Snowy Days and Mondays

Thanks to snowstorms, we’ve already lost the first two Monday nights of the semester to closings.  According to the folks on the Weather Channel, it’s entirely possible that we’ll lose the third, too.

That would not be good.

Day classes usually meet at least two or three times per week.  If you have a class that meets every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, then losing the first two Mondays is frustrating, but it amounts to two out of forty-five meetings.  With a bit of adjustment, it can be managed.

But evening classes usually only meet one night per week.  Instead of losing two out of forty-five, they’ve already lost two out of fifteen, and may soon miss three out of fifteen.  That’s a much more significant hit.

Many classes have web-based components, so they can achieve something productive during snow days.  But not all of them do.  (I hope that this year’s weather will prompt more faculty to add online components, but that doesn’t help right now.)  As luck would have it, the lost days were the first days, so the classes haven’t even met yet.  I know that many professors get student contact information on the first day of class, so they could reach out to students that way even if they didn’t have a full-blown online component to the course.  But when the first days are missed, that workaround hasn’t been established yet.

We have makeup days at the end of the semester, and that helps.  But the logistics of attending on a different day of the week can be an issue, especially for evening students and adjunct faculty.  Childcare arrangements and work hours sometimes prevent folks from making it to makeup days, even with the best of intentions.  

Obviously, the best solution would be for the snowstorms to cooperate.  If they would at least pick different days of the week, the scheduling issues would be much easier.  But this year they’ve picked Mondays, and they’re stubbornly resistant to entreaties.  And given that many evening students are already scheduled to within inches of their lives among their various obligations, there are limits to the amount of flexibility we can expect them to have.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen reasonably elegant workarounds to use when snowstorms stubbornly insist on picking the same day of the week over and over again, even after you’ve politely asked them not to?

Speaking “Innovation” with a Local Accent

I’ve been fascinated by accents since I was a kid.  My Dad was from Tennessee originally, and even after decades away from the South, you could still hear it.  I’d watch movies and get obsessed with a character’s accent.  It struck me as amazing that most people in a given region would agree, informally, to speak differently than people using the same language elsewhere.  To this day, an actor getting an accent wrong will damage a movie for me.  (See, for example, Carrie Fisher’s on-again, off-again Oxbridge accent in Star Wars, Dick Van Dyke’s on-and-off cockney accent in Mary Poppins, or whatever the hell Robert DeNiro was trying to do in Cape Fear.)  I’m told that my own sound is more or less midwestern -- taking after Mom -- except when I have a cold.  Then, you can hear Rochester.  

(For the uninitiated, if you want to hear Rochester, go on YouTube and look up anything by Jenna Marbles.  It really takes me back.)

I was reminded of accents by this piece in IHE, and by a recent on-campus discussion of “15 to finish.”  

“15 to finish” is a bundle of recommendations by Complete College America which are intended to accelerate completion and graduation by nudging students to look at fifteen credits, rather than twelve, as the ‘default’ setting for full-time study.  It’s based on the simple arithmetical fact that a student who takes twelve credits per semester for four semesters doesn’t reach sixty.  Sixty credits in four semesters requires averaging at least fifteen each.  Therefore, if we want to increase “on time” graduation rates, we should encourage students who can, to take at least fifteen credits per term.  

CCA has an entire list of recommendations that it insists should be implemented together, and as a whole.  From a community college perspective, it’s hard not to notice that most of the institutions they cite as positive examples are four-year colleges and universities, and largely selective ones.  Context matters.  

It’s possible to import the raw materials for ideas, but that they have to be adapted to the local context.  You have to speak innovation with a local accent.

In our setting, for example, there’s nothing preventing us from publicizing 15 credits as a default and setting up plans of study (“guided pathways”) based on that.  Of course, we have to build pathways that acknowledge the reality of developmental coursework, which complicates things somewhat, but the concept still holds.  We can even make a point of integrating our credit for prior learning protocols into the pathways, which CCA treats largely as a separate issue.  

But rigid cohort scheduling is a much tougher nut to crack with such a resolutely heterogeneous student body.  Outside of the selective programs, cohorts fly apart quickly.  With different transfer credits, work obligations, family demands, financial conditions, and the like, students rightly and repeatedly resist cookie-cutter schedules.

People on campus know that well; we see it every single day.  And we know that programs like ASAP, at CUNY, require a level of per-student funding far greater than anything we have, or are likely to have.

Under those conditions, barring a visit from the money fairy, the best option is to adapt the parts that make sense here, and to build on success as we go.  It may not provide the clean sample that policy mavens prefer, but community college populations are messy.  A perfectly constructed cohort doesn’t mean much if you can’t join it.

And perception matters.  The people who will actually carry out the program can kill it through foot-dragging if they don’t believe in it.  And if the assumptions underlying the program fly in the face of what they know to be true in their world, they won’t buy it.  But starting with the parts that make sense in our context, and then building on successes, acknowledges both the agency of our faculty and staff and the lived realities of our students.  It’s speaking innovation with a local accent.

Accents don’t have to be perfect.  After seven years in New England, I still don’t use the word “wicked” like a native.  For that matter, Dad never pronounced “how now brown cow” like a New Yorker.  Some of that is fine.  But if CCA really wants to catch on in community colleges, it needs to accept the reality of local adaptations.  Otherwise they’ll keep emphasizing the wrong syllables, and they won’t be understood.

Lifelong Learning and Its Discontents

(Hat-tip to Tressie McMillan Cottom for the idea behind this one.)

Is “lifelong learning” a good thing or a bad thing?  I suspect the answer depends on the definition, and on what you do for a living.

I hear plenty of my fellow academics wax rhapsodic about the virtues of lifelong learning.  They’re sincere in what they’re saying; many of them embody the idea themselves.  They mean several different things by “lifelong learning,” though, which leads to some confusion.

My personal understanding of “lifelong learning” involves picking up the skills to be able to investigate and discover things on your own.  That means a level of literacy and numeracy sufficient to navigate relatively complicated material without help, or at least without sustained or intensive help.  Ideally, it also involves a lively curiosity.  Without that, the skills are largely wasted.  Sadly, higher education struggles as much with the curiosity piece as with the skill piece.

If that were all it meant, I don’t expect that many people would object.

But some take a more literal approach.  They seem to envision graduates cycling back to credit-bearing courses every few years until retirement, if not longer.

From within academia, I see the appeal of that view.  Enrollments are the backbone of our economic model; if we get more repeat customers, that helps pay for all sorts of things.  From a less cynical perspective, it’s certainly true that workers in many industries need to refresh some element of their content knowledge from time to time in order to remain current.  Whether the changes are technological, scientific, or even regulatory, high-performing workers effectively don’t have the option of ignoring them.  So they have to return to the well from time to time to avoid obsolescence.  

But that version of “lifelong learning” strikes much of the public more as a chore than a goal.  It’s acknowledged as a sort of necessary evil, or tolerated as a fact of life, but it’s hardly considered positive.  Each return to school costs money and time, and people in midlife often have plenty of competing demands on both.  

Returning to retool for a new career is usually regarded more positively, but people who do it once usually do it with the hope of not doing it twice.  Having to go back to school to change careers every few years is a pretty dispiriting prospect.  At some point, most people want to move past the ‘student’ stage and get on with life.  Those of us who have made academia our lives may not grasp the distinction, but most civilians do.  

It’s easy to write those attitudes off to anti-intellectualism, and some of that is always around.  But much of it is exhaustion, and the exhaustion comes from entirely respectable sources.  Work a full-time job, help the kids with their homework, shuttle them to after-school activities, take care of meals and laundry, and get some sleep, and time for anything else is at a premium.  In that setting -- a pretty common one -- “lifetime learning” can just sound like one more task.  It’s not the way to recruit allies.

I understand why academics might feel threatened or insulted by talk of “acceleration” of completion, or even of “completion” as a goal in itself.  At its worst, it mistakes credentials for what those credentials are supposed to signify.  But it’s also a sign of respect for people’s time.  

If we want to keep to “lifelong learning” as a rallying cry, we need to embrace forms of it that don’t come across as chores.  Otherwise, it lands with a thud, and defeats the purpose.  If that means being a bit more open to different means to an end, well, we probably should be anyway.  

Snow Day Milestones

We’ve been battered by a couple of significant storms over the last week or so, which means we’ve had some snow days.  But the meaning of snow days is changing.

A few years ago, a snow day meant that no “work” got done, and we probably either watched tv or read.  By late afternoon, the cabin fever would get pretty bad.  Depending on how severe the weather was, sometimes we could play outside, and sometimes not.

Snow days aren’t like that now.  

Technology has changed, for one thing.  As more “work” has moved online, I find myself spending more of each snow day dealing with emails and the like.  Whether that’s progress or backsliding depends on your angle to the universe.

To the extent that we have to stay inside, technology has greatly increased the number of ways to pass time.  I believe in the hand-me-down approach to previous generations of technology, so at this point, the kids have far more possible distractions than they once did.  We have to ration screen time, so it doesn’t take over completely, but it does help with the cabin fever.  It also reduces the amount of television watched, which strikes me as a net gain.  Even better, the kids have reached a level of fluency on their respective musical instruments such that practicing isn’t the hopeless chore it once was.  Snow days make excellent practice time.

We still play outside, when it isn’t awful.  Last week I joined the kids in the backyard throwing a football in the snow -- this being New England, we yelled “Gronk!” at every exertion, laughing ourselves stupid -- and then building a snow fort.  The Girl was amazed when I mentioned that snow forts existed when I was a kid; I think she thinks we were too busy fighting off mastodons and discovering fire to worry about such things.  I told her that we didn’t have internet, and the tv only offered four channels, but we had plenty of snow.  In that setting, snow forts were almost a foregone conclusion.  I taught them the old “pour water on it to give it a coating of ice” trick. which they enjoyed immensely.  Now the backyard is amply protected on the north side, so if any marauding hordes come down from Vermont, they’ll get what for.

But this week brought a moment every Dad savors.

“Dad, can I work the snowblower this time?”

Yes, son, you can.

It’s almost as good as the first time he wanted to mow the lawn.

Experienced driveway warriors know that snowblowers are only half the battle.  They work well on the stretch, but they often run aground at the bottom, where the snowplow piles high the densely packed stuff.  As The Boy guided the snowblower over flat part of the driveway, more or less evenly, I took a shovel to the barrier range between the driveway and the street.  (Noise from the snowblower also masked the increasingly purple soliloquy that I may or may not have issued as the plow drove past, mocking my labors by rebuilding the barrier range.  Small favors.) We finished at almost the same time, and both emerged uninjured.  

Part of me misses the pure isolation of the older model snow day, but I have to admit the new model has its charms.  In the old model, emails could build up like the barrier range at the end of the driveway, and a formidable challenge would await upon returning to work.  In the new model, it’s easier to keep the pile to a reasonable level.  And cabin fever is overrated.  Besides, any time The Boy wants to take charge of the snowblower, he has my blessings.

As long as we can still build snow forts.  Gadgets are great, but there’s no app for that yet.  I’ll just hold on to those a little longer.

Appealing to an Older Demographic

Community colleges are swimming upstream in American culture in several ways.  They’re open-admissions, in a culture based on increasing polarization and exclusivity.  They’re built to create a middle class for a country that’s pulling its middle class apart.  And they’re markedly diverse in a society in which birds of a feather increasingly flock together; in many places, they’re the only major institution in which people from different classes interact, other than malls.  And malls are dying.

Add this one to the list.  If community colleges in the Northeast and Midwest are going to thrive, they’re going to have to learn to appeal to an older demographic.

In our culture as a whole, institutions trip over themselves to appeal to the young.  The idea, other than habit, is that older consumers or voters have become set in their ways and hard to change, but younger ones are still malleable.  Therefore, you get the most bang for the buck by reaching out to the young.  And in some parts of life, there’s probably some truth to that.  

But in some regions, the number of 18 year olds is dropping.  And the political scientist in me can’t help but notice that older Americans vote at much higher rates than younger ones.

Putting those trends together, it’s clear that if they want to maintain or build both their enrollments and their political clout, community colleges will need to appeal more to adults, and especially to senior citizens, who vote at the very highest rates.

Many colleges are already trying the first strategy -- including my own -- through developing and marketing programs and/or delivery methods geared towards working adults.  That usually involves a combination of career-oriented content, credit for prior learning, and flexible scheduling.  It’s difficult to do well, but essential for both communities and community colleges.  This is where you target the thirty-five-year-old who wants to get a better job.

The second strategy is a little less obvious.  Assuming that most senior citizens aren’t terribly interested in job changes, how do you win them over?

One way, I suspect, is to offer regular, free, dedicated on-campus programming.  A seniors’ day, with faculty presentations in areas of likely interest, can go a long way.  (I’ve seen them work well when they’re coordinated with local senior centers, which usually have slates of local cultural events to which their members go.)  That’s especially true when the events happen on the physical campus of the college, and when they happen on a regular schedule.  An annual College Day can go a long way.

Events like those require coordination, and they aren’t free, but they build community support.  That comes in handy when priorities start to collide, as they have a way of doing.

The payoff is hard to measure directly.  You can do surveys, but those tend to measure in-the-moment impressions, as opposed to lasting ones.  In a time of limited resources, it’s easy to dismiss this sort of outreach as “squishy,” or “nice to have.”  But comparing the fates of, say, AFDC on one hand and Social Security on the other, I’d suggest that having seniors on your side is well worth the effort.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen effective and innovative ways that local colleges have recruited local seniors as allies?  Are there other, better ways to achieve the same goal?

Friday Fragments

I read once that the sign of a great mind is the ability to hold contradictory ideas at the same time.  By that standard, community college administrations these days are filled with great minds.

Over the last few weeks, the president of the United States has extolled the virtues of community colleges, and spoken prominently of massive increases in Federal support.  And whenever I listen to Marketplace, I hear that the economy is roaring back.

And yet, on campus, money is getting even tighter.

Part of that is the difference between political oratory and actual budgets.  Part of it is the difficult combination of countercyclical enrollments -- when the economy goes up, enrollments go down -- with cost-shifting.  The state shifted the funding burden to students; when the students start to go away, they take the funding with them.  And part of it is longer-term trends of which I may have written once or twice.

Rhetorical support from the president of the United States for a massive influx of money is great.  But at this point, I’d happily take enough help just to forestall cuts.

--

One administrator to another, I tip my cap to Adam Scales at the Rutgers law school.  He’s the dean who called out students for writing about female professors’ fashion choices on their course evaluations.

Climate-setting is a crucial, if often overlooked, part of administration.  Taking a moment to make a conscious, public statement about treating people with respect is admirable.  Well done, Dean Scales.  

--

Last week, I discovered Belt magazine.  (www.beltmag.com)  I‘m officially irked that I wasn’t notified of it sooner.  It’s extraordinary.

It’s about Rust Belt cities, and the history, politics, and culture there.  

Having grown up in Rochester, I know well the complicated emotions that attach to smaller cities.  The political discourse around millenials and urbanism assumes that every city is Brooklyn.  But most of them aren’t.  Yes, New York City is huge.  But when you add up the Rochesters, Syracuses, Clevelands, Pittsburghs, and similar cities of the Great Lakes region, you’re talking about a whole lot of people.  And those people get overlooked culturally.

The new urbanism is actually confined to a relatively few places.  Boston and New York may be enjoying boom times, but Syracuse and Toledo really aren’t.  That’s still new enough to strike me as noteworthy.  

Contrary to stereotype, those smaller cities have some very real charms.  But the only people who seem to know that are the ones who actually live there.

As a Rochester expat who currently lives outside Springfield, Massachusetts, I can attest that Belt gets a lot right.  It’s refreshing.

--

The Girl inherited the blogging gene.  She has started a blog of her own, in which she selects and captions cute animal pics.  Check it out, but please be kind.  

The random duck is my favorite.

The Harvard Challenge

Harvard raised over a billion dollars just last year.

That’s one university, in one year.  All tax-free.

I did some math.  What would a single year of raising that much -- just one -- do for HCC?  I’ll keep things pretty generic, and favor round numbers -- feel free to plug in the name of your favorite community college.  The big picture is the point.

Let’s round down to one billion -- Harvard raised far more than that, but if you go chasing every last million, there’s no end to it -- and assume that we knew that the incredibly good year was a one-time event.  What could we do with it?

Assume that we’d put it in an endowment of one sort or another.  Let’s assume a 3 percent annual drawdown, which I’m told isn’t crazy for endowments.  Three percent of a billion is 30 million dollars a year in operating income, in perpetuity.  What would thirty million a year get us?

Let’s start with faculty.  Between salary, pension contributions, health insurance, and raises over time, and because I like to keep the math nice and simple, let’s assume $100,000 total cost per year for each new position.  If we hired, say, 100 new full-time faculty, that would be ten million.  That would bring our adjunct percentage down to where it should be.   (RIght now, we have 135 full-time faculty positions on the books, several of which are currently empty.)

I’ll assume that the offices for those faculty come out of capital budgets, rather than operating.

That leaves another twenty million.  Let’s throw some scholarships in there.  Let’s say that we decided to make a point about merit, and offer money to students whose study habits are better than their jump shots.  Tuition and fees for a full-time student taking 15 credits per term come out to slightly over $5,000.  Add some money for books and living expenses -- students gotta eat -- and make it an even 10k per student per year.  If we allot ten million for scholarships at $10,000 a pop. we could cover a thousand students per year.  Completely.

Which leaves another ten million.  Let’s say another five million for staff and administration -- we could use more hands in IT, library, advising, admissions, financial aid, institutional research, instructional design, disability services, grants, etc.  Another million for professional development, to ensure that everyone stays current.  Assuming 500 employees, that would mean two thousand dollars per person per year.  Add another million for library acquisitions and subscriptions.  

We’ve still got three million to go.  Maybe a million for increased utilities and overhead from all those new people walking around, another million for marketing, and a final million for mini-grants for innovative new projects.  

All of that would be covered in perpetuity, based on what Harvard raised in one year.

I know that some of my wise and worldly readers are trained economists.  I’m guessing that the social ROI of a billion at HCC would put to shame the social ROI of yet another billion at Harvard.  Go ahead and crunch the numbers.

So I hereby issue the Harvard Challenge.  Donors to Harvard: this year, just to see what can be achieved, redirect your donation to your nearest or favorite community college.  Then drop by to see what they did with it.

Go ahead.  I dare you.

High Impact Online

Folks who study student retention and success in community colleges are well-acquainted with the concept of “high-impact practices.”  They’re a set of measures that have been shown through empirical research to make positive differences in student outcomes.  The list of high-impact practices usually includes learning communities, service learning, writing-intensive courses, undergraduate research, internships, and capstone courses, among others.  (The AAC&U list is here; it draws heavily on George Kuh’s work.)

Nearly everyone in higher ed agrees that those practices are, by and large, good.  Given the focus on student success at most community colleges now, you’d think we’d be rushing to embrace the entire list, or most of it.  (Capstones don’t always make sense with two-year degrees geared for transfer.)  My own has done a particularly good job with learning communities and service learning, for example.  

It’s probably no surprise that cost has limited the adoption and growth of some high-impact practices.  Learning communities and service learning, for example, require extra coordination and logistical support as opposed to traditional classes, and that support costs money.  In an era in which we’re cost-shifting from states to students, and student enrollments are dropping, it’s hard to find money to scale up expensive programs, even when they’re quite good.

But we’re running into a new obstacle, too.

How do high-impact practices work with online classes?

If you run down the list of high-impact practices, it becomes clear quickly that they assume the presence of full-time students and full-time faculty physically on campus.  To the extent those conditions still hold, implementation is relatively straightforward.  But enrollments are shifting online, and I haven’t yet seen a serious discussion of how to adapt high impact practices for online enrollments.

The need exists.  Online students often perform quite well academically, but have more (or more variable) outside demands on their time.  It can be easy for them to disengage, especially in the gaps between semesters.  

To the extent that we’re using a playbook designed for the campuses of the 1970’s, we’re falling short of meeting the needs of the students we have now.  We have students who take evening classes, online classes, weekend classes; students who use intersession and summer to round out the semesters; students who take courses in funny order because they show up here with assortments of transfer credits from wherever and whenever.  The old model of “pretend you’re a residential liberal arts college” doesn’t work for them.  

In many places, the short-term pragmatic solution has been essentially to reserve the high-impact practices for the students for whom they were originally designed, and to consign everyone else to the basics.  But as the category of “everyone else” gets bigger, the shortcomings of that compromise are getting harder to ignore.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen (or read about, or heard about) smart ways to adapt high-impact practices for online students?

A Truthy Explanation

Stephen Colbert may be between gigs right now, and his character as an only slightly exaggerated Bill O’Reilly may be gone forever, but his idea of “truthiness” lives on.  He defined “truthiness” as statements that _feel_ right, whether they’re “true” or not.  

Dan Berrett’s piece in the Chronicle, tracing the decline and fall of liberal education in America to a statement by then-governor Ronald Reagan in 1967, is truthy.  For academics of a liberal bent, it feels true.  All the right villains line up in a row, and the side of the angels gets to feel suitably besieged.  Too bad it isn’t true.

The piece traces a shift in popular and student perceptions of the purpose of going to college.  Taking the late 60’s and early 70’s as the implied norm -- already a red flag -- and looking entirely and only at four-year institutions -- red flag number two -- it asserts that the culture has finally caved in to its more philistine instincts.  Now, students rarely claim that the purpose of higher education is to develop a philosophy of life, and fealty to the idea of higher ed as job training has become a prerequisite to being taken seriously.

Berrett traces the recrudescence of instrumentalism to Governor Reagan’s comment in 1967 about “intellectual luxuries.”  

Well, no.  

From Berrett’s piece, you wouldn’t know that Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life had come out just slightly before.  Or that “eggheads” took a beating in the 1950’s, exemplified by the political fate of their namesake, Adlai Stevenson.  Or that the surge in enrollments in the humanities around the late 60’s was actually a historical outlier, occasioned by a combination of abrupt coeducation, draft dodging, rapid institution building, and a never-to-be-repeated surfeit of middle-class jobs.  

You wouldn’t know that more community colleges were built in the decade of the 1960’s than have been built in the four-plus decades since, or that the ones in Governor Reagan’s California didn’t charge tuition.  (#FreeCommunityCollege may be a new hashtag, but it’s an older idea.)  For that matter, you wouldn’t know about community colleges at all.  And that’s too bad, since community college humanities are thriving like never before.

Yes, economic reality eventually set in and cooled some enthusiasm for risk-taking.  But that happened in the 1970’s, and pretty much stayed.  (Berrett’s own chart shows remarkable stability in perceptions of higher ed from about the 1970’s to the start of the Great Recession.)  In retrospect, it would have been surprising if that didn’t happen.

When a pair of brutal recessions hit,and state and local governments responded by starting a decades-long trend of cost-shifting higher education to students, students noticed and adjusted accordingly.  The increase in anxiety since the advent of the Great Recession is simply an intensification of a trend that had been going on for nearly forty years.  Add to those trends an increasingly winner-take-all job market and the winnowing away of options for a middle-class income that don’t require college degrees, and student attitudes make sense as reflections of a changed reality.  Treating attitudes as entirely independent variables just gets the history wrong.

If we’re going to get the future right, we need to get a more accurate understanding of the recent past.  The economy has changed much more quickly than colleges have, and today’s students see the disconnect.  They’re rightly concerned about it.  Ronald Reagan giving contradictory speeches in 1967 is beside the point.  The point is that the Golden Age, such as it was, was a brief fluke, and long-term anxiety is the historical norm.  Maybe if we start with that, we can finally start to get a real handle on what we want to see come next.  

Takes on a Plane

Saturday brought a pretty good storm to this area, apparently as a sort of opening act for the Repent-Your-Sins Level storm we’re supposed to get on Tuesday.  Saturday afternoon found me flying into Bradley airport, in Hartford, in a nasty little puddle-jumper.  The combination of a strong storm and a small plane led to sustained turbulence of a severity I had never experienced.    

After several minutes of bouncing around the sky, one’s mind wanders a bit.  What follows is a pretty accurate reconstruction of my takes on the situation, as it just kept going and I tried to distract myself.

After the first set of jolts:

The “universal community college” thing seems to contradict the “undermatching” hypothesis.  The point of the attack on “undermatching” is the idea that community colleges aren’t worthy of good students.  But if they aren’t worthy, then why make them universal?  Has the Obama team figured out that the “undermatching” theory was never a good idea?  Or maybe they’ve failed to connect the dots?  Hell, it took me more than a week, and I live this stuff.  Or maybe they see community colleges as a sort of “public option,” forming a sort of competitive floor for the rest of the market?  Or maybe they know it won’t pass, so they aren’t sweating the contradictions?

At a certain point, the logic of universalism and the logic of meritocracy conflict.  They work well together to the extent that they allow the folks who judge merit to look at a larger pool.  But once they start looking, it’s all about stratifying.  High school is universal, but we have pretty rigidly defined “good” districts and “bad” ones, with property values to match.  Is that the direction community colleges would go?

After the second set of jolts:

You know, I wouldn’t have to do this if we had decent high-speed trains.  At least if a train gets caught in bad weather, the worst that usually happens is it gets stuck.  I still think it’s ridiculous that it takes several hours to get from Springfield to Boston by train, when it runs at all.  Now they’re talking about “high speed,” and still saying two hours.  No, no, no.  It’s 90 miles.  Make it an hour.  Back in Jersey, that was about how long it took from Princeton to Penn Station on NJ Transit.  It’s totally doable.  Stop in Springfield, Worcester, Boston, done.  Hell, add Pittsfield on the other end.  

But noooo.  

After the third set of jolts:

Okay, this is stupid.  I know we’re not going to crash.  Planes don’t crash from turbulence.  No need for drama.  But still.  I’ll be damned if my last living act on this planet is listening to Taylor Swift.  (Takes off headphones.)  

After the fourth set of jolts:

I never really noticed how calming an upright tray table can be if you stare at it long enough…

Here’s hoping all my Northeast peeps get through the Tuesday storm safely.  For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t recommend spending the blizzard on a plane.

Friday Fragments

This piece by Jason Delisle and Ben Miller suggests that many of the political attacks on the short-lived year-round version of Pell were misinformed or misplaced.

From a campus perspective, the major issue with year-round Pell was that it was both introduced and dropped abruptly.  We didn’t have time to completely restructure our academic programs to take real advantage of the opportunity; by the time we started, it went away.

Community colleges are stereotyped as being instantly responsive, and in some cases, that’s true.  But some changes take a little longer.

And not all good things go together.  If we move to a more robust set of summer offerings, then by definition, we will increase our adjunct percentage.  That’s because the full-time faculty position applies only to the Fall and Spring semesters.  From a cost control perspective, that may be a good thing; from a faculty perspective, not so much.  

If we want to enable students to finish degrees more quickly, enabling year-round enrollment should be a no-brainer.  But let’s not make the mistake of assuming that it’s just a matter of flipping a switch.  Getting it right would take a few years, and we would need to commit to that upfront.  Otherwise, it would once again only make a difference on the margins.

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I don’t usually advertise my own college on the blog, but I’m happy to report that HCC is signing an agreement with Westfield State University today for a two-plus-two bachelor’s degree for a total four-year cost to students of $30,000.  (That doesn’t include living in the dorms at WSU.)  

Unlike certain $10,000 degrees, this one is real, open to any in-state resident, and available across a host of majors.  It can be done.

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Chuck Pearson reminded me of this.  You may direct the emails to him.

Back on 2007, in a post about trying to wake The Boy when he really didn’t want to get up, I wrote:

Last week, when more traditional measures had failed, I resorted to the following, of which I am not proud:

“Get up or I'll start singing Anne Murray songs, and nobody wants that!”

(nothing)

(In my best Peter-Brady-voice-changing delivery) “SPREAD YOUR TINY WINGS AND FLY AWAY...”

(TB grunts, chuckles, and climbs out of bed.)

Adolescence is going to be sheer hell for the poor kid. I have a whole repertoire of cheesy MOR 70's hits memorized, due to some really unfortunate parental taste in music. Neil Diamond, Kenny Rogers, Rita Coolidge, Juice Newton; you know the type. I haven't yet resorted to “Angel of the Morning” or “Space Cowboy,” but I haven't ruled them out, either. I'm saving “Horse With No Name” and “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft” for emergencies.

Since then, I’ve introduced some more contemporary material.  The kids don’t know from Anne Murray -- you’re welcome -- so instead I’ve started doing my distinct cover versions of songs that I know they know.  “Bad Romance,” by Lady Gaga, works pretty well; something about a middle-aged man warbling “GA GA GA GA GAAAAA” in the wee hours of the morning is horrifying enough to wake even the most determined sleeper.  (Once, it actually made The Dog cry.)  Recently, Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” has been a favorite.  When I break into “Haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate hate,” The Boy actually shudders.  To be fair, the distinctive dance moves probably don’t help...

There comes a point at which you just have to own the “corny parent” role.  It’s more fun than you might imagine.

Nudges and the Parable of Email

“Don’t forget…”  

Susan Dynarski did a brilliant piece earlier this week in the New York Times about “nudging” students towards success.  She draws the term from Cass Sunstein, who wrote a book about behavioral economics and some of its concrete applications.  For example, some schools that wanted students to select fruit more often for lunch discovered that simply placing the fruit in a more conspicuous and convenient place in the lunch line made a difference.  Nudges are consciously-designed interventions intended to take advantage of people’s unconscious habits to push them in a particular direction.  They’re less coercive than directives, in that the nudged are always free to disregard the hint and substitute their own preferences.  But since most people look for the ‘default’ setting on low-stakes decisions, an adjustment to the ‘default’ setting can produce significant results.  Those who care deeply can always override the default, and some will.

Dynarski mentioned several ways that various schools and colleges have used nudges to improve student success.  Her most compelling anecdote, drawn from a randomized study, involves a college using text messages to remind (or nag, depending on taste) students about deadlines to submit financial aid applications.  Apparently, for a cost of about five dollars per student, the college was able to generate a dramatic improvement in rates of students actually completing financial aid applications.  Given the impact of finances on students’ ability to remain focused and succeed academically, that is nothing to sneeze at.  She concluded with a suggestion that nudges don’t catch on because nobody could take internal credit for them.

Concur in part, dissent in part.

I’m a fan of behavioral economics, and I’ve been talking about her article on campus all week.  In the course of some ot those discussions, though, I’ve started to get a sense of some of the friction that new nudges can encounter.

The most basic is a sense of boundaries.  Email provides an example.  Emails are free to send, and every student at the college is issued an email account.  (My college isn’t unique in that; free “.edu” email addresses are pretty standard.)  Students can access email, theoretically, on just about any device.  So over the years, the number of emails that various offices, programs, and departments sent to students mushroomed. When the trickle became a deluge, students stopped trying to sort out the important stuff from the rest, declared it all spam, and ignored it all.  What had started as a potential game-changer quickly made itself irrelevant through overuse.  We had to develop an organization-wide communication protocol with pretty strict rules about mass emails.  Now, when we really need to get responses on a large scale, we use postcards.

I don’t see why texting would be immune to the same issues.  Good results from initial texting would lead to more, and more, until students start to tune it out.  Worse, many of our students are on very cheap prepaid plans that charge by the text, so the barrage of messages actually costs them money.  That may not be true at more affluent campuses, but at most community colleges, we can’t take for granted that students have unlimited plans.

That sort of effect wouldn’t show up in a small, randomized, controlled study.  It’s the kind of thing that shows up with scale, over time.  But it matters.

Identifying a nifty new nudge is great, and I’m all for it.  Figuring how to adapt it to local context in a way that won’t inadvertently kill it is harder.  I’m all for that, too, but it’s a more complicated process.  It’’s not just about claiming internal political credit.  

Having been through that with email, I can understand a certain reticence to adopting wholesale texting as The Next Big Thing.  Any tool is only as good as the strategy behind its use.  It’s all well and good to tell students not to forget about deadlines, but we have to be sure not to forget the mistakes of our past.

Below the Radar

This report, by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, will probably vanish down the collective memory hole within days.  And that’s a shame, because it puts the lie to several pervasive myths.

The report shows that humanities degrees have been growing as a share of community college degrees for several decades now.  

Which myths does this puncture?

Community Colleges as Nothing More Than Job Training Centers

Community colleges are important elements in workforce development, and are rightly known for helping people find middle-skill jobs.  But they also -- and increasingly -- provide the first two years of a higher degree for students who want to go on to jobs that require bachelor’s degrees or more.  

In the context of the crisis in student loan debt, this should not be dismissed lightly.

Community College Students as Academically Indifferent

Um, no.  Last year my campus alone sent transfer students to Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith, UMass-Amherst, and Cornell, among others.  We have full-time faculty in philosophy, art history, music, and theater.  

Community colleges are easy to get into, by design.  But to infer from that that the students and/or faculty are academically indifferent is both false and insulting.  Students at community colleges run the gamut from the weakest to pretty damn strong, and we have the transfer GPA’s to prove it.

The Humanities as Declining Since the 1970’s

This one’s a favorite on Twitter.  Every few weeks, someone posts a smug, hand-wringing piece claiming that the humanities have been in decline, as a percentage of undergraduate degrees, since around 1970.  It’s usually accompanied by some variation on “kids today…,” or “administrators today…,” or references to Wal-Mart.

It’s a masterpiece of bad math.  It lives on because it sounds right to some people.  But it has several major flaws.

First, it looks only at four-year degrees.

Second, 1970 was an outlier.  If you extend the graph back fifty years prior, you notice quickly that the late 1960’s to early 1970’s are the spike; the level reached by the early 1980’s has held pretty steady since then, and is consistent with the earlier long-term average.  Extrapolating from 1970 is like basing stock prices on the NASDAQ of 1999.  It’s not technically lying, but it’s catastrophically misleading.

Third, it completely ignores the growth -- yes, growth -- in humanities at community colleges.  

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Community college humanities are so far below the national radar that many people assume they don’t even exist.  But they do, they’re growing, and in many cases, they’re really good.  Maybe after the shock of the Great Recession starts to fade, we can start to have that conversation in public.  Until then, consider yourself one of the few in the know.