What would it look like if, say, the Federal government were to decide to prioritize good college-level teaching at the same level that it supports university research?
This piece in IHE addressed the question, but it struck me as falling badly short of reality.
Briefly, the piece suggests that Congress establish a National Pedagogy Foundation as a sort of counterpart to the NEH or the NSF. By pooling a pile of money into a project to award grant funds to deserving projects that promise to advance quality teaching, it suggests, we’d be much more likely to see tenure committees take teaching as seriously as they take research. Until then, “internal mission creep” on the ground -- in which each stratum of higher education imitates those higher -- will defeat the best intentions.
The author works at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I mean that in the nicest possible way.
Encouraging good teaching in the context of a research university is important, and the remedy offered here may have some limited traction in that context. But outside that context, it misses the point.
Quick quiz: Among community colleges with tenure systems, which counts more: teaching or research?
Teaching. That has always been true. And that makes sense, given the mission of the institution. Grants are lovely, of course, but they aren’t required for tenure, and they wouldn’t make much difference on the ground. (If the good folks at Harvard would like to investigate what it means to value good teaching, I suggest a field trip to nearby Bunker Hill Community College.)
Followup quiz: which of the following has more students taking classes: research universities or community colleges?
Community colleges, by a substantial margin. So if you want to make a measurable difference in the quality of teaching for a broad population, you’d start here. Harvard can wait.
So let’s say, then, that we wanted the Federal government to help improve the caliber of teaching at community colleges, and even at four-year public state colleges. What would a National Pedagogy Foundation have to do?
My first thought is to define the mission. Is the goal to improve actually-existing teaching quickly, or to be transformative over time? If it’s the former, the only serious answer -- the ONLY serious answer -- is a massive, sustained infusion of operating funds into college budgets. Not conditional funding, or “seed” funding, or funding with strings: straight-up operational funding. And it would have to come with “matching” requirements, to keep the states and localities from cheaping out and just using the new money as an excuse to cut their own contributions.
I really can’t emphasize this enough. Grants require project managers, and come with expiration dates. Money with expiration dates doesn’t mesh with well with tenure; typically, any faculty hired would be on the cusp of tenure just when the money goes away. So too much of the money is lost to administrative costs, and that which remains can’t be used for faculty. But with committed, sustained operating funding, the existing administrative infrastructure will do, and we could actually hire faculty.
If it’s meant to be transformative, then it needs to be both competitive, substantial, and sustained. (The competition could be based on how plausibly innovative the proposals are, and how scalable they are. No more boutique programs.) It needs to be long-term enough that the institution can risk failure of the first version without necessarily losing the funding. Anything truly transformative will be high-risk; in this fiscal climate, colleges will be risk-averse because they have to be.
In either case, though, the key is that the grants aren’t directed to individual faculty. They’re directed to institutions, and are under institutional control. That’s the only way to reach enough faculty and students to actually matter. Giving Prof. Smith a year off from teaching to expound on what a wonderful teacher he is -- the usual M.O. -- just isn’t a serious answer. Directing grants to individual faculty recreates the star system. There may be an argument for a star system in research, but there simply isn’t in teaching. If you want to improve teaching for enough people to move the needle, you’ll need to move up the average. That means improving the stars, the average, and even the struggling. That means scale, and that means institutions.
I’m sure the Harvard Graduate School of Education means well, but honestly, if you’re serious about undergraduate education, you have to look where the undergraduates are. If anyone from the Feds would like to drop me a line, I’m reachable at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com. But don’t hold some sort of national teacher of the year contest, and don’t look to a few supergeniuses as salvation. Any serious answer has to work at large scale. That means working with, through, and on behalf of institutions. You just have to pick the right institutions.
Monday, March 12, 2012
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Ask the Administrator: Changing Silos
A new correspondent writes
It’s harder than it sounds, actually.
You’re certainly right that math is a key area for student retention, and you’re also right that you’d bring some new (and beneficial) perspectives to student services. But making the leap isn’t all that easy.
Typically, student services is a silo, and academic affairs is a silo. Moving between silos isn’t easily done. The credibility you’ve earned on one side may not carry over to the other. The folks in student services have their own sets of experiences and credentials unique to their area, and may look askance at someone trying to hop over, especially if they’re hopping over at a relatively high level.
My first thought would be to find an area within (or alongside) student services that builds organically off of what you’ve already done.
Two areas leap to mind immediately. One is working with a math center, and the other is directing a grant with a math/retention focus.
The classic critique of faculty-turned-administrators is that they may be subject matter experts, but they have no management experience. Managing employees is very different from teaching students, for a whole host of reasons. Both of these would give you a chance to show (and/or build) your skills as a manager, working in areas for which your academic background has prepared you well.
Best of all, given the salience of the subject matter you’re focusing on to colleges and universities generally, you should have no lack of opportunities if you play your cards right.
My suggestion would be to do some background research on the current thinking regarding math and student success. (Although it’s a different institutional context, the Community College Research Center website is a great place to start.) Then approach the math//tutoring center on your own campus, and see if they’re open to some sort of meaningful participation. If you could manage some sort of exploratory venture in a low-risk way -- I’m thinking getting a course release to work with the math center as a resource person for a year or so -- then you can get some useful exposure to the field without risking your current professional standing. If you decide, after a few months, that you’d really rather return to the classroom, you could. If you decide that you want more than ever to make the leap, you’ve gained some experience and exposure to make yourself a more viable candidate.
Grants are the other way to go. I can attest that anyone who knows how to bring money has a huge leg up. If you can figure out a way to pitch a grant involving math and student success -- again, a hot area -- to either your state or the Feds, you can build a position for yourself. The beauty of this approach is that it lets you start at a fairly high level and play to your strengths, since you’ll design the position yourself. It’s a little slow to start, and there are no guarantees, but if you’re thinking about the long term, this could be a very effective and satisfying way to go.
Good luck! Anyone who can help make a difference on student success in math will be a hot commodity.
Wise and worldly readers, can you think of other options? Are there other or better ways to make the leap?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
I am currently in a tenured faculty position at a teaching-heavy Regional U. I have always a lot of interest in student retention and student services, and would like to eventually transition to an administrative position in that area for a Flagship U - and lo and behold, nearby Flagship U has a position for someone just like that. I am in math, and this is usually the biggest area for student support. The usual path for academic folks is chair > dean > Provost etc, so I realize that this path may be a bit unusual. But I think I could bring new perspectives that are usually not found in administrators in that role. Since you've worked with many types of administrators, what do you think of such a move?
It’s harder than it sounds, actually.
You’re certainly right that math is a key area for student retention, and you’re also right that you’d bring some new (and beneficial) perspectives to student services. But making the leap isn’t all that easy.
Typically, student services is a silo, and academic affairs is a silo. Moving between silos isn’t easily done. The credibility you’ve earned on one side may not carry over to the other. The folks in student services have their own sets of experiences and credentials unique to their area, and may look askance at someone trying to hop over, especially if they’re hopping over at a relatively high level.
My first thought would be to find an area within (or alongside) student services that builds organically off of what you’ve already done.
Two areas leap to mind immediately. One is working with a math center, and the other is directing a grant with a math/retention focus.
The classic critique of faculty-turned-administrators is that they may be subject matter experts, but they have no management experience. Managing employees is very different from teaching students, for a whole host of reasons. Both of these would give you a chance to show (and/or build) your skills as a manager, working in areas for which your academic background has prepared you well.
Best of all, given the salience of the subject matter you’re focusing on to colleges and universities generally, you should have no lack of opportunities if you play your cards right.
My suggestion would be to do some background research on the current thinking regarding math and student success. (Although it’s a different institutional context, the Community College Research Center website is a great place to start.) Then approach the math//tutoring center on your own campus, and see if they’re open to some sort of meaningful participation. If you could manage some sort of exploratory venture in a low-risk way -- I’m thinking getting a course release to work with the math center as a resource person for a year or so -- then you can get some useful exposure to the field without risking your current professional standing. If you decide, after a few months, that you’d really rather return to the classroom, you could. If you decide that you want more than ever to make the leap, you’ve gained some experience and exposure to make yourself a more viable candidate.
Grants are the other way to go. I can attest that anyone who knows how to bring money has a huge leg up. If you can figure out a way to pitch a grant involving math and student success -- again, a hot area -- to either your state or the Feds, you can build a position for yourself. The beauty of this approach is that it lets you start at a fairly high level and play to your strengths, since you’ll design the position yourself. It’s a little slow to start, and there are no guarantees, but if you’re thinking about the long term, this could be a very effective and satisfying way to go.
Good luck! Anyone who can help make a difference on student success in math will be a hot commodity.
Wise and worldly readers, can you think of other options? Are there other or better ways to make the leap?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Thursday, March 08, 2012
Friday Fragments
You’d think I would have learned to expect it by now, but I’m still surprised by the volume of email and delayed meetings that backs up while I’m traveling. Yesterday was a dig-out-from-the-avalanche day, and today features seven scheduled meetings. This is why I don’t travel much.
----------
I don’t get the Netflix thing. Why can’t they stream the same movies they send out on DVD? If I watch, say, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo on a DVD, and then watch it again via streaming, I notice two things. First, my will to live is shot. And second, it’s the same movie. I don’t know why it matters how the pixels get to my tv. They’re the same pixels. If they could stream all the movies they have on DVD, I’d happily sign back up. As it is, though, no.
----------
The joys of disaggregating data: at my college, we used to get course completion rates broken out by race, and again by gender, but not by both. This year we’ve started getting each race broken out by gender, and the extra dimension is revealing. Last Fall, women in the “Latino” category (Latina?) outperformed the white guys in developmental math classes. Within each racial group, women outperformed men by about seven points. What used to look like a racial disparity is starting to look more like a race-and-gender issue.
If nothing else, the data may help fine-tune some interventions. And maybe dispel a few myths.
----------
Podcasts are what radio should have been. Discuss.
----------
Genes are stubborn. I don’t recall ever seeing my grandparents swim, or even hearing them mention it. My Mom wanted -- and still wants -- nothing to do with water. I never enjoyed actual swimming -- as opposed to just messing around in a pool on a hot day -- and dreaded lessons. Now The Girl is complaining about her swim lessons.
The “landlubber” gene is tenacious. That can’t be an entirely bad thing.
---------
If this whole focus on graduation rates continues, I foresee a major grade inflation scandal in the next five years. You heard it here first.
--------
Okay, I have to admit the ipad is getting pretty tempting. But the combination of “faster connectivity” and “sharper resolution” with “data caps” strikes me as a time bomb. I don’t want an episode of The Daily Show on Hulu to run me a couple hundred bucks in overage fees. And there’s still that “getting it back from the kids” problem...
----------
I don’t get the Netflix thing. Why can’t they stream the same movies they send out on DVD? If I watch, say, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo on a DVD, and then watch it again via streaming, I notice two things. First, my will to live is shot. And second, it’s the same movie. I don’t know why it matters how the pixels get to my tv. They’re the same pixels. If they could stream all the movies they have on DVD, I’d happily sign back up. As it is, though, no.
----------
The joys of disaggregating data: at my college, we used to get course completion rates broken out by race, and again by gender, but not by both. This year we’ve started getting each race broken out by gender, and the extra dimension is revealing. Last Fall, women in the “Latino” category (Latina?) outperformed the white guys in developmental math classes. Within each racial group, women outperformed men by about seven points. What used to look like a racial disparity is starting to look more like a race-and-gender issue.
If nothing else, the data may help fine-tune some interventions. And maybe dispel a few myths.
----------
Podcasts are what radio should have been. Discuss.
----------
Genes are stubborn. I don’t recall ever seeing my grandparents swim, or even hearing them mention it. My Mom wanted -- and still wants -- nothing to do with water. I never enjoyed actual swimming -- as opposed to just messing around in a pool on a hot day -- and dreaded lessons. Now The Girl is complaining about her swim lessons.
The “landlubber” gene is tenacious. That can’t be an entirely bad thing.
---------
If this whole focus on graduation rates continues, I foresee a major grade inflation scandal in the next five years. You heard it here first.
--------
Okay, I have to admit the ipad is getting pretty tempting. But the combination of “faster connectivity” and “sharper resolution” with “data caps” strikes me as a time bomb. I don’t want an episode of The Daily Show on Hulu to run me a couple hundred bucks in overage fees. And there’s still that “getting it back from the kids” problem...
Wednesday, March 07, 2012
Ask the Administrator: Positioning For a CC Career
A new, young correspondent writes:
I’m a little struck at the idea of picking a discipline based on market demand. Usually, people pick a discipline they find fascinating, and then try to figure out market demand. But there’s no a priori reason you couldn’t do it this way.
Among the disciplines you listed, we typically have the hardest time hiring for economics. There isn’t a huge demand for economists at the cc level, but when openings occur, they’re remarkably hard to fill. Political scientists and historians are far more plentiful, so even though spots for historians are more common, they’re harder to get. In the business area, you probably wouldn’t get hired without years of real-world business experience on top of the MBA, so if you don’t want to do that, don’t. Like history, that’s a field with many more candidates than positions.
In grad school, the usual training is through a teaching assistantship. Being a t.a. usually covers your tuition and offers a modest – cough – stipend that will almost cover very basic living expenses. Ideally, it gives you a first experience in which you’re teaching with a net; the professor for whom you’re assisting is supposed to be there to mentor you. (Warning: graduate faculty are not uniform in the seriousness with which they approach this role. Prior to my first semester as a t.a., my entire training consisted of a single statement: “you’ll be fine.”)
If at all possible, I’d recommend finding the campus tutoring center and getting training and experience there as well. Seeing the ways that students struggle can be revealing. In my time at the campus writing center, I recall a student who came in complaining that she just couldn’t write, and her class paper suggested that she was right. But she could tell a hell of a story. So for lack of any better ideas, I asked her to write me a letter telling one of those stories. She did, and it read beautifully. I showed her the letter, showed her the paper, and asked if she could see the difference. She could. I suggested that she try writing her papers like she wrote her letters; freewrite first, and edit later. Once she turned off the editor in her head – the one that said “that’s stupid” at every new sentence – she attained the clarity that she had when she told stories.
That experience came in handy later as a professor. If you’re in economics, you may find yourself tutoring math rather than writing, but the same principle applies. If you can see the common ways and places that students make mistakes, you can inform your own subsequent teaching accordingly.
Administration is another matter entirely. First, get your land legs as a professor. After a few years of that, if administration still holds appeal, take baby steps and see what happens.
Good luck!
Wise and worldly readers, what would you advise?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
I seem to share your goal of teaching, and eventually filling an administration role, at the community college level since its seems more helpful and effective to the students, since I have little aspiration to achieve a doctorate degree and since I believe in equal opportunity for all having come from a low-income family. My plan for now is to achieve a Masters in Political Science or potentially one in various social sciences I'm interested in (I'll graduate with a dual major in economics and political science). To build experience, I plan on meeting with CC professors and hopefully serving as a free tutor for students during my Senior undergraduate year. Having said that, I was wondering if I could ask for you a few questions. 1) What departments/subjects, in your experience, do community colleges have the greatest demand for? Which, if any, departments do administrations have difficulty filling positions in? Simply put, which Masters degree would make me most valuable as a candidate: Political Science, Economics, History or an MBA? 2) What venues for gaining experience exist for an undergraduate student? Or a masters student? 3) Is there any advice you have to help me on my career path? Are there any career mistakes you see candidates frequently make that I should avoid?
I’m a little struck at the idea of picking a discipline based on market demand. Usually, people pick a discipline they find fascinating, and then try to figure out market demand. But there’s no a priori reason you couldn’t do it this way.
Among the disciplines you listed, we typically have the hardest time hiring for economics. There isn’t a huge demand for economists at the cc level, but when openings occur, they’re remarkably hard to fill. Political scientists and historians are far more plentiful, so even though spots for historians are more common, they’re harder to get. In the business area, you probably wouldn’t get hired without years of real-world business experience on top of the MBA, so if you don’t want to do that, don’t. Like history, that’s a field with many more candidates than positions.
In grad school, the usual training is through a teaching assistantship. Being a t.a. usually covers your tuition and offers a modest – cough – stipend that will almost cover very basic living expenses. Ideally, it gives you a first experience in which you’re teaching with a net; the professor for whom you’re assisting is supposed to be there to mentor you. (Warning: graduate faculty are not uniform in the seriousness with which they approach this role. Prior to my first semester as a t.a., my entire training consisted of a single statement: “you’ll be fine.”)
If at all possible, I’d recommend finding the campus tutoring center and getting training and experience there as well. Seeing the ways that students struggle can be revealing. In my time at the campus writing center, I recall a student who came in complaining that she just couldn’t write, and her class paper suggested that she was right. But she could tell a hell of a story. So for lack of any better ideas, I asked her to write me a letter telling one of those stories. She did, and it read beautifully. I showed her the letter, showed her the paper, and asked if she could see the difference. She could. I suggested that she try writing her papers like she wrote her letters; freewrite first, and edit later. Once she turned off the editor in her head – the one that said “that’s stupid” at every new sentence – she attained the clarity that she had when she told stories.
That experience came in handy later as a professor. If you’re in economics, you may find yourself tutoring math rather than writing, but the same principle applies. If you can see the common ways and places that students make mistakes, you can inform your own subsequent teaching accordingly.
Administration is another matter entirely. First, get your land legs as a professor. After a few years of that, if administration still holds appeal, take baby steps and see what happens.
Good luck!
Wise and worldly readers, what would you advise?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Tuesday, March 06, 2012
League 3: Inclusion Day
“I realized that I
was more than I was showing.” - A young
man in a video about the Center for Male Engagement at the Community College of
Philadelphia
Every educator knows the wonderful feeling when a student
who hadn’t shown much suddenly catches fire.
Day 3 was devoted to students like that.
Even though I usually suffer pretty awful conference fatigue by the
third day, this was a wonderful way to wrap it up. In various ways, nearly everything was about
ways to include students who sometimes get excluded.
Inclusion is more complicated than it sounds. I had a women’s studies professor who used to
say that feminism can’t be reduced to “add women and stir;” larger changes had
to happen to make the environment truly inclusive. We can’t just add students and stir; the
trick is managing so many variables while staying both sustainable and sane.
Some of the variables were obvious. Wes Moore, the keynote speaker, gave an
especially effective rags-to-riches story, punctuated with lines like “community
colleges are not just in the process of training
the next generation of American workers.” I wish some politicians understood that. Pre-emptively deciding that the kinds of
students who attend community colleges will never be capable of anything more
than rote tasks is both classist and demonstrably false. If we’re going to continue to produce alums
like Wes Moore, we’ll need to be able to do the full range of liberal arts,
robustly and without apology.
Some folks from the Center for Male Engagement at the
Community College of Philadelphia explained their work, which is devoted to
improving success rates among young black men.
CCP’s student body is majority African-American and about two-thirds
female, and it has experienced many of the same stresses as community colleges
have nationally. The statistics they
offered suggested that they’ve been successful in improving the pass rates and
retention rates of African-American men, usually by double digits. (I admit perking up at that.) They received significant grant funding from
both the U.S. Department of Education and the Open Society Foundation (George
Soros’ group), and used the money to offer a panoply of services including
counseling, support coaching, early alert tracking, and even a four-day camping
retreat with stipends paid at the end for successful completion. (The idea there was to have students bond
with each other, so they wouldn’t feel isolated on campus.) The discussion was bracingly honest. During Q & A, someone asked about dress
codes, and the presenters freely admitted that part of their job involved
setting an example for how men dress in a professional context. Strikingly, in discussing the courses with
which the men struggled, one presenter mentioned that the students do markedly
well in CIS. If I had the panel to do
over again, I would have asked more about that.
I suspect there’s something there.
Other panels were more specialized. One discussed concurrent enrollment programs,
in which I quickly learned that there’s a difference between dual enrollment
and concurrent enrollment. Concurrent
enrollment refers to college classes taught by high school teachers in high
schools during the high school day to high school students. Dual enrollment refers to college classes taught
by college faculty, often on the college campus, in which high school students
are also enrolled. Who knew? The presentation quickly became a group
discussion in which it became clear that each state does dual and/or concurrent
enrollment very differently.
Arrangements that are becoming popular in one state would be illegal in
another one. There’s also a distinction
to be made between programs that reach the cream of the crop high school
students, and programs designed for dropout prevention. In both cases, the idea is to extend college
to students who otherwise might not have it.
Even the nerdier stuff in the afternoon was geared toward
inclusion. An instructional designer and
two faculty discussed course redesign, with the goal of helping adjuncts do a
better job in the classroom. And a
panel of state-level policy people presented on attempts to create sustainable
structures for continuous improvement of college performance in three states
(Massachusetts, Michigan, and Virginia).
I’m wiped, but happy to report that some very smart people
are asking some of the right questions, and relying on actual, empirical
evidence to answer them. That may lack
the sex appeal of “disruptive innovation,” but it’s the only way to go. Thanks, Philadelphia. And thanks to the supportive reader who
emailed me – I’m not kidding – to tell me where the coffeemaker was in the room. Some things are important.
Monday, March 05, 2012
The League Day 2: When Generations Clash
Go to enough panels, and you start to detect themes.
Quick quiz: Community colleges are
a. a. A movement
b. b. A daring and audacious bet on democracy
c. c. An established sector of higher education
d. d. Dying
As a Gen X’er, I think the answer is c. I don’t remember a world without community
colleges. Yes, they’ve grown over the
last decade, but the growth was from an already-existing base. Most of the growth that has happened has
happened at campuses that were built decades before.
The founding generation – the Terry O’Banions of the world –
prefers answer a, and sometimes b.
(Their evil twins give answer d.)
They believe that community colleges are insurgents, shaking up the
world of higher education with their open-door, democratic idealism. To be fair, that was true at one time. It just isn’t anymore.
I saw the clash bluntly at a presentation on “Community
Colleges as Disruptive Innovations.”
From the title and the hook, it sounded like the presentation would be a
discussion of community colleges as disruptive innovators, which would put it
into camps a and b. But the bulk of the
discussion was about the unsustainability of the community college model, which
put it somewhere between c and d. You could
tell that the presenter – Debbie Sydow, president of Onondaga Community College
-- really, really wanted to make the claim that they were the wave of the
future, but her evidence wouldn’t let her.
I actually felt bad for her, since I’ve been there; sometimes your
evidence just doesn’t prove what you want it to. The audience seemed perplexed, which seemed
about right.
In his keynote, Terry O’Banion tried the old-time religion,
referring repeatedly to “the community college movement.” But revealingly, he structured his keynote
like a valedictory. He opened with stories
of innovations he pioneered in 1962 – I’m not kidding – and referred a couple
of times to the focus on student success having “brought [him] back to where
[he] started.” The sense of closure,
while poignant, didn’t jibe well with the posture of insurgency. Yes, he enunciated several principles by
which we were all supposed to go forth and bring about change, but it’s hard to
sound insurgent when you have peer-reviewed studies and six-point plans, and it’s
hard to be simultaneously rousing and elegiac.
Moving from the swan song to the cattle call, two panels
addressed recruitment of future leaders, and the difference was striking. There, I didn’t hear a single mention of the
community college movement or disruptive innovation. I heard discussion of dilemmas,
best-available solutions, complexity, mentoring, and training programs; in
other words, the kinds of things that ‘mature’ organizations handle. The first was presented by the Community
College of Baltimore County, and I have to say I was impressed. A dean there has developed a management
training program to expose faculty to the realities of academic administration;
the dean and three alumni of the program discussed it. The theme the faculty kept coming back to was
the unexpected reality of shades of gray.
(I was especially taken with one presenter’s characterization of the
difference between a “right” decision and a “right now” decision, and the need
to make peace with the fact that with partial information, sometimes you have
to settle for the latter.)
The second panel was geared towards future presidents. It featured a self-assessment, which was
revealing in its own way, and some helpful hints about ways to fill in
experiential gaps. (Annoyingly, “experience
blogging” wasn’t on the list. My gaps
were fundraising, managing construction, fundraising, risk management, and
fundraising.) There, too, the tone was
not about insurgency or disruption or challenge; it was about the need for
well-prepared people to step up to handle the increasingly difficult challenges
facing a mature sector.
(As with yesterday, there was also one panel that could only
be called a clear miss. It happens.)
I’m happy to acknowledge a debt to the movement that the
founding generation started so many years ago.
Without the work they did, community colleges would not be the
established force that they are now. But
they are an established force now, and if anything, they’re facing harsher threats
than they have ever faced before.
Celebrate the achievements of the O’Banions, who have earned respect for
what they have wrought, but recruit people who know how to run, and reform,
institutions.
Sunday, March 04, 2012
Live from the League, Day 1
The theme for this year’s League for Innovation conference
seems to be “where is everybody?”
Attendance seems visibly down from last year. Last year’s conference was in San Diego. This year’s is in Philly. I’m not saying
that’s the reason; I’m not saying that’s not the reason.
For reasons unknown, the Sunday panels started at 8:30 in
the morning. For folks from the West
Coast, that’s just cruel. I saw someone
I knew from California looking uncharacteristically ragged just after the first
panel, and couldn’t blame her a bit.
(Adding insult to injury, the rooms in the conference hotel don’t have
coffeemakers. Barbarians!) I’ve also seen fewer ipads this year than
last, which is probably another function of Philly as opposed to San
Diego.
Anyway, some highlights.
Jane Serbousek and Susan Wood offered a hopeful panel that
addressed the redesign of the developmental English and math sequences at the
community college system in Virginia.
(It was probably even more daunting in Virginia than it would be
elsewhere, given that Virginia has 23 community colleges but operates as a
single system.) They broke their
developmental math sequence into 9 1-credit modules, so a student who normally
would have coasted through the first half of the semester before crashing into
the second half doesn’t have to repeat the first half. In response to a question about financial aid
– I didn’t ask it, but I could have – they mentioned that some campuses use a 4-credit
“shell” course for registration purposes.
A student can complete anywhere from 1 to (theoretically) 9 credits’
worth of material, but registers for four.
It seems that the usual resistance to any sort of change was
somewhat muted; as Wood noted, “we couldn’t have worse results [than under the
current system].” Sometimes, innovation
is just another word for nothing left to lose.
As a courtesy, I’ll skip the second panel. Let’s just say it didn’t really work and
leave it at that.
A panel on first-time presidents looking back on their first
five years was by far the best attended I saw.
Two presidents spoke – Hal Higdon of Ozarks Technical Community College,
and Cheryl Thompson-Stacy of Lord Fairfax Community College -- and while there
wasn’t anything groundbreaking, they were both fun to watch. The takeaway: when your president starts to
refer to himself in the third person, it’s time to send out job applications.
For the first time in my memory, the conference actually had
a panel discussing ESL. It was
fascinating, since most of the few people there were ESL instructors
themselves. It quickly became clear that
there’s tension between their ESL department and their English department. I saw that at my last college, too, where it
led to all manner of indignation and blame-shifting but to nothing good. I was hoping to hear some discussion of ways
to improve student completion rates, but this seemed to be more about
addressing a lack of respect from other departments. That’s valid work, but it seems like a
second-order issue. Maybe next year.
In the interstices, I ran into my boss from my last
job. That’s the serendipity factor of
conferences that I’m not sure how virtual conferences could replace. I hadn’t seen him in years, so it was fun to
reconnect.
The keynote was by Cathy Casserly, addressing open
educational resources. Some speakers go
for analysis, some go for rhetoric; she went for concreteness. She argued that in an age in which “we are
all producers,” and the internet consists of “copies, copies everywhere,” the
print-era notion of copyright is unduly limiting. She championed Creative Commons licenses as
alternatives, and pointed us to such resources as openstax college, flatworld
knowledge, and Washington state’s Open Course Library. By her telling – and I haven’t investigated
them well enough to say – these and similar resources can help colleges and
their students get past the economic barriers characteristic of an age in which
information is held privately, rather than shared publicly.
It was a “hey, look at this!” speech, which isn’t typical
keynote fodder, but it worked.
Monday’s panels start even earlier. Suggestion to the Program Committee: keep time
zones in mind. And for heaven’s sake, do
something about the coffee…
Thursday, March 01, 2012
Friday Fragments
The glow from many things fades as one gets older. But snow days stay wonderful.
-----------
I have to admit enjoying Senator Santorum’s assertion that Satan controls higher education in America. To be fair, there is some evidence for his claim. If you’ve ever tried finding a student parking space around noon on a Tuesday in September at a major public university, you know that Satan has major influence in the world of parking deck architecture. And the proliferation of graduate programs in an era of decreasing full-time faculty jobs definitely carries the cloven hoofprints of Big Red.
That said, I always assumed Satan had serious money to throw around. After all, he’d have all those bankers, lawyers, and venture capitalists on his side. He may be the prince of darkness, but he’s supposed to at least be sporting some serious bling.
Instead, we public academics work in cinder-block brutalist buildings with water leaks, while the laywers and financiers have enough money to sponsor people like Senator Santorum.
Satan, we have to talk. You’re not upholding your end of the bargain. I’m very disappointed in you. Bad Satan! Bad!
----------
Meanwhile, Maryland just legalized same-sex marriage. 8 down, 42 to go. Well done, Maryland.
----------
Can you imagine Satan’s outcomes assessment metrics?
By the end of your sojourn into the underworld, you will be able to
- gnash teeth and rend garments simultaneously
- regrow flesh quickly from one flaying to the next
- sit through an entire episode of Real Housewives without making a single snarky aside
----------
Earlier this week The Boy reported that as part of an exercise in the library, they had to figure out who the Huguenots were. Somehow I remembered, and told him. His jaw actually fell open. The Wife laughed and started singing “nerd nerd nerd, you are a nerd...” to the tune of “Bird is the Word.”
The liberal arts begin at home, people.
-----------
Any tips for decent, Windows-based video editing software? The Boy wants to go from basic stop-motion Lego videos to full-on Lego movies, and I don’t want to have to buy a Mac just for that. Our laptop is a couple of years old and wasn’t top of the line even then, so we’re looking for the basics here.
-----------
I’m dusting off the trenchcoat and fedora to reprise my “roving correspondent” role at the League for Innovation conference next week. It’s in Senator Santorum’s home state, come to think of it, so if I see the Senator, Satan, or both, I’ll be sure to say hi.
-----------
I have to admit enjoying Senator Santorum’s assertion that Satan controls higher education in America. To be fair, there is some evidence for his claim. If you’ve ever tried finding a student parking space around noon on a Tuesday in September at a major public university, you know that Satan has major influence in the world of parking deck architecture. And the proliferation of graduate programs in an era of decreasing full-time faculty jobs definitely carries the cloven hoofprints of Big Red.
That said, I always assumed Satan had serious money to throw around. After all, he’d have all those bankers, lawyers, and venture capitalists on his side. He may be the prince of darkness, but he’s supposed to at least be sporting some serious bling.
Instead, we public academics work in cinder-block brutalist buildings with water leaks, while the laywers and financiers have enough money to sponsor people like Senator Santorum.
Satan, we have to talk. You’re not upholding your end of the bargain. I’m very disappointed in you. Bad Satan! Bad!
----------
Meanwhile, Maryland just legalized same-sex marriage. 8 down, 42 to go. Well done, Maryland.
----------
Can you imagine Satan’s outcomes assessment metrics?
By the end of your sojourn into the underworld, you will be able to
- gnash teeth and rend garments simultaneously
- regrow flesh quickly from one flaying to the next
- sit through an entire episode of Real Housewives without making a single snarky aside
----------
Earlier this week The Boy reported that as part of an exercise in the library, they had to figure out who the Huguenots were. Somehow I remembered, and told him. His jaw actually fell open. The Wife laughed and started singing “nerd nerd nerd, you are a nerd...” to the tune of “Bird is the Word.”
The liberal arts begin at home, people.
-----------
Any tips for decent, Windows-based video editing software? The Boy wants to go from basic stop-motion Lego videos to full-on Lego movies, and I don’t want to have to buy a Mac just for that. Our laptop is a couple of years old and wasn’t top of the line even then, so we’re looking for the basics here.
-----------
I’m dusting off the trenchcoat and fedora to reprise my “roving correspondent” role at the League for Innovation conference next week. It’s in Senator Santorum’s home state, come to think of it, so if I see the Senator, Satan, or both, I’ll be sure to say hi.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Incompletes
Has your college found a reasonably elegant way to handle grades of “incomplete?”
We’re struggling, and I know we’re not alone. I’m hoping that crowdsourcing the question will lead to a better idea.
The idea behind the “incomplete” grade, at least at the undergraduate level, is to allow students who had some sort of real personal emergency a chance to finish a course once the emergency has passed. The textbook example is the student who gets into a car accident shortly before finals, and can’t make it to the exam because he’s hospitalized. Most of us, I hope, would agree that giving that student a zero on the exam would be needlessly mean. So the instructor can offer an Incomplete, and give the student a chance to finish the class for a grade once he has recovered.
The Incomplete comes with an expiration date; if the work doesn’t get done by a particular date, the grade reverts to an “F.” It’s not a Get Out of Jail Free card; it’s just an extension.
When the “I” grade works well, the expectations are clear, the amount missing is small, and the resolution is quick. Under those circumstances, the “I” grade isn’t really an issue.
But it isn’t always that easy.
Some people give “I” grades without actually talking to the student first. It’s a mercy grade, on the assumption that surely, Johnny wouldn’t have skipped the final without a good reason. This seeming act of mercy – which I have no doubt is well-intended – actually has serious ripple effects throughout the college.
For one, it wreaks havoc with prerequisites. If Johnny would have received, say, a C without the final, but he gets an Incomplete instead, then he isn’t eligible to move on to the next course in the sequence. He would have been eligible with the C. By the time the “I” gets resolved, it’s either too far into the subsequent semester to take the next course, or all the seats in the next course are taken.
If Johnny received financial aid, the picture is even murkier. The financial aid office has to assume that Johnny simply walked away. If the professor didn’t note a last date of attendance, then Johnny’s aid may be cut. Had Johnny received the C, his aid would have been fine.
The “I” grade doesn’t immediately count against a student’s GPA, but it does count against the Satisfactory Academic Progress that a student has to maintain to keep aid eligibility. Depending on what else he took and how he did, Johnny may lose academic eligibility for financial aid even before the eventual “F” is posted.
But the real nightmare is the professor who assigns “I” grades unilaterally, and then vanishes. At that point, even determining what’s missing -- let alone what an appropriate grade would be -- becomes a serious challenge.
I need to clarify here that I’m working in the context of undergraduates. Grad school incompletes are another animal entirely.
Wise and worldly readers, have you seen ways for a college to keep the option of the “I” grade without falling into these traps?
We’re struggling, and I know we’re not alone. I’m hoping that crowdsourcing the question will lead to a better idea.
The idea behind the “incomplete” grade, at least at the undergraduate level, is to allow students who had some sort of real personal emergency a chance to finish a course once the emergency has passed. The textbook example is the student who gets into a car accident shortly before finals, and can’t make it to the exam because he’s hospitalized. Most of us, I hope, would agree that giving that student a zero on the exam would be needlessly mean. So the instructor can offer an Incomplete, and give the student a chance to finish the class for a grade once he has recovered.
The Incomplete comes with an expiration date; if the work doesn’t get done by a particular date, the grade reverts to an “F.” It’s not a Get Out of Jail Free card; it’s just an extension.
When the “I” grade works well, the expectations are clear, the amount missing is small, and the resolution is quick. Under those circumstances, the “I” grade isn’t really an issue.
But it isn’t always that easy.
Some people give “I” grades without actually talking to the student first. It’s a mercy grade, on the assumption that surely, Johnny wouldn’t have skipped the final without a good reason. This seeming act of mercy – which I have no doubt is well-intended – actually has serious ripple effects throughout the college.
For one, it wreaks havoc with prerequisites. If Johnny would have received, say, a C without the final, but he gets an Incomplete instead, then he isn’t eligible to move on to the next course in the sequence. He would have been eligible with the C. By the time the “I” gets resolved, it’s either too far into the subsequent semester to take the next course, or all the seats in the next course are taken.
If Johnny received financial aid, the picture is even murkier. The financial aid office has to assume that Johnny simply walked away. If the professor didn’t note a last date of attendance, then Johnny’s aid may be cut. Had Johnny received the C, his aid would have been fine.
The “I” grade doesn’t immediately count against a student’s GPA, but it does count against the Satisfactory Academic Progress that a student has to maintain to keep aid eligibility. Depending on what else he took and how he did, Johnny may lose academic eligibility for financial aid even before the eventual “F” is posted.
But the real nightmare is the professor who assigns “I” grades unilaterally, and then vanishes. At that point, even determining what’s missing -- let alone what an appropriate grade would be -- becomes a serious challenge.
I need to clarify here that I’m working in the context of undergraduates. Grad school incompletes are another animal entirely.
Wise and worldly readers, have you seen ways for a college to keep the option of the “I” grade without falling into these traps?
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
That One Stings
As regular readers know, I grew up in a city with minor league baseball. As it happened, a few of the players from the years I paid attention went on later to significant major league careers; one of them even became a first-ballot Hall of Famer. (Yes, I saw him play in the minors. Even then, you could tell he’d be special.)
Following a minor league team is a different enterprise than following a major league team. In the majors, you root for excellence, and the better the players, the better. It’s simple. But in the minors, when a player gets really good, you brace yourself for his departure. The really great ones don’t stick around long. So you hope to catch moments of brilliance, but when you see someone really stand out, it’s bittersweet; you know he’ll be gone soon.
That came rushing back to me this week when a really outstanding employee attracted interest from a higher level. She’s terrific, I absolutely understand the interest, and I’ll be right there cheering her advancement. But in the short term, it’ll be a loss that stings.
It’s the same sting I remember from thirty years ago. Any ethical manager knows the feeling.
I’ve been lucky in my own career; on the occasions I’ve gone to bosses to tell them that I was looking elsewhere, they’ve been supportive. They took the position that fostering the growth of your people is what you do, even when that means they grow away from you. It’s based on an ethical sense of how to treat people, and a faith that taking the high road consistently will generally pay off over time.
Not every organization or manager believes that. I’ve seen managers punish outside interest as disloyalty, and punish people directly or indirectly for failed attempts to leave. That’s common enough that a widely understood etiquette has developed about reference checking that says you don’t contact references until someone has reached the “finalist” stage. Why endanger their standing in their current job unnecessarily?
I abide by the etiquette, but I don’t like where that perspective leads. If jobs become jails, why bother trying to excel? And if nobody ever grows or stretches, what happens when the folks on top retire?
That possessive style doesn’t lead anywhere good. It assumes that the present is the best that could ever happen, and therefore that any change amounts to decline. It’s pessimism as an organizing principle. No, thanks.
I’d rather bet on the future. (It’s what educators like to do anyway.) Encourage people to develop and grow, and accept the occasional sting as a cost of doing business. The folks who are capable of more than they’re doing now won’t stick around forever, but while they’re there, you’ll get their best. Enjoy the flashes of brilliance. And smile when the rest of the world discovers what you already knew.
Following a minor league team is a different enterprise than following a major league team. In the majors, you root for excellence, and the better the players, the better. It’s simple. But in the minors, when a player gets really good, you brace yourself for his departure. The really great ones don’t stick around long. So you hope to catch moments of brilliance, but when you see someone really stand out, it’s bittersweet; you know he’ll be gone soon.
That came rushing back to me this week when a really outstanding employee attracted interest from a higher level. She’s terrific, I absolutely understand the interest, and I’ll be right there cheering her advancement. But in the short term, it’ll be a loss that stings.
It’s the same sting I remember from thirty years ago. Any ethical manager knows the feeling.
I’ve been lucky in my own career; on the occasions I’ve gone to bosses to tell them that I was looking elsewhere, they’ve been supportive. They took the position that fostering the growth of your people is what you do, even when that means they grow away from you. It’s based on an ethical sense of how to treat people, and a faith that taking the high road consistently will generally pay off over time.
Not every organization or manager believes that. I’ve seen managers punish outside interest as disloyalty, and punish people directly or indirectly for failed attempts to leave. That’s common enough that a widely understood etiquette has developed about reference checking that says you don’t contact references until someone has reached the “finalist” stage. Why endanger their standing in their current job unnecessarily?
I abide by the etiquette, but I don’t like where that perspective leads. If jobs become jails, why bother trying to excel? And if nobody ever grows or stretches, what happens when the folks on top retire?
That possessive style doesn’t lead anywhere good. It assumes that the present is the best that could ever happen, and therefore that any change amounts to decline. It’s pessimism as an organizing principle. No, thanks.
I’d rather bet on the future. (It’s what educators like to do anyway.) Encourage people to develop and grow, and accept the occasional sting as a cost of doing business. The folks who are capable of more than they’re doing now won’t stick around forever, but while they’re there, you’ll get their best. Enjoy the flashes of brilliance. And smile when the rest of the world discovers what you already knew.
Monday, February 27, 2012
"Just Like a Real College Student"
A colleague here likes to tell the story of the evening student who visited her office in tears. The student had been trying to locate an academic advisor for a while, and at the time, they weren’t easily available in the evenings. (We’ve since changed that.) By my colleague’s telling, the student complained that it wasn’t fair; she had to work during the day, but she still wanted to feel “just like a real college student.” That meant advisors, and faculty, and even student clubs.
This story in IHE about the kids of the upper middle class finding their way to community colleges reminded me of that. It’s old news to those of us on the ground, but still apparently unknown in the larger political discussion. I hope they notice the story before they go and do something stupid.
When the Great Recession enrollment bump hit us in the Fall of 2009, we got calls from the local paper looking to write the story that we were retraining huge numbers of displaced workers. It would have made a great story, if it were true. But the major bump in enrollments didn’t come from displaced workers; it came from 18 year olds who, in flush times, would have gone directly to four-year colleges. Since we’ve come down a bit from the peak, the major drop has been among the 18 year olds.
Nationally, the political discourse has no room for these developments. Presidents Bush and Obama made references in State of the Union addresses to community colleges as centers of workforce training. The academic blogosphere takes for granted that the liberal arts are under attack everywhere.
But on the ground, that’s not how it looks. Here, the liberal arts are flourishing. Yes, some of that is the effect of classifying certain courses as “gen eds,” but even allowing for that, the transfer major has experienced remarkable growth.
Which makes sense, if you think about it. With student loan debt becoming a major issue, spending the first two years living at home and paying cc tuition makes good economic sense for many students. The humanities and social sciences are hotbeds of innovation on campus, since they have the enrollments and the staffing to do it. (That’s not to deny that we rely entirely too heavily on adjuncts; it’s just to point out that the enrollments are strong.)
The well-intended political leaders who are looking at cc’s as training centers should be careful what they wish for. The vocational programs we run are generally far more expensive to run than the classic liberal arts classes; they require specialized equipment and facilities, for starters, and the class sizes tend to run lower. A dirty little secret of higher ed finance is that certain disciplines – the chalk-and-talk liberal arts classes, mostly – subsidize higher-cost disciplines. All those full-to-the-brim Psych classes help pay for the small and expensive Nursing clinicals. Take away the Psych classes, and the college’s per-student costs will skyrocket. You heard it here first.
American history shows pretty clearly that programs for the poor get punished, while programs for the influential classes become sacred. If community colleges start to serve people who could afford to go elsewhere, that bodes well for their institutional survival.
In that light, the story showing that the scions of the influential classes are finding their way to cc’s actually gives me some hope. Right now, much of the discussion is based on stereotypes, even when the speakers mean well. (Even on the blogosphere, I’ve noticed cc voices remain badly underrepresented. Must be the teaching loads.) But if their own daughters come here -- the sons remain an issue -- it’ll be a little harder to ignore the facts on the ground.
And that will redound to the benefit of all the students here, particularly including the less wealthy ones. If the daughters of privilege start demanding the services that “real” colleges offer, then the single moms who come here will have access to those, too. We won’t have students showing up in tears, asking to be treated like real college students. They’ll finally be treated as the real college students that they actually are.
This story in IHE about the kids of the upper middle class finding their way to community colleges reminded me of that. It’s old news to those of us on the ground, but still apparently unknown in the larger political discussion. I hope they notice the story before they go and do something stupid.
When the Great Recession enrollment bump hit us in the Fall of 2009, we got calls from the local paper looking to write the story that we were retraining huge numbers of displaced workers. It would have made a great story, if it were true. But the major bump in enrollments didn’t come from displaced workers; it came from 18 year olds who, in flush times, would have gone directly to four-year colleges. Since we’ve come down a bit from the peak, the major drop has been among the 18 year olds.
Nationally, the political discourse has no room for these developments. Presidents Bush and Obama made references in State of the Union addresses to community colleges as centers of workforce training. The academic blogosphere takes for granted that the liberal arts are under attack everywhere.
But on the ground, that’s not how it looks. Here, the liberal arts are flourishing. Yes, some of that is the effect of classifying certain courses as “gen eds,” but even allowing for that, the transfer major has experienced remarkable growth.
Which makes sense, if you think about it. With student loan debt becoming a major issue, spending the first two years living at home and paying cc tuition makes good economic sense for many students. The humanities and social sciences are hotbeds of innovation on campus, since they have the enrollments and the staffing to do it. (That’s not to deny that we rely entirely too heavily on adjuncts; it’s just to point out that the enrollments are strong.)
The well-intended political leaders who are looking at cc’s as training centers should be careful what they wish for. The vocational programs we run are generally far more expensive to run than the classic liberal arts classes; they require specialized equipment and facilities, for starters, and the class sizes tend to run lower. A dirty little secret of higher ed finance is that certain disciplines – the chalk-and-talk liberal arts classes, mostly – subsidize higher-cost disciplines. All those full-to-the-brim Psych classes help pay for the small and expensive Nursing clinicals. Take away the Psych classes, and the college’s per-student costs will skyrocket. You heard it here first.
American history shows pretty clearly that programs for the poor get punished, while programs for the influential classes become sacred. If community colleges start to serve people who could afford to go elsewhere, that bodes well for their institutional survival.
In that light, the story showing that the scions of the influential classes are finding their way to cc’s actually gives me some hope. Right now, much of the discussion is based on stereotypes, even when the speakers mean well. (Even on the blogosphere, I’ve noticed cc voices remain badly underrepresented. Must be the teaching loads.) But if their own daughters come here -- the sons remain an issue -- it’ll be a little harder to ignore the facts on the ground.
And that will redound to the benefit of all the students here, particularly including the less wealthy ones. If the daughters of privilege start demanding the services that “real” colleges offer, then the single moms who come here will have access to those, too. We won’t have students showing up in tears, asking to be treated like real college students. They’ll finally be treated as the real college students that they actually are.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Statewide Razzie Awards
The Razzie awards are given each year to movies and performances that truly, impressively, memorably stunk. Adam Sandler is up for several this year, which seems about right. (Halle Berry won serious good-sport points in my book for actually showing up to accept her Razzie in person for Catwoman a few years ago.) I’d like to nominate Joel Schumacher for a Lifetime Achievement Razzie award, for somehow sustaining a high-powered career as a director over several decades without ever making a single watchable film.
We in higher ed should establish our own statewide Razzie awards, to call attention to those states that have really gone above and beyond in treating public higher education stupidly and destructively.
A quick list of this year’s nominees might include:
1. Arizona. The stupid, it burns. A few weeks ago I noted its breathtaking new year’s twofer: mandating G-rated language by faculty at all times, both on- and off-campus; and establishing political conservatives as a protected class. Now, as an alert reader brought to my attention, they’re considering requiring all students on financial aid to contribute a minimum of $2,000 a year to their own education. (Athletes and merit scholarship recipients are exempted.) If you don’t have a spare $8,000 for a four-year degree, tough rocks. I’m not exaggerating. As this article from the Arizona Republic notes:
Welcome to the Razzies, Arizona.
2. Florida. I’ve heard of states cutting higher education funding. And I’ve heard of states establishing new campuses (though admittedly not recently). Florida offers the first case I’ve seen of doing those two things at the same time.
Apparently, a term-limited Republican State Senator, J.D. Alexander, has decided that his legacy will be a new campus. But he doesn’t want to spend money to do it. The obvious solution: cut the overall system funding while mandating spending on a new campus!
I’m not usually a fan of term limits, but if they get this guy out of power, I’ll have to reconsider my position.
The only metaphor that makes sense is jamming both the accelerator and the brake at the same time. It’s physically possible, but why the hell would you do it?
3. California. California is the Cal Ripken of stupidity: it just keeps performing, year after year, and at a remarkably high level.
The state is facing a multibillion dollar structural deficit for the umpteenth consecutive year. Its community colleges have wait lists of tens of thousands of people. And its solution is...set tuition absurdly low, and don’t let the colleges keep it! Make up the difference with furloughs for employees and waitlists for students.
Wow. Just, wow.
If California is the future, we should all be very, very scared.
Wise and worldly readers, who would you nominate for this year’s public higher ed Razzie?
We in higher ed should establish our own statewide Razzie awards, to call attention to those states that have really gone above and beyond in treating public higher education stupidly and destructively.
A quick list of this year’s nominees might include:
1. Arizona. The stupid, it burns. A few weeks ago I noted its breathtaking new year’s twofer: mandating G-rated language by faculty at all times, both on- and off-campus; and establishing political conservatives as a protected class. Now, as an alert reader brought to my attention, they’re considering requiring all students on financial aid to contribute a minimum of $2,000 a year to their own education. (Athletes and merit scholarship recipients are exempted.) If you don’t have a spare $8,000 for a four-year degree, tough rocks. I’m not exaggerating. As this article from the Arizona Republic notes:
Supporters of the bill believe students should have more "skin in the game." Opponents believe students already pay a lot for their education, and tuition is only part of the expense of going to school.About 100 students signed in to oppose the bill, and a handful spoke out against it. James Allen, UA student-body president, told legislators that by passing the bill, legislators would make it harder to achieve a higher-education degree.Rep. Michelle Ugenti, R-Scottsdale, replied, "Welcome to life."
Welcome to the Razzies, Arizona.
2. Florida. I’ve heard of states cutting higher education funding. And I’ve heard of states establishing new campuses (though admittedly not recently). Florida offers the first case I’ve seen of doing those two things at the same time.
Apparently, a term-limited Republican State Senator, J.D. Alexander, has decided that his legacy will be a new campus. But he doesn’t want to spend money to do it. The obvious solution: cut the overall system funding while mandating spending on a new campus!
I’m not usually a fan of term limits, but if they get this guy out of power, I’ll have to reconsider my position.
The only metaphor that makes sense is jamming both the accelerator and the brake at the same time. It’s physically possible, but why the hell would you do it?
3. California. California is the Cal Ripken of stupidity: it just keeps performing, year after year, and at a remarkably high level.
The state is facing a multibillion dollar structural deficit for the umpteenth consecutive year. Its community colleges have wait lists of tens of thousands of people. And its solution is...set tuition absurdly low, and don’t let the colleges keep it! Make up the difference with furloughs for employees and waitlists for students.
Wow. Just, wow.
If California is the future, we should all be very, very scared.
Wise and worldly readers, who would you nominate for this year’s public higher ed Razzie?
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Friday Fragments
The Dog has developed a habit of kidnapping The Girl’s stuffed animals. We find them scattered around the house, sometimes with their eyes missing. The motive is unclear, and the dog isn’t talking.
---------------
In a meeting this week, a frustrated professor described politics as “trying to get one group of rich guys to convince another group of rich guys to do the right thing.” I thought he nailed it.
--------------
This year’s Daddy-Daughter dance was lovely, though notably different than the last few. In previous years, The Girl danced only with me, and happily so. This year, she alternated between dancing with me and dancing with her friends.
And so it begins...
--------------
Life’s little ironies. My publisher has given me a fish-or-cut-bait deadline on the book. I’m making better progress than I thought, but it requires some extended periods in which I shut myself in the dining room for some quality time at the keyboard. So I have to tell the kids to leave me alone so I can write wry and insightful prose about work-life balance.
That just seems wrong, somehow.
---------------
Gremlins attacked the campus email system recently, so the system has been down. Having been without it for a while, I’m not entirely sure I want it back. Without email, I’ve been weirdly uninterrupted and able to complete a few thoughts. Even better, I’ve been able to have longer-than-usual, unpressured conversations. Yes, arranging meetings by phone is cumbersome, but if it cuts down on the number of meetings, this may not be altogether bad.
---------------
From out of the blue, The Girl asked me what causes wars. I said that wars happened when countries couldn’t use their words. She said that was silly. I couldn’t argue.
----------------
I’m looking forward to the League for Innovation conference in Philly in March. If you want to find me, I’ll be the middle-aged white guy.
----------------
The Boy blasted through the Harry Potter and Percy Jackson books some time ago, and recently finished the Hunger Games series. He’s looking for something new, but I don’t have any ideas. Any suggestions for action-packed fiction for an unusually literate ten year old boy?
---------------
In a meeting this week, a frustrated professor described politics as “trying to get one group of rich guys to convince another group of rich guys to do the right thing.” I thought he nailed it.
--------------
This year’s Daddy-Daughter dance was lovely, though notably different than the last few. In previous years, The Girl danced only with me, and happily so. This year, she alternated between dancing with me and dancing with her friends.
And so it begins...
--------------
Life’s little ironies. My publisher has given me a fish-or-cut-bait deadline on the book. I’m making better progress than I thought, but it requires some extended periods in which I shut myself in the dining room for some quality time at the keyboard. So I have to tell the kids to leave me alone so I can write wry and insightful prose about work-life balance.
That just seems wrong, somehow.
---------------
Gremlins attacked the campus email system recently, so the system has been down. Having been without it for a while, I’m not entirely sure I want it back. Without email, I’ve been weirdly uninterrupted and able to complete a few thoughts. Even better, I’ve been able to have longer-than-usual, unpressured conversations. Yes, arranging meetings by phone is cumbersome, but if it cuts down on the number of meetings, this may not be altogether bad.
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From out of the blue, The Girl asked me what causes wars. I said that wars happened when countries couldn’t use their words. She said that was silly. I couldn’t argue.
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I’m looking forward to the League for Innovation conference in Philly in March. If you want to find me, I’ll be the middle-aged white guy.
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The Boy blasted through the Harry Potter and Percy Jackson books some time ago, and recently finished the Hunger Games series. He’s looking for something new, but I don’t have any ideas. Any suggestions for action-packed fiction for an unusually literate ten year old boy?
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Montesquieu Goes to College
Should different economic classes have different colleges? And should those colleges have different missions?
I’m not talking about the elite-of-the-elite letting in a few scholarship students, as welcome as that is. I’m thinking more of art history and philosophy at community colleges.
With what I have to assume is basically good intent, President Obama and many governors are pushing the idea of community colleges becoming workforce training centers. They’re redirecting funding from general operational budgets -- the budget that supports every program at a college -- to grants targeted at favored programs. Generally speaking, that means either STEM fields or fields with presumed local employability. The motivation seems to be to do something about jobs, in hopes of getting the economy moving (and the votes flowing).
On the ground, though, the effects are disturbing.
This report from Diverse Issues in Higher Education suggests the effects of, in essence, replicating the K-12 “tracking” system in higher education. Simply put, it increases the social separation between those who can afford (or can slip into) elite institutions, and everyone else.
Tuesday’s post discussed the value of cross-class exposure and interaction in college. That kind of interaction is only possible when different classes are present. And that will only happen when colleges aren’t rigidly stratified by class.
This isn’t -- at all -- an argument against vocational programs or training. Those programs meet specific needs, and they’ve done wonders when done right.
Instead, it’s an argument for properly valuing the liberal arts in a community college setting. Literature, philosophy, art history, political science, and economics shouldn’t be the privilege of those who have money. They’re the shared (if contested) heritage of a culture, and they bespeak possibilities beyond the present. They’re enriched by a panoply of perspectives, but that panoply is unlikely to be robust if everyone in the discussion went to prep school.
Besides, if you take the whole “student loans are choking the young” argument seriously -- which I do -- then a robust liberal arts transfer route from the community college level becomes part of the solution. If you do two years at the community college, incurring little or no debt, and then transfer to a traditional four-year college, you can escape with a lower debt burden than you otherwise would. To the politicians out there, I’d mention that this is its own form of workforce development. The student who transfers to a four-year college and then goes on to medical school -- and yes, we have those -- does quite well in the job market, thank you very much.
Some faculty locally have opined that the drive to reduce community colleges to workforce training centers is based on a desire to strip the lower classes of the faculties of critical thought, the better to keep them down. That argument strikes me as a little self-flattering, a little patronizing, and oddly enough, a little too credulous. A good nurse needs critical thought to do the job well, for example. More to the point, though, in my discussions with political leaders, I just don’t think they’re that deep. They aren’t trying to wall off philosophy from the proletariat for fear of revolution; they just want to get past the recession as quickly as possible, and this seems as good a way as any.
In other words, the issue isn’t so much nefariousness or corruption as shallowness. Paradoxically enough, the shallowness goes all the way down.
Perorations on the wonderfulness of the liberal arts are fine, as far as they go, but they tend to land on deaf ears. If we academics want to keep the liberal arts available for students of limited means -- and having been one, I am firmly on board with that -- the arguments to make are around cross-class contact, transfer, and student debt. We can orate to each other to keep up morale, if we want, and the old-time religion makes great fodder for graduation speeches. But if we want to preserve this audaciously idealistic mission of bringing the liberal arts to the masses, we have to start from where we are.
The alternative is to recreate the economic segregation of our neighborhoods in our colleges. And that would be a loss for everybody.
I’m not talking about the elite-of-the-elite letting in a few scholarship students, as welcome as that is. I’m thinking more of art history and philosophy at community colleges.
With what I have to assume is basically good intent, President Obama and many governors are pushing the idea of community colleges becoming workforce training centers. They’re redirecting funding from general operational budgets -- the budget that supports every program at a college -- to grants targeted at favored programs. Generally speaking, that means either STEM fields or fields with presumed local employability. The motivation seems to be to do something about jobs, in hopes of getting the economy moving (and the votes flowing).
On the ground, though, the effects are disturbing.
This report from Diverse Issues in Higher Education suggests the effects of, in essence, replicating the K-12 “tracking” system in higher education. Simply put, it increases the social separation between those who can afford (or can slip into) elite institutions, and everyone else.
Tuesday’s post discussed the value of cross-class exposure and interaction in college. That kind of interaction is only possible when different classes are present. And that will only happen when colleges aren’t rigidly stratified by class.
This isn’t -- at all -- an argument against vocational programs or training. Those programs meet specific needs, and they’ve done wonders when done right.
Instead, it’s an argument for properly valuing the liberal arts in a community college setting. Literature, philosophy, art history, political science, and economics shouldn’t be the privilege of those who have money. They’re the shared (if contested) heritage of a culture, and they bespeak possibilities beyond the present. They’re enriched by a panoply of perspectives, but that panoply is unlikely to be robust if everyone in the discussion went to prep school.
Besides, if you take the whole “student loans are choking the young” argument seriously -- which I do -- then a robust liberal arts transfer route from the community college level becomes part of the solution. If you do two years at the community college, incurring little or no debt, and then transfer to a traditional four-year college, you can escape with a lower debt burden than you otherwise would. To the politicians out there, I’d mention that this is its own form of workforce development. The student who transfers to a four-year college and then goes on to medical school -- and yes, we have those -- does quite well in the job market, thank you very much.
Some faculty locally have opined that the drive to reduce community colleges to workforce training centers is based on a desire to strip the lower classes of the faculties of critical thought, the better to keep them down. That argument strikes me as a little self-flattering, a little patronizing, and oddly enough, a little too credulous. A good nurse needs critical thought to do the job well, for example. More to the point, though, in my discussions with political leaders, I just don’t think they’re that deep. They aren’t trying to wall off philosophy from the proletariat for fear of revolution; they just want to get past the recession as quickly as possible, and this seems as good a way as any.
In other words, the issue isn’t so much nefariousness or corruption as shallowness. Paradoxically enough, the shallowness goes all the way down.
Perorations on the wonderfulness of the liberal arts are fine, as far as they go, but they tend to land on deaf ears. If we academics want to keep the liberal arts available for students of limited means -- and having been one, I am firmly on board with that -- the arguments to make are around cross-class contact, transfer, and student debt. We can orate to each other to keep up morale, if we want, and the old-time religion makes great fodder for graduation speeches. But if we want to preserve this audaciously idealistic mission of bringing the liberal arts to the masses, we have to start from where we are.
The alternative is to recreate the economic segregation of our neighborhoods in our colleges. And that would be a loss for everybody.
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