The University of Phoenix, the largest for-profit higher education provider in the country, is closing over a hundred sites. That’s over half of its physical locations. Part of the move is driven by enrollment decline, and part by an increased emphasis on online course delivery.
Although many in traditional higher ed may feel a certain schadenfreude, I was actually saddened by the news. This is hardly an unalloyed good.
Admittedly, part of my perspective comes from having worked in another for-profit, early in my career. At a time when the "virtuous" non-profits offered only adjunct work, a local for-profit offered me a full time job with a living wage and health insurance. And I wasn't the only one; I landed in a department with a cluster of young Ph.D.s who had never intended to land there. For most of us, it functioned as a port in a storm. Many have since moved on to other places -- mostly nonprofit -- but would not have had the opportunity if not for the first big break.
That isn't as idiosyncratic as it may sound. Just as for-profits accounted for most of the enrollment growth over the last decade, they also accounted for a disproportionate share of the employment growth over the last decade. For all of their flaws -- and I'm not disputing those -- they hired good new people when nobody else did. That matters.
I'd strongly counsel hiring committees at community colleges not to turn up their noses at applicants who've worked in for-profits. Some terrific people landed there, just as some terrific people have landed in part-time or adjunct positions. And much of the day-to-day work is less different than you might imagine. Some Phoenix castoffs may be well worth taking seriously.
For a while, the for-profits grew like kudzu. They had the considerable advantage of a business model in which enrollment growth more than paid for itself. (Publics run at a loss, by design.) Unlike their public counterparts, they didn’t have to reduce their offerings when demand increased. And unlike private nonprofits, they weren’t wedded to, say, summer breaks. They could scale up quickly, and they did.
But a model built on tuition alone is inherently unstable. Small drops in income require significant cuts in spending. As tired as those of us on the public side are of dealing with cuts, at least we have some sort of (admittedly shrinking) cushion in the operating budget to offset losses of tuition. When states respect that cushion, and it’s large enough, it becomes possible to make (and live up to) longish term plans.
The fatal flaw of the for-profits, in my mind, isn't that they're fundamentally different from traditional colleges; it's that they're fundamentally the same. They use the same measures of student achievement, the same sequences of courses, and many of the same assumptions as everyone else. Since they have many of the same cost drivers, and they lack the tax exemptions and public subsides of the nonprofits, they have to be clever to stay ahead. That worked for a while, but a combination of a more hostile political climate and some gradual learning among the nonprofits has changed the equation. Their lack of cushion means they experience shocks faster and harder than we do, but the shocks themselves aren’t really different.
I understand the impulse to chortle at Phoenix's misfortune. But let's not assume that the same issues that have plagued it won't plague us. I see the news less as confirmation that the critics of for-profits were right than as a warning sign that we could be next. When Phoenix rose from the ashes, it signaled a new wave in higher education. Now it may be the canary in the coal mine. We ignore the signs at our peril.
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
A College Tax?
It’s “Bad Idea Week” over at the Chronicle. They’ve solicited “out of the box” ideas for changing higher education. Some of them -- hey, what if community colleges hired faculty to teach? -- are just banal. (What, exactly, do you think we’ve been doing?) But others are interesting failures.
One proposal was for a dedicated tax specifically to fund higher education. The idea is that higher ed is a public good, like highways, and so it deserves a dedicated funding stream, just like the gas tax.
(Forehead slap.)
Admittedly, there’s a surface appeal. When legislators divert money from higher ed to, say, prisons, it’s easy to be seduced by a mechanism that would take that choice out of their hands.
But it isn’t as simple as that.
Some states already have a variation on this, called “millages.” A millage, as I understand it, is a property tax (expressed in “mills,” which are tens of cents per dollar of assessed value). A community college (or its “district”) will put a millage on the ballot, and it will win or lose.
Entire sessions at the CASE conference were devoted to tactics for winning millages. The public perceives millages as tax increases -- which, to be fair, they are -- and often votes against them. Entering the political process while remaining nonpolitical requires a certain finesse, and a cultural tailwind.
California has taken the concept farther. There, they govern almost entirely by referendum, reducing the legislature to vestigial status, like an appendix. Let’s just say that since the state went to that system, higher education has not fared well.
The college tax manages to combine several bad ideas into one. It isolates colleges politically, making them conspicuous targets. It increases the year-to-year instability of funding, making intelligent planning harder. It completely divorces funding from performance, creating a powerful incentive for colleges to divert funding from education to marketing. Depending on the level of government that assessed the tax -- federal, state, or local -- it could fall prey to any number of political flaws. A federal tax would shortchange the blue states and enrich the red ones, as federal taxes do. A state tax would be vulnerable to a race to the bottom, as states try to lure businesses. A local tax could fall prey to the race to the bottom, but even worse, would quickly reflect existing disparities of wealth; rich areas could have low rates and still be fine, while poor areas could have high rates and still suffer low quality. A quick look at the K-12 system is proof enough of that.
But worst of all, it lays bare for the world to see our single greatest flaw: stagnant productivity.
As a labor-intensive industry with high fixed costs and a time-bound measurement of performance, higher ed’s costs will increase more quickly than most of the rest of the economy. (See this post for details.) There is simply no way that the revenue from the dedicated tax would increase anywhere near as quickly as costs. Over time, we’d be caught in an inexorable pincer movement. For a sense of how that works, look at the California system.
I concede without argument that many of the frustrations we have with state legislatures have some basis in reality. But this idea is so much worse. The frying pan is no fun, but it beats the fire every time. Let’s hope this idea fades along with Bad Idea Week.
One proposal was for a dedicated tax specifically to fund higher education. The idea is that higher ed is a public good, like highways, and so it deserves a dedicated funding stream, just like the gas tax.
(Forehead slap.)
Admittedly, there’s a surface appeal. When legislators divert money from higher ed to, say, prisons, it’s easy to be seduced by a mechanism that would take that choice out of their hands.
But it isn’t as simple as that.
Some states already have a variation on this, called “millages.” A millage, as I understand it, is a property tax (expressed in “mills,” which are tens of cents per dollar of assessed value). A community college (or its “district”) will put a millage on the ballot, and it will win or lose.
Entire sessions at the CASE conference were devoted to tactics for winning millages. The public perceives millages as tax increases -- which, to be fair, they are -- and often votes against them. Entering the political process while remaining nonpolitical requires a certain finesse, and a cultural tailwind.
California has taken the concept farther. There, they govern almost entirely by referendum, reducing the legislature to vestigial status, like an appendix. Let’s just say that since the state went to that system, higher education has not fared well.
The college tax manages to combine several bad ideas into one. It isolates colleges politically, making them conspicuous targets. It increases the year-to-year instability of funding, making intelligent planning harder. It completely divorces funding from performance, creating a powerful incentive for colleges to divert funding from education to marketing. Depending on the level of government that assessed the tax -- federal, state, or local -- it could fall prey to any number of political flaws. A federal tax would shortchange the blue states and enrich the red ones, as federal taxes do. A state tax would be vulnerable to a race to the bottom, as states try to lure businesses. A local tax could fall prey to the race to the bottom, but even worse, would quickly reflect existing disparities of wealth; rich areas could have low rates and still be fine, while poor areas could have high rates and still suffer low quality. A quick look at the K-12 system is proof enough of that.
But worst of all, it lays bare for the world to see our single greatest flaw: stagnant productivity.
As a labor-intensive industry with high fixed costs and a time-bound measurement of performance, higher ed’s costs will increase more quickly than most of the rest of the economy. (See this post for details.) There is simply no way that the revenue from the dedicated tax would increase anywhere near as quickly as costs. Over time, we’d be caught in an inexorable pincer movement. For a sense of how that works, look at the California system.
I concede without argument that many of the frustrations we have with state legislatures have some basis in reality. But this idea is so much worse. The frying pan is no fun, but it beats the fire every time. Let’s hope this idea fades along with Bad Idea Week.
Monday, October 15, 2012
Ads on Campus
Should colleges use on-campus advertising as a revenue source?
The question came up this weekend when I noted on Twitter how spoiled I've become by watching tv almost exclusively on the DVR. Sunday night I caught part of the Cardinals-Giants game, and couldn't help but notice how many ads there were. An alert reader tweeted back that some colleges are doing the same thing on campus, selling ad space everywhere from the sides of campus buses to the walls of student centers.
It's easy to retreat to either extreme, but I wouldn't recommend it. The purist position that colleges should be havens from commercialism is hard to sustain when many of the buildings are named after donors. (At many private colleges, the entire institution is named after a donor. Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Stanford weren't known for their scholarly contributions.) Naming rights are major sources of capital funding. Similarly, many scholarships and -- in some settings -- endowed chairs are named after donors whose money may not have derived from the life of the mind.
The purist position also bears an uneasy relationship with freedom of speech. It's easy to overstate the "money is speech" position that the Supreme Court seems to endorse, but it's also true that advertising is, among other things, directed information. If a campus tries banning a certain class of information, the precedent could lead to places we don't want to go. Besides, to the extent that students need to be prepared for the real world, learning to navigate commerical information strikes me as part of the deal.
The profit motive is hardly absent from campus anyway. Food and bookstore services are typically run on a for-profit basis, and colleges have long profited by licensing names for sweatshirts, mugs, and the various paraphernalia found in college bookstores.
But I'm still uneasy with going from an acknowledgement of commercial speech to embracing it as salvation.
To the extent that a college derives benefits from its non-profit status -- property tax exemptions, say, and the ability to accept donations -- I can't help but think there's a public trust to uphold. (Public institutions take that a step farther, adding direct subsidies to the equation.) For a college to have an official soft drink, say, strikes me as exploiting its public trust. Depending on how far the endorsement or identification goes, there's a real risk of diluting the college's brand.
I'd also worry about influence. This is a chronic concern with named chairs, for example: would the Donald Trump Chair of Economics really be free to publish on the details of corruption among real estate developers?
Finally, I'd worry about stability. Market fortunes ebb and flow much more quickly than academic needs do. If the endorsement money goes to capital, or is basically ancillary, then that doesn't matter much. But if it starts to fund operations, then the college is even more exposed to market swings than it already is.
I've heard of major endorsement deals at major universities, but not at community colleges. Wise and worldly readers, have you seen (or heard of) major commericalization deals in the community college sector? If so, are there any lessons learned for the rest of us?
The question came up this weekend when I noted on Twitter how spoiled I've become by watching tv almost exclusively on the DVR. Sunday night I caught part of the Cardinals-Giants game, and couldn't help but notice how many ads there were. An alert reader tweeted back that some colleges are doing the same thing on campus, selling ad space everywhere from the sides of campus buses to the walls of student centers.
It's easy to retreat to either extreme, but I wouldn't recommend it. The purist position that colleges should be havens from commercialism is hard to sustain when many of the buildings are named after donors. (At many private colleges, the entire institution is named after a donor. Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Stanford weren't known for their scholarly contributions.) Naming rights are major sources of capital funding. Similarly, many scholarships and -- in some settings -- endowed chairs are named after donors whose money may not have derived from the life of the mind.
The purist position also bears an uneasy relationship with freedom of speech. It's easy to overstate the "money is speech" position that the Supreme Court seems to endorse, but it's also true that advertising is, among other things, directed information. If a campus tries banning a certain class of information, the precedent could lead to places we don't want to go. Besides, to the extent that students need to be prepared for the real world, learning to navigate commerical information strikes me as part of the deal.
The profit motive is hardly absent from campus anyway. Food and bookstore services are typically run on a for-profit basis, and colleges have long profited by licensing names for sweatshirts, mugs, and the various paraphernalia found in college bookstores.
But I'm still uneasy with going from an acknowledgement of commercial speech to embracing it as salvation.
To the extent that a college derives benefits from its non-profit status -- property tax exemptions, say, and the ability to accept donations -- I can't help but think there's a public trust to uphold. (Public institutions take that a step farther, adding direct subsidies to the equation.) For a college to have an official soft drink, say, strikes me as exploiting its public trust. Depending on how far the endorsement or identification goes, there's a real risk of diluting the college's brand.
I'd also worry about influence. This is a chronic concern with named chairs, for example: would the Donald Trump Chair of Economics really be free to publish on the details of corruption among real estate developers?
Finally, I'd worry about stability. Market fortunes ebb and flow much more quickly than academic needs do. If the endorsement money goes to capital, or is basically ancillary, then that doesn't matter much. But if it starts to fund operations, then the college is even more exposed to market swings than it already is.
I've heard of major endorsement deals at major universities, but not at community colleges. Wise and worldly readers, have you seen (or heard of) major commericalization deals in the community college sector? If so, are there any lessons learned for the rest of us?
Sunday, October 14, 2012
The Intersession Drive-By
I’m interested in hearing back from any of my wise and worldly readers who’ve seen or figured out ways to handle this situation elegantly.
My college offers a January intersession. The idea is that students take a single class in a compressed timeframe. For the last few years, it has worked remarkably well for students who are already here. They can either make up for a slip in the Fall or start making headway on the Spring. Course completion rates have floated around the 90 percent range, since such a short timeframe doesn’t give much opportunity for life to get in the way. And anecdotal feedback from the faculty who have taught it has been glowing; they report that there’s an intensity that comes from “owning” the student entirely for a short time that lends itself well to certain types of classes.
Admittedly, it’s not a panacea; I don’t know how a composition class could be done that quickly, for example. There just wouldn’t be the time to grade. But it seems to work really well for certain lab courses, some intro gen eds, and even statistics. I remain convinced that it would make a great “boot camp” opportunity for a refresher course for adult students to skip developmental math.
The goal of the January session was twofold: to help “our” students maintain continuity, and to recruit “visiting” students who are pursuing degrees elsewhere, but who are home for the break. A student at a pricier university who has nothing to do at home for a month might pick up a transferable gen ed class on the cheap and transfer it back. The student would benefit from the cost savings, we’d benefit from the enrollment, and all would be well.
But we’re having some trouble marketing to and enrolling the drive-by student.
Individual financial aid is one issue. By Federal guidelines, a student can only receive financial aid at one college at a time. So a kid who’s enrolled at Regional U can’t transfer part of his award to Local CC to take Intro to Sociology in January. I don’t really understand the rationale behind that -- it seems like a valid expense to me -- but there it is.
Institutional financial aid is a much hairier issue. In order to maintain institutional eligibility, we can only admit “regular” students to our credit-bearing classes. That means we need to verify high school graduation (or the presence of a GED) before allowing the student to enroll. There’s no quick-and-easy way to do that for the student who decides after Christmas that it might be a good idea to take a class in January. We also need to honor all the usual prerequisites, which requires a transcript evaluation; again, that’s easy with enough warning, but it doesn’t work well with the abrupt arrival in January. Depending on the class, there may be placement tests to administer and grade, adding another level of time and expense.
This seems a bit silly to me. In my naive mind, a student enrolling on a non-matriculated basis (that is, not pursuing a degree at that college) shouldn’t be required to undergo the same level of scrutiny as a student who is pursuing a degree. Ashley is home from Northwestern for a few weeks, and wants to try her hand at Intro to Psych at the local cc. Why do we need to make this difficult? I can understand if Northwestern chooses not to take the credits -- that’s their call -- but requiring Ashley to show up weeks in advance to get all the testing and paperwork processed for a single class just seems like overkill.
I’m hoping that we’re making this harder than it needs to be, and that there’s actually a reasonable elegant work-around to make it easier to catch the drive-by student. Wise and worldly readers, have you seen one? How did it work?
My college offers a January intersession. The idea is that students take a single class in a compressed timeframe. For the last few years, it has worked remarkably well for students who are already here. They can either make up for a slip in the Fall or start making headway on the Spring. Course completion rates have floated around the 90 percent range, since such a short timeframe doesn’t give much opportunity for life to get in the way. And anecdotal feedback from the faculty who have taught it has been glowing; they report that there’s an intensity that comes from “owning” the student entirely for a short time that lends itself well to certain types of classes.
Admittedly, it’s not a panacea; I don’t know how a composition class could be done that quickly, for example. There just wouldn’t be the time to grade. But it seems to work really well for certain lab courses, some intro gen eds, and even statistics. I remain convinced that it would make a great “boot camp” opportunity for a refresher course for adult students to skip developmental math.
The goal of the January session was twofold: to help “our” students maintain continuity, and to recruit “visiting” students who are pursuing degrees elsewhere, but who are home for the break. A student at a pricier university who has nothing to do at home for a month might pick up a transferable gen ed class on the cheap and transfer it back. The student would benefit from the cost savings, we’d benefit from the enrollment, and all would be well.
But we’re having some trouble marketing to and enrolling the drive-by student.
Individual financial aid is one issue. By Federal guidelines, a student can only receive financial aid at one college at a time. So a kid who’s enrolled at Regional U can’t transfer part of his award to Local CC to take Intro to Sociology in January. I don’t really understand the rationale behind that -- it seems like a valid expense to me -- but there it is.
Institutional financial aid is a much hairier issue. In order to maintain institutional eligibility, we can only admit “regular” students to our credit-bearing classes. That means we need to verify high school graduation (or the presence of a GED) before allowing the student to enroll. There’s no quick-and-easy way to do that for the student who decides after Christmas that it might be a good idea to take a class in January. We also need to honor all the usual prerequisites, which requires a transcript evaluation; again, that’s easy with enough warning, but it doesn’t work well with the abrupt arrival in January. Depending on the class, there may be placement tests to administer and grade, adding another level of time and expense.
This seems a bit silly to me. In my naive mind, a student enrolling on a non-matriculated basis (that is, not pursuing a degree at that college) shouldn’t be required to undergo the same level of scrutiny as a student who is pursuing a degree. Ashley is home from Northwestern for a few weeks, and wants to try her hand at Intro to Psych at the local cc. Why do we need to make this difficult? I can understand if Northwestern chooses not to take the credits -- that’s their call -- but requiring Ashley to show up weeks in advance to get all the testing and paperwork processed for a single class just seems like overkill.
I’m hoping that we’re making this harder than it needs to be, and that there’s actually a reasonable elegant work-around to make it easier to catch the drive-by student. Wise and worldly readers, have you seen one? How did it work?
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Friday Fragments
- With much of selective higher ed focused on the Supreme Court and its impending declaration on affirmative action in admissions, I’m grateful again to be at a community college. Here, affirmative action in admissions is a non-issue; we take all comers. We have our own legal and political challenges, heaven knows, but not that one.
- The Girl: “Why do some people “reckon” when they believe?” I didn’t have an answer for that.
- The company that owns Red Lobster and the Olive Garden is reducing the hours of its part-time employees to avoid responsibility for health insurance under Obamacare. Some folks on the interwebs are pronouncing themselves shocked, and others are declaring a failure of Obamacare. It’s neither shocking nor a sign of failure; it’s perfectly predictable self-interest.
As long as health care is tied to employment, and the employment in question has a clear cutoff in terms of hours, employers will skirt that line to avoid paying. Those who don’t will fall behind those who do. In higher ed, the explosion of adjunct faculty positions was based on the same idea. But it isn’t confined to adjuncts; the same principle applies to part-time staff below a certain threshold of hours. In the corporate world, the explosion of “temps” and unpaid interns reflects the same premise.
Go ahead and vilify the Olive Garden if it makes you feel better. But it’s only playing by the rules. If you want real change, change the rules. Decouple health care from employment. Make it a basic citizenship right, paid for collectively and controlled democratically. And let people who would really prefer part-time work take it, without having to worry about what happens when they get sick.
- This week, we had the third catastrophic hard drive failure in a year. (It’s the fourth laptop disaster; the other one was a cracked screen.) The pattern seems to be that once the kids get access to a laptop, the hard drive’s days are numbered.
The Wife has pronounced herself sick of technology, but she still needs access to email and Facebook, and I’ve still got obligations of my own. I’m considering something with a solid state drive, on the theory that it would be sturdier, but I’m having a hard time finding anything other than tablets -- which I’m not sure would work well for our purposes -- or chromebooks, which I think of as tablets with keyboards.
Is there a hard drive gremlin on the loose? Is there a kid-proof laptop out there? Are solid state drives actually sturdier? Would a tablet actually work for, say, uploading photos to Picasa? I’m stumped. All I know for certain is that I’m done with Toshiba.
- I haven’t been able to shake this story all week. Apparently, the number of words to which children are exposed before age six is the single strongest predictor of later academic success. Kids with educated parents who spend time with them accrue such a powerful advantage over other kids that the deck is stacked by the time they get to first grade.
(As parents, we stacked the deck early; we have a picture of me reading The Runaway Bunny to The Boy in the hospital, the day after he was born. By age two, he was such a fan of books that we had to hide them under the sofa just to get him to do anything else.)
It seems like the painfully obvious solution to the class gap is to pay preschool and early childhood teachers well enough to attract professionals to the job. As long as daycare workers are paid something close to the minimum wage, kids who don’t get exposure to educated language at home won’t get it in class, either.
Working in higher ed, though, the implications seem defeatist. We get students long beyond the early childhood years. I have to believe that 18 year olds -- and 38 year olds, for that matter -- are still reachable. If I didn’t, I’d have to find another line of work.
- The Girl: “Why do some people “reckon” when they believe?” I didn’t have an answer for that.
- The company that owns Red Lobster and the Olive Garden is reducing the hours of its part-time employees to avoid responsibility for health insurance under Obamacare. Some folks on the interwebs are pronouncing themselves shocked, and others are declaring a failure of Obamacare. It’s neither shocking nor a sign of failure; it’s perfectly predictable self-interest.
As long as health care is tied to employment, and the employment in question has a clear cutoff in terms of hours, employers will skirt that line to avoid paying. Those who don’t will fall behind those who do. In higher ed, the explosion of adjunct faculty positions was based on the same idea. But it isn’t confined to adjuncts; the same principle applies to part-time staff below a certain threshold of hours. In the corporate world, the explosion of “temps” and unpaid interns reflects the same premise.
Go ahead and vilify the Olive Garden if it makes you feel better. But it’s only playing by the rules. If you want real change, change the rules. Decouple health care from employment. Make it a basic citizenship right, paid for collectively and controlled democratically. And let people who would really prefer part-time work take it, without having to worry about what happens when they get sick.
- This week, we had the third catastrophic hard drive failure in a year. (It’s the fourth laptop disaster; the other one was a cracked screen.) The pattern seems to be that once the kids get access to a laptop, the hard drive’s days are numbered.
The Wife has pronounced herself sick of technology, but she still needs access to email and Facebook, and I’ve still got obligations of my own. I’m considering something with a solid state drive, on the theory that it would be sturdier, but I’m having a hard time finding anything other than tablets -- which I’m not sure would work well for our purposes -- or chromebooks, which I think of as tablets with keyboards.
Is there a hard drive gremlin on the loose? Is there a kid-proof laptop out there? Are solid state drives actually sturdier? Would a tablet actually work for, say, uploading photos to Picasa? I’m stumped. All I know for certain is that I’m done with Toshiba.
- I haven’t been able to shake this story all week. Apparently, the number of words to which children are exposed before age six is the single strongest predictor of later academic success. Kids with educated parents who spend time with them accrue such a powerful advantage over other kids that the deck is stacked by the time they get to first grade.
(As parents, we stacked the deck early; we have a picture of me reading The Runaway Bunny to The Boy in the hospital, the day after he was born. By age two, he was such a fan of books that we had to hide them under the sofa just to get him to do anything else.)
It seems like the painfully obvious solution to the class gap is to pay preschool and early childhood teachers well enough to attract professionals to the job. As long as daycare workers are paid something close to the minimum wage, kids who don’t get exposure to educated language at home won’t get it in class, either.
Working in higher ed, though, the implications seem defeatist. We get students long beyond the early childhood years. I have to believe that 18 year olds -- and 38 year olds, for that matter -- are still reachable. If I didn’t, I’d have to find another line of work.
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Connecticut
For once, I’m not going to pick on California.
Connecticut’s new centralized higher education system office has apparently been making either offers or threats -- there’s some dispute, and I have no inside information on it -- to community college presidents. As I understand it, the legislature passed a law last year limiting remedial coursework to a single semester. Apparently, some campuses have balked, so the system office has let the presidents know that if they feel unable to comply, they are welcome to leave.
I’m less interested in the semantics of the offer/threat or in the law about remediation than I am in the way the presidents are being treated.
Whether they’re being threatened or simply offered a graceful exit, it’s pretty clear that the central state authority sees them less as leaders of individual campuses than as branch office managers of a statewide chain. In the eyes of the central board, the job of the president is to carry out statewide mandates.
That’s at odds with the way that people on campus tend to see presidents, and probably at odds with the way many presidents see themselves. It’s not the job they thought they had signed up for; that shift, I’m guessing, is behind the offers to leave. Whether you want to call the severance offers parachutes or planks strikes me as a secondary concern.
Underlying that conflict, I think, is a disagreement about either power -- if you like your theories dark -- or innovation, if you prefer them lighter. Do you get more innovation with a bunch of relatively independent actors trying different things, or do you get more with a single authority in the middle calling the shots? If the statewide goal is, say, to increase the number of college graduates, are you likelier to achieve that goal through centralization or decentralization?
My own theory, for what it’s worth, is that the job of the central authority is to be utterly clear about goals, but to be agnostic on means. The mission should be set centrally, but the individual campuses need the room to experiment with ways to fulfill it.
Let’s say that the state sets a goal of more college graduates. Fair enough; Connecticut can’t compete on natural resources, sunny climate, or cheap land, so it might as well compete on quality of workforce. There are certainly worse ideas.
If the central office sets methods as well as goals, then only one method will be tried. That’s fine, if they get the right one the first time, but it’s reducing the epistemological harvest. (“Epistemological Harvest” would be a great name for a band. But I digress.) Having different campuses try different approaches at the same time, all towards the same general goal, offers a much more wide-ranging set of data. The old “laboratories of democracy” model offers a much better opportunity to discern what works.
More fundamentally, though, it’s hard to get the best out of creative and intelligent people when giving them orders. That’s true of faculty, and it’s true of presidents. Both do their best work when they have a sense of the overall direction, some actual resources, and enough autonomy to be able to make judgment calls as needed. If presidents are reduced to martinets -- and seen accordingly by their faculty -- they won’t be as effective as they could be.
I don’t deny the direction-setting role of the legislature, and therefore of the central office. If the state decides that it wants more transfers to UConn, or more welders, or more exclusivity, that’s its call to make. Someone who just can’t abide the mission should, in fact, be asked to leave. But it’s one thing to set a goal, and quite another to dictate how to get there.
My guess is that they’d get much better results by being a lot less directive. If a given campus fails continuously and refuses to change, then sure, have at it. But the state has a tremendous resource in the organized intelligence of its campuses. Reducing them to the single intelligence of one office is a serious mistake.
Connecticut’s new centralized higher education system office has apparently been making either offers or threats -- there’s some dispute, and I have no inside information on it -- to community college presidents. As I understand it, the legislature passed a law last year limiting remedial coursework to a single semester. Apparently, some campuses have balked, so the system office has let the presidents know that if they feel unable to comply, they are welcome to leave.
I’m less interested in the semantics of the offer/threat or in the law about remediation than I am in the way the presidents are being treated.
Whether they’re being threatened or simply offered a graceful exit, it’s pretty clear that the central state authority sees them less as leaders of individual campuses than as branch office managers of a statewide chain. In the eyes of the central board, the job of the president is to carry out statewide mandates.
That’s at odds with the way that people on campus tend to see presidents, and probably at odds with the way many presidents see themselves. It’s not the job they thought they had signed up for; that shift, I’m guessing, is behind the offers to leave. Whether you want to call the severance offers parachutes or planks strikes me as a secondary concern.
Underlying that conflict, I think, is a disagreement about either power -- if you like your theories dark -- or innovation, if you prefer them lighter. Do you get more innovation with a bunch of relatively independent actors trying different things, or do you get more with a single authority in the middle calling the shots? If the statewide goal is, say, to increase the number of college graduates, are you likelier to achieve that goal through centralization or decentralization?
My own theory, for what it’s worth, is that the job of the central authority is to be utterly clear about goals, but to be agnostic on means. The mission should be set centrally, but the individual campuses need the room to experiment with ways to fulfill it.
Let’s say that the state sets a goal of more college graduates. Fair enough; Connecticut can’t compete on natural resources, sunny climate, or cheap land, so it might as well compete on quality of workforce. There are certainly worse ideas.
If the central office sets methods as well as goals, then only one method will be tried. That’s fine, if they get the right one the first time, but it’s reducing the epistemological harvest. (“Epistemological Harvest” would be a great name for a band. But I digress.) Having different campuses try different approaches at the same time, all towards the same general goal, offers a much more wide-ranging set of data. The old “laboratories of democracy” model offers a much better opportunity to discern what works.
More fundamentally, though, it’s hard to get the best out of creative and intelligent people when giving them orders. That’s true of faculty, and it’s true of presidents. Both do their best work when they have a sense of the overall direction, some actual resources, and enough autonomy to be able to make judgment calls as needed. If presidents are reduced to martinets -- and seen accordingly by their faculty -- they won’t be as effective as they could be.
I don’t deny the direction-setting role of the legislature, and therefore of the central office. If the state decides that it wants more transfers to UConn, or more welders, or more exclusivity, that’s its call to make. Someone who just can’t abide the mission should, in fact, be asked to leave. But it’s one thing to set a goal, and quite another to dictate how to get there.
My guess is that they’d get much better results by being a lot less directive. If a given campus fails continuously and refuses to change, then sure, have at it. But the state has a tremendous resource in the organized intelligence of its campuses. Reducing them to the single intelligence of one office is a serious mistake.
Tuesday, October 09, 2012
Ask the Administrator: Discerning Culture from the Outside
I love this question. A new correspondent writes
First, congratulations on the impending little one!
This is a great question, because it’s both important and difficult.
I’d start by narrowing it down. Within a single college or organization, there can be dozens of microclimates in various offices. What you care about most is the microclimate where you’ll be working. For example, it wouldn’t be at all weird to discover that the unwritten rules in, say, Admissions, are different from the unwritten rules in Biology. Outside of really small colleges, you’ll often find very different climates in different corners of a single place.
That’s why I wouldn’t necessarily focus on HR as a source. It can give you the official policies and forms, but it won’t often tell you that, say, the boss you’d work for has a habit of calling you at home at 9:00 p.m. and expecting you to drop everything. Some places work by the book, and others vaguely recall that there’s a book somewhere.
I’d start with focusing on what you can control, which is your self-awareness. What aspects of “work-life balance” mean the most to you? I mean that in the most concrete, banal sense possible. Is it being home at the same time every day? Is it being allowed to not answer the phone at home? Is it the ability to work from home, as needed? Job-sharing? Unusual hours? Avoiding travel? Try to be as specific as you can in your own mind. Some places that are perfectly fine with, say, having a consistent time to leave, may not be fine with working at home. If you ask a general question about “family friendliness” thinking that it refers to flextime, but they hear it as referring to leaving by 5:00, you may get a truthful but misleading answer.
(For example, given the kids’ schedule, it’s fine for me to arrive at work at the crack of dawn, but I need to be home for dinner. That means that I arrive before almost everybody, but I leave at a consistent time. In my bachelor days, I preferred the polar opposite. Parenthood has forced me to impersonate a morning person, of all things.)
Then I’d look at what is actually practiced, to the extent possible. During interviews, ask the people at the table the questions that matter the most to you, in the most concrete terms possible. If you care about leaving at a set time, ask the people there if they do. If you care about not getting calls at home, ask the people there how often that happens. People know the “right” answer to most abstractions, but often get more truthful when you get more specific. If they recoil in horror or disbelief at your question, then you know what you need to know.
In my more optimistic moments, I like to believe that Gen X types, as they move into management, will be better about these things. As the generation that watched its parents divorce and lived the reality of “joint custody” from a kid’s point of view, I hope that we’ll be more mindful of the three-dimensional realities of people’s lives. Besides, from a management perspective, burning out employees is a stupid waste of resources; over time, you can get better performance from people who aren’t having work-induced personal crises.
Good luck!
Wise and worldly readers, I hope and believe that some of you have found or figured out other ways to suss out the true family-friendliness of a workplace before joining it. Is there a reliable indicator that an outsider could use?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Do you (or any of your wise and worldly readers) have any advice about looking for or finding clues to a college's culture, before you actually work there? For example, everyone says they are "family friendly", but the idea of work/life balance means different things to different people (and Gen X seems to be part of the turning of the tide- go Gen X!) I am a mid/high level administrator, and just getting a chance to start my family (one little one, another on the way) and have already, in the past few weeks, encountered both direct and indirect comments about wanting balance (apparently not a good thing), how I will get my work done (which was just fine last time I was out), and even the idea that one must aways say yes at work- no matter the effect on any other aspect of your work or home life (this last one was said to a group of people- rather demoralizing).
My good friend is on the job market right now as well, and we struggle with how to identify a good, communal, family-oriented culture, and we are both all about cc's. The closest we have come is taking into account the interactions with general staff. My friend has called a number of HR offices asking questions about application procedures, and has received quite a variety of responses, both in terms of helpfulness as well as just general courtesy. Any suggestions you might have would be appreciated!
First, congratulations on the impending little one!
This is a great question, because it’s both important and difficult.
I’d start by narrowing it down. Within a single college or organization, there can be dozens of microclimates in various offices. What you care about most is the microclimate where you’ll be working. For example, it wouldn’t be at all weird to discover that the unwritten rules in, say, Admissions, are different from the unwritten rules in Biology. Outside of really small colleges, you’ll often find very different climates in different corners of a single place.
That’s why I wouldn’t necessarily focus on HR as a source. It can give you the official policies and forms, but it won’t often tell you that, say, the boss you’d work for has a habit of calling you at home at 9:00 p.m. and expecting you to drop everything. Some places work by the book, and others vaguely recall that there’s a book somewhere.
I’d start with focusing on what you can control, which is your self-awareness. What aspects of “work-life balance” mean the most to you? I mean that in the most concrete, banal sense possible. Is it being home at the same time every day? Is it being allowed to not answer the phone at home? Is it the ability to work from home, as needed? Job-sharing? Unusual hours? Avoiding travel? Try to be as specific as you can in your own mind. Some places that are perfectly fine with, say, having a consistent time to leave, may not be fine with working at home. If you ask a general question about “family friendliness” thinking that it refers to flextime, but they hear it as referring to leaving by 5:00, you may get a truthful but misleading answer.
(For example, given the kids’ schedule, it’s fine for me to arrive at work at the crack of dawn, but I need to be home for dinner. That means that I arrive before almost everybody, but I leave at a consistent time. In my bachelor days, I preferred the polar opposite. Parenthood has forced me to impersonate a morning person, of all things.)
Then I’d look at what is actually practiced, to the extent possible. During interviews, ask the people at the table the questions that matter the most to you, in the most concrete terms possible. If you care about leaving at a set time, ask the people there if they do. If you care about not getting calls at home, ask the people there how often that happens. People know the “right” answer to most abstractions, but often get more truthful when you get more specific. If they recoil in horror or disbelief at your question, then you know what you need to know.
In my more optimistic moments, I like to believe that Gen X types, as they move into management, will be better about these things. As the generation that watched its parents divorce and lived the reality of “joint custody” from a kid’s point of view, I hope that we’ll be more mindful of the three-dimensional realities of people’s lives. Besides, from a management perspective, burning out employees is a stupid waste of resources; over time, you can get better performance from people who aren’t having work-induced personal crises.
Good luck!
Wise and worldly readers, I hope and believe that some of you have found or figured out other ways to suss out the true family-friendliness of a workplace before joining it. Is there a reliable indicator that an outsider could use?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Monday, October 08, 2012
The Return of Mercedes U
A few years ago, I floated the idea of an upscale proprietary. (For convenience, I called it Mercedes U.) My argument was that for-profits have, until now, focused on the lower end of the market, where they have to compete with (subsidized) community colleges. Since they can’t compete on price at the low end, I suggested, better to try on the high end. (In California, at this point, they can compete simply by being open. But in the other 49 states, the argument still stands.) The only attempt I saw, Founders College, quickly ran aground on the shoals of Ayn Randian ideology and some pretty iffy management. Since then, nothing.
Now, for-profit Christian (?!) Grand Canyon University is taking another shot at the idea.
The twist is that it’s using the profits from a national online graduate program to subsidize a smaller, more selective campus. Presumably, the idea will be that the prestige from the regular campus will gradually rub off on the larger online program. In other words, the campus becomes a loss leader that generates respect, and the online program uses that respect to make major money.
I’m not entirely sure how the Christian mission fits with that, but I’ll leave that aside for now. Can the loss-leader model work?
I suspect it can. It’s already how most community colleges work; the credit-bearing side of most community colleges operates at a loss, by design. The “continuing education” and business services side turns a profit, which is used to help offset those losses. Many traditional public four-year colleges use the same model.
GCU started, reasonably enough, in Arizona, where the regulations are relatively lax and the private higher ed sector is small relative to population. Now it’s expanding to Massachusetts, a blue state with tighter regs and a much, much more robust private higher ed sector. (Off the top of my head, I couldn’t come up with a single private college or university in Arizona, other than the University of Phoenix. In Massachusetts, there’s Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, BU, BC, Wellesley, Williams, Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Hampshire, Holy Cross...) Depending on the version of Christianity with which they identify, they may be able to define a sustainable market niche, but they’ll still have more of an uphill battle than in Arizona.
But to the extent that the physical campus is about visibility, that might not matter. GCU is being pretty savvy about it; they’re hiring a significant cluster of full-time faculty, pouring money into the physical plant and financial aid, and targeting students with higher SAT scores. (They’re also pursuing Division I athletics, apparently, which strikes me as a fool’s errand. But that’s another post.) They’re moving in the Mercedes U direction, where you can charge more than the publics and still make a profit anyway. If they’re smart, they’ll greatly beef up their tutoring and career advising services next. Sell quality, and the prestige will follow.
The critical issue I identified for Mercedes U was patient capital. It needs funders who are willing to let prestige build over time, and who won’t insist on maximizing quarterly profits. It looks like GCU has that, at least for now. If it can keep its investors patient, it doesn’t get too caught up in sports, and it understands what “loss leaders” actually entail, I like their chances.
In the meantime, the market niche for a secular upscale proprietary remains wide open. I’m just sayin’...
Now, for-profit Christian (?!) Grand Canyon University is taking another shot at the idea.
The twist is that it’s using the profits from a national online graduate program to subsidize a smaller, more selective campus. Presumably, the idea will be that the prestige from the regular campus will gradually rub off on the larger online program. In other words, the campus becomes a loss leader that generates respect, and the online program uses that respect to make major money.
I’m not entirely sure how the Christian mission fits with that, but I’ll leave that aside for now. Can the loss-leader model work?
I suspect it can. It’s already how most community colleges work; the credit-bearing side of most community colleges operates at a loss, by design. The “continuing education” and business services side turns a profit, which is used to help offset those losses. Many traditional public four-year colleges use the same model.
GCU started, reasonably enough, in Arizona, where the regulations are relatively lax and the private higher ed sector is small relative to population. Now it’s expanding to Massachusetts, a blue state with tighter regs and a much, much more robust private higher ed sector. (Off the top of my head, I couldn’t come up with a single private college or university in Arizona, other than the University of Phoenix. In Massachusetts, there’s Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, BU, BC, Wellesley, Williams, Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Hampshire, Holy Cross...) Depending on the version of Christianity with which they identify, they may be able to define a sustainable market niche, but they’ll still have more of an uphill battle than in Arizona.
But to the extent that the physical campus is about visibility, that might not matter. GCU is being pretty savvy about it; they’re hiring a significant cluster of full-time faculty, pouring money into the physical plant and financial aid, and targeting students with higher SAT scores. (They’re also pursuing Division I athletics, apparently, which strikes me as a fool’s errand. But that’s another post.) They’re moving in the Mercedes U direction, where you can charge more than the publics and still make a profit anyway. If they’re smart, they’ll greatly beef up their tutoring and career advising services next. Sell quality, and the prestige will follow.
The critical issue I identified for Mercedes U was patient capital. It needs funders who are willing to let prestige build over time, and who won’t insist on maximizing quarterly profits. It looks like GCU has that, at least for now. If it can keep its investors patient, it doesn’t get too caught up in sports, and it understands what “loss leaders” actually entail, I like their chances.
In the meantime, the market niche for a secular upscale proprietary remains wide open. I’m just sayin’...
Sunday, October 07, 2012
When Fundraisers Attack, Part Three: Mind the Gaps
Sometimes the best moments at conferences come in between the official presentations.
Day three of the CASE conference was like that. I got word that Lisa Skari, the Vice President for Institutional Advancement at Highline Community College, wanted to shed some light on a comment I had captured the day before. I had quoted Susan Kubik referring to the “old wives’ tale” that community college grads who transfer to four-year colleges and beyond generally don’t contribute to their community colleges; the idea is that they transfer allegiance when they transfer enrollment. I noted that the paltry percentage of overall philanthropic giving that goes to community colleges – less than one percent – suggested that the old wives were on to something.
As it happened, Skari just finished a dissertation on this very topic. She agreed that the community college share of overall higher ed philanthropy is disproportionately low, but in her research, she found that the folks who do give were, in fact, mostly folks who also gave to four-year schools. In other words, the issue wasn’t so much a transfer of allegiance; it was a shortage of givers generally.
In her findings, the key predictors of giving to community colleges were age (70+), income, and giving to a four year college. Each was positively correlated with giving to community colleges. (In a separate discussion, Richard Morley mentioned that women are far more likely to give than men; Skari didn’t mention that in our brief conversation.)
Taking Skari’s findings into account, the picture becomes more hopeful. If the key demographic for philanthropy is wealthy (female) transfer alumni over age 70, then it isn’t surprising that community colleges have been relatively small players thus far. Most American community colleges were founded after 1960, and most of them started small. With a few exceptions, most of them simply haven’t had the time to build the demographic that their older four-year counterparts have been able to tap for so long.
(This would also explain the percentage decline in alumni giving over the last ten years. Given the enrollment increases of the last ten years, the alumni pool is skewing younger.)
Additionally, many community colleges have only started taking alumni giving seriously over the last decade or so. One panel on Thursday was devoted largely to ways of using technology to track down successful grads from the 70’s, and to start reaching out to them. It’s one thing to keep good track of the people you have now; it’s quite another to work backwards and then start building bridges with folks whom the four-years have been dunning for years.
If Skari is right, and I’m guessing that she is, then there’s some cause for optimism. The numbers of community college grads in the key demographic will start to reach critical mass soon; cc’s are getting better at tracking them and reaching out to them; and the motivation (or need, if you prefer) has never been stronger.
Solidifying relationships with successful alums can also have a useful political payoff. High-income seniors vote at remarkably high rates; if they feel an allegiance to their local community college, that can only be to the good. They also wield political influence out of proportion to their numbers, for a variety of reasons; again, swinging that influence over to our side makes a world of sense.
The other offhand moment was a comment by Richard Morley, of Irvine County cc. At the end of a panel of foundation program officers describing what they will and won’t fund, Morley raised the issue of institutional capacity building. Basically, in a time in which foundations are becoming much more demanding in their expectations of grant recipients, the money at colleges for hiring grants officers is drying up, and foundations aren’t supporting their cost anymore. Morley pointed out that a major grant in California – I missed the name – recently failed to give away about half of what it intended to, because the colleges were too strapped to be able to meet the reporting requirements. This is penny wise and pound foolish.
The foundation officers – one each from the Kellogg, Irvine, and Hartford foundations – conceded the point, but didn’t have an answer. I’ve seen this on my own campus; we’ve actually declined to apply for certain grants when it became clear that the care and feeding of the gift would cost more than the value of the gift. As gifts get smaller and requirements tighter, this is starting to become more common.
The official program was appropriate for a last day, in which about half the crowd had already left to catch flights. The foundation officers did their duty, though the most memorable line was from the representative of the Irvine foundation, who noted that they deliberately don’t give to backfill budget cuts. As with federal grants, they follow a “supplement, not supplant” rule. Until that changes, I’d expect to see colleges continue to skimp on supporting foundations and fundraisers. Extras are great, but when the staff to raise more extras are paid for by hollowing out the core, it’s fair to ask some questions.
The conference ended with an amusing presentation on storytelling, presented by former television writer Andy Goodman. (Quote of the Day: when he wrote for The Nanny, with Fran Drescher, the show was “a swirling, sucking vortex of despair.”) He reminded everyone that when it comes to changing behavior, anecdotes trump data. I thought about the election and became a little sad.
At the end, I came away with a sense that community colleges as a sector are well-positioned to raise a good deal more philanthropy, but that questions of capacity and supplanting stand in the way. Alums may be far more willing to help than we’ve assumed thus far, but we need to be more creative about how to use that help. The growth will be slow, even as the needs are immediate, and until some basic changes happen, it won’t make up for shortfalls in operations. In the end, the political support of the powerful may matter more than their direct financial support. That wasn’t the official message of the conference, but sometimes you learn the most in the gaps.
Day three of the CASE conference was like that. I got word that Lisa Skari, the Vice President for Institutional Advancement at Highline Community College, wanted to shed some light on a comment I had captured the day before. I had quoted Susan Kubik referring to the “old wives’ tale” that community college grads who transfer to four-year colleges and beyond generally don’t contribute to their community colleges; the idea is that they transfer allegiance when they transfer enrollment. I noted that the paltry percentage of overall philanthropic giving that goes to community colleges – less than one percent – suggested that the old wives were on to something.
As it happened, Skari just finished a dissertation on this very topic. She agreed that the community college share of overall higher ed philanthropy is disproportionately low, but in her research, she found that the folks who do give were, in fact, mostly folks who also gave to four-year schools. In other words, the issue wasn’t so much a transfer of allegiance; it was a shortage of givers generally.
In her findings, the key predictors of giving to community colleges were age (70+), income, and giving to a four year college. Each was positively correlated with giving to community colleges. (In a separate discussion, Richard Morley mentioned that women are far more likely to give than men; Skari didn’t mention that in our brief conversation.)
Taking Skari’s findings into account, the picture becomes more hopeful. If the key demographic for philanthropy is wealthy (female) transfer alumni over age 70, then it isn’t surprising that community colleges have been relatively small players thus far. Most American community colleges were founded after 1960, and most of them started small. With a few exceptions, most of them simply haven’t had the time to build the demographic that their older four-year counterparts have been able to tap for so long.
(This would also explain the percentage decline in alumni giving over the last ten years. Given the enrollment increases of the last ten years, the alumni pool is skewing younger.)
Additionally, many community colleges have only started taking alumni giving seriously over the last decade or so. One panel on Thursday was devoted largely to ways of using technology to track down successful grads from the 70’s, and to start reaching out to them. It’s one thing to keep good track of the people you have now; it’s quite another to work backwards and then start building bridges with folks whom the four-years have been dunning for years.
If Skari is right, and I’m guessing that she is, then there’s some cause for optimism. The numbers of community college grads in the key demographic will start to reach critical mass soon; cc’s are getting better at tracking them and reaching out to them; and the motivation (or need, if you prefer) has never been stronger.
Solidifying relationships with successful alums can also have a useful political payoff. High-income seniors vote at remarkably high rates; if they feel an allegiance to their local community college, that can only be to the good. They also wield political influence out of proportion to their numbers, for a variety of reasons; again, swinging that influence over to our side makes a world of sense.
The other offhand moment was a comment by Richard Morley, of Irvine County cc. At the end of a panel of foundation program officers describing what they will and won’t fund, Morley raised the issue of institutional capacity building. Basically, in a time in which foundations are becoming much more demanding in their expectations of grant recipients, the money at colleges for hiring grants officers is drying up, and foundations aren’t supporting their cost anymore. Morley pointed out that a major grant in California – I missed the name – recently failed to give away about half of what it intended to, because the colleges were too strapped to be able to meet the reporting requirements. This is penny wise and pound foolish.
The foundation officers – one each from the Kellogg, Irvine, and Hartford foundations – conceded the point, but didn’t have an answer. I’ve seen this on my own campus; we’ve actually declined to apply for certain grants when it became clear that the care and feeding of the gift would cost more than the value of the gift. As gifts get smaller and requirements tighter, this is starting to become more common.
The official program was appropriate for a last day, in which about half the crowd had already left to catch flights. The foundation officers did their duty, though the most memorable line was from the representative of the Irvine foundation, who noted that they deliberately don’t give to backfill budget cuts. As with federal grants, they follow a “supplement, not supplant” rule. Until that changes, I’d expect to see colleges continue to skimp on supporting foundations and fundraisers. Extras are great, but when the staff to raise more extras are paid for by hollowing out the core, it’s fair to ask some questions.
The conference ended with an amusing presentation on storytelling, presented by former television writer Andy Goodman. (Quote of the Day: when he wrote for The Nanny, with Fran Drescher, the show was “a swirling, sucking vortex of despair.”) He reminded everyone that when it comes to changing behavior, anecdotes trump data. I thought about the election and became a little sad.
At the end, I came away with a sense that community colleges as a sector are well-positioned to raise a good deal more philanthropy, but that questions of capacity and supplanting stand in the way. Alums may be far more willing to help than we’ve assumed thus far, but we need to be more creative about how to use that help. The growth will be slow, even as the needs are immediate, and until some basic changes happen, it won’t make up for shortfalls in operations. In the end, the political support of the powerful may matter more than their direct financial support. That wasn’t the official message of the conference, but sometimes you learn the most in the gaps.
Thursday, October 04, 2012
When Fundraisers Attack, Part Two
I was advised by some well-placed people at CASE not to use the term “fundraisers.” But I wasn’t given a preferred alternative, and nothing else seems quite right. I refuse to use “friendraisers” on the grounds that it’s a crime against the English language, and it conjures a mental image of zombies rising from graves. “Development officers” is politically correct, but it’s both clunky and vague. “Advancement professionals” is even worse. So I’ll use “fundraisers” until I hear something better.
In their upbeat way, the fundraisers let their freak flag fly on Thursday. It was a day of contradictions.
The keynote speaker, Dan Pallotta, channeled the collective id of the group with a funny and disquieting presentation claiming that a misbegotten focus on asceticism (my word, not his) has led to self-inflicted weakness on the part of nonprofits. He argued that the common question asked of most nonprofit fundraising efforts -- “what percentage of the money goes to overhead?” -- is profoundly misplaced and destructive. As he noted, American culture prescribes one set of rules for nonprofits, and another for for-profits. For-profits are allowed to take sustained losses during the setup phase, on the recognition that investments take time to bear fruit. Non-profits are judged on “overhead” from day one. (He drew knowing laughter by referring to the seven years it took Amazon to show a profit. How many foundation directors would still be employed after seven years of pure overhead?)
His point was that on the for-profit side, people understand intuitively that you have to spend money to make money. But on the non-profit side, spending “too much” money is considered a moral failure. That’s true even when you’re spending “too much” on fundraising, which more than pays for itself. He mentioned that he once responded to the “I don’t want my money to go to fundraising” line by asking if the man wanted to be the only donor. Nicely done.
He illustrated the point with the inevitable slides showing the salary differences between CEO’s of for-profit companies and CEO’s of most charities. By cheaping out on “overhead” -- by which we would otherwise mean “labor” -- we deprive nonprofits of the talent they need to raise enough money to make a meaningful difference in the causes they embrace.
To this crowd, of course, this was red meat. “Pay fundraisers more!” is an easy sell to a room full of fundraisers. It had the naughty thrill of counterintuitive truth laced with a healthy self-interest. And it’s hard to argue with someone comparing the salary of a leader of a charity with the salary of, say, Judge Judy.
Of course, Pallotta’s complex and subtle message came right after a panel with IHE’s own Doug Lederman, in which he reminded us of the difficulty of communicating complex and subtle messages in today’s media. Sigh. Lederman drew an implicit parallel between the thoroughly disrupted world of journalism and the seemingly complacent, but soon to be disrupted, world of higher ed. He argued that the stories that would get press attention are of institutional change. If you can show “self-evaluation, experimentation, and movement,” you have something. But as he noted, it’s hard to sell a complex and subtle tale, especially when it involves admitting earlier flaws.
The rest of the day was more about fundraising in its traditional sense. Ann Kaplan and Susan Kubik did an overview of the Voluntary Support for Education survey, in which they noted, among other things, that the percentage of community college alumni who donate to their colleges has actually been dropping for the past ten years. I was surprised by that, given that so much of the previous day’s discussion was about the benefits of longevity. Given that community college fundraising efforts are still largely in the early stages, I would have expected an upward trend, or at least a fairly level performance. They didn’t have a developed explanation for the dip, though I wish they had. Off the top of my head, I wonder if a combination of rapidly increasing tuition and a steadily more hostile employment environment played into it. I’d be tempted to blame the Great Recession, but the decline has been fairly steady since 2001. Work to be done.
Richard Morley, of Irvine College, addressed the “overhead” question directly, but answered more obliquely. He argued that it takes three to five years to get a good return on investment for even a successful campaign, so that the “right” level of overhead depends on where the college is in the investment cycle. He spent most of his presentation offering “evidence-based” suggestions for successful fundraising, most of which relied on playing the long game. Cultivate “evergreen” donors, which he defined as those who have given for at least six of the previous eight years. Use geolocation data to spot successful alums in your geographic area, and start cultivating them. Don’t rely too much on “special events,” like golf tournaments or galas; they’re useful in small doses for visibility, but eventgoers don’t become philanthropists, and they generally only break even. The “longevity is good” message didn’t quite track with the decade-long decline noted by Kubik and Kaplan, but so it goes.
Finally, Ann McGee of Seminole State, in Florida, won the quote of the day: “Fundraising is like wrestling a gorilla. You don’t stop when you’re tired; you stop when the gorilla is tired.” She and her foundation director offered a lovely outline of several conflicts that occurred when the fundraising side of the house and the operations side of the house weren’t quite in sync. They ran it as a “you make the call!” exercise, for which I have to give them credit.
I’m tired, but the gorilla continues to rage. On to day three!
In their upbeat way, the fundraisers let their freak flag fly on Thursday. It was a day of contradictions.
The keynote speaker, Dan Pallotta, channeled the collective id of the group with a funny and disquieting presentation claiming that a misbegotten focus on asceticism (my word, not his) has led to self-inflicted weakness on the part of nonprofits. He argued that the common question asked of most nonprofit fundraising efforts -- “what percentage of the money goes to overhead?” -- is profoundly misplaced and destructive. As he noted, American culture prescribes one set of rules for nonprofits, and another for for-profits. For-profits are allowed to take sustained losses during the setup phase, on the recognition that investments take time to bear fruit. Non-profits are judged on “overhead” from day one. (He drew knowing laughter by referring to the seven years it took Amazon to show a profit. How many foundation directors would still be employed after seven years of pure overhead?)
His point was that on the for-profit side, people understand intuitively that you have to spend money to make money. But on the non-profit side, spending “too much” money is considered a moral failure. That’s true even when you’re spending “too much” on fundraising, which more than pays for itself. He mentioned that he once responded to the “I don’t want my money to go to fundraising” line by asking if the man wanted to be the only donor. Nicely done.
He illustrated the point with the inevitable slides showing the salary differences between CEO’s of for-profit companies and CEO’s of most charities. By cheaping out on “overhead” -- by which we would otherwise mean “labor” -- we deprive nonprofits of the talent they need to raise enough money to make a meaningful difference in the causes they embrace.
To this crowd, of course, this was red meat. “Pay fundraisers more!” is an easy sell to a room full of fundraisers. It had the naughty thrill of counterintuitive truth laced with a healthy self-interest. And it’s hard to argue with someone comparing the salary of a leader of a charity with the salary of, say, Judge Judy.
Of course, Pallotta’s complex and subtle message came right after a panel with IHE’s own Doug Lederman, in which he reminded us of the difficulty of communicating complex and subtle messages in today’s media. Sigh. Lederman drew an implicit parallel between the thoroughly disrupted world of journalism and the seemingly complacent, but soon to be disrupted, world of higher ed. He argued that the stories that would get press attention are of institutional change. If you can show “self-evaluation, experimentation, and movement,” you have something. But as he noted, it’s hard to sell a complex and subtle tale, especially when it involves admitting earlier flaws.
The rest of the day was more about fundraising in its traditional sense. Ann Kaplan and Susan Kubik did an overview of the Voluntary Support for Education survey, in which they noted, among other things, that the percentage of community college alumni who donate to their colleges has actually been dropping for the past ten years. I was surprised by that, given that so much of the previous day’s discussion was about the benefits of longevity. Given that community college fundraising efforts are still largely in the early stages, I would have expected an upward trend, or at least a fairly level performance. They didn’t have a developed explanation for the dip, though I wish they had. Off the top of my head, I wonder if a combination of rapidly increasing tuition and a steadily more hostile employment environment played into it. I’d be tempted to blame the Great Recession, but the decline has been fairly steady since 2001. Work to be done.
Richard Morley, of Irvine College, addressed the “overhead” question directly, but answered more obliquely. He argued that it takes three to five years to get a good return on investment for even a successful campaign, so that the “right” level of overhead depends on where the college is in the investment cycle. He spent most of his presentation offering “evidence-based” suggestions for successful fundraising, most of which relied on playing the long game. Cultivate “evergreen” donors, which he defined as those who have given for at least six of the previous eight years. Use geolocation data to spot successful alums in your geographic area, and start cultivating them. Don’t rely too much on “special events,” like golf tournaments or galas; they’re useful in small doses for visibility, but eventgoers don’t become philanthropists, and they generally only break even. The “longevity is good” message didn’t quite track with the decade-long decline noted by Kubik and Kaplan, but so it goes.
Finally, Ann McGee of Seminole State, in Florida, won the quote of the day: “Fundraising is like wrestling a gorilla. You don’t stop when you’re tired; you stop when the gorilla is tired.” She and her foundation director offered a lovely outline of several conflicts that occurred when the fundraising side of the house and the operations side of the house weren’t quite in sync. They ran it as a “you make the call!” exercise, for which I have to give them credit.
I’m tired, but the gorilla continues to rage. On to day three!
Wednesday, October 03, 2012
When Fundraisers Attack, Part One
I’m at the CASE conference in San Diego, seeing what “development” (that is, fundraising) officers at community colleges talk about when they gather. (CASE is the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.) It’s a national organization of development officers from all sectors of nonprofit higher ed, but this is their first conference focused specifically on community colleges.
It’s a fascinating world.
Most of the conferences I’ve attended have been populated either by faculty or by administrators from the operational side of the college. This one is dominated by the folks who raise money, and it’s a different crowd. For one thing, it’s a lot more female; I’d guesstimate that the crowd is about two-thirds women. It’s also much more diverse in age than most conference crowds. Perhaps owing to the setting, the dress code is much more, well, colorful than I’m used to seeing. And it’s a far more extroverted bunch than I usually see. During gaps between panels, complete strangers introduce themselves. People who know me in real life would generally describe me as reserved, but here, everyone is chatty. It’s contagious, and a refreshing change of pace. Even I mingled, which is unusual for me.
Looking at community colleges from development folks’ perspective is a little disorienting, but mostly in a good way.
The opening plenary by John Lippincott -- at which they announced a conference attendance of 450, which is remarkable for a first effort -- was devoted to the results of a survey of community college presidents and chief development officers (CDO). A few of the takeaways:
- Longevity matters. When the CEO and the CDO have more than four years together, they tend to raise far more money in any given year. It’s hard to prove causation -- it may be that successful teams last longer precisely because they’re successful -- but it makes sense that having the fundraising person and the public face of the college on the same page would help, and that it might take a while for the two to gel.
- Chief development officers tend to have longer tenures in offices than presidents. You may make of that whatever you wish.
- Apparently, some colleges have conflicts between their board of trustees and the board of directors of their foundation. This leads to all manner of drama, since the president needs to be attentive to both. I’m happy to say that I haven’t seen this on my own campus, so it hadn’t even occurred to me, but it seems to be a real issue in some places.
- The CDO’s wish list includes more staff -- not surprisingly -- but also more campus buy-in to what they’re doing. The survey included a quote from one wishing that her president would “give a damn.” CDO’s often have to mentor their presidents -- which is to say, their bosses -- in the art of fundraising, which can raise some sticky issues. Respect for their work was a major theme, which came as a surprise to me.
At a breakout session exploring the reasons that major donors give to colleges, the same theme of longevity came up. The presenter, Russell Hammond of SUNY-Orange County, noted that most major donors had been “associated” with their chosen college in some sort of active way for at least ten years prior to giving the big gift. He also noted -- and this came as a bigger surprise to me than it probably should have -- that of the philanthropic dollars given to higher education in the U.S., community colleges receive less than one percent. That’s an astonishing figure, given that over forty percent of the undergrads in America are at community colleges at any given time. At the plenary, we were told that it was an “old wives’ tale” that alums of community colleges mostly give to their subsequent schools, but I’m not sure how to square that assertion with the less-than-one-percent figure. The old wives might be on to something.
In terms of “why,” he stressed the need to discern individual donors’ “philanthropic narrative,” which takes time and patience -- again, the longevity theme. He noted, somewhat drily, that different donors will have wildly contradicting political rationales for supporting the same program: what a liberal might see as a strike for social justice, a conservative might see as an alternative to the nanny state. A development officer who can play the long game can figure that out and frame opportunities accordingly. Notably, nearly every major donor he studied was over the age of 55.
A subsequent breakout session by Mark Greenfield of the University of Buffalo about using social media to reach out to Millennials brought a much younger audience. The major takeaway from that one was the importance of ‘mobile.’ For example, using a QR code to direct people to a website with Flash is largely self-defeating, since anyone with an iphone or ipad will be stymied. I was also struck at how quickly popularity can shift among social media platforms.
Between the two sessions, I couldn’t help but notice once again that we Gen X’ers fell between the cracks. Alas.
Coming from the academic side, as I do, I generally assume that fundraisers get a great deal of respect on campus; after all, they bring money. And that’s certainly true on my campus, where the CDO is a respected figure. But judging by the conference so far, that’s still the exception; apparently, many community college presidents still don’t feel that fundraising is properly part of their job. In a perfect world, it probably wouldn’t be, but given the realities of the last few years, it will be. As an academic, I wish there were more like me here, just to hear it all.
On to day two. Jet lag eventually fades, right?
It’s a fascinating world.
Most of the conferences I’ve attended have been populated either by faculty or by administrators from the operational side of the college. This one is dominated by the folks who raise money, and it’s a different crowd. For one thing, it’s a lot more female; I’d guesstimate that the crowd is about two-thirds women. It’s also much more diverse in age than most conference crowds. Perhaps owing to the setting, the dress code is much more, well, colorful than I’m used to seeing. And it’s a far more extroverted bunch than I usually see. During gaps between panels, complete strangers introduce themselves. People who know me in real life would generally describe me as reserved, but here, everyone is chatty. It’s contagious, and a refreshing change of pace. Even I mingled, which is unusual for me.
Looking at community colleges from development folks’ perspective is a little disorienting, but mostly in a good way.
The opening plenary by John Lippincott -- at which they announced a conference attendance of 450, which is remarkable for a first effort -- was devoted to the results of a survey of community college presidents and chief development officers (CDO). A few of the takeaways:
- Longevity matters. When the CEO and the CDO have more than four years together, they tend to raise far more money in any given year. It’s hard to prove causation -- it may be that successful teams last longer precisely because they’re successful -- but it makes sense that having the fundraising person and the public face of the college on the same page would help, and that it might take a while for the two to gel.
- Chief development officers tend to have longer tenures in offices than presidents. You may make of that whatever you wish.
- Apparently, some colleges have conflicts between their board of trustees and the board of directors of their foundation. This leads to all manner of drama, since the president needs to be attentive to both. I’m happy to say that I haven’t seen this on my own campus, so it hadn’t even occurred to me, but it seems to be a real issue in some places.
- The CDO’s wish list includes more staff -- not surprisingly -- but also more campus buy-in to what they’re doing. The survey included a quote from one wishing that her president would “give a damn.” CDO’s often have to mentor their presidents -- which is to say, their bosses -- in the art of fundraising, which can raise some sticky issues. Respect for their work was a major theme, which came as a surprise to me.
At a breakout session exploring the reasons that major donors give to colleges, the same theme of longevity came up. The presenter, Russell Hammond of SUNY-Orange County, noted that most major donors had been “associated” with their chosen college in some sort of active way for at least ten years prior to giving the big gift. He also noted -- and this came as a bigger surprise to me than it probably should have -- that of the philanthropic dollars given to higher education in the U.S., community colleges receive less than one percent. That’s an astonishing figure, given that over forty percent of the undergrads in America are at community colleges at any given time. At the plenary, we were told that it was an “old wives’ tale” that alums of community colleges mostly give to their subsequent schools, but I’m not sure how to square that assertion with the less-than-one-percent figure. The old wives might be on to something.
In terms of “why,” he stressed the need to discern individual donors’ “philanthropic narrative,” which takes time and patience -- again, the longevity theme. He noted, somewhat drily, that different donors will have wildly contradicting political rationales for supporting the same program: what a liberal might see as a strike for social justice, a conservative might see as an alternative to the nanny state. A development officer who can play the long game can figure that out and frame opportunities accordingly. Notably, nearly every major donor he studied was over the age of 55.
A subsequent breakout session by Mark Greenfield of the University of Buffalo about using social media to reach out to Millennials brought a much younger audience. The major takeaway from that one was the importance of ‘mobile.’ For example, using a QR code to direct people to a website with Flash is largely self-defeating, since anyone with an iphone or ipad will be stymied. I was also struck at how quickly popularity can shift among social media platforms.
Between the two sessions, I couldn’t help but notice once again that we Gen X’ers fell between the cracks. Alas.
Coming from the academic side, as I do, I generally assume that fundraisers get a great deal of respect on campus; after all, they bring money. And that’s certainly true on my campus, where the CDO is a respected figure. But judging by the conference so far, that’s still the exception; apparently, many community college presidents still don’t feel that fundraising is properly part of their job. In a perfect world, it probably wouldn’t be, but given the realities of the last few years, it will be. As an academic, I wish there were more like me here, just to hear it all.
On to day two. Jet lag eventually fades, right?
Tuesday, October 02, 2012
Baumol and Big Data
“Trash removal costs go up not because garbage collectors become less efficient but because less labor is needed to manufacture a single computer, for instance, and wages in that industry (and others, as well) continue to climb.” – William Baumol, The Cost Disease, p. 44
If you read only one book about higher education this year, read The Cost Disease, by William Baumol. It’s essential, brilliant, and even readable. And it answers an important question – why the costs of health care and education keep going up – more intelligently than anything else I’ve seen. (My book doesn’t come out until January, so he can have this year…)
William Baumol is an economist who gained fame in the 1960’s for discovering what came to be known as “Baumol’s cost disease.” It’s the observation that rates of productivity growth are uneven across industries, and that the products or services of the industries with lower productivity growth will gradually and inexorably become more expensive than those of the industries with higher productivity growth.
In the original paper, Baumol looked at a Mozart string quartet. It takes just as many musicians just as long to play today as it did two hundred years ago; in real terms, the productivity increase for string quartets has been zero. By contrast, the productivity growth in telecommunications, driven almost entirely by technology, has been astronomical. The rate of growth in telecom has been so high that companies can lower prices and increase profits at the same time. (Bless him, Baumol prefers to look at increased wages, rather than increased profits. Suffice it to say that actual telecoms don’t always work like that.)
Baumol isolates human labor as the key factor. (There’s a vague echo of Marx’ labor theory of value, though Baumol doesn’t acknowledge it.) Industries that have been able to replace expensive human labor with inexpensive machinery (when amortized over lots of production, anyway) have been able to lower costs for everyone. The share of GDP they’ve forfeited by lowering costs has moved over to what he calls the “stagnant” sector, which is the set of industries in which production is still very hands-on and therefore hard to speed up. Education and health care are the most conspicuous examples, though it also holds for live entertainment, restaurants, and legal services.
To take an easy example from the book, in the 1800’s, most Americans worked in agriculture. Now only about three percent do, yet that three percent produces far more food than the majority of the country was able to produce just a few generations ago. Technology has been the key. Even in manufacturing, though the job losses since the midcentury peak have been dramatic, there’s still plenty of stuff being produced; the key change has been that the producers have become so much more efficient that they don’t need as many employees.
Education and health care haven’t enjoyed those gains. They’re still producing in much the same way they did fifty years ago. As a result, salary increases for people who work in education and health care aren’t paid for through increased production; they’re paid for by charging more. Instead of the virtuous cycle of higher wages and lower prices that the more “productive” sector has enjoyed, we’ve endured the vicious cycle of lower wages and higher prices that comes from a long-term productivity squeeze.
Baumol is oddly content with that. He argues throughout the book that when the economy grows enough as a whole, the fact that a few sectors are taking up more of it really doesn’t matter much. I can’t share his confidence, since I can’t help but notice that middle class wages have stagnated for decades even in the face of annual productivity increases. We’ve had a self-reinforcing distribution problem that has concentrated the gains of productivity in the top tier, leading to a politics of resentment among the rest. (One could easily explain the election as the two parties offering different versions of who to resent.) Baumol is right that GDP as a whole can certainly handle increased tuition, but it doesn’t follow that therefore a middle class family can. To paraphrase Tug McGraw, ya gotta disaggregate.
Still, the real breakthrough of the book for me is the discussion of Big Data as a way around the cost disease. The cost disease happens – entirely without villains, corruption, or ill intent – when some sectors increase productivity faster than others for an extended period. Baumol notes that one way around the problem is to zero out productivity growth altogether. He’s right, mathematically, but I don’t think we want to live that way. So the other way around it – which the book explores in the context of health care, but largely ignores for education – is for the slow-growth sectors to pick up their pace.
Baumol contrasts car manufacturing to car repairing: the former allows for easy productivity improvements, but the latter doesn’t. As Tolstoy would have noted, every new car is the same, but every broken car is broken in its own way. (That’s from “Vanna Karenina,” about a minivan in a bad spot.) It’s harder to cut costs on the repair side because the diagnostic step still requires trained human intervention.
And that’s where we in higher ed have an opportunity, though Baumol doesn’t raise it himself. We’ve tried to use midcentury standardization – “take out your number two pencils” – with mostly terrible results. But we haven’t used Big Data more strategically, as a diagnostic.
Amazon.com does this all the time. When I log on, it offers suggestions based on what I’ve bought or looked at before. When I look at a particular book, it offers “others who bought this also liked…” It looks simple, but there’s an impressive amount of data crunching that makes that possible, and the data crunching has only become possible as computers have hit their stride.
As an industry, we still use the artisanal mode of production. Until recently, there was a good argument that it was the best we could do. But I’m not sure that’s true anymore.
To me, the really exciting prospects offered by Big Data and MOOCs and, yes, outcomes assessment, is in helping us allocate human intervention most effectively. In health care, for example, evidence-based reforms have led to procedural checklists that have resulted in better patient outcomes at remarkably low cost. Instead of basing incredibly expensive institutions on anecdotes and self-reinforcing hunches, we have the option of starting to base them on what actually works. Instead of denoting learning in units of time – the credit hour – which defeats any possibility of productivity improvement, we could experiment with different ways of improving student capabilities. If we find a way to get a student to mastery faster, well, that’s productivity.
Oddly for such an insightful book, Baumol seems to take for granted that certain activities are simply trapped, and must be trapped forever. That strikes me as a failure of imagination. Since I don’t share his political complacency, I also don’t share his sense that, say, higher education will just keep on getting more expensive forever and that’s okay. It’s not okay – I have polls and an Occupy movement to prove it – and it’s not necessarily inevitable. We’ll need to be willing to make some pretty drastic changes, but that’s what smart people who intend to survive do. It’s how it’s done. We can do this.
Still, Baumol’s formulation is the only serious answer I’ve seen to why the costs of education, law enforcement, and health care have gone up drastically around the world for decades. It isn’t about this administrator or that one; if that were the issue, we’d see exceptions. The fundamental problem – the issue that colleges have tried to evade with adjuncts – is structural. It’s Baumol’s cost disease. Until we come to grips with that, we’ll be stuck in the politics of resentment.
If you read only one book about higher education this year, read The Cost Disease, by William Baumol. It’s essential, brilliant, and even readable. And it answers an important question – why the costs of health care and education keep going up – more intelligently than anything else I’ve seen. (My book doesn’t come out until January, so he can have this year…)
William Baumol is an economist who gained fame in the 1960’s for discovering what came to be known as “Baumol’s cost disease.” It’s the observation that rates of productivity growth are uneven across industries, and that the products or services of the industries with lower productivity growth will gradually and inexorably become more expensive than those of the industries with higher productivity growth.
In the original paper, Baumol looked at a Mozart string quartet. It takes just as many musicians just as long to play today as it did two hundred years ago; in real terms, the productivity increase for string quartets has been zero. By contrast, the productivity growth in telecommunications, driven almost entirely by technology, has been astronomical. The rate of growth in telecom has been so high that companies can lower prices and increase profits at the same time. (Bless him, Baumol prefers to look at increased wages, rather than increased profits. Suffice it to say that actual telecoms don’t always work like that.)
Baumol isolates human labor as the key factor. (There’s a vague echo of Marx’ labor theory of value, though Baumol doesn’t acknowledge it.) Industries that have been able to replace expensive human labor with inexpensive machinery (when amortized over lots of production, anyway) have been able to lower costs for everyone. The share of GDP they’ve forfeited by lowering costs has moved over to what he calls the “stagnant” sector, which is the set of industries in which production is still very hands-on and therefore hard to speed up. Education and health care are the most conspicuous examples, though it also holds for live entertainment, restaurants, and legal services.
To take an easy example from the book, in the 1800’s, most Americans worked in agriculture. Now only about three percent do, yet that three percent produces far more food than the majority of the country was able to produce just a few generations ago. Technology has been the key. Even in manufacturing, though the job losses since the midcentury peak have been dramatic, there’s still plenty of stuff being produced; the key change has been that the producers have become so much more efficient that they don’t need as many employees.
Education and health care haven’t enjoyed those gains. They’re still producing in much the same way they did fifty years ago. As a result, salary increases for people who work in education and health care aren’t paid for through increased production; they’re paid for by charging more. Instead of the virtuous cycle of higher wages and lower prices that the more “productive” sector has enjoyed, we’ve endured the vicious cycle of lower wages and higher prices that comes from a long-term productivity squeeze.
Baumol is oddly content with that. He argues throughout the book that when the economy grows enough as a whole, the fact that a few sectors are taking up more of it really doesn’t matter much. I can’t share his confidence, since I can’t help but notice that middle class wages have stagnated for decades even in the face of annual productivity increases. We’ve had a self-reinforcing distribution problem that has concentrated the gains of productivity in the top tier, leading to a politics of resentment among the rest. (One could easily explain the election as the two parties offering different versions of who to resent.) Baumol is right that GDP as a whole can certainly handle increased tuition, but it doesn’t follow that therefore a middle class family can. To paraphrase Tug McGraw, ya gotta disaggregate.
Still, the real breakthrough of the book for me is the discussion of Big Data as a way around the cost disease. The cost disease happens – entirely without villains, corruption, or ill intent – when some sectors increase productivity faster than others for an extended period. Baumol notes that one way around the problem is to zero out productivity growth altogether. He’s right, mathematically, but I don’t think we want to live that way. So the other way around it – which the book explores in the context of health care, but largely ignores for education – is for the slow-growth sectors to pick up their pace.
Baumol contrasts car manufacturing to car repairing: the former allows for easy productivity improvements, but the latter doesn’t. As Tolstoy would have noted, every new car is the same, but every broken car is broken in its own way. (That’s from “Vanna Karenina,” about a minivan in a bad spot.) It’s harder to cut costs on the repair side because the diagnostic step still requires trained human intervention.
And that’s where we in higher ed have an opportunity, though Baumol doesn’t raise it himself. We’ve tried to use midcentury standardization – “take out your number two pencils” – with mostly terrible results. But we haven’t used Big Data more strategically, as a diagnostic.
Amazon.com does this all the time. When I log on, it offers suggestions based on what I’ve bought or looked at before. When I look at a particular book, it offers “others who bought this also liked…” It looks simple, but there’s an impressive amount of data crunching that makes that possible, and the data crunching has only become possible as computers have hit their stride.
As an industry, we still use the artisanal mode of production. Until recently, there was a good argument that it was the best we could do. But I’m not sure that’s true anymore.
To me, the really exciting prospects offered by Big Data and MOOCs and, yes, outcomes assessment, is in helping us allocate human intervention most effectively. In health care, for example, evidence-based reforms have led to procedural checklists that have resulted in better patient outcomes at remarkably low cost. Instead of basing incredibly expensive institutions on anecdotes and self-reinforcing hunches, we have the option of starting to base them on what actually works. Instead of denoting learning in units of time – the credit hour – which defeats any possibility of productivity improvement, we could experiment with different ways of improving student capabilities. If we find a way to get a student to mastery faster, well, that’s productivity.
Oddly for such an insightful book, Baumol seems to take for granted that certain activities are simply trapped, and must be trapped forever. That strikes me as a failure of imagination. Since I don’t share his political complacency, I also don’t share his sense that, say, higher education will just keep on getting more expensive forever and that’s okay. It’s not okay – I have polls and an Occupy movement to prove it – and it’s not necessarily inevitable. We’ll need to be willing to make some pretty drastic changes, but that’s what smart people who intend to survive do. It’s how it’s done. We can do this.
Still, Baumol’s formulation is the only serious answer I’ve seen to why the costs of education, law enforcement, and health care have gone up drastically around the world for decades. It isn’t about this administrator or that one; if that were the issue, we’d see exceptions. The fundamental problem – the issue that colleges have tried to evade with adjuncts – is structural. It’s Baumol’s cost disease. Until we come to grips with that, we’ll be stuck in the politics of resentment.
Monday, October 01, 2012
Ask the Administrator: The Case of the Lukewarm Letter
A new correspondent writes:
This is a delicate one.
For what it’s worth, on the hiring side as I’ve experienced it, letters don’t count for a lot. They need to exist if they’re asked for -- someone who can’t find anybody to say anything nice about them probably isn’t our first choice -- but at least here, the content of the letters counts a lot less than I used to imagine they did, back in grad school. (If anything, phone calls are far more useful than letters. You can ask followup questions, and, sometimes, hear some very loud pauses.) That said, of course, your mileage may vary.
Assuming the second full-timer at the current workplace isn’t an option -- I’ll take your word for that -- and assuming that the current employer matters a great deal, then you’re left with how to improve the letter that’s already there.
If you decide to ask the writer to try again, the first issue that comes to mind is explaining how the applicant came to know what was written. The writer may have understood the letter to be confidential. If that’s the case, then there’s a basic epistemological issue. I don’t have a magic bullet for that one, though some of my wise and worldly readers might.
Alternately, I guess, you could try something a little more roundabout. Mention some new twist in either the market or the applicant’s qualifications, and ask for a revised letter. (“Could you make a point of mentioning my latest award?”) That evades the epistemological issue, and offers a face-saving way to ask for a new version. But it raises the very real possibility that the second letter will be just as tepid as the first, if with new details. (It’s a variation on the old dilemma of a student whose extra credit work sucks. Yes, it’s extra, but if it sucks, it sucks.)
Depending on context, some applicants have also used a statement like “please contact my current employer only if I reach finalist status,” and then offered phone numbers. If the kindly soul is a better speaker than writer, this gives a generally-understood way to shift media to something that might get better results. I’ve seen this more on administrative searches than on faculty searches, but it’s generally accepted as an acknowledgement that some places actually punish people for looking. Offering the name and phone number of the kindly professor, bracketed with a statement like that, may come across as “here’s a good soul in a dysfunctional place,” rather than “here’s someone who writes weak letters.” It’s a dodge, but it may work.
I’ll admit not being a fan of letters of reference generally. Between the competitiveness of the academic job market and a widespread fear of litigation, letters are puffier and less candid than would be helpful. It’s one of those old “rational choice” dilemmas: collectively, we’d all be better off with more truthful and nuanced letters, but the first person to make the shift loses. Letters are also subject to cultural biases, quirks of writing style, and the limitations of the genre of what is supposed to be deep reflection but is really just advertising.
Good luck!
Wise and worldly readers, I’m fairly confident that there are more angles to this. What would you recommend? Are there elegant ways around this dilemma?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
I wondered if I could crowdsource a request for advice from a colleague trying to find a full-time academic job.
She finished her PhD a little while ago and has strong references from two prominent faculty members at her graduate institution. For 6 years, she has been doing part-time teaching work at another university that has only two full-time faculty in her discipline: one she doesn't get along with at all (through no fault of her own), but the other is great and has written reference letters for her in the past. However, my colleague just saw one of these letters and it was all of two paragraphs long with nothing of substance to say.
Her question is: should she keep using this poor letter writer as a reference and, if she does, how can she mitigate a weak letter? If she doesn't use her, will too many red flags be raised since she wouldn't have a letter from the institution where she has been teaching (part-time) for the past 6 years?
I have some ideas of my own, but I'd appreciate your thoughts and those of your wise and worldly readers.
This is a delicate one.
For what it’s worth, on the hiring side as I’ve experienced it, letters don’t count for a lot. They need to exist if they’re asked for -- someone who can’t find anybody to say anything nice about them probably isn’t our first choice -- but at least here, the content of the letters counts a lot less than I used to imagine they did, back in grad school. (If anything, phone calls are far more useful than letters. You can ask followup questions, and, sometimes, hear some very loud pauses.) That said, of course, your mileage may vary.
Assuming the second full-timer at the current workplace isn’t an option -- I’ll take your word for that -- and assuming that the current employer matters a great deal, then you’re left with how to improve the letter that’s already there.
If you decide to ask the writer to try again, the first issue that comes to mind is explaining how the applicant came to know what was written. The writer may have understood the letter to be confidential. If that’s the case, then there’s a basic epistemological issue. I don’t have a magic bullet for that one, though some of my wise and worldly readers might.
Alternately, I guess, you could try something a little more roundabout. Mention some new twist in either the market or the applicant’s qualifications, and ask for a revised letter. (“Could you make a point of mentioning my latest award?”) That evades the epistemological issue, and offers a face-saving way to ask for a new version. But it raises the very real possibility that the second letter will be just as tepid as the first, if with new details. (It’s a variation on the old dilemma of a student whose extra credit work sucks. Yes, it’s extra, but if it sucks, it sucks.)
Depending on context, some applicants have also used a statement like “please contact my current employer only if I reach finalist status,” and then offered phone numbers. If the kindly soul is a better speaker than writer, this gives a generally-understood way to shift media to something that might get better results. I’ve seen this more on administrative searches than on faculty searches, but it’s generally accepted as an acknowledgement that some places actually punish people for looking. Offering the name and phone number of the kindly professor, bracketed with a statement like that, may come across as “here’s a good soul in a dysfunctional place,” rather than “here’s someone who writes weak letters.” It’s a dodge, but it may work.
I’ll admit not being a fan of letters of reference generally. Between the competitiveness of the academic job market and a widespread fear of litigation, letters are puffier and less candid than would be helpful. It’s one of those old “rational choice” dilemmas: collectively, we’d all be better off with more truthful and nuanced letters, but the first person to make the shift loses. Letters are also subject to cultural biases, quirks of writing style, and the limitations of the genre of what is supposed to be deep reflection but is really just advertising.
Good luck!
Wise and worldly readers, I’m fairly confident that there are more angles to this. What would you recommend? Are there elegant ways around this dilemma?
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