Fruits of Twitter

Among its other virtues, Twitter makes a nifty self-updating annotated bibliography.  People tweet links with comments; if you follow the right people, you can wind up with some great suggestions.

This week, the tweets runneth over.  Below, some links well worth checking out:

- Sherman Dorn’s response to the Obama plan, and a series of suggestions that he thinks would work better.  Dorn vacillates between “crack cocaine” and “pixie dust” metaphors, but the piece is well worth reading anyway.  It shows a healthy awareness of the ways that various actors can “game” systems, and suggests that putting too much faith in any one algorithm will lead, inevitably, to abuses.  Nicely done.

- “America’s Worst Community Colleges,” from the Washington Monthly.  Spoiler alert: they’re all in California, and largely clustered in the Bay area.  The piece gets a bit confused on causality; it cites several statewide mandates, then argues that too much local control is the real problem.  One could make a much more compelling argument that the issue isn’t so much local vs. state control as institutionalized conflicts of interest and a system that delegates power but not authority.  Still, it explains much of why CCSF is so difficult to get on track, and why so many California community colleges are struggling.  Simply put, the governance model (and, I’d add, the financing model) makes no sense.  

- “America’s Best Community Colleges,” also from the Washington Monthly.  There’s plenty to argue with here, but just going down the chart and looking at states is suggestive.  New England only has one college in the top 50 nationally, a smallish college in Maine.  Washington state seems to do much better than an outsider would suspect.  I know that Washington has had considerable success with the IBest program, but that can’t be the only factor.  

Following up on yesterday’s point about comparative work, I’d love to see a serious comparative study of state systems of community colleges.  Why does Washington state seem to be such fertile territory for community college success?  Why does the Northeast seem to lag?  If we take states as the units of analysis, rather than individual campuses, then some of the structural variables that tend to drop out of most descriptions might become more obvious.

- “Advice for New Community College Presidents” and “Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?” benefit by being read together.  The former is mostly a catalog of variations on “l’etat c’est moi,” with the usual cautions against overweening egos.  The latter, though, suggests that part of the reason that persons with overweening egos -- frequently, though not exclusively, men -- land presidencies in the first place: people who make selections often mistake confidence for competence, so overconfidence gets rewarded.

That isn’t an entirely new finding -- anyone who has read Jim Collins’ work knows about humility in leadership -- but it’s worth revisiting.  The best presidents have some humility, but that same humility makes it less likely that they’ll get chosen for the role.  The HBR piece used gender as a lens, and that’s valid, but issues of hubris and humility transcend gender (cough Sarah Palin cough).  

The challenge the HBR piece poses to Jenkins’ piece is entirely fair.  If so many leaders fall victim to egotism, why do people keep choosing egotists as leaders?  Solve the latter, and the former will mostly take care of itself.

What If We Studied Success?

The more I’ve reflected on President Obama’s plans, as described last week, the less I like them.  Rating community colleges assumes that students choose among many; in practice, community colleges are usually defined by geography, and few students have more than two from which to choose, for all practical purposes.  Rather than pitting them against each other, it would make more sense to lift all boats.

Having said that, though, I’m quite taken with the chart in this piece from Brookings.  Beth Akers and Matthew Chingos did a basic regression analysis using the fifteen largest public universities in America.  The chart shows the amount by which each university either overperformed or underperformed its demographics, using six-year graduation rates as the base measure.

It’s an admittedly partial picture, but it gets at the “sabermetrics” I invoked last week.  Given the socioeconomic profile of your students, what should your grad rate be?  By that measure, the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor and the University of Central Florida have some work to do, but Michigan State and Rutgers are punching above their weight.  

Presumably, similar analyses could be run for institutions in different sectors.  Which community colleges are doing better than their demographics would lead us to expect?  Which four-year public colleges?  For that matter -- and this would be very interesting -- which for-profits?

The real issue is what to do with the information once we have it.  Certainly I’d want to see multiple measures, since any single number is subject to all sorts of distortion.  For example, a graduation rate by itself could reflect excellent teaching or grade inflation or an unusual program mix or an exogenous shock.  Ideally we’d have some sort of measure of actual learning.  In the absence of that, though, it would help to have a more nuanced blend of metrics that would lessen the impact of any given anomaly.

Then, once we have that, I’d love to see the Feds pony up some money for serious comparative studies.  What is, say, Rutgers doing that the U of Michigan isn’t?  In my perfect world, the point of that kind of study would be to extract useful lessons.  What are the consistently high-performing colleges in each sector doing that their peers could learn from?  (Admittedly, the for-profits might not want to participate in that, since they compete with each other.  But it’s worth asking.)  What are the most impressive community colleges doing that other community colleges could adapt?

That kind of study rarely happens now.  The Community College Research Center does heroic and wonderful work, but it’s one place.  Papers at the League for Innovation or the AACC tend to be autobiographical success stories; it’s rare to see or hear systematic examination of underperformance.  Titles III and V fund some wonderful projects, and some cross-conversation occurs among them, but the comparisons are not systematic, and nobody particularly wants to admit struggling.  Gates and Lumina don’t fund comparative work, as far as I’ve seen.

The beauty of an approach like this is twofold.  It’s cheap, and it’s egalitarian.  It would use documented difference in performance to lift all boats, rather than to decide more efficiently who to starve.  In that sense, it’s much truer to the mission of public higher education than a sort of Hobbesian war of each against all.  Deploying a squadron of sociologists to improve public higher education in America strikes me as public money well spent.  Far better to do that than to set colleges at each other’s throats, gaming statistics to make next year’s payroll.

President’s Pell Plan Probably Problematic

From yesterday’s reports, President Obama’s plan for changing how higher education is paid for is very much a mixed bag.  It sounds mostly well-intended, and parts of it are quite good: I was heartened to hear an embrace of competency-based education, for example, and it’s hard to argue with the idea of allowing students with bachelor’s degrees to get aid for vocational training if they need it.  A little well-timed brushing up on, say, software skills can go a long way.

But with money, the devil is in the details.  And I’ve already spotted one slippery devil.  

The plan is based mostly on “ratings” of colleges, based on their performance on a set of measures to be determined.  Students who choose “better” colleges, as defined by the rating system, will be eligible for larger Pell grants and subsidized loans.

Let’s think about that for a minute.  Larger Pell grants for students at “better” schools?

For community colleges, that falls somewhere between “irrelevant” and “catastrophic.”

I understand the surface-level appeal.  Pay for performance sounds a lot like fairness.  It recognizes the power of incentives, and it combines carrot and stick.  I get that.

And done right, it can do exactly that.  But I don’t see larger Pell grants accomplishing that.

That’s because Pell grants go to students, rather than to colleges.  For expensive schools, that may be a distinction without a difference; their tuition is high enough that it consumes the entirety of even a maximum grant..  But in the community college world, the distinction matters.  Here, Pell money above and beyond tuition and fees goes directly to the student.  (The idea is to help offset the costs of books, transportation, and the like.)  That means that the higher Pell grant would help more expensive colleges directly, and community colleges not at all.   

In other words, for most community colleges, a higher Pell ceiling wouldn’t mean a single dollar more for the colleges themselves.  But it might well mean a larger influx of low-income students, who would presumably be rewarded for forsaking more expensive options.  If you buy the argument about “undermatching” -- I’m not a fan, but some people are -- this policy should make it worse.

Over time, more expensive colleges would benefit doubly.  They’d get higher graduation rates from having a higher-income student body -- these things tend to correlate -- and as a result, the low-income they do attract would come with larger checks.  Meanwhile, the lower-cost colleges would absorb more high-risk students, without additional funding to pay for the supports that increase their chances of success.  The only way that community colleges would capture a gain from an increase in Pell grants would be to...wait for it...raise costs dramatically.  

If a low-cost school were to try to capture some of those gains in order to provide support, it would get dinged for a large percentage increase in cost.  Meanwhile, institutions that already cost much more could raise prices much more in absolute terms, since starting from a higher base means the percentages would be smaller.

Hmm.

In the world of the lowest-priced colleges, there’s a yawning gap between the money available to students and the money available to colleges.  That gap means that, say, increasing the maximum Pell grant does absolutely nothing to help a college improve.

I’d also be concerned about regional differences.  In New England, community college graduation rates tend to be lower than in, say, the Dakotas.  That’s not a reflection of institutional performance; if it were, then presumably we’d see exceptions.  It’s a reflection of the other local options available for high-achieving students.  States with more robust four-year sectors tend to have lower two-year graduation rates, and vice versa.  That’s because the Honors high school grad in rural North Dakota is far likelier to attend a community college -- for lack of other options -- than the Honors grad in Boston, where options are thick on the ground.  How that reflects any given college’s “performance” eludes me.

I’d like to think that we wouldn’t base measures of something as important as higher education on dumber statistics than we use for baseball.  The sabermetric movement in baseball -- featured in the book and movie “Moneyball” -- has devised such measures as “expected wins” that a given player generates, or performance above or below “replacement level.”  But we haven’t really done that in higher ed, where the societal stakes are much higher.

Given how important this is, I’d like to see us develop a sabermetrics of higher ed.  Start with an “expected” graduation rate, say, based on the demographic profile of the students.  Colleges that do better than their demographics would suggest must be doing something right; colleges that underperform their demographics presumably have some work to do.  That way, we aren’t just conflating institutional performance with the economic class of the student body.

Of course, that would require recognizing the integrity of institutions as institutions, rather than as simple collections of individuals.  (That’s why I’m so impressed by College for America: it captures the reduced transaction costs of an institution, but also gets around Baumol’s cost disease with competencies.  That’s a powerful one-two punch.)  But that’s a much longer post.

Much of what the president outlined may be moot, absent Congressional approval.  This year the House is too busy with ritualistic votes on repealing Obamacare to deal with much else, and I don’t see this platform being any kind of exception.  As an indication of elite thinking, though, I saw real cause for optimism.  I just hope they’re fluent enough in the details not to do great, if unintended, damage.

The Meanings of Late August

As a kid, late August carried the dread and melancholy of knowing that summer vacation was nearly over.  I’m seeing some of that now with The Boy and The Girl.

As a teenager, late August carried a certain relief and excitement.  The dreary summer job was ending, and I could get back to school to see my friends.  The same held true in college.

In grad school, late August suggested that I could finally get away from the crummy summer jobs that I felt like I should have already aged out of, and get back to the business at hand.  

At DeVry, late August didn’t mean anything at all.  The “summer” trimester ran from July through October.  

For several years, late August meant gearing up for the faculty and students to return, which always generated a new wave of activity.  It still does.

But now, late August has another meaning.  TB and TG are at the ages at which most weeknights during the school year bring out-of-house commitments: Lego League, basketball, baseball, gymnastics, music lessons, band rehearsals, CCD, and the like.  The worst months, in terms of time commitments, are usually September/October and (especially) April/May.  Summer vacation brings blessed relief.

September, among its other blessings, brings the return of Chauffeur Season.  

I’ve come full circle.  The first version of late August melancholy was based on the imminent loss of freedom.  This version is based on the imminent loss of time.

In a few years, I’ll look back on this time fondly.  This piece by Michael Gerson -- of whom I’m not usually a fan -- actually choked me up a little; TB is getting closer to that age than any of us is willing to admit.  In just a few years, late August will mean the imminent departure of TB.  At that point, the chauffeuring may not seem so bad.

But we’re not there yet.  So I’ll try to enjoy these last couple of weeks before the calendar becomes the stern taskmaster that it always does.  Chauffeur Season is as unforgiving as I once imagined the fourth grade would be.

Advising and Naming Names

Some things that strike me as obvious apparently don’t strike others the same way, so I’m doing an ethical compass check here. Should academic advisors steer students towards, or away from, individual professors?

I’ll set some context.  Let’s take a program that’s big enough to have multiple professors teaching sections of the same course.  And let’s assume that the placement of students into the course -- as opposed to any particular section -- is uncontroversial.

Should advisors steer students towards Professor Smith and away from Professor Jones?  For the sake of argument, let’s say there aren’t any issues of predatory or otherwise inappropriate behavior; it’s just about styles.

I’ve heard arguments on both sides.  On the “yes” side, it’s hard to un-know things you think you know about teaching and grading styles.  If you’re relatively plugged into the local grapevine, you may think you have a pretty good sense of the truth about each professor. Withholding information that seems relevant, especially if the student seems vulnerable, may not feel right.  Besides, a grapevine exists, whether we admit it or not.  Denying it on an official level simply increases the advantage of those with connections.  (Many of us made course selections in our student days based on who taught, rather than subject matter.  This isn’t a new issue.)

On the “no” side, it’s easy for prophecies to become self-fulfilling.  A professor who gets a bum rap on the grapevine may be severely disadvantaged precisely because of the grapevine.  What looks from one angle like saving students, looks from another like a whispering campaign.  And the practice of airing dirty laundry in front of students is unseemly, whether or not the laundry is actually dirty.  If nothing else, it puts the students in the position of being pawns in somebody else’s battle.

I know my own view -- I’m pretty firmly in the “no” camp -- but I’m interested in hearing from my wise and worldly readers on this one.  Is there a more persuasive argument on the “yes” side?  

The Ballad of the Red Pen

How do you use the red pen?

As a student, especially in K-12, the red pen was the authority indicating error.  There, I learned that you measured the quality of writing by the number of errors it contained.  The upside of that method was that it forced me to learn my grammar.  The downside was that it tended to reward a certain predictability.  (Five paragraphs, topic sentences...)

In college, the red pen came very late, when it came at all.  It tended to be more cryptic than in high school, sometimes to good effect and sometimes not.  But I had grown to fear it less.  In grad school, the red pen was mostly used to indicate ideological objections, as opposed to “errors” in the sense that most people use the term.  (Some actually used the term “ideological errors,” but I tried to avoid those people.)  

I didn’t encounter a thoughtful conversation about the use of the red pen until I had to t.a. some English composition classes.  Rutgers put social science doctoral students through a year or two of English comp t.a.’ing back then -- I don’t know if it still does -- and in that context, that meant being the instructors of record for our own sections.  To its credit, the English department there understood that, say, political scientists have not been taught how to teach writing, so it established a three day boot camp in writing instruction that we had to attend before we were loosed on unsuspecting freshmen.

That boot camp was one of the most valuable professional development experiences I’ve ever had.  And it was all about the red pen.

People who had studied the ways that students learn how to write -- which is not necessarily the same group as “people who study literature” -- had found “patterns of error” that students fell into when they were trying to stretch as writers.  The point of the boot camp was to help us distinguish between errors of laziness or ignorance, and errors of attempted growth.  The goal was to use the red pen in traditional ways on the former, but to be much more thoughtful about the latter.

Among other things, I was told that the number of “surface errors” -- the kind of mistakes that summoned the red pen reliably in high school -- would actually increase as students moved from simple autobiographical writing to more difficult subjects about which they were less sure.  But the attempt to move from simple to complex engagement should be encouraged.  Too aggressive a job of error-catching could actually arrest students in a developmental stage.  

The concept struck me as both liberatory and wise.  It was liberatory in the sense that I could take off the green eyeshade while grading.  And it was wise in that it replaced mere error-catching with an attempt to recognize the student as capable of more.  I can’t say I always got it right in the implementation, but the concept stuck with me.

In administration, I’ve fallen back on the idea of “errors of growth” quite a bit.  When people step outside of their usual routines and try to do more, there’s an initial phase in which they often make some pretty basic mistakes.  There’s a reason that software experts advise never buying a version that ends in point-zero.  But if you never roll out version 1.0, you’ll never get to the subsequent versions.  The key is in distinguishing between the errors you need to jump on, and the ones that are actually positive signs.

Not everybody has figured this out.  Some wield the red pen in the old k-12 style, attacking every mistake with equal relish.  When the two styles coexist in the same organization, the messages can get pretty confusing. The styles each make sense on their own terms, but they don’t mesh well.  When multiple red pens are in the picture, each with its own set of rules, it’s easy for the author of the paper to get flustered.  That’s true on dissertation committees, and it’s true in organizations.

Wise and worldly readers, have you found ways of making things work when people are using different approaches to their red pens?

Anything to Declare?

Textbook costs have been a major issue for decades.  I remember being shocked at the cost of books when I was a student, back when they were printed on papyrus and delivered by dinosaurs.  Students then sometimes had the option of trying to find used books, but that was pretty much it.  

In the age of electronic resources, I’ve become a booster of Open Educational Resources.  I think we’re at or near the inflection point where it becomes possible for students to get through a majority of classes without actually buying books, assuming the faculty are on board.  Free options have become markedly better over the last few years, and I know many professors are concerned about book costs for their students, so I’m optimistic that we’ll get there.  From a student perspective, money saved on books is the equivalent of a tuition cut.  

But we’re not entirely there yet, so book rentals have sprung up as a sort of transitional option.  They’re still physical books, in most cases, but students can pay to use them just for a single semester and then return them.  As a student, I might not have done that with the courses I cared about most, but would have been happy to do it for the courses I only took to fulfill distribution requirements.  I suspect I wasn’t unique in that.

The appeal is obvious.  Rather than paying full price and then taking their chances on selling it later -- which doesn’t work if the publisher changes editions in the meantime -- you can take the savings upfront.  When students are living week to week, an upfront savings is a very real thing.  

Some college bookstores, including my own, have textbook rental programs.  But they aren’t the only places that do.  Amazon does, too, but with a catch.

I did not see this one coming.

Apparently, depending on the original source from which Amazon sends the book to the student, some rentals are invalidated if the book is moved from the original state to which it was rented.  

Here in New England, where most of the states are small and people cross state lines every day, this could be a real problem.  Even for students who live in-state, which most do, it’s not unusual to have family or other obligations in neighboring states.  Can you imagine getting a bill from Amazon for a few hundred bucks because some tracker in your Bio book alerted Amazon that you had left it in your car when you visited your friend in Connecticut?  

Very weird.  

Apparently, the issue for Amazon is dodging state sales taxes.  I won’t pretend to understand the ins and outs of that as it applies to rentals, but I’ve never heard of travel restrictions on physical books.  The surveillance aspect alone is creepy enough, without even getting into the victimization of low-income students.  (Though it does offer opportunities for enterprising sorts in trenchcoats: “hey...could I interest you in some hot Intro to Econ?”)

It reminds me of the old DRM debates in the oughts.  DRM, or digital rights management, was a set of self-destruct mechanisms built into various software in an effort to prevent people from using it in unauthorized ways.  In the early days of iTunes, for example, you didn’t get raw mp3’s.  You got digital music in a more specific and trackable form, for which you had to get permission for each new device on which you played it.  The goal was to prevent piracy, which digital copying made easy.

But DRM was clunky, intrusive, and insulting, and the market rejected it.  Instead, the market moved away from “ownership” of music altogether.  The companies that clamped down on piracy succeeded mostly in destroying their own business model.  Now even Apple has had to move in the direction of a streaming service.

My guess is that the “no books across state lines” rule will have a similar effect on rentals.  It’s clunky, intrusive, and insulting, and it will simply hasten the move to OER.  Would you rather pay a hundred bucks to rent an Intro to Bio textbook that threatens to nail you for a three-figure fine if you leave it in your car when you go visit your aunt, or pay nothing at all for something that you can access anytime, from anywhere?

It’s a bit of a no-brainer.

I’m disappointed in Amazon for doing this, but I suspect it won’t last long.  Instead, it will merely hasten the transition to something we really should prefer anyway.  How Amazon will make money off OER isn’t clear to me, but it’s really not my problem.

Data and Debate

Bonnie Stewart made a statement on Twitter yesterday that made me sit up.  She wrote that big data inherently undermines shared governance, placing more power in the hands of administration.  

If that’s true -- and I don’t believe that it has to be -- then higher education has a serious problem.

The statement stopped me short because it’s easy enough to describe the conditions under which that happens.  Statistics show that program A works and program B doesn’t.  But program B has a loud and aggressive constituency, and program A doesn’t.  There’s enough money to fund either, but not both.  Who wins?

In that scenario -- any experienced administrator has been through it -- you have a choice.  Do you go with the politically easy choice, or the one with truth on its side?  How much political pushback are you willing or able to endure to do what needs to be done?

In the abstract, it’s easy to criticize that scenario as oversimplified.  What do you mean by “works”?  Are the goals themselves legitimate?  What about when the data are flawed, or ambiguous, or cherry-picked?  What about the things the data can’t (or don’t) capture?

But in actual cases, those larger issues are often less relevant than one might expect.  Defining the conflicts away through epistemological caveats may score debating points, but it doesn’t lead to making an actual decision.  It leads to postponing, possibly forever.  Sometimes, postponing really isn’t an option.  Or it amounts to making a decision in itself, favoring the currently favored over alternatives.  This is the flip side of the idea that data is a cudgel for administrators to use.  

(One of the habits of mind I had to learn, when I moved from faculty to administration, was accepting the reality of limited or conflicting information and making decisions anyway.  If you wait for the dust to settle, you will wait forever.  That’s especially true in settings in which some people kick up dust deliberately, precisely to prevent decisions from happening.  You’ll even see that in job ads for administrative positions -- language like “must be capable of working with ambiguity” pops up for a reason.)

If we replace the word “data” with the word “facts,” the problem is clear.  Does shared governance require a fact-free environment to thrive?  If it does, what does that imply about shared governance?  (Or, as Stephen Colbert puts it in a different context, “reality has a liberal bias.”)

Yes, people can use inside information to get what they want.  They also use bluster, and emotion, and force, and all sorts of other things.  If we ban information, but leave bluster, emotion, and force intact, I don’t see the decisions getting any better.

The issues aren’t confined to data, or to information generally.  State and Federal governments are taking much more active -- some would say intrusive -- roles in academic decisions than they have in the recent past.  Those mandates don’t come with the option of local nullification.  In those contexts, decisions that were once well within the purview of shared governance are now shared with the public at large, with the public having the final say.  

My sense of it is that the meaning of “shared governance” is much murkier than it used to be.  How does it work when a faculty is majority adjunct?  How does it work when a state hands down a mandate?  How much sense does it make to divorce shared governance from budgeting, when so many curricular and policy decisions have budgetary impacts?  (For those keeping score at home, I had the same question about the political thought of Hannah Arendt.  If you separate “the economic” from “the political,” you’re left with a pretty thin concept of “the political.”) nThe external constraints on colleges are far greater than they’ve been, and increasing, and often not really subject to internal veto.  

Last Spring I saw a presentation by a community college from Michigan about “Data Day,” during which they take over a classroom and put up posters with key data points on every wall, along with sheets for comments.  The idea is to bring a common base of information for discussion.  Yes, the selection and framing of the data is non-neutral; that’s inevitable.  But I like the idea of educating the discussion before getting to the conflictual part.  Here’s the mandate, here are the facts as we know them; now what should we do?  Skipping those first two steps isn’t a sign of respect for shared governance; it’s a passive-aggressive way of destroying it.

Virtualization

Apparently, this is turning into “begging for ideas” week.  Please forgive the dreadful manners.

I know juuuuuust enough about IT to be dangerous.  I recently heard an IT idea that strikes me as obviously great, but experience has taught me that ideas that look obviously great at first blush can hide great sins among the details.  So I’m hoping that some folks who have been through this can shed some light.

The idea is “virtualization,” and my bowdlerized understanding of it is as follows.  In traditional on-campus computer labs, every computer has its own CPU and performs its own calculations and processes.  The computers are networked to each other and to the internet, for obvious reasons, but each is capable of doing some pretty serious internal processing.  If you want to run a program on all of the computers in a lab, you have to install it on each computer individually.  Although much of what computers do is online now, we still pay for and maintain all those separate computer brains within each station.

In virtualization, as I understand it, the brains are moved to a centralized location (or locations).  So instead of thirty different machines each running its own version of BasketWeaver, thirty terminals are connected to a single server running a sort of uber-version of BasketWeaver.  

The appeal is twofold.  First, it’s easier to maintain one program on one server than to maintain thirty installations on thirty CPU’s.  Secondly, you can get away with “dumb terminals” on the user end, allowing for cheaper upfront cost. less maintenance/repair, and more consistency.  You don’t have to worry that some machines are running BasketWeaver 2010 and others are running BasketWeaver 2013; you can ensure that whatever version is running is running everywhere.  From a teaching perspective, that’s a real gain.

Obviously, virtualization requires some big honkin’ servers -- I think BHS is the technical term -- and plenty of bandwidth.  But if you have those, you can save the cost and headaches of trying to maintain hundreds of CPU’s across campus.  

If that understanding is broadly correct -- I’m basically thinking of the distinction between a chromebook and a laptop, writ large -- then it seems like it should be a no-brainer.

(I’ll grant upfront that there may be some very specialized use cases in which the old model still makes sense: dedicated Macs for Graphic Design, say.  But even if, say, twenty percent of the student-use computers had to remain in the old model, the savings for the college in terms of both money and maintenance would be substantial.)

But true no-brainers are rare.  There has to be a catch.

So this is where I’m hoping that people with battle scars will shed some light.  What’s the catch?  What’s the “you wouldn’t have thought of it, but this detail will kill you” life lesson?

How to Count?

This may sound crass, but it’s actually an essential exercise.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you have only enough money to pay for one of the following positions:

a. a librarian

b. a professional tutor

c. a academic advisor

Further, for the sake of argument, let’s say that future funding is contingent, in part, on improved student retention and graduation rates.  

And just to make things interesting, let’s say that you’re actually trying to be fair, and there isn’t a sufficiently obvious imbalance in staffing among the areas to make the decision a no-brainer.  It’s actually a tough call.  So ideally, you’d like to make the decision based on some sort of evidence-based idea of which would make the most difference for students.

How would you decide?  I’m not asking which one you would pick.  I’m asking what would count as criteria.  How, exactly, would you quantify the marginal impact on retention and graduation rates of one more librarian, tutor, or advisor?

(To keep things realistic, let’s rule out the “controlled experiment” approach, since it would require a time machine.  I’m hoping to find a method that could work in the real world.)

Has anyone out there seen, used, or figured out a reasonably accurate way to measure the marginal impact of positions like these against each other?