In a discussion last week, I realized that the common denominator to so many of my personal hobbyhorses is fatigue with the climate of permanent austerity that seems to have settled upon public higher education.
Off the top of my head, I can come up with several reasons why we seem to be stuck in permanent austerity mode..
First, there's the basic open-endedness of mission. How much education is enough? How many programs should we run? How small should we let sections get? Which services should we provide? Whose salaries are too low?
That's in contrast to, say, heat. We spend money heating buildings, but there's an upper limit to the amount of heat that's desirable. Above a certain point, it's actually destructive; there is actually such a thing as enough. With a mission like “meeting the educational and workforce needs of the area,” though, it's hard to say how much is enough. In practice, we tend to let the budget set the definition of enough. From the perspective of any given program – or any prospective program – there's always more need. And from the perspective of anyone with a particular interest, there’s always a new program to add. This is also part of why adding programs is sooooo much easier than subtracting them.
Second, we're caught in a vicious pincer movement. State aid keeps dropping, but health care costs keep going up at several multiples of the rate of inflation. Over several years, these twin movements can beat even the most elegant budget into submission. Both trends are essentially out of the college's hands, which makes them that much harder to handle. When health insurance costs go up, say, ten percent a year for a decade, but state aid is actually moving backwards, the squeeze is real.
I'm not terribly hopeful for a short-term reversal of either trend. State aid is reliant on a combination of tax revenues and allocation decisions. Tax revenues still trail what they were a few years ago, and other areas of real need in the state budget don't have alternative revenue sources (like tuition). It'll be a long time before we climb out of that, if we do. And since Obama chose to forego single-payer health insurance in favor of trying to appease the private insurers, and the Republicans are resurgent, I don't see any improvement here either.
Third, we've defined what we do in a way that defeats productivity improvements. We measure learning in units of time. Until we stop doing that, no amount of efficiency-tinkering will make enough of a difference. A three-credit class required forty-five hours of seat time thirty years ago; it still does. On the employee side, pay raises based entirely on seniority mean that labor costs are almost completely divorced from performance. Add seniority-driven raises to lifetime tenure to the lack of mandatory retirement, and you have a perfect inflationary spiral. Any industry without productivity improvements is in for a world of economic hurt sooner or later.
Fourth, unlike almost every other sector except health care, we have to invest in technology even when it doesn’t improve our own productivity. IT is a monster expense that just keeps growing, and many of the more specialized programs have to spend megabucks to keep current with developments in the field. (Do you have any idea what patient simulators cost these days?) All that investment doesn’t show up in our own productivity, in “dollars per hour” terms.
Fifth would be the various unfunded mandates. “Compliance” is one of those magic words that diverts money from other things. In the 1980’s, the college didn’t even have an office for students with disabilities. Now it encompasses a series of offices, with several full-time employees and lots of assistive technology. The money for that is purely internal. Similarly, with every new reporting requirement we need appropriate software, usually with consultant costs.
Sixth, though, and I know some folks don't want to hear it, is flat-out plutocracy. In the worst recession in several generations, the main political debate is over how much to cut taxes on the very wealthiest. That's so staggeringly obtuse that even pointing it out seems futile. The recent New York Times budget widget was inadvertently revealing; when I used it, I got a surplus in 2015 and a tiny deficit in 2030. All I had to do was to raise taxes on the wealthy back to Clinton-era levels -- we’re not exactly talking Sweden here -- and stop fighting wars of choice. That’s it. That’s all it took. Doing nothing more than that, I could put the budget in surplus, which could go, say, for aid to the states to preserve basic services. This ain’t rocket science.
But those choices are considered so far out of the mainstream in American political discourse that you’re considered self-discrediting for even bringing them up. The budget widget’s first several options all involved cutting money to the middle class and poor -- that’s what gets you taken seriously now. Suggesting raising the retirement age marks you as a sober realist; suggesting pulling out of Afghanistan and Iraq makes you a loony lefty.
Yes, public higher ed has some severe internal challenges. Some are self-inflicted, like tenure and the credit hour; others are externally imposed, like state cuts and the repeal of the mandatory retirement age. The internal culture only works when there’s growth; when there isn’t, we exploit the hell out of adjuncts to maintain the comfort of the superannuated. But even granting all of that, it’s hard to get ahead of the curve when the political culture beats up on any public servants who don’t carry guns. As long as wars, health insurers, and financial services companies keep bleeding us dry, no amount of internal reform will make up the difference.
Sorry for the rant. Every so often, I just get tired of beating my head against a wall.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Mini-Me
Academic administrators get tired of hearing the “cross over to the dark side” line. It’s tired, it’s arrogant, and it picks the wrong villain. Darth Vader isn’t the real villain; Mini-me is.
Fans of cheesy-bad movies will remember Mini-me as Dr. Evil’s sidekick/mascot in the Austin Powers movies. Dr. Evil had his share of great lines (“the Diet Coke of evil”), but his true awfulness shone forth in his creation of Mini-Me. Mini-me was exactly how he sounds -- a smaller, but recognizable, version of Dr. Evil himself.
I’ve seen managers hire Mini-me’s to help them, and I really have to wonder what they’re thinking. It’s much smarter to hire your opposites.
We all have strengths and weaknesses. Mini-me’s have the same strengths and weaknesses you have. That means that certain tasks will either get ignored or will get done badly, since they fall under everybody’s weaknesses. Hiring people with similar priorities to yours, but different strengths, makes delegation easier and far more effective. If I can play to my strengths and my staffers can play to theirs, and among us we get most things done, then everybody wins.
Differentiation also allows your people to have distinctive work identities. This doesn’t matter much in the early stages, but over time, it comes to matter quite a bit. Being seen as somebody else’s Mini-me is demeaning, and it doesn’t do much for one’s credibility. Being seen as the go-to person for (whatever) gives you some standing, though, and lets you carve out your own identity without having to sabotage the team effort. You don’t have to be contrary to draw notice.
Opposites will also be able to see in your blind spots, and you’ll be able to see in theirs. It will be much harder to fall into groupthink with people whose orientation to the world is different.
In committee settings, it’s easy to default to ‘consensus,’ which typically means the least-different candidate. This is a serious mistake, and it’s easy to make. Hiring opposites requires a certain level of self-awareness, as well as a certain level of self-confidence. As rare as those traits are in individuals, they’re that much rarer in groups. Academic departments frequently try to clone themselves in hiring, rather than looking for what isn’t already there.
Making opposites compatible takes some doing, but it can happen. Back when creatures called “Associate Deans” still roamed the earth, I had an associate dean whose training (and temperament) were as an accountant. It was wonderful. He handled some of the things I have to force myself to do, and I handled the icky personnel stuff that made him jumpy. Between the two of us, we covered most of what needed to be done, and we never had conflict over who should do what. My preferences and his were almost mutually exclusive, so we could each play to our respective strengths and still get the job done.
Wise and worldly readers, have you found successful and elegant ways to get search committees to reject the evil temptations of Mini-me?
Fans of cheesy-bad movies will remember Mini-me as Dr. Evil’s sidekick/mascot in the Austin Powers movies. Dr. Evil had his share of great lines (“the Diet Coke of evil”), but his true awfulness shone forth in his creation of Mini-Me. Mini-me was exactly how he sounds -- a smaller, but recognizable, version of Dr. Evil himself.
I’ve seen managers hire Mini-me’s to help them, and I really have to wonder what they’re thinking. It’s much smarter to hire your opposites.
We all have strengths and weaknesses. Mini-me’s have the same strengths and weaknesses you have. That means that certain tasks will either get ignored or will get done badly, since they fall under everybody’s weaknesses. Hiring people with similar priorities to yours, but different strengths, makes delegation easier and far more effective. If I can play to my strengths and my staffers can play to theirs, and among us we get most things done, then everybody wins.
Differentiation also allows your people to have distinctive work identities. This doesn’t matter much in the early stages, but over time, it comes to matter quite a bit. Being seen as somebody else’s Mini-me is demeaning, and it doesn’t do much for one’s credibility. Being seen as the go-to person for (whatever) gives you some standing, though, and lets you carve out your own identity without having to sabotage the team effort. You don’t have to be contrary to draw notice.
Opposites will also be able to see in your blind spots, and you’ll be able to see in theirs. It will be much harder to fall into groupthink with people whose orientation to the world is different.
In committee settings, it’s easy to default to ‘consensus,’ which typically means the least-different candidate. This is a serious mistake, and it’s easy to make. Hiring opposites requires a certain level of self-awareness, as well as a certain level of self-confidence. As rare as those traits are in individuals, they’re that much rarer in groups. Academic departments frequently try to clone themselves in hiring, rather than looking for what isn’t already there.
Making opposites compatible takes some doing, but it can happen. Back when creatures called “Associate Deans” still roamed the earth, I had an associate dean whose training (and temperament) were as an accountant. It was wonderful. He handled some of the things I have to force myself to do, and I handled the icky personnel stuff that made him jumpy. Between the two of us, we covered most of what needed to be done, and we never had conflict over who should do what. My preferences and his were almost mutually exclusive, so we could each play to our respective strengths and still get the job done.
Wise and worldly readers, have you found successful and elegant ways to get search committees to reject the evil temptations of Mini-me?
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Business or Town?
Tenured Radical’s thoughtful post on elite presidential salaries got me thinking about the “run the college like a business” canard.
Most of the people who use that phrase, whether approvingly or damningly, haven’t personally worked in a college that was actually a business. I have -- you’ve heard of it -- and I can report confidently that it’s the wrong metaphor for the community colleges I know.
Having been in all three settings, I’m convinced that community college administration is much closer to town or municipal government than it is to for-profit business. If the place were run like a business, you’d know it.
Like a town, a community college has members with wildly disparate agendas and preferences. It has a myriad of missions, but no distinct bottom line. It has people who stick around forever, and people who are just passing through. It has multiple and conflicting power centers, some more powerful than others, and the most effective leaders are the ones who can get the various centers to work with each other towards common goals. It has some basics that need tending -- keeping the lights on, say -- but tremendous disagreement over priorities and resource allocation beyond that.
When the college has both tenure and unions, the likeness is that much stronger. A city manager can’t get rid of her most annoying constituents, and a dean can’t get rid of her most annoying faculty. If anything, the constituents tend to outlast the officeholders. There’s a certain line of authority, but the officeholder takes that literally at her own peril. Instead, the effective officeholders use their positions to help people achieve their various agendas, within the limits of multiple layers of law, chronically limited resources, and the realities of personalities.
As in politics, diplomacy matters here. The peremptory “my way or the highway” style that can work in certain business environments -- not all, certainly, but some -- tends to crash and burn here. People have long memories and thin skins; getting the climate to the point where discussions can be productive requires acknowledging both without getting paralyzed.
It’s easy to snark about municipal government -- and people do -- but the difference between a well-run city and a poorly-run one is dramatic. You notice it in any number of ways, from the efficacy of official channels in solving problems to the presence or absence of graft. There isn’t much glory in municipal management, but when it’s done right, things work. The trash gets picked up, the snow plowed, and the bills paid. When those things are done, citizens can focus on other things and use their creativity productively.
If you try to run a city like a business, you’ll run into the basic contradictions pretty quickly. The same is true here. Yes, community colleges as a group have to be cost-conscious and budget-conscious, as to most cities and towns, but that’s not the same as running like a business. Businesses spend freely -- and without regard to “equality” -- to make even more. While most municipalities and most colleges would certainly welcome more money, and certainly pay attention to costs, making money isn’t the point.
Proprietary U was a business, and the differences were stark. Turnover was rapid, enrollment fluctuations were dramatic, and the academic calendar ran twelve months per year. Programs that didn’t cover their costs got eliminated. The idea of programmatic cross-subsidization, which is simply considered normal here, was verboten there. Making money was exactly the point.
The difference in metaphors matters, I think, because using the wrong metaphors leads to misunderstandings that generate unnecessary and unhelpful conflict. The best deans aren’t ruthless profit-maximizers, and they wouldn’t last long if they were; they’re local diplomats who balance all manner of conflicting pressures. The ones who can do that without forgetting the point of it all are valuable, even if inconspicuous. The good ones run colleges like the small cities that they are.
Most of the people who use that phrase, whether approvingly or damningly, haven’t personally worked in a college that was actually a business. I have -- you’ve heard of it -- and I can report confidently that it’s the wrong metaphor for the community colleges I know.
Having been in all three settings, I’m convinced that community college administration is much closer to town or municipal government than it is to for-profit business. If the place were run like a business, you’d know it.
Like a town, a community college has members with wildly disparate agendas and preferences. It has a myriad of missions, but no distinct bottom line. It has people who stick around forever, and people who are just passing through. It has multiple and conflicting power centers, some more powerful than others, and the most effective leaders are the ones who can get the various centers to work with each other towards common goals. It has some basics that need tending -- keeping the lights on, say -- but tremendous disagreement over priorities and resource allocation beyond that.
When the college has both tenure and unions, the likeness is that much stronger. A city manager can’t get rid of her most annoying constituents, and a dean can’t get rid of her most annoying faculty. If anything, the constituents tend to outlast the officeholders. There’s a certain line of authority, but the officeholder takes that literally at her own peril. Instead, the effective officeholders use their positions to help people achieve their various agendas, within the limits of multiple layers of law, chronically limited resources, and the realities of personalities.
As in politics, diplomacy matters here. The peremptory “my way or the highway” style that can work in certain business environments -- not all, certainly, but some -- tends to crash and burn here. People have long memories and thin skins; getting the climate to the point where discussions can be productive requires acknowledging both without getting paralyzed.
It’s easy to snark about municipal government -- and people do -- but the difference between a well-run city and a poorly-run one is dramatic. You notice it in any number of ways, from the efficacy of official channels in solving problems to the presence or absence of graft. There isn’t much glory in municipal management, but when it’s done right, things work. The trash gets picked up, the snow plowed, and the bills paid. When those things are done, citizens can focus on other things and use their creativity productively.
If you try to run a city like a business, you’ll run into the basic contradictions pretty quickly. The same is true here. Yes, community colleges as a group have to be cost-conscious and budget-conscious, as to most cities and towns, but that’s not the same as running like a business. Businesses spend freely -- and without regard to “equality” -- to make even more. While most municipalities and most colleges would certainly welcome more money, and certainly pay attention to costs, making money isn’t the point.
Proprietary U was a business, and the differences were stark. Turnover was rapid, enrollment fluctuations were dramatic, and the academic calendar ran twelve months per year. Programs that didn’t cover their costs got eliminated. The idea of programmatic cross-subsidization, which is simply considered normal here, was verboten there. Making money was exactly the point.
The difference in metaphors matters, I think, because using the wrong metaphors leads to misunderstandings that generate unnecessary and unhelpful conflict. The best deans aren’t ruthless profit-maximizers, and they wouldn’t last long if they were; they’re local diplomats who balance all manner of conflicting pressures. The ones who can do that without forgetting the point of it all are valuable, even if inconspicuous. The good ones run colleges like the small cities that they are.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Ask the Administrator: Falling Behind on Grading
A new correspondent writes:
It’s a great question, and I’d love to hear from my wise and worldly readers on it.
In my teaching days, I set a self-imposed deadline of a week. Sometimes I’d beat that, but it ensured that even in the worst cases I’d have a weekend to grade. It required me to stagger assignments across my various classes so I wouldn’t have every class turn in a pile of papers at the same time, but that wasn’t prohibitive.
In my current role, though, I draw a distinction between “good practice” and “minimally acceptable practice.” Good practice would be something like a week. The next class would be even better, though that’s not always realistic. Minimally acceptable practice -- not great, but enough to keep you out of trouble -- would include the students having at least two graded assignments back before the end of the withdrawal deadline (usually around the 10th or 12th week of the semester), and adhering to any self-defined deadlines you’ve set. The latter could mean two weeks or even more, as long as the students know it’s coming. What gets them upset -- and I can’t entirely blame them -- is when they have no idea when their papers will come back, and the time just seems to stretch.
It’s largely about managing expectations. If a realistic timeframe for you is two weeks, say so upfront, and plan accordingly. The students may grumble a bit, but from my perspective, as long as you live up to it, you’re okay. (The same holds with student attendance policies. I can defer to almost anything reasonable in a syllabus, as long as you stick to it. But if you start making it up on the fly, or applying different standards to different students, I’ll have a harder time backing you up.)
In terms of promotion and tenure at cc’s, each context is different, but in the ones I’ve seen, the default assumption is that people on the tenure track will get tenure. Since there’s no publication requirement, and teaching quality (or lack thereof) is hard to prove legally, most people make it. In my years in administration, I haven’t seen anybody denied tenure yet. Admittedly, it could happen; I’ve heard of past cases on my own campus. But in those cases, there was usually either an over-the-top incident -- thou shalt not sexually harass students when angling for tenure -- or conspicuously awful teaching.
Promotion may be a different issue. Depending on how it’s handled on your campus, there may be a heavier burden of proof on you to show that you’ve earned it. If that’s the case, then greater visibility may matter.
For what it’s worth, neither I nor any admin I know buys the argument that excessive college service demands should excuse excessively slow grading. Your colleagues have the same obligations you do, yet they manage. If you’ve been put on so many committees that you simply can’t handle it -- this can happen to the first minority hire in a long time, who is suddenly put on every committee under the sun in the name of diversity -- ask for either a course release or a free pass to resign from a few. But don’t half-ass your teaching and then blame college service for it. Not impressive.
I imagine that different people in different contexts view this one very differently, so I’ll open it up. Wise and worldly readers, how would you define a reasonable amount of time to return graded assignments?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
What constitutes “falling behind” on grading in a college classroom and what are the consequences?
It strikes me that there are two parts to this issue:
1. Pedagogically, timely feedback is crucial, most would probably agree. But what, exactly, constitutes “timely”? ASAP is far too simplistic an answer. I teach English FT at a CC, and I have between 120 and 150 students, depending on the semester. What is a reasonable amount of time to take with grading given such a workload? And on the other side, what constitutes “poor performance”? Where is the line?
2. Realistically, FT professors, at least at the CC level, often need to balance the demands of the grading and teaching workload with commitments outside the classroom, including committees, student clubs, faculty senate etc… Often, both inside and outside my particular institution, I hear that the path to tenure and promotion for CC profs has more to do with visibility to admin outside the classroom than with effectiveness inside it. I would love to hear about the ways others have managed these parts of the job in ways that allowed them to continue to be successful inside the classroom.
It’s a great question, and I’d love to hear from my wise and worldly readers on it.
In my teaching days, I set a self-imposed deadline of a week. Sometimes I’d beat that, but it ensured that even in the worst cases I’d have a weekend to grade. It required me to stagger assignments across my various classes so I wouldn’t have every class turn in a pile of papers at the same time, but that wasn’t prohibitive.
In my current role, though, I draw a distinction between “good practice” and “minimally acceptable practice.” Good practice would be something like a week. The next class would be even better, though that’s not always realistic. Minimally acceptable practice -- not great, but enough to keep you out of trouble -- would include the students having at least two graded assignments back before the end of the withdrawal deadline (usually around the 10th or 12th week of the semester), and adhering to any self-defined deadlines you’ve set. The latter could mean two weeks or even more, as long as the students know it’s coming. What gets them upset -- and I can’t entirely blame them -- is when they have no idea when their papers will come back, and the time just seems to stretch.
It’s largely about managing expectations. If a realistic timeframe for you is two weeks, say so upfront, and plan accordingly. The students may grumble a bit, but from my perspective, as long as you live up to it, you’re okay. (The same holds with student attendance policies. I can defer to almost anything reasonable in a syllabus, as long as you stick to it. But if you start making it up on the fly, or applying different standards to different students, I’ll have a harder time backing you up.)
In terms of promotion and tenure at cc’s, each context is different, but in the ones I’ve seen, the default assumption is that people on the tenure track will get tenure. Since there’s no publication requirement, and teaching quality (or lack thereof) is hard to prove legally, most people make it. In my years in administration, I haven’t seen anybody denied tenure yet. Admittedly, it could happen; I’ve heard of past cases on my own campus. But in those cases, there was usually either an over-the-top incident -- thou shalt not sexually harass students when angling for tenure -- or conspicuously awful teaching.
Promotion may be a different issue. Depending on how it’s handled on your campus, there may be a heavier burden of proof on you to show that you’ve earned it. If that’s the case, then greater visibility may matter.
For what it’s worth, neither I nor any admin I know buys the argument that excessive college service demands should excuse excessively slow grading. Your colleagues have the same obligations you do, yet they manage. If you’ve been put on so many committees that you simply can’t handle it -- this can happen to the first minority hire in a long time, who is suddenly put on every committee under the sun in the name of diversity -- ask for either a course release or a free pass to resign from a few. But don’t half-ass your teaching and then blame college service for it. Not impressive.
I imagine that different people in different contexts view this one very differently, so I’ll open it up. Wise and worldly readers, how would you define a reasonable amount of time to return graded assignments?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Friday, November 12, 2010
Friday Fragments
Actual dinner conversation:
TW: So-and-so is dumb as a rock.
TG: Rocks aren’t dumb!
TB: Yeah! Rocks tell scientists lots of interesting facts.
----------------
A counselor on campus mentioned today that she’s working with several homeless students, including a few who have young children. As she detailed some of the ways they cope -- you really don’t want to know -- I realized again that I could never be a counselor. How anyone could do that job without succumbing to depression is beyond me. And there’s something profoundly, deeply wrong with a country that will spend hundreds of billions on wars of choice while relegating single mothers with young children to sleeping in tents on the edge of town.
--------------
This story is sooooo true. To my mind, the obvious medium-term solution to the dilemmas of reallocating within a college is to reallocate beween colleges. Let college A have a healthy theatre program and college B have a healthy engineering program, instead of asking each to sustain both on insufficient resources. It’s politically radioactive, but it’s the truth. Getting there from here is the tricky part. Of course, we could always tap into the aforementioned hundreds of billions, but that doesn’t seem to be working...
--------------
The Boy was mad that his copy of the new Diary of a Wimpy Kid book didn’t arrive until Thursday, since some of his friends got it on Tuesday. Apparently, most of the kids in his class read the series, and several brought in their copies on Wednesday to show them off. After his copy arrived, TB devoured it immediately. It pleases me to no end that the hot ticket in the fourth grade is a book.
--------------
I read somewhere that one of out every ten undergrads in the US attends a for-profit college or university. IHE noted recently that last year, half of all the new hires in higher education were at for-profits. I’m glad to see them finally drawing some meaningful scrutiny, but I’m concerned that much of the discussion has thus far missed the point. They’re growing because they can; public higher ed is cutting because it has to. As long as those remain true, I can predict with some confidence the direction of the trendline.
---------------
What would happen if the “gainful employment” rule were applied to graduate programs in liberal arts fields?
TW: So-and-so is dumb as a rock.
TG: Rocks aren’t dumb!
TB: Yeah! Rocks tell scientists lots of interesting facts.
----------------
A counselor on campus mentioned today that she’s working with several homeless students, including a few who have young children. As she detailed some of the ways they cope -- you really don’t want to know -- I realized again that I could never be a counselor. How anyone could do that job without succumbing to depression is beyond me. And there’s something profoundly, deeply wrong with a country that will spend hundreds of billions on wars of choice while relegating single mothers with young children to sleeping in tents on the edge of town.
--------------
This story is sooooo true. To my mind, the obvious medium-term solution to the dilemmas of reallocating within a college is to reallocate beween colleges. Let college A have a healthy theatre program and college B have a healthy engineering program, instead of asking each to sustain both on insufficient resources. It’s politically radioactive, but it’s the truth. Getting there from here is the tricky part. Of course, we could always tap into the aforementioned hundreds of billions, but that doesn’t seem to be working...
--------------
The Boy was mad that his copy of the new Diary of a Wimpy Kid book didn’t arrive until Thursday, since some of his friends got it on Tuesday. Apparently, most of the kids in his class read the series, and several brought in their copies on Wednesday to show them off. After his copy arrived, TB devoured it immediately. It pleases me to no end that the hot ticket in the fourth grade is a book.
--------------
I read somewhere that one of out every ten undergrads in the US attends a for-profit college or university. IHE noted recently that last year, half of all the new hires in higher education were at for-profits. I’m glad to see them finally drawing some meaningful scrutiny, but I’m concerned that much of the discussion has thus far missed the point. They’re growing because they can; public higher ed is cutting because it has to. As long as those remain true, I can predict with some confidence the direction of the trendline.
---------------
What would happen if the “gainful employment” rule were applied to graduate programs in liberal arts fields?
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Ask the Administrator: Encouraging Junior to Stay Home
Ask the Administrator: Encouraging Junior to Stay Home
A new correspondent writes:
You’ve stumbled upon one of the great unspokens of higher ed. Those huge freshman classes taught by T.A.’s are cash cows for universities. They subsidize other parts of the operation.
In terms of convincing your kid, I think the first question would be whether convincing your kid is actually a good idea. It may be, but each kid is different. What’s the motivation for starting at the university? If it’s little more than “that’s what’s next,” then a cc transfer program can be an excellent choice. If it’s “to get the hell away from my parents,” then talking about student loans would largely miss the point. Does your kid want the whole dorm experience, as you seem to imply?
Thinking back to my decision-making process in late high school, I remember thinking of college not just as a credential or a set of classes, but as a phase of life. It promised many things, not the least of which was getting out of the house and having The College Experience. (I defined that as including smart new friends, tremendous daily freedom, and visions of sex that seemed shameful back in those pre-internet days.) I ruled out any colleges within easy driving distance specifically to prevent falling back into old habits. Distance was a selling point. If you kid is thinking along those lines, then stressing the cost advantages of living with Mom and Dad probably won’t make much of an impression.
Some parents use bribery. They explain the cost savings to the kid, and offer to split the savings with him. This usually takes the form of a car. I always found that vaguely creepy, but your mileage may vary.
If your kid is thinking about distance as a virtue, one way to go might be to find a good cc relatively far away. Depending on where you live, the tuition penalty for being out-of-area may not amount to much, so you could still save on that while giving the kid some freedom from home.
If you do decide (or convince your kid to decide) to take a cc seriously as an option, I would VERY STRONGLY recommend making an appointment to talk with that cc’s transfer counselor before making a decision. Find out which universities have agreements with that cc, and how many credits they’ll take for a given program. You’re right that most of the basic gen eds transfer without issue -- Intro to Psych is Intro to Psych pretty much anywhere -- but some universities have quirky variations that you’d only know if you asked upfront.
At this point, my recommendation would be to look at a cc as a safety school. (They don’t get much safer than open admissions.) Apply to several places, and apply for financial aid at each. Then compare the post-award costs of the various places. Some private colleges rely on “Presidential Scholarships” (that is, discounting) to give everyone a break off the sticker price that nobody pays. Public universities tend to do much less of that, but you can’t always predict the post-aid cost just from looking at the sticker price. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking of loans as aid. Loans are loans. You’re looking at the cost after any discounts or scholarships. Depending on the offers you get, you may be surprised.
As to how you get teenagers to take the future seriously, I have absolutely no idea.
Good luck!
Wise and worldly readers, what would you suggest? Is there an argument that might persuade the kid who has romantic visions of dorm life? Is there a way to get a 17 year old to take future student loans seriously?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
A new correspondent writes:
My children are about to “leave the nest” and head off to college. I have been on a number of college visits now, gone on campus tours, and listened to presentations from admissions staff. In many cases, the university has a “College of General Studies” for those whose major is “undecided”. Tuition for those enrolled in the College of General Studies is considerably less than for those, say, in the College of Engineering. The admissions representatives quite blatantly point out that, for the first two years, everyone is taking the same general education classes, but those enrolled in the College of Engineering are paying several thousand dollars more for them. Of course, no one can get a degree in General Studies. Those in the College of General Studies are expected to transfer into something more specific by the time they have achieved Junior status. The point is that there is a common theme in these presentations; “gen ed classes are gen ed classes.”
Of course, no university representative is going to suggest that prospective students save money by taking some of those gen ed classes at a community collegeand transfer in later. Still, we all know that tuition at a community college is much less than tuition at a university. One of the perks of being a full-time faculty member at a community college is the free tuition benefit for my dependents. Now, the question is…. how does one successfully promote the “live at home for another year and save $40K in tuition” to the senior in high school? It is very hard to combat the high school graduate’s desire to go away to a university, have the dorm experience, and feel independent. The argument of my economically unaware child is, “I can just take out student loans. Other people do it all the time and they manage.”
Of course, we as parents will help pay for some of the tuition, but we also feel that the college student should also be paying a portion of his/her tuition. Still, as one who had student loans hanging over my head for a VERY long time, not taking advantage of the affordable, transferrable, quality classes available at a community college seems like a poor plan.
You’ve stumbled upon one of the great unspokens of higher ed. Those huge freshman classes taught by T.A.’s are cash cows for universities. They subsidize other parts of the operation.
In terms of convincing your kid, I think the first question would be whether convincing your kid is actually a good idea. It may be, but each kid is different. What’s the motivation for starting at the university? If it’s little more than “that’s what’s next,” then a cc transfer program can be an excellent choice. If it’s “to get the hell away from my parents,” then talking about student loans would largely miss the point. Does your kid want the whole dorm experience, as you seem to imply?
Thinking back to my decision-making process in late high school, I remember thinking of college not just as a credential or a set of classes, but as a phase of life. It promised many things, not the least of which was getting out of the house and having The College Experience. (I defined that as including smart new friends, tremendous daily freedom, and visions of sex that seemed shameful back in those pre-internet days.) I ruled out any colleges within easy driving distance specifically to prevent falling back into old habits. Distance was a selling point. If you kid is thinking along those lines, then stressing the cost advantages of living with Mom and Dad probably won’t make much of an impression.
Some parents use bribery. They explain the cost savings to the kid, and offer to split the savings with him. This usually takes the form of a car. I always found that vaguely creepy, but your mileage may vary.
If your kid is thinking about distance as a virtue, one way to go might be to find a good cc relatively far away. Depending on where you live, the tuition penalty for being out-of-area may not amount to much, so you could still save on that while giving the kid some freedom from home.
If you do decide (or convince your kid to decide) to take a cc seriously as an option, I would VERY STRONGLY recommend making an appointment to talk with that cc’s transfer counselor before making a decision. Find out which universities have agreements with that cc, and how many credits they’ll take for a given program. You’re right that most of the basic gen eds transfer without issue -- Intro to Psych is Intro to Psych pretty much anywhere -- but some universities have quirky variations that you’d only know if you asked upfront.
At this point, my recommendation would be to look at a cc as a safety school. (They don’t get much safer than open admissions.) Apply to several places, and apply for financial aid at each. Then compare the post-award costs of the various places. Some private colleges rely on “Presidential Scholarships” (that is, discounting) to give everyone a break off the sticker price that nobody pays. Public universities tend to do much less of that, but you can’t always predict the post-aid cost just from looking at the sticker price. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking of loans as aid. Loans are loans. You’re looking at the cost after any discounts or scholarships. Depending on the offers you get, you may be surprised.
As to how you get teenagers to take the future seriously, I have absolutely no idea.
Good luck!
Wise and worldly readers, what would you suggest? Is there an argument that might persuade the kid who has romantic visions of dorm life? Is there a way to get a 17 year old to take future student loans seriously?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
When Good Actors are Miscast
Have you ever seen a good actor struggle in the wrong role? I’m thinking here of, say, Laura Linney in Mystic River, where she tried to play a tough working-class Bostonian. I’ve enjoyed her work in any number of other things, but she was just unconvincing in that. As good as she usually is, it wasn’t the role for her.
Over the last year or so, we’ve had a few instances of that on campus: talented and hardworking staff people who were just slotted into the wrong roles.
It’s different from the more straightforward “low performer,” since you can see signs of real ability and drive. Every so often, circumstances align to let the talent shine through, but it doesn’t last. The random blasts of talent make the overall mediocrity that much more frustrating.
Sometimes the miscasting is a result of economic need; this was the job available when she needed one, and she interviewed well. Sometimes it’s a personality clash between a staffer and a supervisor. And sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint, but hard to miss -- something is obviously not quite right, but it’s just not clear what it is.
There’s something incredibly satisfying about seeing a situation like that get fixed. When a talented person who just isn’t clicking in office A moves to office B and becomes a star, everybody wins. Office A loses its headache, office B gets a winner, and the staffer is suddenly happier and more effective. The budgetary impact is a wash, but the impact on productivity and morale is substantial. I’ve seen that happen a couple of times now, and I consider those moments pure victories.
On the faculty side, the most common version of miscasting is the wonderful professor who becomes an ineffective department chair. Although the skill sets overlap, they’re not the same; someone who may be great when autonomous may have trouble in a “first among equals” role. Alternately, some professors who excel at upper-level classes struggle when teaching developmental ones, or vice versa.
Low performance isn’t always about miscasting, of course; some people just suck. But when it is about casting, and you’re able to rectify miscasting and see the person suddenly blossom, it’s really gratifying. It’s that rarest of birds, the pure win. Let Laura Linney play the repressed-but-mischievous WASP; it’s a better use of her, and we’re all happier.
Over the last year or so, we’ve had a few instances of that on campus: talented and hardworking staff people who were just slotted into the wrong roles.
It’s different from the more straightforward “low performer,” since you can see signs of real ability and drive. Every so often, circumstances align to let the talent shine through, but it doesn’t last. The random blasts of talent make the overall mediocrity that much more frustrating.
Sometimes the miscasting is a result of economic need; this was the job available when she needed one, and she interviewed well. Sometimes it’s a personality clash between a staffer and a supervisor. And sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint, but hard to miss -- something is obviously not quite right, but it’s just not clear what it is.
There’s something incredibly satisfying about seeing a situation like that get fixed. When a talented person who just isn’t clicking in office A moves to office B and becomes a star, everybody wins. Office A loses its headache, office B gets a winner, and the staffer is suddenly happier and more effective. The budgetary impact is a wash, but the impact on productivity and morale is substantial. I’ve seen that happen a couple of times now, and I consider those moments pure victories.
On the faculty side, the most common version of miscasting is the wonderful professor who becomes an ineffective department chair. Although the skill sets overlap, they’re not the same; someone who may be great when autonomous may have trouble in a “first among equals” role. Alternately, some professors who excel at upper-level classes struggle when teaching developmental ones, or vice versa.
Low performance isn’t always about miscasting, of course; some people just suck. But when it is about casting, and you’re able to rectify miscasting and see the person suddenly blossom, it’s really gratifying. It’s that rarest of birds, the pure win. Let Laura Linney play the repressed-but-mischievous WASP; it’s a better use of her, and we’re all happier.
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
When Presidents’ Eyes Wander
In searches at senior administrative levels, such as presidents and chancellors, it’s common practice to release the names of finalists to the local newspaper while the search is in process. In the age of the internet, even an out-of-state search can become common local knowledge in nanoseconds.
Since the most common job for new presidents is a previous presidency -- that can’t last forever, but it’s true now -- it’s not uncommon for a sitting President of college X to be revealed as a candidate for the presidency of college Y.
This causes ripples at college X.
It’s one thing if the president actually gets the job. She leaves, college X adjusts, and life goes on.
But when the president doesn’t get the job, and her unsuccessful candidacy has become common knowledge on the home campus, things can get awkward.
The rumors start to swirl. Why is she looking? What’s the scoop? Is she looking elsewhere too? (Answer: probably.) What will happen if she leaves in three months? Six months? A year? What if a new person cleans house? Which internal faction will win?
It can be remarkably unsettling. And that can do real damage.
Administrations usually evolve in a pattern of punctuated equilibrium. There’s relative calm for a while, then a huge wave of change, then relative calm again. Presidential change is usually a catalyst for a huge wave. Some of that wave will be initiated by the new president, since many of them like to start by bringing in their own people. (I’m not a fan of that strategy, though I’ll admit some bias there.) Some of it will happen when people leave preemptively, reacting to the writing on the wall. And some of it will happen when people start jockeying for position, perceiving the incumbent as a lame duck.
I don’t know an effective way around this. As long as search finalists are public knowledge, people will make of that knowledge what they will.
Wise and worldly readers, have you seen someone handle that kind of disclosure gracefully? Is there a way for a president to regain local relevance after losing out on a search that the campus discovered?
Since the most common job for new presidents is a previous presidency -- that can’t last forever, but it’s true now -- it’s not uncommon for a sitting President of college X to be revealed as a candidate for the presidency of college Y.
This causes ripples at college X.
It’s one thing if the president actually gets the job. She leaves, college X adjusts, and life goes on.
But when the president doesn’t get the job, and her unsuccessful candidacy has become common knowledge on the home campus, things can get awkward.
The rumors start to swirl. Why is she looking? What’s the scoop? Is she looking elsewhere too? (Answer: probably.) What will happen if she leaves in three months? Six months? A year? What if a new person cleans house? Which internal faction will win?
It can be remarkably unsettling. And that can do real damage.
Administrations usually evolve in a pattern of punctuated equilibrium. There’s relative calm for a while, then a huge wave of change, then relative calm again. Presidential change is usually a catalyst for a huge wave. Some of that wave will be initiated by the new president, since many of them like to start by bringing in their own people. (I’m not a fan of that strategy, though I’ll admit some bias there.) Some of it will happen when people leave preemptively, reacting to the writing on the wall. And some of it will happen when people start jockeying for position, perceiving the incumbent as a lame duck.
I don’t know an effective way around this. As long as search finalists are public knowledge, people will make of that knowledge what they will.
Wise and worldly readers, have you seen someone handle that kind of disclosure gracefully? Is there a way for a president to regain local relevance after losing out on a search that the campus discovered?
Monday, November 08, 2010
Creak...
The retirements are nearly upon us.
My college, like so many, hired a bunch of people all at once, then relatively few for a very long time. In terms of age cohorts, it looks like a pig in a python, and the pig is getting near the end.
The dam hasn’t broken, but it’s creaking.
Looking ahead just a few years, I can see the majority of the administration changing. It’s alarming, because in many areas, there’s really nobody in the pipeline to come next.
If mine were the only college in this situation, it wouldn’t be so bad; we’d just import the talent we need and be done with it. But it’s not.
The usual pipeline for academic administrators is from department chairs or program coordinators, who themselves come from the full-time faculty. The idea is that higher ed is such an idiosyncratic creature that it wouldn’t make sense to import people directly from business or the military; they’d quickly run headfirst into what it means to manage contrarians with tenure. (I just finished Robert Sutton’s latest book, Good Boss, Bad Boss, and chuckled ruefully every time he mentioned that most of his advice is inapplicable in academe. It’s funny because it’s true. If only someone out there with decanal experience would write a book about how to be a dean. Hmm...) So we try to promote from within, to ensure that deans and their counterparts will have a personal sense of how colleges work, and of how faculty see things.
But a generation or two of adjuncting-out the faculty has left the pipeline thin. There just aren’t very many faculty here of my generation. Gen X’ers -- and even the younger Boomers -- are rare birds. Most of the faculty is either in the very early stages, or within a short shot of retirement. The middle is missing.
The “administrative farm team” argument (the official term is “succession planning”) strikes me as a very intelligent objection to the adjuncting trend, even though the opponents of the adjuncting trend tend not to use it. They should; as no less an academic unionist than Sherman Dorn has noted, competent administrators make unions’ jobs easier. (The same is true in reverse; good labor relations make my job easier.) Colleges need people to do the work that deans do; those people can have a sense of the traditional faculty outlook, or not. Better that they do.
My college, like so many, hired a bunch of people all at once, then relatively few for a very long time. In terms of age cohorts, it looks like a pig in a python, and the pig is getting near the end.
The dam hasn’t broken, but it’s creaking.
Looking ahead just a few years, I can see the majority of the administration changing. It’s alarming, because in many areas, there’s really nobody in the pipeline to come next.
If mine were the only college in this situation, it wouldn’t be so bad; we’d just import the talent we need and be done with it. But it’s not.
The usual pipeline for academic administrators is from department chairs or program coordinators, who themselves come from the full-time faculty. The idea is that higher ed is such an idiosyncratic creature that it wouldn’t make sense to import people directly from business or the military; they’d quickly run headfirst into what it means to manage contrarians with tenure. (I just finished Robert Sutton’s latest book, Good Boss, Bad Boss, and chuckled ruefully every time he mentioned that most of his advice is inapplicable in academe. It’s funny because it’s true. If only someone out there with decanal experience would write a book about how to be a dean. Hmm...) So we try to promote from within, to ensure that deans and their counterparts will have a personal sense of how colleges work, and of how faculty see things.
But a generation or two of adjuncting-out the faculty has left the pipeline thin. There just aren’t very many faculty here of my generation. Gen X’ers -- and even the younger Boomers -- are rare birds. Most of the faculty is either in the very early stages, or within a short shot of retirement. The middle is missing.
The “administrative farm team” argument (the official term is “succession planning”) strikes me as a very intelligent objection to the adjuncting trend, even though the opponents of the adjuncting trend tend not to use it. They should; as no less an academic unionist than Sherman Dorn has noted, competent administrators make unions’ jobs easier. (The same is true in reverse; good labor relations make my job easier.) Colleges need people to do the work that deans do; those people can have a sense of the traditional faculty outlook, or not. Better that they do.
Friday, November 05, 2010
Ask the Administrator: Apologies
An occasional correspondent writes:
I hate to default to “it depends,” but it actually does.
Smart managers will reward truthfulness. In a setting in which people are secure in the knowledge that messengers don’t get shot, people will be much more willing to come forward with uncomfortable truths. That’s a good thing, since it will bring hidden problems to light and make it easier to address them. It will also save a great deal of time and work decoding messages, since people will be likelier to deliver truths unencrypted.
However, not all managers are smart. Some of them, I hate to admit, will tend to either shoot the messenger or “solve” problems by finding someone to blame. In a pin-the-blame-on-the-donkey environment, admitting a mistake can be terribly costly.
I’ve worked in both settings. (Happily, right now I’m in the former.) Which more accurately describes your setting, I don’t know.
If you’re in a “find someone to blame” environment, the safest thing to do is to say as little as possible. There, if confronted with a partially true accusation, the prudent course is a noncommittal but dismissive expression, with as few words as possible. You’re essentially acknowledging receipt of the message, without even addressing its merits.
(In a really toxic setting, if you run out of other options, you can always resort to “HOW DARE YOU, SIR!” I should warn you, though, that anyone with experience will take that as an admission of guilt.)
Some people will try passing the blame on to someone else, but I don’t recommend that. It just makes an already toxic setting that much worse. You can also resort to blanket denials and/or webs of self-justifying lies, but again, you’re just digging yourself in deeper. The right to remain silent should not be underestimated.
Depending on the severity of the accusation, if you have a union, you might want to have your union rep with you. In most areas I assume this wouldn’t apply to adjuncts, but if you’re lucky enough to have an adjunct union, this can be a productive approach.
Interestingly, the strongest “pin the blame” culture I’ve seen was actually in a heavily tenured setting. Shaming was the weapon of choice for maintaining order. Over the years, it led to a beaten-down, hangdog culture. No, thanks.
One of the ways to tell if a local culture is functional or dysfunctional is by seeing what happens when someone actually does admit fault. Does it lead to problem-solving or blame-pinning?
I suspect plenty of wise and worldly readers have had experiences with this. Readers, what would you advise?
Good luck!
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
I'm an adjunct at a local CC. This semester, I haven't been very good about grading assignments in a timely manner. One particular student has been constantly asking for an update on his grade. I finally caught up with everything last night, but came in this morning to find out the student had gone to my department head, his department head, and my department dean to complain about me. When my department head came to me with this information, he was very supportive about being on "my side" and letting me know the student didn't come across as very credible. I responded with "Well, it's too bad he went to this extreme, but it's reasonable that he would want to know his grade and he had a legitimate reason to be upset. I'm sorry about all of this." At this, my department head give me something of an incredulous look, sort of "I'm throwing you a line here, why are you doing this?"
So here's my question. Should one deal with student complaints the way one deals with a car crash? i.e. You never say "I'm sorry, it was my fault" because that admission can come back to haunt you. Is it better to reply, "Oh, those wacky students. I'll take care of it." I think this question applies to anytime one is blamed, justly or unjustly, for some workplace SNAFU. Is "I'm sorry" always an admission of guilt that automatically weakens your position?
I hate to default to “it depends,” but it actually does.
Smart managers will reward truthfulness. In a setting in which people are secure in the knowledge that messengers don’t get shot, people will be much more willing to come forward with uncomfortable truths. That’s a good thing, since it will bring hidden problems to light and make it easier to address them. It will also save a great deal of time and work decoding messages, since people will be likelier to deliver truths unencrypted.
However, not all managers are smart. Some of them, I hate to admit, will tend to either shoot the messenger or “solve” problems by finding someone to blame. In a pin-the-blame-on-the-donkey environment, admitting a mistake can be terribly costly.
I’ve worked in both settings. (Happily, right now I’m in the former.) Which more accurately describes your setting, I don’t know.
If you’re in a “find someone to blame” environment, the safest thing to do is to say as little as possible. There, if confronted with a partially true accusation, the prudent course is a noncommittal but dismissive expression, with as few words as possible. You’re essentially acknowledging receipt of the message, without even addressing its merits.
(In a really toxic setting, if you run out of other options, you can always resort to “HOW DARE YOU, SIR!” I should warn you, though, that anyone with experience will take that as an admission of guilt.)
Some people will try passing the blame on to someone else, but I don’t recommend that. It just makes an already toxic setting that much worse. You can also resort to blanket denials and/or webs of self-justifying lies, but again, you’re just digging yourself in deeper. The right to remain silent should not be underestimated.
Depending on the severity of the accusation, if you have a union, you might want to have your union rep with you. In most areas I assume this wouldn’t apply to adjuncts, but if you’re lucky enough to have an adjunct union, this can be a productive approach.
Interestingly, the strongest “pin the blame” culture I’ve seen was actually in a heavily tenured setting. Shaming was the weapon of choice for maintaining order. Over the years, it led to a beaten-down, hangdog culture. No, thanks.
One of the ways to tell if a local culture is functional or dysfunctional is by seeing what happens when someone actually does admit fault. Does it lead to problem-solving or blame-pinning?
I suspect plenty of wise and worldly readers have had experiences with this. Readers, what would you advise?
Good luck!
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Thursday, November 04, 2010
Taxing a la Carte
This story about the election results got me wondering. (And everybody can put the knives down -- I’m not analyzing candidates here.)
In a climate in which government spending is generally considered suspect, and in which people who campaign on “tax cuts good, spending bad” do very well, ballot measures that supported higher education specifically did very well.
When taxes are considered as part of a lump sum, they’re despised. But when they’re earmarked for specific purposes, they seem to be more popular. Which makes sense psychologically, since the earmark makes it easier to see the point.
Would public higher ed be better off moving from being the “balance wheel” of state budgets (hat-tip to Jane Wellman of the Delta Cost Project for the phrase) to having its own dedicated tax?
I’m wondering if a dedicated tax would be harder to cut than an appropriation in an omnibus bill. Somebody may have done some empirical research on this, but I haven’t found it.
Social Security might be a decent example. Politicians routinely run on cutting income taxes, and some of them will enact substantial cuts on social programs, given the chance. But I literally can’t remember the last time someone ran on reducing the FICA tax. (Bush II floated a variation on that in 2005; it went over like a lead balloon.) As annoying as the FICA tax is, people sort of accept it, because they understand what it’s for. An “income tax” is an undifferentiated mass, but a Social Security tax is for one specific thing.
Higher education gets nailed badly during recessions, because state income tax revenues go down and unemployment claims go up, and the difference has to be made up somewhere. Since K-12 and prisons don’t really have alternate revenue sources -- okay, some prisons do, but that’s another post -- it’s easy for legislators to look at higher ed’s tuition stream and decide that cutting college aid would do less harm than cutting other things.
But what if that option were off the table? What if, instead, higher ed had its own a la carte tax? Call it the “college and university” tax, or something catchier, but make it clear (and enforce legally) that it can only go for the public colleges and universities in a given state.
Yes, the money would fluctuate with the economy, but it would probably fluctuate less than appropriations from general budgets do now. With relative predictability, colleges could actually make (and stick to) spending plans without constantly interrupting them to make up for midyear cuts.
Admittedly, the devil can hide in the details. Property taxes are probably easier to administer than income taxes, but they’re also probably harder to sustain politically. They would also establish an expectation of being used locally, whereas income taxes are more often used at the state level. But these strike me as surmountable.
I know that different states operate differently, so some wise and worldly readers may have seen something like this done somewhere. Those who have, how well did it work? International readers -- the worldliest of the worldly -- is something like this done where you are? Does it seem to be a safer haven for higher ed, or is it just as vulnerable? Is there a catch I haven’t seen?
In a climate in which government spending is generally considered suspect, and in which people who campaign on “tax cuts good, spending bad” do very well, ballot measures that supported higher education specifically did very well.
When taxes are considered as part of a lump sum, they’re despised. But when they’re earmarked for specific purposes, they seem to be more popular. Which makes sense psychologically, since the earmark makes it easier to see the point.
Would public higher ed be better off moving from being the “balance wheel” of state budgets (hat-tip to Jane Wellman of the Delta Cost Project for the phrase) to having its own dedicated tax?
I’m wondering if a dedicated tax would be harder to cut than an appropriation in an omnibus bill. Somebody may have done some empirical research on this, but I haven’t found it.
Social Security might be a decent example. Politicians routinely run on cutting income taxes, and some of them will enact substantial cuts on social programs, given the chance. But I literally can’t remember the last time someone ran on reducing the FICA tax. (Bush II floated a variation on that in 2005; it went over like a lead balloon.) As annoying as the FICA tax is, people sort of accept it, because they understand what it’s for. An “income tax” is an undifferentiated mass, but a Social Security tax is for one specific thing.
Higher education gets nailed badly during recessions, because state income tax revenues go down and unemployment claims go up, and the difference has to be made up somewhere. Since K-12 and prisons don’t really have alternate revenue sources -- okay, some prisons do, but that’s another post -- it’s easy for legislators to look at higher ed’s tuition stream and decide that cutting college aid would do less harm than cutting other things.
But what if that option were off the table? What if, instead, higher ed had its own a la carte tax? Call it the “college and university” tax, or something catchier, but make it clear (and enforce legally) that it can only go for the public colleges and universities in a given state.
Yes, the money would fluctuate with the economy, but it would probably fluctuate less than appropriations from general budgets do now. With relative predictability, colleges could actually make (and stick to) spending plans without constantly interrupting them to make up for midyear cuts.
Admittedly, the devil can hide in the details. Property taxes are probably easier to administer than income taxes, but they’re also probably harder to sustain politically. They would also establish an expectation of being used locally, whereas income taxes are more often used at the state level. But these strike me as surmountable.
I know that different states operate differently, so some wise and worldly readers may have seen something like this done somewhere. Those who have, how well did it work? International readers -- the worldliest of the worldly -- is something like this done where you are? Does it seem to be a safer haven for higher ed, or is it just as vulnerable? Is there a catch I haven’t seen?
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
Telling the Future
The Boy's school recently had Back to School night, so the four of us went to see what there was to see. TB actually had 'greeter' duty at the front door, which taxed his patience a bit, but was a source of pride anyway. We wandered the hallways looking at various displays the kids had prepared, and talking with TB's and TG's teachers.
In TB's class – he's in the fourth grade – the kids had done essays on what they want to be in fifty years. The essays were left out on the tables for parents to read. As an exercise in shoe-leather sociology, it was striking.
Out of a class of a little over twenty, only two kids mentioned college, and only one – TB – had any recognizable professional aspiration. (He declared that he will get his doctorate in civil engineering at MIT, so he can build bridges and highways. About a year ago he asked me what the best place was to study civil engineering, so with my layman's knowledge of engineering, I suggested MIT, and that was that.) One other boy mentioned the state university, though he seemed more interested in the sports than in anything else. Every other kid wrote some variation on “I will finish high school, get a job, and get rich.” The teacher mentioned that she had to push some of them to mention finishing high school.
None of the boys – TB included – mentioned anything about getting married and/or having kids, though all of the girls did. (My favorite: “After graduating high school I will get married and have kids. The way I will accomplish this is by meeting a cute boy and falling in love.” It's phrased like a mission statement.) Several kids mentioned getting rich, though only one of them had any idea how. (She declared that she would become a celebrity, though it wasn't entirely clear what she would be celebrated for.)
I was proud of TB, of course, but also quietly horrified at how early and how cleanly class divisions are reproducing themselves. The gender split surprised me a bit in 2010; if nothing else, I would have expected at least a couple of the girls to mention college. The vagueness of the aspirations was striking, too. I expected to see prospective astronauts, baseball players, doctors, presidents, inventors, whatever; there was none of that. For all of the mentions of getting rich, none of them had the foggiest idea that money was somehow connected to a job. (I don't count 'celebrity' as a job, Kardashians or no Kardashians.)
TB's school is public, in a working class/middle class suburb. It's not tony, by any stretch, but it's hardly a disaster. If you were doing a documentary on failing schools, it wouldn't occur to you to look here. TB is thriving, and so is his sister. The class divisions weren't so apparent in her class, though to be fair, she's in first grade. The divide seems to occur somewhere between first and fourth grades.
I’m not sure where that kind of vision is supposed to come from, other than parents. I know the schools shouldn’t teach that college is somehow mandatory; it isn’t, and it shouldn’t be. But it should seem like a realistic aspiration, especially in the fourth grade. And even for those who don’t choose the college route, some kind of “I want to be a...” sentiment should be there somewhere. (This being the Northeast, none of the kids mentioned the military, either.) If nothing else, I’d expect some sort of method to the “getting rich” goal.
I’m glad that TB has us to fill in some of the blanks, and to help him see beyond the confines of his town. I just worry about the ones who don’t have anyone to do that.
In TB's class – he's in the fourth grade – the kids had done essays on what they want to be in fifty years. The essays were left out on the tables for parents to read. As an exercise in shoe-leather sociology, it was striking.
Out of a class of a little over twenty, only two kids mentioned college, and only one – TB – had any recognizable professional aspiration. (He declared that he will get his doctorate in civil engineering at MIT, so he can build bridges and highways. About a year ago he asked me what the best place was to study civil engineering, so with my layman's knowledge of engineering, I suggested MIT, and that was that.) One other boy mentioned the state university, though he seemed more interested in the sports than in anything else. Every other kid wrote some variation on “I will finish high school, get a job, and get rich.” The teacher mentioned that she had to push some of them to mention finishing high school.
None of the boys – TB included – mentioned anything about getting married and/or having kids, though all of the girls did. (My favorite: “After graduating high school I will get married and have kids. The way I will accomplish this is by meeting a cute boy and falling in love.” It's phrased like a mission statement.) Several kids mentioned getting rich, though only one of them had any idea how. (She declared that she would become a celebrity, though it wasn't entirely clear what she would be celebrated for.)
I was proud of TB, of course, but also quietly horrified at how early and how cleanly class divisions are reproducing themselves. The gender split surprised me a bit in 2010; if nothing else, I would have expected at least a couple of the girls to mention college. The vagueness of the aspirations was striking, too. I expected to see prospective astronauts, baseball players, doctors, presidents, inventors, whatever; there was none of that. For all of the mentions of getting rich, none of them had the foggiest idea that money was somehow connected to a job. (I don't count 'celebrity' as a job, Kardashians or no Kardashians.)
TB's school is public, in a working class/middle class suburb. It's not tony, by any stretch, but it's hardly a disaster. If you were doing a documentary on failing schools, it wouldn't occur to you to look here. TB is thriving, and so is his sister. The class divisions weren't so apparent in her class, though to be fair, she's in first grade. The divide seems to occur somewhere between first and fourth grades.
I’m not sure where that kind of vision is supposed to come from, other than parents. I know the schools shouldn’t teach that college is somehow mandatory; it isn’t, and it shouldn’t be. But it should seem like a realistic aspiration, especially in the fourth grade. And even for those who don’t choose the college route, some kind of “I want to be a...” sentiment should be there somewhere. (This being the Northeast, none of the kids mentioned the military, either.) If nothing else, I’d expect some sort of method to the “getting rich” goal.
I’m glad that TB has us to fill in some of the blanks, and to help him see beyond the confines of his town. I just worry about the ones who don’t have anyone to do that.
Tuesday, November 02, 2010
A Response to Marc Bousquet
As regular readers know, Marc Bousquet and I are not each other’s biggest fans. That said, he has really outdone himself this time. In a remarkable tirade on InsideHigherEd – sheesh, I take a week off and the standards drop – Bousquet wrote:
President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan's plans for higher education are evident in their attraction to community colleges. All of the features that most educators deplore about community colleges are what the current administration likes about them: top-down control of curriculum, disposable instructors, automated courseware, a training model of education, and management highly responsive to local employers.
Until now, to my knowledge, Bousquet has restricted his attacks to administrators. Now he’s setting his sights on the public institutions that teach over forty percent of America’s undergraduates.
I'll take the charges individually before getting around to the larger point.
“Top-Down Control of Curriculum.” This is just false. At my cc, and at every one I know, a curricular change -- a new course, a new program, a change to a prerequisite, anything of substance -- has to be proposed by a faculty member in the department responsible for the course(s). It has to be approved by Curriculum Committee, which has a faculty majority. It then goes to the College Senate for approval. I couldn’t impose a program if I wanted to.
“Disposable Instructors.” We have tenured faculty who started teaching here before I was born. Literally. I am not making that up. The people here who live in fear of their jobs are the administrators, among whom turnover -- mostly involuntary -- is much, much higher. Even the adjuncts are unionized, and can’t be dismissed without process.
“Automated courseware.” What does this even mean? We don’t have robo-faculty. We have tenured faculty teaching in learning communities. We have tenured faculty on paid sabbaticals. At least with the previous charge, I can imagine what Bousquet probably meant. This one just leaves me scratching my head.
“A Training Model of Education.” Our largest major is liberal arts transfer. Our largest academic department is English. Our enrollments in transfer programs dwarf our enrollments in career programs. While we’re at it, I’d like to point out that our transfer students graduate their destination colleges at higher rates than their native counterparts. If you want to beat up on someone...
“Management Highly Responsive to Local Employers.” This one is partially accurate. Yes, when considering new vocational programs, we look at local employment needs. I don’t know why we wouldn’t. But to suggest that we’re somehow slaves to market dictates is both slanderous and ignorant of the transfer function.
The specifics of Bousquet's charges are laughable, but I doubt that would bother him. There's a larger worldview underlying his drive-by attack on public institutions that serve low-income students. This, in a column in which he attacks Michelle Rhee (whom he feels entitled to call “Micky”) for trying to reform public institutions that serve low-income students.
If you read Bousquet's stuff often enough – hell, I even slogged through his book – you see a single theme emerge above all others. Faculty are Special, and their purity of motive deserves substantial material reward. Never mind the contradiction. Community colleges are bad because they don't convey enough status to those who are above the need for status. Alrighty then.
That's how Bousquet can assert, simultaneously, that colleges are run by evil and overpaid administrators who glory in the degrading of the faculty, and that those administrators should be entrusted with far larger budgets – with which to pay tenured faculty -- on the public dime. Never mind the contradiction.
There’s a fundamental dishonesty at the heart of Bousquet’s position. He asserts with metronomic regularity that “working conditions are learning conditions,” from which it should follow logically that higher faculty salaries will equate mathematically to better education. (Interestingly, he fails to apply that same logic to administrators. Do higher salaries equate to better management? Goose, gander, whatever.) But he never bothers actually engaging real world economics.
Say that you have a finite budget. Which of the following scenarios will lead to better learning conditions?
1. A full-time professor teaching five sections of fifty students each.
2. Five adjuncts teaching two sections apiece of twenty-five students each.
That’s a pretty clean approximation -- simplified, but recognizable -- of the choices administrators face. Here’s another one:
1. Two programs, each forty percent full-time.
2. One program, eighty percent full-time.
I can envision principled arguments on both sides. But to assume that these dilemmas simply don’t exist, that they’re just smokescreens behind which administrators hide their nefarious agendas, is just silly. And to assert that talk of costs is real but talk of revenues isn’t, is just fantasy.
Bousquet’s tendentious agitprop simply doesn’t allow for a diversity of priorities, a mix of institutions, or the existence of difficult choices. It’s a Manichean morality tale; you are either Good and Pure and Noble or you are Evil. And as with most moralists, the longer he goes on, the larger the category of Evil becomes. It used to ensnare only the administrators and legislators. Now it ensnares an entire category of public institutions, and anybody who dares to suggest that decades of sustained failure might just warrant trying something different.
Community colleges do wonders on a shoestring. I would have expected him to be a supporter of community colleges, since they’re nonprofit and they serve underrepresented populations. Instead, in a climate in which many of us are facing the third consecutive year of state budget cuts and the political winds are cold, he piles on. When those funding cuts come, from whence, exactly, are those faculty raises supposed to come? And is the AAUP seriously in agreement?
It’s an appalling performance, and it couldn’t be less timely. Now I’ll return to crossing my fingers and watching the election returns, hoping against hope that the choices we’ll have to make don’t get even worse.
President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan's plans for higher education are evident in their attraction to community colleges. All of the features that most educators deplore about community colleges are what the current administration likes about them: top-down control of curriculum, disposable instructors, automated courseware, a training model of education, and management highly responsive to local employers.
Until now, to my knowledge, Bousquet has restricted his attacks to administrators. Now he’s setting his sights on the public institutions that teach over forty percent of America’s undergraduates.
I'll take the charges individually before getting around to the larger point.
“Top-Down Control of Curriculum.” This is just false. At my cc, and at every one I know, a curricular change -- a new course, a new program, a change to a prerequisite, anything of substance -- has to be proposed by a faculty member in the department responsible for the course(s). It has to be approved by Curriculum Committee, which has a faculty majority. It then goes to the College Senate for approval. I couldn’t impose a program if I wanted to.
“Disposable Instructors.” We have tenured faculty who started teaching here before I was born. Literally. I am not making that up. The people here who live in fear of their jobs are the administrators, among whom turnover -- mostly involuntary -- is much, much higher. Even the adjuncts are unionized, and can’t be dismissed without process.
“Automated courseware.” What does this even mean? We don’t have robo-faculty. We have tenured faculty teaching in learning communities. We have tenured faculty on paid sabbaticals. At least with the previous charge, I can imagine what Bousquet probably meant. This one just leaves me scratching my head.
“A Training Model of Education.” Our largest major is liberal arts transfer. Our largest academic department is English. Our enrollments in transfer programs dwarf our enrollments in career programs. While we’re at it, I’d like to point out that our transfer students graduate their destination colleges at higher rates than their native counterparts. If you want to beat up on someone...
“Management Highly Responsive to Local Employers.” This one is partially accurate. Yes, when considering new vocational programs, we look at local employment needs. I don’t know why we wouldn’t. But to suggest that we’re somehow slaves to market dictates is both slanderous and ignorant of the transfer function.
The specifics of Bousquet's charges are laughable, but I doubt that would bother him. There's a larger worldview underlying his drive-by attack on public institutions that serve low-income students. This, in a column in which he attacks Michelle Rhee (whom he feels entitled to call “Micky”) for trying to reform public institutions that serve low-income students.
If you read Bousquet's stuff often enough – hell, I even slogged through his book – you see a single theme emerge above all others. Faculty are Special, and their purity of motive deserves substantial material reward. Never mind the contradiction. Community colleges are bad because they don't convey enough status to those who are above the need for status. Alrighty then.
That's how Bousquet can assert, simultaneously, that colleges are run by evil and overpaid administrators who glory in the degrading of the faculty, and that those administrators should be entrusted with far larger budgets – with which to pay tenured faculty -- on the public dime. Never mind the contradiction.
There’s a fundamental dishonesty at the heart of Bousquet’s position. He asserts with metronomic regularity that “working conditions are learning conditions,” from which it should follow logically that higher faculty salaries will equate mathematically to better education. (Interestingly, he fails to apply that same logic to administrators. Do higher salaries equate to better management? Goose, gander, whatever.) But he never bothers actually engaging real world economics.
Say that you have a finite budget. Which of the following scenarios will lead to better learning conditions?
1. A full-time professor teaching five sections of fifty students each.
2. Five adjuncts teaching two sections apiece of twenty-five students each.
That’s a pretty clean approximation -- simplified, but recognizable -- of the choices administrators face. Here’s another one:
1. Two programs, each forty percent full-time.
2. One program, eighty percent full-time.
I can envision principled arguments on both sides. But to assume that these dilemmas simply don’t exist, that they’re just smokescreens behind which administrators hide their nefarious agendas, is just silly. And to assert that talk of costs is real but talk of revenues isn’t, is just fantasy.
Bousquet’s tendentious agitprop simply doesn’t allow for a diversity of priorities, a mix of institutions, or the existence of difficult choices. It’s a Manichean morality tale; you are either Good and Pure and Noble or you are Evil. And as with most moralists, the longer he goes on, the larger the category of Evil becomes. It used to ensnare only the administrators and legislators. Now it ensnares an entire category of public institutions, and anybody who dares to suggest that decades of sustained failure might just warrant trying something different.
Community colleges do wonders on a shoestring. I would have expected him to be a supporter of community colleges, since they’re nonprofit and they serve underrepresented populations. Instead, in a climate in which many of us are facing the third consecutive year of state budget cuts and the political winds are cold, he piles on. When those funding cuts come, from whence, exactly, are those faculty raises supposed to come? And is the AAUP seriously in agreement?
It’s an appalling performance, and it couldn’t be less timely. Now I’ll return to crossing my fingers and watching the election returns, hoping against hope that the choices we’ll have to make don’t get even worse.
Monday, November 01, 2010
Culture of Poverty
Sometimes a little cognitive dissonance can be helpful.
In the last two weeks, I’ve read two lines of argument from the same political camp, and I couldn’t help but notice that they don’t seem to mesh. Which is a shame, because there’s actually an intelligent argument to be made.
Several commenters have noted the New York Times’ recent announcement that sociologists are once again considering “culture of poverty” arguments within bounds. Broadly, in the wake of the Moynihan report in the 1960’s, it became taboo for left/liberal policy analysts ever to suggest that one cause of persistent poverty was dysfunctional behavior by poor people. Doing so was considered blaming the victim. Now, forty-plus years later, it’s apparently okay to suggest that some common behaviors -- drug use, unstable home lives, etc. -- are not just symptoms of poverty, but also causes of it.
There’s some truth to that. Anybody who has taught has seen students sabotage themselves. People engage in self-defeating behavior all the time; why the poor should be uniquely exempt from that isn’t immediately obvious.
Then I read this piece by Charles Murray -- the high priest of ‘culture of poverty’ arguments, who actually goes so far as to suggest a genetic component to the culture of poverty -- excoriating some imagined liberal elites for losing touch with “real” American culture, which he takes to include NASCAR, The Price is Right, and the Left Behind series.
And I thought to myself, hmm.
I grew up outside a dying Northeastern industrial city that I sometimes call Northern Town. In the schools I attended -- public K-12 systems -- nearly everybody was white. The primary social division was class -- the working-class kids had one set of preoccupations, and the professional class kids had another. (I fell in an odd nether zone -- culturally of the professional class, but financially of the working class.) Among the working-class kids was a subset everybody called “the burnouts.” They wore heavy metal t-shirts with 3/4 sleeves, wore their hair like hockey players, worshipped Pink Floyd, and interrupted their weed smoking only for occasional sex or fights. Beavis and Butthead got the look right, and much of the attitude, only these kids weren’t funny.
The burnouts were ubiquitous, aggressive, smug, and mean. They were the kids who kept pet snakes because they enjoyed feeding them live rats. They often seemed surly and bored, but were always up for “whaling on” someone else. Many of them eventually dropped out, and those who didn’t went straight to work or the military after high school.
Some of us who managed to escape Northern Town had an inchoate, but visceral and pronounced, aversion to burnout culture. We didn’t know the term, but at some level, many of us would have agreed that the burnouts had a culture of poverty. They lived in ways seemingly designed to keep them working-class or poor forever. Worse, they seemed to take pride in it. They sneered at ambition, and went out of their way to cause real physical fear among those of us who decided that the best response to life in a northern town was to get the hell out of it.
The cultural affectations of the leaders and sympathizers of the Tea Party should be familiar to anyone who had to navigate his walk to school to avoid the burnouts. Jingoism, defiant ignorance, pride in self-defeating behaviors, arrogant stupidity -- it’s all there. When the guy with the “don’t tread on me” t-shirt stepped on a woman’s head, I recognized the gesture.
My disregard for the Charles Murray line of argument is based on any number of things, but one of them is precisely the recognition of a culture of poverty among the people he claims to valorize. They’re proud of their ignorance. Ignorance is not a principled position. (I would expect any self-respecting conservative to know that. The entire point of conservatism -- its valid reason to exist -- is to remind us of the accumulated wisdom of the ages. Conservatives conserve; it’s what they do. The Tea Partiers are not conservatives; they’re pure plutocrats.) Petulance is not constructive. And manipulating the ignorant with appeals to their worst instincts so you can rob them blind is disgusting.
No, I don’t watch ultimate fighting, or follow NASCAR. Instead I advocate (and vote) for health care for everybody, and education good enough to help the next generation of kids like me to get the hell out of the backwater in which they’re stuck. Best case, I’d hope that some of the kids who might have been confined to burnout status back in the day might find some constructive reason to actually care about something. Give them something to lose, and maybe they’ll actually step up. If they don’t, at least they had a shot.
I’m just struck that the same behaviors that get dark-skinned people tagged as deserving of poverty get romanticized when they’re done by white folk. Black parochialism is considered toxic; white parochialism is considered authentic.
No. Parochialism is toxic either way. Ignorance is the enemy. There was once a time when conservatives knew that. Liberals have finally and correctly realized that some behaviors are self-defeating, even when done by their core constituency; I look forward to the day when conservatives can drop the redneck fetish and do the same. The stakes are too high to base policy on a noble savage, even if the noble savage looks like you.
In the last two weeks, I’ve read two lines of argument from the same political camp, and I couldn’t help but notice that they don’t seem to mesh. Which is a shame, because there’s actually an intelligent argument to be made.
Several commenters have noted the New York Times’ recent announcement that sociologists are once again considering “culture of poverty” arguments within bounds. Broadly, in the wake of the Moynihan report in the 1960’s, it became taboo for left/liberal policy analysts ever to suggest that one cause of persistent poverty was dysfunctional behavior by poor people. Doing so was considered blaming the victim. Now, forty-plus years later, it’s apparently okay to suggest that some common behaviors -- drug use, unstable home lives, etc. -- are not just symptoms of poverty, but also causes of it.
There’s some truth to that. Anybody who has taught has seen students sabotage themselves. People engage in self-defeating behavior all the time; why the poor should be uniquely exempt from that isn’t immediately obvious.
Then I read this piece by Charles Murray -- the high priest of ‘culture of poverty’ arguments, who actually goes so far as to suggest a genetic component to the culture of poverty -- excoriating some imagined liberal elites for losing touch with “real” American culture, which he takes to include NASCAR, The Price is Right, and the Left Behind series.
And I thought to myself, hmm.
I grew up outside a dying Northeastern industrial city that I sometimes call Northern Town. In the schools I attended -- public K-12 systems -- nearly everybody was white. The primary social division was class -- the working-class kids had one set of preoccupations, and the professional class kids had another. (I fell in an odd nether zone -- culturally of the professional class, but financially of the working class.) Among the working-class kids was a subset everybody called “the burnouts.” They wore heavy metal t-shirts with 3/4 sleeves, wore their hair like hockey players, worshipped Pink Floyd, and interrupted their weed smoking only for occasional sex or fights. Beavis and Butthead got the look right, and much of the attitude, only these kids weren’t funny.
The burnouts were ubiquitous, aggressive, smug, and mean. They were the kids who kept pet snakes because they enjoyed feeding them live rats. They often seemed surly and bored, but were always up for “whaling on” someone else. Many of them eventually dropped out, and those who didn’t went straight to work or the military after high school.
Some of us who managed to escape Northern Town had an inchoate, but visceral and pronounced, aversion to burnout culture. We didn’t know the term, but at some level, many of us would have agreed that the burnouts had a culture of poverty. They lived in ways seemingly designed to keep them working-class or poor forever. Worse, they seemed to take pride in it. They sneered at ambition, and went out of their way to cause real physical fear among those of us who decided that the best response to life in a northern town was to get the hell out of it.
The cultural affectations of the leaders and sympathizers of the Tea Party should be familiar to anyone who had to navigate his walk to school to avoid the burnouts. Jingoism, defiant ignorance, pride in self-defeating behaviors, arrogant stupidity -- it’s all there. When the guy with the “don’t tread on me” t-shirt stepped on a woman’s head, I recognized the gesture.
My disregard for the Charles Murray line of argument is based on any number of things, but one of them is precisely the recognition of a culture of poverty among the people he claims to valorize. They’re proud of their ignorance. Ignorance is not a principled position. (I would expect any self-respecting conservative to know that. The entire point of conservatism -- its valid reason to exist -- is to remind us of the accumulated wisdom of the ages. Conservatives conserve; it’s what they do. The Tea Partiers are not conservatives; they’re pure plutocrats.) Petulance is not constructive. And manipulating the ignorant with appeals to their worst instincts so you can rob them blind is disgusting.
No, I don’t watch ultimate fighting, or follow NASCAR. Instead I advocate (and vote) for health care for everybody, and education good enough to help the next generation of kids like me to get the hell out of the backwater in which they’re stuck. Best case, I’d hope that some of the kids who might have been confined to burnout status back in the day might find some constructive reason to actually care about something. Give them something to lose, and maybe they’ll actually step up. If they don’t, at least they had a shot.
I’m just struck that the same behaviors that get dark-skinned people tagged as deserving of poverty get romanticized when they’re done by white folk. Black parochialism is considered toxic; white parochialism is considered authentic.
No. Parochialism is toxic either way. Ignorance is the enemy. There was once a time when conservatives knew that. Liberals have finally and correctly realized that some behaviors are self-defeating, even when done by their core constituency; I look forward to the day when conservatives can drop the redneck fetish and do the same. The stakes are too high to base policy on a noble savage, even if the noble savage looks like you.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Sorry!
Sorry for the abrupt radio silence this week. Life intervened. I expect to be back in the saddle on Monday.
Friday, October 22, 2010
Ask the Administrator: Tracking Down Letters of Recommendation
A longtime reader writes:
I’ve never been a fan of letters of recommendation. Especially at this level, they seem to reward extroversion more than quality, and those who by luck of the draw happened to get full-time, as opposed to adjunct, professors.
That said, though -- and please don’t take this the wrong way -- it sounds like your transcript could use some sort of boost. A GPA below 3 can make admission to many graduate programs an uphill battle.
I’m also curious about the professors who actually had email exchanges with you, but then declined to write letters. Since you actually had exchanges with them, this wasn’t a matter of not being able to track down people who had left. In my experience, professors decline to write letters when they either don’t believe that the student was especially worthy, or they really don’t know the student well enough to say. (It’s conceivable that they could also plead workload, though I wouldn’t expect that to come after exchanging multiple emails.)
So it’s possible that the GPA cutoff and the palpable lack of enthusiasm on the part of your former professors are effectively conspiring to tell you something.
Or not; you could just be a victim of circumstance. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the folks on graduate admissions committees wondered the same thing. If you’re up against other applicants with GPA’s well above 3 and solid letters, I don’t like your chances.
One way around that is precisely what you described: take some other classes, knock them out of the park, and show that you’re stronger than your record thus far would suggest.
Another would be to start with private high schools. They can set their own hiring requirements, and they usually don’t require teaching certifications. If you find the right setting, you may be able to find out fairly quickly whether teaching high school is really for you. Even there, though, you may be up against plenty of people with Master’s degrees, and the pay is typically pretty low.
Since my familiarity with teacher education programs is on the beginning end, I’ll have to ask my wise and worldly readers who know that world better than I do what they would suggest. Wise and worldly readers who know this stuff -- is there a better option?
Good luck!
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
I recently graduated from a third tier SUNY school with a degree in English. I want to be a high school English teacher, which mean I want to go to grad school for a masters in adolescent education/teaching. I transferred into said SUNY from a cc my junior year. Graduated from SUNY with a 2.84 (3.0's and above for 3 out of my 4 semesters; got 3 C's one semester...brought down my gpa some, but I've always been a good student in college). I took some time these past few months, and it was then I decided to apply to grad school. Found some schools in my area that accommodated to a gpa under 3.0, and I plan on taking the GRE to off-set that. (most of these schools btw require ACADEMIC recs, not professional, etc.)
My problem arises from the recommendation portion of my applications....I can't get one! So while it never hurts to ask, I've contacted a few professors (through e-mail) from classes that I've gotten B's and above in. I've written very kind and thought-out e-mails explaining my future academic plans, asking if they would write me a recommendation, but understanding and thanking them anyway if they couldn't. I've had professors turn me down (nicely), and some professors, after a few follow-up e-mails, never getting back to me at all.
I don't want to settle on a future w/o a graduate education because of the unwillingness of a few professors. I also don't really have the hundreds of dollars per credit to take 2 or 3 more english courses at a local college, get an awesome grade, and then HOPE that I'll get a recommendation out of it.
And yes, I have found 1 program near me that doesn't require any recs, but I'm not going to put all my eggs in one basket.
I’ve never been a fan of letters of recommendation. Especially at this level, they seem to reward extroversion more than quality, and those who by luck of the draw happened to get full-time, as opposed to adjunct, professors.
That said, though -- and please don’t take this the wrong way -- it sounds like your transcript could use some sort of boost. A GPA below 3 can make admission to many graduate programs an uphill battle.
I’m also curious about the professors who actually had email exchanges with you, but then declined to write letters. Since you actually had exchanges with them, this wasn’t a matter of not being able to track down people who had left. In my experience, professors decline to write letters when they either don’t believe that the student was especially worthy, or they really don’t know the student well enough to say. (It’s conceivable that they could also plead workload, though I wouldn’t expect that to come after exchanging multiple emails.)
So it’s possible that the GPA cutoff and the palpable lack of enthusiasm on the part of your former professors are effectively conspiring to tell you something.
Or not; you could just be a victim of circumstance. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the folks on graduate admissions committees wondered the same thing. If you’re up against other applicants with GPA’s well above 3 and solid letters, I don’t like your chances.
One way around that is precisely what you described: take some other classes, knock them out of the park, and show that you’re stronger than your record thus far would suggest.
Another would be to start with private high schools. They can set their own hiring requirements, and they usually don’t require teaching certifications. If you find the right setting, you may be able to find out fairly quickly whether teaching high school is really for you. Even there, though, you may be up against plenty of people with Master’s degrees, and the pay is typically pretty low.
Since my familiarity with teacher education programs is on the beginning end, I’ll have to ask my wise and worldly readers who know that world better than I do what they would suggest. Wise and worldly readers who know this stuff -- is there a better option?
Good luck!
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Every So Often...
I’m reminded of what makes working at a college such a privilege.
This week I was able to squeeze out a little time between meetings to catch part of a student concert, and then to drop by the club that was doing a table to support the LGBT community in the wake of the recent suicides and sign their banner of support.
In administration, I usually see students only when they’re bouncing off the ceiling -- the highest achievers doing amazing things -- or when they’re in some kind of trouble. I don’t get the day-to-day interaction with most students that faculty get. My exposure to average students is remarkably small, other than passing in the hallways and hearing snippets of conversation. And since it seems that every student was issued a smartphone, many of those snippets have been replaced by inaudible typing, so even that is partly lost.
The concert was fun. Students were dressed as they are, with skill levels ranging from impressive to earnest. But they were so supportive of each other, and the joy in the room was so palpable, that I couldn’t help but get caught up in it. It felt like sitting in on a rehearsal, and I mean that as a compliment. Even watching their faculty advisors in something like their natural habitat was a refreshing change; I’m so accustomed to seeing faculty in their “I’m Talking to The Administration” mode that I’d forgotten how charming and dedicated some of them are when they’re working with their own students.
But the support group really warmed my heart.
Without undue bragging, I can honestly report that my cc is more gay-friendly than most. The LGBT community here is visible, including within the administration itself. But even within a comparatively welcoming setting, there can still be tension and real fear. The rash of hate-driven suicides nationally obviously struck a chord here.
It did this fortysomething heart good to see some students who looked like they would have been comfortable in a frat mingling comfortably with other students who looked like they stepped out of a Judith Butler seminar, and the entire group catching zero flak from passersby. I don’t recall that happening in my undergrad days. They were all happy to be there, obviously having a good time, supporting each other. The goal they shared was nothing more, or less, than making the college a safe place for everybody.
In a time of economic decline and political absurdity -- Christine O’Donnell? Really? -- there’s something restorative about seeing students being gentle and generous with each other. Between all those meetings, with their dry-as-toast discussions of “metrics” and “benchmarks” and policy quagmires, it’s worthwhile to slip out for a bit and be reminded that there’s a point to it all.
This week I was able to squeeze out a little time between meetings to catch part of a student concert, and then to drop by the club that was doing a table to support the LGBT community in the wake of the recent suicides and sign their banner of support.
In administration, I usually see students only when they’re bouncing off the ceiling -- the highest achievers doing amazing things -- or when they’re in some kind of trouble. I don’t get the day-to-day interaction with most students that faculty get. My exposure to average students is remarkably small, other than passing in the hallways and hearing snippets of conversation. And since it seems that every student was issued a smartphone, many of those snippets have been replaced by inaudible typing, so even that is partly lost.
The concert was fun. Students were dressed as they are, with skill levels ranging from impressive to earnest. But they were so supportive of each other, and the joy in the room was so palpable, that I couldn’t help but get caught up in it. It felt like sitting in on a rehearsal, and I mean that as a compliment. Even watching their faculty advisors in something like their natural habitat was a refreshing change; I’m so accustomed to seeing faculty in their “I’m Talking to The Administration” mode that I’d forgotten how charming and dedicated some of them are when they’re working with their own students.
But the support group really warmed my heart.
Without undue bragging, I can honestly report that my cc is more gay-friendly than most. The LGBT community here is visible, including within the administration itself. But even within a comparatively welcoming setting, there can still be tension and real fear. The rash of hate-driven suicides nationally obviously struck a chord here.
It did this fortysomething heart good to see some students who looked like they would have been comfortable in a frat mingling comfortably with other students who looked like they stepped out of a Judith Butler seminar, and the entire group catching zero flak from passersby. I don’t recall that happening in my undergrad days. They were all happy to be there, obviously having a good time, supporting each other. The goal they shared was nothing more, or less, than making the college a safe place for everybody.
In a time of economic decline and political absurdity -- Christine O’Donnell? Really? -- there’s something restorative about seeing students being gentle and generous with each other. Between all those meetings, with their dry-as-toast discussions of “metrics” and “benchmarks” and policy quagmires, it’s worthwhile to slip out for a bit and be reminded that there’s a point to it all.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Ask the Administrator: The Generic Degree
An occasional correspondent writes:
I hate to admit it, but there’s some truth to this.
I saw this quite a bit at PU, where some older students were already well into their careers and doing well there, but they needed their hands stamped in order to move up to the next level. They didn’t care much about the actual content of it; the point was to become eligible for management ranks. I took it as a personal victory when one of those students actually found value in a class I taught.
At an individual level, this can be kind of silly. Certainly it’s possible to be brilliant (or better, wise) without a degree, and to be bovine with one. And it’s also true that some jobs that stipulate college degrees don’t really draw on the skills that a degree is supposed to confer, whatever the major. Degree factories exist for that very reason.
That said, though, I like to think that a bachelor’s degree from a real college -- as opposed to a degree factory -- carries some meaning.
At one level, it shows the ability and willingness to stick to a program. Given the prevalence of college dropouts, those who actually finish have at least shown the ability to get their stuff together sufficiently to fulfill a multiyear commitment. (Along similar lines, students who transfer from cc’s with associate’s degrees tend to finish bachelor’s degrees at far higher rates than those who transfer with scattered credits. The graduates are those who finish what they start.) It shows the ability to navigate a bureaucracy, which is an essential workplace skill for most of the higher-paying jobs.
If the college is at least halfway serious, a degree should indicate some ability to handle complexity, to communicate at least functionally, and keep one’s balance when dealing with numbers. One of my personal indices for wisdom is the ability to handle ambiguity. Clueless people can be trained to do almost anything routine; the real test comes when the routine has to change. Some of that is temperamental, but some has to do with the ability to discern the bigger picture.
The actual content of the degree is another issue. I don’t often draw on my study of Restoration England, but I do draw on some of the skills developed through it. My social science training enabled me to stay awake and attempt to wring meaning out of long, boring, poorly-written texts; on the job, I use that skill every single day.
There’s certainly a case to be made that if you just need a generic degree, you should go to public institutions. Two years at a cc, followed by two years at a state college, will give you a far lower student loan burden than four years at someplace private. (Financial aid discrepancies may muddy that picture, admittedly.) If it’s just a matter of getting your hand stamped, why pay more?
Does it make sense for employers to use college degrees as hand stamps? In any individual case, probably not, but in the aggregate, probably. (For purposes of discussion, I’m not looking at fields like engineering, where the actual content is obviously relevant.) Given dozens or hundreds of applicants, a degree requirement makes a reasonable, legally-defensible first-level screen. It’s not perfect, but it’s clean, and it’s within reason.
The U.S. actually has a history of using college for purposes other than education. In the 1960’s, it was a source of draft deferments. In the nineties and oughts, it was a way to get health insurance. If the DREAM act passes, it will be a path to citizenship. Degrees as proxies aren’t new, and aren’t unique to the job market.
Wise and worldly readers, what do you think? Do generic degrees make sense as employment screens, or is higher ed on borrowed time economically?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Some jobs out there are advertised as requiring a college degree, but
the employers don't care what was actually studied. So these employers
are in effect using college as a four-year hundred-thousand-dollar
screening test, with perhaps a bit of intellectual calisthenics for
good measure.
I had a chance to discuss this with a supervisor at one of the
management consulting companies, and he confirmed this is in fact
their policy. I suggested that since they don't care about any
specific knowledge -- only smarts and the willingness to work hard --
they should be open to hiring people right out of high school. Some
high-school students can point to significant intellectual
accomplishments, after all. But no, this is Just Not Done.
A four-year degree seems like a very expensive way of doing
intellectual quality control. Could we do better?
I hate to admit it, but there’s some truth to this.
I saw this quite a bit at PU, where some older students were already well into their careers and doing well there, but they needed their hands stamped in order to move up to the next level. They didn’t care much about the actual content of it; the point was to become eligible for management ranks. I took it as a personal victory when one of those students actually found value in a class I taught.
At an individual level, this can be kind of silly. Certainly it’s possible to be brilliant (or better, wise) without a degree, and to be bovine with one. And it’s also true that some jobs that stipulate college degrees don’t really draw on the skills that a degree is supposed to confer, whatever the major. Degree factories exist for that very reason.
That said, though, I like to think that a bachelor’s degree from a real college -- as opposed to a degree factory -- carries some meaning.
At one level, it shows the ability and willingness to stick to a program. Given the prevalence of college dropouts, those who actually finish have at least shown the ability to get their stuff together sufficiently to fulfill a multiyear commitment. (Along similar lines, students who transfer from cc’s with associate’s degrees tend to finish bachelor’s degrees at far higher rates than those who transfer with scattered credits. The graduates are those who finish what they start.) It shows the ability to navigate a bureaucracy, which is an essential workplace skill for most of the higher-paying jobs.
If the college is at least halfway serious, a degree should indicate some ability to handle complexity, to communicate at least functionally, and keep one’s balance when dealing with numbers. One of my personal indices for wisdom is the ability to handle ambiguity. Clueless people can be trained to do almost anything routine; the real test comes when the routine has to change. Some of that is temperamental, but some has to do with the ability to discern the bigger picture.
The actual content of the degree is another issue. I don’t often draw on my study of Restoration England, but I do draw on some of the skills developed through it. My social science training enabled me to stay awake and attempt to wring meaning out of long, boring, poorly-written texts; on the job, I use that skill every single day.
There’s certainly a case to be made that if you just need a generic degree, you should go to public institutions. Two years at a cc, followed by two years at a state college, will give you a far lower student loan burden than four years at someplace private. (Financial aid discrepancies may muddy that picture, admittedly.) If it’s just a matter of getting your hand stamped, why pay more?
Does it make sense for employers to use college degrees as hand stamps? In any individual case, probably not, but in the aggregate, probably. (For purposes of discussion, I’m not looking at fields like engineering, where the actual content is obviously relevant.) Given dozens or hundreds of applicants, a degree requirement makes a reasonable, legally-defensible first-level screen. It’s not perfect, but it’s clean, and it’s within reason.
The U.S. actually has a history of using college for purposes other than education. In the 1960’s, it was a source of draft deferments. In the nineties and oughts, it was a way to get health insurance. If the DREAM act passes, it will be a path to citizenship. Degrees as proxies aren’t new, and aren’t unique to the job market.
Wise and worldly readers, what do you think? Do generic degrees make sense as employment screens, or is higher ed on borrowed time economically?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
The Girl, Social Observer
Last night The Wife and I were working on The Girl’s Halloween costume. She had planned to dress as Medusa, but we couldn’t get the hair right, so she’s going instead as Cleopatra.
The costume involves a dress that’s too long for her, so we were trying to figure out how to shorten it so she wouldn’t trip over it, while not making it look awful. Actual conversation fragment:
DD: Well, you could roll it up a little and sort of pin it on the sides...
TW: No, that would look terrible.
TG: Daddy, you have to think like a girl. What do girls like?
DD: Well, sometimes that’s hard to do.
TG: I know what boys like.
(pause)
DD: Really?
TW: What do boys like?
TG: Well, little boys like Spiderman and legos and stuff like that.
TW: And what do big boys like?
TG: Teenage girls.
I laughed out loud.
I am sooooo not ready for the teen years...
The costume involves a dress that’s too long for her, so we were trying to figure out how to shorten it so she wouldn’t trip over it, while not making it look awful. Actual conversation fragment:
DD: Well, you could roll it up a little and sort of pin it on the sides...
TW: No, that would look terrible.
TG: Daddy, you have to think like a girl. What do girls like?
DD: Well, sometimes that’s hard to do.
TG: I know what boys like.
(pause)
DD: Really?
TW: What do boys like?
TG: Well, little boys like Spiderman and legos and stuff like that.
TW: And what do big boys like?
TG: Teenage girls.
I laughed out loud.
I am sooooo not ready for the teen years...
Monday, October 18, 2010
Tossing Bottles
As a teenager in the 1980’s, I saw most of the important teen movies of the era. One of the staples of 80’s teen movies was the moment when the screwup hero realized that he had imbibed (or allowed others to imbibe at a forbidden party) much of what was in the parents’ liquor cabinet -- these houses always had well-stocked liquor cabinets -- and didn’t want to get caught. Invariably, he’d add water to the various bottles to make the cabinet look, at first glance, undisturbed. Tossing bottles would have given the game away.
SUNY Albany is tossing bottles, and catching holy hell for it. Apparently, it’s suspending admission to programs in French, Italian, Russian, and classics. Stanley Fish has opined that this marks the official collapse of the humanities.
As regular readers know, I stand in awe of Stanley Fish’s ability to maintain a prominent and successful career without ever, even by accident, getting anything right. It’s an astonishing record, really. He’s the David Hasselhoff of academia; nobody can really explain why he’s still there, yet he’s still there.
His win-by-losing streak remains alive. In defense of distribution requirements that used to be the lifeblood of certain departments, Fish writes -- and I am not making this up --
Wow. Just, wow. So the reason we should support the humanities is to provide jobs for humanists.
It’s an interesting bit of logic. Just substitute anything at all for “humanities” and the sentence still works. The reason we should support buggy whips making is to retain the employment of buggy whip makers. The reason we should support the continued use of typewriters is to retain the employment of people in typewriter factories. The reason we should continue the production of whalebone corsets is to support the employment of whalebone corset makers. Whee!
Lest my reading seem reductive, check Fish’s piece. He explicitly rejects the usual “pieties” on behalf of humanistic studies, as well as any kind of economic-usefulness argument. Revealingly, he also rejects internal cross-subsidies:
Why not?
FIsh doesn’t even try to answer that, though he should. Because his alternative -- administrators will save us all! (seriously! that’s what he wrote!) -- assumes that the state legislature will be easier to persuade than will the biology department. Even though the biology department reports to the exact same campus presidents who are supposed to persuade the legislature. Even though Fish assures us that the presidents don’t believe it themselves.
Sigh.
Politically, this doesn’t even rise to the level of ‘failure.’
In a rational world, Fish’s piece would have been drowned out by derisive laughter. Instead, it was quoted approvingly by the AFT FACE folk and all manner of adjunct activists, even though it undercuts their departments’ reason to exist.
*headdesk*
If SUNY Albany had, instead, simply adjuncted-out more courses across the humanities, eventuating in the same level of savings, would that have been better or worse? Suppose that, instead of tossing some bottles, it had just watered more bottles down. How might the world have reacted?
Judging by the last forty years’ worth of trendlines, I’ll go out on a limb and say that nearly nobody outside of Albany would have noticed. Business would have gone on as usual.
Instead, Albany did what few of us have the courage to do: it chose to toss some bottles and wake everyone with the noise of their shattering. It chose to face the truth, and in so doing, to maintain higher levels of resources for the programs that survived. (Fish’s analysis is silent on that point.) It made the decision -- perfectly defensible, in my estimation -- that it would rather do fewer things and continue to do them well than continue to do everything just a little bit worse.
Whether the specific bottles it chose to toss are the right ones, I don’t know; that’s context-specific, and I don’t know the context well enough to say. Whether the decision will withstand the inevitable legal challenges and votes of no confidence, I don’t know.
But it did something that the usual default move doesn’t do: it got public attention. It actually made some noise, and may have started a worthwhile debate. Should colleges continue to act as if all those budget cuts by states make no material difference, or should they put the cost on public display?
I’ll admit being less-than-optimistic that the voters of, say, New York will storm the barricades demanding more graduate programs in French Lit. Academics who care about that are invited to enter the political sphere and try to sway the electorate, though as someone who has done that for years, I’ll advise plenty of patience and a stiff sense of irony. Generally speaking, the more you can frame the discussion in terms of “great education” and “benefits to the state as a whole,” as opposed to “jobs for humanists,” the better a chance you stand.
You can’t water down the bottles forever without fundamentally changing what’s inside them. Albany decided to toss some bottles to save the rest. It’s a debatable choice, but certainly a defensible one, and it offers at least the appeal of abandoning a strategy that has failed for forty years. It also offers the appeal of maintaining quality control -- and yes, jobs -- in the departments that remain.
Albany may or may not be right, but it does not deserve the opprobrium it has received. And Fish’s win-by-losing streak remains intact.
SUNY Albany is tossing bottles, and catching holy hell for it. Apparently, it’s suspending admission to programs in French, Italian, Russian, and classics. Stanley Fish has opined that this marks the official collapse of the humanities.
As regular readers know, I stand in awe of Stanley Fish’s ability to maintain a prominent and successful career without ever, even by accident, getting anything right. It’s an astonishing record, really. He’s the David Hasselhoff of academia; nobody can really explain why he’s still there, yet he’s still there.
His win-by-losing streak remains alive. In defense of distribution requirements that used to be the lifeblood of certain departments, Fish writes -- and I am not making this up --
I have always had trouble believing in the high-minded case for a core curriculum — that it preserves and transmits the best that has been thought and said — but I believe fully in the core curriculum as a device of employment for me and my fellow humanists.
Wow. Just, wow. So the reason we should support the humanities is to provide jobs for humanists.
It’s an interesting bit of logic. Just substitute anything at all for “humanities” and the sentence still works. The reason we should support buggy whips making is to retain the employment of buggy whip makers. The reason we should support the continued use of typewriters is to retain the employment of people in typewriter factories. The reason we should continue the production of whalebone corsets is to support the employment of whalebone corset makers. Whee!
Lest my reading seem reductive, check Fish’s piece. He explicitly rejects the usual “pieties” on behalf of humanistic studies, as well as any kind of economic-usefulness argument. Revealingly, he also rejects internal cross-subsidies:
And it won’t do, in the age of entrepreneurial academics, zero-based budgeting and “every tub on its own bottom,” to ask computer science or biology or the medical school to fork over some of their funds so that the revenue-poor classics department can be sustained. That was the idea a while back, but today it won’t fly.
Why not?
FIsh doesn’t even try to answer that, though he should. Because his alternative -- administrators will save us all! (seriously! that’s what he wrote!) -- assumes that the state legislature will be easier to persuade than will the biology department. Even though the biology department reports to the exact same campus presidents who are supposed to persuade the legislature. Even though Fish assures us that the presidents don’t believe it themselves.
Sigh.
Politically, this doesn’t even rise to the level of ‘failure.’
In a rational world, Fish’s piece would have been drowned out by derisive laughter. Instead, it was quoted approvingly by the AFT FACE folk and all manner of adjunct activists, even though it undercuts their departments’ reason to exist.
*headdesk*
If SUNY Albany had, instead, simply adjuncted-out more courses across the humanities, eventuating in the same level of savings, would that have been better or worse? Suppose that, instead of tossing some bottles, it had just watered more bottles down. How might the world have reacted?
Judging by the last forty years’ worth of trendlines, I’ll go out on a limb and say that nearly nobody outside of Albany would have noticed. Business would have gone on as usual.
Instead, Albany did what few of us have the courage to do: it chose to toss some bottles and wake everyone with the noise of their shattering. It chose to face the truth, and in so doing, to maintain higher levels of resources for the programs that survived. (Fish’s analysis is silent on that point.) It made the decision -- perfectly defensible, in my estimation -- that it would rather do fewer things and continue to do them well than continue to do everything just a little bit worse.
Whether the specific bottles it chose to toss are the right ones, I don’t know; that’s context-specific, and I don’t know the context well enough to say. Whether the decision will withstand the inevitable legal challenges and votes of no confidence, I don’t know.
But it did something that the usual default move doesn’t do: it got public attention. It actually made some noise, and may have started a worthwhile debate. Should colleges continue to act as if all those budget cuts by states make no material difference, or should they put the cost on public display?
I’ll admit being less-than-optimistic that the voters of, say, New York will storm the barricades demanding more graduate programs in French Lit. Academics who care about that are invited to enter the political sphere and try to sway the electorate, though as someone who has done that for years, I’ll advise plenty of patience and a stiff sense of irony. Generally speaking, the more you can frame the discussion in terms of “great education” and “benefits to the state as a whole,” as opposed to “jobs for humanists,” the better a chance you stand.
You can’t water down the bottles forever without fundamentally changing what’s inside them. Albany decided to toss some bottles to save the rest. It’s a debatable choice, but certainly a defensible one, and it offers at least the appeal of abandoning a strategy that has failed for forty years. It also offers the appeal of maintaining quality control -- and yes, jobs -- in the departments that remain.
Albany may or may not be right, but it does not deserve the opprobrium it has received. And Fish’s win-by-losing streak remains intact.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Au Revoir, Bitch
For bloggers of a certain vintage -- those of us who marched into the academic blogosphere around 2004-5 -- the news that Bitch, Ph.D. has called it a day is a bit of a shock.
In her day, Bitch was the undisputed champ of the academic blogosphere. She combined attitude, insight, attitude, humor, autobiography, attitude, sex, and attitude in unpredictable but irresistible ways. She could single-handedly change the entire conversation -- yes, kids, there was a time when there was a single conversation -- just by calling attention to it. And I have to admit that her stories about Pseudonymous Kid struck a chord, since he isn’t much older than TB.
Her links were mighty. The day she linked to my Elephants piece, I got more traffic than I ever had before, and probably since. In one of her early rounds of guest blogging, she even let me pinch-hit for her for a few posts. It didn’t go especially well -- I decided to try to fit her voice, only to discover that she was an original -- but I was flattered and thrilled to have the chance to try. (Her commenters were a lot tougher than mine!) Though we wrote from wildly different situations, I saw a kindred spirit there, and at one point even tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit her to my college.
In many ways, she was a sort of successor to the Invisible Adjunct. For a few years there, the sheer novelty of an open, public sphere in which people could write across ranks and tell their respective truths in narrative form drew a spate of frustrated people whose pent-up frustration gave rise to some prickly, but damned interesting, writing. Some of the topics had never been discussed candidly in public before, and while the efforts often wore the awkwardness of first drafts, they also carried the energy of discovery. Those early flame wars got as heated as they did because they felt like they mattered.
Since then, the blogosphere has evolved and fragmented. Facebook and Twitter came along and sent conversations in different directions, and after a few years, many of the “I’ve always wanted to write about this” topics had been written about. That’s not to deny that nifty writers still come along, but the sense of a ‘scene’ has faded. I have to admit reading far fewer blogs than I used to, and being surprised somewhat less often than I once was.
I recall a piece Bitch did several years ago about bloggers as living, breathing “author-functions.” (They’re sort of like personas.) Part of the appeal of following blogs is watching the author-functions evolve, and become more like themselves. Some, like Dr. Crazy, actually mark the transitions with formal changes of address. Others, like Aunt B., become the published authors they always should have been. My own space became a cross between a blog and a column, which was how I had always thought of it in the first place. Bitch herself moved away from academia, and the blog did, too.
Heaven knows we need people who speak the truth about academia, in their own voices, across ranks. People who can do that in interesting ways are rare. Those who can add humor, and attitude, and the unmistakable stamp of a person underneath it all are even rarer.
Au revoir, Bitch. May you and PK bring your characteristic grace and vinegar with you, wherever your next adventures take you.
In her day, Bitch was the undisputed champ of the academic blogosphere. She combined attitude, insight, attitude, humor, autobiography, attitude, sex, and attitude in unpredictable but irresistible ways. She could single-handedly change the entire conversation -- yes, kids, there was a time when there was a single conversation -- just by calling attention to it. And I have to admit that her stories about Pseudonymous Kid struck a chord, since he isn’t much older than TB.
Her links were mighty. The day she linked to my Elephants piece, I got more traffic than I ever had before, and probably since. In one of her early rounds of guest blogging, she even let me pinch-hit for her for a few posts. It didn’t go especially well -- I decided to try to fit her voice, only to discover that she was an original -- but I was flattered and thrilled to have the chance to try. (Her commenters were a lot tougher than mine!) Though we wrote from wildly different situations, I saw a kindred spirit there, and at one point even tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit her to my college.
In many ways, she was a sort of successor to the Invisible Adjunct. For a few years there, the sheer novelty of an open, public sphere in which people could write across ranks and tell their respective truths in narrative form drew a spate of frustrated people whose pent-up frustration gave rise to some prickly, but damned interesting, writing. Some of the topics had never been discussed candidly in public before, and while the efforts often wore the awkwardness of first drafts, they also carried the energy of discovery. Those early flame wars got as heated as they did because they felt like they mattered.
Since then, the blogosphere has evolved and fragmented. Facebook and Twitter came along and sent conversations in different directions, and after a few years, many of the “I’ve always wanted to write about this” topics had been written about. That’s not to deny that nifty writers still come along, but the sense of a ‘scene’ has faded. I have to admit reading far fewer blogs than I used to, and being surprised somewhat less often than I once was.
I recall a piece Bitch did several years ago about bloggers as living, breathing “author-functions.” (They’re sort of like personas.) Part of the appeal of following blogs is watching the author-functions evolve, and become more like themselves. Some, like Dr. Crazy, actually mark the transitions with formal changes of address. Others, like Aunt B., become the published authors they always should have been. My own space became a cross between a blog and a column, which was how I had always thought of it in the first place. Bitch herself moved away from academia, and the blog did, too.
Heaven knows we need people who speak the truth about academia, in their own voices, across ranks. People who can do that in interesting ways are rare. Those who can add humor, and attitude, and the unmistakable stamp of a person underneath it all are even rarer.
Au revoir, Bitch. May you and PK bring your characteristic grace and vinegar with you, wherever your next adventures take you.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
What’s a Sophomore?
Last week I had a nice discussion with some people who work at nearby four-year schools. We were discussing the various points at which students seem to get sidetracked. Everyone agreed that the first semester is key, but the discussion became a bit more challenging after that.
My counterparts moved to a discussion of the second year of college. They mentioned that the sophomore year is when students need to declare a major, and that students who can’t commit to anything at that point are at much higher risk of walking away.
It sounded right to me, until I realized that they had used “second year” and “sophomore” interchangeably. To be fair, in their specific contexts, that was probably perfectly valid. But it doesn’t describe the community college world well at all.
The traditional sequence for students has students starting as freshmen, then becoming sophomores, and eventually juniors and seniors. Community colleges do the first half of the sequence, with our students graduating at the end of their sophomore years.
Except that the ‘freshman’ and ‘sophomore’ designations don’t work terribly well here. And that has implications for the kinds of interventions that can help at-risk students.
The IPEDS data we report is designed on the traditional model, which means that the success of many of our interventions are measured by the impact they have on the first-time, full-time, degree-seeking cohort (usually abbreviated FTFTDS). That describes the overwhelming majority of entering students at Dartmouth, but a minority here.
Most of the students who start here start with developmental and/or ESL classes, often for more than one semester. They move from full-time to part-time and back again, as economic and family needs dictate. By the time they get to the traditional first-year classes -- Composition 1, College Algebra, etc. -- they may have already been here for two or three semesters.
Since this is a commuter campus, we can’t rely on dorms to clearly mark the first-year cohort. And since students come in with wildly varying levels of academic preparation, we can’t clearly find the first-year cohort in any given class. (Sadly, even the first-level developmental classes aren’t always clean indicators of first-year status.) There’s no clean mechanism to catch them outside of class, and no class we can rely on to catch them. They’re everywhere and nowhere.
To make things more complex, we don’t have the isolated clean start of September (or the slightly less clean starts of September and January) that the more exclusive places have. Students here start and finish at all different points of the year. September is the most popular time, but we get new enrollments in the Spring, Summer, and Fall. We even get them for the January intersession. Cohorts blow apart quickly, especially in the early stages.
Is a second-year student taking 100-level classes a sophomore? I’d say ‘no,’ since I’d define ‘sophomore’ according to progress towards graduation. But that means making a distinction between second-year students and sophomores.
Here, students declare a major upon initial enrollment. I’m told that it’s a financial aid requirement, though I’ll admit not knowing why four-year colleges don’t seem to have that same requirement. Among students who reach my version of ‘sophomore’ status, the subsequent attrition rates are remarkably low; in essence, if they make it to thirty credits, they make it to sixty. The trick is in getting them to thirty, even if it takes more than a year to do it. We just don’t have a word for a second-year freshman.
My counterparts moved to a discussion of the second year of college. They mentioned that the sophomore year is when students need to declare a major, and that students who can’t commit to anything at that point are at much higher risk of walking away.
It sounded right to me, until I realized that they had used “second year” and “sophomore” interchangeably. To be fair, in their specific contexts, that was probably perfectly valid. But it doesn’t describe the community college world well at all.
The traditional sequence for students has students starting as freshmen, then becoming sophomores, and eventually juniors and seniors. Community colleges do the first half of the sequence, with our students graduating at the end of their sophomore years.
Except that the ‘freshman’ and ‘sophomore’ designations don’t work terribly well here. And that has implications for the kinds of interventions that can help at-risk students.
The IPEDS data we report is designed on the traditional model, which means that the success of many of our interventions are measured by the impact they have on the first-time, full-time, degree-seeking cohort (usually abbreviated FTFTDS). That describes the overwhelming majority of entering students at Dartmouth, but a minority here.
Most of the students who start here start with developmental and/or ESL classes, often for more than one semester. They move from full-time to part-time and back again, as economic and family needs dictate. By the time they get to the traditional first-year classes -- Composition 1, College Algebra, etc. -- they may have already been here for two or three semesters.
Since this is a commuter campus, we can’t rely on dorms to clearly mark the first-year cohort. And since students come in with wildly varying levels of academic preparation, we can’t clearly find the first-year cohort in any given class. (Sadly, even the first-level developmental classes aren’t always clean indicators of first-year status.) There’s no clean mechanism to catch them outside of class, and no class we can rely on to catch them. They’re everywhere and nowhere.
To make things more complex, we don’t have the isolated clean start of September (or the slightly less clean starts of September and January) that the more exclusive places have. Students here start and finish at all different points of the year. September is the most popular time, but we get new enrollments in the Spring, Summer, and Fall. We even get them for the January intersession. Cohorts blow apart quickly, especially in the early stages.
Is a second-year student taking 100-level classes a sophomore? I’d say ‘no,’ since I’d define ‘sophomore’ according to progress towards graduation. But that means making a distinction between second-year students and sophomores.
Here, students declare a major upon initial enrollment. I’m told that it’s a financial aid requirement, though I’ll admit not knowing why four-year colleges don’t seem to have that same requirement. Among students who reach my version of ‘sophomore’ status, the subsequent attrition rates are remarkably low; in essence, if they make it to thirty credits, they make it to sixty. The trick is in getting them to thirty, even if it takes more than a year to do it. We just don’t have a word for a second-year freshman.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Final Exams
An alert reader sent me this link to a Boston Globe story about Harvard eliminating its final exam period.
We’ve had similar discussions here, though the reasons aren’t all the same. I’d love to hear from wise and worldly readers who have lived through a similar transition, and who know from experience what the concrete issues are.
Like most colleges on a traditional calendar, we devote the last several days of the semester to a final exam period. Exams are scheduled in two-hour blocs. The blocs don’t always coincide with class times, since class times are usually either fifty or seventy-five minutes. There’s a makeup day at the end, which comes in handy for schedule conflicts and/or snow days. Grades are due shortly after the end of the exam period, with a hard goal of finishing everything before Christmas.
The system works pretty well for courses that lend themselves to traditional exams that can be graded quickly. But it’s awkward, at best, for courses that tend to put more weight on papers, projects, or performances.
Over the years, even some of the folks who give something like traditional final exams have started creeping those forward into the final week of classes. Although the official college policy states that exam week is for finals, we’ve had students complain truthfully that they’ve had multiple finals on the same day, in the week before any are supposed to be given. Of course, others simply have final papers or projects due, usually the week before finals.
From a workload standpoint, this is sticky.
In a collective bargaining environment like this one, everyone in the same unit is supposed to have the same rules. That means that the semester is supposed to start at the same time, and end at the same time.
Some of the people who have moved their exams up have done so out of a sense that their colleagues had a longer vacation than they did. Indeed, if you walk the faculty office corridors during exam week -- I’ve been known to do that -- they’re a lot more vacant than the official exam schedule would lead you to believe. We’ve backed into a situation in which the official norm has become the de facto exception, and students are often caught in between. Frankly, it’s also a grievance waiting to happen.
In addition to the educationally-based ideas outlined in the Globe piece, we’re considering just dropping final exam week and extending classes to the end to address workload equity. If some people can start their vacations earlier simply by declaring that they use project exams, then we have a pretty basic fairness issue. But if classes meet to the end, they meet to the end. People who want to give traditional finals still can; they just have to break them into two parts.
This move would also greatly reduce the number of schedule conflicts, since nobody’s schedule would change for that week. Adjuncts who work at multiple campuses wouldn’t suddenly have to juggle when their obligations shift; they wouldn’t shift.
I’ve heard from a few areas -- music, notably -- that such a change would be a challenge for the final juried performances, but it seems clear that we can work around that with a little ingenuity. It would also make common finals across multiple sections more challenging; presumably, the students who have math on Tuesday could find out from the students who had it on Monday what the questions were. But this, too, seems fixable with a little ingenuity. It’s already standard practice to mix up questions on different versions of the same exam, and/or to change the numbers in a given equation. It can be done.
Wise and worldly readers, it can’t be as simple as this. (Nothing ever is!) Do you see a serious downside to doing away with a final exam period? If you’ve lived through a transition like this, did you see some unanticipated-but-serious issues arise?
We’ve had similar discussions here, though the reasons aren’t all the same. I’d love to hear from wise and worldly readers who have lived through a similar transition, and who know from experience what the concrete issues are.
Like most colleges on a traditional calendar, we devote the last several days of the semester to a final exam period. Exams are scheduled in two-hour blocs. The blocs don’t always coincide with class times, since class times are usually either fifty or seventy-five minutes. There’s a makeup day at the end, which comes in handy for schedule conflicts and/or snow days. Grades are due shortly after the end of the exam period, with a hard goal of finishing everything before Christmas.
The system works pretty well for courses that lend themselves to traditional exams that can be graded quickly. But it’s awkward, at best, for courses that tend to put more weight on papers, projects, or performances.
Over the years, even some of the folks who give something like traditional final exams have started creeping those forward into the final week of classes. Although the official college policy states that exam week is for finals, we’ve had students complain truthfully that they’ve had multiple finals on the same day, in the week before any are supposed to be given. Of course, others simply have final papers or projects due, usually the week before finals.
From a workload standpoint, this is sticky.
In a collective bargaining environment like this one, everyone in the same unit is supposed to have the same rules. That means that the semester is supposed to start at the same time, and end at the same time.
Some of the people who have moved their exams up have done so out of a sense that their colleagues had a longer vacation than they did. Indeed, if you walk the faculty office corridors during exam week -- I’ve been known to do that -- they’re a lot more vacant than the official exam schedule would lead you to believe. We’ve backed into a situation in which the official norm has become the de facto exception, and students are often caught in between. Frankly, it’s also a grievance waiting to happen.
In addition to the educationally-based ideas outlined in the Globe piece, we’re considering just dropping final exam week and extending classes to the end to address workload equity. If some people can start their vacations earlier simply by declaring that they use project exams, then we have a pretty basic fairness issue. But if classes meet to the end, they meet to the end. People who want to give traditional finals still can; they just have to break them into two parts.
This move would also greatly reduce the number of schedule conflicts, since nobody’s schedule would change for that week. Adjuncts who work at multiple campuses wouldn’t suddenly have to juggle when their obligations shift; they wouldn’t shift.
I’ve heard from a few areas -- music, notably -- that such a change would be a challenge for the final juried performances, but it seems clear that we can work around that with a little ingenuity. It would also make common finals across multiple sections more challenging; presumably, the students who have math on Tuesday could find out from the students who had it on Monday what the questions were. But this, too, seems fixable with a little ingenuity. It’s already standard practice to mix up questions on different versions of the same exam, and/or to change the numbers in a given equation. It can be done.
Wise and worldly readers, it can’t be as simple as this. (Nothing ever is!) Do you see a serious downside to doing away with a final exam period? If you’ve lived through a transition like this, did you see some unanticipated-but-serious issues arise?
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Deans and Free Speech
In a nutshell, this is why I write under a pseudonym. Apparently the University of Connecticut fired a dean who later claimed that his termination was due to his criticism of upper administration. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that even if the former dean’s account of the reasons for his termination were factually correct, the dean lacked first amendment protection and therefore lacked standing to challenge his termination. (To be fair, the Court did note that the dean couldn’t actually be jailed for his words, so at least there’s that.)
Hmm.
I file this one under “I know it sucks, but imagine the alternative.” Frustratingly, most of the comments to the IHE story missed the point.
For a college of any meaningful size to accomplish much, it has to have the entire administration rowing in the same direction. This is a difficult, but real, fact of life. If some deans start grandstanding and styling themselves champions of whomever is out of favor at the time, the college will be convulsed by internal politics and unable to function.
Those of us who make our living doing this know that implicitly.
That’s not to say that administrators have to be automatons. The key is knowing when and where you can voice disagreement, and when you have to get in line.
Admittedly, the precise boundaries fluctuate a bit from one context to another. But the rule of thumb is, the smaller and more private the setting, the more candid you can be. Don’t make the amateur mistake of assuming that decisions are made in open meetings.
In an individual meeting, you can say just about anything. That’s the time for really frank conversations.
In a small group meeting, depending on the group, you can still sometimes raise serious objections. The more formal the group, the less this is true.
In public meetings, or in public generally, you have to be on point. That means toeing the party line, or at worst not subverting it. For those of us in these roles, that can be a HUGE point of stress. Stick around long enough, and sooner or later you’ll be put in the position of having to defend a position with which you disagree. It comes with the job.
Nearly everyone has lines they won’t cross. (Admittedly, some people are simply soulless, but I prefer not to dwell on them.) When you have to cross that line too frequently, it’s time to decamp for greener pastures. The folks who complain about administrative turnover seldom mention this variable, but it’s real. It was one of the reasons I left PU. I saw the direction it was going, and I wanted no part of it.
To be clear, nothing I saw or took issue with rose to the level of criminal conduct or fraud. It didn’t rise to the level of whistleblowing. Instead, it was a series of judgment calls that I considered poorly made. The organization had the right to make those calls; I just thought they were misguided. When the accumulation of misguided decisions reached a certain point, I left.
For those of us whose administrative positions don’t also come with tenured faculty positions, the choice is not simply ‘stick around or go back to faculty.’ It’s ‘stick around or lose your job.’ I have had to hold my tongue many times because I didn’t have a safety net. It sucks, but the alternative is hard to picture.
A college can’t have a dozen chief executives. It can only have one. At the end of the day, someone has to be responsible for setting the overall direction, and the people who report to her need to be reliable. They can argue decisions before they’re announced -- and that certainly happens -- but once the play is called, it’s called. At that point, the job is to execute the play.
Admittedly, this level of responsibility for one’s own words can lead to some frustrating exchanges with faculty, who enjoy the freedom to speak to just about anything, whether it falls within their expertise or not. I’ve been in situations in which my own sense of a given policy was somewhat grudging, but I’ve had to embody it in discussions with some faculty who’ve resorted to all manner of mudslinging. Simply put, it’s an unfair fight. But it comes with the job.
So I don’t like it, but I have to agree with UConn. At some point, the President calls the play, and we execute or we don’t. The time for debate is finite, even if we think we’re right.
Administration is not for the faint of heart.
Hmm.
I file this one under “I know it sucks, but imagine the alternative.” Frustratingly, most of the comments to the IHE story missed the point.
For a college of any meaningful size to accomplish much, it has to have the entire administration rowing in the same direction. This is a difficult, but real, fact of life. If some deans start grandstanding and styling themselves champions of whomever is out of favor at the time, the college will be convulsed by internal politics and unable to function.
Those of us who make our living doing this know that implicitly.
That’s not to say that administrators have to be automatons. The key is knowing when and where you can voice disagreement, and when you have to get in line.
Admittedly, the precise boundaries fluctuate a bit from one context to another. But the rule of thumb is, the smaller and more private the setting, the more candid you can be. Don’t make the amateur mistake of assuming that decisions are made in open meetings.
In an individual meeting, you can say just about anything. That’s the time for really frank conversations.
In a small group meeting, depending on the group, you can still sometimes raise serious objections. The more formal the group, the less this is true.
In public meetings, or in public generally, you have to be on point. That means toeing the party line, or at worst not subverting it. For those of us in these roles, that can be a HUGE point of stress. Stick around long enough, and sooner or later you’ll be put in the position of having to defend a position with which you disagree. It comes with the job.
Nearly everyone has lines they won’t cross. (Admittedly, some people are simply soulless, but I prefer not to dwell on them.) When you have to cross that line too frequently, it’s time to decamp for greener pastures. The folks who complain about administrative turnover seldom mention this variable, but it’s real. It was one of the reasons I left PU. I saw the direction it was going, and I wanted no part of it.
To be clear, nothing I saw or took issue with rose to the level of criminal conduct or fraud. It didn’t rise to the level of whistleblowing. Instead, it was a series of judgment calls that I considered poorly made. The organization had the right to make those calls; I just thought they were misguided. When the accumulation of misguided decisions reached a certain point, I left.
For those of us whose administrative positions don’t also come with tenured faculty positions, the choice is not simply ‘stick around or go back to faculty.’ It’s ‘stick around or lose your job.’ I have had to hold my tongue many times because I didn’t have a safety net. It sucks, but the alternative is hard to picture.
A college can’t have a dozen chief executives. It can only have one. At the end of the day, someone has to be responsible for setting the overall direction, and the people who report to her need to be reliable. They can argue decisions before they’re announced -- and that certainly happens -- but once the play is called, it’s called. At that point, the job is to execute the play.
Admittedly, this level of responsibility for one’s own words can lead to some frustrating exchanges with faculty, who enjoy the freedom to speak to just about anything, whether it falls within their expertise or not. I’ve been in situations in which my own sense of a given policy was somewhat grudging, but I’ve had to embody it in discussions with some faculty who’ve resorted to all manner of mudslinging. Simply put, it’s an unfair fight. But it comes with the job.
So I don’t like it, but I have to agree with UConn. At some point, the President calls the play, and we execute or we don’t. The time for debate is finite, even if we think we’re right.
Administration is not for the faint of heart.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Ask the Administrator: Payment Upon Completion
A new correspondent writes:
I have to admit, I enjoy playing with ideas like these.
No, it’s not unique to Texas, though Texas tends to be in the forefront of ideas like this one. A few years ago a thoughtful senior professor at my college suggested a variation on this that he framed as a “graduation deposit.” Upon enrollment, students would pay a few hundred bucks that would be put into an interest-bearing account. If they drop out, they lose it. If they graduate, they get it back with interest upon graduation. The idea was to put some skin in the game. The idea didn’t go anywhere, though I have to admit kind of liking it.
From the legislature’s perspective, the scheme you’ve outlined could be appealing in a couple of ways. Obviously, it could be a backdoor way to cut funding. On a less sinister level, it creates institutional incentives for colleges to start paying attention to graduation, as well as access. At that point, the real question becomes how the colleges respond to it.
You’re certainly right that a shortsighted or panicky administration could respond simply by pressuring the faculty in myriad ways to go easy on the students. I wouldn’t expect it to say so explicitly, of course, but it’s possible to exert pressure in subtler ways. The usual playbook involves getting rid of adjuncts with high fail rates, wreaking havoc on the schedules of full-timers with high fail rates, playing games with placement tests, and/or abusing the bully pulpit.
Alternately, the college could respond the way that Texas high schools did when they fell under a high-stakes testing regime, and simply try to screen out the weaker students upfront. After all, if the weaker kids don’t get in in the first place, they won’t drag down your completion rates. This is easier than you might think. Just scale back on student support services, don’t schedule classes at certain times, and appoint Cruella DaVille to run your Students with Disabilities office. Done and done. It violates the mission of the community college, but if your choices are going upscale or shutting down, I could understand the move.
A smarter administration that actually cared would understand that the way to improve completion rates is to look at them as an institutional, rather than individual, issue. What institutional obstacles exist to throw students off course? For example, are required classes largely scheduled when students can’t take them? Are the numbers of sections of required classes adequate, or are students forced to wait? How efficient is the financial aid office? How efficient is the bookstore? Is there a major parking problem? Is your academic advising system effective, or are students left to flounder?
Other than common sense, one of the major problems with defining attrition as a faculty issue is that the solutions it suggests aren’t scalable. Let’s say that I have good data showing that Professor Jones’ students consistently fare far better than do Professor Smith’s students. What, exactly, can I do with that? I can’t clone Professor Jones. If I want to make a large scale, sustainable difference, I have to do it at the system level.
Done wisely, a completion-based approach would look at faculty as valuable sources of information on the obstacles that students face. What do your students tell you? What gets in their way? Sometimes it can be something as basic as “they never offer this class at night, and I can’t take it during the day.” A college can fix that if it chooses to.
There’s also the basic issue of student goals. Although students have to declare a major upon enrollment if they want to get financial aid, the truth is that many students have no intention of sticking around until graduation. (A common version of that is the kid who only intends to spend a year before transferring; he just has to show his parents that he’s capable.) One way to address that is to come up with ‘certificate’ programs with lower numbers of credits. A 30 credit gen ed certificate, for example, turns that one-year-and-out student from a dropout to a graduate in one fell swoop.
Given the realities of Texas politics as I understand them, you’re probably right to assume the worst. But it’s at least possible for a college, and a state, to take graduation seriously without devolving into a race to the bottom.
Good luck!
Wise and worldly readers, what do you think? Is there a way to reward colleges for improving graduation rates without inadvertently rewarding stupidity?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
We, the faculty, have just been notified by our president that the Texas Legislature (which can only be relied upon to do whatever is worst) is poised to institute a completion-based funding system for higher ed throughout the state. Instead of funding us based on enrollments as of the 12th class day, as it does now, it will use a step system based on completion rates: so much money for students with 15 credit hours, so much more for 30 hours, so much more for graduates, etc. They will probably begin by making 10% of our funding dependent on this measure, but with the expectation of phasing it in gradually until it reaches 100%.
Our administrators claim that we’ll be able to meet the Lege’s goals (which have not yet been defined in detail) without compromising academic standards, but I don’t see how that can be possible. Won’t such a policy inevitably lead regents to push administrators, administrators to push faculty, to pass more students through? How can grade inflation not result? Or pressure to push less prepared students toward shorter (ie., technical) degree programs? Or penalties for faculty who teach in fields like math and A&P that students perceive as harder and are more likely to drop or fail?
And isn’t there a basic inequity and hardship in paying colleges nothing until students have completed 15 credits? I haven’t studied the numbers, but I know anecdotally that many students drop out or flunk out in their first semester: why should the college not be compensated for the worker-hours invested in those students before they accrue 15 credit hours — given especially that the reasons for their disappearance often (usually) have nothing to do with us?
Are you familiar with such developments, and how much trouble do you think we’re in? Is this something so unwise that only Texas could dream it up, or an emerging national trend?
I have to admit, I enjoy playing with ideas like these.
No, it’s not unique to Texas, though Texas tends to be in the forefront of ideas like this one. A few years ago a thoughtful senior professor at my college suggested a variation on this that he framed as a “graduation deposit.” Upon enrollment, students would pay a few hundred bucks that would be put into an interest-bearing account. If they drop out, they lose it. If they graduate, they get it back with interest upon graduation. The idea was to put some skin in the game. The idea didn’t go anywhere, though I have to admit kind of liking it.
From the legislature’s perspective, the scheme you’ve outlined could be appealing in a couple of ways. Obviously, it could be a backdoor way to cut funding. On a less sinister level, it creates institutional incentives for colleges to start paying attention to graduation, as well as access. At that point, the real question becomes how the colleges respond to it.
You’re certainly right that a shortsighted or panicky administration could respond simply by pressuring the faculty in myriad ways to go easy on the students. I wouldn’t expect it to say so explicitly, of course, but it’s possible to exert pressure in subtler ways. The usual playbook involves getting rid of adjuncts with high fail rates, wreaking havoc on the schedules of full-timers with high fail rates, playing games with placement tests, and/or abusing the bully pulpit.
Alternately, the college could respond the way that Texas high schools did when they fell under a high-stakes testing regime, and simply try to screen out the weaker students upfront. After all, if the weaker kids don’t get in in the first place, they won’t drag down your completion rates. This is easier than you might think. Just scale back on student support services, don’t schedule classes at certain times, and appoint Cruella DaVille to run your Students with Disabilities office. Done and done. It violates the mission of the community college, but if your choices are going upscale or shutting down, I could understand the move.
A smarter administration that actually cared would understand that the way to improve completion rates is to look at them as an institutional, rather than individual, issue. What institutional obstacles exist to throw students off course? For example, are required classes largely scheduled when students can’t take them? Are the numbers of sections of required classes adequate, or are students forced to wait? How efficient is the financial aid office? How efficient is the bookstore? Is there a major parking problem? Is your academic advising system effective, or are students left to flounder?
Other than common sense, one of the major problems with defining attrition as a faculty issue is that the solutions it suggests aren’t scalable. Let’s say that I have good data showing that Professor Jones’ students consistently fare far better than do Professor Smith’s students. What, exactly, can I do with that? I can’t clone Professor Jones. If I want to make a large scale, sustainable difference, I have to do it at the system level.
Done wisely, a completion-based approach would look at faculty as valuable sources of information on the obstacles that students face. What do your students tell you? What gets in their way? Sometimes it can be something as basic as “they never offer this class at night, and I can’t take it during the day.” A college can fix that if it chooses to.
There’s also the basic issue of student goals. Although students have to declare a major upon enrollment if they want to get financial aid, the truth is that many students have no intention of sticking around until graduation. (A common version of that is the kid who only intends to spend a year before transferring; he just has to show his parents that he’s capable.) One way to address that is to come up with ‘certificate’ programs with lower numbers of credits. A 30 credit gen ed certificate, for example, turns that one-year-and-out student from a dropout to a graduate in one fell swoop.
Given the realities of Texas politics as I understand them, you’re probably right to assume the worst. But it’s at least possible for a college, and a state, to take graduation seriously without devolving into a race to the bottom.
Good luck!
Wise and worldly readers, what do you think? Is there a way to reward colleges for improving graduation rates without inadvertently rewarding stupidity?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Friday, October 08, 2010
School Pictures
We got The Boy's and The Girl's school pictures this week.
Admitting my own bias upfront, it's still fair to say that these are two good-looking kids. TB is the class heartthrob, tall with a winning smile, and TG is a brunette cherub with a mischievous gleam in her eye.
But you wouldn't know it from the pictures.
In these pictures, our beautiful, wonderful, sweet children look, well, kinda goony.
It's not their fault. They often photograph well, and they smiled obligingly. Yet these shots are worthy of a driver's license in their awkwardness.
Why does that always happen with school pictures?
I have to admit, many of my school pictures as a kid were horrible. The fifth grade pic was uniquely awful, with a sneer that made me, improbably enough, the class bad boy the day it came out. (It didn't last.) None of them looked the faintest bit natural or flattering, and several of them were just mean.
Photography, as an art form and as a technology, has come a long way since then. Yet school pictures are still goony. You'd think they would have improved by now.
I can isolate a couple of factors. The backgrounds are always awful – either 'sky' or 'rumped monochrome.' And the poses are ridiculous. “Lean over. Crane your neck. No, like that. Lean farther. Now, try to have fun!” Sheesh.
Who becomes a school photographer? That seems like some sort of 'community service' punishment for a photographer who did something awful. Train them in Ansel Adams, then loose them on fourth graders. It's just not right.
My Dad used to consider himself a serious photographer, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. He'd spend minutes composing a shot while my brother and I quietly seethed. (The pics usually reflected the seething.) To this day, the one piece of advice I'd give any photographer is “shut up and shoot.” In the age of digital photography, when you don’t have to worry about wasting film and a single card can hold hundreds of shots, I say shoot first and ask questions later. The one thing you should never do, especially with children, is ask them to hold a pose. When a camera could only hold a couple dozen shots and each one was a real cost, there was some excuse for perfectionism. Now, not.
Nowadays, at the end of the school year, teachers present slideshows of candid shots they’ve taken in the class over the course of the year, always accompanied by the Green Day song that goes “there’s something unpredictable...” (Why it’s always that song, I don’t know.) The candids are always far better than the official portraits. They show kids looking like themselves, wearing clothes they’d actually wear, doing things they actually do. They look like life. Honestly, I’d rather have copies of those than of the Official School Pictures. But the official pics live on.
Is there a trick to making school pictures suck less? And just who, exactly, winds up taking them?
Admitting my own bias upfront, it's still fair to say that these are two good-looking kids. TB is the class heartthrob, tall with a winning smile, and TG is a brunette cherub with a mischievous gleam in her eye.
But you wouldn't know it from the pictures.
In these pictures, our beautiful, wonderful, sweet children look, well, kinda goony.
It's not their fault. They often photograph well, and they smiled obligingly. Yet these shots are worthy of a driver's license in their awkwardness.
Why does that always happen with school pictures?
I have to admit, many of my school pictures as a kid were horrible. The fifth grade pic was uniquely awful, with a sneer that made me, improbably enough, the class bad boy the day it came out. (It didn't last.) None of them looked the faintest bit natural or flattering, and several of them were just mean.
Photography, as an art form and as a technology, has come a long way since then. Yet school pictures are still goony. You'd think they would have improved by now.
I can isolate a couple of factors. The backgrounds are always awful – either 'sky' or 'rumped monochrome.' And the poses are ridiculous. “Lean over. Crane your neck. No, like that. Lean farther. Now, try to have fun!” Sheesh.
Who becomes a school photographer? That seems like some sort of 'community service' punishment for a photographer who did something awful. Train them in Ansel Adams, then loose them on fourth graders. It's just not right.
My Dad used to consider himself a serious photographer, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. He'd spend minutes composing a shot while my brother and I quietly seethed. (The pics usually reflected the seething.) To this day, the one piece of advice I'd give any photographer is “shut up and shoot.” In the age of digital photography, when you don’t have to worry about wasting film and a single card can hold hundreds of shots, I say shoot first and ask questions later. The one thing you should never do, especially with children, is ask them to hold a pose. When a camera could only hold a couple dozen shots and each one was a real cost, there was some excuse for perfectionism. Now, not.
Nowadays, at the end of the school year, teachers present slideshows of candid shots they’ve taken in the class over the course of the year, always accompanied by the Green Day song that goes “there’s something unpredictable...” (Why it’s always that song, I don’t know.) The candids are always far better than the official portraits. They show kids looking like themselves, wearing clothes they’d actually wear, doing things they actually do. They look like life. Honestly, I’d rather have copies of those than of the Official School Pictures. But the official pics live on.
Is there a trick to making school pictures suck less? And just who, exactly, winds up taking them?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)