Why Don’t Men Return to College?

You know how the hook of a song can get stuck in your head, or how you sorta, kinda recognize an actor in something and you can’t stop trying to remember where you’ve seen him before?  (Actual conversation at home: “Hey, it’s that guy from...uh...”  “Oh, yeah!  That one with the girl from the show?”  “Yeah, that’s it...”)  

Some questions have that same effect on me.  Once I’ve either heard or asked them, I can’t let them go.  This is one of those.  Why don’t men return to college?

It’s a national phenomenon.  It’s hardly news that community college student enrollments skew female; we already know that.  But if you disaggregate by age, you quickly find that the gender split among traditional-aged students is pretty close to even.  As age increases, though, the group becomes decidedly more female.  Among students over about age 25, ratios of 3 to 1 are hardly unusual.  

Which raises an obvious question.  Where are the guys over 25?

I’ve been bouncing this idea around Twitter for the past few days, and I even had a brief discussion with someone from the CCRC at the conference.  I’ve heard a few working ideas, but nothing that feels like it fully answers the question.  So this post is my attempt to think out loud and possibly crowdsource an answer.  If someone out there is aware of some research that I’ve missed, I’d love to hear about it.

One possible factor is incarceration rates.  Men are incarcerated at higher rates than women.  Outside of a few programs, most inmates don’t attend college while they’re inmates.  (Whether that’s good or bad is another question; I’m just looking for explanations.)  This strikes me as part of the picture, but I don’t think the effect is enough to explain everything.

The second easy guess is opportunity cost.  If men without degrees tend, on average, to make more money than women without degrees, then the cost to a family of sending Mom back to school is less than the cost of sending Dad back to school.  The male wage premium becomes a male opportunity cost penalty.

This strikes me as plausible, though probably less than it would have twenty years ago.  The old unionized jobs are mostly either gone or grandfathered -- and therefore held mostly by the 50+ crowd -- and the construction industry still isn’t close to recovered from 2008.  

On Twitter, one reader from Utah suggested that in some areas, early childbirth is still a cultural norm.  That explains not attending college at 18, but it doesn’t explain why women return and men don’t.  And the cultural norms of Utah don’t explain, say, New England.  

It’s true that much of the job growth, and the retraining for the job growth, has been in health care fields, which have historically been identified with women.  But given the powerful economic incentives, I would have expected more men to move into that field by now.  Apparently not.

I’ve seen research on gender in higher ed, but most of it falls along one of two lines: either how to bring more women into STEM fields, or how to improve the success rates of young men of color.  Both are valid lines of inquiry, but neither really sheds light on this question. (There’s also a distasteful, essentialist “school is feminine” line that seems to suggest that manly man are too busy doing manly male man things to bother with books and other sissified pursuits.  I have a hard time with that one, since men dominated higher education into the 1990’s.  And the ages at which guys are the most knuckleheaded -- the late teens -- are the ages at which we still get them.  So that just doesn’t hold water.)

The question about bringing more adult men back to college isn’t just based on curiosity.  We’re looking at declining numbers of high school grads for the next several years, which means that if we’re going to maintain or grow our enrollments, we’ll have to reach the adult market.  We do pretty well at reaching adult women, but adult men remain a challenge.  And the first step to attracting them is figuring out what’s keeping them away.

So, wise and worldly readers, I’m looking for help in figuring this one out.  Why don’t adult men return to college anywhere near as often as adult women do?

League for Innovation, Day 2

This year’s drinking game at the League would be to drink whenever someone uses the word “data.”  You’d be out cold before lunch.  It’s all data, all the time.  Or pretty much all the time.  We’ll have to crunch the numbers first.

I missed the opening session, since I had to call in to a staff meeting back on campus.  The lesson learned there is never call into a staff meeting on a cell phone.  Most sentences sounded like “so the duck says...Obama...HA!”  But the first session I made, “The Walking Dean: Surviving the Budget Apocalypse,” was entirely worth it.  

Paul Starer and Lareen Balducci, from Foothill College (CA), opened with various images of zombies, carnage, and a post-apocalyptic wasteland, which made for a nice segue to the California state budget.  After an extended discussion of California’s budget cuts and the ways it handles community college budgeting -- the short version is, you don’t want to know -- an overflowing table of administrators traded hints for trying to keep people moving forward when the money isn’t.  (The fact that a discussion on handling budget cuts drew an overflow crowd is telling.)  In brief, I wish the bloggers who like to imagine deans as evil figures rubbing their hands with sadistic glee while counting the ill-gotten gains from exploiting adjuncts had been there.  The group had no magic answer, but was absolutely serious about the question.

Attendance was weirdly sparse at a discussion by Dave Szatmary, a Vice Provost at the University of Washington, on a low-cost online bachelor’s degree completion program.  The entire audience was five people.  You may make of that what you will.  The good news is that UW is actually consulting with community college people before building out its program.  And since it’s online, it’s open to people from other states.  (The U will waive the out-of-state premium for this program.)  It’s starting with Early Childhood Ed, since the Federal mandate for 50% of Head Start teachers to have bachelor’s degrees kicks in this Fall, and many locations are behind.  And yes, the program will draw heavily on data analytics.

I was able to corner poor Georgia West Stacey, an admirably good sport, at the CCRC booth and pick her brain on my current obsession, which is why men over 25 return to college at such drastically lower rates than women over 25.  I haven’t seen any good studies on it, though it seems to be true pretty much across the country.  (Most of the research I’ve seen on gender, students, and higher ed focuses either on recruiting women into STEM fields, or on improving success rates of young men of color.  Both are valid concerns, but neither really sheds light on this question.)  I had hoped that the CCRC or someone similar had cracked the code.  

Alas, no.  The only theories I’ve heard so far that make sense to me are incarceration rates and opportunity cost.  Men are incarcerated at higher rates than women, and men in prison generally aren’t also in college.  That strikes me as true, but I don’t know that the numbers are big enough to answer the question.  The “opportunity cost” argument is a sort of sexism penalty.  If men without degrees generally make more money than women without degrees, then the hit to a family for the man to go back to school would be greater than the hit to the family for the woman to go back to school.  The flip side of the male wage premium is a male opportunity cost penalty.

But that strikes me as more persuasive in, say, 1993 than in 2013.  28 year old men without college degrees generally don’t make much now; the old unionized gigs are either gone or held mostly by the 50+ crowd with two-tier contracts that permanently shut out Gen Y.  Construction still exists, but the whole industry has been suffering since 2008.  

It’s true that health careers are often the draw back to college, and those tend to draw more women.  But that seems to beg the question.  Why do they draw more women?  

Anyway, gatherings like these are opportunities to bounce questions like those off some very smart people.  

Happily, the day ended with some useful ideas of which, as Dizzy Dean would say, I hadn’t thunk.  Linda Davis, from St. Clair County Community College, gave an overview of a “courageous conversations” model that her college uses to engage the faculty and staff in major issues facing the college.  I admit that I showed up expecting the talk to be about racism or homophobia; instead, it was about data.  SC4 (that’s what they call it) set aside a room and put up posters of charts and graphs of relevant internal data, and invited people to walk through and write comments or questions.  By putting the data out for all to see, and soliciting both questions and explanations for it, they were able to shift the conversation on campus.  

I admit loving this idea.  Among other things, it offers a chance to debunk some widely held assumptions.  And it does so in a non-preachy way.

Finally, Heather Van Sickle, of the National Center for Community College Entrepreneurship, gave a thoughtful and provocative discussion of what community colleges need to do to stimulate entrepreneurship in their communities.  The major takeaway was that having a degree or certificate in “entrepreneurship” is aiming too low.  Students often decide to start businesses after they’ve discovered a passion, and sometimes finding that passion takes a while.  The goal instead should be to ensure that every student gets some sort of basic financial and business savvy in the course of studying other things.  Then, when they fall in love with ceramics and want to open a boutique, they’ll have a sense of where to start.  

I immediately translated that into “gen ed outcomes,” and started thinking about freshman seminars and financial literacy.  More to come here.

Now it’s back to airline bingo, since campus business beckons.  Thank you, League, for the chance to hear from some very smart people and take a step back from the day to day.  

League for Innovation, Day 1

Greetings from Dallas, where the theme of the first day of the League for Innovation conference seemed to be “how to deal with actual human behavior.”

This was the first time I actually did a presentation myself at the League.  I had one of the death slots -- 8:30 on the Sunday morning after the “leap ahead” for daylight savings -- but it was well attended anyway, with about thirty people showing up.  The structure of my presentation was “you make the call,” with scenarios that actual deans actually face.  The group was game, and it was gratifying and fun to meet some longtime wise and worldly readers at the end.

The second presentation, by President Susan Karr and academic vice president Lee Ann Nutt of Lone Star College in Houston, addressed “initiative fatigue.”  Anyone who has worked in administration for very long knows the drill: every year or two a new project with a new acronym comes along, and most of the usual suspects address the same questions they addressed last year.  Over time, the various projects overlap, deadlines start to crash into each other, people start to forget what got said where, and after a few years, people start to adopt a “been there, done that” attitude.

They took a crack at breaking initiative fatigue by setting up a coordinating committee with a master chart of outcomes.  The idea was to map who was doing what, so redundancies could be identified and undue duplication avoided.  (Presumably, it could also help identify the areas of minimal coverage, where future projects would be welcome, and areas of ample coverage, where the horse is well and truly dead.)  Yes, it’s almost a parody of administration to suggest a “committee on committees,” but in practice it can make a lot of sense.

Nancy Millichamp, from the NGLC of Educause, gave one of those “I want to learn more” talks about some projects that Educause is sponsoring.  I was struck, again, that Southern New Hampshire University is light years ahead of most of us.  They seem to have a way of doing that.  Its “College for America” program takes the focus on competencies, rather than credits, to its logical conclusion.  At some point I’m going to have to do a field trip to Manchester and check that place out.

Happily, another theme of the day was “okay, folks, cost is a real issue.”  Richard Sebastian, of the Virginia Community College system, presented a “no textbook cost degree” that’s being piloted at Tidewater Community College.  (They need a catchier name, but it’s hard to shorten it without changing the meaning.)  They’ve chosen the Business Administration degree, and through a series of grants and stipends, they’ve convinced enough full-time faculty in the program to use nothing but “Open Educational Resources” that students will be able to get through the entire degree without spending anything on books or other course materials.  (Presumably, the hardware on which they read the resources, and the internet access for the hardware, are the responsibility of the student.)  I asked about how they’d include adjuncts, but at this point, they aren’t; they’re trying to prove the concept before tackling the logistics of acclimating last-minute hires to OER.

The whole OER movement gives me hope.  Yes, tuition and fees have been climbing at a disheartening rate, but what really matters to students is total cost.  If textbook costs are suddenly eliminated or drastically reduced, then this year’s tuition increase would still result in lower overall costs.  If the quality is there -- and the jury is out on that -- then this could be a winner.  (Given the rapid drop in tablet prices, and the easier adaptability of online resources for students with disabilities as opposed to the printed page, the improvement in overall access could be substantial.)

As a side effect of the book and dropping the pseudonym, the hallway and exhibit hall conversations this year were much more fun.  Tom Bailey, of the CCRC, mentioned that he has my book on his desk, thereby making my day.  (In my world, that’s huge.)  A few fans dropped by to wish me well, and I even made some connections for future projects.  

Finally, Diana Oblinger, the President and CEO of Educause, gave a plenary that picked up largely where Sebastian left off.  She went through a host of examples of colleges that are using analytics and other software in fascinating ways, of which my favorite was Austin Peay State University’s program that gives students “top ten” course recommendations for the following semester, complete with projected grades.  The idea is to keep students on track by “nudging” them towards the “right” choices.

As Oblinger went through her examples, I was struck by the heavy (acknowledged) borrowing from behavioral economics.  Behavioral economics uses observed behavior to change the ways that people make decisions.  For example, people are easily overwhelmed by too many options; sometimes they’ll just walk away rather than make a choice.  (Note the parallel to “initiative fatigue.”)  If we don’t have the stomach to mandate decisions, but we don’t want students to just throw up their hands at seemingly infinite options, then we can use “nudging” to push students towards the choices we want them to make.  Top ten lists are a way to do that.  Students are still free to go off the top ten list, but most don’t.  

On to day two.  Reality ahoy!

Friday Fragments

Bruce Leslie, the Chancellor of Alamo Colleges, has a provocative piece on the Huffington Post in which he foretells the end of community colleges.  While it’s easy to argue with this particular or that one, the point that resonates is that we need to move beyond the “mini-university” model.  

As I get older, I’m increasingly convinced that much of what gets explained, after the fact, as intentional was actually either accidental or the product of unthinking habit.  Community colleges were mostly established within a fairly narrow span of years, which coincided with the halcyon days of state universities.  Much of what we now assume to be “normal” dates from that period.  

The problem with unexamined assumptions is that when they get called into question, it feels like a rude shock.  People don’t always do their best work when recovering from a rude shock.

I’d venture to say that the future of community colleges hinges on the ability to recover from the shock and adapt to the new world.  The real threat is misguided reverence for the past.  The past was just as improvised as the present; we’ve just forgotten.

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The Boy did us proud this week.  For purposes of this story, I’ll call his friend Sarah, because that is not her name.  He was at Sarah’s house -- our families are friendly -- when Sarah let slip that a boy in her school had texted her to ask her out.  She didn’t have any particular feeling about the boy, but she was thinking about saying yes just because she could.

TB responded thusly: “No class.  If a boy wants to ask you out, he should ask you to your face.”  

Sarah agreed, and dropped the idea.  Now Sarah’s Mom is TB’s biggest fan, and I’m fairly bursting with pride.  He encouraged Sarah to have higher standards, sending the message that she deserved to be treated with respect.  And he did it without coaching.  Go, TB!

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 This is both brilliant and preposterous.  In response to the terrible job market for new lawyers, Arizona State’s law school is establishing its own firm to hire its own graduates.  In a sense, it’s a sort of postdoc for lawyers.  The schools are trying to sell the idea as a legal analog to a teaching hospital.

In the very short term, it’s a way for a school to goose its own placement rates.  And on a pragmatic level, for a new graduate, so-so work is better than no work at all.  But I can’t help but read it as a sort of admission of defeat.  Teaching hospitals and lab science postdoc positions have economic models that make sense.  These don’t.  Anything is possible, but this just looks like a holding action, or a way to manage decline.  Is there something I’m missing?

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My sympathies to everyone at Manchester Community College in Connecticut.  It had quite a scare this week.   

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Finally some good news.  Yes, many new college grads are underemployed, but relatively few of them are actually unemployed.  And they’re still far better off in the job market with a degree than without one.

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This weekend I’m heading to Dallas for the League for Innovation conference.  Any wise and worldly readers who’ll be there are invited to my panel on Sunday morning (!), or to drop me a line at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com to meet.  Never having been to Dallas, I’m open to any culinary suggestions...

Signal Flares and Suicide Notes

Kevin Carey’s latest, a long piece on financial aid as an enabler of fiscal irresponsibility in elite higher education, is well worth the read.  But for everything in it, I’ve been stewing on a single paragraph for the last few days:

The limitations of accreditation have added to the incentives for state disinvestment in higher education.  Education leaders protest each round of recession-driven cuts by predicting that academic quality will suffer.  But they have no evidence to demonstrate that this is so.  Disinvestment has been a wonderful free lunch for irresponsible state lawmakers: They can pull money out of public colleges with near impunity because nobody can prove they are wrong.

Yes and no.  

Let’s say that you’re the president of a public college, and your college somehow has developed a really robust outcomes assessment protocol.  And let’s say that you’ve absorbed a host of funding cuts over the last few years, with the prospect of more on the horizon.  Just to make things interesting, let’s say that your robust outcomes assessment protocols have shown, clearly, that actual harm has been done to student learning by the last few cuts.

What do you do with that information?

In a rational world, you would use the evidence of harm to drum up support to fix the problem.  The decline in outcomes would be a signal flare, and would result in help arriving post-haste.

But this isn’t a rational world.  

In the world that actually exists, a president who went public with “our programs are circling the drain!” would be cashiered in short order, and rightly so.  The signal flare would be read as a self-fulfilling suicide note.

That’s true for several reasons.

First, it’s far too easy to blame failure on the first responders, rather than the folks who started the fire.  There’s an entire political discourse that presents public austerity as a form of moral fiber.  Given the fatalism with which many people talk about education anyway, it would be far too easy to take decline as an invitation to put a struggling college out of its misery.

Second, the sheer “man bites dog” nature of a college admitting vulnerability would give the story outsize attention, the kind that’s hard to undo.  Even if the college managed subsequently to turn things around, the public’s memory would be of the problem.  

Third, private donors like to contribute to success.  They like to be a part of something.  If a college seems to be sucking wind, it will lose access to the very resources that could have helped.  That’s why the suicide note would be self-fulfilling.  

And that doesn’t even begin to address the on-campus political battles that would ensue if a president publicly declared that a few of its programs just weren’t getting the job done.  

While there’s a strong political upside to invoking the possibility of future harm, there’s almost no upside to public discussions of actual harm.  (On-campus discussions, yes.  They can spur improvement.  I’m referring here to public discussions.)   Over time, of course, that can lead to a skepticism about the college that cried wolf.  But the wolf is really there.  It’s just that it’s not in anybody’s short-term interest to admit it.

Short Term, Long Term

Back in my faculty days at DeVry, during the Clinton years, students would ask me on a regular basis why they had to take “general education” courses, like mine.  They would have preferred to do nothing other than their technical classes, and they weren’t shy about saying so.

I told them that their technical skills would get them their first job, but that their analytical and communication skills would get them promoted.   If they only ever wanted to work at the help desk, they didn’t need my class.  But if they ever wanted to manage the people at the help desk, the stuff I helped them develop would be crucial.

I was reminded of that in reading the Marketplace/Chronicle survey of employers.  In asking employers about how job-ready new college grads are, they consistently responded that the new grads’ tech skills are fine, but their more general job skills are lacking.  I’ve heard the same thing at every employer advisory board I’ve ever attended, going all the way back to the Clinton years.

A few thoughts:

- First, I wonder how much of what they’re seeing is really a function of age, rather than education.  Many 22 year olds are preoccupied with the concerns of 22 year olds.  I don’t mean that as an attack; I wasn’t any different.  “Kids today...” is an ageless complaint, and life experience takes time.  I’d be interested in seeing if the same complaints hold about students who finish degrees in their thirties.  If not, then this is really just measurement error.

- Second, in looking at the responses -- and in reflecting on the responses in every advisory board meeting ever -- it’s hard not to notice that the popular discussion of “relevant” and “irrelevant” courses is badly mistaken.  The skills built in the traditional liberal arts matter a great deal in the workplace.  

- Finally, I wonder about the disjuncture between long term success and short term success.  Every study I’ve seen of long-term salaries tells the same story: liberal arts grads stumble out of the gate, but catch up in ten years or so, and eventually climb to the top.  Technical grads are in high demand upfront, but they tend to peak early.  Yes, there are individual exceptions, but the trend lines are well-established.  

To the extent that’s true, the real question should be how to help liberal arts majors get that first foot in the door.  (Alternately, it could be finding ways to help the tech folks develop soft skills at a higher level.)  That’s particularly tough in a vicious recession, when what little hiring that does occur tends to be very short-term focused.  

Historically, the agreement between higher ed and employers was that we would produce smart people who could be trained, and the employers would train them.  That model has broken down somewhat as employers have started expecting people to arrive pre-trained.  (The new version of that is the de facto requirement of multiple unpaid internships, in which people have to find ways to support themselves while gaining experience.)  Given the speed of turnover, many employers have decided that long training periods aren’t worthwhile.  

Community colleges in particular have a long history of training people for workforce needs, whether on the credit side (such as Nursing), the non-credit side (home health aides), or something in between (IT certifications).  And although the political and popular discussion don’t acknowledge it, I’ve long argued that even the “transfer” major becomes a major contribution to the workforce, since many of the students who go on for four-year degrees -- and even more -- wind up getting better jobs as a result.  The student who transfers from here to the state university and graduates as an engineer is eminently employable.  The general education courses she got here made that possible.

From an educator’s perspective, the useful part of the survey is in suggesting -- correctly, I think -- that atomized courses don’t always add up to a coherent whole.  Students need to be able to work in groups, to develop creative solutions, and to experience the joys and frustrations of political conflict in a goal-oriented setting.  (For me, the college radio station did that.)  Internships are of obvious value, even as they raise issues of access for students who can’t afford to work for free.  Finding scalable and sustainable ways to help less wealthy students get those experiences is a worthy challenge.

But my kingdom for a study that controls for age.  

Ask the Administrator: Administration as Alt-Ac?

A longtime reader writes:

I'm writing because, having decided to leave teaching, I'm looking for some advice on two potential directions that I hope you (and your wise and worldly readers) can help me with.

By way of background: I planned on being a college professor since sometime in high school. At my own 'snooty liberal arts college' I majored in History then went on to a major research university to earn my PhD in the same. It wasn't until the end of that process that I came to appreciate the awful job market and my professors' ignorance of alternative tracks. My post-doctoral landing was softened somewhat by a two-year research postdoc. During that time I did my first adjunct teaching at a California State University campus. That opportunity led to others at nearby CSUs. Now I'm in my first full year as a 'freeway flier.' I love the teaching, but the financial compensation is awful and the job insecurity is worse. In the meantime, I'm not getting any academic writing done, not only because I don't have time but because I'm just not motivated to write to the in-discipline crowd in the required forms.

I've concluded that for the sake of my family and sanity I can't continue on this track . Adjuncting will never provide enough compensation or stability. And without major publication accomplishments I'm just not likely to find tenure-track work in this combination of a glutted labor market and budget squeeze. (Nor would I necessarily want to enter a 'publish or perish' situation.)  

Though I've applied for community college work, those jobs are scarce enough around here that it's not worth holding my breath. So, after six years working on the Ph.D., two more as a research postdoc, and another year of teaching, I'm looking for a new career.  

Two paths come to mind as potentially building on my skills and interests. One would be entering the administrative side of university life. I've now been connected with a broad range of area schools, giving me a somewhat unique perspective. I know their students well and enjoy my work with them. I worked for two years as a Resident Advisor while an undergraduate and enjoyed that work too. But in my experience top administrators either have a background as tenure-track faculty or degrees in Education. If I start a career in the admin side of higher education, am I heading toward a new ceiling I don't yet see? And what kind of job should I look to start in if I want to be able to grow into positions of greater responsibility as I develop greater skills? 

The second path would be to move into public policy work in education. My graduate work focused on late-twentieth century political history, with an emphasis on ideas and institutions, so I think I have the mindset for public policy work though not the usual training. I have experience writing and speaking to non-academics about contemporary topics, including some (paid) articles published with an online journal. But I just don't know that landscape well enough to know where to start. Could you recommend some organizations that you think are doing the best work in helping address the current crises in higher education? 

Of course, at this point I'm open to any additional suggestions. If you were in my shoes, what other options might you consider?

First, congratulations on deciding to rewrite the script.  It can be hard to let go of a long-held goal, but it sounds like you have a perfectly good reason to move on.

The trendy term for what you’re looking for is “alt-ac,” or an alternative to a traditional academic career.  (As William Pannapacker noted on Twitter, these days it’s more accurate to refer to academic careers as alternative, given their scarcity.)  

My entire career has been “alt-ac,” though I don’t know if the term existed back then.  So I’m very much of a supporter of the concept.  And there’s no shame at all in wanting to make a living that can support your family.

You’re right that certain administrative jobs require a background as full-time faculty, but some don’t.  Tutoring or academic support centers often require some teaching experience, for example, but it doesn’t have to be full-time.  Some grant-funded programs look for people who can blend academic qualifications with some sort of either advising or managerial skill.  If you have the chops for it, advising centers can be a way to move up.  The trick is to find careers that offer ladders, rather than ceilings.  

The public policy area is outside my experience, so I can’t really speak to it intelligently. (That’s particularly true in California.)   Any wise and worldly readers who can shed informed light are invited to.  

Good luck!

Wise and worldly readers, what say you?  Are there other, better options?  Is there a realistic path from a history Ph.D. to a public policy role?

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

Phoenix, Ownership, and Control

Life happens when it happens, but I picked a hell of a week to take a blogging break.  The University of Phoenix has been informed that it’s likely to be put on probation by the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association, its regional accreditor.

We already knew that it was likely to be put “on notice.”  When I mentioned that previously, and noted the possible consequences, one commenter insinuated that I was trying to short the stock.  I wasn’t -- I have no financial interest either way -- but I found the accusation interesting.  Now it’s going from “on notice” -- which is serious enough -- to “on probation.”  No amount of ad hominem will get around that.

But what’s really interesting is the grounds for the finding.  Although the academic interwebs are rife with schadenfreude, the basis for the finding doesn’t seem to be any of the usual hobbyhorses.  It’s not overreliance on adjuncts, or insufficient outcomes assessment, or the profit motive itself that motivated the probation: it’s “insufficient autonomy relative to its parent corporation...”  

The Apollo group is the holding company that owns and controls the University of Phoenix.  Apparently, the accreditors are concerned that the University is insufficiently independent of the holding company.

Whatever you think of the U of P, this is a fascinating standard.  I’ll be curious to see whether this standard gets applied to state systems.

In the public sector, the traditional mechanism for ensuring some level of campus autonomy from the state is the Board of Trustees.  Some Boards are more independent than others, and different states organize them differently, but the general idea is that Board members are supposed to be more than just mouthpieces for the governor.  They’re supposed to bring independent judgment to bear on the question of whether the college (and specifically the president) is fulfilling the mission of the college successfully and ethically.  

In the classic model, a Board is comprised of influential and accomplished people who take the long view of the mission and success of the college.  (Historically, they also tend to be donors to the college.)  The Board has to be cognizant of resources, which in public systems necessarily entails paying attention to the state and/or local government.  The Board selects and evaluates the president, which involves setting high-level goals for the college, but it generally doesn’t intrude on daily operations.  Those are understood to be the responsibility of the college administration.

Boards act as buffers between short-term political pressures and local administration.  Given the speed with which political offices turn over, it’s important to have some level of consistency over time to allow local innovations and program a chance to flourish.  

Over the past few years, there has been a move afoot among states to clamp down on Board independence, even while state funding has dropped.  Connecticut is the most prominent example, but it’s hardly alone.  From the perspective of a state legislature, local autonomy can look a lot like high-minded foot-dragging.  When there’s a public policy goal to achieve, it’s easy for legislators to think of campuses as simple extensions of the state, subject to state control just like any other agency.

In this case, though, the HLC is trying to draw some sort of line between the folks who write (some of) the checks and the folks who make academic decisions.  (In reality, most of the checks come from the students, with or without federal financial aid.)  In other words, they’re challenging trustees to do what trustees are supposed to do, and by implication, they’re challenging both states and investors to back off a bit.

The acid test for me will be to see whether this same standard gets applied to public colleges.  (By “applied,” I mean that someone gets sanctioned for not following it.)  Ironically enough, in the early twentieth century, serious social thinkers saw the defining character of the modern corporation as the separation of ownership from control.  The HLC, in its way, is challenging a modern corporation to get back to its roots.  Allow some academic autonomy as a form of quality control, so the competition that does happen is on quality, rather than just marketing.  And even more ironically, the HLC may well wind up mandating that states act more like modern corporations once did, separating ownership from control.  And for much the same reason.

I don’t think it was either Phoenix’ or HLC’s intention to get us back to the foundations of corporate governance.  But if that’s what it takes to restore the insulation between financial and academic decisionmaking, I’ll take it.  

Participation or Efficiency?

Oscar Wilde supposedly once claimed that he would have been a socialist, but he liked to keep his evenings free.  All that civic participation would have crimped his style.

I was reminded of that this week in discussion with some faculty who were balking at the time commitment involved in serving on search committees.  They all believe in heavy faculty involvement in searches, but all that participation really adds up.

They’re certainly right that search committees are major time commitments.  We have some pretty sophisticated protocols for staffing them, trying to balance veterans and newbies, faculty and staff, men and women, subject matter experts and fresh eyes.  Unlike many private sector companies, we don’t let HR do the first round of screening; the search committee culls through the entire set of applications before deciding on who it would like to invite for first-round interviews.  Depending on the position, the applications can run well into three digits.

Just scheduling committee meetings is a major endeavor.  Faculty have different teaching schedules from each other, and staff members’ calendars are different still.  Each committee has to be “charged,” to get its affirmative action training, and to have its “what are we looking for?” conversations.  Then it decides who to invite for first round interviews and has to arrange the internal logistics for 8-10 of those.  Finally, it has to decide on 3-4 finalists to send forward.  

It’s a lot of work.  We have a rule that anyone on a search committee is excused from all other college service for that semester, in recognition of the time it takes.  (College service refers to other sorts of committees, but not to teaching.)  Even with that, some people find the task too onerous.

But there’s no appetite for streamlining, either.  

It wouldn’t be all that hard to streamline.  Let HR decide who to invite for first-round interviews, and bring the committee into play for the first time at that point.  Done and done.

Culturally, though, that’s just not an option.  The committees don’t want to give up control, and control requires work.  The process can be participatory, or it can be low-impact, but it can’t be both.  Participation takes time.

In a context in which most people are teaching four or five classes per semester, that’s not just carping.  Time is at a premium.  That’s even more true as the semester progresses, and just fitting in all the interviews before the deadline becomes a challenge.  And course releases for search committee members are neither economically sustainable -- you’d be surprised how quickly the cost adds up -- nor practical, given that hires tend to come in areas where we’re short-staffed already.  When a department is already running thin, adding several course releases makes it even thinner.

Wise and worldly readers, has your college or company found a relatively practical and sustainable way to balance participation and efficiency in hiring?

(Program Note: Due to some life events, the blog will be quiet next week.  I’ll return on Monday, March 4.)

Taking the Plunge

I like this story a lot, even though it’s a little pessimistic.

Apparently, Klamath Community College, in Oregon, has decided to make a series of changes to improve student success rates.  Some of the changes are relatively straightforward, such as requiring academic advising and new student orientation.  But it has gone farther than that, and eliminated late registration.  

Predictably, eliminating late registration came with a short-term cost.  The college has lost about $400,000 in tuition revenue this year, in a climate in which every dollar counts.  There’s no easy way around that.  Ripping off the band-aid will hurt.

The college is gambling that it will eventually make up most or all of that through improved retention and graduation rates, and possibly through improved state funding that’s contingent on performance.  To the extent that the change will increase performance, Klamath stands to gain.

I like the story a lot because it represents an attempt to verify empirically what many of us suspect theoretically.  And unlike some student success initiatives that are either unethical or fiscally unsustainable, this one may be sustainable over the long term after the sting of the first year wears off.

It makes sense, intuitively, that students who sign up at the last possible moment are putting themselves at an academic disadvantage.   Depending on how late “late” is, they may have already missed a week of classes.  Textbooks sometimes sell out, so a student who arrives late may not have access for a little while.  Financial aid and transportation arrangements sometimes take a little while to gel; if the student is already behind academically, it may be difficult to apply the necessary focus while so many balls are in the air.  

The intuition seems empirically correct.  Nationally, the literature suggests that the last in are the most likely to drop out.  (My own college has run its own numbers, and found the same thing.)  Yes, there’s a short-term fiscal temptation to take the late arrival’s money, but the odds of a good outcome aren’t nearly what they should be.  And from a pedagogical standpoint, faculty are much more likely to do their best work when every student is present from day one, books in hand, finances arranged, and able to focus.  That won’t solve everything, but it helps.  Better to have the entire semester to work with the student than to have to get the weakest students show up already behind.

Ideally, a “no late registration” policy should be paired with an option for “late start” or “part of term” courses, so that a student who shows up, say, September 7th won’t have to wait until January.  If that student is instead allowed to register for classes that start, say, October 1, then she’s less likely to vanish.  And if she isn’t hustled into classes that have already started and for which she doesn’t have books, she’s less likely to fail.

Ideas this good often backfire, due to perverse incentives baked into various funding systems.  I hope that fate doesn’t befall Klamath.  The idea is too good to sacrifice to some idiotic technicality.  Kudos to Klamath for taking the plunge.

Thoughts on Graduate Training

In response to yesterday’s post about the seeming invisibility of the social sciences, a commenter asked me why, if I value the social sciences so highly, I strongly advise against people getting Ph.D.’s in them.  Shortly after that, I saw Michael Berube’s essay about graduate admissions, in which he kinda, sorta suggested that they should be cut back, but not unless the departments are willing, and it’s complicated, and anyway aren’t we all “awesome.”  

A few thoughts.

First, no intelligent observer can deny that the production of doctoral candidates in the evergreen disciplines far exceeds the demand for them in academic positions.  According to this piece in yesterday’s IHE, that’s even true in many scientific fields.  (The headline suggests that tenure-track positions are the true “alt-ac.”)  But degree inflation isn’t limited to academia; as the New York Times pointed out yesterday, many employers now use a college degree as a first-level screen for job applicants, even for jobs that don’t use any college-level skills.  It’s enough of an employer’s market that they can.  The story profiles a law firm in Atlanta in which even the gofer has a four-year degree; among the benefits is a healthy crop of college football rivalries to make office parties lively.

So there’s that.

That’s why I see no contradiction between saying “students would benefit from taking Intro to American Government” and “I wouldn’t encourage my kids to do what I did.”  The former speaks to the intellectual richness of the subject; the latter speaks to the institutional economics of higher education.  Those are not the same thing.  I can simultaneously believe that many students would benefit from a thoughtful examination of politics, and that it’s unlikely that tenure-track jobs in poli sci will suddenly explode.  I love jazz, but I have no illusions that this year it will outsell Bieber.  

A more useful line of inquiry, I think, would be to look closely at the structure and assumptions of graduate education, given the institutional economics of higher education in America.  Does it really make sense to continue to produce so many people whose training is geared so strongly to tenure-track jobs that are increasingly scarce?

Over the long term, which is getting shorter all the time, I don’t see the current system as sustainable.  Law schools are making some painful adjustments, and I don’t see why graduate schools should be immune.  But in the meantime, some pretty basic reforms seem in order.

First, every graduate program with an academic focus should include some sort of introduction to the institutional economics of American higher education.  It’s simply inexcusable that they don’t.  Most programs have some sort of first-year seminar; that seems like a perfect place to do a basic introduction to the realities of the profession.  If that leads to a certain amount of attrition, as disillusioned students pursue greener pastures, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  And if it doesn’t, at least the students will have a more realistic picture of what’s out there.  Yes, research universities are conspicuous and, in many ways, attractive.  They’re also atypical.  Unless you’re coming out of a top-ten program, you’re likelier than not to land elsewhere.  

Ideally, that course could take both “macro” and “micro” perspectives.  From a macro perspective, what are the academic employment trends since, say, 1970?  From a micro perspective, what do actual entry-level jobs actually pay?  What do they actually require?  Do they resemble the idealized image many high-achieving undergrads chase when they go to grad school?  Let’s tell some truth.  If Berube is right -- and I think he is -- that “we have to secure the future of institutions that permit freedom of inquiry and freedom of thought,” then let’s take a good, hard, serious look at what it means, and what it requires, to secure those institutions in this political economy.

It may have been reasonable to skip the introduction to the profession in the boom years, but the boom ended forty years ago.  It’s not reasonable anymore.

Second, and I can’t believe this is still controversial, stop overproducing.  Yes, that may lead to a loss of “access,” but in a setting in which so many people can’t find anything more lucrative than adjuncting, I have to ask “access to what?”  Some graduate programs should shrink, some should re-focus, and some should phase out.  After forty years of this, it’s unethical not to.

Finally, and again, I can’t believe this is controversial, pay some attention to teaching.  At both community colleges and teaching-centered four-year colleges, the faculty positions that do exist go to people who teach well.  (To its credit, English has done a better job of this than many other fields, including my own.)  Grad students pick up messages from their advisors; if teaching is considered nothing more than a distraction from research, those grad students will have to do some serious unlearning before becoming useful outside of a few rarified places.

A more realistic graduate education system might result in fewer dashed hopes, better teaching, and more people with enough sense of how things actually work that productive reforms would be likelier to ensue.  I see all of those as positive goods, even if they aren’t quite awesome.

The Forgotten Disciplines

STEM initiatives are all the rage in academia these days.  They’re popular with policymakers, who see them as a form of high-end workforce development; they’re popular with parents, who see them as high-end job placement; and they’re somewhat popular with students.  At the community college level, developmental math has long been -- and continues to be -- a major challenge for graduation rates; it continues, rightly, to receive substantial attention.  From the bottom of the curriculum to the top, STEM fields are in a kind of heyday.

Meanwhile, the higher education press is rife with humanists.  One would be forgiven for mistaking the Chronicle of Higher Ed for the house organ of the MLA.  In the popular press, to the extent that higher education is discussed at all, it’s often portrayed as a battle between the “fuzzy” humanists -- variously understood to be hand-wringing liberals, stuffy antiquarians, or tattooed lesbians, depending on taste -- and the pragmatic business/engineering types who are busily preparing students for the Real World, with varying degrees of success.  The subtext is that the business/engineering types are winning; whether you want to read that as progress or decline is up to you.

As a card-carrying social scientist, I can’t help but wonder at the relative silence around the social sciences.

They’re still pretty widely taught.  Intro to Psychology is typically one of the most popular courses among American undergraduates.  Intro to American Government -- my old haunt -- is weirdly marginalized, even though the subject matter is of obvious interest.  “Sociology” as a brand is having a rough go, but the topics it addresses remain compelling.  Economics is mostly honored in the breach.  Even history -- whether you classify it under social sciences or humanities -- mostly gets ignored in the popular discussion, except for increasingly tired tirades about whether social history is progress or decline.

Yes, I have some bias here.  But it’s also true that psych and soc and poli sci don’t get anywhere near the attention that math and English do.  

I’m told that, at the K-12 level, the relative neglect of “social studies” is an outgrowth of No Child Left Behind.  I’m old enough not to believe that.  It didn’t get much attention before NCLB, either; at most, NCLB may be guilty of making a bad situation worse.  But it was already bad.

Popular versions of the social sciences sell quite well.  Malcolm Gladwell, Dan Ariely, Nate Silver, and the Freakonomics guys wouldn’t have the careers they do if it were otherwise.  The subject matter of social sciences -- money, power, sex -- certainly holds popular interest.  And from a scholarly point of view, the social sciences offer a wonderful duality.  They’re both intuitive and empirical.  They lend themselves nicely to both qualitative and quantitative analysis.  In fact, the best work tends to draw deliberately on both.  As “general education,” it’s excellent.

Yet it’s largely forgotten.  I can’t remember the last time I read about a statewide focus on improving student outcomes in Intro to American Government.  (“Civic engagement” gets some traction, but that’s not the same thing.)  We have national foundations competing with each other to put forward the Next Great Idea for math, but I haven’t heard anyone address Intro to Psych.  

It’s an odd elision.  In my more conspiratorial moods, I like to think that the relative demotion of the social sciences is a conspiracy against critical thinking applied to social issues.  But then I calm down and realize that it’s probably more a matter of simply taking for granted.

To my mind, the social sciences provide excellent fodder for quantitative reasoning (“correlation is not causation”), communication skills (can I convince you of my position on this hot-button issue?), and information literacy (is Fox news a reliable source?).  They address wonderfully rich issues, and at their best, they can suggest that things we take as “given” are, in fact, changeable.  

Wise and worldly readers, am I just getting this wrong, or are the social sciences getting mostly ignored?  And if they are, should they be?

Friday Fragments

From the “other duties as assigned” file: yesterday I had to go in for a medical procedure.  In the course of making small talk with the tech, she mentioned that her daughter is looking at colleges, but they’re both worried about student loans.  I mentioned where I work, and for the next half hour, the conversation was all about transfer, comparative tuition levels, student loans, and the difficulty for new grads who can’t find jobs but have huge loans to pay off.  All of this during the procedure.  

If nothing else, it brought home to me that the issues we’re dealing with are not abstract in any way.

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The Girl: “The future may take a while.”

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I’ve mentioned before my complete bafflement at the ubiquity of flat roofs in snowy climes.  As those of us who’ve lived through snowy winters can attest, snow has a way of melting.  And when the roof is flat, the water has a way of just sitting there.  All that water is up to no good.

Now I’ve got some scholarly backup.  Apparently, the flat roof fetish was an outgrowth of a really unfortunate flirtation with modernism in the mid-twentieth century.  By a cruel accident of timing, the worst of the modernist fad hit at the exact same time as a building boom in public schools and colleges.  

Gravity, people.  Gravity.  Pitched roofs are your friends.

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The government’s “college scorecard” is out.  

It’s a bit mystifying.  It doesn’t include any measure of academic quality, which you’d think would be a key component of “value.”  And its cost of attendance figures are simply mystifying.  It’s supposed to help prospective students determine how much bang for the buck they’ll get at one school as opposed to another, but there’s no measure of “bang,” and a severely flawed calculation of “bucks.”  Color me unimpressed.

If it wants to achieve something, take a page from Moneyball, and figure out the academic outcomes a college achieves as measured against the outcomes expected from the profile of its entering students.  If a college punches above its weight, then it’s doing something right; if it skews wealthy but still gets lousy results, it’s doing something wrong.  

I understand that any single scorecard will necessarily be reductionist; that’s the nature of a scorecard.  It will have to focus on just a few numbers.  All the more reason to choose the right numbers.

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Convinced that The Boy got taller in the three seconds I was looking in another direction, I measured him the other day.  At age eleven, he’s five foot eight.  

The future may take a while, but he seems to be in a hurry.  I don’t know what we’ve been feeding him...

Coase and Carey: Be Careful What You Wish For

I’ve been a fan of Kevin Carey’s for some time.  He gets a lot right, and even when he’s off, he’s interesting.

This week, he’s true to form.  

In response to President Obama’s hinted-at plans to open up financial aid for higher education providers other than traditional colleges, Carey developed a wish list that’s well worth reading.  He’s almost certainly right that direct government price controls on colleges wouldn’t work, or at least, wouldn’t work in a constructive way.  (Employer-based health insurance was born as an outgrowth of wartime price controls.  How’s that system working out?)  Real innovation typically comes either from new entrants into a field, or from panicked incumbents threatened by new entrants.  Without new entrants, you don’t get major change.  Opening up the financial aid system to new providers with new methods doesn’t guarantee a good outcome, but it certainly improves the chances.

Carey starts from that correct observation, and moves quickly to “and here’s how to do it.”  And that’s where he gets...interesting.

On the one hand, he calls for accreditation to move from institutions as wholes, or even degree programs as wholes, to the course level.  As he put it, “what if you want to specialize and provide nothing other than the world’s greatest Linear Algebra class?”  

I’ll flip the question around.  What if you wanted to be able to offer a whole host of courses in a bunch of different majors?  You’d have to go through the accreditation process for every.  single. course.  The administrative overhead -- assessment, documentation, verification, and the like -- would skyrocket.  It’s even worse if you want to offer something outside the traditional disciplines.  Linear Algebra is pretty well established.  But what if you want to offer, say, a philosophy course on the St. Louis Hegelians?  (Worst baseball team ever.  “There is nothing in the essence of the knuckleball that will not become evident in the series of its appearances...”)  Where would you even find the standards to follow?  What if you wanted to offer a course on the latest cutting-edge findings in a field -- the stuff that hasn’t been standardized yet?  I get a headache just thinking about it.

Worse, students would be left on their own to cobble together coherent and recognized programs of study from the scraps provided.  Many years ago, the economist Ronald Coase noted that the great utility of the “firm” in economic terms is that it reduces transaction costs.  It routinizes, which is its great strength.  Shatter firms, and every transaction has to start from scratch.  In a market with a severe information asymmetry, such as higher education, the idea of loosing untrained 18 year olds (or busy and distracted 38 year olds) into the virtual wilds to piece together what they can is a recipe for disaster, even assuming that each individual piece is good.  

Colleges as “firms” provide more than just courses.  They provide structure.  They provide guidance (usually called “advising” or “counseling”).  They provide legibility.  They provide social support, quiet places to study, and the reassurance of knowing that others have done what you’re trying to do.  They allow for the serendipity moments of discovering that the course of study you thought you wanted wasn’t really for you, and that you’re actually much more fascinated by something else.  

Offload all of those costs onto students, and you’re creating an inefficiency of monstrous proportions.  Worse, the students who would lose the most are the ones with the fewest resources at the beginning.  The wealthy, well-prepared, well-connected kid may be able to fend for himself relatively well in the virtual wilds; the poorly prepared and unconnected will likely either fall prey or fall out.

The one virtue of the course-by-course approach is that it could conceivably open the field to a host of scrappy new providers.  But then Carey falls into an uncharacteristic bit of wealth worship:

Organizational capacity. If Harvard and MIT form a non-profit to do this, their capacity, academic and financial resources should carry weight. If Carl Wieman wants to get in the Physics 101 business, his status as a Nobel prize winner and researcher on best practices in teaching introductory physics should work in his favor. If Pixar wants to teach computer animation, Wall-E should count in their favor. (Cars 2, less so.)

Um, this is not helpful.  The problem with the current system is not that Harvard, MIT,and Pixar are somehow shut out.  They do just fine.  The problem is that scrappy new providers -- and, to be honest, scrappy existing providers -- would be crushed by the wealthy and powerful.  Only the wealthy and powerful could afford to run separate accreditations for every single course, and only the wealthy and powerful would have the name recognition to grab the uninitiated from all over the country.  And as that happens, the argument for public support for access for everyone will get harder to sustain politically.  As both a citizen and an educator, I have to call that a disaster.

Where I draw hope from Obama’s message -- keeping in mind that it’s a long way from footnotes from a speech to enacted legislation -- is in recognizing that innovation requires new blood.  It does.  Creating space for new providers to try new things -- and thereby put some useful pressure on existing providers to get more experimental -- strikes me as a genuine good.  Let’s just not forget the strengths of what we have in the excitement of the possible.