A few years ago, I read a piece about airlines “bumping” passengers who had legitimate tickets. (I’ve never understood how it’s legal to sell the same seat twice, but that’s another post.) The article made the point that some central computer makes decisions that result in bumping, but that agents at counters have to deal with angry passengers, so over time, agents at counters started entering ‘dummy’ passengers with names like Mickey Mouse so they could outsmart the computer. Mickey Mouse wouldn’t yell at them if he got bumped. Over time, the computer compensated by overbooking even more.
The flaw there was that the folks who designed the central system never thought about the needs of the folks on the ground.
I’m watching a few state/national higher ed initiatives -- well-intentioned ones -- come to grief, and they all seem to be flailing for the same reason. They treat colleges as black boxes. They fail to grasp the motivations of the various actors.
Take transfer, for example. It’s one thing for a state to declare that its entire public higher ed system should be a coherent whole, with seamless transfer from each college to every other. And on paper, many of them have that.
But that doesn’t mean students escape having to re-take (and pay again for) courses they’ve already taken and passed.
That’s because while broad policy decisions may be made at the top, actual implementation occurs in the departments. And departments often have very different interests.
In the world of transfer, the usual evasion involves giving a course “free elective” status. The chair of the receiving school’s art department, for example, typically won’t raise an issue with accepting English Comp or Intro to Psych, since her own department doesn’t teach those anyway; the nits she’ll pick will be among the art classes. I’ve had chairs say, to my face, that they don’t want to “give away” too many credits. But if she’s under a mandate from above to accept credits in transfer, she can simply allow the transferring art credits as “free electives.” If her major doesn’t happen to have any free electives in it, well, tough luck. That way, her department gets to re-teach whatever it wants, while she still gets to claim compliance with the mandate. Her interest -- keeping the enrollment and funding levels of her own department high -- are at odds with the larger systemic interest in seamless transfer.
Now that states are starting to define college “performance” in terms of graduation rates, I can see a similar -- considerably more sinister -- version of the same thing on the horizon.
Graduation rates reflect any number of variables, including quality of curriculum and instruction. But those variables also include things like the student profile. To take an easy example, students who arrive at college with strong academic preparation in high school graduate at much higher rates than students who arrive with serious skill gaps. Nobody seriously disputes that. So the quickest and easiest way for a college to nudge its graduation rates upward is to become exclusionary. If you don’t let the higher-risk students in, they can’t drop out.
Some colleges build that into their missions, and that’s fine. If you need developmental math, MIT won’t take you. It’s a private university -- albeit a land-grant, oddly enough -- and it can choose its own path. But to compare graduation rates of places that can cherry-pick with places that take all comers is simply to load the dice.
My concern here is that unthinkingly adopting a single bottom-line standard will push the more accessible colleges to become much less so. They won’t necessarily want to, but if funding depends on it, they’ll do what they’ll have to do. If we assume the same kind of self-interest as in the case of the department chairs, it isn’t hard to predict either evasive or perverse maneuvers.
Those maneuvers could be overt -- admissions requirements, say -- or they could be sub rosa. Moving ESL and developmental classes onto a separate set of books, for example, would immediately elevate the graduation rate. Discreetly reducing outreach into the most disadvantaged communities would elevate the graduation rate. It isn’t hard to come up with ways to game the measure.
As with the airlines, I’d expect the people on the front lines to engage in evasive maneuvers to meet their own needs. The folks who would get bumped would be the most vulnerable students. Bumping is one thing if it’s Mickey Mouse, but something else altogether if it’s a kid from a shaky high school who’s trying to escape poverty. Colleges aren’t black boxes or agents of a single mind; they’re complicated operations with self-aware moving parts. Policies need to reflect that. If they don’t, entire generations will be left sitting on the tarmac.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Scenes from a Strange Week
The computer club had a bake sale on campus. As I neared the table, one of the students called out “Save a nerd! Buy a cookie!” Impressed, I complied.
------------
TW called one afternoon to let me know The Dog had been skunked. (Since the storm did a number on the local trees, varmints of all sorts have been unusually public.)
The tomato juice bath was a nonstarter for any number of reasons, so I did some quick Googling and found a recommended mix of peroxide, baking soda, and Dawn. After getting home and changing, I mixed the ingredients in a bucket, took The Dog and a sponge out back, and did what needed to be done.
Apparently, peroxide works on fur like it works on hair. Now The Dog has subtle blonde highlights.
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Overheard in a meeting: “If you boil down the soup to the nuts and bolts...”
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Sign of a planetary alignment: at the end of a recent evening advisory board meeting, the chair (not me) proposed a follow-up meeting in six months. The group rebelled, saying it was too energized by the excitement of what it was doing, and it wanted to meet sooner and more often.
Over a decade in academic administration, and I had never seen that before. The Force is strong in this one.
--------------
This week’s activities: basketball practice, music lessons, makeup trick-or-treating, lego league, PTO, swim lessons, leaf bagging. Anyone remember the argument that Americans didn’t have “social capital” anymore? We’ve got social capital coming out of our ears. Real capital, on the other hand...
------------
TW called one afternoon to let me know The Dog had been skunked. (Since the storm did a number on the local trees, varmints of all sorts have been unusually public.)
The tomato juice bath was a nonstarter for any number of reasons, so I did some quick Googling and found a recommended mix of peroxide, baking soda, and Dawn. After getting home and changing, I mixed the ingredients in a bucket, took The Dog and a sponge out back, and did what needed to be done.
Apparently, peroxide works on fur like it works on hair. Now The Dog has subtle blonde highlights.
-------------
Overheard in a meeting: “If you boil down the soup to the nuts and bolts...”
-------------
Sign of a planetary alignment: at the end of a recent evening advisory board meeting, the chair (not me) proposed a follow-up meeting in six months. The group rebelled, saying it was too energized by the excitement of what it was doing, and it wanted to meet sooner and more often.
Over a decade in academic administration, and I had never seen that before. The Force is strong in this one.
--------------
This week’s activities: basketball practice, music lessons, makeup trick-or-treating, lego league, PTO, swim lessons, leaf bagging. Anyone remember the argument that Americans didn’t have “social capital” anymore? We’ve got social capital coming out of our ears. Real capital, on the other hand...
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Subscriptions and Attrition
What if college got cheaper as you went along?
Because I am a Big Giant Nerd, I’ve been reviewing literature on financial aid programs in various states. Most of them are either need-based or merit-based, and they tend to fall victim to the predictable pathologies of either genre. The need-based ones can’t keep up with real need, and they’re hard to sell politically. The merit-based ones are easy to sell politically, but they tend to flow disproportionately to the most affluent. Worse, both tend to fall behind rising costs over time.
A few years ago I toyed with the idea of a graduation deposit, like a security deposit: you hand over a chunk of money when you enroll, and if/when you graduate, you get it back with interest. If you don’t graduate, you don’t get it back. While I still like the concept, it’s increasingly clear to me that it, too, would wind up being regressive. The folks who would most need the refund would be the ones least able to cough up the deposit in the first place.
Then I thought of subscriptions.
A typical magazine subscription offer will look something like this: $30 for one year, $50 for two years, and $65 for three years. The idea is to entice readers to commit for longer periods by making the marginal cost of additional years lower. If you want to go year-to-year, you can, but it costs more; by committing upfront to a longer run, you get a lower price.
And I thought, hmm.
In higher ed, we do the polar opposite. We charge by the semester or year, and each year costs more than the year before it. Then we wonder why students leave.
The magazine model comes closer to reflecting actual costs, in some ways. It costs more to recruit a new student than it does to keep a current one, for example. By the time a student is well-ensconced, use of services tends to be more routinized and less catastrophic. It’s the newbies who are the highest-maintenance.
The parallel isn’t perfect, obviously. Upper-level classes tend to be smaller than intro courses -- at least once you get past the remedial level -- so they have higher costs. But that’s really a function of attrition. If sticking around got easier, attrition might decrease, and the upper-level classes would be more fully populated (and therefore more economically sustainable).
Better, students could gradually decrease their paid work hours as they immerse themselves more deeply in a given subject. Unpaid internships and/or co-ops would be less exclusionary than they are now.
The major issue I could foresee would be transfer. If a four-year college adopted this model, it would basically ship its entire freshman class to nearby community colleges. The savvy students would load up on cheap cc credits, then transfer to the newly-affordable third and fourth years. The obvious way around that would be to treat funding for community colleges and state four-year colleges as a single system, and to put the funding where it needs to go for that to work.
Which would involve putting economic value on teaching.
The loss-leader model works well when the issue is attracting people in the first place. That’s not the problem that most of higher ed currently faces. Given the ever-growing wage gap between the college-educated and the high-school educated, I don’t foresee a huge dropoff in overall national demand anytime soon. (Regional dropoffs are another story.) The issue at this point isn’t generating demand or creating access; it’s turning prospective dropouts into prospective graduates. Our issue isn’t recruitment, really; it’s retention.
I’m pretty sure that an idea this big and hairy has some perfectly awful unintended consequences, but I’m not sure what they are just yet. Wise and worldly readers, what say you? What would happen if college got cheaper as you went along?
Because I am a Big Giant Nerd, I’ve been reviewing literature on financial aid programs in various states. Most of them are either need-based or merit-based, and they tend to fall victim to the predictable pathologies of either genre. The need-based ones can’t keep up with real need, and they’re hard to sell politically. The merit-based ones are easy to sell politically, but they tend to flow disproportionately to the most affluent. Worse, both tend to fall behind rising costs over time.
A few years ago I toyed with the idea of a graduation deposit, like a security deposit: you hand over a chunk of money when you enroll, and if/when you graduate, you get it back with interest. If you don’t graduate, you don’t get it back. While I still like the concept, it’s increasingly clear to me that it, too, would wind up being regressive. The folks who would most need the refund would be the ones least able to cough up the deposit in the first place.
Then I thought of subscriptions.
A typical magazine subscription offer will look something like this: $30 for one year, $50 for two years, and $65 for three years. The idea is to entice readers to commit for longer periods by making the marginal cost of additional years lower. If you want to go year-to-year, you can, but it costs more; by committing upfront to a longer run, you get a lower price.
And I thought, hmm.
In higher ed, we do the polar opposite. We charge by the semester or year, and each year costs more than the year before it. Then we wonder why students leave.
The magazine model comes closer to reflecting actual costs, in some ways. It costs more to recruit a new student than it does to keep a current one, for example. By the time a student is well-ensconced, use of services tends to be more routinized and less catastrophic. It’s the newbies who are the highest-maintenance.
The parallel isn’t perfect, obviously. Upper-level classes tend to be smaller than intro courses -- at least once you get past the remedial level -- so they have higher costs. But that’s really a function of attrition. If sticking around got easier, attrition might decrease, and the upper-level classes would be more fully populated (and therefore more economically sustainable).
Better, students could gradually decrease their paid work hours as they immerse themselves more deeply in a given subject. Unpaid internships and/or co-ops would be less exclusionary than they are now.
The major issue I could foresee would be transfer. If a four-year college adopted this model, it would basically ship its entire freshman class to nearby community colleges. The savvy students would load up on cheap cc credits, then transfer to the newly-affordable third and fourth years. The obvious way around that would be to treat funding for community colleges and state four-year colleges as a single system, and to put the funding where it needs to go for that to work.
Which would involve putting economic value on teaching.
The loss-leader model works well when the issue is attracting people in the first place. That’s not the problem that most of higher ed currently faces. Given the ever-growing wage gap between the college-educated and the high-school educated, I don’t foresee a huge dropoff in overall national demand anytime soon. (Regional dropoffs are another story.) The issue at this point isn’t generating demand or creating access; it’s turning prospective dropouts into prospective graduates. Our issue isn’t recruitment, really; it’s retention.
I’m pretty sure that an idea this big and hairy has some perfectly awful unintended consequences, but I’m not sure what they are just yet. Wise and worldly readers, what say you? What would happen if college got cheaper as you went along?
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
The Future of For-Profits
I have a close, longtime friend who has lived the mixed blessing of getting what she has wanted, when she has wanted it. Luckily for her, she generally has good taste, but she has boxed herself into corners a few times when circumstances refused to conspire to save her from herself.
I’m thinking that the last couple of years are conspiring to save for-profit higher ed from itself.
Having worked in both the for-profit and community college worlds, I’ve been arguing for years that the right move for the for-profits is to go upscale. Apparently, they’re starting to figure this out for themselves, even if only as the result of newfound Federal scrutiny.
Historically, for-profits arose in the gaps of traditional higher ed, focusing primarily on the fields that traditional colleges either ignored or neglected. That made some sense at the time. But since then, the non-profits have greatly expanded their coverage, and the for-profits have greatly expanded their offerings to chase enrollments; at this point, the programmatic overlap between the sectors is substantial. Some for-profits have even earned regional accreditation (and others, horrifyingly enough, have bought it.)
Now that they’re offering many of the same courses of study as community colleges and the midtier state colleges of the world, the for-profits are finding it difficult to compete. For a while, many of them managed by taking all manner of ethical liberties with financial aid packaging and deceptive recruiting; the Feds, rightly, have made that more difficult.
They’ll never be able to compete on cost. Community and state colleges are subsidized and, just as importantly, untaxed; for-profits are taxed and unsubsidized. (Proponents of public higher ed rightly note that the subsidies aren’t what they once were, but they often fail to note that the tax exemptions remain.) Yes, for-profits can minimize the taxation issue with online offerings -- property taxes don’t apply to cyberspace -- but the publics can go online, too.
The way to compete is on value, as opposed to price. This is where the for-profits can escape the ethical and legal issues they’ve caused for themselves, set up a lucrative niche, and even expand.
That would actually mirror the way that privatization works in most other industries. Most of the time, “public” offerings are considered less desirable than private ones. Public housing, public transportation, and public schools are generally -- with exceptions, yes, but generally -- considered inferior to their private counterparts. I don’t see any obvious reason that for-profit higher ed couldn’t try the same strategy.
Granted, it would have a hard time competing on academic prestige, at least initially. But by combining programmatic focus with a year-round schedule and concierge-level staffing in career services, it could offer a pretty compelling value proposition. And by being selective, it could screen out the high-default populations and avoid the ethical traps into which the sector as a whole tends to fall. It’s one thing to object to boiler-room sales tactics and shoddy curricula; it’s quite another to object to specialization and good service.
In fact, a high end proprietary could become known for its high academic standards. If it could truthfully market its grads to employers as being among the best in a given industry, it would have a legitimate selling point for prospective students.
The ethics of it all are debatable, but to the extent that they actually chose to compete on quality, I’d argue that the rest of the industry would have to step up. Bottom-feeding is insane when you’re competing with institutions with built-in cost advantages, and you can only run on the boiler room model for so long. The way up is the way out. The for-profits are being forced to figure this out; the winners will be the ones who lean into the change.
I’m thinking that the last couple of years are conspiring to save for-profit higher ed from itself.
Having worked in both the for-profit and community college worlds, I’ve been arguing for years that the right move for the for-profits is to go upscale. Apparently, they’re starting to figure this out for themselves, even if only as the result of newfound Federal scrutiny.
Historically, for-profits arose in the gaps of traditional higher ed, focusing primarily on the fields that traditional colleges either ignored or neglected. That made some sense at the time. But since then, the non-profits have greatly expanded their coverage, and the for-profits have greatly expanded their offerings to chase enrollments; at this point, the programmatic overlap between the sectors is substantial. Some for-profits have even earned regional accreditation (and others, horrifyingly enough, have bought it.)
Now that they’re offering many of the same courses of study as community colleges and the midtier state colleges of the world, the for-profits are finding it difficult to compete. For a while, many of them managed by taking all manner of ethical liberties with financial aid packaging and deceptive recruiting; the Feds, rightly, have made that more difficult.
They’ll never be able to compete on cost. Community and state colleges are subsidized and, just as importantly, untaxed; for-profits are taxed and unsubsidized. (Proponents of public higher ed rightly note that the subsidies aren’t what they once were, but they often fail to note that the tax exemptions remain.) Yes, for-profits can minimize the taxation issue with online offerings -- property taxes don’t apply to cyberspace -- but the publics can go online, too.
The way to compete is on value, as opposed to price. This is where the for-profits can escape the ethical and legal issues they’ve caused for themselves, set up a lucrative niche, and even expand.
That would actually mirror the way that privatization works in most other industries. Most of the time, “public” offerings are considered less desirable than private ones. Public housing, public transportation, and public schools are generally -- with exceptions, yes, but generally -- considered inferior to their private counterparts. I don’t see any obvious reason that for-profit higher ed couldn’t try the same strategy.
Granted, it would have a hard time competing on academic prestige, at least initially. But by combining programmatic focus with a year-round schedule and concierge-level staffing in career services, it could offer a pretty compelling value proposition. And by being selective, it could screen out the high-default populations and avoid the ethical traps into which the sector as a whole tends to fall. It’s one thing to object to boiler-room sales tactics and shoddy curricula; it’s quite another to object to specialization and good service.
In fact, a high end proprietary could become known for its high academic standards. If it could truthfully market its grads to employers as being among the best in a given industry, it would have a legitimate selling point for prospective students.
The ethics of it all are debatable, but to the extent that they actually chose to compete on quality, I’d argue that the rest of the industry would have to step up. Bottom-feeding is insane when you’re competing with institutions with built-in cost advantages, and you can only run on the boiler room model for so long. The way up is the way out. The for-profits are being forced to figure this out; the winners will be the ones who lean into the change.
Monday, November 14, 2011
Ask the Administrator: Starting a Faculty Senate
A returning correspondent writes:
This is good news, and a great question. I don’t have a worked-out general theory of faculty senates, but I’ll offer some thoughts and ask my wise and worldly readers to contribute theirs.
The first question I’d have is context. Is this a response to a particular event or crisis, or is it long-germinating? Is there already a larger “shared governance” structure, or has the college been run pretty much from the top down? If there is a larger structure, how would the faculty senate fit into it? If there isn’t, what jurisdiction would the senate claim?
Getting the jurisdictional boundaries right will matter tremendously. Generally speaking, senates are ‘advisory’ to college presidents. In the case of a college senate, they could advise on any number of things, ranging from curricular proposals to campus smoking bans to the location and structure of the graduation ceremony. However, if you have collective bargaining, the turf of the union(s) and the turf of the senate can’t overlap. That means that the senate can’t deal with salary or job issues, and the union(s) can’t deal with curricular issues.
If you have a faculty senate, as opposed to a college senate, its jurisdiction is narrower still. A faculty senate could still appropriately deal with curriculum, for example, but would have no special say over a campuswide smoking policy, since that would also affect staff. And it couldn’t deal with salary or staffing issues, since those are contractual.
That said, I’ve found value in the faculty-only deliberative body my campus established a few years ago. (Here it’s parallel to the general shared governance structure. Where the all-college body reports to the president, the faculty group reports to the academic vp.) The most valuable moments in it have come through conversations that faculty have with other faculty, in which they sometimes discover that ideas that make perfect sense from the perspective of, say, the history department would be disastrous for the chemistry department. Those conversations actually move substantive discussion forward, because at that point, the history department can’t just blame The Administration for being bullheaded. It has to address some very real concerns that it simply hadn’t considered. (In that case, the question involved the academic calendar and how to compensate for Monday holidays. A solution that made perfect sense for classroom-based courses would have wreaked havoc with the lab sciences.)
If the goal of the faculty senate proposal you’re dealing with is to address staffing levels and/or working conditions, it’s the wrong vehicle; you need a union for that. If the goal is to work on proposals that affect the entire campus, it’s the wrong vehicle; you need something that includes staff and, presumably, students. But if it’s to address specifically academic issues, it makes sense, and it’s probably a good idea to include adjuncts. Given that the adjuncts are central to the delivery of the academic programs, it’s reasonable to include them in those discussions.
If the college really doesn’t have a shared governance structure in any meaningful way, and this is the first foray into those waters, then the primary concern isn’t so much overlap as not shooting yourself in the foot. Careful attention to jurisdictional boundaries, and some upfront discussion of civility and the rules of the road, could help prevent the kind of crash-and-burn that discredits the idea for a decade. If the senate gets taken over by hotheads, it will quickly reduce itself to irrelevance. Cast your net wide, and recruit people known for being grownups. If the senate can gain credibility, it can gain influence.
Good luck!
Wise and worldly readers, what would you add (or correct)? Anyone who has been involved in the recent creation of a faculty senate, what do you know now that you wish you knew then?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Our FT faculty are exploring the creating of a Faculty Senate and allowing adjuncts to participate. Actually, I'm the token adjunct allowed to participate -- on the "proposal writing team". This is just the proposal that I'm allowed to work on, so far.
Any thoughts on Faculty Senates in general? Purposes? Pitfalls? Examples to study? Roles of Adjuncts?
This is good news, and a great question. I don’t have a worked-out general theory of faculty senates, but I’ll offer some thoughts and ask my wise and worldly readers to contribute theirs.
The first question I’d have is context. Is this a response to a particular event or crisis, or is it long-germinating? Is there already a larger “shared governance” structure, or has the college been run pretty much from the top down? If there is a larger structure, how would the faculty senate fit into it? If there isn’t, what jurisdiction would the senate claim?
Getting the jurisdictional boundaries right will matter tremendously. Generally speaking, senates are ‘advisory’ to college presidents. In the case of a college senate, they could advise on any number of things, ranging from curricular proposals to campus smoking bans to the location and structure of the graduation ceremony. However, if you have collective bargaining, the turf of the union(s) and the turf of the senate can’t overlap. That means that the senate can’t deal with salary or job issues, and the union(s) can’t deal with curricular issues.
If you have a faculty senate, as opposed to a college senate, its jurisdiction is narrower still. A faculty senate could still appropriately deal with curriculum, for example, but would have no special say over a campuswide smoking policy, since that would also affect staff. And it couldn’t deal with salary or staffing issues, since those are contractual.
That said, I’ve found value in the faculty-only deliberative body my campus established a few years ago. (Here it’s parallel to the general shared governance structure. Where the all-college body reports to the president, the faculty group reports to the academic vp.) The most valuable moments in it have come through conversations that faculty have with other faculty, in which they sometimes discover that ideas that make perfect sense from the perspective of, say, the history department would be disastrous for the chemistry department. Those conversations actually move substantive discussion forward, because at that point, the history department can’t just blame The Administration for being bullheaded. It has to address some very real concerns that it simply hadn’t considered. (In that case, the question involved the academic calendar and how to compensate for Monday holidays. A solution that made perfect sense for classroom-based courses would have wreaked havoc with the lab sciences.)
If the goal of the faculty senate proposal you’re dealing with is to address staffing levels and/or working conditions, it’s the wrong vehicle; you need a union for that. If the goal is to work on proposals that affect the entire campus, it’s the wrong vehicle; you need something that includes staff and, presumably, students. But if it’s to address specifically academic issues, it makes sense, and it’s probably a good idea to include adjuncts. Given that the adjuncts are central to the delivery of the academic programs, it’s reasonable to include them in those discussions.
If the college really doesn’t have a shared governance structure in any meaningful way, and this is the first foray into those waters, then the primary concern isn’t so much overlap as not shooting yourself in the foot. Careful attention to jurisdictional boundaries, and some upfront discussion of civility and the rules of the road, could help prevent the kind of crash-and-burn that discredits the idea for a decade. If the senate gets taken over by hotheads, it will quickly reduce itself to irrelevance. Cast your net wide, and recruit people known for being grownups. If the senate can gain credibility, it can gain influence.
Good luck!
Wise and worldly readers, what would you add (or correct)? Anyone who has been involved in the recent creation of a faculty senate, what do you know now that you wish you knew then?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Friday, November 11, 2011
Friday Fragments
At dinner last night, TW saw a ladybug crawling on the wall. I was drafted to catch it and set it loose outside, but it fell to the floor and scurried under the rug. As I sat back down, I broke into song, to the tune of “Ladies’ Night.”
Oh it’s a ladybug
and it’s in the rug
Oh it’s a ladybug
Oh, what a bug
(lower) Oh, what a bug...
(pause)
The Boy (deadpan): That was unnecessary.
----------
A window into my world: let’s say you have a proposal for x dollars to increase the available hours for tutoring in the tutoring center, another proposal for x dollars to add supplemental instructors to some new courses, and yet another proposal for x dollars for the library. And you have 1x dollars to spend. On what basis do you make the decision?
This is where “evidence-based” or “data-driven” decisions are tough. I don’t know how to measure the bang for the buck of a few more tutors as opposed to more coverage at the reference desk as opposed to some more supplemental instructors. There’s no obvious value-added metric. And when the funding available is enough to do some but not all, then you have to base the decision on something.
On what basis would you make the call?
-----------
Note to Zooey Deschanel: there’s such a thing as too much mugging. I’m just sayin’.
-----------
Note to my fellow bloggers: the Penn State scandal is the kind of thing that brings out the worst in many bloggers. While some of the larger issues are clear -- most notably around the dangers of excessive inbreeding and length of service -- many of the particulars are still murky. It may be worth getting some clarity before writing things that won’t help.
-----------
At dinner last night, TB and TG drew up a crossword puzzle. TG did an “across” with six letters, and the clue was “tonight I’m gonna get …” The answer was “funky,” spelled “funccy.”
Bless her, that was how she thought that sentence ended. And well it should. Even if they don’t like my rendition of the ladybug song...
Oh it’s a ladybug
and it’s in the rug
Oh it’s a ladybug
Oh, what a bug
(lower) Oh, what a bug...
(pause)
The Boy (deadpan): That was unnecessary.
----------
A window into my world: let’s say you have a proposal for x dollars to increase the available hours for tutoring in the tutoring center, another proposal for x dollars to add supplemental instructors to some new courses, and yet another proposal for x dollars for the library. And you have 1x dollars to spend. On what basis do you make the decision?
This is where “evidence-based” or “data-driven” decisions are tough. I don’t know how to measure the bang for the buck of a few more tutors as opposed to more coverage at the reference desk as opposed to some more supplemental instructors. There’s no obvious value-added metric. And when the funding available is enough to do some but not all, then you have to base the decision on something.
On what basis would you make the call?
-----------
Note to Zooey Deschanel: there’s such a thing as too much mugging. I’m just sayin’.
-----------
Note to my fellow bloggers: the Penn State scandal is the kind of thing that brings out the worst in many bloggers. While some of the larger issues are clear -- most notably around the dangers of excessive inbreeding and length of service -- many of the particulars are still murky. It may be worth getting some clarity before writing things that won’t help.
-----------
At dinner last night, TB and TG drew up a crossword puzzle. TG did an “across” with six letters, and the clue was “tonight I’m gonna get …” The answer was “funky,” spelled “funccy.”
Bless her, that was how she thought that sentence ended. And well it should. Even if they don’t like my rendition of the ladybug song...
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Ask the Administrator: Professional Development for a New Dean
A new correspondent writes with a seemingly simple question:
I like this question.
First, some context. Typically, academic deans at community colleges don’t have a primary focus on fundraising. That’s different at many research universities, where deans are judged largely on their skills at raising money. So I’ll specify that I’m referring here to community colleges.
Unlike many mature industries, higher ed generally doesn’t do much to train administrators. Worse, much of the culture holds administration in a sort of low-level contempt. (Benjamin Ginsberg’s The Fall of the Faculty is a pretty unfiltered example.) That makes it difficult to have candid conversations on campus about the dilemmas you’ll face. It’s disappointing, but try not to take it personally.
For present purposes, I’ll divide opportunities into the external and the internal.
Starting with the external, my personal Bible has been C.K. Gunsalus’ invaluable The Academic Administrator’s Survival Guide. It’s specific, concrete, thoughtful, readable, and spot-on. It isn’t specific to community colleges, but most of the content works perfectly well in this setting.
Conferences can be hit-or-miss. I’ve had pretty good luck with the League for Innovation in the Community College, which is held annually in the Spring. The American Association of Community Colleges also has a Spring conference, though to be candid, that one tends to be a bit stuffier and less helpful. (That’s the one where presentations frequently start with “back in ‘92, when I assumed my first presidency...”) The AAC&U has been weirdly obtuse about community colleges over the years, which I consider a missed opportunity. Given community college funding levels, you’ll need to be selective about your travel, so I’d recommend starting with the League.
Oddly, the blogosphere remains fairly sparse. I started this blog partially out of frustration that it didn’t otherwise exist; since then, it’s still kind of an outlier. There’s plenty of discussion of administration in the academic blogosphere, but it’s usually from disgruntled faculty painting all deans as variations on Snidely Whiplash or Dr. Evil. Reality-based discussions have been few and far between. I’ve found it terribly helpful to crowdsource solutions to some of the dilemmas I face, and honestly, I’d welcome the company.
Internal resources are often discounted when we talk about professional development, but they shouldn’t be. You just have to be intentional in how you approach them.
As a newbie, you have a short-term license to ask obvious and/or stupid questions. Use it. For the next few months, you’ll get a free pass when you ask the questions to which everyone thinks they know the answers. That can be helpful, since you’ll probably find that some of the assumed answers are, in fact, wrong. People generally don’t like looking stupid, and academics are especially sensitive to that, so it’s not unusual for folks to go on indefinitely without asking for clarity, even when they really don’t know what’s happening. For the next few months, ask away. Not only will you pick up all kinds of things, but you’ll also bring some much-desired clarity to everyone else in the room.
If your college has a faculty union -- or, like many colleges, multiple unions for different employee classifications -- then you’ll need to spend some quality time with the contract(s). If you’re in a nonunion setting, I’d advise doing something similar with the employee handbook. I was surprised at how many of the initial questions I got started with “what’s the procedure for...?” When you hit ambiguities, contradictions, or passages that simply defy understanding, ask around. A little time spent upfront can save a whole lot of time in grievances or litigation later.
If your college doesn’t have a forum specific to faculty, in which faculty can discuss matters of concern to them, start one. Attend regularly, and listen far more than you talk. It won’t always be fun, but you’ll learn quite a bit about how the college looks from different angles, and you’ll send a message by your actions that you’re actually concerned and paying attention. That matters.
Depending on location, your state or region may have regular meetings of your counterparts from neighboring colleges. I’ve found that particularly helpful, since my state has some, uh, let’s go with ‘quirks.’ Emails, phone calls, and regular meetings with my counterparts from elsewhere in the state have helped me get historical perspective and some useful how-to’s. If you’re willing to ask questions and actually listen to answers, you can pick up quite a bit.
Finally, respect the fact that you’re human. There will be people on campus who will set out to dehumanize you; I’ve seen good people fall into that trap. Do what you need to do to stay sane. Have a life outside of the college, and keep good boundaries. (For example, be aware that if you’re socializing with people who report to you, they still report to you; any interaction is necessarily layered at best. Old friends are crucial.) My kids have been incredibly helpful in that, since they neither know nor care what I did all day; to them, tonight’s Lego League meeting is far more important than anything that went on on campus. And in an important way, they’re right.
Good luck, and congratulations on the new job! I hope you’re able to wear it well.
Wise and worldly readers, do you have any suggestions for a new dean?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
What professional development do you recommend for a newly appointed community college Dean of Instruction?
I like this question.
First, some context. Typically, academic deans at community colleges don’t have a primary focus on fundraising. That’s different at many research universities, where deans are judged largely on their skills at raising money. So I’ll specify that I’m referring here to community colleges.
Unlike many mature industries, higher ed generally doesn’t do much to train administrators. Worse, much of the culture holds administration in a sort of low-level contempt. (Benjamin Ginsberg’s The Fall of the Faculty is a pretty unfiltered example.) That makes it difficult to have candid conversations on campus about the dilemmas you’ll face. It’s disappointing, but try not to take it personally.
For present purposes, I’ll divide opportunities into the external and the internal.
Starting with the external, my personal Bible has been C.K. Gunsalus’ invaluable The Academic Administrator’s Survival Guide. It’s specific, concrete, thoughtful, readable, and spot-on. It isn’t specific to community colleges, but most of the content works perfectly well in this setting.
Conferences can be hit-or-miss. I’ve had pretty good luck with the League for Innovation in the Community College, which is held annually in the Spring. The American Association of Community Colleges also has a Spring conference, though to be candid, that one tends to be a bit stuffier and less helpful. (That’s the one where presentations frequently start with “back in ‘92, when I assumed my first presidency...”) The AAC&U has been weirdly obtuse about community colleges over the years, which I consider a missed opportunity. Given community college funding levels, you’ll need to be selective about your travel, so I’d recommend starting with the League.
Oddly, the blogosphere remains fairly sparse. I started this blog partially out of frustration that it didn’t otherwise exist; since then, it’s still kind of an outlier. There’s plenty of discussion of administration in the academic blogosphere, but it’s usually from disgruntled faculty painting all deans as variations on Snidely Whiplash or Dr. Evil. Reality-based discussions have been few and far between. I’ve found it terribly helpful to crowdsource solutions to some of the dilemmas I face, and honestly, I’d welcome the company.
Internal resources are often discounted when we talk about professional development, but they shouldn’t be. You just have to be intentional in how you approach them.
As a newbie, you have a short-term license to ask obvious and/or stupid questions. Use it. For the next few months, you’ll get a free pass when you ask the questions to which everyone thinks they know the answers. That can be helpful, since you’ll probably find that some of the assumed answers are, in fact, wrong. People generally don’t like looking stupid, and academics are especially sensitive to that, so it’s not unusual for folks to go on indefinitely without asking for clarity, even when they really don’t know what’s happening. For the next few months, ask away. Not only will you pick up all kinds of things, but you’ll also bring some much-desired clarity to everyone else in the room.
If your college has a faculty union -- or, like many colleges, multiple unions for different employee classifications -- then you’ll need to spend some quality time with the contract(s). If you’re in a nonunion setting, I’d advise doing something similar with the employee handbook. I was surprised at how many of the initial questions I got started with “what’s the procedure for...?” When you hit ambiguities, contradictions, or passages that simply defy understanding, ask around. A little time spent upfront can save a whole lot of time in grievances or litigation later.
If your college doesn’t have a forum specific to faculty, in which faculty can discuss matters of concern to them, start one. Attend regularly, and listen far more than you talk. It won’t always be fun, but you’ll learn quite a bit about how the college looks from different angles, and you’ll send a message by your actions that you’re actually concerned and paying attention. That matters.
Depending on location, your state or region may have regular meetings of your counterparts from neighboring colleges. I’ve found that particularly helpful, since my state has some, uh, let’s go with ‘quirks.’ Emails, phone calls, and regular meetings with my counterparts from elsewhere in the state have helped me get historical perspective and some useful how-to’s. If you’re willing to ask questions and actually listen to answers, you can pick up quite a bit.
Finally, respect the fact that you’re human. There will be people on campus who will set out to dehumanize you; I’ve seen good people fall into that trap. Do what you need to do to stay sane. Have a life outside of the college, and keep good boundaries. (For example, be aware that if you’re socializing with people who report to you, they still report to you; any interaction is necessarily layered at best. Old friends are crucial.) My kids have been incredibly helpful in that, since they neither know nor care what I did all day; to them, tonight’s Lego League meeting is far more important than anything that went on on campus. And in an important way, they’re right.
Good luck, and congratulations on the new job! I hope you’re able to wear it well.
Wise and worldly readers, do you have any suggestions for a new dean?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Wednesday, November 09, 2011
Academic Advising
Quick, what’s the most vexing aspect of academic advising at a community college?
a. turnover of students and adjunct faculty
b. the range of preferences that different transfer-destination schools have for electives
c. the confusion of advising with scheduling
d. shifting and/or inchoate student preferences
e. all of the above
Yup, it’s e. And it makes a conceptually-simple process maddeningly difficult.
In a perfect world, students who had clear ambitions would have sustained, focused conversations with professors who would help them understand how to get there from here. And that actually happens to a remarkable extent.
But circumstances conspire to make things complicated.
Sheer numbers are a major issue. Good advising is relatively personalized, but it’s hard to do that with a fifteen-credit teaching load and near-record enrollments. State finances being what they are, our adjunct percentage is higher than I’d like, and there’s always some churn in the ranks. That churn makes it harder for students to latch on to a particular professor. Some adjuncts stick around for years, of course, and become go-to people for particular programs, but with the pay being what it is, any stability we get there is really a bonus.
Students bring issues of their own, of course. Every time a student changes majors, a new round of advising is necessary, and sometimes a new advisor. Given the number of students who show up with no clear idea of what they want to study, some churn is built into the system. Since it takes time to build rapport and trust with an advisor, each switch carries a cost. That’s pretty much a cost of doing business, of course, but it does make it harder to provide continuity and a comfort level for the student.
The one that bugs me the most is the surprising variation of preferences among transfer-destination schools. This branch of the state college system wants its social work majors to take these two history courses, but that branch of the same system wants them to take two different ones. Multiply that by many more colleges and many more programs, and just keeping track of it all is a challenge. (Then add the times that the destination schools change their minds -- usually as the result of a key personnel change -- and don’t bother to tell us. Even good people get stabby when that happens.) A perfectly well-meaning advisor could inadvertently steer a student towards a course that won’t transfer, just because some new department chair at compass direction state has a different preference.
We try to work around that with articulation agreements, with varying degrees of success. But there’s a limit to the predictability you can build into a system with so many moving parts, each with its own imperatives. That’s especially true with private colleges, since they can pretty much do what they want. And even articulation agreements need regular maintenance as curricula evolve.
The tough nut to crack on campus is the conflation of advising with scheduling. It’s an easy trap to fall into. “History of Etruscan Snoods would suit you.” “But that’s full!” “Okay, let’s see what else there is...” Before long, you’re spending much more time looking for open seats than actually discussing substance. That’s especially true later in the registration periods, when the most popular timeslots and classes are already taken.
I really don’t know how to solve this one. With finite seats, it seems like a fact of life. But I’ve been doing this long enough to know that this is when some of the regrettable decisions get made.
Wise and worldly readers -- especially those at community colleges -- have you found or seen a reasonably elegant, sustainable, affordable way to do academic advisement well, given all of these moving parts?
a. turnover of students and adjunct faculty
b. the range of preferences that different transfer-destination schools have for electives
c. the confusion of advising with scheduling
d. shifting and/or inchoate student preferences
e. all of the above
Yup, it’s e. And it makes a conceptually-simple process maddeningly difficult.
In a perfect world, students who had clear ambitions would have sustained, focused conversations with professors who would help them understand how to get there from here. And that actually happens to a remarkable extent.
But circumstances conspire to make things complicated.
Sheer numbers are a major issue. Good advising is relatively personalized, but it’s hard to do that with a fifteen-credit teaching load and near-record enrollments. State finances being what they are, our adjunct percentage is higher than I’d like, and there’s always some churn in the ranks. That churn makes it harder for students to latch on to a particular professor. Some adjuncts stick around for years, of course, and become go-to people for particular programs, but with the pay being what it is, any stability we get there is really a bonus.
Students bring issues of their own, of course. Every time a student changes majors, a new round of advising is necessary, and sometimes a new advisor. Given the number of students who show up with no clear idea of what they want to study, some churn is built into the system. Since it takes time to build rapport and trust with an advisor, each switch carries a cost. That’s pretty much a cost of doing business, of course, but it does make it harder to provide continuity and a comfort level for the student.
The one that bugs me the most is the surprising variation of preferences among transfer-destination schools. This branch of the state college system wants its social work majors to take these two history courses, but that branch of the same system wants them to take two different ones. Multiply that by many more colleges and many more programs, and just keeping track of it all is a challenge. (Then add the times that the destination schools change their minds -- usually as the result of a key personnel change -- and don’t bother to tell us. Even good people get stabby when that happens.) A perfectly well-meaning advisor could inadvertently steer a student towards a course that won’t transfer, just because some new department chair at compass direction state has a different preference.
We try to work around that with articulation agreements, with varying degrees of success. But there’s a limit to the predictability you can build into a system with so many moving parts, each with its own imperatives. That’s especially true with private colleges, since they can pretty much do what they want. And even articulation agreements need regular maintenance as curricula evolve.
The tough nut to crack on campus is the conflation of advising with scheduling. It’s an easy trap to fall into. “History of Etruscan Snoods would suit you.” “But that’s full!” “Okay, let’s see what else there is...” Before long, you’re spending much more time looking for open seats than actually discussing substance. That’s especially true later in the registration periods, when the most popular timeslots and classes are already taken.
I really don’t know how to solve this one. With finite seats, it seems like a fact of life. But I’ve been doing this long enough to know that this is when some of the regrettable decisions get made.
Wise and worldly readers -- especially those at community colleges -- have you found or seen a reasonably elegant, sustainable, affordable way to do academic advisement well, given all of these moving parts?
Tuesday, November 08, 2011
Support and Context
“I don’t really miss God, but I sure miss Santa Claus.” -- Hole
What does it mean to “support” a program?
I’m running into that question headfirst these days, since it’s time to review proposed budgets for next year. And I’m inundated with proposals for increases of 40 percent, 80 percent, and more. This in a context of flat-to-sliding enrollments and flat state aid.
I don’t think any of the requests are ridiculous, on their own terms. In many cases, they make perfect sense if you look at the one department in isolation. Even where they’re a little ambitious, that’s all they are; I haven’t seen any that I would call absurd or corrupt.
What struck me -- other than the magnitude of some of the numbers -- was the different sense of context.
From a department’s perspective, the relevant context is temporal. “We’ve been waiting for this position for years. We’ve been very patient. Now it’s time to support us.” (Or, more annoyingly, “we fought for this position.”) In some cases, there are references to positions lost years ago, with the implication that they’re somehow still there. The story told is of patience exhausted, combined with a not-subtle threat of political hell if their request is denied.
From my perspective, the relevant context is spatial -- I have to look across the departments. Given flat funding overall, a massive increase for department A can only come at the expense of a massive cut for department B. (The administration already gave at the office; we reorganized to reduce the number of deans first.) The temporal argument -- “we’ve been waiting” -- does nothing to change that. And I’ve literally never -- not once -- seen a budgetary proposal from a department that suggested another department to cut to pay for it. That has never happened, and I’m not holding my breath.
When I deny many of the requests, which the laws of mathematics dictate I have to, some of the departments will accuse me of not “supporting” them. And that’s where I take issue.
Support can refer to money, obviously. At some level, it has to. But it can also refer to truth-telling and empowerment.
Aristotle noted that the opposite of a friend is not an enemy, but a flatterer. That’s because both friends and enemies can bring out your strengths -- what he called “virtues” -- but a flatterer brings out your weaknesses. By telling you what you want to hear, rather than what you need to hear, the flatterer leaves you exposed to your own shortcomings.
In that light, I’m concerned that giving false hope and hollow promises is worse than saying no.
The problem is that some people like being flattered.
I’m hoping to shift the dynamic over time from “how much more can we get?” to “what are we actually trying to do?” I agree that more money would be great, and I vote accordingly, but any clearsighted analysis would have to conclude that waiting for the money fairy is a losing strategy. In the absence of the money fairy, we can stamp our feet and call each other names, or we can come to grips with the reality of the situation. In the second approach lies hope for actual progress.
And that’s where my definition of support comes in. I’m trying to nudge the campus culture. My theory is that we’ll make better decisions for the college as a whole if constraints are acknowledged as real, rather than simply ascribed to the sinister motives of individual administrators. Support, in this case, means support for coming to grips with reality. The default argument that “we’re already doing what’s best, so just write us ever-larger checks” just isn’t sustainable anymore.
Success would look something like this: noticing that it can’t do everything it wants to do with the budget it has, but also noticing that there aren’t exactly spare bags of cash lying around, a department proposes a small study of innovations taking place at comparable colleges. It suggests an experiment or two to try to improve student outcomes. And the support it looks for is reassurance that if the first (or second) pilot project doesn’t work, it won’t be punished; failure will be safe. Experimentation will be rewarded, and some failed experimentation will be acknowledged as a cost of doing business.
Whether or not the money fairy will eventually return when the Great Recession finally fades away, we’ll be in better shape if we’ve spent the intervening time honing our strengths. It’s a more sustainable strategy over time, and, in my mind, a more ethical one. But first we have to get past the idea that saying no to a 40 percent increase means that The Administration doesn’t support the faculty. Sometimes support means still being there after the fantasy of Santa has gone away.
What does it mean to “support” a program?
I’m running into that question headfirst these days, since it’s time to review proposed budgets for next year. And I’m inundated with proposals for increases of 40 percent, 80 percent, and more. This in a context of flat-to-sliding enrollments and flat state aid.
I don’t think any of the requests are ridiculous, on their own terms. In many cases, they make perfect sense if you look at the one department in isolation. Even where they’re a little ambitious, that’s all they are; I haven’t seen any that I would call absurd or corrupt.
What struck me -- other than the magnitude of some of the numbers -- was the different sense of context.
From a department’s perspective, the relevant context is temporal. “We’ve been waiting for this position for years. We’ve been very patient. Now it’s time to support us.” (Or, more annoyingly, “we fought for this position.”) In some cases, there are references to positions lost years ago, with the implication that they’re somehow still there. The story told is of patience exhausted, combined with a not-subtle threat of political hell if their request is denied.
From my perspective, the relevant context is spatial -- I have to look across the departments. Given flat funding overall, a massive increase for department A can only come at the expense of a massive cut for department B. (The administration already gave at the office; we reorganized to reduce the number of deans first.) The temporal argument -- “we’ve been waiting” -- does nothing to change that. And I’ve literally never -- not once -- seen a budgetary proposal from a department that suggested another department to cut to pay for it. That has never happened, and I’m not holding my breath.
When I deny many of the requests, which the laws of mathematics dictate I have to, some of the departments will accuse me of not “supporting” them. And that’s where I take issue.
Support can refer to money, obviously. At some level, it has to. But it can also refer to truth-telling and empowerment.
Aristotle noted that the opposite of a friend is not an enemy, but a flatterer. That’s because both friends and enemies can bring out your strengths -- what he called “virtues” -- but a flatterer brings out your weaknesses. By telling you what you want to hear, rather than what you need to hear, the flatterer leaves you exposed to your own shortcomings.
In that light, I’m concerned that giving false hope and hollow promises is worse than saying no.
The problem is that some people like being flattered.
I’m hoping to shift the dynamic over time from “how much more can we get?” to “what are we actually trying to do?” I agree that more money would be great, and I vote accordingly, but any clearsighted analysis would have to conclude that waiting for the money fairy is a losing strategy. In the absence of the money fairy, we can stamp our feet and call each other names, or we can come to grips with the reality of the situation. In the second approach lies hope for actual progress.
And that’s where my definition of support comes in. I’m trying to nudge the campus culture. My theory is that we’ll make better decisions for the college as a whole if constraints are acknowledged as real, rather than simply ascribed to the sinister motives of individual administrators. Support, in this case, means support for coming to grips with reality. The default argument that “we’re already doing what’s best, so just write us ever-larger checks” just isn’t sustainable anymore.
Success would look something like this: noticing that it can’t do everything it wants to do with the budget it has, but also noticing that there aren’t exactly spare bags of cash lying around, a department proposes a small study of innovations taking place at comparable colleges. It suggests an experiment or two to try to improve student outcomes. And the support it looks for is reassurance that if the first (or second) pilot project doesn’t work, it won’t be punished; failure will be safe. Experimentation will be rewarded, and some failed experimentation will be acknowledged as a cost of doing business.
Whether or not the money fairy will eventually return when the Great Recession finally fades away, we’ll be in better shape if we’ve spent the intervening time honing our strengths. It’s a more sustainable strategy over time, and, in my mind, a more ethical one. But first we have to get past the idea that saying no to a 40 percent increase means that The Administration doesn’t support the faculty. Sometimes support means still being there after the fantasy of Santa has gone away.
Monday, November 07, 2011
Grading and Choosing
You know that feeling when you’ve suspected something for a long time but couldn’t prove it, and then someone proves it for you?
This article had that effect. It’s about how student attrition in STEM majors is actually higher in more selective institutions than in less selective ones. It brought back vivid memories of my days at Snooty Liberal Arts College, and even of late high school.
The article is based on a study by the College Board that suggests that grading is substantially harder in STEM majors than in most others, so students who don’t immediately hit it out of the park in STEM classes tend to gravitate towards the more-welcoming liberal arts and business classes. But that tends to be less true at less selective colleges, oddly enough.
I like it a lot because it explains a number of disconnected impressions I’ve picked up over the years. For example, in my student days, I recall noticing that even though the STEM classes (we didn’t use that term then, but still...) were “harder,” they also had much flatter grade distributions. It was easier to pass a history class than a chemistry class, but easier to get an A in chemistry than in history. The history classes had bell-ish curves; the STEM classes had flat lines. They were easier to fail and easier to ace; the “squishier” subjects were the land of B’s and C’s. Even in my wheelhouse, I was the master of the A-minus; full A’s were basically unicorns. In physics and chemistry, the top students finished with GPA’s above 4.
So saying one is “easier” is kind of misleading. It’s easier to pass, yes, but harder to really nail.
(One underappreciated variable, I think, is the level of consensus in the field. As far as I know, there’s remarkably little controversy in the scientific community -- I’m open to correction on this -- about the material that gets taught in the first couple years of the undergraduate major. That’s certainly not true in the humanities and social sciences. When consensus is missing, it’s harder to definitively nail a subject.)
Students noticed. Those who didn’t much care what their degree was in, as long as it had the SLAC name on it, clustered into English or history. (SLAC didn’t have a business major.) Those who cared strongly about their own “squishy” specialties had the mixed blessing of a bunch of classmates who had taken the courses as second choices. The idea -- accepted as gospel by all -- was that you were either a science person or you were not. If you were, you stuck with it and did great; if you weren’t, you did something else.
(This was made explicit in Organic Chemistry, which was pitched unapologetically as the pre-med weedout course. Difficulty wasn’t a bug; it was a feature. The idea was to winnow the herd, and to leave only the truly worthy still standing.)
In the cc world as I’ve experienced it, that assumption isn’t widely held. Here the idea is that the community (broadly defined) needs more STEM majors, and it’s our job to make that possible. Rather than weeding out, the goal is to bring people in.
If you start with that assumption, then of course your approach will change.
It isn’t just about easier grading. It’s about the purpose of a given class, and therefore the approach to it.
If I were appointed guru of American higher ed, one of the edicts I would issue would be that theory should be taught inductively. It rarely is, which, I’m convinced, is why so many undergrads spit the bit. (This is probably why I bombed geometry, but never mind that.)
Theory is easiest to learn when there’s a context for it. When you know why you need to know something, you’re much more likely to get it. That’s partly a function of motivation, but it’s also a trick of memory. A theorem derived on a board by someone with his back to you is far less memorable than something that comes with the force of “eureka!,” solving a problem with which you’re engaged.
At its base, I suspect, theory is based on pattern recognition. And pattern recognition is easiest when you’ve seen a whole bunch of examples. If you can get a student to the point at which a theory comes as a solution, rather than as an edict, you’ve won. And if you can get students to test theories against each other, you’re raising the cognitive level of what they’re doing and engaging them much more fully.
Instead, science is too often taught from theory to application. Worse, in the selective settings, it’s taught with a clear goal of thinning the herd. At least at the community college level, we don’t consider ourselves to have failed if a significant portion of a chemistry class does well. At this level, we actually pay attention to the teaching itself. That’s not to deny that there’s much more work to be done -- no argument there -- but at least we’re attacking the right problem. The goal shouldn’t be to keep science pure by keeping the great unwashed out of the lab; it should be to keep science accessible by forcing it to be true to its radically democratic roots. Data are no respecters of rank.
If we’d like to direct more of our bright young minds into STEM fields -- a goal I find absolutely worthy -- the elites may actually have something to learn from the community colleges. Hey, Harvard: you’re welcome.
This article had that effect. It’s about how student attrition in STEM majors is actually higher in more selective institutions than in less selective ones. It brought back vivid memories of my days at Snooty Liberal Arts College, and even of late high school.
The article is based on a study by the College Board that suggests that grading is substantially harder in STEM majors than in most others, so students who don’t immediately hit it out of the park in STEM classes tend to gravitate towards the more-welcoming liberal arts and business classes. But that tends to be less true at less selective colleges, oddly enough.
I like it a lot because it explains a number of disconnected impressions I’ve picked up over the years. For example, in my student days, I recall noticing that even though the STEM classes (we didn’t use that term then, but still...) were “harder,” they also had much flatter grade distributions. It was easier to pass a history class than a chemistry class, but easier to get an A in chemistry than in history. The history classes had bell-ish curves; the STEM classes had flat lines. They were easier to fail and easier to ace; the “squishier” subjects were the land of B’s and C’s. Even in my wheelhouse, I was the master of the A-minus; full A’s were basically unicorns. In physics and chemistry, the top students finished with GPA’s above 4.
So saying one is “easier” is kind of misleading. It’s easier to pass, yes, but harder to really nail.
(One underappreciated variable, I think, is the level of consensus in the field. As far as I know, there’s remarkably little controversy in the scientific community -- I’m open to correction on this -- about the material that gets taught in the first couple years of the undergraduate major. That’s certainly not true in the humanities and social sciences. When consensus is missing, it’s harder to definitively nail a subject.)
Students noticed. Those who didn’t much care what their degree was in, as long as it had the SLAC name on it, clustered into English or history. (SLAC didn’t have a business major.) Those who cared strongly about their own “squishy” specialties had the mixed blessing of a bunch of classmates who had taken the courses as second choices. The idea -- accepted as gospel by all -- was that you were either a science person or you were not. If you were, you stuck with it and did great; if you weren’t, you did something else.
(This was made explicit in Organic Chemistry, which was pitched unapologetically as the pre-med weedout course. Difficulty wasn’t a bug; it was a feature. The idea was to winnow the herd, and to leave only the truly worthy still standing.)
In the cc world as I’ve experienced it, that assumption isn’t widely held. Here the idea is that the community (broadly defined) needs more STEM majors, and it’s our job to make that possible. Rather than weeding out, the goal is to bring people in.
If you start with that assumption, then of course your approach will change.
It isn’t just about easier grading. It’s about the purpose of a given class, and therefore the approach to it.
If I were appointed guru of American higher ed, one of the edicts I would issue would be that theory should be taught inductively. It rarely is, which, I’m convinced, is why so many undergrads spit the bit. (This is probably why I bombed geometry, but never mind that.)
Theory is easiest to learn when there’s a context for it. When you know why you need to know something, you’re much more likely to get it. That’s partly a function of motivation, but it’s also a trick of memory. A theorem derived on a board by someone with his back to you is far less memorable than something that comes with the force of “eureka!,” solving a problem with which you’re engaged.
At its base, I suspect, theory is based on pattern recognition. And pattern recognition is easiest when you’ve seen a whole bunch of examples. If you can get a student to the point at which a theory comes as a solution, rather than as an edict, you’ve won. And if you can get students to test theories against each other, you’re raising the cognitive level of what they’re doing and engaging them much more fully.
Instead, science is too often taught from theory to application. Worse, in the selective settings, it’s taught with a clear goal of thinning the herd. At least at the community college level, we don’t consider ourselves to have failed if a significant portion of a chemistry class does well. At this level, we actually pay attention to the teaching itself. That’s not to deny that there’s much more work to be done -- no argument there -- but at least we’re attacking the right problem. The goal shouldn’t be to keep science pure by keeping the great unwashed out of the lab; it should be to keep science accessible by forcing it to be true to its radically democratic roots. Data are no respecters of rank.
If we’d like to direct more of our bright young minds into STEM fields -- a goal I find absolutely worthy -- the elites may actually have something to learn from the community colleges. Hey, Harvard: you’re welcome.
Friday, November 04, 2011
Notes from an Emergency
We were lucky. We were only without power and heat for five days.
You'd be surprised just how quickly a house can lose heat. By the second day, we were in blankets from about five o'clock on. The fireplace rendered one room almost okay, but that meant that the four of us were stuck together in a dark and still-cold room every night with absolutely nothing to do. It was too dark to read, and all of the electronic gadgetry ran out of juice by the second day.
For the benefit of those who haven't been through something like that, and before I forget, a few notes to share.
-- For lack of other options, we got our information from local radio. On the second night, I remember noticing that the radio took on an apocalyptic tone. The patter was mostly about gas stations that actually had gas available – in a blackout, there's no electricity to work the pumps – and occasionally about ATM's that actually worked. Of course, with everyone getting the same tips at the same time, the effort was largely self-defeating. I drove past a gas line about 15 cars deep at one point. It felt like science fiction.
-- People with wells and septic systems were really in a tough spot. For them, no electricity means no water.
-- Even in a major blackout, there will be weird, isolated oases of power. In our town, the one oasis was a single block with one takeout pizza place. The guy who owned it said the phone never stopped ringing.
-- If you live in a town that does robo-calls for public emergencies, make sure they have your cell number. We get our phone service with our cable and internet, so when they went, it went. This rendered the robo-calls entirely useless.
-- The Girl was livid about not being able to go trick-or-treating. With lights out and wires down everywhere – some of which could be live – it just wasn't safe. But try explaining that to a seven-year-old with a cool costume and visions of fun size Snickers.
-- This weekend really made vivid the limits of the cloud, and of connectivity generally. It’s great, as long as you have electricity and a connection. Without those, you have nothing. Stores took only cash, since they couldn’t process credit card transactions. A family friend who has a rotary phone (!) was more connected than we were. If we’re serious about moving more systems online, we’d better make darn sure we have a reliable grid. Without some old technical holdovers, we would have been completely helpless.
-- The bright side, to the extent there was one, was plenty of sleep for the first couple of nights. But even that hit diminishing returns; after a couple of days of going to bed early, there just wasn’t much sleep to be had.
-- On campus, most of the talk upon returning was of who had power, and who didn’t yet. The sheer randomness of it was striking; you really couldn’t discern a pattern. Even within a given town, houses one street apart might be two days apart in the restoration of power. There’s something humbling in that -- you couldn’t buy your way out of chaos -- and also something democratic. But I prefer my democracy with indoor heat, thank you very much.
-- I usually think of online courses as immune to snow days, and they usually are. But when the power lines are down, so are the online courses. (Even when the servers come up, many of the instructors still lacked power or connectivity at home.) And I had to chuckle at the initiative of the student who called in to ask if he still had to do his homework for his online class when the campus was closed.
-- Make sure your phone trees are up-to-date, and have both home and cell numbers. When our phone finally got reconnected, we had 25 (!) voicemails, most of them relatively urgent and several days old. There was just no way of knowing.
We’re back, finally. No word yet on alternative trick-or-treating dates, but The Girl won’t let it slide. It’ll take more than a freakishly powerful storm to knock her down. She will have her Snickers, and that will be that.
You'd be surprised just how quickly a house can lose heat. By the second day, we were in blankets from about five o'clock on. The fireplace rendered one room almost okay, but that meant that the four of us were stuck together in a dark and still-cold room every night with absolutely nothing to do. It was too dark to read, and all of the electronic gadgetry ran out of juice by the second day.
For the benefit of those who haven't been through something like that, and before I forget, a few notes to share.
-- For lack of other options, we got our information from local radio. On the second night, I remember noticing that the radio took on an apocalyptic tone. The patter was mostly about gas stations that actually had gas available – in a blackout, there's no electricity to work the pumps – and occasionally about ATM's that actually worked. Of course, with everyone getting the same tips at the same time, the effort was largely self-defeating. I drove past a gas line about 15 cars deep at one point. It felt like science fiction.
-- People with wells and septic systems were really in a tough spot. For them, no electricity means no water.
-- Even in a major blackout, there will be weird, isolated oases of power. In our town, the one oasis was a single block with one takeout pizza place. The guy who owned it said the phone never stopped ringing.
-- If you live in a town that does robo-calls for public emergencies, make sure they have your cell number. We get our phone service with our cable and internet, so when they went, it went. This rendered the robo-calls entirely useless.
-- The Girl was livid about not being able to go trick-or-treating. With lights out and wires down everywhere – some of which could be live – it just wasn't safe. But try explaining that to a seven-year-old with a cool costume and visions of fun size Snickers.
-- This weekend really made vivid the limits of the cloud, and of connectivity generally. It’s great, as long as you have electricity and a connection. Without those, you have nothing. Stores took only cash, since they couldn’t process credit card transactions. A family friend who has a rotary phone (!) was more connected than we were. If we’re serious about moving more systems online, we’d better make darn sure we have a reliable grid. Without some old technical holdovers, we would have been completely helpless.
-- The bright side, to the extent there was one, was plenty of sleep for the first couple of nights. But even that hit diminishing returns; after a couple of days of going to bed early, there just wasn’t much sleep to be had.
-- On campus, most of the talk upon returning was of who had power, and who didn’t yet. The sheer randomness of it was striking; you really couldn’t discern a pattern. Even within a given town, houses one street apart might be two days apart in the restoration of power. There’s something humbling in that -- you couldn’t buy your way out of chaos -- and also something democratic. But I prefer my democracy with indoor heat, thank you very much.
-- I usually think of online courses as immune to snow days, and they usually are. But when the power lines are down, so are the online courses. (Even when the servers come up, many of the instructors still lacked power or connectivity at home.) And I had to chuckle at the initiative of the student who called in to ask if he still had to do his homework for his online class when the campus was closed.
-- Make sure your phone trees are up-to-date, and have both home and cell numbers. When our phone finally got reconnected, we had 25 (!) voicemails, most of them relatively urgent and several days old. There was just no way of knowing.
We’re back, finally. No word yet on alternative trick-or-treating dates, but The Girl won’t let it slide. It’ll take more than a freakishly powerful storm to knock her down. She will have her Snickers, and that will be that.
Thursday, November 03, 2011
Trading Papers
(Sorry for the unscheduled down time. Mother Nature decided to knock out electricity for five days, just for the sheer fun of it. I wrote this just before the power went out.)
What if Professors Smith and Jones swapped papers for a semester? I’d be intrigued to hear from anyone who has actually tried this.
Anyone who has taught courses in which grading relies on judgment knows the delicate balance of both encouraging and judging students. You try to set the student up to succeed, but the result is dreadful; now you have to be the bearer of bad news. Since students don’t always understand the basis of the judgment, especially in the heat of embarrassment, it’s easy for them to default to some not-very-flattering assumptions about the instructor. Suddenly, you’ve got a psychologically fraught situation that does not lend itself to good teaching.
So a thought: what if Professors Smith and Jones traded papers for a semester? Obviously, I’m assuming that they’re teaching different sections of the same course, with enrollments close enough to equal that their workloads would not meaningfully change. If I grade your 25 papers and you grade my 25 papers, the workload adjustment is pretty much a wash.
The upside, I think, would be that the role of ‘coach’ and the role of ‘judge’ would be clearly separated. Now it’s not “try to psych out the teacher;” it’s “you and me against the guy behind the curtain.” With the roles more clearly demarcated, the instructor would be free to position herself as the student’s ally, which, in fact, she is.
It could conceivably make for more consistent grading, too. It’s easier to be objective when you don’t know the student. (At least, it’s less likely that personal likes and dislikes will enter into the judgment unconsciously.)
The major objections I’ve heard have been twofold, but neither strikes me as terribly compelling.
The first is the task of coordination. Yes, there would have to be some planning and communication between the instructors to keep things aligned. But this strikes me as the kind of thing that gets less true as you do it more. The first time out, I’d guess that the costs of coordination would be non-trivial, but by the fourth or fifth, they should be pretty minor.
The second is that the instructor would not get as complete a picture of student performance as she would if she read the papers herself.
There’s some truth to that, though it doesn’t strike me as a deal-breaker. I’m thinking that in a class with, say, four papers over the course of the semester, maybe the swap occurs in the final two. The professor gets to prep the students for the objective, outside judge. You’d still get a sense of who was who, but having that outside person come in later could help with the psychological dynamics of the class. That would be especially true if the grades on the later papers counted more heavily.
As with so many back-of-the-envelope ideas, the devil is in the details. So I’d like to hear from any of my wise and worldly readers who have actually tried this or something like it. Did it help? Did it harm? Is there a trick to getting it right?
What if Professors Smith and Jones swapped papers for a semester? I’d be intrigued to hear from anyone who has actually tried this.
Anyone who has taught courses in which grading relies on judgment knows the delicate balance of both encouraging and judging students. You try to set the student up to succeed, but the result is dreadful; now you have to be the bearer of bad news. Since students don’t always understand the basis of the judgment, especially in the heat of embarrassment, it’s easy for them to default to some not-very-flattering assumptions about the instructor. Suddenly, you’ve got a psychologically fraught situation that does not lend itself to good teaching.
So a thought: what if Professors Smith and Jones traded papers for a semester? Obviously, I’m assuming that they’re teaching different sections of the same course, with enrollments close enough to equal that their workloads would not meaningfully change. If I grade your 25 papers and you grade my 25 papers, the workload adjustment is pretty much a wash.
The upside, I think, would be that the role of ‘coach’ and the role of ‘judge’ would be clearly separated. Now it’s not “try to psych out the teacher;” it’s “you and me against the guy behind the curtain.” With the roles more clearly demarcated, the instructor would be free to position herself as the student’s ally, which, in fact, she is.
It could conceivably make for more consistent grading, too. It’s easier to be objective when you don’t know the student. (At least, it’s less likely that personal likes and dislikes will enter into the judgment unconsciously.)
The major objections I’ve heard have been twofold, but neither strikes me as terribly compelling.
The first is the task of coordination. Yes, there would have to be some planning and communication between the instructors to keep things aligned. But this strikes me as the kind of thing that gets less true as you do it more. The first time out, I’d guess that the costs of coordination would be non-trivial, but by the fourth or fifth, they should be pretty minor.
The second is that the instructor would not get as complete a picture of student performance as she would if she read the papers herself.
There’s some truth to that, though it doesn’t strike me as a deal-breaker. I’m thinking that in a class with, say, four papers over the course of the semester, maybe the swap occurs in the final two. The professor gets to prep the students for the objective, outside judge. You’d still get a sense of who was who, but having that outside person come in later could help with the psychological dynamics of the class. That would be especially true if the grades on the later papers counted more heavily.
As with so many back-of-the-envelope ideas, the devil is in the details. So I’d like to hear from any of my wise and worldly readers who have actually tried this or something like it. Did it help? Did it harm? Is there a trick to getting it right?
Friday, October 28, 2011
Friday Fragments
Last weekend we went pumpkin-picking, and then stopped for lunch. I ordered a Blue Moon with my burger, which, to my surprise, came with a slice of orange on the glass. I removed it without really looking at it, assuming it was lemon. TW asked why I removed the orange. I responded that I thought is was a lemon. Thinking she was helping, The Girl chimed in brightly, “suck it!”
----------
A couple of weeks ago I had a conversation with someone who works at Yale. He discussed this project and that project, all of which struck me as unthinkably expensive and ambitious. When he asked me about my world, I mentioned flat state funding, enrollment declining from its spike, and unfunded mandates. He looked puzzled and asked why we don’t just draw down more from our endowment. I mentioned that we don’t have an endowment, and that we aren’t allowed to use philanthropic money for operations. He looked at me like I had just grown antlers.
----------
This year’s Halloween costumes are a lego brick (TB) and a washing machine (TG). The kids chose them, and TW has spent the better part of a week building them. The washing machine is a front-loader, so there’s a window in the front with some socks in it. TW picked up some spare dials at a local appliance shop and put them on the back, and printed out an “energy star” insignia for the front. There’s also a bottle of Tide attached to the top, which is harder than you would think.
The kids chose the costumes themselves, and I couldn’t be prouder. TB’s involvement with Lego League is accelerating, so the lego brick makes perfect sense. And the fact that The Girl is completely indifferent to the usual fairies/princesses/tiaras strikes me as a moral victory. My favorite is still the veterinarian outfit, followed by the astronaut, but washing machine has to win for creativity. Her friend will go as a ninja, so they should make quite a pair. If you answer the door on Monday night to find a smiling washing machine and a cherubic ninja, you’ll know why.
----------
My modest proposal for immigration reform: give post-secondary degrees recognition as green cards. I honestly don’t understand what’s gained by making it hard to employ the best and brightest from around the world. If we aren’t going to fund our own public higher education system, we should at least be willing to import the educated from elsewhere. If the next Sergey Brin winds up in Canada or India instead of the U.S., we’ll only have ourselves to blame.
----------
Spotify is proving weirdly addictive. (It’s a streaming music service that lets you be incredibly specific.) This is kinda mortifying, but true: a couple of weeks ago, missing my Dad, I decided to re-listen to some of the music he loved when I was a kid. Juice Newton, The Carpenters, the Fifth Dimension, and the queen of his record collection, Anne Murray. Hearing “Snowbird” again brought a lot back.
Heaven knows it’s not my taste, but I can’t deny that it was part of my life back then. This won’t win me any hipster street cred, but for me, Anne Murray is “roots” music.
I don’t know which memories of me will mortify my kids when they get older, but I know some will. Beyond a certain point, they never really stop telling you to suck it. You can only hope that at some level, they don’t mean it.
----------
A couple of weeks ago I had a conversation with someone who works at Yale. He discussed this project and that project, all of which struck me as unthinkably expensive and ambitious. When he asked me about my world, I mentioned flat state funding, enrollment declining from its spike, and unfunded mandates. He looked puzzled and asked why we don’t just draw down more from our endowment. I mentioned that we don’t have an endowment, and that we aren’t allowed to use philanthropic money for operations. He looked at me like I had just grown antlers.
----------
This year’s Halloween costumes are a lego brick (TB) and a washing machine (TG). The kids chose them, and TW has spent the better part of a week building them. The washing machine is a front-loader, so there’s a window in the front with some socks in it. TW picked up some spare dials at a local appliance shop and put them on the back, and printed out an “energy star” insignia for the front. There’s also a bottle of Tide attached to the top, which is harder than you would think.
The kids chose the costumes themselves, and I couldn’t be prouder. TB’s involvement with Lego League is accelerating, so the lego brick makes perfect sense. And the fact that The Girl is completely indifferent to the usual fairies/princesses/tiaras strikes me as a moral victory. My favorite is still the veterinarian outfit, followed by the astronaut, but washing machine has to win for creativity. Her friend will go as a ninja, so they should make quite a pair. If you answer the door on Monday night to find a smiling washing machine and a cherubic ninja, you’ll know why.
----------
My modest proposal for immigration reform: give post-secondary degrees recognition as green cards. I honestly don’t understand what’s gained by making it hard to employ the best and brightest from around the world. If we aren’t going to fund our own public higher education system, we should at least be willing to import the educated from elsewhere. If the next Sergey Brin winds up in Canada or India instead of the U.S., we’ll only have ourselves to blame.
----------
Spotify is proving weirdly addictive. (It’s a streaming music service that lets you be incredibly specific.) This is kinda mortifying, but true: a couple of weeks ago, missing my Dad, I decided to re-listen to some of the music he loved when I was a kid. Juice Newton, The Carpenters, the Fifth Dimension, and the queen of his record collection, Anne Murray. Hearing “Snowbird” again brought a lot back.
Heaven knows it’s not my taste, but I can’t deny that it was part of my life back then. This won’t win me any hipster street cred, but for me, Anne Murray is “roots” music.
I don’t know which memories of me will mortify my kids when they get older, but I know some will. Beyond a certain point, they never really stop telling you to suck it. You can only hope that at some level, they don’t mean it.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
What Else Is To Be Done?
Lenin famously asked “what is to be done?” The relevant question now is slightly different.
I’ve taken heart in the Occupy Wall Street movement, even with its inherent vagueness. One of the clear messages coming from it is resentment of the pincer movement of high student loan debt and a lousy job market. If you’re in your twenties, fresh out of college with a five or six figure loan burden and no immediate prospect of a job that will pay enough to spare you from moving in with your parents, you have a right to feel betrayed. You followed the rules and still came up short.
(Generation X academics lived that movie back in the 90’s, but without the broader cultural support. In this, if in nothing else, we academics actually were ahead of the culture!)
My grandfather lived a life that’s almost unimaginable now. He dropped out of the ninth grade to go to work. He worked as a tree trimmer, then got a job as a lineman for the local electric utility. The job was unionized, and it paid enough (and offered good enough benefits) that he was able to own his own home in a decent neighborhood and send both of his kids -- including his daughter, my Mom -- to college. When he retired in his early sixties, he collected a pension and Social Security, and lived a secure existence right up to the end.
He respected education, and made sure his kids got it, but he didn’t have much himself. The world at the time didn’t require it. He was able to live a perfectly fine working-middle class life without it.
That option doesn’t really exist anymore. The kids who once would have signed up for unionized factory work out of high school can’t get it now, and in the rare cases when they can, they get a permanently lower “tier” of salary as a penalty for being born late.
Yes, there are exceptions, but the overall trend is clear: salaries for people without college degrees have taken beatings over the last few decades. Today’s high school grads are basically correct when they identify college as a de facto necessity. The path my grandfather followed is closed.
Since college is a de facto necessity, the students have taken on whatever debt they’re needed to to cover the cost. And between public disinvestment, Baumol’s cost disease, poor market signaling, and the various “arms races” for prestige, the level of debt required has increased far more quickly than the possibility of paying it back.
In their shoes, I’d be protesting, too. They’re really caught between the dog and the fire hydrant. Skip college, and absent family money or a remarkable bit of luck, you’re pretty much consigned to the economic margins. Go to college, and you have to take on debt that presumes a job market that doesn’t exist anymore. Anya Kamenetz can give all the TED talks she wants about DIY education; for the typical 18 year old, the relevant question about college is “what else is to be done?” If not college, then what?
I’m a huge supporter of many reforms within higher ed to make it more sustainable over time, and of a series of economic and political reforms that I think would make the economy both more equitable and more stable. But I hope that as the dialogue unfolds, we don’t make the mistake of missing the economic coercion underlying so much of the anxiety. Not everyone wants to go to college, and it shouldn’t be an ironclad prerequisite for a middle-class life. I’m all in favor of access, but at some level the access should be voluntary. Let colleges be colleges, which involves a certain amount of cost and, inevitably, telling some students that they just aren’t cutting it.
If we have a reasonable answer to “what else is there,” then it’s much easier to hold the line on academic standards. But if we’re the only game in town, then the economic pressures the students and graduates rightly resent will inevitably drag colleges down, too. A serious answer to the Occupy folk involves far more than some student loan relief, as welcome as that is. It involves ensuring that there are other ways to make a living. Colleges were never meant to be the personnel offices for the entire economy, and they’re straining under the task. The answer is not to keep watering college down until it’s cheap and ubiquitous. The answer is to make it genuinely voluntary. Until then, we’ll just keep shouting at each other as the bills pile up.
I’ve taken heart in the Occupy Wall Street movement, even with its inherent vagueness. One of the clear messages coming from it is resentment of the pincer movement of high student loan debt and a lousy job market. If you’re in your twenties, fresh out of college with a five or six figure loan burden and no immediate prospect of a job that will pay enough to spare you from moving in with your parents, you have a right to feel betrayed. You followed the rules and still came up short.
(Generation X academics lived that movie back in the 90’s, but without the broader cultural support. In this, if in nothing else, we academics actually were ahead of the culture!)
My grandfather lived a life that’s almost unimaginable now. He dropped out of the ninth grade to go to work. He worked as a tree trimmer, then got a job as a lineman for the local electric utility. The job was unionized, and it paid enough (and offered good enough benefits) that he was able to own his own home in a decent neighborhood and send both of his kids -- including his daughter, my Mom -- to college. When he retired in his early sixties, he collected a pension and Social Security, and lived a secure existence right up to the end.
He respected education, and made sure his kids got it, but he didn’t have much himself. The world at the time didn’t require it. He was able to live a perfectly fine working-middle class life without it.
That option doesn’t really exist anymore. The kids who once would have signed up for unionized factory work out of high school can’t get it now, and in the rare cases when they can, they get a permanently lower “tier” of salary as a penalty for being born late.
Yes, there are exceptions, but the overall trend is clear: salaries for people without college degrees have taken beatings over the last few decades. Today’s high school grads are basically correct when they identify college as a de facto necessity. The path my grandfather followed is closed.
Since college is a de facto necessity, the students have taken on whatever debt they’re needed to to cover the cost. And between public disinvestment, Baumol’s cost disease, poor market signaling, and the various “arms races” for prestige, the level of debt required has increased far more quickly than the possibility of paying it back.
In their shoes, I’d be protesting, too. They’re really caught between the dog and the fire hydrant. Skip college, and absent family money or a remarkable bit of luck, you’re pretty much consigned to the economic margins. Go to college, and you have to take on debt that presumes a job market that doesn’t exist anymore. Anya Kamenetz can give all the TED talks she wants about DIY education; for the typical 18 year old, the relevant question about college is “what else is to be done?” If not college, then what?
I’m a huge supporter of many reforms within higher ed to make it more sustainable over time, and of a series of economic and political reforms that I think would make the economy both more equitable and more stable. But I hope that as the dialogue unfolds, we don’t make the mistake of missing the economic coercion underlying so much of the anxiety. Not everyone wants to go to college, and it shouldn’t be an ironclad prerequisite for a middle-class life. I’m all in favor of access, but at some level the access should be voluntary. Let colleges be colleges, which involves a certain amount of cost and, inevitably, telling some students that they just aren’t cutting it.
If we have a reasonable answer to “what else is there,” then it’s much easier to hold the line on academic standards. But if we’re the only game in town, then the economic pressures the students and graduates rightly resent will inevitably drag colleges down, too. A serious answer to the Occupy folk involves far more than some student loan relief, as welcome as that is. It involves ensuring that there are other ways to make a living. Colleges were never meant to be the personnel offices for the entire economy, and they’re straining under the task. The answer is not to keep watering college down until it’s cheap and ubiquitous. The answer is to make it genuinely voluntary. Until then, we’ll just keep shouting at each other as the bills pile up.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
The Tortoise and the Hare
As a veteran of many an industry advisory board meeting, this report really didn’t surprise me. A study from the National Bureau for Economic Research says that the income gains from specifically vocational majors (as opposed to liberal arts majors) peter out relatively early in life. By midlife, the liberal arts majors are actually out-earning the vocational majors, on average. The most dramatic fades occur in apprenticeship programs.
As always, “on average” covers all manner of sins. But still.
Data, intuition, and personal experience and observation all suggest that the liberal arts folks do better once they get past that first real job. The trick is getting that first real job. The vocational folks do much better at getting that first real job, but often have trouble moving up from it. (That’s especially true when the one job for which they’re specifically trained gets automated or outsourced.) The vocational degrees are the proverbial hares, quick out of the gate but fading over time; the liberal arts tortoises make a weak first impression, but have a way of winning over time.
The short term/long term distinction gets lost in much of the popular discussion, especially since the Great Recession started.
Entry-level positions tend to be relatively task-specific, and to reward some pretty low-level skills. But they also allow the opportunity to show higher-level skills over time. It’s one thing to be a good helpdesk technician with the ability to diagnose and fix computer problems; it’s quite another to know how to work with angry users, to prioritize tasks, and to handle difficult colleagues. Those skills won’t get you the first job, but they’ll get you promoted.
The challenge for the liberal arts folks is finding that first real job, where the softer skills get the chance to shine.
This report about STEM skills across the curriculum made the same point from the other direction. Instead of pitting STEM against the humanities, it made the obvious point that even the humanists and social scientists would benefit from the ability to think quantitatively. Can you unpack the assumptions behind the charts and graphs? Can you see through the bad assumption, and figure out the missed opportunity? People who can do that add real value, whether in business or in scholarship.
Over the last decade-plus of industry advisory boards, I’ve consistently heard the same thing: employers need employees who can communicate, think on their feet, and handle change. Smart people can be (and often will be) trained in the specifics on the job. Those who grasp the big picture are the ones who will move up. Judging by employer feedback, that big picture ability is surprisingly rare.
Maybe it’s me, but I find the convergence of these stories an occasion for hope. In different ways, they’re saying the same thing: don’t mistake the short term for the long term. Yes, heading back to Mom’s basement after graduation can be profoundly depressing. I’m fairly certain I would have chewed my own leg off to avoid that trap. But for those who’ve learned how to communicate well, to handle ambiguity, and to see around corners, the breaks will come.
In the meantime, we’ll just keep right on teaching the liberal arts tortoises, and doing it without apology. To the economy at large, I’ll just say, you’re welcome.
As always, “on average” covers all manner of sins. But still.
Data, intuition, and personal experience and observation all suggest that the liberal arts folks do better once they get past that first real job. The trick is getting that first real job. The vocational folks do much better at getting that first real job, but often have trouble moving up from it. (That’s especially true when the one job for which they’re specifically trained gets automated or outsourced.) The vocational degrees are the proverbial hares, quick out of the gate but fading over time; the liberal arts tortoises make a weak first impression, but have a way of winning over time.
The short term/long term distinction gets lost in much of the popular discussion, especially since the Great Recession started.
Entry-level positions tend to be relatively task-specific, and to reward some pretty low-level skills. But they also allow the opportunity to show higher-level skills over time. It’s one thing to be a good helpdesk technician with the ability to diagnose and fix computer problems; it’s quite another to know how to work with angry users, to prioritize tasks, and to handle difficult colleagues. Those skills won’t get you the first job, but they’ll get you promoted.
The challenge for the liberal arts folks is finding that first real job, where the softer skills get the chance to shine.
This report about STEM skills across the curriculum made the same point from the other direction. Instead of pitting STEM against the humanities, it made the obvious point that even the humanists and social scientists would benefit from the ability to think quantitatively. Can you unpack the assumptions behind the charts and graphs? Can you see through the bad assumption, and figure out the missed opportunity? People who can do that add real value, whether in business or in scholarship.
Over the last decade-plus of industry advisory boards, I’ve consistently heard the same thing: employers need employees who can communicate, think on their feet, and handle change. Smart people can be (and often will be) trained in the specifics on the job. Those who grasp the big picture are the ones who will move up. Judging by employer feedback, that big picture ability is surprisingly rare.
Maybe it’s me, but I find the convergence of these stories an occasion for hope. In different ways, they’re saying the same thing: don’t mistake the short term for the long term. Yes, heading back to Mom’s basement after graduation can be profoundly depressing. I’m fairly certain I would have chewed my own leg off to avoid that trap. But for those who’ve learned how to communicate well, to handle ambiguity, and to see around corners, the breaks will come.
In the meantime, we’ll just keep right on teaching the liberal arts tortoises, and doing it without apology. To the economy at large, I’ll just say, you’re welcome.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
The Cutting Edge May Not Be Where You Expect
Academics have a weakness for the latest cutting-edge innovations. It’s kind of what we do. And in many cases, that’s a good thing.
This week, though, I’ve seen two older ideas come back as new solutions to current issues. They’ve both been out of fashion long enough that they actually seem new, even though they’re anything but.
The first, prosaically enough, is the return of the desktop computer.
People who follow technology know that desktops are rapidly heading for the dustbin of history. They’re clunky and relatively unportable and not the least bit sexy.
But they’re also hard to steal, easy to upgrade and maintain, and relatively cheap for the amount of computing power. In other words, while they might not hold the consumer appeal they once did, they still solve some real issues for institutions.
Laptops and especially tablets can grow legs easily. Some of the measures necessary to keep them in place defeat their appeal. Tablets in particular are basically black boxes; just try upgrading the memory on your ipad. I dare you. But a big old honking desktop lends itself to internal upgrades, extending its useful life and low cost. And tethering a desktop to a desk is no big deal; it’s not meant to move around anyway.
At some distant future point when everyone has their own porta-device, the dedicated computer lab may become redundant. But we aren’t there yet, and desktops still do the job better than their newer, sexier, more expensive counterparts.
The second is even more low-tech, basic, and old. It’s the quiet study area.
Libraries (and “learning commons,” increasingly) are becoming steadily more high-tech, and more group focused. The paradigmatic cutting-edge library space now is the warren of desks with wifi where groups of students can work on projects together, using whatever device they happen to bring with them.
But as the world gets louder, I’m starting to see more demand and appreciation for the old “sit down, shut up, and study” space.
It’s easy to lose sight of this, especially at a commuter campus. We don’t have dorms, and we don’t have a sylvan quad. Space for students to just sit down and study is at a premium. We have a library, but most of the library is given over to tables at which students often engage in group study or other conversation. For a student who may not have a quiet home, quiet study space can be a scarce commodity.
Academically Adrift generated no end of discussion a few months ago, but one of its most compelling findings went mostly ignored. It reported that time spent in group study was negatively correlated with gains in critical thinking, but time spent in individual study was positively correlated with gains in critical thinking. Sometimes you just need to focus. And for all the cutting-edge innovations in instructional technology -- regular readers know that I enjoy my gadgets as much as anybody -- sometimes you just need to get back to basics: a student, a table, a lamp, a book. (Those of us who spent meaningful time in graduate reading rooms in grad school know the setting well. Once silence becomes expected, it’s almost self-enforcing.)
At better-funded institutions, this need may be so well-covered that further discussion is just redundant. But in these parts, blessed silence is a breakthrough.
Sometimes the cutting edge isn’t where you expect it to be. In these two cases at least, it’s in the past.
This week, though, I’ve seen two older ideas come back as new solutions to current issues. They’ve both been out of fashion long enough that they actually seem new, even though they’re anything but.
The first, prosaically enough, is the return of the desktop computer.
People who follow technology know that desktops are rapidly heading for the dustbin of history. They’re clunky and relatively unportable and not the least bit sexy.
But they’re also hard to steal, easy to upgrade and maintain, and relatively cheap for the amount of computing power. In other words, while they might not hold the consumer appeal they once did, they still solve some real issues for institutions.
Laptops and especially tablets can grow legs easily. Some of the measures necessary to keep them in place defeat their appeal. Tablets in particular are basically black boxes; just try upgrading the memory on your ipad. I dare you. But a big old honking desktop lends itself to internal upgrades, extending its useful life and low cost. And tethering a desktop to a desk is no big deal; it’s not meant to move around anyway.
At some distant future point when everyone has their own porta-device, the dedicated computer lab may become redundant. But we aren’t there yet, and desktops still do the job better than their newer, sexier, more expensive counterparts.
The second is even more low-tech, basic, and old. It’s the quiet study area.
Libraries (and “learning commons,” increasingly) are becoming steadily more high-tech, and more group focused. The paradigmatic cutting-edge library space now is the warren of desks with wifi where groups of students can work on projects together, using whatever device they happen to bring with them.
But as the world gets louder, I’m starting to see more demand and appreciation for the old “sit down, shut up, and study” space.
It’s easy to lose sight of this, especially at a commuter campus. We don’t have dorms, and we don’t have a sylvan quad. Space for students to just sit down and study is at a premium. We have a library, but most of the library is given over to tables at which students often engage in group study or other conversation. For a student who may not have a quiet home, quiet study space can be a scarce commodity.
Academically Adrift generated no end of discussion a few months ago, but one of its most compelling findings went mostly ignored. It reported that time spent in group study was negatively correlated with gains in critical thinking, but time spent in individual study was positively correlated with gains in critical thinking. Sometimes you just need to focus. And for all the cutting-edge innovations in instructional technology -- regular readers know that I enjoy my gadgets as much as anybody -- sometimes you just need to get back to basics: a student, a table, a lamp, a book. (Those of us who spent meaningful time in graduate reading rooms in grad school know the setting well. Once silence becomes expected, it’s almost self-enforcing.)
At better-funded institutions, this need may be so well-covered that further discussion is just redundant. But in these parts, blessed silence is a breakthrough.
Sometimes the cutting edge isn’t where you expect it to be. In these two cases at least, it’s in the past.
Monday, October 24, 2011
The Faculty-Staff Divide
A thoughtful correspondent wrote last week to express concern about what she perceived as a growing rift between faculty and professional staff on her campus.
It’s one of those issues that waxes and wanes, but never really goes away.
Professional staff can be characterized as people with graduate degrees who do non-faculty work. They could be counselors, financial aid staff, librarians, registrars, disability-services providers, IT, instructional designers, or any number of other positions, depending on the campus. Some of them may have teaching backgrounds, and some may even teach on an adjunct basis while working as staff. Their positions are usually twelve month, five-day-a-week jobs. Some campuses have a tenure system for staff, and some have tenure for some staff (librarians) and not others.
Although friction between faculty and administration gets most of the press, friction between faculty and staff can be quite real, and sometimes toxic.
In my observation, some of it comes from what Cathy Davidson calls attention blindness. We don’t notice certain things, based on our priorities at the time. If I’m focusing on how best to teach my class in two hours, I’m not thinking much about how the financial aid department works, and vice versa. Over time, it’s easy to see folks in the other roles are basically ancillary.
Different calendars are a persistent source of friction, and not just for the obvious reasons. For example, one of the most frequent areas of calendar-driven faculty-staff conflict I’ve seen has been parking. If your workday starts at 8:30 every single day, it’s hard to muster much sympathy for the professor who complains that she can’t find a space just before her 11:00 class. Conversely, if you’re the professor trying to get to class, it’s hard not to wonder just who all these people are taking up spaces.
The yearly calendar makes the problem more complex. Parking is relatively easy in the summer, since most of the faculty aren’t there. When they come back in September, the parking follies begin. That’s nobody’s fault, obviously, but some people think in terms of people rather than systems, and train their anger accordingly.
Even such basics as “how was your summer?” can be grating if you spent most of your summer in cubicle hell. I recall a professor a few years ago complaining bitterly that the summer was a wash, because he only got to spend one month on Cape Cod. It took real restraint not to unleash a snark attack of historic proportions. Well-meaning “welcome back” messages can have the same effect on people who never left.
I’ve also seen a persistent confusion among some faculty between “shared governance” and “faculty governance.” They don’t see the distinction, though to the staff, the distinction is loud and clear. Pronouncements like “the faculty are the college” are a direct slap in the face to staff.
Then, of course, there’s status. Most staffers don’t go by titles, even if they have academic credentials at the same level as faculty. (There’s nothing weird about addressing someone as Professor Smith, but it would be weird to call her Librarian Smith.) The culture of faculty, in which they regard themselves largely as independent contractors on loan from their disciplines, implies a different locus of loyalty than the culture of staff, who regard themselves as employees of the college. When that divided loyalty comes with lifetime job security, a staffer who has neither may grumble.
None of this is to deny that resentments can run the other way, too. Many professors who are tired of the adjunct trend look at the growth in non-faculty positions and see an unchecked resource suck. Depending on turnover rates, racial and gender demographics can sometimes be markedly different among faculty as opposed to staff, leading to resentments that have little to do with the jobs themselves. And personalities are an ever-present wild card.
I don’t know if faculty-staff tensions are getting worse, the same as they ever were, or getting better. I’m not even sure how to measure that. I hope they improve, not least because those of us who care about public higher education need to put up a united front against an increasingly difficult political climate. At some point, we need to acknowledge that divisions of labor are simply necessary.
I’d guess that the faculty-staff divide varies greatly by context. Wise and worldly readers, have you seen circumstances that make it markedly better or worse? Is there another source of conflict I’ve missed? And is there a realistic way you can imagine to make it better?
It’s one of those issues that waxes and wanes, but never really goes away.
Professional staff can be characterized as people with graduate degrees who do non-faculty work. They could be counselors, financial aid staff, librarians, registrars, disability-services providers, IT, instructional designers, or any number of other positions, depending on the campus. Some of them may have teaching backgrounds, and some may even teach on an adjunct basis while working as staff. Their positions are usually twelve month, five-day-a-week jobs. Some campuses have a tenure system for staff, and some have tenure for some staff (librarians) and not others.
Although friction between faculty and administration gets most of the press, friction between faculty and staff can be quite real, and sometimes toxic.
In my observation, some of it comes from what Cathy Davidson calls attention blindness. We don’t notice certain things, based on our priorities at the time. If I’m focusing on how best to teach my class in two hours, I’m not thinking much about how the financial aid department works, and vice versa. Over time, it’s easy to see folks in the other roles are basically ancillary.
Different calendars are a persistent source of friction, and not just for the obvious reasons. For example, one of the most frequent areas of calendar-driven faculty-staff conflict I’ve seen has been parking. If your workday starts at 8:30 every single day, it’s hard to muster much sympathy for the professor who complains that she can’t find a space just before her 11:00 class. Conversely, if you’re the professor trying to get to class, it’s hard not to wonder just who all these people are taking up spaces.
The yearly calendar makes the problem more complex. Parking is relatively easy in the summer, since most of the faculty aren’t there. When they come back in September, the parking follies begin. That’s nobody’s fault, obviously, but some people think in terms of people rather than systems, and train their anger accordingly.
Even such basics as “how was your summer?” can be grating if you spent most of your summer in cubicle hell. I recall a professor a few years ago complaining bitterly that the summer was a wash, because he only got to spend one month on Cape Cod. It took real restraint not to unleash a snark attack of historic proportions. Well-meaning “welcome back” messages can have the same effect on people who never left.
I’ve also seen a persistent confusion among some faculty between “shared governance” and “faculty governance.” They don’t see the distinction, though to the staff, the distinction is loud and clear. Pronouncements like “the faculty are the college” are a direct slap in the face to staff.
Then, of course, there’s status. Most staffers don’t go by titles, even if they have academic credentials at the same level as faculty. (There’s nothing weird about addressing someone as Professor Smith, but it would be weird to call her Librarian Smith.) The culture of faculty, in which they regard themselves largely as independent contractors on loan from their disciplines, implies a different locus of loyalty than the culture of staff, who regard themselves as employees of the college. When that divided loyalty comes with lifetime job security, a staffer who has neither may grumble.
None of this is to deny that resentments can run the other way, too. Many professors who are tired of the adjunct trend look at the growth in non-faculty positions and see an unchecked resource suck. Depending on turnover rates, racial and gender demographics can sometimes be markedly different among faculty as opposed to staff, leading to resentments that have little to do with the jobs themselves. And personalities are an ever-present wild card.
I don’t know if faculty-staff tensions are getting worse, the same as they ever were, or getting better. I’m not even sure how to measure that. I hope they improve, not least because those of us who care about public higher education need to put up a united front against an increasingly difficult political climate. At some point, we need to acknowledge that divisions of labor are simply necessary.
I’d guess that the faculty-staff divide varies greatly by context. Wise and worldly readers, have you seen circumstances that make it markedly better or worse? Is there another source of conflict I’ve missed? And is there a realistic way you can imagine to make it better?
Friday, October 21, 2011
Ask the Administrator: Know When to Hold ‘Em, Know When to Fold ‘Em
A new correspondent writes:
Context matters.
It sounds like your college has a relatively short tenure clock, which is good and bad. The good is that you don’t have to worry as long; the bad is that decisions will necessarily be based on pretty limited information. Given that the college has to live with its decision for decades to come, and that it has to base that decision on a few years that may or may not be representative, a certain hypervigilance is to be expected. It’s a predictable, if not inevitable, result of a design flaw.
“Speaking up” can mean a lot of things, and different administrations have different thresholds for how much is too much. Some will take offense at perfectly civil disagreement; others will withstand astonishing levels of contrapower harassment, and even slander, without retaliation. (I have the mixed good fortune of living in the latter.) I don’t know where your college falls on the continuum.
That said, a few pointers seem relevant.
First, pay attention to the setting. There’s a meaningful difference between disagreeing behind closed doors and rallying the troops. The former allows your interlocutor some room to move, which in theory can lead to a constructive solution. The latter doesn’t. There may be times when rallying the troops makes sense, but it should nearly never be the first move.
Second, allow for the possibility of information asymmetry. They may know something you (and other faculty) don’t. Sometimes that information can be shared, but you have to know to ask. The bane of my existence is that sometimes it can’t be shared; this is usually the case with personnel matters. It’s incredibly frustrating to sit through an angry tirade based on misinformation when you know the facts but are bound by confidentiality rules not to disclose it.
Third, don’t become the boy who cried wolf. Every campus has That Guy who has to sound off at every meeting, whether provoked or not. Sometimes That Guy actually has a valid point, but once you’re typecast, even the valid points get lost. The people whose objections carry the most weight are the ones who pick their battles. Credibility counts. Sherman Dorn has used the term “deviance credits” to capture this. In essence, you build credits over time with solid performance, and spend them when speaking out. If you go into deviance debt, your credit/credibility is destroyed. Everyone starts with some credits, and it sounds like you built some more in your first year. But if you get caught up in the white-knight fantasy, you can quickly find yourself overspent. Whether that affects your tenure bid or not, it would absolutely affect your quality of life there. You don’t want to see eyes roll when you speak.
Finally, try to get a sense,whenever you can, of the “why” behind what you find objectionable. Although faculty often believe that administrators have nearly unlimited discretion, we actually work under substantial imperatives and constraints. If my college’s accrediting agency thinks that outcomes assessment matters, then it does; yelling at me won’t change that. If my state decides to measure colleges based on graduation rates, then graduation rates matter, whether I agree or not. Attacking the wrong person may feel cathartic in the moment, but it’s ultimately counterproductive. You may need that person’s help later to construct some sort of solution, and everybody’s human.
I’d strongly advise you to find a trustworthy, experienced person at your college as a mentor. If your interest is truly in problem-solving, find someone who seems to have been effective at that, and have some frank conversations. Your concern about tenure suggests that you want to be in this for the long haul. That means you don’t have to solve everything now. Find a sustainable pace, pick your battles, and call it good. That’s all any of us can do, tenure or not.
Good luck. I hope you’re able to find a sane and sustainable balance.
Wise and worldly readers, I assume there’s a panoply of views on this; let’s please assume goodwill in the discussion.
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
I'm a new hire in my second year at a large community college in the Mid-Atlantic region. During my first year I largely kept my eyes and ears open and my mouth shut as I adjusted to a new workplace with its own culture, policies, and personnel. Tenure reviews from my committee and student evaluations were glowing, and overall, everyone seems pretty glad they hired me. During that first year and more recently I've seen a few things going on that I don't agree with or have strong opinions about. Some are issues at the district level, some at the college level, and some are within my own division. This year I've started speaking up in division meetings and in conferences, trying to offer solutions and different points of view rather than point fingers. The feedback from fellow faculty has been positive - they like that I'm speaking up, even if they don't necessarily agree with me all the time. Various members of the administration, however, have taken
notice as well and the feedback from them hasn't been as positive. I suspect they prefer the 'company guy' they saw in my first year rather than this new guy with his opinions (which on occasion are diametrically opposed to those of administration). Do you have any tips on how to navigate tenure while still maintaining my self respect? I can't abide muzzling myself for another two years, but I don't want to get pegged as a troublesome faculty member by administration and risk not getting tenure either.
Context matters.
It sounds like your college has a relatively short tenure clock, which is good and bad. The good is that you don’t have to worry as long; the bad is that decisions will necessarily be based on pretty limited information. Given that the college has to live with its decision for decades to come, and that it has to base that decision on a few years that may or may not be representative, a certain hypervigilance is to be expected. It’s a predictable, if not inevitable, result of a design flaw.
“Speaking up” can mean a lot of things, and different administrations have different thresholds for how much is too much. Some will take offense at perfectly civil disagreement; others will withstand astonishing levels of contrapower harassment, and even slander, without retaliation. (I have the mixed good fortune of living in the latter.) I don’t know where your college falls on the continuum.
That said, a few pointers seem relevant.
First, pay attention to the setting. There’s a meaningful difference between disagreeing behind closed doors and rallying the troops. The former allows your interlocutor some room to move, which in theory can lead to a constructive solution. The latter doesn’t. There may be times when rallying the troops makes sense, but it should nearly never be the first move.
Second, allow for the possibility of information asymmetry. They may know something you (and other faculty) don’t. Sometimes that information can be shared, but you have to know to ask. The bane of my existence is that sometimes it can’t be shared; this is usually the case with personnel matters. It’s incredibly frustrating to sit through an angry tirade based on misinformation when you know the facts but are bound by confidentiality rules not to disclose it.
Third, don’t become the boy who cried wolf. Every campus has That Guy who has to sound off at every meeting, whether provoked or not. Sometimes That Guy actually has a valid point, but once you’re typecast, even the valid points get lost. The people whose objections carry the most weight are the ones who pick their battles. Credibility counts. Sherman Dorn has used the term “deviance credits” to capture this. In essence, you build credits over time with solid performance, and spend them when speaking out. If you go into deviance debt, your credit/credibility is destroyed. Everyone starts with some credits, and it sounds like you built some more in your first year. But if you get caught up in the white-knight fantasy, you can quickly find yourself overspent. Whether that affects your tenure bid or not, it would absolutely affect your quality of life there. You don’t want to see eyes roll when you speak.
Finally, try to get a sense,whenever you can, of the “why” behind what you find objectionable. Although faculty often believe that administrators have nearly unlimited discretion, we actually work under substantial imperatives and constraints. If my college’s accrediting agency thinks that outcomes assessment matters, then it does; yelling at me won’t change that. If my state decides to measure colleges based on graduation rates, then graduation rates matter, whether I agree or not. Attacking the wrong person may feel cathartic in the moment, but it’s ultimately counterproductive. You may need that person’s help later to construct some sort of solution, and everybody’s human.
I’d strongly advise you to find a trustworthy, experienced person at your college as a mentor. If your interest is truly in problem-solving, find someone who seems to have been effective at that, and have some frank conversations. Your concern about tenure suggests that you want to be in this for the long haul. That means you don’t have to solve everything now. Find a sustainable pace, pick your battles, and call it good. That’s all any of us can do, tenure or not.
Good luck. I hope you’re able to find a sane and sustainable balance.
Wise and worldly readers, I assume there’s a panoply of views on this; let’s please assume goodwill in the discussion.
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Ask the Administrator: Helping, Cheating, or Marketing?
A returning correspondent writes:
Maybe it’s me, but I’ve never heard of this, and can’t imagine doing it.
My first thought is that if a student calls looking for help researching a paper, direct her to the reference desk at the library. A good reference librarian will not only steer her to useful and valid sources, but will also be conversant in the teaching of research ethics. That will give the student ethically unimpeachable help, show the student how to do her own work, and get her out of your hair without you actually refusing discussion. There’s no shame in a referral.
If you aren’t comfortable with that, but still feel the need to help the student somehow, there’s always the old “suggest a source” approach. Again, a student whose motives are entirely honorable will find it helpful, but the student looking for a free paper won’t.
I wouldn’t call the dean every 45 minutes; if a professor did that with me, I’d assume some sort of major emergency (or major dysfunction). Just make an appointment and, when it comes, explain your misgivings and ask if there’s more to the picture.
The closest analogue I can come up with in my experience is the random email application for an adjunct class. Every so often, someone will just pull my email address from the campus website and email me a letter and cv, asking for a class or two. Experience has taught me to just forward it to the relevant program, along with a noncommittal note along the lines of “as you will...” I then respond to the applicant saying, truthfully, that I’ve forwarded it along.
It’s possible that the dean was relatively indifferent to the content of your response, but was just concerned that there was one. (From a PR perspective, there’s a world of difference between a minimal response and a non-response. The former can look professional, but the latter comes off as disrespectful.) If that’s the case, then the matter is fairly trivial. Refer the student to the reference desk or a favorite source, assure the dean that you’ve answered the query, and call it good.
Yes, it’s also possible that there’s something more nefarious going on, but I prefer to save those explanations for when other explanations fail. In this case, they haven’t yet.
Good luck! I hope this turns out to be little more than concern that the email didn’t get summarily deleted.
Wise and worldly readers, have you seen anything like this? How would you handle it?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
I teach history in the major university in my area. Every year I get
3-4 emails from high school students who want help with their papers.
They often describe their topic with a phrase that sounds suspiciously
like a high school essay question. High school instructors seem to
feel that students are showing "initiative" by asking somebody else to
do their work for them. With time, my initial sense of outrage over
the laziness of students has given way to resignation.
The new development, however, comes from the dean of my school, who
recently forwarded me such an email, and then followed up the next
day: was I able to help the student? The request made me very
uncomfortable: I didn't want to say no to the dean. I asked the head
of programme what he thought, and he wrote the dean for me. The HoP
pointed out that we may as faculty be undermining the high school
teacher, that students we help may get an unfair advantage, and that
anyway students have terrible research skills and nead the practice.
He said he'd advised me not to respond, but that it was my call.
The dean wrote back acknowledgint these points, but suggested we
should always reply to such requests. Evidently it's good PR with our
future students. She also seemed to think that this particular student
was "a cut above" the average student requesting help, which wasn't my
impression at all.
I called the dean every 45 minutes during the last workday to discuss
the issue, but never got a hold of her. I didn't want to write
anything in an email. In the end, I wrote the student a very minimal
book recommendation. However, I regret it and feel dirty about it. I
also can't help wonder why the dean took such an interest in this
case. Is the student is somehow related to the dean ... a friend's
daughter, or something?
Maybe it’s me, but I’ve never heard of this, and can’t imagine doing it.
My first thought is that if a student calls looking for help researching a paper, direct her to the reference desk at the library. A good reference librarian will not only steer her to useful and valid sources, but will also be conversant in the teaching of research ethics. That will give the student ethically unimpeachable help, show the student how to do her own work, and get her out of your hair without you actually refusing discussion. There’s no shame in a referral.
If you aren’t comfortable with that, but still feel the need to help the student somehow, there’s always the old “suggest a source” approach. Again, a student whose motives are entirely honorable will find it helpful, but the student looking for a free paper won’t.
I wouldn’t call the dean every 45 minutes; if a professor did that with me, I’d assume some sort of major emergency (or major dysfunction). Just make an appointment and, when it comes, explain your misgivings and ask if there’s more to the picture.
The closest analogue I can come up with in my experience is the random email application for an adjunct class. Every so often, someone will just pull my email address from the campus website and email me a letter and cv, asking for a class or two. Experience has taught me to just forward it to the relevant program, along with a noncommittal note along the lines of “as you will...” I then respond to the applicant saying, truthfully, that I’ve forwarded it along.
It’s possible that the dean was relatively indifferent to the content of your response, but was just concerned that there was one. (From a PR perspective, there’s a world of difference between a minimal response and a non-response. The former can look professional, but the latter comes off as disrespectful.) If that’s the case, then the matter is fairly trivial. Refer the student to the reference desk or a favorite source, assure the dean that you’ve answered the query, and call it good.
Yes, it’s also possible that there’s something more nefarious going on, but I prefer to save those explanations for when other explanations fail. In this case, they haven’t yet.
Good luck! I hope this turns out to be little more than concern that the email didn’t get summarily deleted.
Wise and worldly readers, have you seen anything like this? How would you handle it?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Ask the Administrator: Improved Open Admissions
A regular reader writes:
There’s a lot here. Depending on which assumptions you use, you could go in several different directions.
The best way, which is also the most challenging, would be to try to meet the students where they are and them raise the bar. It’s difficult, obviously, since students start in so many different places. My current suspicions are that we need to move away from the infinite-remediation model, and towards something that speaks to student goals in the first semester. (Once students know what they’re shooting for, you’re halfway there.) But there’s no denying that this high-road approach is exhausting, expensive, and difficult.
Or you could take shortcuts.
Selective colleges attain their higher pass rates by outsourcing failure; they only admit students who are likely to succeed no matter what happens in college. (A recent study suggested that the high lifetime earnings of Ivy League grads are functions of who got in, rather than of anything they learned there. I had to smile...) That’s not to deny the efforts of wonderful instructors there, obviously, but I’d bet my salary that my cc would see dramatically higher graduation rates if it switched student bodies with, say, Swarthmore.
If your college is willing to move to selective admissions, then there’s your answer. But it may not be, whether because of a perceived mission, historical commitments, and/or fear of the short-term enrollment hit from turning people away.
Of course, there’s overt selectivity and covert selectivity. You could always reject the former and embrace the latter. Take anyone who applies, but skew the application pool.
The easiest way to do that would be by raising tuition substantially, and leaving financial aid flat. (This would have the added benefit of offsetting some of the revenue hit from decreased enrollment.) Since the strongest predictor of student test scores is parental income, you could probably move your student body upscale just by trying.
You could also shift resources away from support programs that tend to help at-risk students. Do away with vocational majors. Put in tight restrictions on course withdrawals and second attempts. Make the financial aid hoops much harder to navigate. Stop “advertising,” and start making your college noticeable in more upscale circles. (Have you ever seen an ad for Yale? Me, neither.)
I’m not a fan of any of these, except maybe the advertising one, but they’d probably work. Going with the plutocratic flow would open many opportunities. The major downside, other than the initial enrollment hit, is the ethics of it.
For my money, the real trick isn’t in showing that you can get better academic performance from wealthier and better-prepared students. That’s easy. The real trick is figuring out how get better results with the students who actually need you.
I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to tweak advisement and curricular design so that students don’t have to eat quite so much spinach before getting to something they actually want. If we can address the very real academic deficits in the course of teaching something they actually want to know, we’ll really have something. In my teaching days, I always found student motivation more telling than raw skill, as important as that was.
Good luck!
I suspect that my wise and worldly readers have seen some better approaches, so I’ll crowdsource this one. Is there a way to harvest a better crop of new students without abandoning open admissions?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
I teach at an open admission, 4 year college. Unlike community colleges, we actually pull our students from [several states].
I was having a conversation with another faculty member about our students, many of whom aren't particularly interested or engaged in school. She suggested that we should try to improve our student base, and that we could do that while keeping our open admission policy.
Do you know of schools that did this, tried to get better students without changing the admissions policy? What would that even look like?
There’s a lot here. Depending on which assumptions you use, you could go in several different directions.
The best way, which is also the most challenging, would be to try to meet the students where they are and them raise the bar. It’s difficult, obviously, since students start in so many different places. My current suspicions are that we need to move away from the infinite-remediation model, and towards something that speaks to student goals in the first semester. (Once students know what they’re shooting for, you’re halfway there.) But there’s no denying that this high-road approach is exhausting, expensive, and difficult.
Or you could take shortcuts.
Selective colleges attain their higher pass rates by outsourcing failure; they only admit students who are likely to succeed no matter what happens in college. (A recent study suggested that the high lifetime earnings of Ivy League grads are functions of who got in, rather than of anything they learned there. I had to smile...) That’s not to deny the efforts of wonderful instructors there, obviously, but I’d bet my salary that my cc would see dramatically higher graduation rates if it switched student bodies with, say, Swarthmore.
If your college is willing to move to selective admissions, then there’s your answer. But it may not be, whether because of a perceived mission, historical commitments, and/or fear of the short-term enrollment hit from turning people away.
Of course, there’s overt selectivity and covert selectivity. You could always reject the former and embrace the latter. Take anyone who applies, but skew the application pool.
The easiest way to do that would be by raising tuition substantially, and leaving financial aid flat. (This would have the added benefit of offsetting some of the revenue hit from decreased enrollment.) Since the strongest predictor of student test scores is parental income, you could probably move your student body upscale just by trying.
You could also shift resources away from support programs that tend to help at-risk students. Do away with vocational majors. Put in tight restrictions on course withdrawals and second attempts. Make the financial aid hoops much harder to navigate. Stop “advertising,” and start making your college noticeable in more upscale circles. (Have you ever seen an ad for Yale? Me, neither.)
I’m not a fan of any of these, except maybe the advertising one, but they’d probably work. Going with the plutocratic flow would open many opportunities. The major downside, other than the initial enrollment hit, is the ethics of it.
For my money, the real trick isn’t in showing that you can get better academic performance from wealthier and better-prepared students. That’s easy. The real trick is figuring out how get better results with the students who actually need you.
I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to tweak advisement and curricular design so that students don’t have to eat quite so much spinach before getting to something they actually want. If we can address the very real academic deficits in the course of teaching something they actually want to know, we’ll really have something. In my teaching days, I always found student motivation more telling than raw skill, as important as that was.
Good luck!
I suspect that my wise and worldly readers have seen some better approaches, so I’ll crowdsource this one. Is there a way to harvest a better crop of new students without abandoning open admissions?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Consultation and Conflicts
This piece in the Washington Post -- sent along by a few alert readers -- inadvertently draws attention to one of the consistent dilemmas of established colleges trying to make change.
The article is about helping students avoid, or at least minimize the cost of, the quagmire of remedial course sequences. It notes, correctly, national data showing that students who place into developmental courses but skip them anyway tend to do just as well as students who took them. Tellingly, it cites leaders of several local cc’s claiming that such findings couldn’t possibly apply to their own campuses.
I had to smile.
The first-person exception defeats many a great idea. “That’s probably true in other places, but we know better.” It’s the reason that some jaded administrators either skip the “consult with the folks in the trenches” step, or at least discount it deeply. In some cases, the folks in the trenches have such deep and fundamental conflicts of interest that their ability to respond thoughtfully to evidence is simply defeated. Program reviews, for example, tend not to conclude in suicide notes; they nearly always conclude with calls for more resources.
Worse, the folks in the trenches typically are in only one set of trenches. They see their own program. They don’t see the other programs competing for resources. It’s easy to criticize administrators for focusing too narrowly on numbers, but we have to make decisions about allocating limited resources among competing programs, each with its own passions, anecdotes, and virtues. You have enough money to pay for two new faculty lines, and you have compelling needs in six programs. How do you decide which two get what they want, and which four don’t?
The usual response -- “just consult with the departments” -- doesn’t help. Each department wants its own. That’s understandable, but it limits the usefulness of the input. (The other usual responses -- “say yes to everyone” or “consider excellence” -- are even worse.) At least with data on enrollments and/or adjunct percentages, you have something disinterested to consider. You have a common denominator. It shouldn’t be everything, but when other factors cancel each other out, it’s something.
Say what you want about virtue and academic excellence; at the end of the day, it’s silly to pretend that self-interest doesn’t play a major role in departmental feedback. Departments that rely on developmental courses to maintain their staffing aren’t likely to sign on to proposals to streamline those courses. As they see it -- often incorrectly, but still -- they’d be slitting their own throats.
Colleges with relatively robust traditions of shared governance, such as mine, are likely to fall prey to all the usual failings of interest-group politics. It would be surprising if they didn’t. Taking self-interested testimony at face value will lead to distorted results. Sure, the national data may be clear, but we’re special!
And that’s why I had to smile.
Real progress -- the kind that actually takes account of facts -- requires the willingness, or ability, to get beyond interest-group politics. That means accepting the possibility that a deeply-held and/or very convenient belief may be wrong. In other words, it requires a vanishingly rare set of conditions.
I have faith in the truth, but its progress can be maddeningly slow. In the meantime, we lose students in preventable quagmires.
The article is about helping students avoid, or at least minimize the cost of, the quagmire of remedial course sequences. It notes, correctly, national data showing that students who place into developmental courses but skip them anyway tend to do just as well as students who took them. Tellingly, it cites leaders of several local cc’s claiming that such findings couldn’t possibly apply to their own campuses.
I had to smile.
The first-person exception defeats many a great idea. “That’s probably true in other places, but we know better.” It’s the reason that some jaded administrators either skip the “consult with the folks in the trenches” step, or at least discount it deeply. In some cases, the folks in the trenches have such deep and fundamental conflicts of interest that their ability to respond thoughtfully to evidence is simply defeated. Program reviews, for example, tend not to conclude in suicide notes; they nearly always conclude with calls for more resources.
Worse, the folks in the trenches typically are in only one set of trenches. They see their own program. They don’t see the other programs competing for resources. It’s easy to criticize administrators for focusing too narrowly on numbers, but we have to make decisions about allocating limited resources among competing programs, each with its own passions, anecdotes, and virtues. You have enough money to pay for two new faculty lines, and you have compelling needs in six programs. How do you decide which two get what they want, and which four don’t?
The usual response -- “just consult with the departments” -- doesn’t help. Each department wants its own. That’s understandable, but it limits the usefulness of the input. (The other usual responses -- “say yes to everyone” or “consider excellence” -- are even worse.) At least with data on enrollments and/or adjunct percentages, you have something disinterested to consider. You have a common denominator. It shouldn’t be everything, but when other factors cancel each other out, it’s something.
Say what you want about virtue and academic excellence; at the end of the day, it’s silly to pretend that self-interest doesn’t play a major role in departmental feedback. Departments that rely on developmental courses to maintain their staffing aren’t likely to sign on to proposals to streamline those courses. As they see it -- often incorrectly, but still -- they’d be slitting their own throats.
Colleges with relatively robust traditions of shared governance, such as mine, are likely to fall prey to all the usual failings of interest-group politics. It would be surprising if they didn’t. Taking self-interested testimony at face value will lead to distorted results. Sure, the national data may be clear, but we’re special!
And that’s why I had to smile.
Real progress -- the kind that actually takes account of facts -- requires the willingness, or ability, to get beyond interest-group politics. That means accepting the possibility that a deeply-held and/or very convenient belief may be wrong. In other words, it requires a vanishingly rare set of conditions.
I have faith in the truth, but its progress can be maddeningly slow. In the meantime, we lose students in preventable quagmires.
Monday, October 17, 2011
Ask My Readers: Working With an Instructional Designer
Sometimes I take questions from readers, but today I have a question for you.
My college will bring its first full-time Instructional Designer on board soon.
For those of who have worked with instructional designers on your campuses, what should we try to encourage? What should we be extra careful to avoid?
The point of the hire is primarily to help take the online courses to a higher level of quality. Having someone whose job it is to be current in the technology field, and who has a background in teaching, will (I hope) help faculty find and adapt the innovations that work best for their courses and styles. (I assume that process will involve a fair amount of culling. Tech that might make sense in one course might not in another.)
I can imagine that if we aren’t careful, the instructional designer could quickly be relegated to the status of a helpdesk technician. Alternately, if we go too far in the other direction, she could come off as an imposition.
To my mind, she’s be part scout, part coach, and part consultant. But the devil is always in the details.
For those who have experience either as instructional designers or as faculty working with them, what are the traps? If you knew then what you know now, what would you have done differently?
Thanks.
My college will bring its first full-time Instructional Designer on board soon.
For those of who have worked with instructional designers on your campuses, what should we try to encourage? What should we be extra careful to avoid?
The point of the hire is primarily to help take the online courses to a higher level of quality. Having someone whose job it is to be current in the technology field, and who has a background in teaching, will (I hope) help faculty find and adapt the innovations that work best for their courses and styles. (I assume that process will involve a fair amount of culling. Tech that might make sense in one course might not in another.)
I can imagine that if we aren’t careful, the instructional designer could quickly be relegated to the status of a helpdesk technician. Alternately, if we go too far in the other direction, she could come off as an imposition.
To my mind, she’s be part scout, part coach, and part consultant. But the devil is always in the details.
For those who have experience either as instructional designers or as faculty working with them, what are the traps? If you knew then what you know now, what would you have done differently?
Thanks.
Friday, October 14, 2011
The Girl, Political Philosopher
Earlier this week, The Girl and I did a grocery run. The following exchange occurred in the ice cream aisle.
TG (sighing): It must be nice to be in charge.
DD: What?
TG: It must be nice to be in charge! You get to decide what everyone will do!
DD: Well, sometimes it can be nice. But sometimes it’s not.
TG: Why not?
DD: Because sometimes you have to make a decision that people don’t like, and then they get mad at you.
TG: Just let them vote on it!
DD (suppressing a laugh): That’s not always an option.
TG: Why not?
(pause)
DD: What would happen if your teacher asked the class to vote on whether to do math or to have recess?
TG: We’d vote for recess!
DD: Probably. But then how would you learn math?
(pause)
TG: It must be nice to already know math.
TG (sighing): It must be nice to be in charge.
DD: What?
TG: It must be nice to be in charge! You get to decide what everyone will do!
DD: Well, sometimes it can be nice. But sometimes it’s not.
TG: Why not?
DD: Because sometimes you have to make a decision that people don’t like, and then they get mad at you.
TG: Just let them vote on it!
DD (suppressing a laugh): That’s not always an option.
TG: Why not?
(pause)
DD: What would happen if your teacher asked the class to vote on whether to do math or to have recess?
TG: We’d vote for recess!
DD: Probably. But then how would you learn math?
(pause)
TG: It must be nice to already know math.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
What We Talk About When We Talk About Markets
The recent silliness in Florida, in which the governor is questioning the need for more anthropologists, got me to thinking about the whole idea of market demand for degrees. When we speak of market demand for certain disciplines, which market do we mean?
There’s the market for B.A. grads (or A.A. grads, or A.S. grads) in private industry. Looking solely at that, you’d conclude that a field like psychology is pretty much DOA.
Then there’s the market for Ph.D. grads in a given discipline. There, psychology looks stronger, but English isn’t looking too hot.
Then there’s the market for seats in classes, or campus-based demand. Looking at that market, English and psych are both healthy, but engineering doesn’t look too good.
Some of the friction between colleges and states, I’m convinced, has to do with which market you look at. The two sides are looking at different markets, and drawing different conclusions. And as we move to “market-based” reforms, the divergence will grow.
On campus, the plain-vanilla gen ed disciplines are in consistently high demand. Some of that, of course, is a function of distribution requirements within degree programs, but the tuition is where the tuition is.
But distribution only explains a small part of the picture. Students cluster into majors like English and Psychology voluntarily, choosing them over engineering or computer science. They do that despite a well-orchestrated campaign telling all and sundry that tech is where the jobs are. Even many of the vocational programs -- criminal justice, human services, culinary -- are mostly non-technical.
It’s easy for folks on the outside to look at colleges as the personnel offices of the economy, and to request more engineers and fewer comparative lit majors. It’s even possible, if difficult, to shift funding around to encourage some paths more than others.
But at the end of the day, any policy that fails to account for both student choices and institutional imperatives is doomed to irrelevance.
Students aren’t drafted into majors. They select them. And students select majors for a host of reasons, perceived marketability being only one of them (and “perceived” is the key word). Some students won’t have anything to do with advanced math. Some will only do what their friends do. Some select for personal taste, some for perceived ease of completion and/or grading, and some just sort of drift through. (I was in the “personal taste” category.)
Colleges respond to the preferences that students express with their feet. It’s all well and good to hear a governor say that we need fewer psych majors and more engineering grads. But if the students avoid engineering like the plague and stuff the psych lectures full, and if my college is tuition-driven, then what, exactly, do you expect me to do?
If you want colleges to be able to channel students away from their expressed preferences and towards something else, you need to give those colleges the financial cushion to reduce the relevance of student tuition. In other words, if you want colleges to be more responsive to the “employer” market, you have to make them less dependent on the “student” market.
The usual ritualistic bleating about “market-based reforms,” on the one side, and “learning for learning’s sake,” on the other, fails to account for the paradox. What students want to take, and what employers want students to take, are not the same thing. If you want colleges to discount the former in favor of the latter, you have to pay for it. Otherwise, colleges will do what they have to do, and those anthropologists will just keep on coming. If the governor of Florida wants to snuff out psychology, he’ll need to pony up some serious cash to make all those small STEM classes sustainable. Failing that, he’s just blowing smoke. The markets have spoken.
There’s the market for B.A. grads (or A.A. grads, or A.S. grads) in private industry. Looking solely at that, you’d conclude that a field like psychology is pretty much DOA.
Then there’s the market for Ph.D. grads in a given discipline. There, psychology looks stronger, but English isn’t looking too hot.
Then there’s the market for seats in classes, or campus-based demand. Looking at that market, English and psych are both healthy, but engineering doesn’t look too good.
Some of the friction between colleges and states, I’m convinced, has to do with which market you look at. The two sides are looking at different markets, and drawing different conclusions. And as we move to “market-based” reforms, the divergence will grow.
On campus, the plain-vanilla gen ed disciplines are in consistently high demand. Some of that, of course, is a function of distribution requirements within degree programs, but the tuition is where the tuition is.
But distribution only explains a small part of the picture. Students cluster into majors like English and Psychology voluntarily, choosing them over engineering or computer science. They do that despite a well-orchestrated campaign telling all and sundry that tech is where the jobs are. Even many of the vocational programs -- criminal justice, human services, culinary -- are mostly non-technical.
It’s easy for folks on the outside to look at colleges as the personnel offices of the economy, and to request more engineers and fewer comparative lit majors. It’s even possible, if difficult, to shift funding around to encourage some paths more than others.
But at the end of the day, any policy that fails to account for both student choices and institutional imperatives is doomed to irrelevance.
Students aren’t drafted into majors. They select them. And students select majors for a host of reasons, perceived marketability being only one of them (and “perceived” is the key word). Some students won’t have anything to do with advanced math. Some will only do what their friends do. Some select for personal taste, some for perceived ease of completion and/or grading, and some just sort of drift through. (I was in the “personal taste” category.)
Colleges respond to the preferences that students express with their feet. It’s all well and good to hear a governor say that we need fewer psych majors and more engineering grads. But if the students avoid engineering like the plague and stuff the psych lectures full, and if my college is tuition-driven, then what, exactly, do you expect me to do?
If you want colleges to be able to channel students away from their expressed preferences and towards something else, you need to give those colleges the financial cushion to reduce the relevance of student tuition. In other words, if you want colleges to be more responsive to the “employer” market, you have to make them less dependent on the “student” market.
The usual ritualistic bleating about “market-based reforms,” on the one side, and “learning for learning’s sake,” on the other, fails to account for the paradox. What students want to take, and what employers want students to take, are not the same thing. If you want colleges to discount the former in favor of the latter, you have to pay for it. Otherwise, colleges will do what they have to do, and those anthropologists will just keep on coming. If the governor of Florida wants to snuff out psychology, he’ll need to pony up some serious cash to make all those small STEM classes sustainable. Failing that, he’s just blowing smoke. The markets have spoken.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Occupation
The word “occupation” has been getting a workout lately.
The Occupy Wall Street movement, which seems to have gone viral around the country, is emerging as a welcome and badly-needed counterweight to the Tea Party. It has given rise to an Occupy College movement, in which students protest excessive tuition increases, student loan burdens, and, implicitly, the lack of well-paying jobs available upon graduation.
And then there are occupations, as in jobs. The lack of occupations is causing occupations.
“Occupations” in the former sense are usually considered intrusions. An interloper refuses to leave; the area is under occupation. An occupying power is present after an invasion. In the case of Wall Street, the idea is that people outside the financial elite are daring to tread on the elites’ turf. In the Occupy College movement, which, paradoxically enough, demonstrated itself through vacating classrooms, the idea is that the students who are just passing through are stopping to stay a while, presumably because there’s nowhere else for them to go.
Working at a community college, I find the latter harder to stomach than the former. Certainly any sentient observer of American politics would have to concede that the plutocratic bias of the system is both catastrophic and self-reinforcing. Taking public exception to plutocracy strikes me as reasonable, if not required. Coming up with a reasonable and realistic alternative is somewhat harder, but the movement is welcome in at least making it clear that there’s real objection to the incessant rightward drift of our politics.
Whether the occupation will actually accomplish that is another question. After all, “Wall Street” is a literary device. The folks with real money don’t actually live there. Much of what “Wall Street” does is actually done online from wherever. The street itself is mostly unoccupied. The Occupy Wall Streeters are bemusingly tolerated mostly because they’re harmless. They’re occupying a space where people don’t live.
The issue they’re trying to address is only partly solvable by isolating a few villains (even conceding that those few are really awful). It’s mostly systemic. The cockpit is mostly unoccupied.
That’s even more true in higher education. Yes, it’s easy to point out a few celebrity presidents who make asses of themselves with ridiculous salaries and tone-deaf pronouncements in the press. (Mark Yudof, I’m looking at youuuuu...) But they’re ultimately beside the point. The real drivers behind cost escalation are structural: Baumol’s cost disease, a labor-intensive artisinal production model, health insurance, unfunded mandates, the constant demand for new technology...
That’s why the blogosphere’s knee-jerk “if the administrators would just wake up and/or go away” meme is so pointless. In the desperate search for villains, it misses the real story. The real story is that thousands of people have cycled through academic administration for the past few decades. These people have had different backgrounds, politics, personalities, demographics, and inclinations. And yet despite trying all of those different people -- most of whom were intelligent and at least partly well-meaning -- the cost trend has been inexorable in every sector of higher ed, in every region, for decades. The issue is systemic.
Occupying the dean’s office won’t make Baumol’s cost disease go away. Replacing this president with that one won’t stop the unfunded mandates. Decrying the adjunct trend won’t make health insurance any cheaper to provide.
And attacking the one remaining institution in American life that actually serves upward social mobility is not going to create the jobs its graduates want.
I wish the OWS people well. They’re exerting political counterpressure that desperately needs to be exerted. But with a few exceptions, the issues they’re concerned about won’t be solved by seizing the enemy’s turf, because there is no enemy. The issues are structural and impersonal, which is why they can seem inexorable. They’re complicated. They require changing the rules of the game.
Trying to figure that out, at least in higher ed, is occupying my time. I invite others to join me here. The ground may be virtual, but the issues are real. In the meantime, I’ll tip my cap to the folks working the other way ‘round, for opening the political space to start.
The Occupy Wall Street movement, which seems to have gone viral around the country, is emerging as a welcome and badly-needed counterweight to the Tea Party. It has given rise to an Occupy College movement, in which students protest excessive tuition increases, student loan burdens, and, implicitly, the lack of well-paying jobs available upon graduation.
And then there are occupations, as in jobs. The lack of occupations is causing occupations.
“Occupations” in the former sense are usually considered intrusions. An interloper refuses to leave; the area is under occupation. An occupying power is present after an invasion. In the case of Wall Street, the idea is that people outside the financial elite are daring to tread on the elites’ turf. In the Occupy College movement, which, paradoxically enough, demonstrated itself through vacating classrooms, the idea is that the students who are just passing through are stopping to stay a while, presumably because there’s nowhere else for them to go.
Working at a community college, I find the latter harder to stomach than the former. Certainly any sentient observer of American politics would have to concede that the plutocratic bias of the system is both catastrophic and self-reinforcing. Taking public exception to plutocracy strikes me as reasonable, if not required. Coming up with a reasonable and realistic alternative is somewhat harder, but the movement is welcome in at least making it clear that there’s real objection to the incessant rightward drift of our politics.
Whether the occupation will actually accomplish that is another question. After all, “Wall Street” is a literary device. The folks with real money don’t actually live there. Much of what “Wall Street” does is actually done online from wherever. The street itself is mostly unoccupied. The Occupy Wall Streeters are bemusingly tolerated mostly because they’re harmless. They’re occupying a space where people don’t live.
The issue they’re trying to address is only partly solvable by isolating a few villains (even conceding that those few are really awful). It’s mostly systemic. The cockpit is mostly unoccupied.
That’s even more true in higher education. Yes, it’s easy to point out a few celebrity presidents who make asses of themselves with ridiculous salaries and tone-deaf pronouncements in the press. (Mark Yudof, I’m looking at youuuuu...) But they’re ultimately beside the point. The real drivers behind cost escalation are structural: Baumol’s cost disease, a labor-intensive artisinal production model, health insurance, unfunded mandates, the constant demand for new technology...
That’s why the blogosphere’s knee-jerk “if the administrators would just wake up and/or go away” meme is so pointless. In the desperate search for villains, it misses the real story. The real story is that thousands of people have cycled through academic administration for the past few decades. These people have had different backgrounds, politics, personalities, demographics, and inclinations. And yet despite trying all of those different people -- most of whom were intelligent and at least partly well-meaning -- the cost trend has been inexorable in every sector of higher ed, in every region, for decades. The issue is systemic.
Occupying the dean’s office won’t make Baumol’s cost disease go away. Replacing this president with that one won’t stop the unfunded mandates. Decrying the adjunct trend won’t make health insurance any cheaper to provide.
And attacking the one remaining institution in American life that actually serves upward social mobility is not going to create the jobs its graduates want.
I wish the OWS people well. They’re exerting political counterpressure that desperately needs to be exerted. But with a few exceptions, the issues they’re concerned about won’t be solved by seizing the enemy’s turf, because there is no enemy. The issues are structural and impersonal, which is why they can seem inexorable. They’re complicated. They require changing the rules of the game.
Trying to figure that out, at least in higher ed, is occupying my time. I invite others to join me here. The ground may be virtual, but the issues are real. In the meantime, I’ll tip my cap to the folks working the other way ‘round, for opening the political space to start.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
You! Out of the Pool!
This kind of situation gives administrators fits, since there’s no easy answer.
Let’s say a student is so disruptive in class that he’s making it impossible to teach. The professor exercises the prerogative to kick the student out of class. The professor files disciplinary charges, but it will be a week or more before the charges can be heard (and the student can give his side of the story). The class will meet at least twice, if not more than that, before the hearing can be held.
Should the student be allowed back in class, pending the hearing?
The argument for ‘yes’ relies on due process and the presumption of innocence. If a student is wrongly banned from class for an extended period, then real academic harm is done to the student. If we assume that there’s meaningful distance between accusation and conviction, then it’s hard to argue with ‘yes.’
The argument for ‘no’ relies on the authority of the professor. If a professor goes so far as to kick a student out of class, in front of the rest of the class, then a statement has been made. Seeing that student stroll right back in the next time, grinning smugly, makes an unmistakable statement to the other students. Even if the charges are subsequently upheld, it’s hard to undo the damage of that impression.
Ideally, of course, students would not be this disruptive. But that’s like saying we wouldn’t need a criminal justice system if people just stopped committing crimes. It’s theoretically true, but of no practical interest.
The next-best situation has faculty so well trained, and so even-tempered and wise, that they’re able to handle any situation that develops without resorting to kicking anyone out. And there’s some truth to that. Learning to manage difficult students is part of teaching. I knew a professor at Proprietary U who was fresh out of grad school, where she had been trained in finding ever-more-finely-ground evidence of social injustice in the unlikeliest places. Her first class ate her alive. Her exquisite sensitivity left her without the thick skin needed to handle actual people. Anyone in authority has to endure a certain amount of abuse as a part of the job, and professors are not immune to that. I don’t recall a professor ever kicking a student out of class in my student days, and I never resorted to it in my faculty days. It should be rare.
But some students are really far beyond what a reasonable person should have to deal with, even if they aren’t technically criminal. They need to be removed if the class is going to work.
The next next-best situation has the hearing held post-haste. But sometimes that’s just not reality. You can be fast, or you can be thorough, but you can’t be both. Since our legal system prizes thoroughness over speed, quick-and-dirty leaves you exposed. So non-trivial time lags are likely to remain an annoying fact of life for the foreseeable future.
But that’s a hard sell to a pissed-off professor. Even though the law doesn’t stop at the classroom door, some professors honestly believe that they’re absolute monarchs in the classroom. They have tremendous authority and discretion, but it’s not unlimited. Students do have certain rights, due process among them.
I’m hoping there’s a reasonably elegant balance that someone out there has struck. Wise and worldly readers, has your campus found a way to deal with disruptive behavior when the mills of due process grind slowly?
Let’s say a student is so disruptive in class that he’s making it impossible to teach. The professor exercises the prerogative to kick the student out of class. The professor files disciplinary charges, but it will be a week or more before the charges can be heard (and the student can give his side of the story). The class will meet at least twice, if not more than that, before the hearing can be held.
Should the student be allowed back in class, pending the hearing?
The argument for ‘yes’ relies on due process and the presumption of innocence. If a student is wrongly banned from class for an extended period, then real academic harm is done to the student. If we assume that there’s meaningful distance between accusation and conviction, then it’s hard to argue with ‘yes.’
The argument for ‘no’ relies on the authority of the professor. If a professor goes so far as to kick a student out of class, in front of the rest of the class, then a statement has been made. Seeing that student stroll right back in the next time, grinning smugly, makes an unmistakable statement to the other students. Even if the charges are subsequently upheld, it’s hard to undo the damage of that impression.
Ideally, of course, students would not be this disruptive. But that’s like saying we wouldn’t need a criminal justice system if people just stopped committing crimes. It’s theoretically true, but of no practical interest.
The next-best situation has faculty so well trained, and so even-tempered and wise, that they’re able to handle any situation that develops without resorting to kicking anyone out. And there’s some truth to that. Learning to manage difficult students is part of teaching. I knew a professor at Proprietary U who was fresh out of grad school, where she had been trained in finding ever-more-finely-ground evidence of social injustice in the unlikeliest places. Her first class ate her alive. Her exquisite sensitivity left her without the thick skin needed to handle actual people. Anyone in authority has to endure a certain amount of abuse as a part of the job, and professors are not immune to that. I don’t recall a professor ever kicking a student out of class in my student days, and I never resorted to it in my faculty days. It should be rare.
But some students are really far beyond what a reasonable person should have to deal with, even if they aren’t technically criminal. They need to be removed if the class is going to work.
The next next-best situation has the hearing held post-haste. But sometimes that’s just not reality. You can be fast, or you can be thorough, but you can’t be both. Since our legal system prizes thoroughness over speed, quick-and-dirty leaves you exposed. So non-trivial time lags are likely to remain an annoying fact of life for the foreseeable future.
But that’s a hard sell to a pissed-off professor. Even though the law doesn’t stop at the classroom door, some professors honestly believe that they’re absolute monarchs in the classroom. They have tremendous authority and discretion, but it’s not unlimited. Students do have certain rights, due process among them.
I’m hoping there’s a reasonably elegant balance that someone out there has struck. Wise and worldly readers, has your campus found a way to deal with disruptive behavior when the mills of due process grind slowly?
Thursday, October 06, 2011
Fifth Grade Math Homework
(Congratulations to anyone who actually read this post after seeing the title!)
Many years ago, MAD magazine had a piece about joke courses for college football players. The one I remember was called “Subtraction: Addition’s Tricky Pal.”
The Boy is discovering that there’s some truth to that.
He’s struggling with “borrowing.” Say you want to subtract 235 from 700. Turning the last zero into a ten requires borrowing from the digit before, but that’s a zero, so...
Oh, the humanity.
I learned “borrowing” sometime during the Carter administration, so I’m a little fuzzy on the step-by-step of teaching it. I suggested thinking of 700 as seventy ‘tens.’ To borrow a ten for the last column would leave you with 69 tens. Then, in order from right to left, ten minus five is five, nine minus three is six, and six minus two is four. 465, done and done.
That doesn’t seem to take, though. The idea of “seventy tens” seems a little too abstract.
He’s fine when just borrowing from a single digit. 82 minus 28 is fine, since borrowing from the 8 still leaves enough to subtract the 2. But borrowing across multiple digits remains mysterious.
Trying to convey ‘borrowing’ to a ten year old really brings home the difference between knowing how to do something and knowing how to teach it. I’ve walked him through problems step by step, narrating each step as I go, and he seems to follow. Then I have him try a few problems, and he does great. But it’s gone by the next day. It doesn’t stick.
His frustration is palpable and insidious. He’ll get back worksheets with middling grades, but the middling grade really just reflects a single mistake repeated over and over again. He honestly wants to get it right, but just can’t seem to hold the concept for very long.
I’m okay with him learning to struggle a bit, since that’s a valuable life skill. (Sometimes I think the only way in which my social science grad school training prepared me for my current job was in teaching me how to take a punch.) But I don’t want him to get so discouraged that he starts to doubt his own abilities. I don’t want him to become the kid who writes off math as something you’re either born with or not, like wiggling your ears.
He can’t be the first bright, motivated kid to have trouble holding on to a mathematical concept overnight. So I’m sending out this message in a bottle -- okay, in a blog -- hoping that someone has found a way to help that kind of concept stick in the mind of a ten year old.
Wise and worldly readers, have you found a way to explain this sort of math that’s both simple enough for a ten year old, and sticky enough to make it to the next day? TB and I would be terribly grateful for anything that works.
(Program note: We’re trekking across several states over the next few days, so the next post will be on Tuesday the 11th.)
Many years ago, MAD magazine had a piece about joke courses for college football players. The one I remember was called “Subtraction: Addition’s Tricky Pal.”
The Boy is discovering that there’s some truth to that.
He’s struggling with “borrowing.” Say you want to subtract 235 from 700. Turning the last zero into a ten requires borrowing from the digit before, but that’s a zero, so...
Oh, the humanity.
I learned “borrowing” sometime during the Carter administration, so I’m a little fuzzy on the step-by-step of teaching it. I suggested thinking of 700 as seventy ‘tens.’ To borrow a ten for the last column would leave you with 69 tens. Then, in order from right to left, ten minus five is five, nine minus three is six, and six minus two is four. 465, done and done.
That doesn’t seem to take, though. The idea of “seventy tens” seems a little too abstract.
He’s fine when just borrowing from a single digit. 82 minus 28 is fine, since borrowing from the 8 still leaves enough to subtract the 2. But borrowing across multiple digits remains mysterious.
Trying to convey ‘borrowing’ to a ten year old really brings home the difference between knowing how to do something and knowing how to teach it. I’ve walked him through problems step by step, narrating each step as I go, and he seems to follow. Then I have him try a few problems, and he does great. But it’s gone by the next day. It doesn’t stick.
His frustration is palpable and insidious. He’ll get back worksheets with middling grades, but the middling grade really just reflects a single mistake repeated over and over again. He honestly wants to get it right, but just can’t seem to hold the concept for very long.
I’m okay with him learning to struggle a bit, since that’s a valuable life skill. (Sometimes I think the only way in which my social science grad school training prepared me for my current job was in teaching me how to take a punch.) But I don’t want him to get so discouraged that he starts to doubt his own abilities. I don’t want him to become the kid who writes off math as something you’re either born with or not, like wiggling your ears.
He can’t be the first bright, motivated kid to have trouble holding on to a mathematical concept overnight. So I’m sending out this message in a bottle -- okay, in a blog -- hoping that someone has found a way to help that kind of concept stick in the mind of a ten year old.
Wise and worldly readers, have you found a way to explain this sort of math that’s both simple enough for a ten year old, and sticky enough to make it to the next day? TB and I would be terribly grateful for anything that works.
(Program note: We’re trekking across several states over the next few days, so the next post will be on Tuesday the 11th.)
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