When Public Speaking Works Best

I’ve never done improv comedy, but the recent piece in IHE about the benefits of improv training rang true.  I’ve seen it in my own public speaking.

At graduation this year, I introduced the recipient of the annual teaching award.  As it happened, this year it went to someone who teaches public speaking.

Publicly introducing someone who teaches public speaking for a living is a bit, well, intimidating.  She’s a professional.  Over the years,  I trial-and-error’ed my way to a method that mostly works for me.  

I say “mostly,” because sometimes it just isn’t in the cards.  Some days, for whatever reason, you’re just off your game.  On those days, it’s helpful to have enough technique that even in the absence of inspiration, you can at least come across as competent.  Inspiration can be encouraged, but it can’t be forced.

In my early teaching days, I discovered quickly that I couldn’t work from a script and still fill entire classes.  They were just too long, and a hastily prepared script read by a nervous t.a. sounds like, well, a hastily prepared script read by a nervous t.a.  It isn’t pretty.

But some of the early fails, as painful as they were, actually served a purpose.

Have you ever been at a pool, and seen someone do an unintentional, and presumably painful, belly-flop?  Do you remember how you felt when you saw it?

You probably didn’t heap scorn on the poor schlub.  You probably winced and felt bad for him.  He probably felt silly, and pained, for a little while, but then moved on.

The “moving on” is the important part.  Knowing, viscerally, that you can fall on your face in front of an audience and not die is liberating.  It makes improvisation possible.

The most annoying public speakers are the ones who simply ignore the audience.  That can take the form of endless droning, or, paradoxically enough, it can take the form of a hermetically-sealed performance.  One professor in grad school -- I won’t name names -- used to give remarkably smooth, canned lectures in the 300 student intro class.  I was impressed at his facility, and the complete lack of “um,” “uh,” or any discernible verbal tics.  Students hated him.  They saw him as an actor performing a part, utterly indifferent to them.  They were right.

My best moments as a speaker have consisted of a layer of improvisation on top of a prepared framework.  The words were substantially ad-libbed, but in a context that had been thought through in advance.  Having the safety net of a clear framework, the knowledge of where I was going, and the security of knowing that the worst that could happen wouldn’t do permanent damage, made it possible to follow the muse of the moment.  I could improvise knowing the direction I wanted to go, and having faith that I’d get there one way or the other.

The Boy is attending his first dance this week, squiring his crush.  It took him a little while to work up the courage to ask her.  I told him that the same principle holds when asking a girl out.  I got shot down plenty of times in my day -- not meaning to brag -- and it always stung in the moment.  But the next day, I was still there.  The world didn’t end.  It was okay.  I could shake it off and move on.  Realizing that the worst-case likely outcome wasn’t really that bad made it easier.  When he asked “but what if she says no?,” I could answer “well, what if she does?”  He didn’t have an answer for that, so he was able to ask her.

Preparation and improvisation aren’t opposites; the former actually improves the latter.  When you’re confident that you know what you’re doing, and that you could survive a face-plant, it’s easier to improvise effectively.  Besides, much “improvisation” is actually something closer to “set pieces.”  You may not have the words written out, but you have a relatively well-defined “bit” that you’re performing.  Sometimes it’s the connective tissue between the bits that requires the most planning.

I don’t know what a professional teacher of public speaking would say about that, but it seems to work.  

Do Climbing Walls Explain Rising Tuition at Community Colleges?

No.

Kids, Conscience, and Consciousness

Anyone who doubts the tight connection between test scores and socioeconomic standing is invited to go househunting.

In preparation for the new gig at Brookdale, we’ve put our house on the market, and we’re looking for a place to live in New Jersey.  Putting our house on the market is labor-intensive and emotionally fraught, but elements of it are straightforward enough.  The buying part is more complicated.

We’ve both lived in New Jersey before -- TW spent most of her life there, and I was there for 18 years -- but not in Monmouth County specifically.   We had spent time on the Shore -- it’s where we got engaged -- and had caught a few concerts at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, but we didn’t learn the local reputations of Monmouth school districts.  We’re learning them now, with some level of urgency and with outsiders’ perspective.  With The Boy starting high school this Fall, and The Girl starting sixth grade, we want to make sure they get schools worthy of them.

There’s no shortage of school rankings.  Some of them are done by the state, but the really influential ones are done by a private, for-profit magazine (New Jersey Monthly).  The magazine rankings are as powerful within the state as the US News higher ed rankings are nationally.  As near as I can tell, its power arises from a gap between the desire for information in easily digestible form, and the relative scarcity of information like that.  (In my time at CCM, I remember being told that NJ Monthly penalizes schools that send higher percentages of graduates to community college, even if they subsequently transfer and thrive.  True or not, I remember it a decade later.)  GreatSchools.com and homefacts.com also offer easily understood ratings, though their respective provenances aren’t entirely clear.

As a professional educator who’s relatively fluent in education policy debates, I can rattle off all the reasons to be skeptical of, if not openly hostile to, school rankings.  They’re proxies for economic class.  They reflect standardized test results, which are both narrow and skewed.  They can become self-fulfilling on the extremes, as wealthier people make strong districts stronger, and people with options abandon the districts on the bottom to the people who don’t have options.  I get all of that.

But I’m also a parent of two specific children.  Even granting parental bias, they’re great kids.  I want them to have great school experiences, both academically and socially.  

And that’s where kids, conscience, and social consciousness sometimes pull in different directions.

From a pure parental perspective, the argument for getting into the most high-achieving, “desirable” district we can afford is open-and-shut.  TB and TG are wildly smart kids who will rise to the expected level; I want the level to be high.  That strategy also has the benefit of higher resale value for a house, since other parents make the same calculation.  But it also involves pretending not to know certain things, or deciding not to care about them.  

That’s hard.  I want the kids to know that the world is larger and more diverse than the Honors track in a competitive suburban district.  And while I want my kids to “win,” I also know that the game is rigged in a host of ways.  

In a more perfect world, differences among schools would be differences of personality, rather than quality, and you could just send your kid to the local public school wherever and be confident that s/he would get a great experience.  If that happened, I think we’d see a great leveling of property values.  Those who paid a premium to get into a “good” district could be expected to fight any such leveling, on the grounds that they’d lose the premium they’d paid.  Which, in fact, they would.

In political discussions, we sometimes talk about school quality as if it were a pure win for everyone.  But “good” districts only carry premiums because of the contrast to “bad” districts.  Lose the latter, and the former will take a serious hit.  They can be expected to respond accordingly.

I adopted the “Dean Dad” label years ago to capture the two roles that occupy most of my waking hours.  (“Veep Dad” doesn’t have the same ring to it, so I’ll keep “Dean Dad” as my Twitter handle.)  The two roles are similar in some ways; when I started, the major conflict I saw was logistical.  But in the case of househunting, the two roles conflict conceptually.  I want to make a point, and I want to do right by my kids.  

Ultimately, I’d like for us not to have to choose.  That’s the world to work towards.  

Friday Fragments

The MDRC just published a paper demonstrating what many of us on the ground have known for years: year-round financial aid makes a positive difference in both speed and likelihood of degree completion.

It makes sense.  “Summer melt” isn’t confined to the high school years.  January intersession can be a tremendous boon to students, since it allows extended focus on one thing.  (It’s especially good for certain lab classes, since long periods allow for more ambitious experiments.)  

The beauty of year-round financial aid is that it’s conceptually simple, and it works in concert with the completion agenda.  When students who are on a roll have to stop out simply because the aid clock won’t restart for several months, life gets more chances to get in the way.  

Year-round aid existed for a hot minute, but it came and went so quickly, and with so little fanfare, that many colleges didn’t get a chance to take full advantage.  Now that completion is very much front-and-center, bringing it back would make sense.  In 2015, it’s hard to argue with a straight face that national higher education policy should take the agrarian calendar as sacrosanct.  Let’s recognize reality, and realize the gains from continuity.

--

If you haven’t yet seen the Hechinger Report’s piece on college in Norway, it’s worth checking out, even though it buries its most interesting part in the middle.

Briefly, Norway does an admirable - enviable -- job of getting economic barriers to college out of the way.  College is free to students, much like high school is here.  But Norway is much less polarized than we are, so you don’t have the massive disparities among colleges that we have among high schools.  Students even receive cost-of-living stipends.

Even with all of that, though, college attendance varies strongly with income.  

At one level, that seems like an argument for giving up on efforts to expand access.  If access has natural limits, and we’re almost there now, what’s the point?

But the piece makes two points that make the fatalistic conclusion shaky.

First, Norwegian higher education doesn’t do much in the way of “student support.”  You’re an adult; you sink or swim on your own.  We do much more to try to help students avoid sinking.  It may be that one cancels out the other, at least in part.

Second, though -- and to me, this is the smoking gun -- in Norway, it’s still relatively easy to make a decent living in a blue-collar occupation.  College is free, yes, but it’s also truly optional.  

If we want to talk intelligently about higher education, we can’t separate it from the larger political economy.  If we do, we’ll miss the point.

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Farewell, Ornette Coleman.  

He was an unusual one, but a real talent.  Anyone who would entitle his album “The Shape of Jazz to Come” is not messing around.

His music was a distinct blend of lyrical and abstract.  I remember the first time I heard his “Dancing In Your Head,” and thinking it was either the smartest party music or the hottest chamber music I’d ever heard.  He was a huge influence on Pat Metheny, among others, even though the affinities weren’t immediately obvious.  Nothing about him was immediately obvious.

Others will write about “Lonely Woman,” and that’s fine.  But for me, it’s “Feet Music.”  Even at his funkiest, nobody else sounded like him.   

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Friday, June 12 is my last day at HCC.  Thanks to everyone who made it possible to look back over seven years with justifiable pride.  Now it’s time to heed the siren call of Jersey...

Ask the Administrator: Can They Take My Stuff?

A new correspondent writes:

I’ve taught in nursing program at a nearby CC in an interim position in the department PT/FT for the last 3 years.  They hired a FT person for the fall.  On the last day of class, the person they hired -- who was team teaching with me -- asked the students for copies of my PPTX etc.  

Any input or experience with this?

That’s...odd.  My guess is that the newbie was improvising.

Different colleges have different policies about the ownership of instructional materials.  At CCM, for example, syllabi were considered to be owned jointly by the instructor and the college, since they were works-for-hire, but handouts, notes, and presentations were considered the property of the instructor.  At HCC, even the syllabus is considered the property of the instructor.  (That sometimes creates issues when destination colleges call to check on a particular course, but that’s another matter.)  Departments create “generic” syllabi to outline instructional objectives, student learning outcomes, sample assignments, and the like for a given class, but section syllabi vary from one instructor to the next.  The goals of a given course are set by the department, but the way an individual instructor wants to achieve those goals can vary.

Whatever permutation of the policy exists on your campus, though, it would not involve going through students to get your materials.  If the college has a right to review your materials, however defined, and it wants to exercise that right, it should ask you for them.  That would most likely come from a dean or a department chair, depending on local policy and structure.

In this case, the newbie was almost certainly acting alone.  Otherwise, why go through the students?

I could imagine a few motivations for going it alone.  S/he could be overwhelmed, and looking to save time on course preparation without asking someone she might see a competitor.  S/he might be concerned that asking for materials would look weak or incompetent.  S/he might simply be curious, and naive in the ways of academe.  

Whether you want to make an issue of it, I think, depends on local culture, your relationship with the chair/dean, and your goals at the college.  

The most graceful way to do it would be to ask the newbie directly.  S/he might not realize the degree to which that violates academic norms.  Assume goodwill first; if it’s true, then you’ve avoided making yourself the bad guy.  If it’s false, and there really is malice or something similar involved, you’ll know soon enough.

If the newbie isn’t available or forthcoming, then you need to decide whether to report.  That’s where your goals and communication style matter.  If you do report, again, present it as a confusing misunderstanding, rather than a conscious offense; even if you’re wrong, you come off well.  

It’s common practice for faculty to share materials with each other as a professional courtesy.  But going through the students, behind your back, is neither professional nor courteous.  

Good luck!

Wise and worldly readers, what would you suggest?

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

What Smart People Look Like

Dear Hollywood,

Did you know that many of the smartest people in their fields got that way through hard work?

It’s true!  But you wouldn’t know it from portrayals of smart people on tv.  It’s getting pretty bad.

I’ll start with the obvious: smart people come in all colors, sizes, genders, races, ages, and the like.  Some are conventionally attractive, some are not.  Some are wildly unkempt, some are not.

That’s not what I’m talking about (though it’s a valid point on its own).  I’m talking about the consistent portrayals of smart people as effortlessly brilliant, and brutally dismissive or contemptuous of everyone else.  The “genius as misanthropic jerk” genre.

You know the type.  Dr. House.  Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man.  Rainn Wilson’s latest.  (Interestingly, the examples that come to mind are all white guys.  Again, not my focus here, but worth noting.)

That’s not how intelligence works.  And I think the consistency of the misrepresentation does real damage.

Most of us in higher education would give vital organs to never again hear a student say “I’m just not a math person.”  Nobody is.  Math is a set of skills and a way of thinking, and it can be developed through sustained practice.  But that means accepting the possibility of having to work hard to get it.  It means having faith that not getting it the first time doesn’t mean that you never will.

In academic circles, we speak of a “growth mindset,” as opposed to a “fixed mindset.”  The former is the idea that intelligence is a muscle, and that it can be trained to get stronger.  The latter is the idea that intelligence is a given trait that you have or you don’t.  

Lots of people believe in the “fixed” mindset, even though it’s largely false.  Worse, it’s debilitating; it suggests that if you struggle to learn something, you probably shouldn’t bother.  You’ll never be good.  Hard work is a sign that you’ve already failed.  

I’d like to see some vaguely realistic portrayals of reasonably smart people actually working to figure something out.  And I don’t mean the reflection of the young man’s face in a computer screen, either.  I mean actually grappling with something, making mistakes, and getting better.

You don’t seem to struggle with the concept when it’s applied to sports.  I’ve seen plenty of shows and movies in which the athlete has to train hard, and fail repeatedly, before becoming successful.  But for some reason, you don’t seem willing to do the same for mental tasks.

I’m asking because I’m tired of sending unwittingly damaging messages to students.  You don’t have to be instantly brilliant to be smart, and you don’t have to be an insulting jerk, either.  In fact, some of the people who are most effective at actually getting things done are capable of working with others, and of accepting some degree of false starts and errors as part of the process.  I’ve seen some very capable people come to grief because the “soft skills” -- the stuff that movie geniuses denigrate as beneath them -- weren’t there.  In most organizations of any size, getting results means working with others.  If you alienate everyone, you will quickly find yourself the target of all manner of sabotage.  It’s a fact of life.

Better portrayals of smart people can be done.  Back in the ‘90’s, the show Homicide featured a detective team who embodied the two mindsets.  Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher) was the genius who know everything from the first moment, and who could be brutally dismissive of those who didn’t.  His partner, Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor), was much more hesitant than Frank.  But Bayliss got results, too; he just had to put in the work to do it.  The constant uncertainty made him a compelling character.  I’m not asking for something unprecedented here.

Self-impressed jerks happen enough naturally without being encouraged.  Would it kill you to show some collaborative characters who succeed through repeated, sustained effort?

Thanks.

Sincerely,

Matt

Acceleration

I didn’t expect to read about a three year degree at Wesleyan.  When higher ed types talk about accelerating the process of degree completion, they’re usually referring to less selective -- and often less expensive -- places.  Elites are typically assumed to be perfect just the way they are.

Which suggests, among other things, that the economic argument for acceleration isn’t entirely what it seems to be.  A single year at Wesleyan costs far more than an entire degree at a community college.  If it were truly all about cost, you’d think the trend would have started at the top of the food chain, where college costs the most.  It didn’t.

Acceleration is a plausible answer to a host of questions.  It can keep students from getting lost on the way to completion.  It can reduce cost.  It can force a kind of focus, which has obvious academic benefits.  Done right -- which is to say, when it’s routinized -- it can make juggling outside life variables easier.  At a really basic level, very few outside jobs function on the academic seasonal calendar; moving to a twelve-month calendar can make it easier for some working adults to make it through.  Continuity can be a virtue.

That said, something about “rush the proles through while the elites take their sweet time” doesn’t sit right.

Part of the rush to get students through, I think, is driven by the mismatch between student loan debt and entry-level pay. But the really eye-popping student debt loads don’t typically occur at community or state colleges.  The median debt load of an HCC graduate last year was zero.  The wage problem is a wage problem, not a tuition problem.  To the extent that public colleges have increased tuition over the last several years, the root cause is simple enough.

Acceleration can help with student success.  Some of it is based on outrunning life.  The longer that students take, the more opportunities arise for life to get in the way.  That’s probably why our course completion rate in the January Intersession period are always well into the nineties, which is off the charts for community colleges generally.  When courses are so short, life doesn’t have time to intervene.  Students don’t have time to fall behind.

Some of the push to accelerate is clearly to the good.  To the extent that colleges spell out, say, that defining “full time” as 12 credits means not graduating on time, I see all upside.  Constructing course sequences in clear enough ways that real students could really take them, similarly, is an unalloyed good.

I’m less sold, though, on the version of acceleration that asks high school students to identify a career goal.  Yesterday’s IHE piece on transfer made mention of “endorsements” that high school students in Texas are supposed to make in the ninth grade, picking a general field of study.  That seems awfully early to me, and it seems to take for granted a level of field awareness (and of self-awareness) that I’d be surprised to find prevalent in ninth graders.  Yes, it’s more efficient when students know from day one exactly what they want to do.  But I’d hate to sacrifice exploration entirely, locking students into pathways based on decisions made before they could drive.  

Instead, I’d love to see more instruction in high school that gives students exposure to lots of different real-world occupations before asking them to choose.  Inform the choice first.  Fill in the cultural capital that the better-off kids get at home as a matter of course.  Once they have a basic sense of their options, committing to one becomes less random.  

Acceleration done right is too good an idea to become a marker of lower-class status.  I’m surprised to see Wesleyan try it, though not surprised that very few students took them up on it. They don’t have to.  They have the luxury of time.  I hope that doesn’t become the latest marker of status.  We have enough of those already.

Creating Emergencies

Jen Ebbeler has a thoughtful and thought-provoking post up about the virtue of skipping the “pilot” stage of a new enterprise and instead jumping in with both feet.

Admittedly, Ebbeler is writing in a different context.  She’s referring specifically to some online courses she taught at UT-Austin in which enrollments exploded unexpectedly.  When the numbers blasted far beyond what she had anticipated, as she put it, “every problem became evident very quickly.”  She couldn’t ignore, finesse, or develop labor-intensive small-scale workarounds; she had to fix the plane as it flew.  She notes that “[m]any of the challenges of large enrollment courses are logistical and are a direct result of scale.  In order to identify and remediate them, the “pilot” of the course has to be run at scale.”

I enjoyed the post immensely, both despite and because of the difference of context.  

Most community colleges don’t have single sections with hundreds of students in them, so the direct example doesn’t transfer cleanly.  But in the context of various experiments around improving student success, the issues of pilots and scale keep coming back.

The advantages of small-scale pilots to test new ideas are several.  Most basically, as every doctor knows, “first, do no harm.”  If a new idea is a train wreck, confining it to model-train scale contains the damage.  Having seen a few ideas crash and burn over the years, I can attest that this is not to be dismissed lightly.

In a community college context, where resources are always an issue, pilots can sometimes be largely or entirely grant-funded.  Grant funding can help the institution develop the capacity to scale up.  At HCC, we’ve used Title III and TAACCCT funding in exactly those ways, and they’ve made real differences.  If we had to wait until we had the money to try things at scale, we might not be able to try some of them at all.  When the pilots pan out, there’s a stronger argument for internal reallocation of resources than “I want to” or “I have a hunch.”  

Pilots also help with collateral damage.  Take self-paced math, for instance.  Yes, that required faculty development and support, and some close work with the registrar.  But it also required working with IT to ensure that the room was properly equipped and set up; working with financial aid to ensure that we were all conversant in drop dates, satisfactory progress, and the like; working with Admissions and Advising to ensure that folks on the “intake” side know how to explain self-paced math, and to whom to explain it; and working with the bookstore to ensure that it was up to speed on “all you can eat” user codes, among others.  It wasn’t the sort of thing that one department, no matter how determined and focused, could do alone.  Given that every department has its own projects, priorities, and constraints -- all valid -- there’s something to be said for keeping the “proof of concept” round relatively manageable.

Still, I have to acknowledge Ebbeler’s point about the issues unique to scale.  With a small pilot group, many of the back-office issues get resolved through customized workarounds.  That’s defensible when you have a cohort of, say, twenty.  But if you’re running thousands of students through at once, it’s impossible to get away with that.  You have to go to the trouble of actually developing system-level fixes.  Assuming the presence of sufficient resources, and significant tolerance for error on the first go-round, the occasional state of emergency can help distinguish real and significant issues from garden-variety foot-dragging.  It requires clear and strong direction from the top, and sustained attention over time, but used sparingly, it can bring clarity.

The “tolerance for error” piece is both cultural and regulatory.  If you have a culture of finger-pointing, some shock therapy may be in order; if haters are gonna hate anyway, there’s no point in trying to meet them halfway. Bold new facts on the ground can, sometimes, change a culture in necessary or helpful ways.  On the regulatory side, though, the cost of certain errors at scale may be simply prohibitive.  At that point, the “start small” approach wins by default.

Starting big can also get around the “too many pilots” problem.  (This was the point of the piece about “Initiative Triage” last week.)  Institutional bandwidth is limited, and every new project takes more than its share.  When you’re running a dozen pilots at the same time, just keeping track of them all becomes a problem.  Deciding as a matter of policy that it’s “go big or go home” necessarily means focusing on only one or two big changes at a time.  As large as those are, they’re actually easier to track than ten or twenty little ones.

In Ebbeler’s case, scale happened accidentally and abruptly.  She had no choice but to step up, and apparently, she did.  And her natural experiment didn’t require much in the way of coordination among departments or institutional silos beyond what already existed.  She had to work herself silly, but she was willing to do that, and now she’s enjoying the well-deserved fruits of her labor.  I tip my cap to her.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen cases in which it was better to jump in with both feet than to start small?

The Harvard Challenge, Revisited

A Harvard University alumnus donated $400 million to endow the institution’s engineering college…

One person donated the equivalent of eight years of HCC’s entire operating budget to one subunit of one university.  The entire gift is tax deductible, of course.

I don’t often do reruns, but a few months ago I did a piece wondering what would happen if one year’s bounty of Harvard fundraising were distributed among community colleges.  I called it The Harvard Challenge.  In light of the latest gift, it seems worth revisiting.

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Harvard raised over a billion dollars just last year.

That’s one university, in one year.  All tax-free.

I did some math.  What would a single year of raising that much -- just one -- do for HCC?  I’ll keep things pretty generic, and favor round numbers -- feel free to plug in the name of your favorite community college.  The big picture is the point.

Let’s round down to one billion -- Harvard raised far more than that, but if you go chasing every last million, there’s no end to it -- and assume that we knew that the incredibly good year was a one-time event.  What could we do with it?

Assume that we’d put it in an endowment of one sort or another.  Let’s assume a 3 percent annual drawdown, which I’m told isn’t crazy for endowments.  Three percent of a billion is 30 million dollars a year in operating income, in perpetuity.  What would thirty million a year get us?

Let’s start with faculty.  Between salary, pension contributions, health insurance, and raises over time, and because I like to keep the math nice and simple, let’s assume $100,000 total cost per year for each new position.  If we hired, say, 100 new full-time faculty, that would be ten million.  That would bring our adjunct percentage down to where it should be.   (RIght now, we have 135 full-time faculty positions on the books, several of which are currently empty.)

I’ll assume that the offices for those faculty come out of capital budgets, rather than operating.

That leaves another twenty million.  Let’s throw some scholarships in there.  Let’s say that we decided to make a point about merit, and offer money to students whose study habits are better than their jump shots.  Tuition and fees for a full-time student taking 15 credits per term come out to slightly over $5,000.  Add some money for books and living expenses -- students gotta eat -- and make it an even 10k per student per year.  If we allot ten million for scholarships at $10,000 a pop. we could cover a thousand students per year.  Completely.

Which leaves another ten million.  Let’s say another five million for staff and administration -- we could use more hands in IT, library, advising, admissions, financial aid, institutional research, instructional design, disability services, grants, etc.  Another million for professional development, to ensure that everyone stays current.  Assuming 500 employees, that would mean two thousand dollars per person per year.  Add another million for library acquisitions and subscriptions.  

We’ve still got three million to go.  Maybe a million for increased utilities and overhead from all those new people walking around, another million for marketing, and a final million for mini-grants for innovative new projects.  

All of that would be covered in perpetuity, based on what Harvard raised in one year.

I know that some of my wise and worldly readers are trained economists.  I’m guessing that the social ROI of a billion at HCC would put to shame the social ROI of yet another billion at Harvard.  Go ahead and crunch the numbers.

So I hereby issue the Harvard Challenge.  Donors to Harvard: this year, just to see what can be achieved, redirect your donation to your nearest or favorite community college.  Then drop by to see what they did with it.

You’ll be glad you did.

Initiative Triage

I loved the piece on Sinclair Community College’s student success efforts earlier this week in IHE.  It’s worth checking out, but the short version is that SCC has been doing student success initiatives long enough that it’s starting to do a sort of initiative triage, culling the ones that either haven’t worked or that provide far too little bang for the buck.

That sounds like common sense, and in a way, it is.  But it’s much harder to do than it sounds.  The fact that they’ve been able to do it with an apparent minimum of bloodshed speaks well to the campus climate.

Campus climate is a delicate balance.  Too little accountability can lead to drift and stasis, and to the tyranny of the loudest or most unpleasant personalities.  Too much accountability -- yes, that’s a thing -- can lead to risk aversion, or to a culture of finger-pointing and infighting.  If people are terrified of having their heads chopped off when something goes wrong, you can expect a great deal of campus energy to be diverted to blame-shifting.  Time spent ducking blame is time not spent actually solving problems.

The ideal balance involves a sense of urgency of purpose, combined with a faith that if smart people keep working hard, something good will eventually happen.  It might not happen on the first try, and it might not happen every time; occasional failures are the price of experimentation.  If the occasional failure is safe, you’ll see much more entrepreneurialism, and much less energy directed to infighting.

As this piece in Harvard Business Review notes, though, that tone has to be set by leadership.  And it has to be set with deeds, as well as words.  That means the leadership has to be willing to admit failure in public, when it happens, and to regroup and move forward anyway.

In a culture of pin-the-blame-on-the-donkey, an isolated mid-level person who tries to take the high road is basically engaged in unilateral disarmament.  It’s unlikely to end well.  The tone has to be set from the top.

There, too, balance is key.  A leader who screws up constantly won’t inspire much more than despair.  But a generally competent leader who owns up to a real, but understandable, mistake can actually improve the climate for candor.

Given how slowly many results show themselves in this industry -- it’s often years before we know whether a given idea worked or not -- trust matters in the meantime.  A new initiative requires energy and political risk, and won’t pay off -- if it ever does -- for years.  This isn’t the tech industry, where you know within weeks or less whether you have a hit or a dud.  And people with a vested interest in denying failure can always play the “why don’t we wait for more/better/different data” game.  Within academic culture, it can be difficult to distinguish between rigorous standards of proof and simple stalling.  To be fair, the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

All the more reason, then, to interrupt the circuit when it just isn’t working.  

The politics of program cuts are always hard.  Nearly every program has its champion and its constituency.  When the constituency is students who have some sort of strike against them, people with vested interest in a program can wield claims of bias against that group of students to prevent accountability.  When trust is low, that kind of demagoguery can be effective, at least in the short term.

So a tip of the cap to Sinclair.  In an industry in which nearly every incentive is to deny failure, they’ve shown that candor can lead to sustained success.  Well done.

Unbundling the Organization

No, college tuition bills are not just like cable bills.

Jeff Selingo argues that they are.  In a piece in the Washington Post this week, he focuses on “bundling” as the common denominator.  He notes that on most four-year campuses, students are billed by the semester, rather than by the course or the credit.  Therefore, students either take too few credits per semester, or too many credits per degree.  (To his credit, Selingo notes the apparent contradiction.)  Consumers routinely complain about paying for cable channels they don’t watch in order to have access to the ones they do; Selingo argues that students have the same issue.

I don’t know if Selingo is right about most four-year colleges, but I’m pretty sure the observation doesn’t apply to most community colleges.  Most of the community colleges I’ve seen have one of two pricing structures: either a basic per-credit rate (the pure a la carte model), or a per-credit rate up to a certain plateau.  Given that the majority of community college students attend part-time -- even though most performance measures assume otherwise -- a per-credit rate offers the proportionality Selingo advocates.

It’s a mixed blessing.

Making part-time attendance easier makes on-time completion harder.  That’s why so many community colleges are adopting versions of “15 to finish,” encouraging students to move quickly enough to graduate in two years.  Some variation on plateau pricing -- or limited bundling, or “buy five, get one free” -- can nudge students towards taking more credits.  Many students won’t because they can’t, but some may move from 12 per semester to 15.  

Selingo is on weaker ground when he addresses transfer.  He argues:

The credit transfer business is arbitrary at best. Credits earned at a community college might be accepted at a public university across the state, but not one in the same town. Colleges say they reject credits they don’t deem worthy, but what they are really doing is trying to protect their bottom lines, just like the cable companies. Each credit a college accepts from somewhere else is revenue they forgo.

Be careful here.  That’s not exactly how it works.

Typically, when students transfer with a non-trivial number of credits, they’re transferring into a given major.  The receiving college will split the transfer credits into two groups: those that apply directly to the major, and “gen eds.”  Gen Ed credit transfer decisions are usually made centrally, and apply across the board.  A prospective poli sci major, for instance, is likely to be able to transfer English Composition without much trouble.

But courses within the major are typically referred to the academic department at the receiving institution.  The prospective poli sci major might have no trouble with U.S. History, but could easily run into issues with, say, Constitutional Law.  That’s because the receiving department doesn’t teach U.S. History anyway, so it suffers no loss by “giving away” credits.  But it does teach Con Law, and it isn’t psyched about losing those credits.

Four-year colleges often fudge the issue by assigning the denied credits “free elective” status.  That way they can claim publicly that they’re good transfer partners, even while actually making students pay to repeat courses they’ve already taken elsewhere because gee, it’s not their fault that none of their programs actually have “free elective” slots in them.  Darn the luck.

All of which is to say that if you want to look at the economic basis of transfer credit acceptance decisions, you have to unbundle the university.  There’s the university as a whole, embodied in action by the dreaded Administration, and then there are the various departments.  The incentives of the two often conflict.

Selingo is right that over the last few years, as enrollments have dropped sharply in much of the country, many four-year institutions have become more accepting of transfer credits.  That largely reflects an economically-driven power shift from departments to central administrations at four-year schools.  I’d argue that it’s mostly a good thing, in this context, but I wouldn’t be shocked to see a back-and-forth between the power centers over time as enrollments fluctuate.

Yes, by all means, let’s unbundle cable bills.  But if we want better credit transfer policies, a certain kind of tighter bundling may actually be the answer.

Early Feedback from Florida

As a political scientist by training -- one of the disciplines that trains the most leaders, apparently -- I’m generally skeptical of anything labeled “early results from Florida.”  The reliability of such things tends to be iffy.

That said, Florida made remedial coursework optional for students in public colleges and universities, effective in the Fall of 2014, and we have some early results.

Not surprisingly, enrollments in remedial courses dropped by about 40 percent.  And pass rates in the college-level math classes students took instead dropped by about five points.

I’m inclined to read the combination as positive.

Yes, the pass rate in college level classes dropped, which isn’t a great sign.  But the drop was much smaller than the number of students skipping developmental coursework would suggest.  And to get a fair comparison, just looking at the pass rate in the college level class won’t do it.  We should look at the pass rate at college level for students who skipped developmental classes, compared to the pass rate at the college level for students who started in developmental.  In other words, look at the percentage of students in Basic Math I who make it through College Math 1.  My guess is that the drop would be more than five points.

The early returns are consistent with what we’ve seen locally.  Last Fall we did a pilot with a cohort of 500 students, offering them the option of skipping developmental math if they placed into it.  About half took the option, which is pretty close to what happened in Florida.  Between the two, I’m encouraged by the number of students who chose to take basic skills classes even when they weren’t required to.  Self-awareness is a beautiful thing.

That said, a few qualifiers:

First, it’s not clear whether the results in math are similar to the results in English.  My guess is that the needle is harder to move in English.  That’s a testable hypothesis, though, and I could envision a combination of optional skips for developmental math and something like the ALP for English having a beneficial effect.

Second, just because a student skipped developmental math doesn’t necessarily mean she took college-level math.  She may have simply procrastinated math.  Students do that more than you might think, when given the chance.  It’s incredibly self-defeating, but I’ve seen students finish everything required for graduation except math, and then require multiple semesters to pass math.  Far better to attack it upfront.  To the extent that the difference in college math pass rates is so small because students skipped it altogether, future semesters should fill out the story.  

Third, and I cringe even to mention it, I’d want some reassurance that there was no formal or informal pressure on faculty in the college-level classes to lower standards to goose the rates.  It shouldn’t happen, and I’d like to think it never does.  But I wouldn’t be shocked, either, and if it does, then the information gathered would be skewed.  Again, some of those effects should wash out over time; you can’t keep up that pressure forever.

In my experience, the first semester of a new approach typically gets worse results than subsequent semesters.  To the extent that the numbers we’re seeing are untainted, and mostly not the result of students putting off math altogether, these results strike me as cause for some optimism.  

“Skip it,” as a solution to remediation, has a gordian-knot appeal.  It’s also affordable, and easy to scale.  If it winds up working, I foresee widespread adoption post-haste.  I just hope we can wait long enough to see if it’s actually working.  I’ve been mislead by early returns from Florida before...