After Dual Enrollment

What happens to students after dual enrollment?

Dual Enrollment and Early College High School programs are gaining ground in the Northeast, having already established themselves as popular choices in much of the Midwest and South.  They come in a variety of flavors, but the general idea is that students in high school can take college classes for transcripted credit.  Frequently, the college classes also meet high school requirements, so a student taking a college-level math class is simultaneously fulfilling her high school math requirement.  

In some cases, high school students complete so many college credits while in high school that they graduate with a high school diploma and an associate’s degree at the same time.  (Given the differing lengths of school year, sometimes the college degree comes a month or so before the high school diploma!)  Typically, programs in which students can earn the entire degree are called “Early College High School,” while programs with an a la carte approach are called dual or concurrent enrollment.  For simplicity, I’ll lump them all under “dual enrollment.”

The appeal of dual enrollment is severalfold.  For a high school, it can offer a way to keep high-achieving students from bolting for private schools.  It can also offer an alternative to AP or IB, both of which base success or failure on a single high-stakes test.  For parents who are concerned about cost, dual enrollment is usually less expensive than traditional college attendance, and unlike AP or IB, actually results in transcripted college credit.  For students, dual enrollment can offer a differentiator, a potential cost savings, and a way around what is often a relative academic wasteland in the senior year of high school.  High-achieving students have frequently done most of what they can do in high school by the senior year; spending a year in a holding tank while dreading college costs is a lot less appealing than just getting on with it and saving thousands of dollars.

That said, because my region is relatively new to the idea, I’m curious about how ECHS grads are treated when they arrive at four-year colleges.  They sort of fall between categories.

Are they freshmen?  They’re the traditional age for freshmen, and in terms of dorm life, they’re largely interchangeable with other 18 year olds.  But academically speaking, they’re juniors; they more closely resemble transfer students than “native” freshmen.  

That may seem like a picky distinction, but it matters.

Many scholarships, for example, are geared towards freshmen.  Some -- though far fewer -- are geared for transfer students.  (I’d LOVE to see more scholarships for transfer students, but that’s another post entirely.)  Depending on how a student is defined, her eligibility for scholarships will vary.

Many four-year colleges put “study abroad,” internships, or co-ops in the junior year.  A student arriving as an 18 year old junior confounds some of the expectations of that model.  “Welcome to campus!  You already missed the deadline for some great stuff!”  

Athletic eligibility may be limited, though I’ll admit that’s really not my wheelhouse.  I’ll leave that one to the folks who know it better.

Are they considered “first-time, full-time” for purposes of institutional graduation rates?

A colleague at a four-year school mentioned to me recently that his school is considering adding a third (and possibly fourth) year for these students and building in a Master’s degree.  That way they don’t have to start “adulting” until twenty-two, like everyone else, but they still reap a tangible reward for their efforts.  I’ll admit being intrigued by that one.

A couple of weeks ago I asked how dual enrollment students fare at admission.  This is the next question: what happens after they get there?  Any wise and worldly readers at four-year colleges that have been dealing with this for a while are invited to shed light.  In my neck of the woods, we’re still sort of figuring it out.

Amazon OER?

So Amazon is working on a site that will curate Open Educational Resources.  The initial market is K-12, though I have a hard time imagining higher ed will be far away.  They’re calling it Amazon Inspire, and it’s supposed to launch in a few months.

Hmm.

This could be very good or very bad.  But I’m leaning towards very good.

On one level, of course, it’s fourteen kinds of awesome.  I’m a big fan of OER, but I know that one of the major barriers to widespread adoption is the difficulty in finding material.  Combining Amazon’s considerable skill at user-friendly search, and user reviews, with a repository of freebies would make exploration much easier.  

Done well, it could do for OER what itunes did for podcasts.  Podcasts are underappreciated miracles.  They went from curiosities to a sort of cultural wallpaper without really passing in between.  Media that make that kind of quantum leap never really get their due.  They had a brief moment with the first season of “Serial,” but otherwise they sort of escaped notice until they were ubiquitous.  Apple may have promoted them to sell ipods (the “pod” in “podcast”), but they’ve transcended that purpose.  They’re free, they’re convenient, and some of them are really good.  To my mind, they’ve rescued audio from the fetid, inbred swamp that commercial radio had become by the mid-90’s.  The better podcatchers have pretty good search functions, making it easy for listeners to make intriguing finds.  And the podcasts themselves are free, so the cost to a listener of finding a dud is minimal.

In the case of OER, though, the upside is even higher.  Textbook costs are a real issue for both school districts (in K-12) and students (in higher ed).  For a student taking five classes a semester -- remember, 15 to finish -- it’s easy for a single semester’s book tally to hit four figures.  Taking that off the table would make a material difference for many students.  Even better, since OER are designed for accessibility from the outset, they’re likely to be friendly to screen readers and other devices that help students with disabilities participate fully from day one.  Free materials that are genuinely accessible to all students have been a dream up to this point.  Soon they could be as common and as vital as podcasts are now.  Instead of serving as alternatives to the Morning Zoo, OER would free up Pell money for rent and food.  That’s a real contribution.

My hesitation is around trying to identify Amazon’s interest.  In Apple’s case, the idea was to sell more razors by giving the blades away for free.  It worked.  But I don’t think Amazon is in a position to do the same with the Kindle.  Screens are everywhere now, and the whole point of OER is to be platform-agnostic.  Assuming that Jeff Bezos isn’t just a heckuva guy, I have to think there’s a business angle.  That’s fine when it’s clear, but I get suspicious when I can’t identify it.

Are they trying to kill commercial publishers?  Harvest student data?  Commission hagiographic treatments of the life of Jeff Bezos?  Amazon isn’t known for philanthropy.

The edweek article mentions that Amazon might use OER to promote paid materials that the reader might also like.  “Interested in reading more about accounting?  Try these…”  It’s a variation on the “freemium” model used in many game apps.  The first one is free, in hopes that you’ll get hooked and buy more.

In the case of education, though, I’m don’t mind that.  Getting students excited about a subject is a feature, not a bug.  If a student in my poli sci class gets so taken with a subject that she starts reading about it on her own, I consider that a win.  If Amazon is where she finds subsequent books, well, so be it.  I’ve certainly done the same.

In the best of all possible worlds, the podcast analogy comes to fruition.  Apple was the first to bring podcasts to scale, and itunes is still the most popular place to find and distribute them.  But there’s no shortage of alternatives.  (I’m a fan of Pocket Casts, fwiw.)  It’s easy now to listen regularly to a host of podcasts without ever dipping a toe in the Apple universe.  If enough alternatives come along to Amazon that it can’t control the market, even if it remains prominent within it, we could all win.  

Almost all, anyway.  The folks who charge $300 for a textbook will lose.  But I’m okay with that.

Bring it on, Amazon.  As with podcasts, this could be such a roaring success that nobody notices until we can’t remember what came before.  But if you could explain what’s in it for you, I think we’d all be a lot more comfortable with it.

When Student Preferences Don’t Align

“Students want degrees that lead to jobs.”

Well, sometimes.  The gap between that sentiment and actual student behavior explains part of why the model of higher education as a sort of human resources office for the economy always falls short.  Students aren’t widgets.  They have preferences of their own, and those preferences don’t always align with local employment markets.

I’ll make it concrete.

We have a Teacher Education program that feeds students into four-year programs to become teachers.  The local job market for teachers varies by specialty and level; if being a high school teacher is your goal, you’re far better off with a math, science, or Spanish specialization than with English or social studies.  But far more students want the English or social studies slots, and enroll accordingly.

It’s not entirely a function of ignorance.  It’s no secret that math and science teachers are rarer birds than English teachers.  But students want what they want.

We don’t draft students into majors.  They get to choose.  And sometimes they choose more saturated fields over less saturated ones.

In some cases, the preferences may be based on factors like pay.  Early childhood education is a fine and noble thing, but it pays terribly.  A student who likes to work with children, but wants to make an adult living, may shy away from that field.  Low pay leads to high turnover and therefore a decent number of openings, but the pay limits the appeal.

In others, though, it’s not about pay.  High school math and science teachers make just as much as English and social studies teachers do.  They often have more choices of where to work.  But far more students choose the more crowded fields.

In a way, that makes sense.  Why are the other fields more crowded in the first place?  Presumably, it’s because more people wanted them.  Students now are not terribly different from those a generation before; they’re just walking into a tougher market, in which many of the more popular jobs are taken.  

The challenge we face as a sort of personnel office, then, is complicated.  We can, and do, share occupational information with students.  We help them pick fields based on both their own preferences -- I’m a big fan of career counseling in the first semester, and even before enrollment -- and on where the opportunities are likely to be.  We mandate “gen ed” courses to help even the most specialized students pick up some of the “soft skills” that often make the difference between success and failure.  We offer “major fairs” to students, so they can see what’s available and where the various options lead.  We work with local employers to ensure that our curricula are relevant and up-to-date.  And we track placements, to provide a reality check.

But at the end of the day, students want what they want.  There are limits to what we can mandate.  We are market-takers more than we are market-makers, and the more we’re forced to rely on tuition for operating income, the more true that becomes.  To the extent that we want more autonomy from student preferences, we would need to return to a model in which tuition was a much smaller share of the budget.  

(It’s worth mentioning, too, that for many students, “transfer” degrees are workforce degrees.  That’s literally true in a field like teacher education, but it’s also true for students who want jobs that require bachelor’s degrees or higher.  For those students, a liberal-arts focus at this level is entirely compatible with a strong career focus.  This point often escapes notice in popular discussion, but it’s true.)

If the “students want jobs” story were entirely true, this would be a lot easier.  It just isn’t as simple as that.

Makerspaces and Gender

Earlier this week I did a post about makerspaces, asking my wise and worldly readers who had worked with or seen them for any tips they could offer.  And folks came through with some great points about staffing, cleaning, qualifications for using, intellectual property, and more.

But several also came back with a concern about gender that I have to admit hadn’t occurred to me.

Although different readers expressed it differently, the basic idea was that it’s easy for makerspaces to became male-dominated.  Boys With Toys will create an atmosphere that will drive away most women, and thereby reinscribe the sexism in tech that has been well-documented elsewhere.  An idea born of good intentions would inadvertently reinforce the negative messages that women and girls get about working with technology.

That’s not the goal at all.  The idea is to create a space where people who have been excluded would have access to the means to develop ideas and see them to fruition.  In that sense, a makerspace is simply the latest iteration of the community college mission of access.  But achieving that goal may require more conscious attention than I had initially thought.  

So, assuming that there’s a spot on the Venn diagram between the “makerspace” circle and the “gender fairness” circle, has anyone found relatively effective ways to get there?  I don’t expect complete immunity from the issues of the larger world, but if we can make them sufficiently irrelevant that people of all sorts feel comfortable being there and tinkering, I’ll call it good.  Creativity crosses genders, races, and all sorts of other barriers; I want it to feel at home here.

Thanks to the readers who made the initial point, and thanks to anyone who offers a useful remedy.  

A Quiet Win

A few months ago I got The Boy to sit down with me and watch the movie “La Jetee” on Hulu.  It’s a nearly forgotten classic from the early 1960’s.  It’s only about 25 minutes long, black-and-white, and it’s almost entirely still photographs with voiceover.  It’s a tale of time travel, sort of, and also a whodunit.  It looks like it was made for about a dollar fifty.  But it’s engrossing, the story is great, and by the end, TB was rapt.  When it was over, and I asked him what he thought, he smiled and said “it’s quiet, but it sneaks up on you.”  

I had a moment like that this week.  It was simple, and quiet, and if you blinked you might have missed it, but it was satisfying in a way that some larger and more obvious wins aren’t.  

I’ll have to softpedal the particulars, for reasons that should be obvious.

Two well-meaning, high-performing, respected members of Hypothetical Work Area had crossed wires.  They were both upset, as were some colleagues.  Neither was at his/her best in the moment, though neither meant any harm.

In a subsequent conversation with one of the parties to the conflict, we were able to piece together several points: a theory as to why the conflict happened, how statements intended one way could be taken in another, how to prevent something similar from happening again, and how taking the high road could lead to a positive outcome for everyone.  

I heard later that it went well.  Nothing is final, of course -- it never is -- but it went from worrisome to hopeful.  Adults acting in good faith, with mutual respect, were able to get back to a good place.  All it took was a little reflection, and a willingness to make a conscious choice to take the high road.

That’s the kind of management win that’s hard to capture in a strategic plan or a budget.  From the outside, it probably doesn’t look like anything at all.  At most, it was the dog that didn’t bark. But it made my day.

Colleges are collections of very smart people.  Very smart people are great, but sometimes get far enough along in one train of thought that they don’t notice other tracks.  When they get going really fast on one track -- as smarts allow them to do -- they may not even notice that they’re on a collision course until the damage has been done.  It’s not out of malice or negligence; if anything, it can be a side effect of extreme focus.  The danger sneaks up on them.

Putting up a signal, or fixing an intersection, isn’t glamorous.  It isn’t “disruptive.”  You won’t win awards for it.  Collisions that would have happened, but don’t, go unnoticed.  The firefighter who rescues the child from the burning building is a hero; the urban planner who tweaks the building code to prevent the next fire is a forgotten, faceless bureaucrat.  

But those quiet wins matter.  The best ones don’t rely on identifying a villain, but on identifying a misunderstanding.  When the misunderstanding is cleared up, nobody is diminished; everyone involved is recognized as capable and well-meaning, and the way forward is clearer.  

Not every conflict is like that, of course.  Some are zero-sum; some are structural; some are side effects of other agendas; some are symptoms of deeper pathologies.  Humans are complicated critters.

But sometimes you get a conflict like this.  Very few people know the specifics, and that’s as it should be.  Like La Jetee, these are quiet, often still, and measured in shades of gray.  The satisfying ending sneaks up on you.

From Farce to Tragedy

Disloyalty?

Wow.

Simon Newman, at Mount Saint Mary’s, has made a national joke of himself.  First it was the “drown the bunnies” line about students, which is jarring enough from the head of a Christian college.  Then it was firing the provost for pointing out, correctly, that the “drown the bunnies” plan was a bad idea.  Now he’s summarily firing tenured faculty for transgressing a “duty of loyalty” by disagreeing with him.

This has gone from embarrassing to appalling to surreal.  The fact that the Board hasn’t fired him yet, as of this writing, is beyond belief.

Dwight Eisenhower was a wildly successful general and a respected President of the United States, but he struggled as president of Columbia University.  Higher education is a diverse world in some ways, but it’s a world; it has its own rules and expectations, just like the worlds of finance or the military do.  If you try to impose the rules of one world on another -- in either direction -- it’s unlikely to end well.  President Newman is trying to run a college like a hedge fund.  It isn’t working.

If the damage were confined to Mount Saint Mary’s, I could shrug it off.  But it has ripple effects.

College administrators have an uphill battle on a good day.  In many places, we’re facing demographic headwinds.  Benefits costs are strangling operating budgets, but folks who don’t read budgets don’t know that and make assumptions about where all the money goes.  The political climate vacillates between lovely words and terrible appropriations.  And local issues -- whether personnel, politics, or processes -- are never far from the surface.  

On the best of days, there’s suspicion of administration among many faculty.  It’s usually at a higher level than is strictly healthy, but it fluctuates.  A single over-the-top bit of cartoonish villainy, even in another state, can be enough to set folks off.  

That’s no exaggeration.  When Scott Walker broke the unions in Wisconsin, I saw ripple effects among faculty in Massachusetts.  His moves made my life harder, even though I had nothing to do with them.  Ex officio guilt by association may be factually ridiculous, but it’s psychologically real.  It did damage on ground on which Walker never set foot.

Which is why I’m asking President Newman to step down.  Failing that, I’m asking the Board of Mount Saint Mary’s to fire him, and then to step down.

The longer this goes on, the harder it will be for all of us.  Distrust is contagious.  

I went into higher education because I care about education.  I went into administration because I saw a chance to make a positive difference that many of my faculty colleagues couldn’t or wouldn’t.  But I can only do that if people aren’t scared to death.  

When the Newman case just seemed silly, I wrote about it accordingly.  But now it has gone from farce to tragedy.  It has to end, and it has to end now.  You want to be decisive, President Newman?  Do it.  Make the decision to step down.

Makerspace Lessons

I’m quite taken with the concept of “makerspaces” on college campuses.  As I understand them, they’re dedicated areas open to members of a given community, with lots of both high-tech and low-tech tools and materials.  I think of them as piles of oily rags, waiting for the sparks that students or faculty could provide.  Except for the fire hazard, of course.

As a concept, makerspaces provide an enticing blend of project-based learning, open exploration, labwork, and even entrepreneurship.  They’re the well-equipped garages in which ideas are born, except that they’re open to people who can’t afford garages.  They can be the playgrounds in which tinkering leads to both skill development and actual ideas.

In my college days, the closest thing I had to a makerspace was the radio station.  Once I discovered the joys of audio editing, I had a blast putting together ridiculous show intros.  (My fave was the one for the community affairs show.  It opened with a piercing scream, followed by a voiceover saying “No need to be afraid. It’s only the community affairs show…” over “Baroque and Blue,” a bouncy little instrumental.  I like to think it told a story…)  But a makerspace could allow for far more than just low-end media production.  It could allow for prototyping, sculpture, and all sorts of stuff.  For example, this piece features a great discussion of the makerspace at the College of San Mateo, where it apparently serves as a proving ground for STEAM.

But it can’t be that easy.

The article mentions that it’s hard to assess the outcomes of a makerspace in the same way that you could of, say, a class.  That’s probably true, though gate counts could at least tell you something.  If the makerspace sits empty most of the time, it probably isn’t accomplishing much.  But I suspect that the assessment nut can be cracked.  I’m more worried about unknown unknowns.

This is where I’m hoping some wise and worldly readers can offer the benefit of experience.

When it comes to makerspaces, what’s the catch?  Alternately, what’s the easy-trap-to-fall-into-if-you-don’t-look-out?  What’s the unknown unknown that only become painfully clear when it became concrete?

A Study I’d Like to See

A few weeks ago I attended an orientation for parents for the International Baccalaureate Program at The Boy’s high school.  TB is a bright kid, doing well in honors classes, and the school is offering a “pre-IB” tenth grade program, so I thought I’d check it out.  

The place was packed with a couple hundred Alpha parents, loaded for bear.  

A few administrators and teachers gave presentations on IB, then opened the floor for questions.  More than half of the questions were variations on these:

Do IB courses actually count for credit?

How many credits?

Which credits?

Which schools accept them for credits, instead of just “placement”?

I was the one who asked about the degree to which IB kids felt isolated from the rest of the school.  It was the only non-academic question.  (It was also the one to which TB most wanted to know the answer.)

In the moment, I had two thoughts.  One was that we may have a marketing opportunity for dual enrollment, since transcripted college credit carries weight that IB or AP can’t.  And the other was that in my own case, AP credit only counted for placement.  I didn’t save a dime.

I bring this up because Sunday’s New York Times had a piece about competitive college admissions and some efforts to make them less stressful.  Among other suggestions, it offered:

“[C]olleges should say they’ll value community college courses just like A.P. courses in the admissions assessment.  Even if their high schools offer few A.P.’s, most lower-income kids have access to community colleges.”

Wait, what?

Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

I was struck, and confused.  The “should” implies that right now, competitive colleges value simulated college classes over real ones.  Is that actually true?

I can suggest a host of reasons that it shouldn’t be: AP or IB courses stretch a three-credit class of content over a year, where community colleges teach a semester in a semester.  AP and IB come down to a single standardized test; community college courses use multiple assessments, capturing variables like effort over time that don’t show on a test score.  Community colleges are accredited to teach at the college level, with faculty who have master’s degrees or higher in the discipline.  (Exceptions exist in some specific vocational or technical fields, but those are mostly irrelevant in this case.)  Transcripted credit from an accredited institution is supposed to carry some weight; if it doesn’t, we have some much larger questions to ask.

But “shouldn’t” and “isn’t” are not the same thing.  I don’t know how competitive colleges weigh dual enrollment classes, as against AP or IB.  I’m pretty sure the Alpha parents would want to know that before choosing dual enrollment over either.  

Does anyone know, beyond anecdotally?  Has this been studied?

And if the Times’ angle is factually correct, is there any decent reason beyond raging class snobbery?

Thoughts on Cluster Hiring

A few days ago, IHE had a story about UC Riverside’s efforts to move to a “cluster hiring” strategy for hiring faculty. It sounds like they’ve had a bumpy ride, with one initiative trying to serve a host of different goals.  All politics is local, so I’ll stay out of the particulars of that one, but having seen the aftermath of a cluster-hiring binge, I can offer some thoughts on it generally.

Cluster hiring is the practice of concentrating hires in one or a few departments or areas for a year, as opposed to spreading hires around.  

It has its virtues.  

For one, it helps with diversity.  When a department gets to make, say, four hires in one shot, it’s much harder for folks to object to a non-traditional candidate or two.  Everybody can get their favorite.  

Relatedly, it can help with issues of critical mass.  When a given department is entirely fifty and above, a thirty-year-old newbie can feel very much on the spot.  But when that newbie has a few counterparts starting at the same time, she isn’t so isolated.  Having a cohort can make it easier to avoid being bullied, and can shift the culture of a department that has grown a little too entrenched.  A single hire might be overwhelmed, but a group has power just through sheer numbers.  

Cluster hiring can allow a department to attain critical mass in a curricular area in one fell swoop, too.  For a college trying to start a program in a new area, a single hire might not be enough.

It can also offer ways around zero-sum conflicts.  Instead of having to choose among the loyal long-serving adjunct, the minority candidate with a new degree, and the techie who loves teaching online, why not hire all three?  For a department chair, that’s a remarkably elegant solution.

All of that said, though, I’ve seen the downsides, and they aren’t pretty.

The most obvious one is that cluster hiring only works if you know you’ll be able to repeat it year after year, with departments taking turns.  If the money goes away after the first or second round, you’ll be stuck with some pretty glaring imbalances among departments, and those imbalances could last a while.  I walked into that at Holyoke.  When I got there, the English department had just hired a bunch, and math was waiting its turn.  Then the money went away.  Although the FTE’s were similar, English had twenty full-timers while math had ten.  It took me years to get back to something more balanced, adding one or two at a time to math as the opportunity arose.  In the meantime, the strain on the math department was considerable.

If money is inconstant, better to spend it more evenhandedly while it’s there.  Otherwise, you can get frozen in a bad spot for years.

Cluster hiring can also lead to internal resentment.  “You have enough money for them to get five new people, but I’m down two positions in two years?”  Unless the money fairy dropped by -- and she has been seriously slacking for some time now -- you cobble together a cluster for one area by shaving positions from a bunch of others, usually by attrition.  If those other areas are already struggling, which many of them probably are, then you’re hurting a lot of people to please a few.  Do not take that lightly.

Finally, and I know some people don’t want to hear this, the fifth hire in a batch often isn’t quite as strong as the first.  I’ve seen plenty of searches where we wished we could have hired the top two instead of the top one; I don’t think I’ve ever seen one where we wished we could have hired the top five.  Given the scarcity of funding for full-time positions, I’m not a fan of hiring the fifth-best for one area while starving out other areas entirely.  I’d bet that if a department hired five people in one year, the average quality would be lower than if it hired one person a year for five years.  Measured strictly by attrition, that has been true.  And in the meantime, the multiple other areas that would have been starved for years would be able to hire the best, too.  

I get the temptation for cluster hiring, and under some very narrow and specific circumstances, I could be persuaded.  But unless you know the money will flow for years, nobody is shorthanded, and you can’t achieve diversity any other way, I’m skeptical.  

Wise and worldly readers, have you ever seen it done right?  Is there a way around the “imbalances frozen in amber” problem?

Postcards from the Provinces

This is a sensitive subject for me, because I grew up in a region that most of the country has no idea even exists.  It’s called “Western New York,” and it is not New York City.  It’s closer to Michigan than to Manhattan, both physically and culturally.  But in the rest of the country, “New York” refers only to the city.  The western part of the state makes news only when a blizzard strikes, or the Bills make it to the Super Bowl.  The region has its charms, but in an era of “spiky” distributions of wealth and the growth of the top ten major metros, it struggles for recognition and resources.  If you aren’t from there, you may never give it a moment’s thought.  In policy discussions, it almost doesn’t exist.

A new study shows -- brace yourself -- that people who grow up in out-of-the-way places often stay there.  When they go to college, they tend to stay close to home.  Not all, but most.  

That matters on a number of levels.  

For one, as the IHE article suggests, it means that the “undermatching” thesis is even less useful and valid than it seems.  Partisans of the “undermatching” thesis believe that talented but isolated or low-income students from the provinces would flock to selective, elite universities in Boston or New York, if only they weren’t so darned ignorant.  Put a scorecard online, and just watch the brain drain from the provinces to the cities.  What happens to the provinces, well, that’s their problem.

But that’s not how it works.  Talented students often stay close to home, and restrict their college choices to places nearby.  And that’s not because they don’t know any better.  It’s because they want to.  Believe it or not, people consider factors beyond what shows up in scorecards.  Family obligations, regional tastes, and a sense of being at home matter.  

Performance funding schemes that operate at a statewide level are remarkably poor fits in regions like that.  Tell someone in Lockport that, say, Guttman Community College has a higher graduation rate than Genesee Community College.  What, exactly, do you expect her to do with that information?  Putting Batavia and Manhattan on the same grid, as if they were essentially interchangeable, gets both places wrong.  Guttman and Genesee don’t compete with each other for students.  But in a performance funding system, they would compete with each other for resources.

(In my previous job, I saw the same thing in reverse.  Holyoke had a much higher graduation rate than Bunker Hill, in Boston.  They competed with each other for state funding, though I never met a single student who chose one over the other.  They’re 90 miles and a world apart.)  

The intuitive appeal of the “undermatching” thesis to many policy types is that it accepts hierarchy and polarization as inevitable.  Its logic leads to inevitable death spirals for the weaker locations, which would lead to even greater inequality of opportunity by region.  If you’re of a Darwinist bent and living in an elite metro, that may sound perfectly fine to you.  But if you live in one of the forgotten parts of the country, the callousness and elitism are hard to miss.

If we assume that the point of higher education is to pluck out the few worthies from the great mass and to siphon them to the few places that matter, then the undermatching thesis is the way to go.  But if we assume that people who choose the Batavias of the world -- for reasons of their own -- also matter, then we need to reject it out of hand.

Community colleges are increasingly countercultural in a geographic sense.  As Richard Florida likes to point out, the geographic distribution of wealth and opportunity is becoming increasingly spiky.  But community colleges’ distribution is flat.  They’re built on the assumption that the Batavias of the world matter.  

They do.  Students know that; they’re telling us with their feet.  I hope policymakers figure that out before they do even more damage.

Lessons from Kathie Lee

A few years ago, on a snow day, my bride had the tv on in the morning and was watching Hoda and Kathie Lee.  I walked in to ask her something, and heard Kathie Lee set up the next bit: “How to get your man to eat better.”  

“My man?”  I asked.

“I don’t think this is aimed at you,” my bride responded.

In that case, no harm, no foul; Kathie Lee and I have ignored each other for this long, and it seems to work for both of us.  But sometimes I read things that are supposed to encompass the world of American higher education, and I have that same sense of being invisible.  But in these cases, it isn’t just me, and it actually matters.

For example, Kerry Ann Rockquemore had a pair of excellent essays in IHE about the challenges of attracting and retaining minority faculty.  In the second essay, though, in a discussion of efforts to discern why faculty of color leave, I saw this:

“...the failure to extend a counteroffer only reinforced and served as a further push factor to a faculty member leaving.”

And I thought, hmm.  That presumes that it’s possible to make counteroffers at all.  In some collective bargaining environments, it isn’t.  

That’s because in many settings, salary schedules are rigidly prescriptive.  Ironically, the argument for a system like that is precisely to ensure that members of underrepresented groups are treated equally.  By reducing salaries to a formula, it’s possible to ensure that candidates of equal credentials will be treated equally.  (The more cynical formulation would say that incumbents would start screaming “salary inversion!” as soon as you deviate from the schedule for any reason.  That, too, is true.)  A dean who makes an offer beyond the schedule, even trivially so, effectively tapes a “grieve me” sign to her back.  It’s not an option.

Formulaic salaries have arguments pro and con, but if you’re in an institution that has them, don’t take the absence of a counteroffer personally.  It’s not about you.  

I had a similar sense reading Karen Kelsky’s latest, about whether negotiating a job offer could cause it to be rescinded.  Contrasting a candidate with an offer from an Ivy with one from a “small public college,” she wrote:

“Your startup offers will differ by a factor of 10 -- $4,000 for you, $40,000 for your friend.”

I spat my coffee.  No, you won’t get a “startup offer.”  We don’t do that.  We can’t.  That’s not how this works.  And hearing that doesn’t mean that you’re being disrespected; it’s not about you.  It’s how the entire system works.  Whether that’s good or bad is a debatable point, but it’s structural.  

I mention these not so much for myself -- the points aren’t about me, either -- but because I’d hate to see early-career faculty draw inferences from the absence of perks that we simply aren’t allowed to give.  That’s not how it works here.  We hire, too, and candidates from outside the community college world may not know the ground rules.  Better that they know, and not take them personally, then not know and take offense.

Kathie Lee probably didn’t intend to snub me with her comment; I just wasn’t on her radar.  I hope that candidates get these issues on their radar before they draw unhelpful or depressing conclusions from offers that can’t, and won’t, happen.  

MIT 2?

So an MIT Dean, Christine Ortiz, is taking a leave of absence to start a new university in a city that badly needs one: Boston.

Oooooookay.

She wants the Boston campus to be the size of MIT, and to open other campuses in other cities over time.  It’ll be nonprofit, and the fundraising hasn’t started yet.

Oooooookay.

Her vision, as outlined in a brief Chronicle interview, sounds like a whole bunch of research labs.  She says it’s “more toward the graduate-education model,” with the entire campus basically becoming a huge interdisciplinary lab.  “Lecture” will be virtual and modularized, with the model “very much moving away from tenure.”  

That’s not how I remember graduate education, but never mind that.

Whether the idea is audacious or delusional will become clear over time.  But it did get me thinking.

For the past forty years or so, most new colleges were for-profits.  The public sector mostly threw in the towel by the mid-1970’s.  More community colleges were established in the 1960’s than in the five decades since.  More private colleges are going under than starting up. The non-profit sector of higher ed, as a sector, is mature.  It has moved from the exciting phase of investment and growth to a more difficult phase of austerity and scrutiny.  Expectations formed during the growth phase can’t be fulfilled.  “Kludge,” defined as sedimentary layers of workarounds and adaptations around processes and even personalities, is the normal state of things.  

The prospect of a shiny new kludge-free setting is enticing.  

For a while, the for-profits offered a version of that.  They grew quickly, opening up opportunities for a generation of Ph.D.’s that non-profits had largely sacrificed to the convenience of incumbents.  For a time, they offered an unlikely port in a storm.  But after a while, the compromises built in to the need to meet stockholders’ earnings expectations became unsustainable.  Eventually, the mission devoured most of them.

Now, with the for-profits either laying low or circling the drain, the space for innovation is wide open.  MOOCs held promise for a bit, though they’ve largely settled into a role of supplementing, rather than supplanting, traditional providers.  Western Governors University and College For America developed to offer intriguing new ways to offer degrees, with very different structures for delivery.  But at this point, the green shoots are relatively rare.  

In other words, whether Dean Ortiz’ vision comes to pass or not, it’s a good time to try something new.  Somebody has to.

My own vision?  I’ll let Dean Ortiz work on the elite end, filling in the yawning chasm between Harvard and MIT.  I’m obsessed with helping the students who would never be admitted to either.  That means addressing a different set of needs.  “Unbundling” may make sense for the student with plenty of cultural and educational capital, but to the first-generation student, it’s disempowering.  The key is to start with student needs and build the institution around it.  That’s not how it has been done in the past.

The piece I’ll be watching closely is the funding.  Dean Ortiz allows breezily that she hasn’t started fundraising for her MIT-sized university yet, which I found either disingenuous -- Zuckerberg or the Defense Department in her back pocket, say -- or discrediting.  But hey, maybe she knows something I don’t.  Research universities are her world, not mine.

For the non-elites, the funding question is paramount.  The DeVrys of the world addressed that through selling stock; the limits of that strategy have become apparent.  Community colleges have relied on public funding, but the past few recessions have shown the limits of that.  Philanthropy helps, but rarely at scale.  Even Cooper Union had to start charging tuition.  If there’s another, better way, I’m all ears.

So good luck to Dean Ortiz.  It’s a longshot, but I’m glad to see someone stepping up.  I’ll be taking notes...