Credit and Credibility

Several years ago, I started musing about the potential for an upscale for-profit college.  (Here’s the first piece in which I floated the idea of “Mercedes U,” back in 2005.)  Since then I’ve returned to the idea several times (such as this piece from 2010, and this from 2012).  Founders College gave the idea a shot several years ago, but flamed out quickly due to terrible planning and a quixotic Ayn Rand fixation.  As far as I know, that has been the only credible attempt.

Now Tressie McMillan Cottom is trying to put some meat on the bones of the idea.  And she’s doing it in a wonderfully bloggy way, posting a work-in-progress on her blog for crowdsourced brainstorming.  

The idea of an upscale for-profit makes too much sense not to happen.  In fact, it makes so much sense that it’s worth asking why it hasn’t happened yet.

In most of American life, for-profit providers routinely capture the high end of the market.  Think about the image of “public housing,” as opposed to private homes, or of “public transportation,” as opposed to private cars.  Generally, we use public options to provide something minimally acceptable to people who otherwise wouldn’t have anything at all; we allow for-profit providers to cater to those with the means to pay for higher perceived quality.

As the distribution of wealth has polarized, and the political discourse has failed to catch up, public institutions that try to deliver high quality to large numbers at low prices -- such as public higher education -- are getting squeezed on all sides.  Student, parent, and employer expectations for performance are increasing even as operating funding is flatlining.  But strangely, even as the publics get squeezed, the private providers aren’t doing what we would normally expect.

In higher ed, for-profits have historically focused on the “low” end of the market, competing mostly with community colleges.  For a long time, there was enough financial aid and private investment capital floating around that for-profits could charge much more than community colleges and still be fine.  But financial aid is tightening, and MOOCs are free; on the low end of the prestige hierarchy, it’s getting harder to continue to ignore cost.  We’ve long had a robust “private” sector in higher ed, but most of the private colleges have been technically not-for-profit.  (The way some of them handle endowments casts doubt on the “non-profit” conceit, but that’s another issue.)  The same is true in K-12: there’s no shortage of private schools, but most of them are technically nonprofit.  

McMillan Cottom isolates “prestige” as a relevant variable, and I agree that it’s an obstacle for any new entrant.  But it’s hardly insurmountable.  Prestige can follow from exclusivity and money, both of which for-profit companies have shown themselves more than capable of providing in other contexts.  I’m wondering if something like religion is the missing variable.

Some private colleges have religious affiliations now, but many more of them started that way.  And while public colleges are expressly forbidden from being specifically religious, much of  traditional academic culture carries unmistakably churchly holdovers.  Graduation robes are obvious manifestations of that, but it goes much deeper: the entire idea of a tenured priesthood of self-selecting men who have special access to The Truth comes straight from the church.  Even now, many academics take a vow of poverty to fulfill their callings as teachers.  There’s a sense of mission -- a religious term in its own right -- among many academics that encourages them to take economically damaging deals just to stick around.

Americans are happy to pursue profit, and happy to talk about faith.  But we get a little jumpy about mixing the two.  That, I think, is where prestigious for-profits would face the real obstacle.  Part of the prestige that attends private higher education comes from the sense of mission that relies, in a fundamental sense, on the idea that they aren’t in it for the money.  They’re in it for the mission.  Anyone who has worked in administration knows that mission and money actually bump into each other every. single. day.  (I’m told that the same is true for people who actually run churches.)  But in the public mind, the two are largely distinct.  Anyone who’s willing to live on academic wages just to get to teach ancient history must really love teaching ancient history.  The purity of motive that comes from the absence of profit sacrifices credit for credibility.

As long as for-profits stayed away from anything mission-like, and just focused on very short-term job training, the fact that they were in it for the money didn’t matter much.  But as they have expanded their “mission” to overlap with much of what traditional higher ed has started to cover -- and even to seek approval from the same regional accreditors -- the purity of motive that nonprofits can claim isn’t there.  They’ll have to find a way around that if they’re going to break the prestige barrier.

I think it will happen, but more slowly than a strict economic calculation would suggest.  Ironically enough, much of higher education has become far more secular than its institutional design ever assumed, which leads to no end of cultural tension.  Vocabularies and assumptions based on very different worldviews survive in contradictory fragments, wielded by very smart people who often haven’t reflected on their history.  Logics of priesthood coexist with logics of industrial unions, as if the two are somehow compatible.  (Here’s one: “peer review” and “worker solidarity” are contradictory.  Discuss.)  I’ve never heard of a priests’ union.

Secularization is a powerful force in American culture, even if we generally don’t own up to it.  As it takes greater hold, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of the stigma attached to for-profit education fade away, replaced by a more pragmatic, results-oriented view of it.  At some point, prestige might come to correlate with actual quality of performance; depending on your angle to the universe, that’s either exhilarating or heresy.  

But we’re not quite there yet.  

Anyway, I’m happy to see that some very smart people are starting to ask some of the right questions.  Why hasn’t the upscale proprietary caught on yet?  What’s stopping it, exactly?  In the meantime, if you have the chance, I strongly recommend checking out McMillan Cottom’s paper and offering constructive thoughts.  There’s something here, and I suspect it may shed light on more than just the next investment opportunity.

Ask the Administrator: No Experience without a Job..

A left coast correspondent writes:

I have been trying to get my foot in the door in CC's in southern California for a year now. I must've called a dozen or more schools, applied through the online systems, and informally sent my CV and cover letters to the chairs and vice chairs of several departments. While I am still trying, I am also applying to full-time jobs. I've read that CC experience is a must--that I must have experience teaching the CC student body. While I have not taught at a CC, I have taught 8 independent intersession courses: 3 at my R1 where I am currently ABD and 5 at my alma mater, a city college (part of the City University of New York). The city college has a diverse student population and is pretty much an open-door school, with very low SAT admissions. Thus, I do believe I have the desired experience with students from a variety of backgrounds, both academically and socioeconomically. I emphasized this in my cover letter, as did two of my recommenders.

My questions are: 1) Is CC experience essential? Should I even bother applying to FT TT positions without having taught at a CC, despite my other experiences? 2) Is intersession work not as important or weighed as heavily as full semester teaching? I'm assuming that teaching one class in the winter and summer may not

I’ll start by acknowledging that I don’t know the California system, and whatever collective bargaining issues that may be in play. In some states, there’s a contractual preference for people who are already in the system.  Whether that’s true in California specifically, I don’t know; readers who know the quirks of the California system are invited to share in the comments.  

That said, I can say that I’ve seen faculty applicants succeed in getting full-time cc faculty positions without prior cc experience.  The critical variable is usually the academic discipline.  

In disciplines in which the ratio of candidates to positions isn’t so high, it’s easier for new people to break in.  That means, for example, that it’s much easier to break in if you’re in Nursing than if you’re in English.  I know that isn’t terribly helpful at this point, but since you don’t specify a field of study, it’s worth mentioning.

I’m not a fan of people pre-emptively ruling themselves out of jobs.  If you really want to teach at a community college full-time, go ahead and apply for posted positions.  (I wouldn’t bother with cold calls, though.  The processes are far too prescribed these days for cold calls to work.)  You can’t make accidents happen, but you can make yourself accident-prone.

If you aren’t up against a contractual issue, and you manage to get an interview, I’d recommend focusing on the ways that the teaching experience you do have is similar to teaching at a community college.  How do you reach students whose academic preparation isn’t strong?  How do you help students whose focus is necessarily divided among college, family, and work?  How have you worked with students with disabilities?

From a hiring perspective, I wouldn’t look at intersession courses as the equivalent of semester courses, if only because you’re probably only teaching one at a time.  Given that a standard community college teaching load is five courses per semester, I’d want to see that you have shown signs of being able to juggle multiple classes simultaneously.  Someone who may be perfectly fine doing one thing may struggle with doing five.

Typically, the way around the “no job without experience, and no experience without a job” conundrum is through adjuncting.  Adjunct gigs are much easier to get, since they pay so poorly.  If nothing else, they will give you the experience to say truthfully that you’ve taught in a community college setting.  They will also give you exposure to the reality of the community college classroom, which could inform your judgment as to whether this really is where you want to make a career.  Just be prepared to live really frugally unless you have some other job at the same time.  The fact that there’s such a thing as an adjunct track is deeply troubling in itself, both from a fairness perspective and from a sustainability-of-the-industry perspective, but that’s a much longer, separate discussion.

Good luck!  I hope you’re able to find a path that makes sense for you.

Wise and worldly readers, what do you think?  Is there a better way around the “no experience without a job” dilemma?

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

Surprises

People who know me will have a hard time picturing this, but it’s true.

Seventeen years ago yesterday, I met a willowy brunette in a bar in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Neither of us had any business being there, but there we were.  I was a grad student.  She worked in a cubicle.

We bantered, we walked, her teeth chattered in the cold.  She saw me drive off in my powder blue 1989 Toyota Tercel, and wondered about a guy who would drive such a thing.

I called shortly after, and her answering machine ate the message.  I broke the rules and called again the day after that.  

Now our kids call her Mom.  Happy anniversary, honey.

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I’ll file this one under “learn something new every day.”  Did you know that when two colleges form a financial aid consortium, they have to do a separate agreement, manually, for every single student?

I ran headfirst into that one this week.  

A student can only receive federal financial aid at one college at a time.  So if a student who is matriculated at Hypothetical State College wants to take a class at Nearby Community College, either the student has to pay for the NCC class out of pocket, or HSC and NCC need to have a consortial arrangement.  That way, the student’s aid can run through HSC, and HSC can include the cost of the NCC course in the aid package.  

Coming from the academic side of the operation, I had assumed that consortia were sort of like articulation agreements.  Articulations are treaties between colleges in which they agree that, say, HSC will accept sixty credits from NCC towards a bachelor’s degree for any student who has a 2.0 GPA.  They’re ways of guaranteeing that transfer students get a predictable deal.  

The key difference is that an articulation agreement, once signed, can apply to hundreds or thousands of students.  But every single student needs a unique consortium arrangement.  When financial aid offices are scrambling already, the labor involved becomes prohibitive at any significant scale.

Note to the Federal Department of Education: if you want to encourage innovation, degree completion, and efficiency, you need to change this rule.  The bureaucratic overhead required is simply absurd.  

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Nanette Asimov has been posting some wonderful pieces on the City College of San Francisco and its accreditation issues.  This piece is particularly fascinating; it directly takes on the “what if?” scenario of CCSF actually losing its accreditation.

If I were a betting man, I’d say that it won’t; I just don’t think the accreditors are up for taking on an institution of that size.  But it’s fascinating to look at what would happen; it isn’t nearly as straightforward as one might expect.  Check it out.

Airline Pricing or Flat Rates?

Southwest has spoiled me.  I’m so used to just checking a bag and not thinking about it that when I flew USAir last week and saw a “bag fee,” I actually got offended.  What do you mean, “bag fee”?  If I didn’t bring a bag, I’d get flagged by TSA, but you’re charging a bag fee?  How about a seat fee?  Sheesh.

The airlines that charge extra fees do it so they can reap revenue while still appearing cheap on travel websites.  Since people generally shop by fare, isolating fees from fares is a way to game the system and still make money.  People of my generation and older will remember the yellow pages, and the old trick of plumbers naming themselves A. Aaron and Sons to get the first alphabetical listing.  It’s the same idea, only less honest.

So I had to smile when I read about colleges doing basically the same thing.  In order to appear cheap on comparison charts and in headlines, they’re holding “tuition” down by shifting revenues to “fees.”  Worcester State, in my own state of Massachusetts, drew headlines a little while back by charging a pedestrian access fee to pay for sidewalks.  Other colleges have charged “quality” fees, or “global” fees, or, in the case of Oklahoma State, a “life safety and security” fee.  I have no idea what a “life safety” fee covers, or, more menacingly, what happens if you don’t pay it.  (“We’ll show you the real meaning of “Sooner..”)  

The issue with fees isn’t so much their existence as their extent.  “Lab fees” are fairly standard across higher ed; they cover consumables that students use in lab sciences and/or studio art classes.  Most people accept those as straightforward, since their utility is clear.  “Student activities” fees are also pretty standard.  “Technology” fees sound general, but given student expectations about on-campus tech, they’re pretty easy to defend.

But fees are multiplying well beyond their original intent.

(A quick word about my own state of Massachusetts.  Here, the legislature sets the tuition, and for courses taught by full-time faculty, the tuition reverts to the state.  But colleges set their own fees and keep the revenue.  The legislature hasn’t raised “tuition” since heaven knows when, so at this point, fees are several multiples of tuition.  If it were up to me, we’d just reverse the names and be done with it.  The issue arises with “free tuition” scholarships or benefits.  Since tuition is a relatively small, and declining, percentage of cost, those benefits mean less than a reasonable person would expect at first blush.)

The problem with airline pricing, as anyone who follows the airlines knows, is that it’s unsustainable.  The commercial air industry is remarkably volatile, and customer satisfaction with its more absurd pricing practices is legendarily low.  But at a basic level, I get it.  Flights cost.  If your competitor hides the cost and you don’t, you lose.  You need revenue to operate.  So you do what you have to do.  (Southwest’s model suggests that the “you lose” scenario isn’t necessarily true, but I don’t pretend to understand all the variables.)  

I’ve been listening to last week’s episode of This American Life, about the Disability program run through Social Security.  The argument of that episode parallels the arguments around fees.  Basically, when we ended “welfare as we knew it,” we didn’t end the need for welfare.  So disability has become a de facto welfare system in many areas.  We can rail against “welfare” all we want; at the end of the day, a modern economy has costs, and we have to pay them one way or another.  We can call it welfare, we can call it disability, or we can call it incarceration, but one way or another, we’ll pay it.  We can’t not.  In fact, by hiding the real cost and getting cute about it, we wind up paying more.  The program mentioned a private company that has contracts with 17 states to comb through the welfare rolls to find people to shift to the disability program; since welfare is paid by states but disability is paid by the feds, the states have an incentive to cost-shift.  And the company with those contracts is, in the scheme of things, a deadweight cost that serves only to hide the truth.

In my perfect world, I’d rather see public colleges have reliable and substantial operating funding, and the freedom to experiment with competency-based credentialing, than try to keep the old system alive through a shell game of find-the-fee.  But I get it.  Education costs.  We can pay that honestly -- and therefore cheaply -- or we can play games.  I’d rather we paid it honestly, but if we only pay attention to headline numbers...

Comparative Perspectives

Next week I’m doing my first accreditation visit.  I’ve been on the receiving end of three ten-year visits in my career -- you’d think that wouldn’t be mathematically possible, but it is -- but this will be my first time on the visiting side.  I spent a chunk of this weekend plowing through the self-study, pen in hand.

Already, I can see the value in it as a professional development exercise.  The college I’m visiting is in a different state than my own, so it has a different set of political variables to manage.  It has its own history, its own local quirks, and its own challenges.  Yet much of what it’s facing is simply a variation on what nearly everybody in public higher education is facing.  And that’s where the professional development value comes in.

Unless you make a conscious effort not to, it’s easy for people on a given campus to think that its issues are unique to it.  That’s true because most of the time, most people on campus aren’t made privy to, or interested in, comparative perspectives.  They’re too busy focusing on their own work -- to their credit -- and it’s easier just to assume that whenever someone in administration makes some sort of reference to an external force, it’s just cover for a personal agenda.  

But much of the time, it isn’t.  And that becomes really obvious when you look beyond a single campus.

In many industries, people move between employers frequently enough that some level of comparative perspective can develop almost without trying.  Marissa Mayer brings a perspective to Yahoo that an insider probably would not.  Consultants make entire careers out of bringing comparative perspectives to bear on local situations.  In many industries, there’s nothing weird about the idea that companies have things to learn from each other.

In higher ed, though, it’s commonplace for faculty to spend decades at a single college.  When the last time you worked somewhere else was in the 80’s, and that was in a grad student role, it can be hard to know where local quirks stop and industrywide developments start.   

Scholarly associations allow for some level of comparison, but only within a single discipline.  In the years when I routinely attended the American Political Science Association conferences, I got a fair sense of which departments were hot.  But I had no idea about the larger universities or colleges within which they operated.  That’s not a criticism of APSA; that isn’t its mission.  But even after years of that, the first time I heard about outcomes assessment I assumed it was a personal interest of my dean.  

At the conferences that deal specifically with community colleges as institutions -- I’m thinking here of the League for Innovation and the AACC, primarily -- most of the research presented is case studies of single campuses.  There are some blessed exceptions -- I’m a huge fan of the CCRC, for example, because it does exactly this -- but most of what gets presented is success stories from a single college.  Rigorous comparison is left to the audience.

That lack of a comparative perspective probably contributes to much of the conflict on individual campuses.  To the extent that some folks think that major external shifts are somehow optional -- that is, subject to refusal -- they’ll miscalculate the options.  They’ll mistake the messenger for the message, with unhelpful results.  

A few years ago, I had hoped that the blogosphere would do more to foster comparative perspectives than it has.  But supply doesn’t necessarily create demand; even thoughtful writing doesn’t mean much if it goes unread.  Those who think to seek out other perspectives are already ahead of the game.  

An accreditation visit pushes the comparative perspective even deeper.  In this case, the information is pretty thorough and specific.  I don’t know what I’ll find when I get to the campus, but I’m already looking forward to it.  

Financial Literacy

I’ve been in D.C. for the past few days at a Project Directors’ meeting for several Federal grant programs.  The conference was heavy on plenary sessions, which I’ll admit is not my preferred style.  Much of the oratory has been of the “hooray for us” variety, which keeps the peace but doesn’t really help us do our jobs better.  

That said, though, I found a useful breakout session about improving students’ financial literacy.  The session was standing-room-only, which I actually took as a good sign; at least there seems to be widespread recognition that this is a real issue.

Given that the folks doing the presentations mostly work at colleges, they tended to present ‘financial literacy’ in the context of student loan default rates.  It’s a start.

The single strongest predictor of the likelihood of default on student loans is whether the student dropped out or graduated; dropouts default at more than four times the rate that graduates do.  Which makes sense, if you think about it.  The dropouts have lower incomes, on average, and may well feel that they didn’t get what they paid for.  To the extent that we can improve graduation rates, there may be a positive effect on loan repayment rates.

A host of panelists presented various websites, workshops, and on-campus coaching sessions they offer students around financial literacy.  Strikingly, though, nobody had any longitudinal data on which forms of outreach actually work, if any.  

The lack of an evidence base for the effectiveness of any given intervention is a major gap, but one that could be closed with some effort.  I’d guess upfront that student loan defaults are best read as a subset of student (and recent graduate) economic struggles generally.  Students who are doing well economically tend to repay.  This may be a case in which the best way to effect a narrow goal -- reducing default rates -- is to attack a much larger goal, which is something like “how to manage money as an adult in the real world.”  

For example, some students don’t know the difference between subsidized and unsubsidized loans.  Some may not understand the logic behind paying down the highest-interest loan first.  They may not understand the concept of a “credit rating,” and the effect it can have on, say, apartment hunting.  (At 22, I had no clue about credit ratings.)  I’ve been told by an economics professor on campus that her students recoil in horror when she goes through the details of how credit cards make their money; they simply didn’t know.  (I can only imagine how they’d react to learning the details about payday lenders.)  Young adults who’ve never dealt with insurance may not have any sense of what a “deductible” is -- the word always struck me as misleading -- or why it matters.  

If anything, I’m wondering if financial literacy might make a good substantive focus for a freshman seminar.  Yes, it could cover student loans, but it should go well beyond that.  As a subject, the relevance should be obvious.  Better, it would allow students to exercise the various general education outcomes that most colleges profess: communication skills, critical thinking, and quantitative reasoning all leap to mind.  The actual math involved may be relatively simple, but the way of looking at the world is both powerful and complex.  I remember reading, somewhere around the age of 30, that paying off a student loan at 8 percent interest -- yes, kids, that was what we were charged back then -- was the equivalent of an investment with a guaranteed after-tax return of 8 percent.  If you could find an investment like that, you’d take it.  So paying down the student loans faster was a good financial move.  The math is pretty basic, but simply flipping the concept around made a concrete difference in my financial behavior.

Hell, I remember being flummoxed at my first paycheck when I saw the difference between “gross” pay and actual take-home pay.  That was a rude shock.  Giving students a heads-up on that, and the real costs of commuting, could help them make decisions in their own benefit later.  

Admittedly, a freshman seminar with this kind of focus might be a challenge when the ages of entering students are as disparate as they are at community colleges.  But it could also give the older students a chance to share some real-world experience, and to gain some respect for what they’ve been through.  James Baldwin famously noted that poverty is expensive; people who have actually lived broke know exactly what that means.  If the students learn enough so that they later steer clear of payday lenders, then they’re empowered to lead lives in which their choices are their own.   

Ideally, we could use our outcomes assessment protocols to look not only at the gen ed outcomes, but eventually, at students’ economic outcomes.  Is financial literacy simply an interesting academic exercise, or does it actually improve students’ lives?  And do some ways of teaching it work better than others?

As educators, we don’t control the job market.  And I’ll concede upfront that we need to do a better job on tuition.  But even granting both of those, students who leave with a sense of real-world economics strike me as empowered in a way that students who don’t, aren’t.

Wise and worldly readers, what do you think?  Is financial literacy a potentially useful subject for a freshman seminar?  Or is this all just dancing around the recession?

Ask the Administrator: The Kabuki Search

A thoughtful correspondent writes:

This is not hypothetical—I’ve had to deal with it a couple of times now. I keep asking for ethical advice but no one yet has offered me any that I find really satisfactory. We hire someone to work in a temporary position, and are thus able to do so without a national search. This person turns out to be extremely good, and we convince the administration to give us a new line so we can hire them permanently. University policy nevertheless requires us to conduct a national search to fill the position. So we find ourselves in effect recruiting for a slot that has already been filled. What are the ethics of advertising, interviewing, etc., when we already know who we’ll be hiring? I’m extremely squeamish about this process, but I simply haven’t been able to come up with an alternative.

As someone who has occasionally been a sacrificial lamb candidate in searches that were foregone conclusions, this was tough to read.  I know it happens.

I think the key phrase is “we convince the administration to give us a new line so we can hire them permanently.”  That’s the wrong reason for a new line.  

It’s difficult to separate the person from the position, but to get a handle on this, it needs to be done.  Imagine that the position is vacant.  Is it the single most fruitful way to spend a hire?  Or are you building the organization around the incumbent?

That may seem cold and impersonal, and in some ways, it is.  But it’s also what has to be done.  Say you hire SuperTemp to a contrived permanent role, and she leaves in two years for something better.  Now you have an organization built around a suboptimal use of resources based on personal considerations that no longer matter.  Not good.  You also start to build a cultural expectation that jobs are earmarked for certain people.  For the sake of argument, let’s say the person you have in mind is white.  Then let’s say that an African-American candidate with strong paper qualifications applies, loses, and gets wind that the fix was in the entire time.  She files a discrimination suit.  If you have any record anywhere indicating that the fix was in, good luck defending yourself.

This is why I don’t believe in the “take a number” system advocated by some champions of adjuncts, in which full-time positions would go to the longest-serving adjuncts.  If you do that, you will never -- never -- diversify your faculty.  The same applies on the staff side, just substituting “part-timer” or “temp” for “adjunct.”  You will effectively restrict your hiring pool to people who can afford to work for peanuts for years while waiting their turn.  You will never bring in people from other places, who have other ideas, other contacts, and other experience.   In effect, you will extend graduate school for everybody, which strikes me as unethical in the extreme.

If you take affirmative action seriously, then you need to hold searches that are really, truly open.  For real.  Which can mean having some difficult conversations with department chairs or local faculty who are a little too comfortable with a patronage/political machine model.

Several times, I’ve had to be the scold who has had to tell a department that it couldn’t just award a job to its favorite protege without a real search.  It’s never fun; among other things, I discovered quickly that some people have a very different ethical code than I do.  (They belong to the “help your friends and punish your enemies” school, as opposed to the “fairness even for someone you haven’t met” school.)  In some cases, they have no idea that what they’re proposing is, in fact, fundamentally corrupt.  They think they’re right, which makes the conversation that much harder.

I’ll end with the same advice I’ve offered them.  If SuperTemp gets the job through a fixed search, then there will always be a cloud over her.  But if she’s really as wonderful as you say, she’ll easily win a fair, open fight.  If she wins a fair fight, nobody can say anything.  And if she doesn’t, then you get someone even better.

Besides, putting external candidates through hoops when they have absolutely no chance strikes me as unethical in the extreme.  Job searches take time and money.  They are not undertaken lightly.  Putting people through it just to check a box is simply using them to perpetrate a ruse.  Not cool.

The open search isn’t the problem.  The foregone conclusion is the problem.  Let go of the idea that this is already SuperTemp’s job, and decide whether this permanent role is the best use of the resources that would go to a new hire.  If it is, then run an open search -- a really open search -- and let the chips fall where they may.  If SuperTemp is really super, she’ll win fair and square.  

Good luck!  Although the theory is easy, getting there can be really hard.  Some people will never understand why you’re right.  It comes with the territory.

Wise and worldly readers, what do you think?  Is there an argument for giving up open searches?

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

Liberal Arts Deans

In Straight Man, Richard Russo has a wonderful line to the effect that there’s nothing scarier than a happy liberal arts dean, since the possibility of happiness in that role suggests a world other than the world that exists.

It’s true.  I had to smile when I saw IHE tackle the same theme.

The IHE piece was written from a university perspective, so applying it to community colleges requires some translation.  For example, the bright line between “general education” and “liberal arts” isn’t quite so strong at the community college level.  And at medium-sized or smaller schools, there’s generally one central budget, rather than a series of tubs on their own bottoms.  (I don’t like the metaphor either, but it’s the generally accepted usage.)

Liberal arts faculty at the community college level often feel like the red-headed stepchildren of higher ed.  They’ve often been trained at the highest levels, but they’re teaching too much, paid too little, and generally ignored by both their scholarly disciplines and the larger political discourse.  (The disciplines like to assume that everybody lives and dies by publication; the political discourse assumes that community colleges are job training centers and nothing more.)  When the folks you went to grad school with are bitching about 3/3 loads and grade-grubbing students, and you’re teaching 5/5 loads for lower pay to students with a much wider range of preparation, it can be hard not to get frustrated.

As a dean, you’re a bit of a stand-in for all of those larger forces.  Faculty can’t lash out at higher education generally, or at the government as a whole, or at their students.  But they can lash out at the local administration.  

Worse, in a dean’s role, you don’t always have the autonomy or resources to address many of the concerns that, truth be told, you probably share.  That’s especially true if you’re in a setting in which faculty have tenure and you don’t.

So with all of that said, why would a reasonably intelligent person of goodwill give up tenure, summers, casual dress, and a flexible/autonomous schedule to deal with other people’s problems?  Yes, there’s usually a pay bump, but it’s far less than folks on the blogs seem to think, particularly in the community college world.  By itself, that wouldn’t do it.

The best ones do it because they’ve seen the difference an effective dean makes in the classroom.  When someone is minding the store, and the details are being handled, then faculty are free to focus on actually teaching their classes.  That matters.  And the better deans are able not only to manage the administrivia involved in maintenance, but also to see around corners.  They figure out the win/win solution hiding in the sticky dilemma.  They remember hearing about a grant at some interminable meeting last year that would be just the thing for an ambitious professor’s new program.   The good ones are able to notice, and bring up, tweaks that professors can make in class that would help.  They’re able to anticipate the ways that policies might be received, to separate productive feedback from griping, and to crowdsource dilemmas in ways that respect everybody’s intelligence.  They know how to get past the drama of knee-jerk conflict and get to a sustainable solution.  And yes, the best ones also know how to manage up.

In the STEM and workforce areas, grant money is easier to find.  It’s relatively easy to get people motivated when there’s new money to be had.  That happens much less often for, say, English composition.  Deans who can’t play Santa have a tougher row to hoe.  And every single time there’s another state or federal announcement of workforce this or efficiency that, you can hear some of the liberal arts faculty grinding their teeth.

These aren’t the kinds of issues that can be resolved by combining nearby departments or by separating gen ed from liberal arts.  They’re deeper than that.  People who can breathe at those depths are few and far between.  But we’d be in a heap of trouble without them.

Ask the Administrator: Second Round Interviews

A new correspondent writes:

I am writing about second round interviews at community colleges. I have found many helpful resources online about first round interviews, but I have found fewer resources about second round interviews, and those resources tend to be short on details. Thus, I was hoping that you might be willing to post some questions about second round interviews on your blog. In particular, I would like to solicit feedback on the following questions:

What can candidates expect from second round interviews? What if the first round consisted only of a brief (20-30 minute) interview? Might a teaching demonstration then be expected? Or are those always conducted during the first round? What kinds of questions do search committee members typically ask during second round interviews? What about administrators (e.g., deans)? Do second round interviews usually contain many of the same kinds of questions asked during the first round, or do they tend to be significantly different? What exactly are faculty and administrators looking for when conducting second round interviews beyond "fit"? Or is it often all about "fit?"

I’ll assume that you’re talking about interviews for faculty positions, since your refer to a teaching demonstration.  

First, each institution has its own protocols.  Without giving away anything confidential about my own, I’ll say that the first round is typically where the teaching demos occur.  The first-round search committee includes faculty from the discipline in which the hire is being made, and that’s where we screen for both subject matter competence and a demonstrated ability to teach.  By the time I get the list of second round candidates, I assume that all of them have shown both content knowledge and teaching ability.

Different institutions handle second round interviews differently.  At mine, the second round interview is about 45 minutes to an hour with the VPAA, the dean of the division, the campus affirmative action officer, and the chair of the first round committee.  (Having the chair of the first round committee is helpful, since s/he can address any abrupt changes in answers from the first round.  That person’s presence also helps quell rumors of administrative perfidy in the second round in case the first round committee’s favorite doesn’t win.  Sometimes, people tank second interviews, and having a witness helps.)

In the second round, since basic competence is already established, we’re looking for other things.  Are you aware of the realities of teaching a community college population?  How have you handled, say, students with learning disabilities, or major cultural clashes?  In what way do you see yourself contributing to the college beyond teaching?  How do you work with difficult colleagues?  With students whose academic preparation wasn’t as strong as one might have liked?

The subtext of all of these questions, and the many others that come up, is how well you would wear, over time, as an employee.  Do you show signs of flexibility and reflectiveness, or is it all about you?  Do you want to be a citizen of the college, or are you likelier to just teach and go home?  Is this really where you want to be, or are you settling?  (One whiff of the latter is the kiss of death.)  

On the blogs, I’ve seen “fit” put in scare quotes, and used as if we all know it’s nothing but code for whatever “ism” you object to -- racism, sexism, classism, and the like.  And it can be that.  But it can also be a very real daily reality.  For example, at my previous college, a candidate for a full-time position in music asked if it would be a problem if she took off most of October every year to tour Europe.  Um, yes.  Yes, it would.  As a teaching institution, that’s not how we work.  Somebody who really has the Eastman School in mind wouldn’t be happy here, and that kind of unhappiness is both toxic and contagious.

This may all sound squishy, but folks who’ve been through the drill a few times know that it’s real.  Yes, we want excellent teachers who know what they’re doing; I take that as given.  But we also want people who actually want to be here.

Good luck on your search!  

Wise and worldly readers, I assume that you’ve seen contexts I haven’t.  What have you usually seen or done at second round interviews?

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

OER

Has anyone out there been part of a large scale experiment with Open Educational Resources?

Open Educational Resources are free course materials, typically online, that students can use in place of traditional textbooks, lab manuals, and the like.  The idea behind them is twofold: they save money, and because they’re digital and open, they’re subject to continuous improvement.  (If a textbook has a mistake, you have to wait until the next edition to get it corrected.  If an online resource has a mistake, it could be corrected immediately.  The Spring edition of a text could include corrections from the Fall.)  In the best cases, the publishers use data analytics to improve the usefulness of the materials from semester to semester.

Although free websites have existed for some time now, OER as a movement looks just about ready for prime time.  Several foundations have put resources into them, so there’s a choice of multiple providers.  Reading platforms have improved tremendously, so now a student wouldn’t necessarily have to sit at a computer to read.  (Ipads, kindles, and various android tablets should be able to handle them.  And used/refurb versions of those are getting cheaper all the time.)  With the plethora of platforms, I hope, will come much greater access for students with disabilities.  Print textbooks can be a nightmare for disability access, but platforms like ipads are often much friendlier to students who need other ways to get the material.

From a cost perspective, the appeal is obvious.  For most students, what matters is total cost, rather than the split between tuition/fees and books.  If we could zero out the cost of books, then even with a small tuition/fee increase, the total cost to the student still drops significantly.  That’s especially true at community colleges, where the ratio of book cost to tuition/fee cost tends to be the highest.  (Our courses may be less expensive, but our books typically aren’t.)  To the extent that students are either borrowing money or working their way through at minimum wage, saving a few hundred bucks a semester on books is nothing to sneeze at.

Of course, there’s always a catch, which is why I’m hoping to hear from people who have actually tried teaching with OER.  (Alternately, I’d also like to hear from students who took courses that used OER.)  

In thinking through the details, I’m struck by a few possible obstacles:

-- Hardware.  If you need to spend, say, two hundred bucks on a kindle fire or something similar in order to take advantage of OER, then it’s probably a break-even proposition at best if only one course is using it.  You’d need to amortize the cost over multiple sections, and preferably multiple semesters, to really capture the savings.  I’m not entirely sure how to do that within the confines of financial aid.  If the material is platform-independent -- which is why I’m still a little hesitant about itunes u -- then it’s hard to specify any one device on which to read it.  But if we don’t specify and mandate a device, I’m not sure that financial aid could cover it.

-- Breadth of adoption.  This refers both to faculty across disciplines, and to faculty within a single discipline.  Given that the savings really appear only when a student has multiple courses with OER, the usual “start small with a pilot” method doesn’t necessarily make sense.  When every professor is entitled to choose her own materials, and many adjuncts are hired relatively late in the game, I’m not sure how to effectively encourage wide enough adoption to make the hardware purchase and learning curve worthwhile for the students.

-- Quality.  My impression is that quality has improved dramatically over the last few years, and I’m just old enough to remember faculty (including myself) complaining about the low quality of traditional textbooks.  But faculty in each discipline would still need both the time and the inclination to wade through what’s out there to see what’s up to snuff.

-- Ancillary materials.  One of the ways that traditional publishers battle the used textbook market is by bundling new books with workbooks, lab manuals, website access codes, test banks, and the like.  In some disciplines, the ancillary materials amount to a significant portion of the appeal.  I don’t know to what extent the OER stuff is competitive with that, at least at this point.  (I’d love to be wrong on this, though.)

Wise and worldly readers, especially those who have experienced teaching with OER from either the facuty or the student side, what should those of us who are intrigued by the prospect know before jumping in?

Friday Fragments

Get a Job or Your Tuition is Free!  The App Academy, in San Francisco, offers a 9 week, 90 hour per week boot camp to train people as programmers.  In return, the students pay 15 percent of the salaries they land for the first year.  

The contrast between the App Academy, which appears to be thriving, and the City College of San Francisco, which is fighting closure, is tempting, if unfair.  The App Academy is narrowly focused and, by virtue of the 90 hour per week requirement, pretty selective.  But the idea of the trainers having a stake in the success of the students has something to be said for it.

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If you haven’t seen this graph yet -- it went viral -- check it out.  It tells you quickly why public higher education has been struggling.

Public higher education is built on a bargain.  In return for pricing itself below cost, it will receive steady public funding.  The states are largely shirking their end of the deal, which forces an unhappy combination of price increases and service cuts.  Those of us in the trenches know this intimately, but it’s nice to see it made explicit.

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I asked recently why men don’t return to college.  Now a study from MIT suggests that the reason is the rise of single motherhood.

Ooookaaayyyy...

The theory seems to be that girls can do okay with single mothers, but that boys with single mothers really struggle.  If that’s true -- and the mechanism strikes me as pretty opaque -- then the decline in the number of marriageable men could be self-perpetuating.  More single mothers lead to more boys who will struggle, which leads to more single moms, and so on.

I don’t have the research base to say ‘yay’ or ‘nay,’ but my instincts tell me that this is one of those studies that we’ll look back on ten years from now and wonder what the hell we were thinking.  It just doesn’t sound quite right.  

In The Signal and The Noise, Nate Silver gives the example of a real but misleading correlation between ice cream sales and forest fires.  They tend to rise together and fall together, year after year.  But one doesn’t cause the other; they’re both caused by summer weather.  That’s how this study feels to me.  There’s a missing term, but I don’t know what it is.

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Last Saturday The Boy’s basketball team won its championship, which was a happy enough occasion in its own right.  

But the real highlight came after the game, during the celebratory pizza party.  TB spontaneously led a line of teammates over to the volunteers’ table, where he and his teammates thanked the volunteers for making their season possible.  

Judging by the reactions of the volunteers, that doesn’t usually happen.  One of them commented to TB “that really shows class.”  Being the sweet eleven-year-old that he is, when he relayed that comment to us later, he added “woo-hoo!  I have class!”  

Yes, he does.

Training for What?

Should a public college partner with a private company to train scabs?

Anya Kamenetz has a thought-provoking piece about the Milwaukee Area Technical College’s agreement to run welding programs for Caterpillar.  Caterpillar is expecting a strike, so it wants the local technical college to train its managers and non-unit staff to be able to do union jobs if its welders walk off the job. MATC is responding to employer need, offering training in an employable skill and thereby supporting the local economy.  Now the Steelworkers’ union is petitioning MATC to refrain from what it considers pre-emptive strikebusting.

It’s an ugly, sticky issue.  

There’s nothing objectionable about a technical college teaching welding.  It has done that for years, and I assume has done it well.  And there’s nothing unusual about a college contracting with specific private employers to run classes or training workshops for its employees.  Community colleges have done that for decades.  It’s a longstanding practice that frequently offers benefits to all involved: the employer gets good training at a reasonable cost; the taxpayers get a productive workforce and a strong economy; and the college fulfills its mission and makes money to support its nonprofit activities.  (Some of the faculty who object the loudest to workforce training on the grounds that it’s “impure” don’t seem to understand that it materially subsidizes their purity.)  Since noncredit workforce classes have to be economically self-supporting most of the time -- grants aside -- the benefit of working with a single employer is the guarantee of a critical mass of students at a given time and place.

In this case, the union is essentially asking the college to take a moral position that training these workers in this skill at this time is wrong.  

It reminded me of a discussion I had on my own campus recently.  It’s hardly news that Massachusetts is planning to legalize casinos, and that it’s soliciting proposals from various developers for locations.  Community colleges in relevant areas are preparing programs to train workers in the various skills for which casinos hire.  In conversation last week, a respected professor suggested to me that the college should take a moral position that casinos are bad for communities and simply refuse to participate.  

For that matter, I think there’s a serious argument to be made that graduate programs in many humanities and social science disciplines should either shrink or be shut down.  The employment prospects for their graduates at this point are so poor that the idea of spending taxpayer money to send the next wave of recruits into the wall doesn’t make sense.  But there, too, the people being asked to take a moral stand are the people whose livelihoods would be affected if they did.

It’s easy to condemn any or all of these activities, but thinking through the consequences of taking a self-consciously moral position gets complicated quickly.  Suppose MATC told Caterpillar to go away.  The governor of Wisconsin isn’t known for being particularly union-friendly; I can imagine severe political (and therefore budgetary) consequences for the college far beyond the loss of the contract.  Something like that is going on now in Michigan, where some public colleges are trying to sign long-term contracts with unions to beat the “right to work” deadline, and legislators are threatening budgetary retaliation.  

In the context of casinos, if the public sector training providers walked away, private sector training providers would happily pick up the slack.  The “pure” academic side would lose the cross-subsidy, and the political cost to the colleges would probably be substantial.  And the casinos would still be here.

As far as graduate education goes, I think the record is clear.  Graduate programs continue to admit because they need the t.a.’s and they like the prestige.  They’re caught in a variation on the tragedy of the commons; shutting down any one program would do great harm to the people in that program, but would barely make a dent in the larger problem.  The “you first” temptation is so strong that nobody goes first.  

The Milwaukee case struck me as an usually clear example of an issue that we face all the time.  Mixed motives are a fact of life, and political consequences can be very real.  

Wise and worldly readers, what would you do?  If you ran MATC, would you honor the union request, or would you run the program?