Ask the Administrator: Ph.D. or Industry?

An ambitious new correspondent writes:

I have taught or tutored since 1998. I was an adjunct chemistry instructor for 3 years at my community college.  I have been Coordinator of Divisional Planning (read assistant dean) for my division for 1 year.  I work with program coordinators and department chairs on student learning outcomes, program review and improvement, marketing/ PR, hiring, accreditation documents, room scheduling, collaborations with outside organizations, advisory boards, professional development, student appeals, student engagement activities, and other duties as assigned.  I am the go-to person between our division and both HR and Institutional Effectiveness.  Through my work on student learning outcomes, I even developed a very specific process for writing strong uses of results that I have submitted for presentation at a CC conference.  This position is a part-time position with no prospect of becoming full-time within the next 3 years. My dean has been a phenomenal mentor.  About 6 months ago he encouraged me to start exploring the option of becoming a CC dean.  Since that time I have spoken with my VP of instructional services and another CC dean about what steps I needed to take to make that happen.  My VP had the most specific recommendations.  He said that the biggest holes in my resume were in direct supervision and budgeting and lack of a PhD in higher ed administration.  The other CC dean said that in order to get faculty buy-in as a dean I needed to follow the traditional path and hold a full-time position in a CC. Although my dean actively seeks out opportunities to help me build my skill set, my current position has 2 very real limitations: no opportunity for direct supervision and it is part-time with little hope of being made full-time within the next few years. I understand that the traditional path to deanship is full time faculty, program coordinator, department chair, dean.  Your blog and my own conversations have confirmed that.  My VP said that he felt confident that I could move directly to department chair based on my teaching experience and current role.  My dean feels that I can move directly into a dean position. Out of the blue, I was offered a manager position in customer service and HR for a medical device manufacturing company.  It would offer me the supervisory and HR experience that I am lacking, and the pay increase would allow me to go back to school to get my PhD in CC Leadership. It is even within my general field of expertise.  However, the experience would not follow the traditional CC dean path. My dean recommended that I take the position, but also suggested that I run the information by as many others as possible to get their perspectives.  He said that I could remain employed in his office, he would funnel projects my way to keep my foot in the door, and that anything that is required for the PhD, he would make sure that I could do at my institution.  My dean said that although he followed the traditional path, he felt that his resume lacked the industrial experience that would have been particularly helpful when working with advisory boards and writing grants. So here is my question: Is it better to keep my current administrative position in the hopes that a dept chair or dean position becomes available in my area or is it better to pursue a degree, fill the gaps in my experience and hope that someone will consider me for a CC dean position?

This is a good problem to have.  You’ve impressed people enough that they’re trying to figure out ways to keep you around and move you up the ladder.  But you have to choose which ladder you want.

For the record, it’s simply not true that you need a doctorate in community college leadership to be a dean.  It’s one route, but hardly the only one.  At my college, for example, none of the deans has one. They all have degrees in disciplines they’ve taught.

Deans come in different flavors.  The traditional dean of an academic division typically has full-time faculty experience, and a Master’s or higher in an academic discipline taught in that division.  Your chemistry degree covers that, though your teaching experience thus far has been mostly adjunct.

But there are also deans of planning and assessment, for example.  (They’re also sometimes called deans of institutional effectiveness.)  From what you’ve written, it looks like you’re on a fast track for something like that.  (Sometimes they’re called “directors.”)  In a role like that, you may or may not have much supervisory responsibility, but your purview extends across the entire college.  Being the assessment officer for a college gives you a key role in maintaining regional accreditation -- no small thing -- and it exposes you to the entire institution in ways that divisional deanships typically don’t.  

So I’d suggest that it really comes down to what you want.  If you want the traditional deanship of an academic division, then I’d strongly encourage you to try to find a full-time faculty slot.  (Sometimes cc’s will hire people directly as department chairs, if nobody among the incumbents wants to deal with it.  Selling your administrative experience could work in your favor.)  Get some exposure to the culture of full-time faculty and to the daily realities of their world.  After a few years, you’ll be in much better shape, even without a doctorate.

But if you like the assessment focus and the collegewide scope it gives you, you’re pretty well positioned already.  

Other than salary -- which if you need it right now, settles the question -- I’m not sure what some years in industry will give you at this point.  It makes a world of sense if you want to have a career in industry, but in terms of moving a community college academic career forward, I don’t see it.  Management in a for-profit company is wildly different from management in a community college -- longtime readers have probably seen me hit that note once or twice -- and I don’t see it buying you much extra credibility.  Even the “but it could pay for my doctorate” note sounds a little off, since typically the dissertations for programs like that consist of fieldwork at one’s home institution.  If you don’t have a home academic institution, you’ll have a hard time doing the work.

One admin’s perspective, anyway.  I’m sure folks in different contexts have different angles on this, so I’ll open it up.  Wise and worldly readers, what say you?  Does one path seem clearly more likely to succeed than the others?

Good luck!

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

The Long View

In a fit of responsibility, our budget guy did some projections five years out.  Simply put, the gap is growing quickly, and it’s not likely that the state will pony up anything close to enough to fill it..

It was a sobering exercise.  

Students are currently the single largest revenue source, which was never supposed to be true for a community college.  But enrollments are down from their 2009 peak, and the number of high school grads in our service area is projected to continue to decline for the next several years.  Even with thoughtful outreach to adult students, and some pickup of economic exiles from some higher-priced places, it looks like flat enrollment is the best case scenario.  And while our tuition and fees are still quite low relative to our area, nobody sees double-digit percentage increases as sustainable over time.  There comes a point at which the students are carrying all they can carry.

We don’t control what the state gives, so assuming substantial increases in state aid would just be irresponsible.  That’s not to say we wouldn’t welcome it -- bring it on! -- but that we can’t count on it.  And it’s not like political advocacy is any guarantee of success.

The college gets some revenues from non-credit offerings, which encompass both personal enrichment classes and workforce training.  We intend to continue to grow those, but they tend to be somewhat unpredictable from year to year.  The same holds true of room rentals to outside groups.  The gym charges community members and employees for memberships, and that can probably go up a bit, but it’s hardly a game-changer.  Bookstore revenues help, but with students going online more, the bookstore is likely exhausted as a source of growth.  As a community college, sports are not a revenue source.

Philanthropy is of limited benefit, since we aren’t allowed to use it for operating expenses.  It helps some with construction and capital (like microscopes), but we can’t use it for salaries.  And labor is, by far, the largest cost item in the budget.

Grants can help in some areas, but they’re typically of limited duration, they bring high administrative costs, and in most cases they can’t be used for operating expenses outside narrowly defined grant activities.  (For federal grants, they actually have prohibitions on “supplanting” existing college resources.  Put differently, that means that any money can’t be used for what you would normally use money for.  That tends to limit the usefulness a bit.)

We’ve already plucked much of the low-hanging fruit.  We used stimulus funding to improve energy efficiency on campus, lowering utility bills ever after.  We’ve shed administrators.  Our adjunct percentage is already plenty high enough.  

Online courses may help, since they continue to show growth and the infrastructure costs are minimal.  Annoyingly, though, we’re at the point at which continued growth of online offerings will bring increased costs, since we’ll have to start developing more robust online processes and services to serve students who don’t come on campus.  (Right now, the vast majority of our online students are also onsite, just using online to make their schedules friendlier.  That’s pretty normal for community colleges nationally.)  Recruiting students who never set foot on campus will require much more than manual workarounds.

We’re experimenting with various ways to improve student success, and there’s a reasonable argument that we may get some small financial benefit from improved retention.  But unless we’re willing to jack tuition up to levels that actually cover full cost, that won’t save us.  And most retention efforts cost money.

I intend to beat the bushes locally for ideas, hoping to find something, but experience tells me that faculty proposals tend to involve spending more money, not less.  

The alternative to raising revenues, of course, is to cut costs.  That’s the default path, and we’ll almost certainly continue to have to do some of that.  But the point of “access” is access TO something.  If the education has been watered down, what’s the point of having access to it?  If we want to maintain quality -- or, preferably, improve -- we’ll need to raise revenues.  

So in good Gen X fashion, I’m crowdsourcing it.  Wise and worldly readers, have you seen a public college come up with an effective way to raise revenues without compromising quality or just jacking up costs for students?

Thoughts on a Day of Higher Ed

My IHE blogger colleague Lee Bessette has tagged April 2 as a “day of higher ed,” complete with twitter hashtag #dayofhighered.  The idea is to share with the general public just what it is, exactly, that those of us in higher ed do all day.  

It’s a neat idea.  Last week’s Washington Post column about how underworked professors are certainly invited a fact-based rebuttal, and the idea of generating a slew of first-person responses has a certain appeal.  

That said, though, there are limits to what I can share about my day.  Too much of it involves dealing with sensitive topics -- personnel issues, emerging grant applications, that sort of thing -- or issues that sort of bubble under the surface for a while, any one of which could erupt on any given day.  I can share that at this point, I have four meetings scheduled for a total of five and a half hours -- pretty normal for a Monday -- and will spend a good chunk of the rest of the time preparing for some job interviews I’m conducting later this week.  I will also tend to a few simmering issues that require attention soon, though some of them may slip into Tuesday.  And of course, the unknown unknowns -- usually couched in the form of “got a minute?” --  are always out there.

Then there’s the family stuff.  Up at 5 to work out before work.  Later, Mondays bring the kids’ music lessons, and The Girl’s softball practices have started.  Homework, the bedtime shuffle, blogging.  And that book deadline is looming ever larger...

In my faculty days, I occasionally wondered just what it was that administrators did all day.  (I say “occasionally” because I didn’t usually give it much thought.)  I’ve tried conveying some of it through the blog, but some of it is just too sensitive or context-specific to be bloggable.  Transparency is great, but discretion and even confidentiality have their place, too.  

I’ll be reading other folks entries on higher ed day with interest, not least because the world of a community college and the world of, say, a research university are so very different.  But also because it strikes me that the next step would be looking at ways to change what we do for the better.  

If enough people participate, we’d have the raw material to do some serious reflection.  

Ultimately, the winning response to the nagging cultural suspicion about academics not working hard enough isn’t “do, too!”  It’s winning over the culture with a display of value that counts in terms that most people find understandable and important.  If the kind of testimony offered during higher ed day helps spur that discussion internally so that we can make a better case for ourselves externally, then it’s all good.

So readers, have at it.  If you’re on twitter, I’ll see you there.  If not, pick the venue that works for you.  But if you’re in higher ed, just what do you do all day?

All You Can Learn?

A few days ago I mentioned that the credit hour must die, and several readers asked for clarification.  (In a Leslie Neilsen voice: “Death is the end of life.  But that’s not important right now.”)  

Now I see that a new for-profit, New Charter University, is trying to kill the credit hour.  I have to admit being fascinated.

As the Chronicle tells it, New Charter charges students a set fee per month as a sort of membership.  As long as their membership is current, students can take as many or as few courses as they want at any given time.  The courses are offered online -- “taught” might be too strong a word -- and students can move through modules at their own pace.  When they’re ready, they take exams.  As they accumulate something like credits, they move toward a degree.  (The article mentions that NCU isn’t regionally accredited at this point, so the degree may not count for much, but I anticipate the accreditation coming.)

It sounds like a wonderful setup for older, self-directed students who have significant life experience but lack paper credentials.  The beauty of it is that students who already know certain parts of courses can just blast through them and spend more time on the parts that require actual effort.  And since it’s self-directed and asynchronous, there’s no issue of transportation, work hours shifting, or the various stuff of life that makes showing up consistently in the same place and time for fifteen weeks a challenge.

Put differently, even if students earn “credits,” they don’t need “credit hours.”  The unit of time has been broken.  If you can blast through a basic course in ten hours instead of the prescribed forty-five, good for you -- your efficiency isn’t punished.  Conversely, if you need a hundred hours, well, hell, they’re your hours.  Take what you need.  Instead of failing after forty-five and retaking all forty-five -- including the parts you already mastered -- you can just take the time you need and get it right.

In a way, it seems like an obvious thing to try.  But ask any experienced administrator why we don’t, and we’ll all give the same answer: financial aid.  The entire financial aid system is based on credit hours which, in turn, are based on clock time.  And rather than getting away from that as distance education has rendered clock time less relevant, they’ve actually tightened the screws on clock time in light of perceived abuses in the for-profit sector.  NCU’s breakthrough is to skip financial aid altogether.  You put cash on the barrel every month, and it’s all you can learn.  How you get the cash is your problem.

*headdesk*

To recap: productivity refers to value divided by time.  When your value is denominated in units of time, your productivity can never increase, by definition.  (Its cost can and will inflate, but that’s not the same thing.)  Public colleges -- those designed to serve people who may not have much money -- are legally forbidden to increase their productivity.  But for-profits can, as long as they skim only the student population that doesn’t need financial aid.  In other words, the sector that most needs to innovate is forbidden to do so, while its growing for-profit competition can barrel ahead without compunction or restriction.  And while the publics experience a pincer movement of flat productivity, increased costs, and decreased state support, the for-profits charge more than their cost of production and plow some of the proceeds into marketing, all the better to skim the students who aren’t constrained by financial aid.

*headdesk*

The credit hour must die.  As someone who is dedicated to public higher education, and who believes strongly that the publics will be worth saving only if they stay good enough to attract people who have other options, I don’t like where this leads.  If we’re going to compete, we’re going to need to be free to experiment.  And we’re going to need the financial aid rules, union contracts, state regulations, and regional accreditation agencies to adjust, to let us do that.  They all assume the credit hour as traditionally understood, and they have the cumulative effect of tying us to an anchor.  No wonder we struggle to stay afloat.

I don’t know if NCU will work, but it’s trying some of the right things.  I’d love to see the publics free to experiment like that without forcing students to go without financial aid, but we’re not there yet.  Maybe, just maybe, a high-profile success in another sector will finally break the logjam.

So good luck, NCU.  I hope to be able someday to adapt some of your innovations to a setting that’s also based on access and fairness to everyone.  Preferably while the change is still voluntary.

Ask the Administrator: Getting Your Discipline Noticed

A new correspondent writes:

I am an adjunct instructor at a large, urban university and I'm very happy with my job - this spring will mark the end of my third year here. Every so often a student approaches me to express their desire to switch their major to my discipline (anthropology) and I have to tell them we do not offer it as a major or minor. My classes are only on the books in order to enrich the actually existing majors of sociology and criminal justice, and because my department chair (sociology) sees that I'm doing a good job and genuinely likes me.

This was not always the case. In the recent past, say 10-15 years ago, the university had two full-time faculty in my discipline and offered the major. Then, in quick succession, one retired and the other suddenly died. Rather than bring those lines back the program was shuttered. Now there's just intro classes and adjuncts, and that's about it. Every time someone asks me how they can take more classes in my subject I wish I could tell them there was something we could do to bring the major back.

Is there any hope for getting my university to expand its commitment to my admittedly esoteric discipline? My classes are popular and pique students' curiosity, but they have to go to another institution to study it more. Is there an appropriate way to bring that popularity to the administration's attention?


It’s a great question, because it gets to the heart of what the institution chooses to support.  And it shows a basic flaw in “shared governance” as it’s usually understood.

Most community colleges below a certain size have to make some difficult choices about which majors to support (or combine).  Those choices tend to reflect transferability and/or employability, enrollments, historical commitments, what was hot in the fat years, the availability of external funding, and incumbent employee preferences (both faculty and administration).  It doesn’t usually reflect the academic merit of one course of study as against another, since that varies so greatly depending on who’s measuring.

That may sound cold and offensive in the abstract, but when you get to cases, it makes sense.  Okay, you’re in charge of allocating faculty positions this year, and you have one to give to a department that makes a good proposal.  You get impassioned arguments from both photography and anthropology.  Quick, which has more academic merit, and how do you know?  

It’s a remarkably difficult question to answer with any level of confidence.  (And heaven help the administrator who explains to an incumbent department that its program lacks academic merit!)  But you could look at enrollment data, transfer/employment data, and external funding; those are all much easier to defend, if need be, and they speak to the ability of the college to sustain the program over time.  It’s easy to caricature that as “corporate” or “soulless,” but I think of it as an expression of epistemological humility.

For a major that doesn’t currently exist as a major, it’s usually not enough to say that the course of study is inherently worthwhile, or even that some students have asked you about it.  You should be able to show not just demand -- though that’s certainly helpful -- but also what problem you’re solving.  If your college already offers a sociology major, what would an anthropology major give the students that they don’t already have?  Could they transfer to a four-year college and major in anthro if they majored in sociology at your cc?  If so, what would your proposed major give them that they don’t already have?

Shared governance, as usually understood, is premised on the idea that the incumbent faculty are in charge of curriculum, and the administration handles the budget.  But the two categories are hard to separate when it comes to new program development.  And when incumbent employees vote and prospective ones don’t, there will be a pronounced tendency to direct resources to where they already are.  A new program that can draw entirely on faculty who are already there is an easy sell, but one that would require existing departments to forego badly-wanted hires in favor of something entirely new is harder.  There’s a conflict of interest to overcome.  It can be done, but it’s harder.

The few successful cases I’ve seen have either involved entirely new technology or belated recognition of massive external economic forces.  It’s not immediately obvious to me that either would apply in the case of anthropology as such.  But you might be able to work with sociology to hitch a ride with something else.  Could you develop a course that might be of particular interest to allied health majors?  Maybe something with human services?  Sometimes a program can develop organically simply by becoming the common denominator among disparate areas.  But there’s no guarantee of success, and it’s a hell of a lot of work.

Sorry to be a downer, but that’s how it looks from here.  

I’d love to hear from my wise and worldly readers on this one.  Is there a better way to raise your discipline’s profile within the institution?  Have you found a more effective route?

Good luck!

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

Ask the Administrator: The Non-Academic President

A new correspondent writes:

I work at a comprehensive community college.  The president has announced his retirement and a search committee is being formed.  Several of the faculty and staff have mentioned nominating a candidate who might be a great fit for the position, but he has no graduate degree and limited direct experience in higher education.  His experience in other areas, however, makes him attractive.  He has served in elected state offices and on a number of educational boards and committees and has a history of supportive relationships with higher education in general and the college in particular.  He certainly possesses some of the managerial skills necessary to do the job and brings some unique qualifications to the table.  While his lack of driect experience is certain to be objectionable to some, his pro higher education history and reputation are likely to favorably influence others. Is it critical that a president come from the academic ranks?  What problems might we expect to encounter during the hiring process?  What issues have others encountered working for a president from outside the profession?

I’ll open by noting that region matters.  In my neck of the woods, a candidate without a graduate degree of some sort would be a non-starter.  That may or may not hold in your area, depending on regional accreditation requirements and local culture.

Assuming no bright-line rule from the accreditors, the trustees, or the state, the question would be what the likely challenges are.

Community college presidencies are at an inflection point.  The average age of a community college president in the US is 61 and climbing.  The cohort that moved into community colleges during the great growth period is aging out, but the bench behind them is often thin.  Historically, the most common “feeder” job for new presidents was chief academic officer – usually called either an academic vice president or a provost – but the average age there is climbing, too, and surveys suggest that fewer CAO’s want presidencies than was once the case.  Those two developments suggest that more presidents will come from other places.

And that’s not necessarily bad.  Presidents’ jobs have become much more about external relations – community, philanthropic, and political – than they once were.  (That’s a major reason that fewer CAO’s see the appeal.)  Someone who can work those relationships well, such as your preferred candidate, stands a decent chance of being successful at the role as it has evolved. 

The major issue will be with the faculty on academic issues.  It’s one thing to be broadly supportive of education; it’s quite another to understand academic culture and the needs and fears of faculty.  Many faculty will fear – with some warrant – that a president whose major focus is financial or political will neglect academic matters, or sell them out to the highest bidder with the best of intentions.  (That’s remarkably easy to do.) 

My advice to a candidate who fits the profile of your candidate would be to establish, quickly, a strong provost system.  Keep or appoint a provost with unimpeachable academic credentials and a solid sense of academic culture, and then back the provost fully.  If the entire college understands the president/provost relationship as similar to a CEO/COO relationship, and they trust the provost, it could work.  But a non-academic president who isn’t humble or self-aware enough to hire his weakness will run aground quickly through tone-deafness.   Faculty culture is a creature unto itself; at some level, either you get it or you don’t.  And even if you do, lacking the credentials will mean you start with a strike against you. 

That’s my sense of it, though I can’t claim to have seen every case.   Wise and worldly readers, have you seen cases where this kind of president has succeeded?  Or is this ultimately a fool’s errand?

Good luck!

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

Connecticut Goes for Broke

Several alert readers sent me links to this piece from the Hartford Courant.  Apparently, the Nutmeg state is considering abolishing standalone remedial courses in community colleges altogether, starting in 2014.  They’ll allow colleges to replace them with “as needed” remediation offered in the context of credit-bearing courses.

I have to admire the chutzpah, though I haven’t a clue how it could work.  I’ll be following the experiment with considerable interest.

The rationale for the change is hard to dispute.  Apparently, Connecticut community colleges statewide have a four-year graduation rate of 13 percent, which is low even by sector standards.  (To be fair, with the exception of Alaska, there’s a nearly inverse relationship between four-year graduation rates by state and two-year graduation rates by state.  It’s about the student population finding its way into each sector.)  

It wasn’t long ago that Connecticut centralized control of its community colleges.  Now it’s considering the kind of broad strokes that centralization makes possible.  That can be very good, or it can be disastrous.  In this case, possibly both.

The upside is clear.  Graduation rates -- or even just rates of making it to 100-level classes -- are not good for students who start in developmental courses.  Students who have more than a semester of developmental work do particularly badly.  Research from the CCRC suggests that the drivers of poor outcomes are a combination of a greater number of possible exit points -- the longer it takes, the more time for life to get in the way -- and the incredible demotivating effect of being told that nothing you’re doing really counts.

But I’m having trouble envisioning the logistics of it.

Let’s say you have 30 students in a section of English 101.  20 of them require some level of remediation, but the levels required range from just-a-brushup to here’s-how-to-write-a-sentence.  As near as I can figure, at the end of the 101 meeting, the ten students who don’t need remediation would leave, and the 20 left behind would get some sort of attention.  

The instructor would need absolutely heroic range to reach all of those students at appropriate levels.  Alternately, if you had multiple sections running simultaneously, the followup classes could be grouped by ability, but at that point in the absence of a lockstep curriculum in 101 you’d have serious discontinuity issues.  That would defeat much of the pedagogical gain that could otherwise be realized through just-in-time remediation.  Or you could do a lockstep curriculum, but that would likely be pretty demoralizing to the faculty.

Alternately, you could do drop-in remediation and rely on students to know what they need and when they need it.  But I’d strongly advise against it.  As Kay McClenney likes to say, students don’t do optional; if they aren’t forced into the extra help, they’ll underuse it, and the fail rates will reflect that.

However Connecticut engineers it, I’d advocate giving serious thought in advance to how they would define success.  Comparing pass rates of the “new” English 101 to the previous 101 will almost certainly suggest terrible failure, since the previous one featured only those students who had already made it through (or bypassed) remediation.  The relevant measures, I’d think, would include success rates in the followup course (Composition 2, say), graduation, and measures of student outcomes on defined learning objectives.  Even if the pass rates in 101 are abruptly lower than they once were, they may still be higher than the combined pass rates of two semesters of remediation plus 101.  Ultimately, if more students make it into comp 2, you’ll know it “worked.”

If I were advising Connecticut -- Nutmeg state readers are invited to pass this along to whomever -- I’d suggest having some campuses try the new system while other ones stick with the old one.  Do that for a few years, then compare the results.  If you see a significant improvement, finish the shift; if you see a significant decline, revert to the status quo ante.  Centralization doesn’t have to mean standardization.  This is a chance to run a wonderful experiment with national implications.  Otherwise, it’s just another state-level policy change.

Good luck, Connecticut.  It’s a brave move.  I’ll be curious to see if it’s bold or foolhardy.

Fish? Check. Barrel? Check.

So the interwebs were abuzz this weekend with discussions of an editorial in the Washington Post arguing that professors are vastly overpaid relative to their work, and that their relative laziness is a primary driver of the higher ed cost spiral.

The usual suspects responded with the usual flurry of attacks.  Several pointed out that the Post is owned by the Kaplan company, which also owns a host of for-profit colleges.  Predictably, there were plenty of “not me!” statements, assertions of superhuman workweeks, and ritualistic denunciations of “administrative” costs.  

As is usually the case in straw man conflicts, neither side really got to the heart of the matter.  The op-ed completely whiffed on causality, and the major objections whiffed on relevance.

The op-ed purported to condemn academic labor costs, yet it never mentioned adjuncts.  That’s a remarkable omission, especially at the two-year level.  And while it addressed salaries -- which have gone up in the low single digits annually at best for a long time -- it never mentioned benefits, the costs of which have gone up far faster.  (As long as that’s true, the gravitational pull towards adjuncts will be hard to fight.)  

It also took a number of stupidly cheap shots.  Measuring faculty workload solely in terms of classroom time is like measuring athletes’ workload based on how long the event takes.  By that measure, sprinters are the laziest people on earth -- they work only seconds per day!  The idea that a 5/5 load equates to a fifteen hour workweek is true only if you assume no preparation or grading.  (Having taught that load myself, I can attest that the assertion is pure crap.)  If there’s a real issue here, it’s the mismatch between what’s good for the organization and what it chooses to reward.  Because in the system we have, there’s often very little incentive for the professor to do more than the bare minimum.  Many do, to their personal credit, but those that don’t, don’t really face consequences for it.  

Which begins to get at the actual issue.  The higher ed cost spiral has outpaced inflation at every level of higher ed, in every institutional type, in every region of the country, for decades.  To attribute that to personal failings is preposterous by definition.  Clearly, the cost issue is structural.

Some have claimed that “administrative bloat” is the heart of the problem.  (This tends to be the favorite whipping boy on the interwebs.)  Never mind that this assertion has been empirically discredited, or that the “supervisory” ranks in colleges have shrunk even faster than the full-time faculty ranks.  The only actual growth has been in IT, services for students with disabilities, and financial aid.  Firebrands are invited to explain which of those they’d cut.

Although I find the “administrative bloat” canard both offensive and tiresome, the real problems with it are twofold.  First, it’s simply false.  (I like to think that matters.)  Second, it’s politically tone-deaf.  College administrations are the people whose job it is to manage college budgets.  Painting administrations as bloated and incompetent will push legislators in exactly one direction: cutting budgets.  Would you entrust growing sums to people who don’t know what they’re doing?  If we want to encourage more generous appropriations -- which I’d think we would -- the first thing to do is stop disparaging the folks who would manage the money.  That’s Politics 101, and I’m still amazed at the number of intelligent people who don’t see it.

So if the real issue behind the cost spiral isn’t faculty laziness or administrative bloat, what is it?  Is it climbing walls?  (Most cc’s, mine included, don’t have them.)  Is it football?  (Ditto.)  Lavish dorms?  (Ditto again.)  

Is it financial aid?  Has financial aid loosened the sense of fiscal responsibility on college campuses?

That has a certain first-blush appeal to it, but it flunks the comparison test.  The health care cost spiral hasn’t been hampered by over fifty million Americans lacking health insurance.  Remarkably, the veterinary health care cost spiral has been similar, despite the almost entire absence of pet insurance.  (It’s also hard not to notice that single-payer health care systems have much lower costs overall, which is the opposite of what the “external payer hurts discipline” theory would predict.)  The “Pell is the Problem” theory also completely fails to explain the rise of private lending, which covers the increasing amounts that subsidized aid won’t.  

So no, that’s not it.  I’ll boil it down to two.

The first, which is easy to explain, is cuts in public appropriations.  My own college gets about five million per year less from the state than it got four years ago.  (That’s over ten percent of its total budget.)  That’s before adjusting for inflation.  In many other states, it’s considerably worse.  You simply cannot remove that much money that quickly without consequences.

The only problem with this theory is that while it’s unassailable in explaining the last few years, it isn’t as strong in explaining the preceding decades.  Yes, the recent fiscal sinkhole matters, but tuition went up fast during better years, too.

The longer-term issue is productivity.  And no, that’s not a euphemism for “you’re too lazy.”  It’s simply to say that if you continue to measure learning in units of time, and those units don’t change, then your productivity increases will forever be zero, by definition.  When the rest of the economy grows a few percent per year for decades, the gap compounds.  It’s called “Baumol’s cost disease,” and it’s endemic to education and health care.  And that’s true whether the professors or doctors are lazy, conscientious, or even heroic.  It’s not about them.

I have to admit being of divided mind on this one.  Long-term, I’m convinced that the only way to break the spiral is to break free of time-bound measures.  The credit hour must die.  But in the short term, no amount of innovation is likely until we get sustainable operating budgets on the political side and some room to move on the legal side.  As long as we’re stuck fighting rearguard battles externally -- and dodging circular firing squads internally -- we’ll continue down the path we’re on.  

That’s a lot harder than pointing at some lazy professor and laughing, or pointing at some insipid op-ed and sneering.  It requires a thoroughgoing reconstruction of the core of what we do.  That’s not sexy, or easy, or fast, or cheap.  But unlike shooting fish in a barrel, it’s actually worth doing.

Friday Fragments

Note to software/hardware vendors: if you want to make the case that what you’re selling will overturn teaching and learning as we know them, don’t do so with a four-hour lecture.

I’m just sayin’.

----------

A rare “bravo!” to Colorado for considering legalizing a multiyear contract system for college faculty.  The only way we’re going to move to sustainable fairness is to get away from the Manichean tenure/adjunct dichotomy.  Here’s hoping the idea starts making its way East.

----------

The Girl demonstrated some unnerving ingenuity last week.  We stopped for ice cream in celebration of The Boy’s terrific school conference, and TG had a cone.  She poked a hole in the side of the cone, about an inch up from the bottom, and stuck her straw in it.  Then she started sucking the melting ice cream through the straw.  

Yes, dear readers, my daughter invented the ice cream bong.

I am fairly bursting with pride.

----------

You read that your local community college has a 25 percent graduation rate.  Leaving aside the crimped definition of ‘graduation rate’ that has become the industry standard -- in which students who transfer elsewhere before finishing, then finish there, count as dropouts -- does it then follow that if you enroll there, you have a 25 percent chance of graduating?

No.  

If you don’t understand why that is, please don’t write articles and books in which you attack community colleges.  Because you literally don’t know what you’re talking about.

Hint: different demographic niches of students graduate at very different rates.  Different majors graduate at different rates.  Students who intend to graduate do so at much higher rates than those that don’t.  The overall institutional number is the average of all of those.  But you aren’t.

----------

Great Moments in Parenting: The Boy is casting about for this year’s science fair project.  He’s trying to come up with some sort of renewably-powered engine.  Conversation ensues:

TB: Wouldn’t it be cool if I could make a car that runs on poop?

TW: Or maybe one that runs on Daddy’s farts!

DD: They are renewable.

TB: No, that’s a fossil fuel.

DD: I am not a fossil!

----------

Of course, to a ten-year-old, I am a fossil.  Sometimes I forget.

Mandatory Moodle?

Should every professor on campus be required to use the college’s LMS system, whether they’re teaching online or not?

Lasell College in Massachusetts is trying that.  It’s requiring its entire faculty to use Moodle.  (I have to admit scratching my head at the headline: “getting its money’s worth.”  Moodle is free.)  The story doesn’t actually give a reason, so the reader is left to guess.

Off the top of my head, I could come up with a few:

- Disaster preparedness.  When snow days or other natural disasters strike, you can minimize disruption to classes by having a robust online presence.  If students are capable of shifting to online mode when classes can’t meet physically, then you have improved the continuity of instruction.

- Reducing printing and photocopying costs.  

- Speeding the development of entirely-online curricula.

- Ensuring/improving accessibility for students with disabilities.

- Nudging curmudgeons to retire.

I can’t imagine getting away with something like that here.  

The boundaries of where administrative jurisdiction ends and individual faculty jurisdiction begins aren’t always clear or obvious in online classes.  With traditional classes, certain rules are clear.  The administration selects the time, days of the week, and location of the course, and the instructor does the content.  So if you have, say, a Math 101 class on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 10 in room 144, the content the professor chooses to fulfill the goals of the course fall under that professor’s academic freedom.  But if the professor just decides one day to switch the location and time to something more personally convenient, the administration has the right to put the kibosh on that.  Students build schedules around expectations, and there’s a finite number of classrooms to go around.  The traffic cop function -- this class meets here and that class meets there -- properly belongs to administration.

With online classes, it isn’t that easy.  We’ve had cases in which a professor who teaches in, say, Blackboard at another local college doesn’t want to learn Moodle for us; in those cases, we’ve taken the position that the LMS is analogous to the classroom.  It’s where instruction happens.  If you teach online for us, you use the LMS we use.  That way we can be sure that we can provide technical support and ADA compliance, and students don’t have to learn different systems for each class.

But to my mind, there’s a difference between saying “all online classes must use Moodle” and saying “all classes must use Moodle.”  The former strikes me as reasonable and sometimes even necessary, but the latter seems like a stretch.  

The way to go, I think, would be to make the universally-relevant parts of the LMS ridiculously easy to adopt.  Putting up the syllabus means not having to bring spare copies with you all the time for students who lose theirs.  Having a quick way to contact every student at once comes in handy for days the instructor is absent.  Give faculty a way to get some of the low-hanging fruit with minimal effort -- there’s always some, but it’s getting easier -- and over time, I suspect, most will.  

That said, I’ll admit being intrigued.  Wise and worldly readers, what do you think?  Would it make sense to require some sort of standard online presence for every class?

Fear, Blame, and Financial Aid

Some stories have deeper roots than others.

This story is about a change to Federal financial aid policy that’s taking effect July 1.  At that point, no new students can receive financial aid -- or from what I’ve been told, could even pay their own way if the college itself is financial aid eligible -- to attend college if they don’t already have a high school diploma or a GED.  (Dual or concurrent enrollment programs are exempted.)  That means that the “ability to benefit” test will no longer work; students who show up without either a diploma or a GED have to go get one.  (Students previously admitted under ATB will be allowed to finish.)

At the same time, as an outgrowth of No Child Left Behind and the various state-based “accountability” movements, 28 states have instituted high-stakes, must-pass standardized tests that students have to pass to graduate high school and receive a diploma.  Depending on the state, students who finish the twelfth grade but don’t pass the test fall into a sort of limbo.  They’ve run out of high school, but they don’t get diplomas or GEDs.  

I don’t think the new policy was written with this cohort in mind, but it’s not a trivial-sized group. Yes, theoretically they could get GEDs, and maybe, eventually, a few will, but it’s one more hurdle, and a uniquely dispiriting one.  

Worse, Adult Basic Education programs are often oversubscribed already.  Adding a whole new client base without adding new funding -- call me cynical, but I’m not holding my breath here -- is just asking for trouble.

The punish-the-dropouts movement is colliding with the test-’em-all movement to create a cohort of students who stuck out high school until the end, only to leave without diplomas and without eligibility for a second chance in community college.  Add an underfunded ABE network and you’ve created a real problem.

Underlying the collision, I think, is a tension between a drive to punish and a need to offer second chances.  

American culture gets scarily enthusiastic about punishment.  We lead the industrialized world in incarceration rates, and still apparently feel so scared of dark people that we’re willing to look the other way when a gun nut chases down an unarmed black teenager carrying nothing but iced tea and skittles and shoots him in the chest.  We’re scared enough of women being sexual that we pass laws mandating stillbirths to be carried to term because, well, that’ll teach ‘em to have sex.  And we’re scared enough of failure that we want to believe that people who fail are somehow at fault themselves, and that failure will go away if they do.  

But that’s not how things work.

If half of the students in a given high school don’t graduate -- some drop out, others run out the clock but never pass the test -- who do you punish?  Punishing the students, which is what the new policy will do, has the undesirable effect of essentially punishing the poor for being poor.  It also leads to a loss of hope, which can lead to some awful places.  

Punishing the teachers doesn’t solve issues of student transience, unstable home lives, or suboptimal peer groups, and it virtually guarantees that good teachers will avoid those districts in the future.  Punishing principals doesn’t seem to help, judging by the “meh” effects that the charter school movement has had nationally.  

No.  We’re not going to get through this by punishing our way out.  Okay, some school districts struggle more than others; the statistics are easily available, and we all know the major variables involved.  Are we content with that, or can we find ways to help people climb out?  (Knowing that one could climb out -- even if the option is never taken -- has value.  Nothing is more dangerous than fatalism.)  Yes, eventually it would be lovely if every school did a great job the first time, nobody ever needed remediation, everyone was college-ready, and the economy was begging for new employees at all skill levels.  That would be nifty; sign me up.  But in the absence of that option, we have choices to make.

By all means, let’s work on improving the high schools.  But we have students graduating now for whom even the best improvements will come too late.  What to do about them?

Where fear and hope collide, let’s choose the second chance over the punishment.  Let’s not write off entire classes of students when they turn 18, if they even make it that far.  We need to get past the destructive and self-defeating drive to punish people who have already lost, and instead get serious about bringing the outsiders back in.  This should be an easy place to start.  Let them in.  And then let’s get serious about facing those fears.

Ask the Administrator: If I Become a Dean, Will My Faculty Colleagues Shun Me?

A new correspondent writes:

I've been thinking a lot lately about how much I do (or don't) want to move farther into academic administration.  I've been chair of my department, as well as chair of my division of my institution, but I haven't (yet) taken on a full-time administrative position.
I often see articles these days about how isolating and challenging academic leadership can be.  And I can see how being a provost / dean of faculty would significantly limit one's ability to have casual conversations with faculty colleagues, which would feel like a loss.  On the other hand, I could imagine that being in such a position would allow one to cross paths with a wider cross-section of interesting faculty colleagues, and to learn about and support their work.  What have you found the balance of these costs and benefits to be in your position?

On a related note, in a recent post you mentioned (in a slightly different context) "the need for well-prepared people to step up to handle the increasingly difficult challenges" of academic leadership.  I realize that you were paraphrasing someone else's message, but to what extent do you think there is an obligation for faculty members who might be effective administrators to at least consider taking on that role?  

I’ll take the second point first.  No, there’s no individual personal obligation to move into administration.  Some professors are absolutely wonderful in the classroom, but just don’t have the temperament for management.  (I assume that they have the intelligence.)  And that’s fine.  Part of the satisfaction of administration is knowing that you’re creating the space in which creative and independent-minded people can do their best work.  If you can enjoy, vicariously, knowing that you’re protecting the brilliant teacher, then administration might be for you.  If you need to be the one in the classroom yourself, probably best to avoid the dean’s office.

On an institutional level, though, there is a need for smart and capable people who understand the larger context of what they’re doing.  If people who understand the classroom don’t go into administration, people who don’t, will.  

In my case, self-awareness played a role.  I was a pretty good classroom instructor, but not a great one.  But I felt like I’d be much more above the average in administration, since I felt like I had a better since of the big picture than many of the people already there.  Over a decade later, that still feels right.  It’s easy enough to find other professors as good as me, if not better, but I still feel like I do better at admin than most.  In a way, it was the doctrine of comparative advantage, applied to occupational choice.  Were I a rock star in the classroom, I probably would have stayed there.  I was fine, but so are lots of other people.  I’d rather be a real asset in an admin role than a fine-but-nothing-special instructor.  That may say as much about me as it does about administration, but that’s what happened.

The first part of your question reflects something real, though it isn’t as bad as all that.  Yes, if you move into a deanship (or something similar), your rapport with many faculty will change.  Some of that is a function of stereotyping, some of different tasks, and some of different work calendars.  When I made the shift at the college where I started as faculty, I noticed quickly that some relationships changed drastically, and others very little.  

On the plus side, though, you’ll find quickly that you’ll have a certain camaraderie with other administrators, and for many of the same reasons.  They’re up against the same things you’re up against, and often at the same times.  They’re around when you’re around, and they get the same cold shoulder from some faculty that you do.  Unlike many external critics, they understand that one ‘good’ often conflicts with another, and that choices are inevitably made among flawed options in imperfect conditions with limited information.  You do the best you can, and you live with it.

The key is to remember where you came from, and why you’re there at all.  

Different people have different ways of doing that.  Getting out of the office on a regular basis is helpful.  If you’re in a setting in which administrators are allowed to teach -- I’m not, frustratingly enough -- then teaching the occasional class can keep you grounded.  To the extent you can, try to send the message -- and live by the message -- that you don’t shoot messengers; without that, you may fall prey to people telling you what they think you want to hear until something explodes.  Better to find out while you can still do something about it.

Even just reading the academic blogosphere can help.  If I ever forget how admins look to faculty, it’s easy enough to find reminders.

Finally, the farther up the food chain you go, the more isolated you can become.  Having strong outside-of-work support networks is huge.  I’ve seen people who let their work become their life; over time, they invest far too much emotional energy in trivia, just because it has to go somewhere.  Having people close to you who don’t give two hoots what you do at work can keep you sane.

Good luck!  If you’re honest with yourself, I’m sure you’ll make the right decision for you.

Wise and worldly readers, what say you?  Is there an ethical obligation for capable people to step up?  And is living in a bubble inevitable?

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