point from the other direction. Instead of pitting STEM against the humanities, it made the obvious point that even the humanists and social scientists would benefit from the ability to think quantitatively. Can you unpack the assumptions behind the charts and graphs? Can you see through the bad assumption, and figure out the missed opportunity? People who can do that add real value, whether in business or in scholarship.

Over the last decade-plus of industry advisory boards, I’ve consistently heard the same thing: employers need employees who can communicate, think on their feet, and handle change. Smart people can be (and often will be) trained in the specifics on the job. Those who grasp the big picture are the ones who will move up. Judging by employer feedback, that big picture ability is surprisingly rare.

Maybe it’s me, but I find the convergence of these stories an occasion for hope. In different ways, they’re saying the same thing: don’t mistake the short term for the long term. Yes, heading back to Mom’s basement after graduation can be profoundly depressing. I’m fairly certain I would have chewed my own leg off to avoid that trap. But for those who’ve learned how to communicate well, to handle ambiguity, and to see around corners, the breaks will come.

In the meantime, we’ll just keep right on teaching the liberal arts tortoises, and doing it without apology. To the economy at large, I’ll just say, you’re welcome.

The Cutting Edge May Not Be Where You Expect

2011-10-25T02:45:00.000-07:00

Academics have a weakness for the latest cutting-edge innovations. It’s kind of what we do. And in many cases, that’s a good thing.

This week, though, I’ve seen two older ideas come back as new solutions to current issues. They’ve both been out of fashion long enough that they actually seem new, even though they’re anything but.

The first, prosaically enough, is the return of the desktop computer.

People who follow technology know that desktops are rapidly heading for the dustbin of history. They’re clunky and relatively unportable and not the least bit sexy.

But they’re also hard to steal, easy to upgrade and maintain, and relatively cheap for the amount of computing power. In other words, while they might not hold the consumer appeal they once did, they still solve some real issues for institutions.

Laptops and especially tablets can grow legs easily. Some of the measures necessary to keep them in place defeat their appeal. Tablets in particular are basically black boxes; just try upgrading the memory on your ipad. I dare you. But a big old honking desktop lends itself to internal upgrades, extending its useful life and low cost. And tethering a desktop to a desk is no big deal; it’s not meant to move around anyway.

At some distant future point when everyone has their own porta-device, the dedicated computer lab may become redundant. But we aren’t there yet, and desktops still do the job better than their newer, sexier, more expensive counterparts.

The second is even more low-tech, basic, and old. It’s the quiet study area.

Libraries (and “learning commons,” increasingly) are becoming steadily more high-tech, and more group focused. The paradigmatic cutting-edge library space now is the warren of desks with wifi where groups of students can work on projects together, using whatever device they happen to bring with them.

But as the world gets louder, I’m starting to see more demand and appreciation for the old “sit down, shut up, and study” space.

It’s easy to lose sight of this, especially at a commuter campus. We don’t have dorms, and we don’t have a sylvan quad. Space for students to just sit down and study is at a premium. We have a library, but most of the library is given over to tables at which students often engage in group study or other conversation. For a student who may not have a quiet home, quiet study space can be a scarce commodity.

Academically Adrift generated no end of discussion a few months ago, but one of its most compelling findings went mostly ignored. It reported that time spent in group study was negatively correlated with gains in critical thinking, but time spent in individual study was positively correlated with gains in critical thinking. Sometimes you just need to focus. And for all the cutting-edge innovations in instructional technology -- regular readers know that I enjoy my gadgets as much as anybody -- sometimes you just need to get back to basics: a student, a table, a lamp, a book. (Those of us who spent meaningful time in graduate reading rooms in grad school know the setting well. Once silence becomes expected, it’s almost self-enforcing.)

At better-funded institutions, this need may be so well-covered that further discussion is just redundant. But in these parts, blessed silence is a breakthrough.

Sometimes the cutting edge isn’t where you expect it to be. In these two cases at least, it’s in the past.

The Faculty-Staff Divide

2011-10-24T02:15:00.000-07:00

A thoughtful correspondent wrote last week to express concern about what she perceived as a growing rift between faculty and professional staff on her campus.

It’s one of those issues that waxes and wanes, but never really goes away.

Professional staff can be characterized as people with graduate degrees who do non-faculty work. They could be counselors, financial aid staff, librarians, registrars, disability-services providers, IT, instructional designers, or any number of other positions, depending on the campus. Some of them may have teaching backgrounds, and some may even teach on an adjunct basis while working as staff. Their positions are usually twelve month, five-day-a-week jobs. Some campuses have a tenure system for staff, and some have tenure for some staff (librarians) and not others.

Although friction between faculty and administration gets most of the press, friction between faculty and staff can be quite real, and sometimes toxic.

In my observation, some of it comes from what Cathy Davidson calls attention blindness. We don’t notice certain things, based on our priorities at the time. If I’m focusing on how best to teach my class in two hours, I’m not thinking much about how the financial aid department works, and vice versa. Over time, it’s easy to see folks in the other roles are basically ancillary.

Different calendars are a persistent source of friction, and not just for the obvious reasons. For example, one of the most frequent areas of calendar-driven faculty-staff conflict I’ve seen has been parking. If your workday starts at 8:30 every single day, it’s hard to muster much sympathy for the professor who complains that she can’t find a space just before her 11:00 class. Conversely, if you’re the professor trying to get to class, it’s hard not to wonder just who all these people are taking up spaces.

The yearly calendar makes the problem more complex. Parking is relatively easy in the summer, since most of the faculty aren’t there. When they come back in September, the parking follies begin. That’s nobody’s fault, obviously, but some people think in terms of people rather than systems, and train their anger accordingly.

Even such basics as “how was your summer?” can be grating if you spent most of your summer in cubicle hell. I recall a professor a few years ago complaining bitterly that the summer was a wash, because he only got to spend one month on Cape Cod. It took real restraint not to unleash a snark attack of historic proportions. Well-meaning “welcome back” messages can have the same effect on people who never left.

I’ve also seen a persistent confusion among some faculty between “shared governance” and “faculty governance.” They don’t see the distinction, though to the staff, the distinction is loud and clear. Pronouncements like “the faculty are the college” are a direct slap in the face to staff.

Then, of course, there’s status. Most staffers don’t go by titles, even if they have academic credentials at the same level as faculty. (There’s nothing weird about addressing someone as Professor Smith, but it would be weird to call her Librarian Smith.) The culture of faculty, in which they regard themselves largely as independent contractors on loan from their disciplines, implies a different locus of loyalty than the culture of staff, who regard themselves as employees of the college. When that divided loyalty comes with lifetime job security, a staffer who has neither may grumble.

None of this is to deny that resentments can run the other way, too. Many professors who are tired of the adjunct trend look at the growth in non-faculty positions and see an unchecked resource suck. Depending on turnover rates, racial and gender demographics can sometimes be markedly different among faculty as opposed to staff, leading to resentments that have little to do with the jobs themselves. And personalities are an ever-present wild card.

I don’t know if faculty-staff tensions are getting worse, the same as they ever were, or getting better. I’m not even sure how to measure that. I hope they improve, not least because those of us who care about public higher education need to put up a united front against an increasingly difficult political climate. At some point, we need to acknowledge that divisions of labor are simply necessary.

I’d guess that the faculty-staff divide varies greatly by context. Wise and worldly readers, have you seen circumstances that make it markedly better or worse? Is there another source of conflict I’ve missed? And is there a realistic way you can imagine to make it better?

Ask the Administrator: Know When to Hold ‘Em, Know When to Fold ‘Em

2011-10-21T02:21:00.000-07:00

A new correspondent writes:

I'm a new hire in my second year at a large community college in the Mid-Atlantic region. During my first year I largely kept my eyes and ears open and my mouth shut as I adjusted to a new workplace with its own culture, policies, and personnel. Tenure reviews from my committee and student evaluations were glowing, and overall, everyone seems pretty glad they hired me. During that first year and more recently I've seen a few things going on that I don't agree with or have strong opinions about. Some are issues at the district level, some at the college level, and some are within my own division. This year I've started speaking up in division meetings and in conferences, trying to offer solutions and different points of view rather than point fingers. The feedback from fellow faculty has been positive - they like that I'm speaking up, even if they don't necessarily agree with me all the time. Various members of the administration, however, have taken
notice as well and the feedback from them hasn't been as positive. I suspect they prefer the 'company guy' they saw in my first year rather than this new guy with his opinions (which on occasion are diametrically opposed to those of administration). Do you have any tips on how to navigate tenure while still maintaining my self respect? I can't abide muzzling myself for another two years, but I don't want to get pegged as a troublesome faculty member by administration and risk not getting tenure either.

Context matters.

It sounds like your college has a relatively short tenure clock, which is good and bad. The good is that you don’t have to worry as long; the bad is that decisions will necessarily be based on pretty limited information. Given that the college has to live with its decision for decades to come, and that it has to base that decision on a few years that may or may not be representative, a certain hypervigilance is to be expected. It’s a predictable, if not inevitable, result of a design flaw.

“Speaking up” can mean a lot of things, and different administrations have different thresholds for how much is too much. Some will take offense at perfectly civil disagreement; others will withstand astonishing levels of contrapower harassment, and even slander, without retaliation. (I have the mixed good fortune of living in the latter.) I don’t know where your college falls on the continuum.

That said, a few pointers seem relevant.

First, pay attention to the setting. There’s a meaningful difference between disagreeing behind closed doors and rallying the troops. The former allows your interlocutor some room to move, which in theory can lead to a constructive solution. The latter doesn’t. There may be times when rallying the troops makes sense, but it should nearly never be the first move.

Second, allow for the possibility of information asymmetry. They may know something you (and other faculty) don’t. Sometimes that information can be shared, but you have to know to ask. The bane of my existence is that sometimes it can’t be shared; this is usually the case with personnel matters. It’s incredibly frustrating to sit through an angry tirade based on misinformation when you know the facts but are bound by confidentiality rules not to disclose it.

Third, don’t become the boy who cried wolf. Every campus has That Guy who has to sound off at every meeting, whether provoked or not. Sometimes That Guy actually has a valid point, but once you’re typecast, even the valid points get lost. The people whose objections carry the most weight are the ones who pick their battles. Credibility counts. Sherman Dorn has used the term “deviance credits” to capture this. In essence, you build credits over time with solid performance, and spend them when speaking out. If you go into deviance debt, your credit/credibility is destroyed. Everyone starts with some credits, and it sounds like you built some more in your first year. But if you get caught up in the white-knight fantasy, you can quickly find yourself overspent. Whether that affects your tenure bid or not, it would absolutely affect your quality of life there. You don’t want to see eyes roll when you speak.

Finally, try to get a sense,whenever you can, of the “why” behind what you find objectionable. Although faculty often believe that administrators have nearly unlimited discretion, we actually work under substantial imperatives and constraints. If my college’s accrediting agency thinks that outcomes assessment matters, then it does; yelling at me won’t change that. If my state decides to measure colleges based on graduation rates, then graduation rates matter, whether I agree or not. Attacking the wrong person may feel cathartic in the moment, but it’s ultimately counterproductive. You may need that person’s help later to construct some sort of solution, and everybody’s human.

I’d strongly advise you to find a trustworthy, experienced person at your college as a mentor. If your interest is truly in problem-solving, find someone who seems to have been effective at that, and have some frank conversations. Your concern about tenure suggests that you want to be in this for the long haul. That means you don’t have to solve everything now. Find a sustainable pace, pick your battles, and call it good. That’s all any of us can do, tenure or not.

Good luck. I hope you’re able to find a sane and sustainable balance.

Wise and worldly readers, I assume there’s a panoply of views on this; let’s please assume goodwill in the discussion.

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.

Ask the Administrator: Helping, Cheating, or Marketing?

2011-10-20T02:12:00.000-07:00

A returning correspondent writes:

I teach history in the major university in my area. Every year I get
3-4 emails from high school students who want help with their papers.
They often describe their topic with a phrase that sounds suspiciously
like a high school essay question. High school instructors seem to
feel that students are showing "initiative" by asking somebody else to
do their work for them. With time, my initial sense of outrage over
the laziness of students has given way to resignation.

The new development, however, comes from the dean of my school, who
recently forwarded me such an email, and then followed up the next
day: was I able to help the student? The request made me very
uncomfortable: I didn't want to say no to the dean. I asked the head
of programme what he thought, and he wrote the dean for me. The HoP
pointed out that we may as faculty be undermining the high school
teacher, that students we help may get an unfair advantage, and that
anyway students have terrible research skills and nead the practice.
He said he'd advised me not to respond, but that it was my call.

The dean wrote back acknowledgint these points, but suggested we
should always reply to such requests. Evidently it's good PR with our
future students. She also seemed to think that this particular student
was "a cut above" the average student requesting help, which wasn't my
impression at all.

I called the dean every 45 minutes during the last workday to discuss
the issue, but never got a hold of her. I didn't want to write
anything in an email. In the end, I wrote the student a very minimal
book recommendation. However, I regret it and feel dirty about it. I
also can't help wonder why the dean took such an interest in this
case. Is the student is somehow related to the dean ... a friend's
daughter, or something?

Maybe it’s me, but I’ve never heard of this, and can’t imagine doing it.

My first thought is that if a student calls looking for help researching a paper, direct her to the reference desk at the library. A good reference librarian will not only steer her to useful and valid sources, but will also be conversant in the teaching of research ethics. That will give the student ethically unimpeachable help, show the student how to do her own work, and get her out of your hair without you actually refusing discussion. There’s no shame in a referral.

If you aren’t comfortable with that, but still feel the need to help the student somehow, there’s always the old “suggest a source” approach. Again, a student whose motives are entirely honorable will find it helpful, but the student looking for a free paper won’t.

I wouldn’t call the dean every 45 minutes; if a professor did that with me, I’d assume some sort of major emergency (or major dysfunction). Just make an appointment and, when it comes, explain your misgivings and ask if there’s more to the picture.

The closest analogue I can come up with in my experience is the random email application for an adjunct class. Every so often, someone will just pull my email address from the campus website and email me a letter and cv, asking for a class or two. Experience has taught me to just forward it to the relevant program, along with a noncommittal note along the lines of “as you will...” I then respond to the applicant saying, truthfully, that I’ve forwarded it along.

It’s possible that the dean was relatively indifferent to the content of your response, but was just concerned that there was one. (From a PR perspective, there’s a world of difference between a minimal response and a non-response. The former can look professional, but the latter comes off as disrespectful.) If that’s the case, then the matter is fairly trivial. Refer the student to the reference desk or a favorite source, assure the dean that you’ve answered the query, and call it good.

Yes, it’s also possible that there’s something more nefarious going on, but I prefer to save those explanations for when other explanations fail. In this case, they haven’t yet.

Good luck! I hope this turns out to be little more than concern that the email didn’t get summarily deleted.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen anything like this? How would you handle it?

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.

Ask the Administrator: Improved Open Admissions

2011-10-19T02:20:00.000-07:00

A regular reader writes:

I teach at an open admission, 4 year college. Unlike community colleges, we actually pull our students from [several states].

I was having a conversation with another faculty member about our students, many of whom aren't particularly interested or engaged in school. She suggested that we should try to improve our student base, and that we could do that while keeping our open admission policy.

Do you know of schools that did this, tried to get better students without changing the admissions policy? What would that even look like?

There’s a lot here. Depending on which assumptions you use, you could go in several different directions.

The best way, which is also the most challenging, would be to try to meet the students where they are and them raise the bar. It’s difficult, obviously, since students start in so many different places. My current suspicions are that we need to move away from the infinite-remediation model, and towards something that speaks to student goals in the first semester. (Once students know what they’re shooting for, you’re halfway there.) But there’s no denying that this high-road approach is exhausting, expensive, and difficult.

Or you could take shortcuts.

Selective colleges attain their higher pass rates by outsourcing failure; they only admit students who are likely to succeed no matter what happens in college. (A recent study suggested that the high lifetime earnings of Ivy League grads are functions of who got in, rather than of anything they learned there. I had to smile...) That’s not to deny the efforts of wonderful instructors there, obviously, but I’d bet my salary that my cc would see dramatically higher graduation rates if it switched student bodies with, say, Swarthmore.

If your college is willing to move to selective admissions, then there’s your answer. But it may not be, whether because of a perceived mission, historical commitments, and/or fear of the short-term enrollment hit from turning people away.

Of course, there’s overt selectivity and covert selectivity. You could always reject the former and embrace the latter. Take anyone who applies, but skew the application pool.

The easiest way to do that would be by raising tuition substantially, and leaving financial aid flat. (This would have the added benefit of offsetting some of the revenue hit from decreased enrollment.) Since the strongest predictor of student test scores is parental income, you could probably move your student body upscale just by trying.

You could also shift resources away from support programs that tend to help at-risk students. Do away with vocational majors. Put in tight restrictions on course withdrawals and second attempts. Make the financial aid hoops much harder to navigate. Stop “advertising,” and start making your college noticeable in more upscale circles. (Have you ever seen an ad for Yale? Me, neither.)

I’m not a fan of any of these, except maybe the advertising one, but they’d probably work. Going with the plutocratic flow would open many opportunities. The major downside, other than the initial enrollment hit, is the ethics of it.

For my money, the real trick isn’t in showing that you can get better academic performance from wealthier and better-prepared students. That’s easy. The real trick is figuring out how get better results with the students who actually need you.

I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to tweak advisement and curricular design so that students don’t have to eat quite so much spinach before getting to something they actually want. If we can address the very real academic deficits in the course of teaching something they actually want to know, we’ll really have something. In my teaching days, I always found student motivation more telling than raw skill, as important as that was.

Good luck!

I suspect that my wise and worldly readers have seen some better approaches, so I’ll crowdsource this one. Is there a way to harvest a better crop of new students without abandoning open admissions?

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.

Consultation and Conflicts

2011-10-18T02:56:00.000-07:00

This piece in the Washington Post -- sent along by a few alert readers -- inadvertently draws attention to one of the consistent dilemmas of established colleges trying to make change.

The article is about helping students avoid, or at least minimize the cost of, the quagmire of remedial course sequences. It notes, correctly, national data showing that students who place into developmental courses but skip them anyway tend to do just as well as students who took them. Tellingly, it cites leaders of several local cc’s claiming that such findings couldn’t possibly apply to their own campuses.

I had to smile.

The first-person exception defeats many a great idea. “That’s probably true in other places, but we know better.” It’s the reason that some jaded administrators either skip the “consult with the folks in the trenches” step, or at least discount it deeply. In some cases, the folks in the trenches have such deep and fundamental conflicts of interest that their ability to respond thoughtfully to evidence is simply defeated. Program reviews, for example, tend not to conclude in suicide notes; they nearly always conclude with calls for more resources.

Worse, the folks in the trenches typically are in only one set of trenches. They see their own program. They don’t see the other programs competing for resources. It’s easy to criticize administrators for focusing too narrowly on numbers, but we have to make decisions about allocating limited resources among competing programs, each with its own passions, anecdotes, and virtues. You have enough money to pay for two new faculty lines, and you have compelling needs in six programs. How do you decide which two get what they want, and which four don’t?

The usual response -- “just consult with the departments” -- doesn’t help. Each department wants its own. That’s understandable, but it limits the usefulness of the input. (The other usual responses -- “say yes to everyone” or “consider excellence” -- are even worse.) At least with data on enrollments and/or adjunct percentages, you have something disinterested to consider. You have a common denominator. It shouldn’t be everything, but when other factors cancel each other out, it’s something.

Say what you want about virtue and academic excellence; at the end of the day, it’s silly to pretend that self-interest doesn’t play a major role in departmental feedback. Departments that rely on developmental courses to maintain their staffing aren’t likely to sign on to proposals to streamline those courses. As they see it -- often incorrectly, but still -- they’d be slitting their own throats.

Colleges with relatively robust traditions of shared governance, such as mine, are likely to fall prey to all the usual failings of interest-group politics. It would be surprising if they didn’t. Taking self-interested testimony at face value will lead to distorted results. Sure, the national data may be clear, but we’re special!

And that’s why I had to smile.

Real progress -- the kind that actually takes account of facts -- requires the willingness, or ability, to get beyond interest-group politics. That means accepting the possibility that a deeply-held and/or very convenient belief may be wrong. In other words, it requires a vanishingly rare set of conditions.

I have faith in the truth, but its progress can be maddeningly slow. In the meantime, we lose students in preventable quagmires.

Ask My Readers: Working With an Instructional Designer

2011-10-17T02:45:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I take questions from readers, but today I have a question for you.

My college will bring its first full-time Instructional Designer on board soon.

For those of who have worked with instructional designers on your campuses, what should we try to encourage? What should we be extra careful to avoid?

The point of the hire is primarily to help take the online courses to a higher level of quality. Having someone whose job it is to be current in the technology field, and who has a background in teaching, will (I hope) help faculty find and adapt the innovations that work best for their courses and styles. (I assume that process will involve a fair amount of culling. Tech that might make sense in one course might not in another.)

I can imagine that if we aren’t careful, the instructional designer could quickly be relegated to the status of a helpdesk technician. Alternately, if we go too far in the other direction, she could come off as an imposition.

To my mind, she’s be part scout, part coach, and part consultant. But the devil is always in the details.

For those who have experience either as instructional designers or as faculty working with them, what are the traps? If you knew then what you know now, what would you have done differently?

Thanks.

The Girl, Political Philosopher

2011-10-14T02:50:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, The Girl and I did a grocery run. The following exchange occurred in the ice cream aisle.

TG (sighing): It must be nice to be in charge.

DD: What?

TG: It must be nice to be in charge! You get to decide what everyone will do!

DD: Well, sometimes it can be nice. But sometimes it’s not.

TG: Why not?

DD: Because sometimes you have to make a decision that people don’t like, and then they get mad at you.

TG: Just let them vote on it!

DD (suppressing a laugh): That’s not always an option.

TG: Why not?

(pause)

DD: What would happen if your teacher asked the class to vote on whether to do math or to have recess?

TG: We’d vote for recess!

DD: Probably. But then how would you learn math?

(pause)

TG: It must be nice to already know math.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Markets

2011-10-13T02:19:00.000-07:00

The recent silliness in Florida, in which the governor is questioning the need for more anthropologists, got me to thinking about the whole idea of market demand for degrees. When we speak of market demand for certain disciplines, which market do we mean?

There’s the market for B.A. grads (or A.A. grads, or A.S. grads) in private industry. Looking solely at that, you’d conclude that a field like psychology is pretty much DOA.

Then there’s the market for Ph.D. grads in a given discipline. There, psychology looks stronger, but English isn’t looking too hot.

Then there’s the market for seats in classes, or campus-based demand. Looking at that market, English and psych are both healthy, but engineering doesn’t look too good.

Some of the friction between colleges and states, I’m convinced, has to do with which market you look at. The two sides are looking at different markets, and drawing different conclusions. And as we move to “market-based” reforms, the divergence will grow.

On campus, the plain-vanilla gen ed disciplines are in consistently high demand. Some of that, of course, is a function of distribution requirements within degree programs, but the tuition is where the tuition is.

But distribution only explains a small part of the picture. Students cluster into majors like English and Psychology voluntarily, choosing them over engineering or computer science. They do that despite a well-orchestrated campaign telling all and sundry that tech is where the jobs are. Even many of the vocational programs -- criminal justice, human services, culinary -- are mostly non-technical.

It’s easy for folks on the outside to look at colleges as the personnel offices of the economy, and to request more engineers and fewer comparative lit majors. It’s even possible, if difficult, to shift funding around to encourage some paths more than others.

But at the end of the day, any policy that fails to account for both student choices and institutional imperatives is doomed to irrelevance.

Students aren’t drafted into majors. They select them. And students select majors for a host of reasons, perceived marketability being only one of them (and “perceived” is the key word). Some students won’t have anything to do with advanced math. Some will only do what their friends do. Some select for personal taste, some for perceived ease of completion and/or grading, and some just sort of drift through. (I was in the “personal taste” category.)

Colleges respond to the preferences that students express with their feet. It’s all well and good to hear a governor say that we need fewer psych majors and more engineering grads. But if the students avoid engineering like the plague and stuff the psych lectures full, and if my college is tuition-driven, then what, exactly, do you expect me to do?

If you want colleges to be able to channel students away from their expressed preferences and towards something else, you need to give those colleges the financial cushion to reduce the relevance of student tuition. In other words, if you want colleges to be more responsive to the “employer” market, you have to make them less dependent on the “student” market.

The usual ritualistic bleating about “market-based reforms,” on the one side, and “learning for learning’s sake,” on the other, fails to account for the paradox. What students want to take, and what employers want students to take, are not the same thing. If you want colleges to discount the former in favor of the latter, you have to pay for it. Otherwise, colleges will do what they have to do, and those anthropologists will just keep on coming. If the governor of Florida wants to snuff out psychology, he’ll need to pony up some serious cash to make all those small STEM classes sustainable. Failing that, he’s just blowing smoke. The markets have spoken.

Occupation

2011-10-12T02:20:00.000-07:00

The word “occupation” has been getting a workout lately.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, which seems to have gone viral around the country, is emerging as a welcome and badly-needed counterweight to the Tea Party. It has given rise to an Occupy College movement, in which students protest excessive tuition increases, student loan burdens, and, implicitly, the lack of well-paying jobs available upon graduation.

And then there are occupations, as in jobs. The lack of occupations is causing occupations.

“Occupations” in the former sense are usually considered intrusions. An interloper refuses to leave; the area is under occupation. An occupying power is present after an invasion. In the case of Wall Street, the idea is that people outside the financial elite are daring to tread on the elites’ turf. In the Occupy College movement, which, paradoxically enough, demonstrated itself through vacating classrooms, the idea is that the students who are just passing through are stopping to stay a while, presumably because there’s nowhere else for them to go.

Working at a community college, I find the latter harder to stomach than the former. Certainly any sentient observer of American politics would have to concede that the plutocratic bias of the system is both catastrophic and self-reinforcing. Taking public exception to plutocracy strikes me as reasonable, if not required. Coming up with a reasonable and realistic alternative is somewhat harder, but the movement is welcome in at least making it clear that there’s real objection to the incessant rightward drift of our politics.

Whether the occupation will actually accomplish that is another question. After all, “Wall Street” is a literary device. The folks with real money don’t actually live there. Much of what “Wall Street” does is actually done online from wherever. The street itself is mostly unoccupied. The Occupy Wall Streeters are bemusingly tolerated mostly because they’re harmless. They’re occupying a space where people don’t live.

The issue they’re trying to address is only partly solvable by isolating a few villains (even conceding that those few are really awful). It’s mostly systemic. The cockpit is mostly unoccupied.

That’s even more true in higher education. Yes, it’s easy to point out a few celebrity presidents who make asses of themselves with ridiculous salaries and tone-deaf pronouncements in the press. (Mark Yudof, I’m looking at youuuuu...) But they’re ultimately beside the point. The real drivers behind cost escalation are structural: Baumol’s cost disease, a labor-intensive artisinal production model, health insurance, unfunded mandates, the constant demand for new technology...

That’s why the blogosphere’s knee-jerk “if the administrators would just wake up and/or go away” meme is so pointless. In the desperate search for villains, it misses the real story. The real story is that thousands of people have cycled through academic administration for the past few decades. These people have had different backgrounds, politics, personalities, demographics, and inclinations. And yet despite trying all of those different people -- most of whom were intelligent and at least partly well-meaning -- the cost trend has been inexorable in every sector of higher ed, in every region, for decades. The issue is systemic.

Occupying the dean’s office won’t make Baumol’s cost disease go away. Replacing this president with that one won’t stop the unfunded mandates. Decrying the adjunct trend won’t make health insurance any cheaper to provide.

And attacking the one remaining institution in American life that actually serves upward social mobility is not going to create the jobs its graduates want.

I wish the OWS people well. They’re exerting political counterpressure that desperately needs to be exerted. But with a few exceptions, the issues they’re concerned about won’t be solved by seizing the enemy’s turf, because there is no enemy. The issues are structural and impersonal, which is why they can seem inexorable. They’re complicated. They require changing the rules of the game.

Trying to figure that out, at least in higher ed, is occupying my time. I invite others to join me here. The ground may be virtual, but the issues are real. In the meantime, I’ll tip my cap to the folks working the other way ‘round, for opening the political space to start.

You! Out of the Pool!

2011-10-11T02:48:00.000-07:00

This kind of situation gives administrators fits, since there’s no easy answer.

Let’s say a student is so disruptive in class that he’s making it impossible to teach. The professor exercises the prerogative to kick the student out of class. The professor files disciplinary charges, but it will be a week or more before the charges can be heard (and the student can give his side of the story). The class will meet at least twice, if not more than that, before the hearing can be held.

Should the student be allowed back in class, pending the hearing?

The argument for ‘yes’ relies on due process and the presumption of innocence. If a student is wrongly banned from class for an extended period, then real academic harm is done to the student. If we assume that there’s meaningful distance between accusation and conviction, then it’s hard to argue with ‘yes.’

The argument for ‘no’ relies on the authority of the professor. If a professor goes so far as to kick a student out of class, in front of the rest of the class, then a statement has been made. Seeing that student stroll right back in the next time, grinning smugly, makes an unmistakable statement to the other students. Even if the charges are subsequently upheld, it’s hard to undo the damage of that impression.

Ideally, of course, students would not be this disruptive. But that’s like saying we wouldn’t need a criminal justice system if people just stopped committing crimes. It’s theoretically true, but of no practical interest.

The next-best situation has faculty so well trained, and so even-tempered and wise, that they’re able to handle any situation that develops without resorting to kicking anyone out. And there’s some truth to that. Learning to manage difficult students is part of teaching. I knew a professor at Proprietary U who was fresh out of grad school, where she had been trained in finding ever-more-finely-ground evidence of social injustice in the unlikeliest places. Her first class ate her alive. Her exquisite sensitivity left her without the thick skin needed to handle actual people. Anyone in authority has to endure a certain amount of abuse as a part of the job, and professors are not immune to that. I don’t recall a professor ever kicking a student out of class in my student days, and I never resorted to it in my faculty days. It should be rare.

But some students are really far beyond what a reasonable person should have to deal with, even if they aren’t technically criminal. They need to be removed if the class is going to work.

The next next-best situation has the hearing held post-haste. But sometimes that’s just not reality. You can be fast, or you can be thorough, but you can’t be both. Since our legal system prizes thoroughness over speed, quick-and-dirty leaves you exposed. So non-trivial time lags are likely to remain an annoying fact of life for the foreseeable future.

But that’s a hard sell to a pissed-off professor. Even though the law doesn’t stop at the classroom door, some professors honestly believe that they’re absolute monarchs in the classroom. They have tremendous authority and discretion, but it’s not unlimited. Students do have certain rights, due process among them.

I’m hoping there’s a reasonably elegant balance that someone out there has struck. Wise and worldly readers, has your campus found a way to deal with disruptive behavior when the mills of due process grind slowly?

Fifth Grade Math Homework

2011-10-06T02:35:00.000-07:00

(Congratulations to anyone who actually read this post after seeing the title!)

Many years ago, MAD magazine had a piece about joke courses for college football players. The one I remember was called “Subtraction: Addition’s Tricky Pal.”

The Boy is discovering that there’s some truth to that.

He’s struggling with “borrowing.” Say you want to subtract 235 from 700. Turning the last zero into a ten requires borrowing from the digit before, but that’s a zero, so...

Oh, the humanity.

I learned “borrowing” sometime during the Carter administration, so I’m a little fuzzy on the step-by-step of teaching it. I suggested thinking of 700 as seventy ‘tens.’ To borrow a ten for the last column would leave you with 69 tens. Then, in order from right to left, ten minus five is five, nine minus three is six, and six minus two is four. 465, done and done.

That doesn’t seem to take, though. The idea of “seventy tens” seems a little too abstract.

He’s fine when just borrowing from a single digit. 82 minus 28 is fine, since borrowing from the 8 still leaves enough to subtract the 2. But borrowing across multiple digits remains mysterious.

Trying to convey ‘borrowing’ to a ten year old really brings home the difference between knowing how to do something and knowing how to teach it. I’ve walked him through problems step by step, narrating each step as I go, and he seems to follow. Then I have him try a few problems, and he does great. But it’s gone by the next day. It doesn’t stick.

His frustration is palpable and insidious. He’ll get back worksheets with middling grades, but the middling grade really just reflects a single mistake repeated over and over again. He honestly wants to get it right, but just can’t seem to hold the concept for very long.

I’m okay with him learning to struggle a bit, since that’s a valuable life skill. (Sometimes I think the only way in which my social science grad school training prepared me for my current job was in teaching me how to take a punch.) But I don’t want him to get so discouraged that he starts to doubt his own abilities. I don’t want him to become the kid who writes off math as something you’re either born with or not, like wiggling your ears.

He can’t be the first bright, motivated kid to have trouble holding on to a mathematical concept overnight. So I’m sending out this message in a bottle -- okay, in a blog -- hoping that someone has found a way to help that kind of concept stick in the mind of a ten year old.

Wise and worldly readers, have you found a way to explain this sort of math that’s both simple enough for a ten year old, and sticky enough to make it to the next day? TB and I would be terribly grateful for anything that works.

(Program note: We’re trekking across several states over the next few days, so the next post will be on Tuesday the 11th.)

Tolerance for Ambiguity

2011-10-05T02:20:00.000-07:00

“That’s stupid.”

As a professor, I gritted my teeth every time I heard a student say that. It was an attempt to shut down discussion of something that didn’t lend itself to an easy answer. Since then, I’ve seen it applied to all manner of things, from gadgets that don’t behave to other people’s motives.

It’s an expression of frustration at the inability to read a situation. If I’m confronted by something I don’t understand, either I’m at fault for not understanding it, or the thing itself defeats understanding. Calling it stupid is a way of blaming the thing.

The habit survives because sometimes it’s true. Some decisions or actions really are stupid, and are accurately described as such. In the twenty-first century, I think there’s a case to be made that the electoral college is genuinely stupid. Blackberry’s decision to launch a tablet without an email reader was truly stupid. It happens.

But moving too quickly to blame the thing itself can quickly become dysfunctional.

I had to smile when I saw this piece, which notes a correlation between creativity and the tolerance for ambiguity.

In managing people, ambiguity comes with the territory. That’s especially true when the people involved are intelligent, self-directed, and concerned only with a small corner of the organization.

Some people handle that by tuning out the ambiguity. One way to do that is to become a rule-driven martinet, enforcing rules as written because they’re written rules. This is the cop who pulls you over for doing 22 in a 20 zone.

The other way is to ignore the rules and go entirely by gut instinct. This is the preferred solution of every cop movie ever made. Just get the job done and don’t worry about “technicalities.” Except that those technicalities exist for reasons, and ignoring them doesn’t make them go away.

Administration necessarily involves living in that gray zone in which rules are both necessary and imperfect. Progress comes from accepting that and deciding to move forward anyway. The best administrators -- and I don’t place myself in this camp yet, though I’m trying hard to get there -- manage to refocus the ambiguity.

Which sounds better: uncertainty or possibility? Failure or learning experience? Internal politics or growing pains?

It likely won’t be long before there are some new deans on campus. I’ll be involved in the selection process. I would love to be able to spot the folks who can handle ambiguity, and even better, reframe it into a hopeful sense of possibility. Folks who can tell the difference between growing pains and fatal objections, between a failed experiment and a failed experimenter.

It strikes me as a kind of wisdom, though it’s not necessarily related to age. I’ve seen young adults who have it, and older adults who don’t. Experience helps, but I’m convinced that it only helps if you have the right framework with which to process it. An experienced martinet is still just a martinet.

Wise and worldly readers, is there an effective way to screen for the tolerance for ambiguity? Even better, is there a good way to suss out the people who see the kernel of promising future lodged in the teeth of the present? These hires are likely to matter a great deal, and I’d hate to scuttle some promising cultural change by hiring someone who’s too quick to call things stupid.

Purgatory

2011-10-04T03:06:00.000-07:00

What if you could predict with confidence which prospective students would succeed in college and which wouldn’t?

Apparently the University of Tennessee at Knoxville has discovered a fairly obvious way to do that. It’s offering 75 students who were waitlisted for admission a chance to prove their mettle. They spend their first year living on the UT campus, but take classes at nearby Pellissippi State Community College. If a student earns at least 30 credits with a gpa of at least 2.5, then s/he is admitted to UT for the sophomore year.

The community college serves as a sort of purgatory for the marginal-admit, giving the four-year college a chance to see if the student can be academically successful in college.

This kind of thing has happened informally for years. Students who more or less coasted through high school have a hard time convincing their parents to shell out big money to go away to college, so they strike a deal: spend a year at the cc, and if you show you’re serious by doing well there, then transfer. What’s new in this program is that the four-year college is initiating it, and blessing it with both its imprimateur and an explicit promise of admission.

I hope that the aboveboard nature of this project will prevent the participating cc’s from being penalized for low graduation rates when the students leave after one year. Under the current reporting rules, those students count as attrition, even if they earn their four-year degrees on time. That’s an asinine artifact of lousy bookkeeping, but it’s also a fact of life.

The other innovative element of it is that the students actually live on the campus of the four-year school. They can participate in almost all aspects of student life there, except for certain athletics. (Presumably that’s to prevent the program from becoming a work-around for NCAA athletic eligibility rules.) The idea is to give the four-year school the purest possible sample, and to give the students the strongest incentive to stick around.

Obviously, the program relies on geographic convenience, so it’s not easily replicated everywhere. But I like it a lot, and wish it well. If it succeeds, it could become a model for similar programs in plenty of other places.

One endearing element is that it recognizes that nothing predicts success in college quite as well as success in college. At my cc, we have stats going back years showing that our grads graduate their four-year destination colleges at higher rates than “native” freshmen; it’s heartening to see some recognition of that. Say what you want about community college stereotypes; anyone who has seen the 300-person Intro lecture at State U knows that the caliber of teaching is nothing to shout about. 100-level classes aren’t hugely different wherever you go, and it’s nice to see that recognized formally.

I also like the implicit recognition that an associate’s degree is not necessarily in the plans for every student at a cc. Some of them only ever intend to do a single year before transferring. To count those students as institutional failures when they achieved their own goals is silly. A structure like this makes it easy to identify students who never intended to get a two-year degree. If they succeed in getting four-year degrees, then the argument for ignoring the “attrition” strikes me as obvious.

It’s possible, of course, that not all will be sweetness and light. If the academic performance of the program grads isn’t up to snuff, then the community college will have some work to do. That’s fair. And funding will clearly become an issue one way or another; it always does.

But I tip my hat to UT and Pellissippi State. This is a genuinely nifty idea, and it has the potential to bring some fairness and legitimacy to the netherworld of the waiting list. Purgatory may not be anybody’s first choice, but it beats being consigned to the flames altogether.

Classroom Styles and College Styles

2011-10-03T02:37:00.000-07:00

Though I’m a confessed agnostic on the subject of learning styles, I enjoyed this essay quite a bit. It suggests the danger of mismatching a style of teaching to a subject matter, so that the folks who do well in the course as taught are not necessarily the folks who actually have the best sense of the subject. An easy example might be a public speaking class in which the grade is based entirely on multiple choice exams. It could be done, but it wouldn’t make sense, and the people who do best on the exams may be an entirely different set than the people who can make the most effective presentations.

From this side of the desk, the same thing is true of colleges. Each has its own culture, even though it often doesn’t really know it. And a set of decisions or policies that might make a world of sense at one college might miss the mark badly at another, simply because it fits one culture better than another. Colleges have styles, and each style has its blind spots.

I’ll give some examples of styles I’ve seen and/or experienced, to make it concrete.

The Catholic School Style. In this culture, tut-tutting and tsk-tsking take the place of substantive dialogue. It usually rests on a foundation of hideously complex unwritten rules, for which the complexity and secrecy are precisely the point. For reasons I’ve never really understood, gift exchange is a major event in this style. In this style, time-in-place is prized, because it takes that much time to build gift credits and to suss out enough unwritten rules to become an enforcer. The preferred rhetorical mode is the argument from authority. Status is everything, and the way to get ahead is to back-stab without getting bloody. Passive aggression from the moral high ground is the preferred mode of attack.

In the Catholic School style, straightforward arguments from pragmatism are considered either suspect or naive. The relentlessly internal focus means that arguments with external referents are assumed to be some sort of code.

(To be clear, the Catholic School style can happen in public institutions.)

I’ve seen administrators handle the Catholic School culture in a few ways. One is to go native, and to try to out-intrigue the tut-tutters. Down that path lies madness. Another is to ignore it, and to just pretend everyone is rational. That works until it doesn’t. My eventual method was to leave.

The Corporate Style. I’ve seen this in both for-profit and non-profit forms. In the for-profit setting, its natural habitat, the corporate style is at its purest.

Traditional academics often caricature the corporate style as heartless, which I think misses the point. It’s actually closer to attention deficit disorder. If the Catholic School style is trapped by the past, the corporate style is markedly indifferent to it. The focus is unapologetically on the next thing.

The upside of the corporate style is that it lends itself to pragmatism and optimism. The downside is that it easily loses touch with reality, and the succession of flavors of the month can lead to a certain cynicism. In my time at Proprietary U, it once had three different generations of College Algebra running alongside each other simultaneously, each with different credit hours, to serve different curricula. The students frequently landed in the wrong place, and those of us on the front lines had to try to undo the damage that they had unknowingly done. The idea of giving an experiment a few years to work was simply foreign.

The administrators who did well there managed to compensate for institutional ADD with some personal stability. Those who simply went with the ADD tended to crash and burn quickly.

The Clock-Punchers. In a sense, this is the faculty analogue of the corporate style. In this culture, the faculty show up, teach, and go home, and leave the rest to the administration. In this style, an autocratic management style is actually an asset, since the culture places more value on time-saving than on inclusiveness. Though I have yet to work in this setting, I’ve seen it from the outside. The advantage of this culture is that remarkably little time is spent on navel-gazing. The tragic flaw of this approach is that it largely limits institutional wisdom to just a few people. The trains will run on time, but whether they’re going to the right places is an open question.

Elites in Exile. I’ve been on both sides of this one. The faculty largely believe that they were meant for better things, and they combine admirably high standards with a painful status anxiety and a simmering resentment that they aren’t at some unspecified “better” place. This culture can lead to wonderful innovations, but it also tends towards a chronic bitterness and a bad habit of proxy battles.

In this setting, the important tension for administration to notice is the seemingly infinite need for praise before anything can get done, on the one hand, and not feeding the sickness, on the other. Status anxiety can be temporarily distracted, but it can never really be satisfied. The only long-term method I can imagine for dealing with this is to try steadily to bring expectations in line with reality.

Each style is different. “Inclusion” works well for elites in exile, but falls flat with clock-punchers. Management-by-charisma works well in the Catholic School style, but clashes badly with the corporate style and falls flat with elites in exile. Command-and-control works well with the clock-punchers and acceptably with the corporates, but fails miserably in the Catholic School and the elites in exile. Management-by-favors can work well with the Catholic School, but will insult the elites in exile.

The trick is in adapting a given management style to what a particular culture can handle, or in recognizing when that’s just not possible. (There’s a great book waiting to be written about the middle manager caught between a faculty who wants to go one way and senior leadership who wants to go another.) People on administrative job searches would be well-advised to be honest with themselves about their own styles, and to try to select colleges at which they’re likely to succeed. In this sense, hiring is a lot like casting actors. The point isn’t necessarily to find the best overall actors and hire them; the point is to find the actors who will do the best jobs with the roles as written. If you hire Sean Penn to play a teenage girl, it’s not likely to work.

So no, I don’t know about the whole “learning styles” literature, but I’m convinced that there are cultural styles afoot at different colleges. And many of the issues of fit are the same.

Wise and worldly readers, what college cultures could be added to the list?