Cannibals!

I had to smile at news of the report that an internal investigation at GWU has highlighted concerns that online courses are “cannibalizing” classroom courses.

I’d guess that nearly every community college administrator has heard some version of that over the years.  The usual “cannibals” are online classes and classes taught at sites other than the main campus.  The assumption underlying the charge is that classes taught in classrooms at the main campus are somehow more “real” than either online or offsite classes.  

It’s easy to get sidetracked by the usual debates about online learning, but for present purposes, they’re beside the point.  Instead, I’ll frame the alleged cannibalization as an organizational issue.  It’s about structure.

For the sake of clarity, I’ll use the English department as an example, but it’s really not about English.  Substitute nearly any department you want, and the point is the same.

We have one English department.  It consists of full and part-time professors who teach classes ranging from developmental writing to literature, but with a heavy concentration on composition.  Composition classes are required in every degree program at the college.  That’s not unusual; it’s a cornerstone of general education.

That means that students at the main campus, where the faculty offices are located, take classes.  But we also offer English classes online, and we offer them at the branch campuses and offsite locations, as well (what we call “higher education centers”).  The English department, which is located physically on the main campus, is responsible for staffing, teaching, and monitoring the quality of English classes regardless of location or modality.  So a professor whose office is at the main campus in Lincroft may teach a few classes there, plus a class at the branch campus in Freehold and another online.  

We don’t have separate English departments for each location, or for online classes.  It’s all the same department.

The advantages of that are twofold.  The first, which should be obvious, is cost; duplicating departments across locations and modalities across the curriculum would be prohibitively expensive.  Some private universities can do that -- I’m thinking here of Southern New Hampshire University, which I believe has a separate faculty for its online classes -- but we can’t.  The second, which may be more subtle, is ensuring consistent quality.  Not only do we have the same academic requirements for faculty across locations and modalities, we often use the same people.  That makes it much easier to ensure that academic standards, student learning outcomes, and the like are consistent.  If Professor Hypothetical teaches well in Lincroft, I’m confident that she will also teach well in Freehold.  When the department meets to make curricular decisions, it includes people who teach in other locations and modalities without even trying, because many of them are the same people who teach at the main campus.

Given too few faculty, though, in the heat of scheduling, it’s easy to perceive other locations and modalities as cannibalizing the main campus.  That’s particularly true when some of the offsite locations tend to run smaller sections.  The directors of the offsite locations get frustrated at having to beg for sections, and the department gets frustrated at having to stretch to cover the sections it has.  The conflict endures because both sides are correct, as far as they go.

Even if we had the resources to hire enough faculty, though, I’m not sure I’d go with the “separate departments for each location” model.  Having the same people cover multiple sites and modalities ensures consistent quality and constant communication.  Yes, the logistical burden of maintaining that is non-trivial, but it’s in the service of quality control.  That strikes me as worthwhile.

GWU apparently has other concerns as well, many of which are presumably local.  But the cry of “Cannibals!” is painfully familiar.  If it means that students across the college are getting the same high level of instruction, I’ll take it.  

Ask the Administrator: Labeling OER Sections

A new correspondent writes:

The state of CA does some interesting things that are often not thought through…..

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201520160SB1359

“This bill would require each campus of the California Community Colleges and the California State University, and would request each campus of the University of California, to identify in the online version of the campus course schedule its courses that exclusively use digital course materials, as specified, and communicate to students that the course materials for these courses are free of charge and therefore not required to be purchased. By imposing new duties on community college districts, this bill would impose a state-mandated local program. The bill would become operative on January 1, 2018.”

So, for our spring schedule we have to identify courses that use free course materials.  For the students this is great, but I see many larger implications.  If one section of a course uses online/free materials, but the others don’t, will the students choose the free one resulting in cancellations of sections that do not?  Will this force all faculty to migrate to the free/online materials?  What will happen to publishers?  What will be the incentive for faculty to write textbooks or course material?

As a general rule, I’m not a fan of legislative mandates that get into the educational weeds.  Even assuming good intentions, the interventions are often much blunter than the organizations they’re trying to improve.  That’s why I’m a fan of streamlined remediation, for instance, but I don’t support the Connecticut legislation that mandated how it must be done.

That said, though, I’m having a hard time finding fault with this one.  

At its core, it’s about disclosure.  Students want to, and should, know which sections won’t require them to buy books.  That may sound petty, but given the reality of student basic needs that Sara Goldrick-Rab and others have documented, it isn’t.  California is many things, but a low cost-of-living state it is not.  For a student on the economic margins, the difference between a couple of OER sections and a couple of sections with $200 textbooks could be the difference between staying and dropping out.  

Yes, signalling to students which sections have OER might lead them to vote with their feet (or clicks).  But I think that’s a feature, not a bug.  If I were a student picking classes, all else being equal, I imagine I’d choose OER sections over sections that would make me buy books.  

“What will happen to publishers?”  Those who can’t adapt their business models to provide greater value for the money will probably fold.  Those who can adapt will probably thrive.  For example, in math, some publishers have started providing test banks and homework assignments to go along with OER texts.  They’ve figured out that it’s hard to compete with free on the book itself, but that supplemental materials, such as test banks and homeworks, require more frequent updates than OER sources sometimes provide.  They found a profit center.  

The incentives argument is real, but I have a hard time believing that we need to accept the textbook prices we’ve seen over the last several years in order to reward writers.  For introductory courses, there’s certainly no shortage of instructors who are dissatisfied with existing texts; a little institutional support for collaboration can go a long way.  

At my own college, we’ve actually put an icon next to sections that have let us know that they’re using OER precisely in order to help students find them.  The incentive institutionally is to encourage faculty to adopt OER where they can, because it gets a barrier to student success out of the way.  Whatever we lose in bookstore revenue we’ll more than make up through improved retention and completion, and I’d much rather generate revenue by helping students than by milking them.

So yes, I understand the impulse to resist legislative meddling, and often agree with it.  But in this case, they may actually have done something right.  

Wise and worldly readers, what do you think?  Is mandating the disclosure of OER sections a good idea?

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

Financial Aid for PLA?

Adult students often know stuff for which they don’t have academic credit.  When they can get transcripted credit for knowledge or skills they can document, they get a head start towards a degree. But giving them credit for what they can document is often a lot harder than it sounds.

Quick: what’s the single biggest barrier to giving credit for portfolios of work?

Yes, there are issues of rigor, but those are largely addressable through looking at student learning outcomes.  Yes, there are issues of turf, but (most of) those can be managed, even if it occasionally involves calling someone on the carpet.  Those issues exist, but they’re comparatively minor.  What’s the big one?

Bueller...Bueller…

Assessing a portfolio takes time.  Assessing lots of portfolios takes lots of time.  That time needs to be compensated.  And we don’t currently have a reasonable way to pay for it, at scale.

Charging students full tuition for the courses for which they’re trying to get credit would work well for the institution, but it’s absurd for the student.  CAEL has a well-developed system for evaluating portfolios of work -- the term of art is Prior Learning Assessment, or PLA -- but it’s expensive, and the cost isn’t covered by financial aid.  Students have to put cash on the barrel, with no guarantee of an outcome.  (If the outcome were guaranteed, that would amount to selling credits, which is what diploma mills do and what accreditation exists to avoid.)  For a student with relevant experience, a high fee for PLA feels like a shakedown.  For a college that doesn’t want to do shakedowns, though, PLA amounts to an unfunded mandate.  Scaling it up means scaling up an uncompensated cost at a moment when most public colleges can’t seriously entertain the idea.  

Iris Palmer, from New America, had a good piece this week on some of the issues around PLA and the ways to pay for it.  Apparently Indiana is using state funding to offset the cost, which strikes me as an excellent idea all the way around.  It leaves students’ Pell limits untouched, which is no small thing; it reduces the cost for the state of generating more college graduates; and it allows colleges to step up without blowing holes in their budgets.  

Most states, including my own, don’t do that.  They should.

PLA credits shorten the time to degree, which is a good in itself.  They also show respect students and what they’ve been able to learn on their own.  They’re validating on a personal level, with salutary effects on student morale and motivation.  They also prevent frustrated students having to endure, and pay for, courses that cover what they already know.  

Many years ago, a professor who taught Spanish told me that her most challenging students were native Spanish speakers who took Spanish 1 because they thought it would be easy.  Instead, they got bored, starting missing assignments, and even failed before they knew it.  Educationally, I’d be hard-pressed to explain why that was good.  It strikes me as a waste all around: the students spent (or borrowed) money for a class they didn’t need; the professor had frustrated students; the county and state subsidized a fool’s errand.  

At least with Spanish, we have CLEP exams.  But many courses don’t have CLEP exams, and/or don’t really lend themselves to a standardized test format.  

Federal financial aid is a tricky fit with PLA for a bunch of reasons.  But state aid doesn’t have to be.  PLA credits aren’t free -- the aforementioned assessment costs money -- but they’re cheaper than paying for entire classes.  Scaling up the assessment process could lead to economies of scale, at least in terms of structure, which would make the cost advantage even greater.  And from a recruitment perspective, colleges would stand to benefit.

My own state will have a new governor shortly.  I offer this idea freely.  This is about as low-hanging as low-hanging fruit gets.

Ready, Fire, Aim!

My academic training wasn’t in psychology, so I’m guessing some of my wise and worldly readers have much more understanding of this than I do.  I hope they can shed some light.

There’s a personality type that prizes confident and quick decisiveness over thinking.  I think of it as the “ready, fire, aim” personality, though I’m sure there’s a scientific term for it.  (“Shoot from the lip” works, too.)  It’s the type that, when confronted with something it doesn’t understand, immediately assumes that the thing is either evil or stupid.  This type sees dark blacks and bright whites, holding grays in deep suspicion when it notices them at all.  

For reasons I don’t entirely grasp, many people register that type as showing “leadership.”  

It’s a type that can do tremendous damage in both obvious and subtle ways.

The obvious ways are, well, obvious: sweeping declarations based on miniscule knowledge, blunt instruments applied to complicated problems, and a style of discussion that favors bluster over evidence.  The subtle ways can be more damaging over time, though.  People with knowledge of the grays of a situation often learn, over time, that it’s not worth the battle, so they stop bringing it up; gradually, discussions get dumber.  Worse, decisions start getting made based not on what’s best, but on what’s likely to provoke a reaction.  People start playing the game of “what’s the most negative possible way this could be portrayed?,” and working backwards from there; the bandwidth devoted to that is diverted from actually improving ideas.  

If you’re the sort that takes ideas seriously, the greatest sin of the “ready, fire, aim” personality is its staggering inconsistency.  If today’s gut reaction contradicts yesterday’s, well, who remembers yesterday’s, anyway?  

At a previous career stop, I had the experience of reporting to someone whose memory and executive function gradually declined.  He became a “ready, fire, aim” type as his ability to grasp nuance or remember what was said the week before started to slip.  It was hard to endure, because it took a while to realize what was happening.  As his understanding grew shallower, his reactions became more impulsive.  The whole atmosphere soured.

But some folks are like that without the excuse of mental decline.  

President Obama used to catch flak for his habit of pausing when he spoke, but I liked it.  In his case, it was because he was thinking.  Thinking before speaking struck me as an endearing habit in a leader, particularly one in charge of a nuclear arsenal.  Say what you want about his policy choices, but he was consistently good about keeping impulsive reactions in check and speaking in paragraphs.  I think of that as the right kind of temperament for a leader.

Jessica Valenti had a good piece in the Guardian a few days ago asking whether, as she put it, “abusive men aren’t rising to the top in spite of their disdain for women, but because of it.”  What she calls “domineering bravado” sometimes manifests in sexual harassment, but -- as bad as that is -- it’s only one form of domination.  They abuse power, whether economic, political, physical, or sexual.  

And yet, they keep getting power.  That’s the part I still struggle to understand.  As transparent as many of them are -- honestly, it’s not hard to spot -- they keep receiving deference.  Domineering bravado often works.  That’s the mystery.

So, wise and worldly readers, I wind up with two questions.  Is there a clinical term for this type?  And why does it keep getting rewarded?

The View from the Back Row

This weekend Brookdale had its Fall Open House.  Last year we changed the format from a trade-show setting in the arena to a full-campus spread, with faculty in their natural habitats, holding information sessions on their majors.  As with last year, I attended but didn’t speak; instead, I moved with the crowd, observing presentations from the back row.

It’s worth trying.  The view is different from there.

To make the effect work, I had to ditch the suit.  Instead, I decided to try to pass as “middle-aged suburban dad.”  Not to brag, but I totally nailed it.  I had hoped to recruit The Boy to come with me as a sort of mystery shopper, but he had a scheduling conflict with a volunteer shift.  Next time.

None of the employees were fooled, obviously.  I just wanted to get a sense of what the parents and prospective students experience.

I was struck by how unguarded many of the parent/student interactions were. I have my own theories of parenting; apparently, they are not universally accepted.  I didn’t see anything I’d consider abusive, but there were a few insults from parent to student that I found bracing, especially in earshot of strangers.  They were usually along the lines of “yes, you need to go to college, you dumb @$##@.”  Happily, those were the exceptions, but still.  

Folks who work at community colleges are well aware that some families use them as a sort of punishment, or, at best, a kind of purgatory.  (“Go there for a year, and if you get decent grades, we’ll send you to a real college.”) Human psychology being what it is, that isn’t a great motivator for learning.  A student who resents having to be there at all will be much less likely to stick around and finish. Yes, sometimes it happens, but the deck is stacked.  

I’m thinking it might be helpful, at some point, to recruit someone from the nearby flagship university to talk about what a 100-level class there looks like, and to compare it to a 100-level class here.  When I was a TA at Rutgers, the Intro to Politics class had 300 students.  Actual interaction occurred in “recitation” sections, run by graduate students with minimal training.  (The sum total of my training before I started: “You’ll be fine.”  Uh, thanks…)  Here, intro classes rarely hit 30 students, and they’re taught by actual faculty.  Those of us in the industry know that, but to the world at large, that’s a well-kept (or often ignored) secret.  It’s worth broadcasting.

The better moments came when I poked my head into some of the info sessions, especially in areas with distinct facilities.  There’s nothing quite like having an enthusiastic professor in a well-equipped facility holding court on the subject she loves.  The enthusiasm is contagious.  Judging by facial expressions among some of the parents and students in those rooms, everyone there considered their time well-spent.  

The real challenge with these is remembering what the experience looks like if you aren’t in the industry.  Does an opening plenary seem useful and appropriate, or self-serving?  (In this case, I’d argue the former.)  What should go where?  What do folks need to know, but wouldn’t think to ask?  And what should we do if it rains?

Since I’m always looking for ways to improve things, and have no shame at all about drawing on the collective wisdom and of my wise and worldly readers, I’ll throw this one open.  What do folks need to know, but might not think to ask?  Alternately, for those who’ve been to Open Houses, was there anything they did that struck you as uncommonly useful or smart?

Friday Fragments: “Happy Little Clouds” edition

Apparently, 11 percent of doctoral degree holders and 13 percent of professional degree holders got their start at community colleges.

For all of the talk of STEM and workforce development -- entirely fine, as far as they go -- community colleges also serve as the most accessible on-ramps to higher education.  The “transfer” function doesn’t get the attention that the workforce one does, but it should.  After all, for jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree or higher, facilitating transfer _is_ workforce development.

One out of nine Ph.D.’s.  Just sayin’...

--

I got home too late and emotionally drained to blog on Wednesday, but it was worth it.  The Matawan-Aberdeen school district, here in Monmouth County, is establishing a “Recovery” high school on the Brookdale campus.  Wednesday night was the celebratory/fundraising dinner.

The “recovery” in question is recovery from addiction.  The high school exists to serve students who have struggled with addiction.  It gets them out of the environment full of triggers of bad habits, and gives them intensive supervision in a new setting to help get them back on track.  

Of course, a mission like that is born of stories.  One woman who works as a counselor now told the story of her own life as the child of addicts; by the time she was done, I was emotionally spent.  And when she talked about some kids she wasn’t able to save -- kids the age of my own -- well, as a parent, it’s hard to hear.  It was somehow both unimaginable and vivid, and entirely heartbreaking.

The school is an expensive experiment, but it will save lives.  It’s a monument to a sort of humane sanity that sometimes seems scarce.  Hat-tip to Matawan-Aberdeen for going first, at least locally.  

The kids got extra hugs that night.

--

I think of the tv personality and painter Bob Ross, if at all, as an artifact of the 80’s.  But he’s weirdly popular among teenagers now, long after his death.

The Boy and The Girl both catch him on Netflix from time to time.  TB describes him as “the king of chill,” and explains that something in his voice and persona is just incredibly calming.  The “happy little clouds” have taken on new lives as memes.

The Girl took it to another level.

For Halloween, Her Friend (HF) dressed up as Bob Ross, complete with facial hair (in the form of her Mom’s eyeliner).  TG dressed up as a “happy little cloud.”  She painted a fluffy white cloud on a sky-blue background, and cut out a hole for her head in the middle of the cloud.  As she and HF approached a door, she’d put the frame up around her face.  

As Halloween costumes go, I had to give it to them on creativity.  It wasn’t vampy, cliched, or last-minute; it took thought and preparation, and they were both fully dressed.  

If you had told me, in high school, that my future children’s exposure to 80’s culture would have consisted of Bob Ross, I wouldn’t have believed you.  Happy little clouds live on.

Unstructured Time

IHE published an essay this week applying a variation on the “slow food” movement to college administrators, arguing that we should have fewer meetings so we’d have more time for leisurely, unstructured conversations.

(pause)

Well, that would be nice, but…

The piece makes some good points about the echo chamber that senior administrators can find ourselves in, if we don’t make a point of getting out of it.  

At a basic level, though, the piece is unsatisfying because it doesn’t address the causes of calendar jam.  Without addressing causes, it’s hard to change outcomes.

The most basic cause is that most administrative work is necessarily collaborative.  That means meshing calendars with other people.  Outside of a few tentpole meetings, they move around a lot.  And the more inclusive you try to be, for all the right reasons, the more slippery the schedule gets, because you’re juggling that many more schedules.  It’s always easier to find a common open time for three people than for six, and it’s even harder for ten.  

If it’s just a matter of approving purchases and signing off on travel requests, I can do that whenever.  But I can only meet when the people I’m meeting with can meet.  When they tend to have high-traffic times, so do I.  

At a previous college -- I won’t get specific, but if pressed, I could -- I spent the better part of a month trying to put together a meeting with a small group of faculty on a particular issue.  Everyone had some sort of conflict, and nobody wanted to come in on their “day off.”  (Their language, not mine.)  They shot down date after date after date.  Eventually, the time came when I had to make a decision, so I made it.  Then they got mad that they weren’t consulted in person.  

That’s where the chronic sense of urgency comes from.  Being inclusive of people who are vigorously protective of their time is a challenge unappreciated by those who’ve never tried it.  When you find that rare open slot, you jump on it, because another one might not come around for a while, and some issues need attention.

The flip side of that is that there’s plenty of unstructured time on Fridays in July, but not that many folks around to chat.  If they’re only here when they need to be, then they’re busy when they’re here.  When they aren’t here, they aren’t available to chat.  Chat goes two ways.

At higher levels, many of the meetings involve people who don’t work at the college, and who aren’t on the academic calendar.  Partnering with other organizations is good for the college, but labor-intensive.  That follows from the theory of the firm, which is that a firm exists to reduce transaction costs.  The more you work outside the firm, the more the transaction costs accrue.  In our case, that cost tends to be labor.

Several years ago, at Holyoke, we had a natural experiment: the email system went down for a few days.  It was bliss.  The torrent of content finally subsided.  I can’t imagine what these jobs must have been like in the days before email, but I’m guessing they were easier.  Constant reachability establishes an expectation of constant responsiveness, which feeds the sense of urgency.

All of that said, relatively open-ended one-on-one conversations in the hallway or as meetings break up are time well-spent, when I have the option.  If I could hire more people to spread the work around and make more of those meetings possible, I’d love to.  In the meantime, I tip my cap to the brave souls who are willing to have actual conversations.  Perspective helps, even if I sometimes have to run to the next meeting.

Ask the Administrator: New Data, New Dissertation Topic?

In light of the new IPEDS data, a longtime reader who is pursuing a doctorate asks:

So, here's the career advice question.  Can you think of a compelling research question that can now be explored with the new data and would make a good dissertation topic?  

I like this question, for obvious reasons.  

To recap: IPEDS, the federal data system for higher education, has long been the bane of community colleges for its exclusive focus on first-time, full-time, degree-seeking students.  It’s finally making some key changes, including looking at part-time students and students who aren’t first-time.  It still has some blind spots, such as early transfer to ontime completion and crossing state lines, but it’s considerably better.

So, given new and more accurate data, what questions are either worth revisiting, or worth asking with a new expectation of an actual answer?

I’ll suggest a few starting points, and then ask my wise and worldly readers to improve on them or add their own.  Some of these may involve supplementing IPEDS, but they’re meant as prompts.

Reverse transfer.  Most of the literature on transfer looks at the success rates of students who start at two-year schools and then transfer to four-year schools.  We haven’t looked as closely at “lateral” transfer -- two-to-two or four-to-four -- or at “reverse,” defined as four-to-two.  But those are much more common than many people think.  How do students who start out at, say, Penn State and then transfer to Harrisburg Area Community College do?  And is the effect different across demographic lines: race, gender age?  

Effects of “stopouts.”  People who work at community colleges know that students frequently stop out and return, generally due to financial or familial circumstances.  IPEDS has historically counted those as dropouts, but that’s often misleading.  How do students who take a semester or year off fare upon their return?  Again, break it out by demographics.  Do some groups thrive more than others?  Does it work better in some regions than others?  Our policies and default assumptions take stopouts as dropouts, but that may not reflect reality.

“15 to Finish” vs. “Pace Yourself.”  There’s a philosophical debate raging in community college circles around the “15 to Finish” initiative.  “15 to Finish” is based on basic arithmetic: finishing a 60 credit degree in 4 semesters requires averaging 15 credits per semester, as opposed to the 12 that the Feds define as “full-time.”  Some colleges have found that nudging students who normally carry 12 credits to carry 15 instead increases graduation rates.  But many students -- most, in this sector -- don’t start with 12.  For students taking, say, six credits at a time, would moving to twelve and borrowing money lead to better outcomes than taking six and working?  Because that’s the choice that many students face.  

Older vs. Younger.  Do stopouts work differently for 19 year olds than 29 year olds?  Is part-time status more dangerous at one age than another?  Again, demographic breakdowns are likely to matter, so they’re worth testing.  

Online achievement gaps.  This one probably goes beyond IPEDS, but if there’s good data on it, it’s worth exploring.  

ESL/ELL.  I have yet to see a good study on the progression of ESL or ELL students.  It’s an important population, especially in the community college sector, but badly understudied.  Does the logic of streamlining that many of us apply to remediation make sense here, or is it a fundamentally different enterprise with different needs?  What’s the most effective way to help students learn English while completing a degree or certificate program?  Do they navigate institutions differently?  

Men over 24.  I’ve written about this before, but it remains a question.  This is the most elusive group to enroll.  How do they retain and complete?  Are there programs/areas in which they do better?  I’m thinking race and region will matter here, though that’s obviously testable.  

Dual/concurrent enrollment.  College courses offered to high school students are all the rage.  How do their effects play out over time?  

Anyway, those are some first thoughts.  Wise and worldly readers, what would you add, subtract, substitute, or change?

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

Fun with Data

Along with many other community college people, I’m glad to see that the National Center for Education Statistics is finally making some fundamental changes to its IPEDS numbers, which have painted an unduly negative picture of community colleges for decades.

IPEDS (the Integrated Post-Secondary Education Data System) calculates a “headline” graduation rate based on the cohort of first-time, full-time, degree seeking students who graduate the institution at which they started within 150 percent of “normative” time.  For a community college associate’s degree program, that means three years.  Nationally, the average hovers in the low twenties, with some variation based on regional factors.  (For example, regions with heavy concentrations of four-year colleges tend to have lower two-year college graduation rates, because more of the “honors” high school students take those other options.  In states with sparser four-year options, the two-year colleges attract more of the high achievers.)  Those low-sounding numbers give ammunition to a punitive “performance-based funding” movement, and serve to reinforce the stigma around open-admissions institutions.

Which might be okay if they reflected reality, but they don’t.  The NCES also tells us that nearly half of bachelor’s degree graduates in the US have significant numbers of community college credits.  Squaring that number with a graduation rate in the low twenties suggests that the graduation rate is missing quite a bit.  And it is.

The time limit is a poor fit for many student populations with particular needs, such as English-language learners.  They often take longer than three years to finish because they’re learning the English language as they go.  That’s an impressive feat, and one worthy of support, but the new immigrant who graduates in four or five years, gets a job, pays taxes, and supports a family shows up in our numbers as a dropout.

The existing rate misses part-time students, students who are returning to college with credits from previous forays, and -- remarkably -- students who leave a community college prior to graduation but complete a bachelor’s degree “on time.”  We have a lot of those.  They come to community college to get some momentum, and possibly to prove to themselves or their parents that they’re academically capable and serious; once they have some momentum, they move on.  I like to use theological language to describe them.  They treat community college as purgatory, where they cleanse themselves of sin before moving on to the promised land.  By any reasonable measure, both those students and the community colleges that serve them have succeeded; by the old IPEDS measure, though, they count as dropouts.  

Part of that is due to an ambiguity in the term “degree-seeking.”  “Degree-seeking” doesn’t necessarily mean “degree-seeking here.”  For a student who starts at a community college to save money and/or overcome a shaky high school record, but who really doesn’t care about picking up an associate’s degree on the way to a bachelor’s, the IPEDS measure is a terrible fit.  It picks up far too many false negatives.  The student who does a year at Brookdale before transferring to Rutgers, where she graduates on time, shows up in our numbers as a dropout.  She lowers our graduation rate, despite successfully completing a bachelor’s in four years.  Substantively, that’s absurd.

We’ve developed some homegrown measures that include early transfer, such as the Voluntary Framework of Accountability.  But even there, we can’t always capture transfers across state lines.  For smallish states in densely populated regions, that’s a major issue; we send plenty of students to New York City, Philadelphia, and other areas, but they show up as dropouts.  I’d make a distinction between transferring early to Temple and dropping out, but the Feds don’t.  The same applies to post-graduation wage data.  Many of the jobs in NYC or Philly pay more than jobs locally, but only the local ones show up in our data.  That leads to figures lower than reality.

Most of this would be inside baseball among sociologists if it didn’t impact our funding and public image.  But it does.  A measure that makes reasonable sense for a residential college that only admits academically strong students who can attend full-time is a lousy fit for us.  The new-and-improved version still has some key gaps -- transfers across state lines still show up as dropouts, rendering false negatives for small states -- but it looks at more students.  That’s a start.  

In my perfect world, we’d have accurate data that we’d use for improvement, rather than punishment or stigma.  We’d recognize that students stopping out to work for a while isn’t necessarily a sign of institutional failure; if anything, the ability to offer second chances is a feature, not a bug.  Heck, while we’re at it, we’d have parity in per-student funding with four-year colleges and universities, and maybe some policies based on the students we actually have.  

But for now, some recognition that the complaints we’ve been lodging for decades are largely correct is a welcome start.  I’ll take it.

ROI

Karen Stout, the President of Achieving the Dream and a longtime community college president, made a comment at the #RealCollege conference that I haven’t been able to shake.  She noted that between extended public austerity and the sources from which Boards of Trustees are often comprised, many public colleges are starting to behave like for-profits.  They’re looking closely at the financial return on investment of any decision, with an eye towards maximizing surpluses.  At a certain point, what starts off as self-defense or fiscal prudence can cross over into a perversion of the mission; colleges start to see students as means, rather than ends.

I was reminded of that in reading Thursday’s IHE story about public universities attracting a larger share of affluent and out-of-state students.  

The primary appeal of out-of-state and affluent students is that they pay more.  They also help with rankings, whether through higher SAT scores, higher completion rates, or whatever other statistical weight they carry.  In other words, they serve the college’s purpose nicely.

But that’s backwards.  Colleges are supposed to serve students.

Using students as means, rather than ends, makes it difficult to fulfill the social justice mission that colleges are supposed to serve.  I’ll use food service as an example.  Many colleges, including my own, have outsourced food service to for-profit vendors.  The reasons are straightforward enough: food service typically wasn’t a strength of the institution, and there are companies that do nothing but food service.  Going with a Sodexo (or a Subway) offers the prospect of replacing a mediocre product on which we lose money with a better product that also provides a revenue stream.  I get that.

But it also makes it harder to provide free or reduced-cost food to low-income students who need it.  Sara Goldrick-Rab’s proposal to extend the K-12 free lunch program to community colleges -- conceptually, a brilliant idea -- is harder to implement when food service has gone from an internal service to an external one that has to hit certain numbers.  Food service is a low-margin business even without giveaways.  The same is true of outsourced day care centers; if they have to cover their own costs and even make a profit, it’s hard to do that while still offering prices that struggling young parents can afford.  That’s why private ones generally don’t.  

Compare those services to, say, the campus library.  Students don’t have to pay every time they use the library; they can use it whenever it’s open.  The library has to stay within a budget, and we do gate counts and satisfaction surveys, but it doesn’t have to hit a profit target.  That means it can offer displays or programs as services, even when those displays or programs aren’t as popular as some others might have been.  It can focus on the mission.  

To the extent that college budgets are more tuition-driven, they have to look more at either outsourcing or treating internal operations as if they were outsourced.  That means losing the ability to make mission-based decisions in progressively more areas over time.

We sometimes talk about “for-profit” and “non-profit” colleges, but the distinction is starting to blur. It doesn’t have to; it’s a choice we’ve made as a society, seemingly without realizing it.  For students with money, that may not matter much; in some ways -- I’m thinking better food -- it may even be an improvement.  But for those without, it’s increasingly brutal.  

I don’t particularly blame public universities for recruiting more out of state and/or affluent students; they’re being instrumentally rational within the existing rules.  I’m saying we need to take a good, hard look at the rules.  The students are worth it.

A Family Tree of Reading

The Girl’s English teacher assigned her students to do “family trees of reading,” which involve quizzing family members on their reading habits and history.  I think it’s a pretty nifty assignment, so I’ve used my answers as today’s post.

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1. Why did you get into reading?

I don’t recall it being a choice.  It was what we did.  I was read to from a very early age, and at some point decided that I wanted to be able to do it myself.  There also weren’t that many options for quiet indoors spare time back then; the tv had all of four channels, and the web hadn’t been invented yet.  I could read before bed, or when it rained, or when I didn’t have anything else to do.  Sometimes a book would grab me and not let go until it was finished.

2. What were your favorite books as a child and what are your favorite books now?

As a child, I loved Dr. Seuss.  (Honestly, I still do.)  Fox in Socks had some great tongue-twisters, and The Sleep Book remains a favorite.  I can still recite most of the “moose juice/goose juice” sequence from memory.  

Later, I found Encyclopedia Brown and Mad Magazine.  You can probably explain a lot about me by mashing up those two.  My Mom is a very smart woman; she figured out that if I thought something was funny, I’d keep reading it.  Mad Magazine was a sort of literary bribery.  From there, it was a short leap to the Hitchhiker’s Guide, which is mostly harmless.

Now, I mostly read nonfiction about current events or higher education.  I like books that get me to look at things I thought I knew, in new ways.  Recent favorites include The Nordic Theory of Everything, by Anu Partanen, Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehesi Coates, and Quiet, by Susan Cain.  Each of them made me look at things I’ve seen with new eyes.  

3.  Why do you think that they changed?

There’s an age limit for Encyclopedia Brown.  Also, at some point, I started to value depth of understanding over breadth of knowledge.  I’d rather do sustained, deep dives into a few things than skim the surface of many.  Over time, it gets easier to see where a particular argument is going.  

That’s probably why I never really got into fantasy novels, or what I call hobbitry.  I’m too busy trying to understand this world to get that wrapped up in another one.

4.  Did seeing your parents read influence your reading?

Absolutely!  My mom has always been a voracious reader, and she set an expectation in the house that reading for pleasure is utterly normal.  We made regular trips to the library, where I sometimes made choices that are hard to explain in retrospect.  (I think I was the only kid in the fifth grade who read Art Buchwald.)  My dad was more of a newspaper reader; I inherited that from him.  

By high school, I didn’t watch tv much, and that’s still true.  I’m told that we’re in a golden age of television right now, but I pretty much have to take other people’s word for it.  To the extent that I watch tv at all, I want it to be either purely silly or silly-but-deep.  (Someday, when you’re older, I recommend the series Bojack Horseman.  But no rush…)  I’d much rather watch the Adam West Batman than any of the Christian Bale or Michael Keaton ones.

5.  What was writing your own book like?

Slow and difficult, but satisfying.  Working with an editor meant learning to let go of some pet phrases, and to sand off some of the rougher edges of my writing to make it more readable.  It also meant finally having to come to terms with outlining, my old nemesis.  

A couple of years ago, I was at the kitchen table, struggling with a blog post.  The Boy saw the look on my face, rolled his eyes, and said “Dad, you’re not working on another book, are you?”  Writing a book while doing a full-time day job, blogging five days a week, and being an involved parent of two amazing kids is satisfying, but tiring.  

One of my proudest moments as a parent was after you saw my book for the first time, and immediately declared what your first book would be about.  I can’t wait to read it.

A Different Take on Conferences

The Prodigal Academic has a nice primer on the ways that new academics -- especially graduate students -- should handle conference travel.  It’s about the importance of networking, the informal chatter between sessions, and visibility.  It’s all true, as far as it goes, but it got me thinking about a very different primer I might offer for more senior people at teaching-intensive institutions.

Conference selection is probably the most important part.  At most community colleges and teaching-intensive, non-selective four-year colleges, travel funding is relatively thin and teaching loads are pretty high.  On the bright side, the “rat race” side of the research competition -- seeing and being seen by the right people -- matters a lot less.  That means you’re often free to skip the big national disciplinary conferences in favor of either more regional ones or ones more focused on teaching.  (In math, for example, AMATYC is often of more relevance to community college faculty than the university-focused version.)  For disciplines that take teaching seriously enough to devote conferences to it, these can be valuable.

But an even better idea, if you’re willing, is to go to the occasional conference in a field about which you don’t know a lot.  I call it going in “sponge mode” -- just absorb what you can.  That might mean something like CUR, the AAC&U, the AACC, or even something like #RealCollege.  

The first time you try something like that, it can be disorienting.  If you’re accustomed to going to the same conference or two, when you go at all, a new one in a different field often means knowing very few people there.  I had a taste of that a couple years ago when I went to a Middle States conference for the first time, having previously attended (and presented at) NEASC for several years.  I had reached the point with NEASC where I knew enough people that I felt comfortable walking in, knowing I’d soon see somebody I’d be happy to see.  Walking into the hall at Middle States for the first time felt a bit uncanny; I had the muscle memory of comfort, but knew almost nobody.  That took a little getting used to.

The joy of going to a strange conference in sponge mode is that the pressure is off.  It feels like a really intense graduate tutorial, but in a good way.  In those settings, the side comments during presentations are often revealing.  They give clues to what’s considered passe, or trite, or insultingly obvious.  It’s lines like “we’re not going to food-pantry our way out of this” that really help shift perspective.  It’s a sort of defamiliarization that, if you’re open to it, can help you see things you didn’t notice before.

At their best, well-chosen conferences that are a little distinct from what you usually do can shift your sense of what’s possible.  I remember the team from Holyoke coming back from a conference at which they saw faculty from Tidewater Community College present on an all-OER degree program.  It was one thing to hear about the concept, but something altogether different to see people actually enact it.  They came back energized.  I remember the same feeling the first time I saw Nikki Edgecombe, from the CCRC, present on students who skipped the remedial classes into which they had been placed; she found that they did just as well in college-level classes as the students who did as they were told.  It had never occurred to me even to ask that question.

To me, the greatest danger for senior folks -- faculty, staff, or administration -- is stagnation.  The most common version of that comes from isolation, but the second-most common comes from going to the same conference every time.  Mixing them up increases the benefit exponentially.   The same bucks can get you much more bang.

Going into sponge mode at #RealCollege on Monday reminded me of just how valuable moments like those can be.  Whether it’s that conference or another one, if you’re at a point where you can skip the “see or be seen” part of travel, picking something new and going with ears open can be rejuvenating.  Leave the nametag-gazing behind, and go learn something.