A few years ago, my college started a January intersession in which students take a single course for two weeks. It was a runaway hit; enrollments have grown every year, course completion rates have hovered around 90 -- off the charts by community college standards -- and faculty feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.
So now we’re starting to imagine what it would look like if we could break up the Fall and Spring semesters into smaller units: maybe a couple of seven-week terms in each, or, in the most radical version, five three-week sessions in which students take one course at a time.
The idea is still very much in the “what if...” stage. I’m hoping that my wise and worldly readers can help me think this through. (It will go to local faculty, too, of course; I just don’t want to present them with anything half-baked.)
The appeal, from the institutional perspective, is that students seem to do better when they have fewer balls to juggle at any given time. There’s something to be said for the “total immersion” model of a course, just as there is for a language. (For language courses, it’s a slam dunk.) The opportunity to lose yourself in a single class -- whether for faculty or for students -- is enticing. If the class meets several hours per day for three weeks, and it’s the only class you’re taking, then it’s possible to build a day-to-day continuity that’s much harder when the class is broken into 45 50-minute periods over four months.
This approach could also work better for students who have to miss a few weeks. They could just drop one class and be done with it; the others would be unaffected. Students who start late could skip the first several weeks, for example. It would also be easier -- potentially -- to keep the same schedule four or five days per week, which would be of real value to students with jobs and/or children. It’s much easier to juggle life circumstances when classes don’t vary from Monday to Tuesday.
It has its downsides, of course. Science labs could be a real challenge, at least on a large scale. I’m not sure how it would work for courses that require the material to seep in slowly, like philosophy or literature. The financial aid implications could be a headache, and I’m pretty sure we could crash the ERP system in short order if we weren’t careful.
But it’s hard to ignore evidence on the ground. When students take fifteen weeks to do a class, the completion rates are lower than when they take two or three weeks. Treating classes as projects seems to work for them.
Obviously, we’d have to work through any contractual issues beforehand, but there’s no principled reason that couldn’t happen.
Even if we split the difference and went to a variation on a quarter system -- split each semester into two seven-week halves, and have students take just two or three classes at a time -- I’d expect to see at least some gains. It’s easier to manage two or three projects than to manage five.
Wise and worldly readers, have you tried something like this? Are they any gains or pitfalls that you didn’t expect, or that aren’t obvious from the outside?
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Monday, April 23, 2012
Ask the Administrator: Changing Grades
A regular correspondent writes:
My college uses a standard similar to that now. Happily, it has not resulted in any of the doomsday scenarios you suggest, although your mileage may vary.
Interpretation is the key. “Error” here is taken to refer to computation or data entry mistakes. The reason that administrators need the ability to use that is that sometimes faculty quit or become otherwise unavailable (for health reasons, say) and can’t be reached to make the change. If the professor is the only one capable of changing a grade, and the professor can’t be reached, then the grade is stuck. That hardly seems fair to the student. Designating someone with the authority to correct a mistake if the professor can’t be reached is just good contingency planning.
“Unfairness” -- we use a similar term -- is interpreted here to mean “discrimination.” If a different standard was applied to one set of students than to the rest, then there’s a reason to make a change. That’s different from being tough across the board, or passing judgment on the substance of what’s being done. In practice, “unfairness” might apply to a professor who simply refused to accommodate a student with a documented disability.
While it’s true that someone could apply more elastic interpretations to those terms -- particularly “unfairness” -- it’s almost certainly better to have rules than not to have rules. In the absence of rules, one of two things will happen. Either grades will never get changed -- and students will simply be stuck with whatever mistakes were made -- or they’ll get changed on a case-by-case basis, which virtually guarantees inconsistency. I can attest that from this side of the desk, it’s much easier to turn away a student who complains that professor so-and-so was “unfair” when all she can muster in support of that is a general sense of being underappreciated.
My suggestion would be to try to clarify -- preferably in writing -- the meanings of the terms.
If the real issue is mistrust of the administration, you might want to propose some sort of faculty committee charged with passing judgment on grade appeals. Then that committee could use the clarified standards as its basis for judgment. You’d still have the issue of non-experts passing judgment, since nobody is an expert in every field, but the standards as interpreted here don’t require expertise.
I fully agree that having grades changed just to keep students happy is both unethical and profoundly demoralized. But the alternative is not to just throw out grade changes altogether. It’s to bring some consistency to the process.
Good luck!
Wise and worldly readers, what do you think? Have you seen a better way to handle grade changes when the original professor can’t be reached?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
My state wants cc administators to be able to change grades if faculty demonstrate "error" or "unfairness". This is in a context where some of my colleagues are suspended because students complained that they "embarrassed me in front if the class" or "were mean". To be fair this information comes to me via the union so maybe that's their spin. All the same I don't know if the admin has our back. My fear is the students feel empowered to complain and if they get results they'll just do it more and more.
I'd be ok with colleagues judging my grading, but honestly what does an administrator know about grading the specialized field I teach in? They could catch clerical errors in my spreadsheet, but if that was the issue I'd obviously change the grade (who wouldn't?). The only possible way they could judge is if I made an insanely specific metric for all student work. I know metrics are something admins like anyway, but if my skill set could be reduced to a metric they could hire anyone to do my job.
Ultimately if my grades can be reversed by someone not qualified in my field, and students are getting traction getting profs suspended and grades changed I'll just have an incentive to give As and Bs.
My college uses a standard similar to that now. Happily, it has not resulted in any of the doomsday scenarios you suggest, although your mileage may vary.
Interpretation is the key. “Error” here is taken to refer to computation or data entry mistakes. The reason that administrators need the ability to use that is that sometimes faculty quit or become otherwise unavailable (for health reasons, say) and can’t be reached to make the change. If the professor is the only one capable of changing a grade, and the professor can’t be reached, then the grade is stuck. That hardly seems fair to the student. Designating someone with the authority to correct a mistake if the professor can’t be reached is just good contingency planning.
“Unfairness” -- we use a similar term -- is interpreted here to mean “discrimination.” If a different standard was applied to one set of students than to the rest, then there’s a reason to make a change. That’s different from being tough across the board, or passing judgment on the substance of what’s being done. In practice, “unfairness” might apply to a professor who simply refused to accommodate a student with a documented disability.
While it’s true that someone could apply more elastic interpretations to those terms -- particularly “unfairness” -- it’s almost certainly better to have rules than not to have rules. In the absence of rules, one of two things will happen. Either grades will never get changed -- and students will simply be stuck with whatever mistakes were made -- or they’ll get changed on a case-by-case basis, which virtually guarantees inconsistency. I can attest that from this side of the desk, it’s much easier to turn away a student who complains that professor so-and-so was “unfair” when all she can muster in support of that is a general sense of being underappreciated.
My suggestion would be to try to clarify -- preferably in writing -- the meanings of the terms.
If the real issue is mistrust of the administration, you might want to propose some sort of faculty committee charged with passing judgment on grade appeals. Then that committee could use the clarified standards as its basis for judgment. You’d still have the issue of non-experts passing judgment, since nobody is an expert in every field, but the standards as interpreted here don’t require expertise.
I fully agree that having grades changed just to keep students happy is both unethical and profoundly demoralized. But the alternative is not to just throw out grade changes altogether. It’s to bring some consistency to the process.
Good luck!
Wise and worldly readers, what do you think? Have you seen a better way to handle grade changes when the original professor can’t be reached?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Sunday, April 22, 2012
Placing Thousands of Students Quickly
How do you know if a student needs remediation?
It isn’t as straightforward as it sounds.
Most community colleges require entering students to take standardized placement tests in math and English. If the student scores below a certain cutoff, s/he is shunted into developmental courses. Depending on how far below the cutoff she scores, she may be shunted into two or three semesters’ worth of developmental coursework, nearly doubling the anticipated time to graduation. (Of course, graduation rates of students who start out at the lowest levels of developmental coursework are far lower than students who don’t.)
In many cases, the students are referred directly to testing upon initial admission, with no opportunity to review for the test. My college, like many, uses a test mandated by the state, so we don’t have the option of changing it or disregarding it.
It’s frustrating. Last year, when we started looking at restructuring (shortening) the developmental math sequence, one math professor here looked at student performance in existing developmental classes and compared it with placement test results. He found no correlation. In other words, the test scores offered absolutely no predictive value.
Yet we’re still required to use them.
It’s easy to condemn placement tests. They carry all of the flaws of any high-stakes standardized test, and they don’t even help in the aggregate.
But condemning the tests doesn’t solve the underlying problem. When you have thousands of new students showing up in a compressed timeframe, ranging in age from fresh out of high school to retirement, and you need to place them all quickly, what do you do?
Small, selective places have the option of doing granular reviews of high school grades, and/or of simply turning away students who aren’t prepared to jump right in to college level math. That’s fine for them, but it doesn’t work for a larger, open-admissions setting. We don’t have the staffing to do that, and even if we did, it’s not clear that it would make sense for older students. (I last took advanced math in the 1980’s. Drop an exam from that class in front of me now, cold, and I wouldn’t have a clue what to do.)
Alternately, we could allow students to select their own classes. (There are times when I lean this way myself.) The danger there, though, is that students will badly overestimate their own abilities and quickly wash out of college-level classes. In the meantime, though, they will have taken seats that could have gone to students who might have succeeded. The libertarian ideal of “let them fail” falsely assumes that the cost of failure accrues only to the student; unfortunately, the student who took up a seat deprived another student of that seat. Given a scarcity of seats, we have a responsibility to allocate them as wisely as we can. (One could also argue that “let them fail” represents a waste of financial aid, which is largely tax-funded.)
There’s also the annoying political reality that “let them fail” would lead, in the short term, to even higher attrition rates. In an era in which attrition is assumed to be the college’s fault, that would amount to institutional suicide.
In the short term, the easiest and most prudent approach is probably the small-bore solution of finding a test that actually tells you something, preferably with students getting an opportunity to review ahead of time. The more radical solutions of embedded remediation or just letting them fail would either take years to develop, as in the former, or require a political sea change, as in the latter.
Is there a better way? Wise and worldly readers, have you seen (or come up with) a reasonably fast and efficient way to place thousands of students at the right level in a short time?
It isn’t as straightforward as it sounds.
Most community colleges require entering students to take standardized placement tests in math and English. If the student scores below a certain cutoff, s/he is shunted into developmental courses. Depending on how far below the cutoff she scores, she may be shunted into two or three semesters’ worth of developmental coursework, nearly doubling the anticipated time to graduation. (Of course, graduation rates of students who start out at the lowest levels of developmental coursework are far lower than students who don’t.)
In many cases, the students are referred directly to testing upon initial admission, with no opportunity to review for the test. My college, like many, uses a test mandated by the state, so we don’t have the option of changing it or disregarding it.
It’s frustrating. Last year, when we started looking at restructuring (shortening) the developmental math sequence, one math professor here looked at student performance in existing developmental classes and compared it with placement test results. He found no correlation. In other words, the test scores offered absolutely no predictive value.
Yet we’re still required to use them.
It’s easy to condemn placement tests. They carry all of the flaws of any high-stakes standardized test, and they don’t even help in the aggregate.
But condemning the tests doesn’t solve the underlying problem. When you have thousands of new students showing up in a compressed timeframe, ranging in age from fresh out of high school to retirement, and you need to place them all quickly, what do you do?
Small, selective places have the option of doing granular reviews of high school grades, and/or of simply turning away students who aren’t prepared to jump right in to college level math. That’s fine for them, but it doesn’t work for a larger, open-admissions setting. We don’t have the staffing to do that, and even if we did, it’s not clear that it would make sense for older students. (I last took advanced math in the 1980’s. Drop an exam from that class in front of me now, cold, and I wouldn’t have a clue what to do.)
Alternately, we could allow students to select their own classes. (There are times when I lean this way myself.) The danger there, though, is that students will badly overestimate their own abilities and quickly wash out of college-level classes. In the meantime, though, they will have taken seats that could have gone to students who might have succeeded. The libertarian ideal of “let them fail” falsely assumes that the cost of failure accrues only to the student; unfortunately, the student who took up a seat deprived another student of that seat. Given a scarcity of seats, we have a responsibility to allocate them as wisely as we can. (One could also argue that “let them fail” represents a waste of financial aid, which is largely tax-funded.)
There’s also the annoying political reality that “let them fail” would lead, in the short term, to even higher attrition rates. In an era in which attrition is assumed to be the college’s fault, that would amount to institutional suicide.
In the short term, the easiest and most prudent approach is probably the small-bore solution of finding a test that actually tells you something, preferably with students getting an opportunity to review ahead of time. The more radical solutions of embedded remediation or just letting them fail would either take years to develop, as in the former, or require a political sea change, as in the latter.
Is there a better way? Wise and worldly readers, have you seen (or come up with) a reasonably fast and efficient way to place thousands of students at the right level in a short time?
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Friday Finds
If you haven’t seen this interview with Jane Wellman, it’s well worth a read. She’s an expert on the drivers of college costs, and she was the founding director of the Delta Cost Project. (She’s also funny as hell in a sardonic, I’ve-had-toothaches-scarier-than-you way.) She makes several points that I wish we could all just stipulate before having any more conversations about college costs: that every new dollar of tuition goes directly to health insurance costs; that community colleges are routinely shafted in funding formulae and desperately need substantial and permanent increases in operating subsidies; and that the cost of prisons is one of the primary drains on state budgets. (Yes, I also liked her recognition that the “administrative bloat” complains are symbolic, rather than serious; if you redistributed the money, it would be a drop in the bucket.) Accepting those truths wouldn’t necessarily lead to a single policy outcome, but it would rule out some truly stupid and destructive ones. That would help. Even just recognizing that higher education’s funding issues are inextricably connected to health care and prisons would be a tremendous improvement.
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The California death spiral continues. Now that the state has decided that Santa Monica College’s attempt at self-preservation was illegal, the survival options for community colleges are even fewer. Kevin Carey’s column this week drew some flak for being alarmist, but honestly, it struck me as restrained. First, California establishes a three-tier system of higher education, corresponding roughly to economic classes. Then it starves out the lowest tier. Then it stops taking transfers into the second tier. It’s gravitational pull, rather than conspiracy -- that’s why I call it a death spiral -- but it’s accelerating. Meanwhile, the for-profits swoop in to pick up the students on waiting lists. The only possible way to reverse it is to completely restructure the funding rules, starting with allowing campuses to keep the tuition and fees they raise. In the absence of that -- in other words, the far likelier outcome -- is that the higher education system there will go the way the K-12 system went before it.
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Several alert readers sent me links to this piece from Esquire about the upward generational transfer of wealth in America. It’s a little polemical, but substantially correct, and easy enough to apply at your own workplace. What percentage of salary do the 1970’s hires have to contribute to their retirement plans? What percentage of salary do recent hires have to? If they don’t match -- at mine, they’re nowhere close -- then you have a problem. And that’s before you account for the higher student loan burden of the current generation.
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Speaking of, Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina made waves this week with her statement of having no patience for people who rack up significant student loan debt. The Quick and the Ed reveals that tuition at her alma mater has more than tripled in real terms since she was there. I assume, of course, that Rep. Foxx must therefore be a HUGE booster of community colleges. Otherwise, she’s just awful.
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Meanwhile, I hope against hope that despite all this generational warfare, The Boy and The Girl will grow into a country that deserves them. Better to bet on the future than the past.
---------
The California death spiral continues. Now that the state has decided that Santa Monica College’s attempt at self-preservation was illegal, the survival options for community colleges are even fewer. Kevin Carey’s column this week drew some flak for being alarmist, but honestly, it struck me as restrained. First, California establishes a three-tier system of higher education, corresponding roughly to economic classes. Then it starves out the lowest tier. Then it stops taking transfers into the second tier. It’s gravitational pull, rather than conspiracy -- that’s why I call it a death spiral -- but it’s accelerating. Meanwhile, the for-profits swoop in to pick up the students on waiting lists. The only possible way to reverse it is to completely restructure the funding rules, starting with allowing campuses to keep the tuition and fees they raise. In the absence of that -- in other words, the far likelier outcome -- is that the higher education system there will go the way the K-12 system went before it.
-----------
Several alert readers sent me links to this piece from Esquire about the upward generational transfer of wealth in America. It’s a little polemical, but substantially correct, and easy enough to apply at your own workplace. What percentage of salary do the 1970’s hires have to contribute to their retirement plans? What percentage of salary do recent hires have to? If they don’t match -- at mine, they’re nowhere close -- then you have a problem. And that’s before you account for the higher student loan burden of the current generation.
----------
Speaking of, Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina made waves this week with her statement of having no patience for people who rack up significant student loan debt. The Quick and the Ed reveals that tuition at her alma mater has more than tripled in real terms since she was there. I assume, of course, that Rep. Foxx must therefore be a HUGE booster of community colleges. Otherwise, she’s just awful.
----------
Meanwhile, I hope against hope that despite all this generational warfare, The Boy and The Girl will grow into a country that deserves them. Better to bet on the future than the past.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Clippy's Revenge
When did Microsoft Word become such a lumbering, bloated behemoth?
It was not always thus. Many years ago, I recall Word being a vaguely clunky but otherwise harmless word processing program. In its early iterations, as I remember them, it was clearly nerdy -- not much in the way of fonts or colors -- but it got the job done without much fuss. Even when the Windows versions came along and some of the simple elegance of the old DOS version fell away, it was still pretty tolerable. For a time, Word and WordPerfect were the Coke and Pepsi of word processing programs; preference was a matter of taste, but you could pretty much move between them without especially noticing.
The first real sign that something had gone horribly wrong was Clippy. (I think this was somewhere around 2000, though I’ve forgotten the particulars in the same way that the body forgets pain.) Clippy was an animated paper clip who existed mostly to annoy users. He asked presumptuous questions, and just getting him to go away took more labor than it should have. “You look like you’re writing a letter! Would you like some help?” Sure, Clippy, what’s another way of saying GET THE %(&$ OFF MY SCREEN YOU &^*(%$&#^%*?
Clippy was eventually dispatched -- nobody asked too many questions -- and Word reverted to its mildly annoying self. Soon, free alternatives like Open Office came along that fulfilled much the same role WordPerfect used to, only without having to pay for it. I switched, as did most people I know.
I mostly skipped Office 2007, except for a few ill-fated experiments on a short-lived laptop. This was the version in which Microsoft decided that easily found, clear commands like, say, “print,” just weren’t sporting enough, so it hid them. I actually had to google “How to print in Word 2007.” When you have to google “how to print,” something isn’t right.
By this point, of course, I had discovered Google Docs. Google Docs is mercifully stripped down, like Word once was, and it has the virtues of zero cost, self-updating, and automatic online backup. (That may not sound like much, but go through a hard drive crash or two, and you’ll see the appeal.) I liked it because I could start noodling with a blog post on my lunch break on one computer, and then finish it at home that night without bothering with file transfer. It also has an obvious “print” button. This is not to be dismissed lightly.
For the last several years, I’ve been happily using NeoOffice at work, Google Docs at home, and Open Office on the road when I couldn’t get online. Not perfect, but fine.
Then, the book came along.
I compose in Google Docs, but for reasons unknown, my publisher wants files in Word, and it sends files back and forth in Word, complete with obscure functions like “track changes.” So I bit the bullet and got Word 2010.
The horror...the horror...
Clippy’s revenge is total. In addition to being absurdly huge, the program is almost comically inscrutable. Now it comes in “starter” as well as, I don’t know, “veteran” flavors. Did you know that “starter” doesn’t include “track changes?” I didn’t, either. And can you buy the one additional feature you want? Negative -- it’s all or nothing. “Copy and paste” has become far more complex, and even something as simple as “save” requires changing screens. Just figuring out how to change the line spacing from single to double required multiple trips to “help,” since its preferred solution was to change templates (!).
I didn’t need Clippy. I needed a sherpa.
I understand the impulse to add yet another feature whenever someone wants it, but Apple (and Google Docs) has shown us the virtue of keeping things simple enough that you don’t have to do internet searches to figure out how to print a damn document. The 286 pc I bought in 1990 could print a damn document, even if it had to use dot matrix to do it. (For younger readers, just imagine that I yelled at you to get off the lawn.) First things first.
Clippy, you may be enjoying this bit of revenge now, but I’m putting you on notice. I wrote this post, like nearly every other post, in Google Docs, and I liked it. And as soon as this manuscript is in, I’m done with you.
Keep it simple. Life is too short to have to look up “save.”
It was not always thus. Many years ago, I recall Word being a vaguely clunky but otherwise harmless word processing program. In its early iterations, as I remember them, it was clearly nerdy -- not much in the way of fonts or colors -- but it got the job done without much fuss. Even when the Windows versions came along and some of the simple elegance of the old DOS version fell away, it was still pretty tolerable. For a time, Word and WordPerfect were the Coke and Pepsi of word processing programs; preference was a matter of taste, but you could pretty much move between them without especially noticing.
The first real sign that something had gone horribly wrong was Clippy. (I think this was somewhere around 2000, though I’ve forgotten the particulars in the same way that the body forgets pain.) Clippy was an animated paper clip who existed mostly to annoy users. He asked presumptuous questions, and just getting him to go away took more labor than it should have. “You look like you’re writing a letter! Would you like some help?” Sure, Clippy, what’s another way of saying GET THE %(&$ OFF MY SCREEN YOU &^*(%$&#^%*?
Clippy was eventually dispatched -- nobody asked too many questions -- and Word reverted to its mildly annoying self. Soon, free alternatives like Open Office came along that fulfilled much the same role WordPerfect used to, only without having to pay for it. I switched, as did most people I know.
I mostly skipped Office 2007, except for a few ill-fated experiments on a short-lived laptop. This was the version in which Microsoft decided that easily found, clear commands like, say, “print,” just weren’t sporting enough, so it hid them. I actually had to google “How to print in Word 2007.” When you have to google “how to print,” something isn’t right.
By this point, of course, I had discovered Google Docs. Google Docs is mercifully stripped down, like Word once was, and it has the virtues of zero cost, self-updating, and automatic online backup. (That may not sound like much, but go through a hard drive crash or two, and you’ll see the appeal.) I liked it because I could start noodling with a blog post on my lunch break on one computer, and then finish it at home that night without bothering with file transfer. It also has an obvious “print” button. This is not to be dismissed lightly.
For the last several years, I’ve been happily using NeoOffice at work, Google Docs at home, and Open Office on the road when I couldn’t get online. Not perfect, but fine.
Then, the book came along.
I compose in Google Docs, but for reasons unknown, my publisher wants files in Word, and it sends files back and forth in Word, complete with obscure functions like “track changes.” So I bit the bullet and got Word 2010.
The horror...the horror...
Clippy’s revenge is total. In addition to being absurdly huge, the program is almost comically inscrutable. Now it comes in “starter” as well as, I don’t know, “veteran” flavors. Did you know that “starter” doesn’t include “track changes?” I didn’t, either. And can you buy the one additional feature you want? Negative -- it’s all or nothing. “Copy and paste” has become far more complex, and even something as simple as “save” requires changing screens. Just figuring out how to change the line spacing from single to double required multiple trips to “help,” since its preferred solution was to change templates (!).
I didn’t need Clippy. I needed a sherpa.
I understand the impulse to add yet another feature whenever someone wants it, but Apple (and Google Docs) has shown us the virtue of keeping things simple enough that you don’t have to do internet searches to figure out how to print a damn document. The 286 pc I bought in 1990 could print a damn document, even if it had to use dot matrix to do it. (For younger readers, just imagine that I yelled at you to get off the lawn.) First things first.
Clippy, you may be enjoying this bit of revenge now, but I’m putting you on notice. I wrote this post, like nearly every other post, in Google Docs, and I liked it. And as soon as this manuscript is in, I’m done with you.
Keep it simple. Life is too short to have to look up “save.”
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Ask the Administrator: Making a Class Writing-Intensive
A returning correspondent writes:
That worked fine in composition courses, since all that process wasn’t competing with anything. It even worked pretty well in “Debate” classes, which I thought of as essentially similar. Since the course was about skills, rather than content, the process approach was a natural fit.
But when it came to my own discipline -- a social science -- making the intro class fit the parameters of a composition class didn’t leave much time for the actual social science.
Back in the 90’s, when grunge bands ruled the earth and our biggest political worry was what to do with the budget surplus, “writing across the curriculum” briefly gained traction. The idea was that it was unreasonable to expect one or two English composition classes to bring students to fluency on their own; they needed backup from other fields. If students had to write papers in sociology and chemistry and business, the argument went, then they’d improve through repetition and they couldn’t shrug off criticism of poor writing with “this isn’t an English class!”
The theory made sense, as far as it went, but it failed to account for the workload in the other disciplines. Turning Psych 101 into English 101b didn’t leave much room for Psych.
The best answers I was able to find involved adaptation. While it just wasn’t reasonable to assign as many papers in social science 101 as they did in composition -- class size alone made that impossible, let alone coverage of course material -- it still made sense to draw on the lessons of process instruction.
A former professor of mine used to say that every teacher has to make a choice: you can cover, or you can uncover. It’s overdrawn, obviously, but there’s something to it. Given how little students remember of actual content when it’s simply “covered,” there’s an argument for picking a few of the most important things and focusing more intently on those. Process can be a way to do that.
It takes some serious advance planning, but if you can design assignments so they build on each other, incorporating new information as they go, you’ve got something. Having a series of mini-deadlines can help keep students on target, since it makes the inevitable procrastination that much harder. (If nothing else, it at least reduces the stakes of procrastination.)
I also carried over a few tricks. For exams, I’d write six essay questions and hand them out a week in advance. I’d tell them that four of them would appear on the test, and they could choose any two to answer. That meant that they had to prepare for four of the six. Then I let them bring in a single index card, no larger than 4 x 6, with anything handwritten on it that they wanted.
They cackled, thinking they had found a loophole. They’d bring in their index cards, chockablock with notes. Then, as they were beavering away, a few of them would figure out what had just happened: I had tricked them into studying. Bwa-ha-ha-ha!
(Admittedly, this was in the era before smartphones.)
The following week, I’d hand out copies of the single best essay (with the name removed), and would go over it briefly with the class, calling attention to what made it work. Some of the weaker writers were shocked at how good it was, which had a salutary effect on their studying for the next exam.
Out-of-class writing was much tougher, since plagiarism was rampant. Some of it was painfully obvious, and would turn up with a quick Google search. But some of it was the “my girlfriend wrote it for me,” which was harder to catch. Multiple drafts could help, theoretically, but the girlfriend could always write multiple drafts. Some level of in-class writing made a helpful plagiarism check. If the kid who always turns in brilliant papers can’t write See Spot Run in class, you have a clue.
Of course, these are just a few first thoughts. I’m certain that my wise and worldly readers have found other ways to square this particular circle, so I’ll just ask. Wise and worldly readers, have you found good ways to incorporate intensive writing into classes in other disciplines?
Good luck!
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
I've been fortunate enough to be hired as a visiting instructor for one year at a small liberal-arts college, and I'm very excited to teach there. I will be teaching a class that I've taught several times before (basically an intro survey of my primary field of study), but the head of the department and I have agreed to make it a writing intensive class. This is throwing me for a loop.I used to have these discussions all the time. Proprietary U’s Gen Ed department was dominated by English professors, and they used to insist on the “process” approach to teaching writing which, they insisted, had to be done across the curriculum.
I have checked in with the writing center, and so I know what is required to make the class qualify as writing intensive in terms of "x number of papers" and "peer review", etc. But I am worried about the logistics of 1.) carving out enough time from the substance of the class to accommodate the writing process, and 2.) how to guide my students to be better writers. Are there any pitfalls to avoid at all costs? Are there any secret paths to managing the work of being both a professor of my subject and a writing guru? Do you (and your worldly and wise readers) have any advice on this subject?
That worked fine in composition courses, since all that process wasn’t competing with anything. It even worked pretty well in “Debate” classes, which I thought of as essentially similar. Since the course was about skills, rather than content, the process approach was a natural fit.
But when it came to my own discipline -- a social science -- making the intro class fit the parameters of a composition class didn’t leave much time for the actual social science.
Back in the 90’s, when grunge bands ruled the earth and our biggest political worry was what to do with the budget surplus, “writing across the curriculum” briefly gained traction. The idea was that it was unreasonable to expect one or two English composition classes to bring students to fluency on their own; they needed backup from other fields. If students had to write papers in sociology and chemistry and business, the argument went, then they’d improve through repetition and they couldn’t shrug off criticism of poor writing with “this isn’t an English class!”
The theory made sense, as far as it went, but it failed to account for the workload in the other disciplines. Turning Psych 101 into English 101b didn’t leave much room for Psych.
The best answers I was able to find involved adaptation. While it just wasn’t reasonable to assign as many papers in social science 101 as they did in composition -- class size alone made that impossible, let alone coverage of course material -- it still made sense to draw on the lessons of process instruction.
A former professor of mine used to say that every teacher has to make a choice: you can cover, or you can uncover. It’s overdrawn, obviously, but there’s something to it. Given how little students remember of actual content when it’s simply “covered,” there’s an argument for picking a few of the most important things and focusing more intently on those. Process can be a way to do that.
It takes some serious advance planning, but if you can design assignments so they build on each other, incorporating new information as they go, you’ve got something. Having a series of mini-deadlines can help keep students on target, since it makes the inevitable procrastination that much harder. (If nothing else, it at least reduces the stakes of procrastination.)
I also carried over a few tricks. For exams, I’d write six essay questions and hand them out a week in advance. I’d tell them that four of them would appear on the test, and they could choose any two to answer. That meant that they had to prepare for four of the six. Then I let them bring in a single index card, no larger than 4 x 6, with anything handwritten on it that they wanted.
They cackled, thinking they had found a loophole. They’d bring in their index cards, chockablock with notes. Then, as they were beavering away, a few of them would figure out what had just happened: I had tricked them into studying. Bwa-ha-ha-ha!
(Admittedly, this was in the era before smartphones.)
The following week, I’d hand out copies of the single best essay (with the name removed), and would go over it briefly with the class, calling attention to what made it work. Some of the weaker writers were shocked at how good it was, which had a salutary effect on their studying for the next exam.
Out-of-class writing was much tougher, since plagiarism was rampant. Some of it was painfully obvious, and would turn up with a quick Google search. But some of it was the “my girlfriend wrote it for me,” which was harder to catch. Multiple drafts could help, theoretically, but the girlfriend could always write multiple drafts. Some level of in-class writing made a helpful plagiarism check. If the kid who always turns in brilliant papers can’t write See Spot Run in class, you have a clue.
Of course, these are just a few first thoughts. I’m certain that my wise and worldly readers have found other ways to square this particular circle, so I’ll just ask. Wise and worldly readers, have you found good ways to incorporate intensive writing into classes in other disciplines?
Good luck!
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Monday, April 16, 2012
Four-Year Degrees, Two-Year Schools
The news from Michigan that Northwestern Michigan College, a two-year school, has applied for permission to offer four-year degrees got me thinking about the entire concept.
(I’m not focusing in particular on Northwestern Michigan College, since it’s armed at a level that my college simply is not. They have a 224 foot submarine. I’m not gonna mess with that.)
Should community colleges offer bachelor’s degrees?
My strong inclination is “no,” though I’m more than happy to support cooperative bachelor’s degree completion programs, aggressive articulation agreements, and even statewide transfer blocs. Community colleges as the first two years of a four year degree strike me as a very reasonable solution for many people. Community colleges as four year schools, not so much.
I understand the impulse. Four year colleges get much more respect, and can charge correspondingly higher tuition. The faculty would generally support the idea, as long as it came with the lower teaching loads characteristic of four-year schools. Students routinely ask when we’ll start offering four-year degrees, since they like it here and don’t want to go elsewhere. I get that.
But mission creep is poisonous, especially when money is tight.
If we suddenly had to cover twice as many sections with the same faculty, we’d have to either increase our adjunct ratio even more, or stuff the class sections fuller. That’s how a lot of the four-year schools do it. When I t.a.’ed for the 101 class in my discipline at Flagship State, the main lecture was taught in an auditorium for 300 students. “Recitation” sections had about 25 students, but the t.a.’s were typically grad students in their mid-twenties with minimal preparation. We learned on the job, if at all. By contrast, the 101 classes at my cc are taught by real faculty in sections of 32 or less. The students can actually ask questions.
The political issues might even swamp the staffing ones. Right now we have excellent relationships with most of the local four-year colleges, since they see us -- correctly -- as a feeder. We transfer the higher achievers directly into their lower-enrolled upper-level sections. The four-year schools can fill their upper-level classes even after freshman attrition; we can give students real and valid goals to shoot for; the students can get four-year degrees at a deep discount. Wins all around.
But recast us from “feeder” to “competitor,” and suddenly things get ugly. We have to raise prices substantially to compensate for the extra staffing, extra sections, extra facilities, and extra marketing. The four-year colleges move from “accepting transfers” to “poaching,” with all of the ethical dilemmas that implies. We have to reduce our freshman admissions in order to make room for the upper-level students, with directly regressive economic fallout.
More broadly, mission creep is one of the underappreciated cost drivers in American higher education. Second-tier schools want to be first-tier, and they know that it costs money to do that. Colleges want to be universities, and the slightly selective want to be more selective. Right now, community colleges offer the benefit of relative specialization, and of a clear identity. They specialize in the first two years, and leave the rest to others. Suddenly moving from “effective provider of the basics” to “mediocre four-year wannabe” strikes me as wrongheaded. If anything, the right move for community colleges is towards greater specialization, not less.
The universe of higher education has become more diverse, even as the various colleges and universities try to imitate each other. (For-profits account for the difference.) My free advice for community colleges is to embrace specificity. Do those first two years better than just about anybody else. Let the for-profits pick up the most expensive vocational programs. Focus intensely on the liberal arts core, with a few vocational programs of obvious relevance. (In my neck of the woods, that would include allied health and criminal justice. In Northwest Michigan, it may include working 224 foot submarines. Gotta protect us from rogue Canadians.) Let the other folks carry the costs of HVAC technician training or upper-level seminars.
Community colleges have the raw material to be the breakthrough sites for innovations in teaching writing, speaking, and math to first-year college students. That’s a worthy and difficult mission, hard to do well but valuable when done right. Let’s do that. I’m content to leave the upper-level stuff to the colleges that specialize in it. Better to do what we do, well.
(I’m not focusing in particular on Northwestern Michigan College, since it’s armed at a level that my college simply is not. They have a 224 foot submarine. I’m not gonna mess with that.)
Should community colleges offer bachelor’s degrees?
My strong inclination is “no,” though I’m more than happy to support cooperative bachelor’s degree completion programs, aggressive articulation agreements, and even statewide transfer blocs. Community colleges as the first two years of a four year degree strike me as a very reasonable solution for many people. Community colleges as four year schools, not so much.
I understand the impulse. Four year colleges get much more respect, and can charge correspondingly higher tuition. The faculty would generally support the idea, as long as it came with the lower teaching loads characteristic of four-year schools. Students routinely ask when we’ll start offering four-year degrees, since they like it here and don’t want to go elsewhere. I get that.
But mission creep is poisonous, especially when money is tight.
If we suddenly had to cover twice as many sections with the same faculty, we’d have to either increase our adjunct ratio even more, or stuff the class sections fuller. That’s how a lot of the four-year schools do it. When I t.a.’ed for the 101 class in my discipline at Flagship State, the main lecture was taught in an auditorium for 300 students. “Recitation” sections had about 25 students, but the t.a.’s were typically grad students in their mid-twenties with minimal preparation. We learned on the job, if at all. By contrast, the 101 classes at my cc are taught by real faculty in sections of 32 or less. The students can actually ask questions.
The political issues might even swamp the staffing ones. Right now we have excellent relationships with most of the local four-year colleges, since they see us -- correctly -- as a feeder. We transfer the higher achievers directly into their lower-enrolled upper-level sections. The four-year schools can fill their upper-level classes even after freshman attrition; we can give students real and valid goals to shoot for; the students can get four-year degrees at a deep discount. Wins all around.
But recast us from “feeder” to “competitor,” and suddenly things get ugly. We have to raise prices substantially to compensate for the extra staffing, extra sections, extra facilities, and extra marketing. The four-year colleges move from “accepting transfers” to “poaching,” with all of the ethical dilemmas that implies. We have to reduce our freshman admissions in order to make room for the upper-level students, with directly regressive economic fallout.
More broadly, mission creep is one of the underappreciated cost drivers in American higher education. Second-tier schools want to be first-tier, and they know that it costs money to do that. Colleges want to be universities, and the slightly selective want to be more selective. Right now, community colleges offer the benefit of relative specialization, and of a clear identity. They specialize in the first two years, and leave the rest to others. Suddenly moving from “effective provider of the basics” to “mediocre four-year wannabe” strikes me as wrongheaded. If anything, the right move for community colleges is towards greater specialization, not less.
The universe of higher education has become more diverse, even as the various colleges and universities try to imitate each other. (For-profits account for the difference.) My free advice for community colleges is to embrace specificity. Do those first two years better than just about anybody else. Let the for-profits pick up the most expensive vocational programs. Focus intensely on the liberal arts core, with a few vocational programs of obvious relevance. (In my neck of the woods, that would include allied health and criminal justice. In Northwest Michigan, it may include working 224 foot submarines. Gotta protect us from rogue Canadians.) Let the other folks carry the costs of HVAC technician training or upper-level seminars.
Community colleges have the raw material to be the breakthrough sites for innovations in teaching writing, speaking, and math to first-year college students. That’s a worthy and difficult mission, hard to do well but valuable when done right. Let’s do that. I’m content to leave the upper-level stuff to the colleges that specialize in it. Better to do what we do, well.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Growing Your Own?
Where will the next generation of deans come from?
It’s an increasingly urgent question, since the current crop is largely aging out of the profession. And in many settings, there’s no heir apparent at the ready.
A study from the Harvard Graduate School of Education recently made the rounds on the interwebs because it made the striking claim that managerial talent really only shows when it’s used, which means that the talent pool looks thinner than it really is. People with experience, it claims, are given more credit than they deserve, because people without experience have no way of showing their talent (or lack thereof). The only way to be really safe in hiring, then, is to hire for experience, which leads to a game of musical chairs among incumbents.
It’s one of those “magnesium is the secret of the universe!” theories that explains a few things, but is easily oversold. The most obvious flaw is that it takes “talent” as a given, and reduces experience to pure signaling. As with teaching, though, that’s not quite right. Rookies make rookie mistakes, even with talent; the first few years of experience may signal, but they also hone. Most professors will admit that their teaching was better a few years in than it was the first time out; why administration would be any different is not obvious. While I’ve long argued that the value of experience is not linear -- the years between fifteen and twenty make much less difference than the five years between zero and five -- it’s not zero, either. Those first few years matter.
That said, though, the study does hit on a few basic truths. The most basic, and the one that the AACC is trying to address through a “grow your own” leadership development program, is the leap of faith involved in giving someone that first experience. Academia fully admits the need for a leap of faith in the context of teaching; it’s the stated rationale behind giving graduate students teaching assistantships. The idea is to create a rank from which rookies aren’t ruled out for being rookies. But as an industry, we like to pretend that anyone can just step into administration at any time. Once in a while, that works, but the fail rate is high enough that you’d think we would have moved past it by now.
The “grow your own” approach helps get around the “no job without experience, no experience without a job” dilemma by creating cultivated experiences for their own sake. While it’s hard to imagine just what those cultivated experiences might look like, the concept makes some sense. I’ve seen perfectly wonderful professors flame out when they’ve had to work with others as equals, and I’ve seen high-performing perfectionists who simply couldn’t bring themselves to rely on other people. (“To get it done right, I’ll just do it myself.”) In my own case, chairing the campus accreditation self-study was the introduction to administration. While I made my share of rookie mistakes on that, I was able to show that I could work with other people and take the occasional punch, both of which are core competencies of administration.
The flaw in the “grow your own” model, though, is that it presumes the presence of a willing and basically capable generation of full-time faculty. But the pig-in-a-python generational problem that they’re trying to solve -- a monster-sized cohort aging out -- exists, too, among the faculty. Decades of minimal full-time faculty hiring have resulted in a thin bench. If we had plenty of full-time faculty in their mid-thirties to mid-forties just waiting for their big break, then the “grow your own” model would be just the thing. But when an entire generation got basically skipped, as mine did, then the grow your own model will hit its natural limits pretty quickly.
Worse, all the recession-driven shedding of administrative positions over the last few years has led to some incredibly flat organizations. When you don’t have associate deans -- my college doesn’t -- then you don’t have easy ways for people to move up the ladder. The ladder was sacrificed a few budget cuts ago, and we’re seeing the consequences of that now.
I wish the AACC program well. It’s well-intended, and there are probably a few folks for whom it will present a real opportunity. But at the end of the day, you can’t skip a generation of hiring, eliminate intermediate positions, and heap calumny on an entire class of employees, and then pretend that a training program will make up for it. It just doesn’t work like that. The next generation of deans will face an entirely different set of challenges, and often will not have had the kind of experience we would have liked. If only someone would write about that...
It’s an increasingly urgent question, since the current crop is largely aging out of the profession. And in many settings, there’s no heir apparent at the ready.
A study from the Harvard Graduate School of Education recently made the rounds on the interwebs because it made the striking claim that managerial talent really only shows when it’s used, which means that the talent pool looks thinner than it really is. People with experience, it claims, are given more credit than they deserve, because people without experience have no way of showing their talent (or lack thereof). The only way to be really safe in hiring, then, is to hire for experience, which leads to a game of musical chairs among incumbents.
It’s one of those “magnesium is the secret of the universe!” theories that explains a few things, but is easily oversold. The most obvious flaw is that it takes “talent” as a given, and reduces experience to pure signaling. As with teaching, though, that’s not quite right. Rookies make rookie mistakes, even with talent; the first few years of experience may signal, but they also hone. Most professors will admit that their teaching was better a few years in than it was the first time out; why administration would be any different is not obvious. While I’ve long argued that the value of experience is not linear -- the years between fifteen and twenty make much less difference than the five years between zero and five -- it’s not zero, either. Those first few years matter.
That said, though, the study does hit on a few basic truths. The most basic, and the one that the AACC is trying to address through a “grow your own” leadership development program, is the leap of faith involved in giving someone that first experience. Academia fully admits the need for a leap of faith in the context of teaching; it’s the stated rationale behind giving graduate students teaching assistantships. The idea is to create a rank from which rookies aren’t ruled out for being rookies. But as an industry, we like to pretend that anyone can just step into administration at any time. Once in a while, that works, but the fail rate is high enough that you’d think we would have moved past it by now.
The “grow your own” approach helps get around the “no job without experience, no experience without a job” dilemma by creating cultivated experiences for their own sake. While it’s hard to imagine just what those cultivated experiences might look like, the concept makes some sense. I’ve seen perfectly wonderful professors flame out when they’ve had to work with others as equals, and I’ve seen high-performing perfectionists who simply couldn’t bring themselves to rely on other people. (“To get it done right, I’ll just do it myself.”) In my own case, chairing the campus accreditation self-study was the introduction to administration. While I made my share of rookie mistakes on that, I was able to show that I could work with other people and take the occasional punch, both of which are core competencies of administration.
The flaw in the “grow your own” model, though, is that it presumes the presence of a willing and basically capable generation of full-time faculty. But the pig-in-a-python generational problem that they’re trying to solve -- a monster-sized cohort aging out -- exists, too, among the faculty. Decades of minimal full-time faculty hiring have resulted in a thin bench. If we had plenty of full-time faculty in their mid-thirties to mid-forties just waiting for their big break, then the “grow your own” model would be just the thing. But when an entire generation got basically skipped, as mine did, then the grow your own model will hit its natural limits pretty quickly.
Worse, all the recession-driven shedding of administrative positions over the last few years has led to some incredibly flat organizations. When you don’t have associate deans -- my college doesn’t -- then you don’t have easy ways for people to move up the ladder. The ladder was sacrificed a few budget cuts ago, and we’re seeing the consequences of that now.
I wish the AACC program well. It’s well-intended, and there are probably a few folks for whom it will present a real opportunity. But at the end of the day, you can’t skip a generation of hiring, eliminate intermediate positions, and heap calumny on an entire class of employees, and then pretend that a training program will make up for it. It just doesn’t work like that. The next generation of deans will face an entirely different set of challenges, and often will not have had the kind of experience we would have liked. If only someone would write about that...
Thursday, April 05, 2012
Thoughts I Can't Shake
Thoughts I Can’t Shake
The Girl: “If you dug a tunnel to China, would the hole in the earth make a whistling sound as the earth turned?”
------------
I first saw this piece a week or two ago, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head since. It argues that certain jobs, such as management, call on skills that are remarkably hard to discern from the outside. Therefore in filling those jobs, employers tend to fall back on experience as a criterion, since it’s easier to see and quantify. As a result, the piece argues, experience is overrated (and overcompensated), and capable-but-unproven people often don’t get the chance to prove themselves in the first place.
There’s some truth to that, though I’d add that experience doesn’t only reveal underlying strengths; it also develops them, at least to a point. If that sounds sketchy when applied to administration, think of it as applied to teaching; most teachers don’t do the best work of their career in the first class they ever taught. It takes a little while to get the hang of it. The benefits of experience aren’t necessarily linear -- I tend to think they’re frontloaded, with diminishing returns beyond a certain point -- but they aren’t zero, either.
But you can only develop those strengths by getting the opportunity in the first place. And that’s where I foresee administrative hiring in higher ed getting even harder in the next several years.
----------
‘Tis Spring, which means it’s ceremony season, which means it’s time for the ritual butchering of the last names.
Anyone who has had to read long lists of unfamiliar student names knows the drill. And no matter how many safeguards we build in, someone always winds up wincing in pain as the speaker turns three syllables into five, or leaves off a hyphenation, or gets stuck, starts again, gets stuck again, laughs, and generally calls attention to himself.
Even knowing how words are usually pronounced doesn’t necessarily help. I used to live in a part of the country where Indian names were common, so I learned to pronounce names like “Sapana.” (It’s pronounced “Suppna.”) I surprised many a Sapana by getting that right.
Now I’m in an area with lots of French last names. Some have adopted English pronunciations and some haven’t. Quick: does “DuBois” rhyme with “Francois” or “Rejoice”? (Answer: yes.) And I still haven’t mastered “Nguyen.”
The only helpful hint I can offer is to commit to one pronunciation, no matter how wrong, and just do it. The start-stop-start-stop-start thing is worse than just a straight-up error. And just accept the fact that no matter how hard you try, someone out there will think you’re an idiot.
-----------
Program Note: Since my publisher has started using phrases like “it sure would be a shame...,” I’ll be away from the blog next week, trying to make the manuscript look like I meant that all along. I’ll resume posting for Monday, April 16.
The Girl: “If you dug a tunnel to China, would the hole in the earth make a whistling sound as the earth turned?”
------------
I first saw this piece a week or two ago, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head since. It argues that certain jobs, such as management, call on skills that are remarkably hard to discern from the outside. Therefore in filling those jobs, employers tend to fall back on experience as a criterion, since it’s easier to see and quantify. As a result, the piece argues, experience is overrated (and overcompensated), and capable-but-unproven people often don’t get the chance to prove themselves in the first place.
There’s some truth to that, though I’d add that experience doesn’t only reveal underlying strengths; it also develops them, at least to a point. If that sounds sketchy when applied to administration, think of it as applied to teaching; most teachers don’t do the best work of their career in the first class they ever taught. It takes a little while to get the hang of it. The benefits of experience aren’t necessarily linear -- I tend to think they’re frontloaded, with diminishing returns beyond a certain point -- but they aren’t zero, either.
But you can only develop those strengths by getting the opportunity in the first place. And that’s where I foresee administrative hiring in higher ed getting even harder in the next several years.
----------
‘Tis Spring, which means it’s ceremony season, which means it’s time for the ritual butchering of the last names.
Anyone who has had to read long lists of unfamiliar student names knows the drill. And no matter how many safeguards we build in, someone always winds up wincing in pain as the speaker turns three syllables into five, or leaves off a hyphenation, or gets stuck, starts again, gets stuck again, laughs, and generally calls attention to himself.
Even knowing how words are usually pronounced doesn’t necessarily help. I used to live in a part of the country where Indian names were common, so I learned to pronounce names like “Sapana.” (It’s pronounced “Suppna.”) I surprised many a Sapana by getting that right.
Now I’m in an area with lots of French last names. Some have adopted English pronunciations and some haven’t. Quick: does “DuBois” rhyme with “Francois” or “Rejoice”? (Answer: yes.) And I still haven’t mastered “Nguyen.”
The only helpful hint I can offer is to commit to one pronunciation, no matter how wrong, and just do it. The start-stop-start-stop-start thing is worse than just a straight-up error. And just accept the fact that no matter how hard you try, someone out there will think you’re an idiot.
-----------
Program Note: Since my publisher has started using phrases like “it sure would be a shame...,” I’ll be away from the blog next week, trying to make the manuscript look like I meant that all along. I’ll resume posting for Monday, April 16.
Wednesday, April 04, 2012
Tear Gas? Really?
There must be something in the water in California.
A few months ago, the world saw the viral video of campus police tear gassing protesters at a UC campus. This week, students at Santa Monica College -- a community college -- were tear gassed when trying to enter a public meeting to protest the proposed two-tier tuition plan outlined here.
No, no, no.
I don’t know enough about the logistics of the event to know whether the students were out of line in the moment or not; I’m content to leave that to the people on the scene. And I have to wonder why California colleges have forgotten how to “use their words,” as they say in daycare. But I have to wonder at the protest itself.
A college’s funding is cut, so it responds by attempting to make some of its programs self-sustaining. Quick: who do you protest?
If your answer is “the college” or “the college’s administration,” you’re missing the point.
Faced with severe and ongoing state cuts, a public institution has very few choices. It can cut its offerings -- the ‘enrollment cap’ solution that most of California has adopted. It can water down its quality, as many colleges have. It can narrow its focus and do fewer things, but commit to still doing them well. And it can raise prices to maintain breath and quality.
I can imagine arguments on behalf of any of those. The enrollment cap maintains quality while controlling costs, but at the expense of access. Across-the-board dilution lets everyone in and maintains range, but defeats the purpose of education in the first place. Narrowing the menu of options maintains quality and cuts costs, but it sends students who want certain programs to other places. Or you can raise prices enough to cover costs, which is what has been proposed at Santa Monica.
Candidly, among those choices, I find the third and fourth far less objectionable than the first two.
The problem is that the third and fourth tend to lead to much more intense political pushback. Shut down a degree program, and you make the national news. (Just ask SUNY Albany.) Raise prices significantly and students storm your board meeting. But slowly adjunct-out the English department, and the worst you get is some cynical grousing.
The moves that are the easiest politically in the short term do the most damage in the long term. If we don’t fix that, we’re in for collapse as an industry. That means that we all have to be a lot smarter in deciding whom, and when, to attack.
The right way to handle this is to pressure the state to fund the colleges at a level where they don’t have to make these awful choices. If the state comes through and the colleges act boneheaded anyway, then sure, protest away. But storming the local barricades when the local college made a choice to make its programs sustainable in a hostile environment makes no sense.
And California, lay off the tear gas. Seriously.
A few months ago, the world saw the viral video of campus police tear gassing protesters at a UC campus. This week, students at Santa Monica College -- a community college -- were tear gassed when trying to enter a public meeting to protest the proposed two-tier tuition plan outlined here.
No, no, no.
I don’t know enough about the logistics of the event to know whether the students were out of line in the moment or not; I’m content to leave that to the people on the scene. And I have to wonder why California colleges have forgotten how to “use their words,” as they say in daycare. But I have to wonder at the protest itself.
A college’s funding is cut, so it responds by attempting to make some of its programs self-sustaining. Quick: who do you protest?
If your answer is “the college” or “the college’s administration,” you’re missing the point.
Faced with severe and ongoing state cuts, a public institution has very few choices. It can cut its offerings -- the ‘enrollment cap’ solution that most of California has adopted. It can water down its quality, as many colleges have. It can narrow its focus and do fewer things, but commit to still doing them well. And it can raise prices to maintain breath and quality.
I can imagine arguments on behalf of any of those. The enrollment cap maintains quality while controlling costs, but at the expense of access. Across-the-board dilution lets everyone in and maintains range, but defeats the purpose of education in the first place. Narrowing the menu of options maintains quality and cuts costs, but it sends students who want certain programs to other places. Or you can raise prices enough to cover costs, which is what has been proposed at Santa Monica.
Candidly, among those choices, I find the third and fourth far less objectionable than the first two.
The problem is that the third and fourth tend to lead to much more intense political pushback. Shut down a degree program, and you make the national news. (Just ask SUNY Albany.) Raise prices significantly and students storm your board meeting. But slowly adjunct-out the English department, and the worst you get is some cynical grousing.
The moves that are the easiest politically in the short term do the most damage in the long term. If we don’t fix that, we’re in for collapse as an industry. That means that we all have to be a lot smarter in deciding whom, and when, to attack.
The right way to handle this is to pressure the state to fund the colleges at a level where they don’t have to make these awful choices. If the state comes through and the colleges act boneheaded anyway, then sure, protest away. But storming the local barricades when the local college made a choice to make its programs sustainable in a hostile environment makes no sense.
And California, lay off the tear gas. Seriously.
Tuesday, April 03, 2012
Ask the Administrator: Ph.D. or Industry?
An ambitious new correspondent writes:
This is a good problem to have. You’ve impressed people enough that they’re trying to figure out ways to keep you around and move you up the ladder. But you have to choose which ladder you want.
For the record, it’s simply not true that you need a doctorate in community college leadership to be a dean. It’s one route, but hardly the only one. At my college, for example, none of the deans has one. They all have degrees in disciplines they’ve taught.
Deans come in different flavors. The traditional dean of an academic division typically has full-time faculty experience, and a Master’s or higher in an academic discipline taught in that division. Your chemistry degree covers that, though your teaching experience thus far has been mostly adjunct.
But there are also deans of planning and assessment, for example. (They’re also sometimes called deans of institutional effectiveness.) From what you’ve written, it looks like you’re on a fast track for something like that. (Sometimes they’re called “directors.”) In a role like that, you may or may not have much supervisory responsibility, but your purview extends across the entire college. Being the assessment officer for a college gives you a key role in maintaining regional accreditation -- no small thing -- and it exposes you to the entire institution in ways that divisional deanships typically don’t.
So I’d suggest that it really comes down to what you want. If you want the traditional deanship of an academic division, then I’d strongly encourage you to try to find a full-time faculty slot. (Sometimes cc’s will hire people directly as department chairs, if nobody among the incumbents wants to deal with it. Selling your administrative experience could work in your favor.) Get some exposure to the culture of full-time faculty and to the daily realities of their world. After a few years, you’ll be in much better shape, even without a doctorate.
But if you like the assessment focus and the collegewide scope it gives you, you’re pretty well positioned already.
Other than salary -- which if you need it right now, settles the question -- I’m not sure what some years in industry will give you at this point. It makes a world of sense if you want to have a career in industry, but in terms of moving a community college academic career forward, I don’t see it. Management in a for-profit company is wildly different from management in a community college -- longtime readers have probably seen me hit that note once or twice -- and I don’t see it buying you much extra credibility. Even the “but it could pay for my doctorate” note sounds a little off, since typically the dissertations for programs like that consist of fieldwork at one’s home institution. If you don’t have a home academic institution, you’ll have a hard time doing the work.
One admin’s perspective, anyway. I’m sure folks in different contexts have different angles on this, so I’ll open it up. Wise and worldly readers, what say you? Does one path seem clearly more likely to succeed than the others?
Good luck!
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
I have taught or tutored since 1998. I was an adjunct chemistry instructor for 3 years at my community college. I have been Coordinator of Divisional Planning (read assistant dean) for my division for 1 year. I work with program coordinators and department chairs on student learning outcomes, program review and improvement, marketing/ PR, hiring, accreditation documents, room scheduling, collaborations with outside organizations, advisory boards, professional development, student appeals, student engagement activities, and other duties as assigned. I am the go-to person between our division and both HR and Institutional Effectiveness. Through my work on student learning outcomes, I even developed a very specific process for writing strong uses of results that I have submitted for presentation at a CC conference. This position is a part-time position with no prospect of becoming full-time within the next 3 years. My dean has been a phenomenal mentor. About 6 months ago he encouraged me to start exploring the option of becoming a CC dean. Since that time I have spoken with my VP of instructional services and another CC dean about what steps I needed to take to make that happen. My VP had the most specific recommendations. He said that the biggest holes in my resume were in direct supervision and budgeting and lack of a PhD in higher ed administration. The other CC dean said that in order to get faculty buy-in as a dean I needed to follow the traditional path and hold a full-time position in a CC. Although my dean actively seeks out opportunities to help me build my skill set, my current position has 2 very real limitations: no opportunity for direct supervision and it is part-time with little hope of being made full-time within the next few years. I understand that the traditional path to deanship is full time faculty, program coordinator, department chair, dean. Your blog and my own conversations have confirmed that. My VP said that he felt confident that I could move directly to department chair based on my teaching experience and current role. My dean feels that I can move directly into a dean position. Out of the blue, I was offered a manager position in customer service and HR for a medical device manufacturing company. It would offer me the supervisory and HR experience that I am lacking, and the pay increase would allow me to go back to school to get my PhD in CC Leadership. It is even within my general field of expertise. However, the experience would not follow the traditional CC dean path. My dean recommended that I take the position, but also suggested that I run the information by as many others as possible to get their perspectives. He said that I could remain employed in his office, he would funnel projects my way to keep my foot in the door, and that anything that is required for the PhD, he would make sure that I could do at my institution. My dean said that although he followed the traditional path, he felt that his resume lacked the industrial experience that would have been particularly helpful when working with advisory boards and writing grants. So here is my question: Is it better to keep my current administrative position in the hopes that a dept chair or dean position becomes available in my area or is it better to pursue a degree, fill the gaps in my experience and hope that someone will consider me for a CC dean position?
This is a good problem to have. You’ve impressed people enough that they’re trying to figure out ways to keep you around and move you up the ladder. But you have to choose which ladder you want.
For the record, it’s simply not true that you need a doctorate in community college leadership to be a dean. It’s one route, but hardly the only one. At my college, for example, none of the deans has one. They all have degrees in disciplines they’ve taught.
Deans come in different flavors. The traditional dean of an academic division typically has full-time faculty experience, and a Master’s or higher in an academic discipline taught in that division. Your chemistry degree covers that, though your teaching experience thus far has been mostly adjunct.
But there are also deans of planning and assessment, for example. (They’re also sometimes called deans of institutional effectiveness.) From what you’ve written, it looks like you’re on a fast track for something like that. (Sometimes they’re called “directors.”) In a role like that, you may or may not have much supervisory responsibility, but your purview extends across the entire college. Being the assessment officer for a college gives you a key role in maintaining regional accreditation -- no small thing -- and it exposes you to the entire institution in ways that divisional deanships typically don’t.
So I’d suggest that it really comes down to what you want. If you want the traditional deanship of an academic division, then I’d strongly encourage you to try to find a full-time faculty slot. (Sometimes cc’s will hire people directly as department chairs, if nobody among the incumbents wants to deal with it. Selling your administrative experience could work in your favor.) Get some exposure to the culture of full-time faculty and to the daily realities of their world. After a few years, you’ll be in much better shape, even without a doctorate.
But if you like the assessment focus and the collegewide scope it gives you, you’re pretty well positioned already.
Other than salary -- which if you need it right now, settles the question -- I’m not sure what some years in industry will give you at this point. It makes a world of sense if you want to have a career in industry, but in terms of moving a community college academic career forward, I don’t see it. Management in a for-profit company is wildly different from management in a community college -- longtime readers have probably seen me hit that note once or twice -- and I don’t see it buying you much extra credibility. Even the “but it could pay for my doctorate” note sounds a little off, since typically the dissertations for programs like that consist of fieldwork at one’s home institution. If you don’t have a home academic institution, you’ll have a hard time doing the work.
One admin’s perspective, anyway. I’m sure folks in different contexts have different angles on this, so I’ll open it up. Wise and worldly readers, what say you? Does one path seem clearly more likely to succeed than the others?
Good luck!
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Monday, April 02, 2012
The Long View
In a fit of responsibility, our budget guy did some projections five years out. Simply put, the gap is growing quickly, and it’s not likely that the state will pony up anything close to enough to fill it..
It was a sobering exercise.
Students are currently the single largest revenue source, which was never supposed to be true for a community college. But enrollments are down from their 2009 peak, and the number of high school grads in our service area is projected to continue to decline for the next several years. Even with thoughtful outreach to adult students, and some pickup of economic exiles from some higher-priced places, it looks like flat enrollment is the best case scenario. And while our tuition and fees are still quite low relative to our area, nobody sees double-digit percentage increases as sustainable over time. There comes a point at which the students are carrying all they can carry.
We don’t control what the state gives, so assuming substantial increases in state aid would just be irresponsible. That’s not to say we wouldn’t welcome it -- bring it on! -- but that we can’t count on it. And it’s not like political advocacy is any guarantee of success.
The college gets some revenues from non-credit offerings, which encompass both personal enrichment classes and workforce training. We intend to continue to grow those, but they tend to be somewhat unpredictable from year to year. The same holds true of room rentals to outside groups. The gym charges community members and employees for memberships, and that can probably go up a bit, but it’s hardly a game-changer. Bookstore revenues help, but with students going online more, the bookstore is likely exhausted as a source of growth. As a community college, sports are not a revenue source.
Philanthropy is of limited benefit, since we aren’t allowed to use it for operating expenses. It helps some with construction and capital (like microscopes), but we can’t use it for salaries. And labor is, by far, the largest cost item in the budget.
Grants can help in some areas, but they’re typically of limited duration, they bring high administrative costs, and in most cases they can’t be used for operating expenses outside narrowly defined grant activities. (For federal grants, they actually have prohibitions on “supplanting” existing college resources. Put differently, that means that any money can’t be used for what you would normally use money for. That tends to limit the usefulness a bit.)
We’ve already plucked much of the low-hanging fruit. We used stimulus funding to improve energy efficiency on campus, lowering utility bills ever after. We’ve shed administrators. Our adjunct percentage is already plenty high enough.
Online courses may help, since they continue to show growth and the infrastructure costs are minimal. Annoyingly, though, we’re at the point at which continued growth of online offerings will bring increased costs, since we’ll have to start developing more robust online processes and services to serve students who don’t come on campus. (Right now, the vast majority of our online students are also onsite, just using online to make their schedules friendlier. That’s pretty normal for community colleges nationally.) Recruiting students who never set foot on campus will require much more than manual workarounds.
We’re experimenting with various ways to improve student success, and there’s a reasonable argument that we may get some small financial benefit from improved retention. But unless we’re willing to jack tuition up to levels that actually cover full cost, that won’t save us. And most retention efforts cost money.
I intend to beat the bushes locally for ideas, hoping to find something, but experience tells me that faculty proposals tend to involve spending more money, not less.
The alternative to raising revenues, of course, is to cut costs. That’s the default path, and we’ll almost certainly continue to have to do some of that. But the point of “access” is access TO something. If the education has been watered down, what’s the point of having access to it? If we want to maintain quality -- or, preferably, improve -- we’ll need to raise revenues.
So in good Gen X fashion, I’m crowdsourcing it. Wise and worldly readers, have you seen a public college come up with an effective way to raise revenues without compromising quality or just jacking up costs for students?
It was a sobering exercise.
Students are currently the single largest revenue source, which was never supposed to be true for a community college. But enrollments are down from their 2009 peak, and the number of high school grads in our service area is projected to continue to decline for the next several years. Even with thoughtful outreach to adult students, and some pickup of economic exiles from some higher-priced places, it looks like flat enrollment is the best case scenario. And while our tuition and fees are still quite low relative to our area, nobody sees double-digit percentage increases as sustainable over time. There comes a point at which the students are carrying all they can carry.
We don’t control what the state gives, so assuming substantial increases in state aid would just be irresponsible. That’s not to say we wouldn’t welcome it -- bring it on! -- but that we can’t count on it. And it’s not like political advocacy is any guarantee of success.
The college gets some revenues from non-credit offerings, which encompass both personal enrichment classes and workforce training. We intend to continue to grow those, but they tend to be somewhat unpredictable from year to year. The same holds true of room rentals to outside groups. The gym charges community members and employees for memberships, and that can probably go up a bit, but it’s hardly a game-changer. Bookstore revenues help, but with students going online more, the bookstore is likely exhausted as a source of growth. As a community college, sports are not a revenue source.
Philanthropy is of limited benefit, since we aren’t allowed to use it for operating expenses. It helps some with construction and capital (like microscopes), but we can’t use it for salaries. And labor is, by far, the largest cost item in the budget.
Grants can help in some areas, but they’re typically of limited duration, they bring high administrative costs, and in most cases they can’t be used for operating expenses outside narrowly defined grant activities. (For federal grants, they actually have prohibitions on “supplanting” existing college resources. Put differently, that means that any money can’t be used for what you would normally use money for. That tends to limit the usefulness a bit.)
We’ve already plucked much of the low-hanging fruit. We used stimulus funding to improve energy efficiency on campus, lowering utility bills ever after. We’ve shed administrators. Our adjunct percentage is already plenty high enough.
Online courses may help, since they continue to show growth and the infrastructure costs are minimal. Annoyingly, though, we’re at the point at which continued growth of online offerings will bring increased costs, since we’ll have to start developing more robust online processes and services to serve students who don’t come on campus. (Right now, the vast majority of our online students are also onsite, just using online to make their schedules friendlier. That’s pretty normal for community colleges nationally.) Recruiting students who never set foot on campus will require much more than manual workarounds.
We’re experimenting with various ways to improve student success, and there’s a reasonable argument that we may get some small financial benefit from improved retention. But unless we’re willing to jack tuition up to levels that actually cover full cost, that won’t save us. And most retention efforts cost money.
I intend to beat the bushes locally for ideas, hoping to find something, but experience tells me that faculty proposals tend to involve spending more money, not less.
The alternative to raising revenues, of course, is to cut costs. That’s the default path, and we’ll almost certainly continue to have to do some of that. But the point of “access” is access TO something. If the education has been watered down, what’s the point of having access to it? If we want to maintain quality -- or, preferably, improve -- we’ll need to raise revenues.
So in good Gen X fashion, I’m crowdsourcing it. Wise and worldly readers, have you seen a public college come up with an effective way to raise revenues without compromising quality or just jacking up costs for students?
Sunday, April 01, 2012
Thoughts on a Day of Higher Ed
My IHE blogger colleague Lee Bessette has tagged April 2 as a “day of higher ed,” complete with twitter hashtag #dayofhighered. The idea is to share with the general public just what it is, exactly, that those of us in higher ed do all day.
It’s a neat idea. Last week’s Washington Post column about how underworked professors are certainly invited a fact-based rebuttal, and the idea of generating a slew of first-person responses has a certain appeal.
That said, though, there are limits to what I can share about my day. Too much of it involves dealing with sensitive topics -- personnel issues, emerging grant applications, that sort of thing -- or issues that sort of bubble under the surface for a while, any one of which could erupt on any given day. I can share that at this point, I have four meetings scheduled for a total of five and a half hours -- pretty normal for a Monday -- and will spend a good chunk of the rest of the time preparing for some job interviews I’m conducting later this week. I will also tend to a few simmering issues that require attention soon, though some of them may slip into Tuesday. And of course, the unknown unknowns -- usually couched in the form of “got a minute?” -- are always out there.
Then there’s the family stuff. Up at 5 to work out before work. Later, Mondays bring the kids’ music lessons, and The Girl’s softball practices have started. Homework, the bedtime shuffle, blogging. And that book deadline is looming ever larger...
In my faculty days, I occasionally wondered just what it was that administrators did all day. (I say “occasionally” because I didn’t usually give it much thought.) I’ve tried conveying some of it through the blog, but some of it is just too sensitive or context-specific to be bloggable. Transparency is great, but discretion and even confidentiality have their place, too.
I’ll be reading other folks entries on higher ed day with interest, not least because the world of a community college and the world of, say, a research university are so very different. But also because it strikes me that the next step would be looking at ways to change what we do for the better.
If enough people participate, we’d have the raw material to do some serious reflection.
Ultimately, the winning response to the nagging cultural suspicion about academics not working hard enough isn’t “do, too!” It’s winning over the culture with a display of value that counts in terms that most people find understandable and important. If the kind of testimony offered during higher ed day helps spur that discussion internally so that we can make a better case for ourselves externally, then it’s all good.
So readers, have at it. If you’re on twitter, I’ll see you there. If not, pick the venue that works for you. But if you’re in higher ed, just what do you do all day?
It’s a neat idea. Last week’s Washington Post column about how underworked professors are certainly invited a fact-based rebuttal, and the idea of generating a slew of first-person responses has a certain appeal.
That said, though, there are limits to what I can share about my day. Too much of it involves dealing with sensitive topics -- personnel issues, emerging grant applications, that sort of thing -- or issues that sort of bubble under the surface for a while, any one of which could erupt on any given day. I can share that at this point, I have four meetings scheduled for a total of five and a half hours -- pretty normal for a Monday -- and will spend a good chunk of the rest of the time preparing for some job interviews I’m conducting later this week. I will also tend to a few simmering issues that require attention soon, though some of them may slip into Tuesday. And of course, the unknown unknowns -- usually couched in the form of “got a minute?” -- are always out there.
Then there’s the family stuff. Up at 5 to work out before work. Later, Mondays bring the kids’ music lessons, and The Girl’s softball practices have started. Homework, the bedtime shuffle, blogging. And that book deadline is looming ever larger...
In my faculty days, I occasionally wondered just what it was that administrators did all day. (I say “occasionally” because I didn’t usually give it much thought.) I’ve tried conveying some of it through the blog, but some of it is just too sensitive or context-specific to be bloggable. Transparency is great, but discretion and even confidentiality have their place, too.
I’ll be reading other folks entries on higher ed day with interest, not least because the world of a community college and the world of, say, a research university are so very different. But also because it strikes me that the next step would be looking at ways to change what we do for the better.
If enough people participate, we’d have the raw material to do some serious reflection.
Ultimately, the winning response to the nagging cultural suspicion about academics not working hard enough isn’t “do, too!” It’s winning over the culture with a display of value that counts in terms that most people find understandable and important. If the kind of testimony offered during higher ed day helps spur that discussion internally so that we can make a better case for ourselves externally, then it’s all good.
So readers, have at it. If you’re on twitter, I’ll see you there. If not, pick the venue that works for you. But if you’re in higher ed, just what do you do all day?
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