Time Travel with a Ten Year Old

The Girl has a bit of the philosopher in her.  Sometimes it catches me off-guard.

The Girl and I, driving home from some errands last night:

TG: I wonder why we find animals cute.  I mean, back in caveman times, furry things could attack us!

Me: That’s true…

TG  Finding a leopard cub cute could mean getting attacked!

Me: Yes, it could.

TG: There’s a difference between cute and pretty.  Puppies are cute, but they aren’t usually pretty.

Me: No.

TG: And butterflies are pretty, but they aren’t really cute.

Me: That’s true.  I’ve seen sunsets that were pretty, but I’ve never called one cute.

TG: You know, if someone from hundreds of years ago overheard us, he’d be like, “you must have a lot of time on your hands to talk about what’s pretty and what’s cute.”

Me: Probably.

TG: He’d be like, “I spend all day chopping wood to survive!  And you get to talk about puppies and kittens!”

Me: (laughing)

TG: I wonder what someone from the 1800’s would like the most if he suddenly appeared here.  Maybe television.  They’d think it was magic!

Me: Or cars.

TG: Or airplanes!

Me: It depends on who it is, too.  Like if it was a woman, she’d be excited that she could wear pants in public.

TG: And vote!

Me: And own property, and have her own job.

TG: Yeah, it must have stunk for women back then.  I bet she wouldn’t want to go back!

Me: Probably not.

TG: And we can play Minecraft on the computer!  They didn’t have Minecraft back then.

Throwback Thursday

In the age of group texting apps, robocalls, email, electronic bulletin boards, social media, and untold varieties of wireless communication, we’re finding we get some of the best results by using…

Postcards.

Yes, the same postcards that colleges sent twenty years ago.  Ink on paper, snail-mailed to students’ homes.  

Postcards have several advantages.  They’re relatively cheap, they’re easy to mass-produce, and they’re well suited to simple messages.  But they also have two advantages that are unique to them, and that set them apart from most electronic forms of communication.

Anyone in the home can see them, and they’re easy to stick on refrigerators.

Letters are sealed, and therefore less likely to be read by others.  Electronic messages, in whatever form, are easily lost in the shuffle, whether that takes the form of a spam folder, an avalanche of other communications, or students’ changing phone numbers.  But postcards do a pretty good job of tracking students down.  And almost nobody prints out text messages and posts them on refrigerators.

Sometimes, the older methods still have some life left in them.  It’s worth keeping that in mind as we look for ways to address nagging challenges.

My personal fave happened a few years ago.  The library set up a quiet study room with no tech at all.  It’s really basic: desks, lamps, chairs, not much else.  I’m told it has a smallish, but devoted, clientele that enforces the expectation of quiet on newcomers.  For students with chaotic home lives, just having a reliable, quiet place to study makes a difference.  It’s hardly cutting edge, but it still works.  The rest of the library embraces technology in forward-thinking ways, and the group study area -- complete with single computers with multiple keyboards and large displays -- gets plenty of use.  But there’s still a market for the classic clean, well-lighted place.

With much of the latest tech, we’re at the stage of trying to figure out where the tech can help, and where we need to preserve or enhance the high-touch human element.  Anyone who has watched an email exchange degenerate over time knows that sometimes you have to interrupt the circuit and go to phone or in-person conversation.  The same holds for anything asynchronous.  Asynchronous conversation allows for convenience, and in the best cases, for reflection before and during engagement.  But it can also allow for stewing.  Having the option of switching back to an older mode -- even if you don’t use it all that often -- provides a safety valve.  After a half hour of “if the problem is with your home phone, press 5,” I just want to speak with a human being.  We’ve all been there.

Wise and worldly readers, what throwbacks have you seen redeem themselves by being surprisingly useful?

No Payments for 90 Days!

Sometimes I wonder if colleges could learn from appliance stores.

Like many community colleges, we’re enrolling now for Spring classes.  Some students sign up as early as humanly possible, in order to get the exact schedules that they want.  Many don’t.  

The former -- the early birds -- make sense intuitively.  If they fully intend to return in the Spring, and they don’t see any colossal barriers to doing so, then getting an early jump to get the perfect schedule is a rational way to get the most bang for the buck.  For many students on financial aid, the aid is packaged for the academic year, so someone who started in the Fall shouldn’t face a barrier to early enrollment for the Spring.

The latter are the trickier cases.  Why do so many students who apparently intend to return take their sweet time registering?

From the institution’s perspective, it would be vastly preferable if more students signed up early.  With fuller counts early on, we’d have a better sense of which sections would run, and where we’d need more or fewer.  It would also make budgeting easier, since we’d be better able to project tuition/fee income.  It might also improve student success, since students would have more time to arrange work and transportation around class schedules in advance.

Apparently, though, many students who don’t have fully packaged financial aid put off registering so they can put off paying the bill.  They’re looking towards the Christmas holiday, and hoping to have enough money in December to get through it.  Paying tuition in November would make that harder.

And that’s where I wonder if appliance stores (or furniture stores, or..) have something to teach us.

In the retail world, “no payments for 90 days” is a common gimmick for getting people to buy.  The idea is to separate the pain from the gain, and to put the gain first.  Economists can protest all they want about the irrationality of that, but judging by the ubiquity of the gimmick, it seems to work.  If it works for sectional couches, it should work for sections of English.

I’m wondering what would happen if we used “no payments for 90 days” as an incentive for early registration.  Miss the cutoff for “early” registration, and the rule defaults to paying upon registration.  Register first, and you get to pay last.  That way, the student’s incentive would align with the institution’s.

I’m guessing that the major barrier preventing widespread adoption of “no payments for 90 days” in higher ed is the specter of no-shows.  A student who ponied up the money upfront has something at stake; a student who didn’t might be likelier to develop second thoughts.  That’s less relevant in the case of appliances; once the washing machine is delivered, there it is.  No-shows would defeat the institutional gain of better planning.  Instead of guessing which empty seats would eventually fill, we’d have to guess which filled seats would actually turn out empty.  In a sense, that’s actually worse.  At least in the case of obviously empty seats, we wouldn’t have to turn anyone away.  I’d hate to turn away prospective students because no-shows took their seats.  In that scenario, nobody wins.

Has anyone out there tried a variation on the “no payments for 90 days” gimmick in the context of early registration for classes?  If so, what happened?  Did students respond to the incentive by registering early, or did it just pass unnoticed?  And were no-shows an issue?  Any hard-earned observations would be appreciated.

Games and Casting

Gerry Canavan’s piece on the higher education faculty job market is well worth a read.  Briefly, Canavan rejects both the idea of “market as meritocracy” -- hard to sustain when demand fluctuates as much as it does -- and “market as lottery,” which suggests the complete irrelevance of anything candidates do or don’t do.  Instead, he argues for understanding the market as a game, in which the moves a candidate chooses matter, but luck also plays a significant role.  

I agree that luck plays a significant role.  Even if you imagine that each individual position is filled entirely on “merit,” whatever that means, the existence of positions at any given time is a matter of luck.  Last year, we hired for math.  This year, we’re hiring for English.  The switch is not a reflection on anyone’s merit.

Different disciplines -- and different levels of the academic hierarchy -- have different sets of rules.  Right now, for example, we’re hiring two tenure-track positions in English, and two more in Computer Information Systems.  In English, it’s very much an employer’s market; in CIS, not so much.  Were I a betting man, I’d bet that we’d get an order of magnitude more applications for English than for CIS.

From this side of the table, I can attest that candidates have agency beyond the moment of deciding to apply.  I’ve seen candidates do very well at interviews, and I’ve seen frontrunners disqualify themselves by their interview performance.  So yes, there’s more agency than a “lottery” would imply.  Besides, the “lottery” metaphor assumes that search committees don’t see distinctions among candidates.  They most certainly do.  We bother to have search committees at all precisely because of the differences among candidates.

All of that said, from this side, the metaphor I would use is “casting.”  Given fewer positions than needs, each hire counts.  The “best” candidate for a given role depends, in part, on who is already there.  If a given program is full of outsize personalities and high drama, a more reserved and even-keeled candidate becomes more attractive.  If it’s stale and complacent, a sparkplug would be a better choice.  (As you’ve probably guessed, I’m not a huge fan of monocultures.  They breed pathogens.) Sometimes you need someone with range; sometimes you need a specialist.  I don’t know how to compare the “merit” of those in any absolute sense, but in a given context, one may be more useful than the other.

It’s an article of faith in the academic blogosphere that “fit” is a euphemism for all sorts of sinister motives.  And it can be.  But sometimes it’s a function of the mix of personalities already present.  From the candidate’s perspective, that’s invisible and useless, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.  It just means that there’s a perspective beyond the candidate’s.

One of the tragedies of the lopsided market in many disciplines is that candidates trying to find the first full-time job often lack the luxury of giving “fit” any serious consideration.  That sometimes results in people accepting jobs out of desperation, then growing discontented quickly on the job as they realize that the institution has very different priorities than they do.  I lived that myself when I took a faculty job at DeVry.  It wasn’t what I’d had in mind when I went to grad school, but as the saying goes, any port in a storm.  It allowed me to make an adult living, albeit a modest one, plying my trade.  It wasn’t until several years later that I gained enough experience to decamp for a place with values closer to my own.  

In many cases, people don’t get that chance, and they wind up feeling stuck at places they might not have chosen if they had other options.  The issue might be that it’s a community college instead of a selective liberal arts college, or that it’s hundreds of miles from partner and/or family, or that the culture of the place just isn’t a match.  

The issue with “fit,” I think, isn’t so much that it’s fictitious or disingenuous; it’s that it’s imbalanced.  At the entry level, in most fields, employers can be far choosier than prospective employees can be.  Judgment is running largely in one direction.  If it were more reciprocal, I suspect some of the dysfunction that arises from poor matches would subside.  

Unlike Canavan’s “game” metaphor, the “casting” metaphor assumes that different searches will be looking for very different things.  They will.  An actor who’s well-suited to playing an ingenue may be a poor choice as an action hero.  That’s no reflection on “merit,” but it isn’t random, either.  That may not be terribly helpful to someone looking desperately for a port in a storm, but it does suggest a couple of takeaways.  For example, some self-awareness about one’s own priorities might help avoid disastrous matches.  If you are, well and truly, an urban creature, then applying for the job in the middle of nowhere is probably a bad idea.  If you see teaching as a distasteful chore to be tolerated only to the extent that it allows you to publish, then a community college is not the place for you.  And you can get turned down for a dream job due to factors you couldn’t have controlled even if you had known about them.  

Canavan is certainly right that the rhetoric of meritocracy, applied here, serves mostly to punish the victim.  Whether we go with the game metaphor, the casting metaphor, or something else, let’s not make the basic mistake of assuming that winners win because they’re winners, and losers lose because they’re losers.  In this market, winners often lose.

How Gainful Employment Looks From Here

Policy is meant to address problems as they’re understood.  When the problems aren’t fully understood, the policy intervention can misfire pretty badly.  

The higher ed policy world is lit up with commentary on the proposed new rules for “gainful employment” regulations.  The details are complicated, but in essence, the idea is to crack down on programs that are designed for the benefit of the institution that offers them, rather than for the benefit of the students.  If high numbers of graduates prove to be so loaded with debt, and so poorly paid, that they can’t pay back their loans, then the providers of those programs will have to either improve the outcomes or lose eligibility for Federal financial aid.

“Gainful employment” regulations apply to “terminal” programs that are supposed to lead to jobs.  They don’t apply to, say, liberal arts transfer programs at community colleges, since those programs were never intended to be either terminal or vocational.  They were designed to be the first two years of a four year degree, so judging outcomes by wages a year out wouldn’t make sense.  A year out should mean the junior year of college.  Most currently-enrolled undergraduates don’t make very much.  Of course, they also have student loan deferments, so between low wages and deferments, applying wage-loan metrics wouldn’t shed much light.

The details of the new proposal are many -- seriously -- and complicated, and I won’t pretend to have mastered all of them.  They’re also subject to legal challenge and shifting political winds.  My community college colleagues have already pointed out, correctly, that loan default rates can be a misleading measure when only a very small portion of the student body takes out loans at all.  I’m add concern about the difficulty of assuming a clean division between “academic” and “vocational” programs.

Teacher Education is a good illustration.  It’s a classically vocational program, in the sense that it’s entirely oriented around preparing for a specific job.  But you don’t get a teaching job, at least in most states, with only an Associate’s degree.  A full-time K-12 teaching job requires a Bachelor’s at a minimum, and they frequently require going beyond that as a condition of keeping the job.  So the program is “vocational,” in the sense that’s it’s oriented around a particular job, but it’s also “transfer.”  And the eventual outcomes have at least as much to do with the four-year college as with the community college, making “accountability” that much more complicated.

Much the same applies to engineering, human services/social work, criminal justice, and, increasingly, nursing.  Policies that assume a clean divide between ‘vocational’ and ‘transfer’ programs will have a difficult time addressing these.

If current trends continue, though, I’d expect to see programs like these become progressively larger parts of the system.  They’re already too big to write off as exceptions, but soon, they’ll be big enough to constitute a category of their own.  We need to be careful not to write policy that will get in the way.

If anything, I’d like to see more awareness at the high school level -- including guidance counselors and parents -- that for many students, posing the question as “community college or a four-year school” gets the conjunction wrong.  For many students, community college AND a four-year school is the best answer.  It’s a straightforward way to keep costs down without sacrificing ambition.  For that pathway to thrive, though, policy has to allow for it.

In practice, the current focus seems to be primarily on for-profit providers, some of which have alarmingly bad outcomes.  By all means, crack down on the worst abuses.  But let’s not get so focused on the abuses that we inadvertently penalize or shut down what is increasingly the best option for many students.  

Community colleges suffer a certain invisibility when their graduates go on to graduate from higher-level places and go on to do great things.  That’s bad enough; let’s not make a bad situation worse by building policies that premise accountability on false assumptions.

Ask the Administrator: Putting on a Happy Face

A longtime reader writes

Faculty in my neck of the university recently hosted a visit from our new Vice Chancellor. In preparation for his visit, our programme (one of several in a "school" which functions as a unit only in administrative spheres above my pay grade) sat down and briefed itself, and our full professors with administrative interests or knowledge gave us marching orders: we were to put on a positive face, talk about our brilliant research, our terrific retention numbers, etc. etc., and most importantly: utter no complaints. "This is not the venue" for disaffection, we were told. When His Illustriousness descended from on high, the head of school gave a talk about how great the school is, and then the heads of the programmes talked about how wonderfully everything is going in their respective programmes.There was a Q and A in which the Vice Chancellor said some reasonable things at some length, and then our hour was up. The Vice Chancellor departed for a meeting with the chancellor, and faculty were left to mill about. Discussing how it had gone, the head of programme and the full professors conferred, congratulating themselves on their glowing presentations. The Vice Chancellor will have left the meeting thinking that our house is in order, the wise heads concluded, will think that we are positive and put together, and thus not a problem, which means that our programme and school "won't become a target." Heads were also shaken at the foolishness of another programme, whose faculty members had apparently aired their grievances.

Well, I don't really understand how my institution functions, and don't have any administrative ambitions, so what do I know? Nevertheless, the whole incident  seems highly dysfunctional to me. If individual heads of programme see the Vice Chancellor's visit primarily as a potential threat to be avoided, doesn't that speak poorly for the relations between administration and individual programmes? I don't know whether the administration is that arbitrary and tyrannical, or whether our programme is just craven, but either way, it seems a poor indication about the university's internal culture. I suppose that heads of programme have more chance to have their voices heard behind closed doors, but our department has had some serious internal divisions in the past. When and how are grievances supposed to be raised, if not when the vice chancellor visits once every four years, or however often it is? I've been in other situations where everybody is all smiles, for example my job interview, but the meeting I attended struck me as even less candid than a job interview.

Maybe this sort of thing is normal? I repeat that I don't understand how my institution really functions. Nor do I have any any other point of comparison: I've had other one-year temporary positions, but this is my only full time academic job. What do you make of this story?

Context matters.  In this case, it matters a lot.

I wouldn’t advise putting too much significance on a single occasion.  To me, “[w]hen and how are grievances supposed to be raised” is the real issue.  I don’t see a problem with a culture that allows for robust discussion in a variety of venues choosing to hang “not now, please” signs on a few.  But if “not now” applies to every occasion, you have a problem.

I’d advise separating the grievances themselves from the issue of venues, and first focusing on the venues.  Do venues for discussing contentious matters exist?  If not, can they be created?

That isn’t necessarily as easy as it sounds, especially in the early stages.  Assuming that some folks have been burned before, you’ll have to overcome some initial skepticism.  You’ll need to be willing to focus the venue on solvable issues, and to set a goal of providing solutions, rather than blame.  That may involve disappointing some of the more ardent True Believers.  But if you’re able to set a constructive tone, you’ll quickly gain credibility.  (That is, unless the dysfunction runs so deep that nothing would work. Again, context matters.)

On my own campus, for example, there was no faculty-only venue for discussing academic issues when I arrived.  To some raised eyebrows among my administrative colleagues, I worked with some interested faculty to establish the Faculty Council.  For the first couple of years, discussions there were frequently pretty rough.  The backlog of frustration was greater than I had initially guessed.  Over time, though, it has become a respected and useful part of campus dialogue, and it has made its mark on multiple policies.  

If that middle way is hopelessly blocked, whether because of history, personalities, or culture, then your choices are more stark.  In those settings, it’s easy for dysfunction to become self-reinforcing.  The sane ones decide that dissent isn’t worth the trouble, so they walk away from public venues, leaving only the True Believers.  The True Believers monopolize what venues remain, reinforcing each other’s fixations and giving the entire enterprise a bad name.  If you have the energy, it’s worth trying to interrupt the circuit.   I’d advise testing the waters with something relatively focused, and building upwards from there.  

Good luck!  

Wise and worldly readers, what do you think?  Is there a better way, or should the correspondent simply settle for enduring?

Have a question?  Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.

If Michael Bloomberg is Looking for Ideas…

I’ve written before about my distrust of the “undermatching” thesis.  (Quick review: “undermatching” refers to talented, low-income students choosing colleges that are easier to get into than they could have.)  Defining “undermatching” as a significant problem writes the academic prestige hierarchy into nature, ratifies resource inequality among institutions in the name of “meritocracy,” writes off the institutions that most people attend as irredeemable, and assumes an independent effect of selectivity that empirical social science suggests doesn’t exist.  It assumes that the solution to mass drowning is a few life preservers.

But it holds a strong intuitive appeal in some quarters.  This week, the Bloomberg Philanthropies announced a project -- in collaboration, surprisingly, with the Aspen Institute -- to steer high-achieving, low-income students to what it’s calling “top colleges.”  The Times even quotes Michael Bloomberg buying wholeheartedly into the myth: “If we really believe that America is the world’s greatest meritocracy -- and I do…” said the billionaire.  Well, yes, he probably does.

It’s disappointing, but hardly surprising.  The Calvinist streak runs deep in American culture, even among folks who would never call themselves Calvinists.

At the very same time, though, EDMC -- a struggling for-profit higher ed chain -- announced that it will be “going private” once again.  In other words, management will buy back enough stock to take control of the company, thereby freeing it from having to meet the expectations, and reporting requirements, that come with external shareholders.  

And I thought, hmm.

DeVry was publicly traded when I worked there.  (It still is.)  It had a frustrating habit of making changes so quickly that people on campus were constantly on the far left side of the learning curve.  There wasn’t enough time to get good at one thing before the next one came along.  When I asked why that was, the answer I got was “market responsiveness.”  When you have quarterly estimates to hit, you can’t wait several years for a given experiment to play itself out.  You need to take decisive action again and again, even if the cascade of changes reduces the chances of any particular change succeeding.  At one point, three different versions of College Algebra were running alongside each other, reflecting consecutive curricular changes crashing into the reality of irregular student schedules. It was a nightmare.

At the time, I wondered if what economists called “patient capital” could make the model work.  What if someone with very deep pockets were to invest with a long-term perspective?  What if someone were to try to compete with traditional higher education without falling prey to the tyranny of the quarterly report?  

What if, say, a Michael Bloomberg type were to pour a pile of funding into a for-profit and see if, with enough time and the right internal incentives, it could become a respected and contributing -- if somewhat threatening -- member of the higher education world?  What if it could combine high quality with sufficient scale to exponentially increase the number of life preservers?

Yes, I’d still prefer a more robust funding scheme for public higher education, but this is something one high-minded billionaire could do.  It wouldn’t require swaying entire states.  

The idea has a certain “put up or shut up” appeal.  And it wouldn’t rely on perpetuating destructive messages about the colleges most Americans attend.  Instead, it would offer an alternative.  

The willingness to offer an actual, concrete alternative is why I’m such a fan of SNHU, and why I’m fascinated by Western Governors University.  Whether they wind up getting it right or not, they’re at least trying.  They’re making new visions concrete, and inviting comparisons.  In a way, for a while, that’s what publicly traded for-profits did.  If Bloomberg wants to make a difference for more than just a lucky and talented few, here’s his chance.  Even if it doesn’t work, the failure could be instructive.  

Or we could just keep casting most of public higher education as something that the talented few need to be rescued from.  

I’d rather test an interesting new idea than feed a destructive old one.  Bloomberg Philanthropies, do you have the courage to be patient?

Call Waiting

I was happy to see yesterday’s report on the latest from the Center for American Progress, calling for a new round of public investment in higher education.  I was particularly taken with the idea of focusing the largest increases on community colleges, which have absorbed the largest proportional cuts over the last decade and a half.  The report suggests using progressive taxation to fund a drive by the Feds to get the states to reinvest in public higher education.  But the report skips a crucial step.

There’s certainly no shortage of damning data.  Although the trend of state disinvestment in public higher education goes back decades, it accelerated radically with the Great Recession.  As a result, colleges increased tuition and fees at exactly the moment that students could least afford to pay them.  The impact was most dramatic at community colleges, which serve the most economically vulnerable students.

For the record, the idea of a return to meaningfully progressive taxation, with the proceeds being used to help public institutions adapt to changing needs, strikes me as excellent and well worth trying.  It’s also pretty unlikely for the foreseeable future, outside of a few pockets.

Which is why I was so disappointed at the conclusion of the report.  It concludes with a call to action.

Well, yes.  But if that were going to work, it would have worked by now.  The issue is not a lack of awareness that funds have been cut -- those of us on campuses are pretty well-versed in that -- or a lack of awareness that a well-educated public is a good thing.  The issue is the lack of a strong political constituency behind it.

As a political theorist, by training, I’m well-acquainted with the temptation to finish with a call to something.  I’m probably guilty of it myself from time to time.  It offers an easy answer to “so what?,” and it feels like doing something.  

But it skips a step.  Who should do something, and how does it serve their self-interest to do it?

The most successful programs tend to serve multiple needs for multiple constituencies.  Good program architecture requires, among other things, careful thought to political coalition building.  

An easy example would be workforce training programs for companies or industries that are struggling to hire.  The company wants employees.  Local political leaders want a thriving economy.  Residents want jobs.  Colleges want students.  When the program matches the need, everybody wins.  And they win not just in an “enlightened self-interest” sense twenty years out, but right now, and in concrete ways. It’s sustainable because it doesn’t require special farsightedness or self-sacrifice on anybody’s part; it simply requires everyone to do what they want to do anyway.

Of course, “wants” aren’t always transparent.  I mentioned yesterday that employers’ needs are actually much more nuanced than they’re typically assumed to be in our political discourse.  The skills often derided as “soft” are crucial to success in most workplaces. (Along similar lines, Jeff Selingo noted correctly that the preferences of senior managers often don’t align with the practices of HR departments or hiring managers.)  Speaking of “employers” as monolithic will obscure those issues; successful coalition building will require awareness of those fissures, and a willingness to engage with the possibilities they offer.

The comments to the IHE story were illustrative.  Some of them simply assumed that colleges are hotbeds of critical theory and cultural subversion, and suggested that if they weren’t entirely consumed by women’s studies and suchlike, they’d be fine.  Others suggested that education is an individual good, rather than a social good, so shifting costs to students was reasonable.

The first answer fails to explain why community colleges would take the most severe hits.  Do you know how many women’s studies majors we had in 2008?  Zero.  Not a single one.  Did that protect us?  Nope.  If women’s studies had anything to do with it, we would not have been cut.  In fact, women’s studies had nothing to do with it one way or the other.

The second strikes me as mistaken, but more understandable.  It’s basically asking for a reason to care.  Although some of us might wish that the question would answer itself, a basic respect for democracy suggests that it’s fair to be asked to justify a position to the public.  That’s a winnable argument, if we bother to show up.  We need to show up with more than just data.  We need to offer reasons for people outside the industry to care, and offer plans that recognize those reasons.  Without that, we can keep calling to action, but nobody new will answer the call.

The Bossypants Conundrum

In this, as in so many things, we can learn from Tina Fey.

There’s a passage in Bossypants that got relatively little attention, but that stood out for me.  It was in her SNL years.  She wrote a sketch set in a restaurant and noticed, in rehearsal, that some of the prop people had drawn Osama bin Laden on a tablecloth.  (It’s something like that; I neglected to highlight the passage at the time.)  She asked them why, and they replied that they thought it would be funny.  She objected that it was distracting, and that it interfered with the direction of the sketch.  She made them remove it.

For a single vision to work, other visions had to be sacrificed.  

Following the tech industry as I do, much the same is true there.  Apple is rightly celebrated for bringing remarkable and groundbreaking products to market, and Steve Jobs was revered as one of the great creative minds of our age.  But the creative products it produces are only possible because of a remarkably repressive production regime.  Cupertino may be home to a host of “creatives,” but Foxconn assembly lines are not known for being warm and fuzzy.  (A few years ago, Foxconn responded to a spate of workers committing suicide by leaping from the roof of the factory by...installing nets to catch jumpers.  I am not making that up.) Tightly controlled production makes design innovation possible.  

Higher education is starting to experience that tension, but it rarely names the problem.

In many ways, higher education’s mode of production is still artisanal.  Each professor sets her own standards for grading, selects her own materials, and to a significant extent reigns supreme in the classroom.  The apprentice-journeyman-master structure of grad school makes some sense in the context of an artisanal model.  The artisanal model has its own dogma, in which academic freedom and shared governance are supposed to ensure that the artisans are substantially left alone.  As with any working dogma, it has its own internal contradictions -- shared governance can work against the autonomy of dissenters, for example, which is why dysfunctional department meetings are endemic to the industry -- but it has held up for long enough that some people think it’s natural.

Over time, the economic limitations of the artisanal model led to a wave of unionization based on the industrial model.  Unionization had clear benefits, although it introduced a whole new set of tensions.  For example, the artisanal ideal that every professor is a special snowflake sits uneasily alongside payscales determined solely by seniority.  “Master” status relies on being somehow special; collective bargaining relies on solidarity.  And the boundaries between curricular decisions, which are subject to shared governance, and economic decisions, which are subject to collective bargaining, aren’t always clear.  Is program elimination curricular or economic?  (The correct answer is “yes.”)  Still, to the extent that the unionization drive reinforced the artisanal ideal of faculty being substantially left alone, most of the contradictions could be contained.

Now a new logic is emerging, and it’s bringing new tensions.  State governments, often following initiatives from national foundations, are starting to look more intentionally at community and state colleges as branches of state workforce development systems.  In so doing, they’re working to shift the locus of decision-making from the campus, where shared governance remains the preferred method of decision-making, to the state.  Instead of deferring to faculty, whether individually or collectively, they’re looking at student behavior and employer preference as guiding factors.  Student behavior -- discerned through data analytics, or Big Data -- increasingly trumps faculty preference.  And employer preference, rather than faculty judgment, is increasingly dispositive.

In a sense, the latest shift is from a producer-centered model to a consumer-centered one.  (That’s true whether you construe the student or the employer as the consumer.)  Colleges are increasingly referred to as “pipelines.”  In states with strongly centralized systems of governance, the shift is relatively straightforward; in states like my own, the tension between home rule and statewide coherence is palpable.  Seen in that light, the move in Massachusetts a few years ago to shift appointing authority for Board chairs from the Boards themselves to the Governor makes sense.  If colleges are to function as organs of the state, they need to be accountable to the state.  The tensions on campus between local preferences and state demands are mediated by administrators, whose jobs are becoming exponentially more complex.

If you like, of course, you can construe the latest shift as simply an expansion of “shared governance” to include the body politic.  As long as state governments are elected, there’s an argument to be made that subjecting colleges to legislatures is, in fact, more democratic than deferring to a self-perpetuating priesthood.  Expertise and democracy have never been entirely comfortable together, and public higher education is no exception.

In a sense, the for-profits were ahead of their time.  They got to ‘centralization’ and a consumer-centered model before everyone else, and in many cases, followed the logic of those models to their logical conclusions.  Faculty whose professional expectations reflect a blend of the artisanal and industrial models regard the new direction with skepticism and some hostility, and it’s easy to see why.  (Of course, for-profits’ governance was by shareholders, rather than citizens, which brings an entirely different set of issues.)

The latest model has its own contradictions, naturally.  Too strong a focus on getting students through a pipeline can lead to grade inflation and a general lowering of standards, which would defeat the purpose.  Part of the reason that so many highly-qualified people are willing to teach for very little money -- adjuncts most obviously, but junior full-timers, too -- is that they enjoy the autonomy the role has historically allowed.  To the extent that the new model chips away at that autonomy, it slowly corrodes its own economic underpinnings.  (How many students go to grad school with the dream of eventually teaching at DeVry?  I’ve never met one.)  And employer preferences are often more complex than policymakers imagine.  Anyone who has attended as many Employer Advisory Board meetings as I have can tell you that the “soft skills” that politicians often deride usually make it to the top of employers’ wish lists.  The stereotype of “hard” employment skills being opposed to “soft” academic skills is factually incorrect, but that nuance is often lost in translation.  The model is still new enough that it’s not clear whether the contradictions will be containable.

I offer this historical sketch not to advocate one vision over another, but to try to get a handle on some recurring issues.  Last week the Chronicle reported on a simmering conflict in Minnesota, in which a statewide faculty union objects to the Chancellor’s strategic plan on the grounds that they weren’t included in writing it.  They don’t take issue with the contents of the plan as much as the process of making it.  From a short-term, pragmatic perspective, that can seem silly; if you don’t object to the content, what’s the issue?  But to the extent that the process stokes simmering anxieties about a shift in the locus of power, it makes sense.  Giving up home rule feels like a loss, even if the statewide policies enabled by giving it up are unobjectionable.  

In the case of Tina Fey’s sketch, the resolution was quick and clear; she made the call, the sketch went on as written, end of story.  In the case of higher education, I see the resolution, if any, being gradual, uneven, and sometimes jarring.  But we’re smart people, generally.  Hegel famously noted that freedom is the insight into necessity.  I’m hopeful that some insight into necessity will allow us to stop being buffeted by external forces, and to discern ways forward that preserve the best of what we do even as the world changes around us.

Friday Fragments

My brother sent me this.  Apparently, Williams College -- my undergrad alma mater -- made the list of the top ten colleges producing the most dateable alumni.  Rutgers University -- my graduate alma mater -- made the list of top ten colleges producing the least dateable alumni.  If statistics are to be believed, my stock dropped enormously when I went to grad school.

To which I say, pshaw.  I met TW in New Brunswick.  It’s all about disaggregation, people.

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I’m happy to report that HCC signed an articulation agreement with the Commonwealth Honors Program at UMass/Amherst.  Now our Honors students are guaranteed admission into the CHC, assuming certain GPA and course selection requirements have been met.  Special thanks to Provost Katherine Newman, of whom I’ve been a fan ever since reading No Shame in My Game.

Honors programs at community colleges and public universities often don’t get the attention they deserve.  The political discourse around community colleges is so strongly linked to workforce development, remediation, and underdog stories that you rarely hear about the many students here who are as strong academically as their counterparts at better-known places.  To its credit, UMass saw HCC’s strength, and made a move to capture more of our high achievers.  For a student with more talent than money, a strong honors track from a community college to a public university can be an excellent choice.  

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Lumina’s new clearinghouse project for reverse transfer strikes me as promising.  

It’s planning to put together a national system to allow students who have transferred from community colleges before finishing degrees to reverse-transfer credits and get Associate’s degrees while pursuing Bachelor’s.  That way, if life intervenes and the student has to stop out, s/he leaves with something to show for it.  From the community college’s perspective, it offers the prospect of giving cc’s the credit they deserve, but currently don’t receive, for launching students on academic pathways.

Some states have done some work on systems like these, but Lumina has the resources to capture students who cross state lines.  In a geographically small state like mine, that matters.  And it’s offering to provide the data for free, which means we could actually use it.

Presumably, a clearinghouse like that would allow for the kinds of Big Data studies that would show, for example, that cc-to-four-year transfers are only a fraction of the transfer picture.  We actually get a surprising number of cc-to-cc transfers, as well as a significant number of four-year-to-two-year transfers.  I assume that the clearinghouse would address those, too.  

And that’s my real institutional hope.  So many policy decisions are made on the basis of unexamined assumptions; it would be lovely to base more of them on actual facts.  To the extent that Lumina’s project makes that easier, I’m happy to welcome it.

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The Girl has started a blog.  I’m beaming with nerdy-dad pride.

Reader, consider yourself warned.  There’s another one!  Early indications suggest that hers will focus less on educational administration, and more on fluffy animals.  No word yet on whether I’ll appear as The Dad, but I’m hoping...

Hope Helps

IHE reported that Senatory Patty Murray, of Washington, has proposed a limited reintroduction of the Ability to Benefit rule in the latest draft of the Higher Education Act.

This is one of the better ideas I’ve heard from the Senate.  And no, I don’t mean that as damning by faint praise.

Students without high school diplomas really got squeezed by a pincer movement over the last couple of years.  On one side, the old ATB rule -- under which students who lacked either a high school diploma or its equivalent (usually a GED) could get into college if they could demonstrate the ability to benefit through a test score -- was repealed.  On the other side, the GED was made both more expensive and more difficult.  So if you didn’t already have a high school diploma, the GED became considerably more difficult, and the end-run around it was blocked.  

I don’t know that the moves were coordinated, but the effects were mutually reinforcing.  It became much harder for prospective students without diplomas to get into community college.  Some responded by giving up -- it’s probably no coincidence that community college enrollments have dropped nationally since the changes were made.  Other students responded by pouring into Adult Basic Education classes that were never funded to handle the influx.  (At my own college, we responded by substituting the HiSet test for the GED.)  

To the extent that the changes were supported by actual arguments, they derived from success rates.  (ATB students graduated at lower rates than diploma students.  To the extent that community colleges are judged on graduation rates, keeping them out actually helped colleges “perform” better under currently popular definitions.)  But here, probably more than anyplace else, it’s important to keep in mind the “access” mission of community colleges.  For people in unstable, low-wage jobs, the prospect of improving your lot through a community college isn’t just one option among others; in a really basic way, it’s a kind of social safety valve.  It’s a concrete cause for hope.  Even if you don’t take advantage of it at a given time, just knowing it’s there for the taking can offer some sense of an alternative future.  Taking it away, and not replacing it with anything, shuts off a safety valve.

Hope serves a crucial social function, even beyond the content of what’s hoped for.  It gives people a reason to keep trying.  

I fully agree with those who argue that higher education should not be the only avenue to the middle class.  Some people are able to start their own businesses and do quite well.  But if you’re starting with little access to capital and little sense of the rules of the game, it’s a tall order.  Even if your eventual goal is to start your own business, spending some time first learning the basics of the business world can make the path a lot easier.  And not everybody wants to be an entrepreneur.  

Saying that college shouldn’t be the only route is very different from saying that it shouldn’t be a route at all.  Over the last couple of years, for many people, it has effectively moved out of reach.  I can’t help but think that the long-term effects of sustained fatalism can’t be good.

From the IHE piece, it’s unclear how likely the new rules are to be enacted.  They have some level of bipartisan support, though, which is encouraging.  Even if the HEA has to stay in limbo for a while, ATB may still find its way back.  I certainly hope it will.

So, a tip o’the cap to Senator Murray.  Here’s hoping that enough of her colleagues understand the importance of hope that they sign on.