Applying Blunt Instruments More Efficiently

One of the shocks of moving into community college administration is discovering how many “academic” decisions are made based on financial aid rules.

Some folks on campus are floating an idea that I have to admit makes a certain kind of bureaucratic sense.  It involves restricting the windows during which students can change their majors to the periods between semesters.  A student who decides in, say, October that she picked the wrong major would have to wait until January to switch.

It’s driven by financial aid.  

Federal financial aid only covers courses in (or, sometimes, prerequisite to) a student’s major.  The idea is that aid is for “degree-seeking students,” so it should cover only degree-seeking behavior.  In the minds of the Feds, courses outside of one’s major are clearly larks, and the taxpayers shouldn’t be on the the hook for larks.

It’s a position that makes sense in the abstract, but that falls apart when you meet actual students.

Actual students don’t always know from the first day of classes what they want to study.  Or, they may think they do, but discover upon exposure that it wasn’t what they had in mind.  The idea behind “meta-majors” and “guided pathways” is to help students choose, without leaving credits behind if it takes them a little while.  A first semester comprised of a meta-major exploring a wide field, combined with some gen eds, will transfer nicely from one major to another. That’s a point that many critics of pathways miss.

But pathways or no, a student who decides to change her major mid-semester can create an awkward financial aid situation.  Courses that had been eligible for coverage under the initial major may not be under the new one; all of a sudden, a student can be on the hook to pay back aid that she already received.  For instance, “Business” is not a general education category. So a student who enrolls in a business class with the idea of majoring in business, but who changes her mind mid-semester and wants instead to major in humanities, may find that her business class doesn’t carry over.  And now she’s on the hook for it financially.

But if she waits until January, then what’s done is done.  She can change majors without imperiling financial aid. (She’ll still lose credits.)  

Civilians might be surprised at how often, and how many, students change majors.  It’s not a trivial number. Pushing all of them into January or the summer -- but especially January -- would create a hellacious crunch time for advising, registration, and financial aid.  It would also most likely lead to some students missing appointments, whether because they lose track of time, get crowded out by others doing the same thing, or just decide it isn’t worth it.  

In this case, improved technology has actually made the situation worse.  It’s easier now to track when students’ courses don’t match their majors, and to get that information quickly.  Once a college knows, it has to act; the technology now is too good to hide behind “we didn’t know in time.” The interstices of manual systems, I’m told, created room for human judgment.  But the tech has become good enough to squeeze out those spaces. We can now apply blunt instruments much more efficiently.

In my more-perfect world, financial aid would be flexible enough that students could explore a bit without penalty.  Lifetime Pell limits would be restored to pre-2012 levels (or eliminated altogether), to allow students with developmental and/or ESL coursework realistic timeframes to complete programs.  We would make aid decisions based on academic needs, rather than the other way around.

But this is where we are.  Between narrow rules and advancing technology, we’re getting to the point at which telling a student who wants to switch majors “come back in three months” actually makes a kind of sense.  Not academically, of course, but there’s no rule for that.

Salutations

We recently had an internal search for an interim administrative position.  Four people initially applied, each with an individual letter.

It’s the little things.  The salutations of the four letters were as follows:

“Dear Members of the Committee,”

“To Whom It May Concern,”

“Dear Dr. Reed,”

“Dear Matt,”

I’m not sure of the etiquette, but I had to smile at the range.

Wise and wordly readers, what’s your preferred salutation in a cover letter?

A Tale of Two Accreditors

If you saw the title to this piece and kept reading anyway, bless you.

Like most of the rest of us who follow these things, I was surprised when NEASC, the regional accreditor for the New England states, shot down Connecticut’s proposal to consolidate its twelve community colleges into a single entity.  The apparent goal behind the plan was to reduce administrative and back-office costs, though I’ll admit never being convinced that the math added up. NEASC wasn’t convinced that the plan made sense, either, and sent it back. Mark Ojakian, the system president, vows to take another crack at it, but with Governor Malloy in his final year in office, it’s not clear that even a revised plan would have state backing long enough to happen.  

At almost the same time, the Higher Learning Commission -- the single largest regional accreditor, covering most of the middle of the country -- approved Purdue’s takeover of Kaplan.  Purdue already has a partnership with Indiana University with a name so clunky -- Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis -- that it goes by IUPUI, pronounced “Ooey Pooey.” Consistent with that precedent, I refer to Kaplan/Purdue as “Kooey Pooey.”  

In some basic ways, the Kooey Pooey proposal is much more radical than the Connecticut one.  Connecticut proposed to merge likes with likes, combining twelve public, nonprofit community colleges into a single statewide one.  That’s not without precedent in New England; both Vermont and Rhode Island have statewide community colleges already. All twelve colleges are unionized, so that presumably wouldn’t change.  All are public and nonprofit, so that wouldn’t change. The core of the change was cost-cutting through eliminating perceived redundancies across campuses that do essentially the same things.  I wasn’t convinced by the proposal in concrete terms, but conceptually, it made sense. There’s no particular reason the colleges couldn’t form purchasing consortia for payroll services, office supplies, or ERP’s, for instance.  They may already have, for all I know.

Kooey Pooey, on the other hand, is a merger of nonprofit public university with a privately-held for-profit one.  The former has tenure; the latter doesn’t. The former has a research mission; the latter doesn’t. The former has a version of shared governance; the latter doesn’t.  The former has an eleemosynary mission; the latter doesn’t. The latter was formed with the narrow and specific goal of making money.

Which is fine, as far as it goes.  Colleges and universities routinely partner with for-profit vendors for ancillary functions like food service and bookstores.  But in those partnerships, the internal logics of each partner can be opaque to the other without harm. That the business models are different doesn’t matter, because they’re in fundamentally different businesses.  

In the case of Kooey Pooey, though, the merger cuts to the heart of the mission.  It goes to shared governance, academic standards, and the sorts of things that should give accreditors pause, but apparently didn’t.

Accreditors have come under fire over the last few years, in the wake of so many for-profits’ failures, for being the dogs that didn’t bark.  I was glad to see NEASC step up and do what a regional accreditor should do when presented with a half-baked plan. As for the HLC, well, I hope they know something I don’t know.  Because from here, the “dog that didn’t bark” seems pretty accurate.

It Doesn’t Just Seem Harder…

A tweet last week caught a bit of fire, so I thought it might be worth revisiting.  Last week we had graduation, and we gave a Distinguished Alumnus award to a graduate who has gone on to achieve great things.  A professor introduced me to her the day before; she mentioned that when she started in 1978, tuition was $6 per credit. (To be fair, someone on campus suggested that she might have been rounding down…)  I found an inflation calculator online, which converted six dollars in 1978 money to twenty-three dollars now. Our current tuition is $135 per credit.

The national minimum wage in 1978 was $2.35 per hour.  At six dollars per credit, and 15 credits per term, you could cover full-time tuition in just over 38 hours of work.  Over 15 weeks, that’s about 2 ½ hours per week. Pretty doable, I think. That leaves out fees, books, and living expenses, but it’s a good baseline.

The minimum wage in New Jersey in 2018 is $8.60 per hour.  At 135 dollars per credit, and 15 credits per term, you could cover full-time tuition in just over 235 hours of work.  That’s almost 16 hours per week.

It doesn’t just _seem_ harder than it used to be.  It actually is. Looking only at tuition and minimum wage, it’s over six times harder.

And that’s before accounting for faster-than-inflation increases in the cost of textbooks and rental housing.  

Robert Kelchen did a quick analysis showing that one of the usual villains in the narrative about tuition -- so-called “administrative bloat” -- is badly overstated, to the extent that it exists at all.  The community college sector in particular has been parsimonious, often to a counterproductive level, in parceling out administrative positions. Spending in that area has been flat for years, despite increases in the need for staffing in IT, financial aid, and disability services, among others.  That means that the remaining staff is doing more with less.

(A few years ago, I saw a piece that narrowed down so-called “administrative bloat” to the research university sector, and specifically to universities with teaching hospitals attached.  That was because every single hospital employee was counted as “administrative.” It’s measurement error.)

We know it’s not primarily a function of inflated faculty salaries, either.  A quick comparison of adjunct percentages over the years puts that one to rest quickly.  

As longtime readers know, I believe that Baumol’s Cost Disease is an inexorable factor.  That’s true directly, through the educational enterprise measured in seat time, and indirectly, through the cost of health insurance for employees and the institution.  

Health insurance is clearly a driver.  But tuition increases don’t only reflect cost increases.  They also reflect subsidy decreases, after inflation.

Locally, for example, state aid has been flat - in nominal terms - for twenty years.  County aid is actually lower now than it was ten years ago, even before adjusting for inflation.  Cost-shifting from the polity to the students has had a tremendous impact. If you prefer to think in generational terms, you could say that the Boomers who benefitted from heavy tuition subsidies have chosen not to pay it forward to the generations that followed.  If you prefer to think in class terms, the downward distribution of the tax burden has lightened the load remarkably on people who least need the load lightened...

I mention all of this in defense of current students.  Millennial-bashing is great sport in some circles, but I can’t help but notice how much harder they’re working than either the Boomers or the X’ers had to.  Most of our students work at least 30 hours per week for pay outside of class, often skimming off some of their pay to support their families, rather than the other way around.  Our systems and expectations weren’t built for that, but there it is. As a society, we’re eating our young. That is not a sign of health, and it is not sustainable.

In this context, the call for “free community college” can be read as calling for restoring intergenerational justice.  It’s an attempt to give current students something approaching the deal that their forerunners got. It’s both a moral cause -- fair is fair -- and a pragmatic one; we will not be able to sustain the productivity increases needed to support all those retirees if we don’t educate the young.  It simply will not happen.

Free tuition, OER, and basic needs support are ways to take some of the economic pressure off, to allow students to be students. I’d love to see more students be able to reduce the hours they have to work for pay and still be able to take care of themselves.  The move away from a humane model has been gradual enough to seem inevitable or natural, but it isn’t; it’s a choice. It’s a choice we can make differently.

When the alumna told me what she paid, I laughed and said “wow!”  I’d love to get to a point at which it wouldn’t seem unbelievable.

Friday Fragments

The Culinary program had its graduation Wednesday night.  About 40ish students were there, along with over a hundred family, friends, and faculty.  

Each student was introduced to the crowd by name.  When one particular student was introduced, a little boy -- I’m guessing six or seven -- stood up and yelled loudly “That’s my brother!  That’s my brother!”

Graduations never get old.

--

Albums do, though.  I saw somewhere that Liz Phair’s “Exile in Guyville” is 25 years old.  Yes, technically, 2018-1993=25, but that can’t possibly be right. Simply not possible.

Creatively, Phair was pretty much a one-album wonder, but she made it count.  (Yes, she had a pop crossover hit in the early 00’s, but the album was forgettable.)  “Exile” managed both to come out of nowhere and to capture its moment. Admittedly, I was at a moment in my life where lines like these from “Divorce Song” were a gut punch:

It’s harder to be friends than lovers

And you shouldn’t try to mix the two

“Cause if you do it and you’re still unhappy

Then you know that the problem is you

She attracted attention for being frank about sex, but really, she was frank about everything.  Her vocals were flat, but that came off as frankess. She could barely play, but in that context, minimalism passed for honesty.  She told it like it was. Subsequent albums were more competent, but less interesting; she had one story to tell, and by the second album, she had told it.  

For whatever reason, that era lent itself to one-album wonders.  Bettie Serveert’s “Palomine,” released at about the same time, set expectations that their subsequent work didn’t meet.  Ditto for The Breeders with “Last Splash.” (Another refugee from that era, Belly, just came out with a reunion album that’s pretty “meh.”)  Kristin Hersh managed to continue to produce good work, but the rest of that cohort really didn’t.

Still, “Exile” was strongly present at a distinct point in my life.  It cut through the noise in a way that few albums ever have. If that point was 25 years ago, well, the math can’t possibly be correct.  It just can’t.

--

Time is relentless.  On Thursday, Dean Carl Calendar experienced his last Brookdale graduation.  He was at the first graduation, in 1970, and every graduation since then. After 48 years, he’s moving on to other things.

Congratulations, Carl.  It won’t be the same without you.

Mammals In Space

(No, this isn’t a reference to the old Muppet sketch “Pigs in Space…”)

Over the summer, Brookdale is bringing its Rutgers University partnership to Brookdale’s main campus.  Experienced admins know what that means.

Let the space jockeying begin!

There’s widespread support on campus for bringing Rutgers here.  The partnership itself isn’t new; it was first established 20 years ago.  But in that time, it has been at a branch campus (in Freehold), rather than the main campus.  We’re moving it to the main campus in hopes of making it more appealing for students who would like to stay here to complete their four-year degrees.  Selfishly, I’m hoping that it will entice more students to stay here for the sophomore year, since they’ll be staying through the senior year anyway. We have plenty of capacity in our 200-level courses, and the faculty have indicated that they’d be happy to run more sections of upper-level courses if enrollments warranted.  The selling point for students and their families is clear: get a four-year degree from the flagship state university while living at home, paying only community college tuition for the first two years, and being on a pretty, collegiate campus with clubs and sports the entire time.

All of which is lovely.  But then there’s the question of where to put them.

A retiring dean likes to say that the thorniest problems involve “mammals in space,” and I’m discovering that he’s right.  

Among the variables:

• Over the years, certain classrooms have come to be “owned” by certain departments.  The ownership isn’t literal, of course, but the physical layout and technology in the rooms have been optimized for certain courses.  For example, we have “composition classrooms” in which a set of desks in the middle of the room are surrounded by computers along the walls, so students can alternate between individual work on their papers and lecture/discussion in the middle.  We also have “speech classrooms” in which we’ve put up monitors in the back of the room facing the front, so a speaker doing a presentation can see the PowerPoint slides without looking backwards. Repurposing rooms like those could involve harming the quality of teaching.

• Faculty generally prefer to have offices near where they most commonly teach, and generally prefer to be with their own departments.  Cascadia Community College in Washington state has done some interesting work with organizing faculty physically by different principles, so it can be done, but we’re still invested in the “department” model.  As a longtime fan of Jane Jacobs, I see the appeal of mixing it up, but this just isn’t the time.

• A move involves much more inconvenience for some people than for others.  “Why us?” is a very real question.

• Campus visibility.  I don’t want the partnership to be a well-kept secret.  I want students to know, from the first day they’re here, that the option exists for them.  It only works if students know about it.

• External visibility.  Coordinating marketing involves allocating costs and decision-making between two institutions.  We’ve done it before, and both sides are willing, but it requires attention and maintenance.

• Time.  It’s May, and we fully intend to have this up and running in September.  

• Cost.  Moving is not free.

• Potential growth.  To put my cards on the table, I hope the program grows.  If it does, over time, it may need more room. Any solution that would “landlock” it, even if it buys short-term peace, is a bad idea.

• Parking.  Always.

Happily, the plan on which we’ve landed manages to preserve the dedicated composition and speech classrooms, and doesn’t involve moving any faculty offices.  That took some doing, but it worked. We’ll move one dean’s office, but only one building over.

My question for wise and worldly readers who’ve been through similar changes elsewhere: what else should we look for or expect?  Did you find any landmines that surprised you? Mammals in space are tricky, but in this case, I see the payoff being worth it.

OER and Dual Enrollment

A few years ago Myra Snell coined the term “stupiphany” to describe that forehead-slapping moment when you realize something that’s so obvious in retrospect that you feel stupid for not having seen it sooner.

I had one of those this week around OER and dual enrollment.

Most public high schools supply textbooks free of charge to their students.  Most colleges don’t. When a college teaches courses in a high school for high school students, someone -- whether the district, the students, the parents, or the external funder, if any -- is likely to get sticker shock at the cost of the books.  That’s because they’ve been working on a “free textbooks” model forever. The aspect of OER that seems so novel in the college setting is old hat in the high school setting.

Put differently, aggressive adoption of OER at the college level can make dual enrollment classes much easier to sustain.

To the extent we move in that direction, we’re addressing cost on a couple of fronts.  We’re taking textbook costs off the table, and we’re making dual enrollment classes available on a sustained basis to more students.  Those can be remarkable money-savers in themselves, and because they aren’t eligible for Pell grants at this point, they can help students conserve their Pell eligibility.  

The stupiphany came in realizing that the two are connected.  Meaningful progress in OER adoption would make meaningful progress in dual enrollment much easier.  Even the most strapped school board can manage to cover “free.” Even better, many OER resources are consistently updated; as recent news coverage from Arizona has shown us, that isn’t true of traditional textbooks.  Nothing against Blake Shelton, but when I saw that a young girl was issued the same textbook he was issued at her age, I had to grimace. If the social studies book refers to President Reagan in the present tense, it’s time to replace the book.

The common denominator between OER and dual enrollment is access.  In fact, with dual enrollment we’ve had questions raised about how much access is too much.  Several high schools allow students who don’t register for the college course to sit in on it.  Some faculty here have objected that the free-riding students are setting themselves up for better grades later by getting a free preview.  I’m torn. Yes, free-riding creates obvious issues of sustainability. But you could also read it as studiousness. I don’t object if students use libraries to read up on the subject matter of classes before taking the classes, or even if they view MOOCs on subjects prior to taking the classes.  If anything, I tend to have a soft spot for students who are so eager to learn that they jump ahead. It’s a good problem to have.

Outside of certain literature or philosophy classes, I’m generally skeptical of the claim that a given subject can only be taught with The One True Text.  Part of the point of the focus on “student learning outcomes” is that it frees up faculty to try different approaches to help students learn. As long as the students get what they’re supposed to, any of a number of different resources could work.  Yes, a course on Shakespeare requires texts by Shakespeare (or by the true author of “his” plays, if you’re more conspiratorially-minded). But an Intro to Marketing course could use any number of different resources and still get the students what they need.  

Dual enrollment has fans and foes, but I’ve never heard anyone complain that the books weren’t expensive enough.  If the growth in dual enrollment leads to speeding up the pace of adoption of OER, everyone wins. Except maybe for folks who collect textbooks owned by famous people now over 40.

Income Caps

I’m glad to see that Maryland is joining the list of states either rolling out or seriously considering a free community college program.  (New Jersey’s new governor has declared support, but with a phase-in that’s scheduled to take three years, so we don’t have it yet.) But the announcement reminded me of a feature that many of the plans include that may come to haunt them: income caps.

At the risk of annoying some people with whom I usually agree, I’m philosophically opposed to income caps for free community college.  It’s for the same reason that I’m philosophically opposed to income caps for public libraries or parks.

The theory behind income caps is straightforward enough.  Students from families with incomes above x are able to pay their own way, so why subsidize them?  Why not direct scarce resources to people with greater need?

I’ll offer a few reasons.

The first, and most basic, is that imposing an income cap turns a benefit of citizenship into a marker of need.  American political history is rife with examples of programs identified with the poor becoming poor programs. Income caps generally aren’t indexed to inflation or other taxes, so they tend to move downward in real terms over time.  

In any given budget year, upward adjustments for inflation feel like giveaways.  But over time, if you don’t keep up, the programs lose effectiveness.

The second, which is related, is that income caps imply that the benefit is charity, rather than earned.  In a tight budget year, charity gets targeted as “nice to have, rather than essential.” But tight budget years are precisely when programs like free community college matter most.

Income caps also fail to take notice of expenses.  An income level that may seem extravagant in a low-cost state may be fairly modest in a high-cost state or region.  Relatedly, they fail to take notice of family size. A family with several kids in college, but $5000 over the income cap, may be much more strapped than a family with one kid in college and $5000 below the cap.  And that’s before even considering local property tax burdens, family medical expenses, the local cost of housing, and the like.

Income caps generate political animus among people just over the cap.  Tell someone making $1,000 “too much” that she’s on the hook for $5,000 tuition, and you’ve made an enemy for life.

Income caps assume constant levels of income, which is decreasingly true in an economy marked by both gigs and churn.  They also fail to account for wealth, as opposed to income, so they don’t even screen out wealthy folks living on previously-accumulated money.  

And then there’s the paperwork.  “Prior-prior” or not, the paperwork is a massive deadweight cost, and a serious deterrent to many low-income students who wouldn’t be otherwise affected by a cap.

Finally, there’s the inexorable fact that in our system, prestige and wealth are closely related.  If community colleges are going to get the academic respect they deserve -- by which I mean, have their credits accepted in full upon transfer -- it would help to draw from all economic strata.  That may be cynical, but it’s true.

Yes, removing income caps could make the initial sticker price of a program slightly higher.  But it would make the program politically sustainable, simpler to run, and easier to communicate.  That would benefit low-income students disproportionately.

I’m unbothered by the prospect of Zuckerberg’s kid getting free tuition at a community college.  If anything, that would attract political and philanthropic support from powerful people to ensure that the college is strong.  That support would benefit everyone here. And I’d much rather spend money on instruction and student support than on more staff to do income verification.  

None of this is intended to shoot down Maryland’s proposal; even as it stands, it’s a massive improvement over the status quo.  But Maryland could, if it wanted, make the program even better by making it simpler. Free means free, no matter who you are.

Suits and Ties on Monkey Bars

On Saturday I filled in as “coach for a day” and took The Girl to a regional debate tournament in New York City.  

That sentence requires some parsing.

By “coach for a day,” I mean I filled in for the teacher who is usually the team coach.  That meant dealing with registration and lunch orders, mostly. But I had to smile at the term.  I was never terribly athletic, and other than baseball, my understanding of most sports is elementary at best.  Even with baseball, I’m not much help at technique. Between a demanding work schedule and my utter ineptitude at most sports, I never felt entitled to volunteer as a coach for any of the kids’ teams.  I saw other Dads step up, and always felt a mix of gratitude and guilt that they did and I didn’t. It seemed fitting that my first bit of “coach for a day” was in debate. I didn’t really coach them in any meaningful way, but it was the first time I felt like if I had to, I could.  And yes, everyone got lunch.

But the real story was the kids.  The tournament, for grades 6 through 8, consisted of 93 teams of 3 kids each from a total of 33 schools from 7 different leagues in what I think was 9 states.  (My notes are shaky, but I think that’s largely correct.) Each team participated in five debates, with a final, sixth, public debate occurring between the top two teams in front of everyone else.  Every debate was on a different topic, and the kids weren’t told which side of each topic they’d have to argue. So each kid had to prepare two sides on each of six different issues, and know them well enough to withstand attacks.  The research alone is formidable. Then add the public speaking component -- five minutes per topic, plus questions and “heckles” and the need to answer both -- and the sheer stamina required was impressive.

I served as a judge in three rounds, so I got to see TG’s team in the other two.  That means I wound up watching over 30 middle schoolers debate in a single day.

Every single one of them was strong.  Every single one of them.

That made judging hard, but I’m happy to make that sacrifice.  

Seeing over 30 kids, none of whom was old enough to drive, make cogent arguments from research, parry counterarguments on their feet, and graciously accept both victory and defeat gave me hope.  Most of them did better than would most adults I know.

The kids were still kids.  The tournament director, Kate Schuster, gave out her cell number at the opening assembly so people could contact her in emergencies.  But she also invited more informal messages, and reported back a couple of times on the best ones. They included marriage proposals, doggerel, the scroll from every Star Wars movie, and even a rickroll.  (Rickroll? I’m not sure of the capitalization rule there…) The kids howled at all of them. The sartorial range of the students was, uh, let’s go with “expansive,” as tends to happen in middle school. (The less said about my sartorial choices at that age, the better.)   The gender split appeared pretty even, and the racial mix was fairly robust. The school that hosted the tournament had a courtyard in the middle, complete with monkey bars, and the monkey bars were seldom empty. You don’t often see people in suits and ties on monkey bars, but there they were.  It seemed like a pretty concise visual representation of that age.

The Girl’s team stomped, as is its habit.  It came in 11th out of 93 teams, winning four out of five matches and the trophy for “best team from the Jersey Shore league.”  The entire delegation from her school won seven out of ten, which is pretty good for the caliber of teams they faced. Even better, they worked together beautifully.  TG and her two teammates had collaboration down to a routine, and had already decided on the speaking order for every permutation of every topic before they even arrived.  During the twenty-minute windows before each round started but after the topic was announced, they got right to it, working in near-silence as they prepared their notes together.  

When I watch political shows, what passes for debate is mostly a combination of “talking points,” cheap shots, and appeals to prejudice.  Even worse, the speakers talk over each other. But here, kids too young to drive showed how it should be done. I read somewhere that part of the reason the Parkland kids have been so effective is that they were trained in debate; from what I saw on Saturday, I absolutely believe it.

The kids are doing great.  It’s the adults I’m worried about.

Pattern Recognition

I don’t usually do bummers for Fridays, but I’m seeing a pattern, and feel obligated to note it.

A short tale of community college budgets in America over the last seven years:

First, they shifted the burden to students.  Then the students went away.

It’s a bit antiseptic, but basically correct, as far as it goes.  IHE’s story about Tidewater CC, in Virginia, could have been about nearly any community college in my own state.  As state and local support have failed to keep up with costs, and enrollments have dropped, administrators have had to find new ways to split the difference between tuition increases and service (and staff) cuts.  And the underlying demographics don’t suggest a turnaround for years to come.

As Yogi Berra noted, it’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.  Community college enrollments tend to be countercyclical to the economy, and we haven’t had a recession for a while; I assume that we will, at some point, and we’ll get a short-term boost from that.  My own governor has plans for free community college, which has led to enrollment gains in the states that have tried it. We’re still in early days, legislatively, but hope springs eternal.

The Atlantic has a piece speculating, not for the first time, that declines in tax support for public higher education are tied to the decreasing percentage of college students who are white.  It wouldn’t be the first time such a relationship held. For instance, tax support on a per-student basis for most flagship state universities is far higher than for most community colleges. (Malcolm Gladwell noted a few years ago that the per-student value of Princeton’s tax exemption on its endowment is far higher than support for either Rutgers or community college students.  Princeton is notably whiter.) Nationally, the correlation is strong.

At the state level, though, it isn’t necessarily.  New Hampshire and Vermont fund their community colleges badly, and both are among the whitest states in America.  New York and California are more diverse, but fund community colleges comparatively better. I believe there’s a connection to race, but it doesn’t do much to explain some rural areas.

Douglas Webber offers an analysis based on following the money -- always a good place to start -- and concludes that much of the money moved from education to healthcare.  He may actually be understating the shift, given the rapidly-increasing part of college budgets that goes to health insurance for employees. For example, at my own college, the total cost (split between employer and employee) for family coverage is over $30,000 per year.  At that level, even relatively modest percentage increases are substantial in absolute terms. (And last year it went up thirteen percent, more than swamping every other category of expense or revenue.) That money shows up in the “education” category, but it’s really healthcare spending.  Get the healthcare spending under control, and college budgets will suddenly gain breathing room.

The issues aren’t confined to the public sector.  This week we heard that the College of St. Joseph, in Vermont, is considering closing.  Unforgiving enrollment declines, combined with unforgiving health insurance increases, have squeezed it.  The same could be said of Mount Ida College.

Of course, what seem like inexorable trends are really outcomes of political choices.  We could, if we chose to as a society, decide that mortality is involuntary, and therefore that healthcare shouldn’t be treated as a consumer good.  That alone would relieve much of the pressure that colleges are facing. We could also decide, as a society, that millennials and Gen Z should get the same level of subsidy that the Boomers got, and that students of color should get the same respect that white students get.  We could even decide, as a society, that investing in the future is our best hope by far. Someone might point out that, say, the workers whose taxes will support the Boomers in retirement are in college or high school now. These are all available options.

Yes, college leaders need to be clever, driven, resourceful, and collaborative.  Absolutely true. But at some point, you need something to work with. Blue Cross doesn’t accept “clever” in payment.  Demographics aren’t going to save us; we need to make some clear political choices.

Incentives

Sometimes the answer is simple, if you know where to look.

At one point in grad school, my then-girlfriend and I were watching something on tv.  A character trotted out the old saw, “what do women want?”

“Pockets!” she yelled at the screen.

When I stopped laughing, she explained that women’s clothes often lack functional pockets, and it’s inconvenient.  I had to admit I had never given it much thought.

Someday, some designer will make buckets of money simply by including functional pockets in women’s clothes that don’t usually have them.  

I’m looking for a similarly obvious-in-retrospect answer now, though to a different question.

We’re looking at offering a series of workshops for new students over the course of their first semester.  The idea is to improve student success rates by arming them with relevant information in digestible amounts.  But the chronic problem with workshops is that the only ones who show up are the ones who don’t need to. Kay McClenney’s observation that “students don’t do optional” is particularly true in the context of workshops.  

Some sort of incentive is in order.  But what?

CUNY’s ASAP program uses MetroCards, which are subway and bus passes, to get students to check in with advisors on a prescribed schedule.  But we don’t have subways, and the bus routes only matter to people who live near them and don’t have cars. In a suburban area, I just don’t see the same level of appeal as in, say, Brooklyn.  And parking is already free, so there aren’t parking permits to give away.

Tech goodies, such as ipads, are often too expensive to offer to everyone, which means resorting to some sort of raffle.  But I’m thinking that an uncertain reward, even an appealing one, probably won’t have the pull of a certain one. And many students are already relatively well situated with technology.

College swag -- sweatshirts, t-shirts, etc. -- is easy enough, but again, I’m not sure it would have much pull with the students we most need to reach.

Cash would be nice, but it raises all sorts of issues.  

I’m guessing that other colleges have faced this, and found ways to address it.  So this is my shameless attempt to steal good ideas from other people. Wise and worldly readers, have you seen a practical incentive that can be taken to scale, and that appeals strongly enough to students to get them to show up?

Academic Earworms

The term “earworm” usually refers to songs so catchy that you can’t get them out of your head.  They get into your brain through your ear, and won’t get out. (I’ve had Kirsty MacColl’s “He’s on the Beach” on a loop in my head for about two weeks now.  Why that song wasn’t a monster hit in the 80’s is entirely beyond me.) Or, occasionally, it refers to a particularly nasty scene in Star Trek II. But as a category, I apply the term to any random little thing I can’t get out of my head.  

Over the last few weeks, I’ve encountered a few academic earworms.

For instance, at a meeting of my counterparts from across the state, one college presented on how it went from nearly no awareness of OER to an entire zero-textbook-cost degree in one year.  The catalyst was a trip to the OER conference at UMass-Amherst to which the college sent a delegation of 28 administrators, faculty, and staff.

At the AACC, Ken Ender, the president of Harper College, urged us all to send teams to Germany to see how the apprenticeship model is done right.

On the same panel, Steve Johnson, the president of Sinclair Community College, mentioned that his college either is sending or recently sent (my notes aren’t clear) a dozen people to Germany for that exact reason.

At a panel on what makes a college a great place to work, someone shared a line from G.K. Chesterton: “It isn’t that they can’t see the solution.  It’s that they can’t see the problem.” (To be fair, Chesterton is a reliable source of great lines. My favorite was his response to the customs agent who asked, upon Chesterton’s arrival in America, whether he advocated the violent overthrow of the government.  Chesterton responded that he’d like to see the place first before making that decision.)

Finally, at a workshop on diversity, the facilitator shared a flowchart.  Step three of the flowchart was “create a culture of equity.” That was step three.  It reminded me of the question mark in the “underwear gnomes” bit on South Park. (Next step: profit!)

The commonality of the earworms, I think, is that they’re all predicated on shifting a frame of reference through large-scale intervention.  Sending one or two people to a conference, or even a country, doesn’t give you critical mass. You need to send dozens. If it’s the right idea, it’ll resonate, but it needs critical mass.  Which means setting aside the resources in the first place, before you know it will work.

If ideas were all mattered, that wouldn’t be true; a great idea is a great idea even if only one person holds it.  But to move from an idea to a fact on the ground, it helps to have allies. Multiple sets of eyes on an idea will improve it, and multiple advocates for an idea make it harder to write it off as somebody’s pet project.  

When budgets get cut, travel is one of the first things to go.  It shouldn’t be. It’s sort of like eliminating research and development.  In the very short term, you may get a savings, but you’re cutting down the future to the size of the present.  The places that have made significant leaps forward have done it by being audacious, not flinty. They rightly understand targeted professional development as an investment in future performance.  Let it slide for too long, and you’ll find yourself in a self-reinforcing rut. You can’t cut your way to greatness.

I couldn’t help but notice how many breakthroughs happened after large groups traveled.  I’ve seen it myself when I was at Holyoke, and the League for Innovation held its conference in Boston.  I was able to send a decent-sized team who went to Tidewater’s presentation on the z-degree; that cohort became the vanguard of OER at HCC thereafter.  

Musical earworms usually fade after a while.  Sometimes they get replaced by new ones, and sometimes life doesn’t give you room for one at all.  (In the case of Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off,” it was more the look of mortification on the kids’ faces when I’d sing it.  Whatever works.) But I suspect these earworms will stick around longer. The only way to get rid of them is to make them unnecessary.