Lab Groups

In grad school, I openly envied my colleagues in the sciences.  It wasn’t the slightly higher stipends or the chance to play with cool toys, as real as both of those were.  It was the opportunity to work on a regular basis with a lab group.

In most of the humanities and social sciences, scholarly work is mostly conducted alone.  I remember being unpleasantly surprised at just how isolating graduate school could be.  Some of us routinely talked shop with each other, of course, but a combination of shared ignorance and misplaced competitiveness put limits on the usefulness of that.  

In contrast, the folks in the sciences had work groups handed to them, and they had to be able to work with each other.  When I visited my friend the chemical engineer out in California, I was immediately struck at how great it was that he and his labmates could take group coffee breaks in the middle of the afternoon.  (Later, a mathematician colleague told me that math is the process of turning coffee into theorems.  It sounded right to me.)

As an outsider, it would be easy to idealize the lab group.  As with any group of disparate, intelligent people, it can fall prey to any number of dysfunctions.  Someone is distracted, someone is a prima donna, someone gets ditzy at key moments, and egos are never entirely out of the picture; I get that.  But compared to the war of each against all that my own field took as normal, it seemed inviting.

At some level, I still carry the lab group ideal as my model of what a college could be.  At its best, it’s a group of intelligent people with different strengths working together on a shared project.  The project is experimental -- by definition -- and at the end of the day, the results of the project speak more loudly than anyone’s opinion.  Membership in the group can evolve as the needs of the task change.  Over time, the lab group makes real progress in solving the issue it has set for itself.  And all the while, the members of the group have each other to lean on.

It’s not a perfect model, but there’s a lot to be said for it.  The trick is in getting there.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen a college (or company, for that matter) do a good job of moving to a “lab group” culture?  Is there anything in particular to be sure to avoid?

Burying the Lede

(Hat-tip to Sarah Pavlus for highlighting this one.)

Sometimes I remember that we academics read differently than most people.  

Bloomberg news yesterday ran a story about the University of Phoenix, in which it reported drops in quarterly earnings and share price as a function of a drop in enrollment.  The headline reflected net income and enrollment.  But the real news was buried in the fifth paragraph:

The company is also expecting to receive a draft report from its accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission, said Gregory Cappelli, Apollo’s Chief Executive Officer, during a conference call with analysts and investors. He said the company believes it will be placed on notice, which would require follow-up reports and action.

Whoa.  In my world, that’s stop-the-presses news.  (Okay, I’m old.  What’s the internet version of stop the presses?)  The Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association is planning to place the country’s largest for-profit college on notice?  And it’s likely enough that the CEO was comfortable revealing it on a conference call with investors?

That’s huge.  That’s way more interesting than this week’s share price.

Stock prices fluctuate; it’s what they do.  But a potential loss of accreditation -- which would come after “notice,” admittedly, but that’s what the “notice” is about -- would mean a loss of eligibility for Federal financial aid.  That’s the lifeblood of Phoenix’ operation.  It literally would not survive without students having access to that money.

The rest of the story returns to the stock price, which, to my mind, is a grand exercise in point-missing.  If Phoenix were to lose its accreditation, this week’s stock price would quickly become a memory.  

The story doesn’t give a reason for North Central’s prospective notice; we’ll have to wait for the folks who understand higher ed to get in there and find that out.  

In the for-profit world, the demarcation between the regionally accredited and the rest is effectively the demarcation between major and minor league.  The few who have attained regional accreditation aren’t shy about it; they treat it as validation, which, in a way, it is.  And it’s a hunting license of considerable import.  (That was why certain for-profits spent much of the early 2000’s buying the accreditations of failing nonprofits, essentially treating them as taxi medallions.  I’m told that the accreditors eventually clamped down on that, which is all to the good.)

My hunch is that the for-profits have peaked.  Their model brought certain efficiencies -- some thoughtful, some ruthless -- but ultimately couldn’t get past the same issues that plague traditional higher education.  Convenience and occupational relevance are valid selling points, but they’re relatively easily copied.  And it’s hard to compete on price when one sector is both taxed and unsubsidized while the other is subsidized and untaxed.  Now that many publics offer online programs with vocational relevance, and at much lower cost to students, I’d expect to see some panic in the for-profits.  And since for-profits have neither endowments nor appropriations to cushion the blow from lost tuition, the fall could be hard.

There’s much more to this story, and I look forward to seeing it unfold.  I just hope that future reports don’t bury the lede quite so egregiously.

Admins as Inkblot Tests

Over the break, I had a welcome chance to catch up on my reading.  Through the miracle of Twitter -- which I think of as an annotated bibliography that self-updates in real time -- I ran across these two articles, and couldn’t help noticing how they crash into each other.

The first, by Keith Kroll, is a pretty standard lament for the good old days by an English professor.  Surveying the rise of adjunct instruction and the decline in full-time faculty jobs, Kroll concludes that the issue boils down to political will.  He calls on faculty, and prospective faculty, to “push back.”  From reading his piece, you’d think that the only reason that we don’t have the academic job market of 1966 is that deans are foolishly caught up in faddish imitation of the private sector.  I was particularly struck at the portrayal of administrators as either feckless (“leave it alone”) or evil, focused on short term cost-cutting.

The second is a more forward-looking piece by Nathan Harden, who claims that the internet will do to higher ed what it did to the music industry.  Recorded music still exists -- in many ways, it’s far more available than it has ever been -- but its economic underpinnings have changed fundamentally.  Music consumers have more and better options than ever, but both musicians and what used to be called record companies have lost revenue. (Elsewhere, I’ve read that the new model is based entirely on speculation.  Neither Pandora nor Spotify is actually profitable, but they attract investment capital based on rapid growth.)  In this version, the key story is the shift of market power from producers to consumers.

In this version, administrators are painted as the foot-dragging guardians of the status quo, defending the economic rents derived from exclusivity.  

Both visions of administrators -- everybody knows that they’re bent on the destruction of tradition, and everybody knows that they’re unthinking guardians of tradition -- have just enough evidence to be plausible.  On the “bent on destruction” side, it’s easy to point to the shift towards adjunct faculty, and a sort of chronic cost-consciousness that results in saying “no” to plenty of otherwise good ideas.  On the “guardian of tradition” side, it’s easy to point to decades of faster-than-inflation tuition increases in both the private and public sectors, as well as to construction booms among the elites.  

But evidence for one discredits the other.  If administrators were actually market apparatchiks, why do they keep raising tuition faster than inflation?  (In the free market, it’s normal to compete on price.)  Alternately, if administrators are docents of tradition, why do they keep watering it down by converting full-time positions to part-time?

What both versions capture, if only half-consciously, is that the underlying structure of higher education is under strain. Decades of Baumol’s cost disease, economic polarization, and questionable political choices have led to a series of split-the-difference decisions.  But you can’t just “push back” against time-bound measures of productivity and expect to get anywhere.  Until the 1990’s, there was no serious alternative to traditional higher education, so it was able to thrive by default.  The for-profits mounted a threat for a while.  Now MOOCs are starting to threaten.  Unlike the for-profits, MOOCs have solved the productivity problem.

I don’t think the current cohort of MOOCs will be fatal -- as the New York Times acknowledged yesterday, nobody has yet figured out a business model for them -- but they are radically different from anything that has come before them.  In this context, it’s more helpful to see many administrators as neither feckless nor evil, but instead as doing the best they can to maintain a structure that’s becoming harder to maintain.  

In my perfect world, we’d get past calls for Restoration -- those never quite work out like they’re supposed to -- and instead work on innovation.  Rearguard actions don’t lead to victory, and I’m not interested in surrender.  We need to adapt.  The critique to make of administrators isn’t that they’re backwards-looking or slaves to the market; it’s that they need to confront more deliberately the forces that drive their decisions.  And that will take the collective intelligence of faculty, staff, and administrators, all working together.

Dropping by the MLA

Last Friday I had the chance to drop by the MLA conference for the first time ever.  In my faculty days, I used to attend APSA fairly regularly; now I can sometimes be found at the League for Innovation or the AACC.  The MLA was a new one.  But between an opportunity to participate in a bloggers’ panel in the Exhibit Hall Theater and an unusually accessible location, I couldn’t turn it down.

Some observations from a social scientist and administrator, walking among humanists:

- I was struck by the number of times that different people mentioned their own colleges, both public and private, making conscious efforts to recruit large numbers of wealthy, full-freight students from China.  (One even mentioned that Brazil is offering scholarships for its students to go abroad, so that’ll be the next wave.)  The conversations usually revolved around culture clashes and English fluency, but I couldn’t help but think about what it suggested about the fiscal sustainability of the current model.  Presumably, sooner or later, other countries will have their own higher ed infrastructures.  

- Nearly every laptop at MLA was an Apple.  Given all the talk of budget constraints and two-tier wage systems, that surprised me.

- The gender balance was a lot more female than APSA.  It was almost as female as CASE, though with much darker clothing.  Make of this what you will.

- Nametag-checking is alive and well.  I had a press pass, since I was there with IHE, so people didn’t quite know what to do with that.  When I dropped by a food court for lunch, a woman behind me in line asked about the different color of my tag.  (She was a presenter.)  When I said “press,” she recoiled, as if from a bad smell.

- Apparently, they haven’t quite gotten the hang of the “Exhibit Hall Theater” concept yet.  The EHT panels weren’t included in the version of the panel schedule that people actually use, so they were pretty lightly attended.  The IHE panel on career advice, was nearly empty, despite a topic that seemed like it would attract some interest.  On the bright side, the folks who were there had a great discussion.  

- If you have an active Twitter presence, it’s fun to see avatars come to life in three dimensions.  In person, my colleague Lee Skallerup Bessette looks a lot like someone I went to high school with; I had to remind myself repeatedly not to call her “Kim.”  

- I attended a panel on “alt-ac” careers that was as interesting for its tone as for its content.  I went in expecting the usual angry admin-bashing and self-righteous invocations of imagined Golden Ages, but that really didn’t happen.  Instead, the panelists stressed -- correctly, in my view -- the range of possibilities for people who are willing to break from the script.  (Brian Croxall captured it nicely with his phrase “the transmission of possibility.”  Someone else referred to “future-proofing” the Ph.D. by supplementing the traditional research skills with skills around technology, budgeting, and even management.)  The common denominator among the various panelists was that things that had started as side projects were frequently what opened the next door.  I had to smile when someone started a sentence with “I know we all like to hate on admins, but...” -- for the first time in recent memory, I heard public acknowledgement that having administrators with real academic backgrounds can make a positive difference.  

- Obviously, there was a great deal of talk about frustrated adjunct or short-term faculty.  It was at the relatively early “consciousness-raising” stage -- lots of anecdote, almost no analysis -- but it’s a start.  At some point, I’d love to see some of these very smart people get beyond “moral suasion” as a strategy and actually look at the institutional drivers behind the trend.  (See the aforementioned rich students recruited from China.) But if the prior discussion simply didn’t exist -- which I’m told was largely the case -- then this is the start of progress.

- Despite the new focus on adjunct and labor issues, the conference had remarkably light representation from community colleges.  It also did relatively little on composition courses, and almost nothing on developmental courses. Some of that is probably a function of travel budgets -- at this level, they’re a bit spare -- and some probably reflects an informal division of labor with the CCCC.  But still, if they want an accurate picture of the institutional realities within which many of the labor issues occur, they might want to open things up a bit.

- Of course, a major function of conferences is catching up with friends and meeting new people.  I enjoyed meeting Lee, Mary Churchill, Nate Kreuter, and Serena Golden from IHE, and catching up with Scott Jaschik.  It was also refreshing to get to spend some time with my college friend Vic, who has built a formidable alt-ac career of her own.  As with the alt-ac panelists, her pattern has been a side project on job A leading to job B.  When the route up the middle is blocked, there’s no shame in a well-executed end run.  It’s a hell of a lot more fun than just hitting the wall repeatedly.  

Friday Fragments

See you in the exhibit hall theater at MLA 13 Friday at 1:30!  IHE bloggers Mary Churchill, Nate Kreuter, and I will be on the “Career Advice” panel.  I’ll offer tips for job candidates who are considering community colleges.  Any readers in the Boston area are welcome to stop by and say hi.

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Sometimes Santa hits it out of the park.

The Girl got a tent that she can put on her bed.  She immediately set up a shelf of books along one side, brought in a battery-powered lantern, and started reading.  Since Christmas, she has kept the tent up on her bed, and she has read in it every night.  I’ve even managed to squeeze in there a couple of times to read with her.  I don’t know what it is about reading and forts, but it still works.  Well played, Santa.

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Mom’s surgery went well, which was a huge relief.   My brother and I were able to tag-team staying with her, so she always had help.  In the waiting room, I got to catch up on my daytime television, which strengthened my conviction that daytime television is some sort of punishment.  Did you know Kathie Lee is still on the air?  Amazing.

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Score one for Texas.  Apparently, it’s going to provide a financial literacy class for high school students to prepare them for the college decision.  The devil is in the details, of course, but the idea makes a heap of sense.  

In my perfect world, we’d have some sort of “life economics” class in college that would teach students about amortization, and insurance, and co-pays, and compound interest, and all that good stuff.  Personal finance could make a good hook for a sociology class, say, or as part of a course on civic engagement.  The idea would be that someone who is constantly in thrall to immediate material necessity isn’t capable of taking the long view and engaging well with the larger society.  Therefore, it’s important to equip students with the knowledge to get necessity under enough control that they can have some sort of agency.  As Hegel put it, freedom is the insight into necessity; what better place to develop insight than college?

Even if this isn’t quite at that level, though, it’s a good concept.  Here’s hoping it works...

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Probably as a result of her voracious reading, TG has discovered that you can make anything sound foreboding or mysterious by appending “or is it?” (or some close variation) at the end of almost any declarative sentence.

“Dave opened the package.  Or did he?”

Now she’s doing it at dinner.  “I passed the ketchup.  Or did I?”  She can even raise her eyebrows with a theatrical flourish.

Future teachers of TG, you’re welcome.

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After his tirade this week, I officially take back every critical thing I’ve ever said about Chris Christie.  He won me over with his correct observation that when natural disasters have struck other parts of the country, Congress was quick with help.  But when the Northeast got hit, suddenly everything stopped.  It has been over nine weeks since Sandy hit, and still Congress hasn’t bothered even trying to pass aid.  

The Republicans have become an increasingly regional party, dominant in parts of the South and mountain states, but almost entirely absent in the Northeast and on the West coast.  Sometimes their regional prejudice comes out -- as in Sarah Palin’s famous quip about being in a “pro-America part of the country,” or in Mitt Romney’s claim of Michigan as his home state, even after spending four years as governor of Massachusetts -- but it’s usually just rhetorical.  Now it’s doing active harm.  

Red states get help, and blue states drown?  No.  Not okay.  The Northeast paid its share when Katrina struck, and when Ike struck, and did so without hesitation; it’s time to reciprocate.  

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According to IHE’s in/out list, I’m both “out” and “in.”  I’m Schrodinger’s Matt!

Data and Craft

I still remember the terror and thrill of having my own class to teach for the first time.

It didn’t pay much -- this was graduate school, after all -- but the autonomy was wonderful.  When I closed the classroom door, it was just me and the students.  The course had goals of its own, of course -- anyone teaching Intro to American Government has to go through “Congress is divided into the House and the Senate” whether they want to or not -- but how I got there, and how I framed much of the content, was really my call.  I went through a painful, if inevitable, bit of trial and error, but eventually found my stride.

After far too many years of being on the other side of the desk, and then a few years of t.a.’ing for some people whose styles and choices, um, let’s go with “were not my own,” I relished having the chance to do things the way I thought they should be done.  When they worked, it was gratifying beyond belief; when they didn’t, at least I had the autonomy to make a change on the fly.  That mattered.

(In administration, sometimes I miss that autonomy.  In administration, the constraints are greater, and successes tend to be partial, collaborative, and often indirect.  There’s nothing quite like the rush of a class that really nailed it.  The closest I get to that now is when a blog post really nails it.)

I thought again about that experience yesterday as I read about an appealing new project that proposes using carefully crafted analytics to improve student learning outcomes.  There’s nothing inherently sinister or silly about using documented, aggregate results to drive improvements; in most fields, that would be considered common sense.  In fact, there’s a perfectly intelligent argument to be made to the effect that evidence-driven reform is one of the most promising avenues we have for raising student achievement.  I’ve made that argument myself before, and still believe it.

But to someone in the classroom to whom autonomy is a major benefit of the job, evidence-driven reform can look an awful lot like someone else telling you what to do.  If you’re sufficiently pessimistic, it can even look like de-skilling the faculty.  Even if you don’t see it as a stalking horse for a shift from artisinal to mass production of education, it can still feel intrusive.  And to be fair, much of it is in the early stages, in which it may not be as precise as one would like.

The trick, which I’m still struggling with, is to find ways for faculty to be able to make those findings their own.  If they can draw benefit from the information without surrendering their autonomy -- a key source of new experiments anyway -- then we’ll be where we should be. In the best of all possible worlds, this kind of information would be a resource to be used for improvement.  But right now, it’s often rejected out of hand in favor of personal observation and an appeal to authority.  

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen a use of analytics or evidence-driven reform on campus that didn’t raise hackles?  If so, how did it work?  (Alternately, have you seen a de-hackling process that worked?)  Anything useful is welcome...

Barriers to Entry

My fellow IHE blogger, Lee Skallerup-Bessette, got a bit of a discussion going on Twitter over the break when she posted a real estate listing for an abandoned college campus.  In the context of adjunct activism, she proposed pulling people together to buy the campus and start their own college.

Two thoughts.

First, yes, I like the idea of trying something new from scratch.  I disagree that the first step is buying a campus, especially one that has already failed; I’d suggest coming up with the business plan first, and then deciding on a facility (or not).  But the entrepreneurial spirit strikes me as healthy and welcome.  Given the issues facing traditional institutions, it seems like a great time to try something different.

Second, though, the barriers to entry in higher ed are among the highest in any industry.  I suspect this may explain a lot.

On the employment side, of course, the primary barrier to entry is graduate school.  By consistently raising the bar on future faculty, we keep many interested people out.  We refer to the process as “having standards,” which is both true and not.  Progressively raising the barriers to entry benefits the incumbents.

But what’s unique to higher ed is the barrier to entry on the institutional side.  It’s harder to start a new college than it is to start a new law firm, medical office, store, or really just about anything.  

On the institutional side, the main barriers are accreditation and state licensing.  

Both have valid reasons.  If we assume that unscrupulous people aren’t above setting up cheesy little operations to scam money -- shocking, I know -- then it makes sense to have some sort of seal of approval that the general public can use when trying to decide whether a given college is legit.  Accreditation isn’t a perfect process, but it does serve to ensure that a given institution actually is what it says it is.  When people often aren’t in a position to make that judgment for themselves, that’s a real service.

Accreditation has become a de facto requirement for financial aid eligibility, which is a de facto requirement for a college to make a go of it.  Getting accreditation requires showing not only that a college has strong faculty and curriculum, but also that it has effective outcomes assessment, student services, financial aid, fiscal planning, fiscal resources, information technology resources, long-term planning, and more.  (City College of San Francisco, has recently discovered just how serious this actually is.) Every single one of those comes with costs, and every single one must be in place at an acceptable level before accreditation will be awarded.  In other words, anyone opening a new college had better have not only a chunk of capital for startup, but a chunk of capital to lose money for the first several years of operation.  

MOOCs and various online alternatives are trying to disaggregate the bundle of services that a college provides.  I’ve been surprised and impressed by the speed with which they’ve moved.  But at this point, they’re still very much supplemental to accredited education.  They’ve found ways to ally with existing institutions -- critics might say, to feed off existing institutions -- but they haven’t found ways to handle accreditation themselves.

In most industries, the barriers to entry for new entrepreneurs are much lower than in higher ed.  Yes, individual faculty can ply their skills in a number of places, and many have sidelines as consultants in various fields (or as adjuncts elsewhere).  But it’s much harder to set up a new college than to set up, say, a new store or a new law firm.  Starting small really isn’t an option; the resources required to attain critical mass are so substantial that very few interested people can do it.

Higher education needs to experiment with various institutional structures if it wants to thrive in the next few decades.  In practical terms, that means finding ways to make it easier for new actors to hang out shingles.  As long as most of higher ed consists of “mature” institutions, the sector as a whole will behave accordingly.  It’s more difficult -- possible, yes, but much harder -- for an institution with decades of obligations to make significant changes than it is for a newcomer.  If we want a badly-needed infusion of new ideas, energy, and approaches, we need a host of new institutions with the ability to try new things.  

We need it to be possible for Lee and her allies to start their own college.  I still wouldn’t recommend buying the campus, though.

Holiday Fragments

If you can read this, the world didn’t end.  So there’s that.

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As a gadgethead who’s also budget conscious, I’m frequently torn.  I enjoy the latest and coolest toys, but hate paying much for them.  Smartphones are the worst; they’re unassailably cool, but also stupidly expensive on a monthly basis.  (In my neck of the woods, Verizon is the only carrier with consistently reliable coverage.  Their smartphones start at 90 dollars per month and go up quickly from there.)  

But I found a workaround.  I got a used 4G tablet on ebay, and paired it with a cheap prepaid phone.  The phone handles what calling and texting I actually do -- not that much, really -- and the tablet offers the apps with a bigger screen.  The total monthly cost is about half of what I used to pay on an iphone.  Victory!

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Speaking of budgets, the second and third graphs on this page may not suggest the end of the world, but they seem to suggest the end of something.  Apparently, student loan delinquency rates are skyrocketing.  This is not good.

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Oh, sure.  This happens, and suddenly, the world ends.  That’s just great.

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For the MLA conference in January, Scott Jaschik is putting together a group of IHE bloggers on Friday afternoon at 1:30 in the exhibit hall; we’ll be discussing the academic job market from various angles.  I’ll be there to chime in from a community college perspective.  If any regular readers are in the area, I’d love to meet you.

This will be my first MLA conference; as a political scientist and then administrator, I never had much reason to attend before.  From what I hear, it’s quite the experience.  

My Dad used to attend, back in the 1970’s.  In those days -- and I think until quite recently -- it started the day after Christmas.  That was not popular on the home front.  Kudos to the MLA for eventually recognizing that some humanists have families, too.

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Speaking of hiring, the new year will bring searches for several new deans on campus, along with a host of new faculty.  The world may not be ending, but a generational torch is finally being passed.  The current crop is strong, but it will be fun to bring in the next cohort.  They’ll have plenty to do...

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The Boy and The Girl had their first major music recital last weekend.  They each had their solo moments -- TB on guitar and TG on piano -- but they also played in a band along with a drummer, another guitarist, and a singer.

If you’ve never seen a pop/rock band comprised of 8 to 11 year olds, you’re missing out.  To their credit, they didn’t have any sort of taped backup; every sound on stage was there because they made it.  They played two songs -- “Love Me Do,” and a lyrically edited version of “I’m Glad You Came,” by The Wanted -- and did it without the usual swagger and ego that pop/rock bands try to project.  The band had three girls and two boys, and it worked together supportively and sweetly.  The music sounded good, but we were especially proud of the maturity the kids showed in working together.  I know adults who struggle with that.

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Program Note: The blog will take a holiday break, so I can enjoy a holiday without deadlines.  It’ll be back on Wednesday, January 2, unless the Mayans were right.  Have a great break, everyone!

And on a Lighter Note...

The Girl tried out for a part in the church Christmas play.  The play is based on the nativity scene.

Conversation at the tryout:

Teacher: TG, are you hoping to play Mary?

TG: (deadpan) Meh.  It depends on who plays Joseph.

(pause)

Teacher: (sotto voce) smart girl.

She’s playing a shepherd.

Administration and Critique

Last week, IHE featured a story about a prominent professor at Texas Tech whose bid for a deanship was denied on the basis of his stated opposition to the tenure system.  This week, a court upheld the termination of an HR director for stating her opposition to gay marriage.  Although one case is much more sympathetic than the other, they really address the same issue.  Should administrators be allowed to raise policy objections in public?

Note here that I’m referring to policy objections, as opposed to, say, confidential personnel information, or personal attacks on co-workers.  And I’m not referring to refusal to carry out a job duty.  This is about policy objections.

I’ve thought a lot about this, for obvious reasons.  And I have to concede that I have a dog in this fight.  I like my job, and I see value in sharing my thoughts about some of what I see.  

That said, though, this isn’t just about me.   Shared governance can’t work without administrators being able to tell the truth as we see it.  Real improvements won’t happen when the very people who are the most informed about the consequences of various policies are under effective gag orders.  

Policy disagreements can be awkward, and nobody likes awkwardness.  If the big questions were broadly settled, I guess one could argue that the awkwardness isn’t worth it.  But we’re in a period of massive transition.  The 1960’s model of public higher education is becoming unsustainable, but it isn’t yet clear what will come next.  At this point, informed, vigorous, thoughtful public discussion is more important than it has ever been.  We need to hear from the people in a position to know about what happens when, say, the rules for Pell or Perkins money change.  We need to be able to discuss the virtues and, yes, the failings of both new and old ways of delivering education.  

That’s difficult in an industry on which so much is based on reputation.  In the absence of good, public information with which to compare one college to another, colleges do what they can to protect and enhance their reputations.  In some ways, they have to; a college that chooses not to will be brutalized by those that do.  There’s a market-based incentive to prevent anything resembling dirty laundry from getting out there.

But that’s a fallback position, based on an absence.  As an industry, we’d be much better off basing arguments on facts available to the public.  Which first involves getting them out there.

If we insist on muzzling policy disagreements among administrators, we’ll be left with either true believers -- those who are least capable of dealing with change, by definition -- or people working below their cognitive capacity.  Neither seems appealing.

Healthy debate can be clarifying.  I’ve had times myself when I initially disagreed with a policy, but was persuaded by arguments I hadn’t thought of.  That’s only possible when those arguments are stated and spelled out.  And the whole point of shared governance, or any decisionmaking process with a multiplicity of veto groups, is quality control.   That only works when people can actually say what they think.  If faculty have freedom to disagree and administrators don’t, then the debate will be one-sided, and therefore consigned to irrelevance.  If we want the discussions to matter, they have to be open.

Obviously, the issue would be different if a disagreement over policy became a refusal to carry it out.  That would be actionable, and rightly so.  But if someone is doing the job and doing it well, then the fact that if he had his druthers he’d do things differently strikes me as immaterial.  Given the speed with which things are changing, I see much more risk in the status quo than I do in people who are capable of seeing beyond what’s right in front of them.

The problem with any free speech argument is that it has to apply to speech that’s hurtful, asinine, and wrong.  I’d describe the homophobic HR director as falling in that category.  Her case is particularly difficult in that one could easily imagine a “hostile environment” claim relying on her comments; the same could not be said of the prospective dean who doesn’t like the tenure system.  But free speech applies not only to the wise and likable, but also to the stupid and hurtful.  It has to.  That’s how freedom works.

The etiquette issue here is real, but solvable.  My own line involves a distinction between a policy critique and a personal attack.  The former strikes me as well within bounds, and as part of a healthy public sphere; the latter strikes me as an abuse of power.  In any given case, the line can be blurry, but the basic distinction makes sense.  The rule of thumb should be that the more general the issue, the more public it can be.  If I have a problem with Ottmar, I should take it up with Ottmar; if I have a problem with a federal policy, I should be able to take it public.

Enforced groupthink is comfortable in the short term, but deadly over time.  At this point, unthinking perpetuation of the status quo is an existential threat to public higher ed in a way that some intemperate comment couldn’t be.  We need the people who know what’s actually happening to be able to say so.  Otherwise, those who don’t know will be free to spout at will, and those who know will be under gag orders.  Under those rules, what do you think will happen?

Corporate Governance, Shared Governance, and Higher Ed

The only thing scarier than higher education with administrators is higher education without them.

Last week, Lee Skallerup Bessette and Paul Fain both had thought-provoking pieces in IHE about StraighterLine and the possibility of “freelance” higher education.  It’s sort of a supply-side version of Anya Kamenetz’ DIY U.  Instead of students breaking free from the shackles of individual colleges, the idea is that faculty will break free from the shackles of individual colleges.  Absent such dead weight as institutional identity, curricula, student services, marketing departments, unions, and outcomes assessment, the theory goes, faculty will be free to capture the fruits of their labor on the open market.  Let the bureaucrats shake in their uninteresting shoes as the glorious market-based revolution restores all power to the workers.

Hmm.

Anyone with a sense of history will detect familiar echoes in this story.  

Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means anticipated much of the twentieth century American economy in their classic The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932).  Berle and Means suggested that the model of corporate governance then ascendant was a fundamentally new and different thing.  They pointed out that the rise of a distinct “managerial” class -- neither proletarian nor owner -- effected the separation of ownership from control in the modern corporation.  Stockholders owned the company, but managers ran it.  Aligning the interests of the two groups was not a trivial endeavor.

Managerial capitalism created some weird issues for theorists of the market.  When ownership is relatively dispersed among stockholders around the country, but managerial authority is centralized in a relatively small group, it becomes easy for the managers to run the company for their own benefit, rather than for the benefit of the stockholders.  And there’s a good case to be made that during the halcyon days of the American corporate economy -- call it 1946-1973 -- that’s what they did.  They bought labor peace by negotiating contracts with unions that were more generous than they strictly needed to be.  They accepted salaries much lower, proportionally, than either their predecessors or their successors.  They favored a certain stability over pure profit maximization, sometimes to the frustration of stockholders.

That arrangement started to crack in the 1970’s, and to transform in the 1980’s.  Mutual funds aggregated scattered stockholders into single voices.  “Raiders” used newly available credit to “liberate shareholder value,” which is to say, to sack existing management and replace it with people who wouldn’t be so soft on workers.  401(k)’s, stock options, and quick trigger fingers worked wonders to align management’s goals with those of stockholders, even if that meant teaming up against workers.  

Now, private sector union membership is in the single digits, and concentrated mostly in shrinking, older industries.  Median wages have been stagnant for decades, even as rewards for those at the top have skyrocketed.  And the image of the peace-seeking manager as a pillar of the community is remembered, if at all, as quaint.  

I suspect that higher education may be following a similar script, with its characteristic tape delay.

In this version, though, the management was what held together -- through carefully balanced frustration -- the centrifugal desires of students, faculty, and taxpayers.  Doing that well means annoying a lot of people a lot of the time.  Each of those groups is only vaguely aware of what the others want; what it sees more directly is those annoying bureaucrats always putting on the brakes.  Each group imagines, at some level, that it could liberate value by attacking the institution as an institution.  Call it expropriation, call it shareholder democracy, call it unbundling; it’s all the same move.  It’s all about undoing restraints on the market.

Be very, very careful what you wish for.  The market has no respect for “shared governance” or “life tenure” or “unions” or “academic freedom.”  It wants what it wants when it wants it.  Imagine three hundred different professors you’ve never heard of, each offering some variation on Intro to Psychology online, each naming her own price.  How, as an 18 year old of average talent and no special inside information, do you choose?  Until recently, you chose an entire institution, and it assigned you instructors, and advisors, and counselors.  Now, you can be on your own.  Power to the people!

If the rest of the economy is any guide, moving away from institutions will involve a much more dramatic polarization of wealth among people in the industry.  It will mean much more instability, much more cutthroat competition, and, yes, a few incredibly well-paid superstars.  It will mean much less coherence in courses of study, and an explosion of fraud.  

And I say all of that knowing full well many of the flaws of the current system.  

My modest proposal: let’s learn from the past.  We don’t have the option of simply digging in our heels and refusing to change; Kodak tried that, which is why it’s now worth less than Instagram.  But we do have the option of navigating that change actively rather than just being buffeted by it.  Taxpayers are anxious, students don’t want huge debt but do want good jobs, and employers want capable employees.  There’s validity in each of those.  If we can adapt, rather than just refuse, we may be able to thrive and to do well.  That will involve making some difficult choices, but we still have the option of making those ourselves.

Until recently, there wasn’t really an alternative to the old model, which is probably why it lasted so long.   But now there is.  Whether StraighterLine or someone else does it is beside the point; the point is that interesting and intelligent alternatives are springing up almost weekly.  

Administrators are the enemy if we think of institutions as total.  But they aren’t total.  They’re porous, and they’re fragile.  The alternative isn’t blank checks written by grateful students; it’s digital adjuncting.  We’ve seen this movie.  We can change how it ends.

Sandy Hook

We’ve stopped in Sandy Hook any number of times over the last few years, driving between Massachusetts and New Jersey.  It’s a cute little town just off route 84, about halfway between Danbury and Waterbury.  It has several good lunch places, and a lovely upscale toy store in an old house that couldn’t be any more New England-y if it tried.  Behind the toy store there’s a creek with several decks overlooking it, and if I remember right, even a mill wheel.  The last couple of times we were there, we spent more time than was strictly necessary, just because we liked it so much.

It never occurred to me that it would make national news, and certainly not like this.

From the pictures on the news, Sandy Hook Elementary looks a whole lot like TG’s school.  It has the same grades, and was probably built around the same time.  The kids who were walked through the parking lot could have been TG’s classmates.  

As a parent, there’s no way to avoid thinking like that.  It’s just too vivid.

On Saturday I took The Boy to the Lego League state championship at WPI in Worcester.  The spectator-friendly part of the event took place on a basketball court, on which teams of nine-to-eleven-year-olds ran their programmable robots through obstacle courses.  (The meet also featured closed-door judging of projects the teams designed to make senior citizens’ lives easier.  TB’s team developed a mechanism for putting on socks without bending over.)  The parents -- hundreds of us -- were careful not to mention anything in front of the kids.  But when the kids were out of earshot, most of the conversation was about the shooting.  And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit wondering about the wisdom of gathering all those kids in one easily accessed place so soon afterwards.  Anyone could walk in by just walking in.

Of course, the same could be said of shopping malls and movie theaters.  At some level, risk is just part of life.  I know enough statistics to know that mathematically, the drive to Worcester was more dangerous than the event itself.  But knowing that and feeling it are two different things.

Colleges are no strangers to these issues.  Over the last several years, they’ve started taking a more focused approach to security issues, simply because they’ve had to.  

But no single institution can become a bubble.  In a culture in which gun ownership is a right and health insurance is a privilege, some awful outcomes are probably inevitable.  In America, young men with serious issues can get weaponry more easily than they can get treatment.  That isn’t true everywhere, which is why these shootings don’t happen everywhere.

I’ll probably get accused of “politicizing” the shooting in saying that, as if periodic massacres of innocents were just acts of Nature.  But the truth is the truth.  As a parent, I’d be negligent if I didn’t try to protect my kids against mortal threats.  In this case, the mortal threat is political.  I’m tired of having to leave the newspaper face-down on the kitchen table in the morning so TG doesn’t see the latest news about people who look like her being shot dead with legal assault rifles at school.  I’m just tired of it.  If that annoys some conservative somewhere, then so be it.  I care a lot more about my kids than I do about appeasing someone who only read the second half of the second amendment.  And I’m tired of having to find just the right words to convey to an eight year old girl why a grown man would shoot his way into a school just like hers and kill children, but that she shouldn’t worry.  There are no right words for that.  The very topic is an obscenity.

Until Friday, Sandy Hook was known only as a cute little town.  Now it’s famous for a reason nobody would ever choose.  I struggled for the right words with TG, but I think I know the right words for us adults: Enough.  Enough.

Certifying Soft Skills?

“Lose the do-rag.”

A dozen or so years ago, I actually had to say that to a student who was on his way to a job interview.  It simply hadn’t occurred to him that wearing a “do-rag” (a bandana over his hair) would be a problem.  (Now, faculty tell me, similar conversations occur with young women who favor bare midriffs.)

That didn’t happen at Williams.  There, most of the students arrived with the informal folkways of the professional class already at hand, and those who didn’t, picked them up quickly.  We knew that you didn’t go to an interview in a t-shirt, or unshaven.  We knew about the handshake, the small talk, and the rule about showing up 10 minutes early.  We didn’t necessarily know how to write resumes, but we knew that they existed, that they mattered, and that we could get help from career services.  

That’s because Admissions screened for a certain cultural capital.  Students who got in, by and large, had already figured out how to succeed in mainstream institutions.  The college could pretty much assume that between what students brought with them, and what they picked up from each other in four years of close quarters, they’d know what to do on job interviews and in professional workplaces.  Students who didn’t already have the basics simply didn’t get in.

In the community college world, it’s a mistake to take any of that for granted.

That’s why I’m sympathetic with Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College’s move to start grading, and certifying, “soft skills” in its students.  It has noticed what employers have been saying for years, and has decided to stop pretending that its students just pick up those skills by osmosis.

I’ve been to more than my share of employer advisory boards over the last dozen years, at three different colleges.  They’re remarkably consistent; every time, the feedback is that we’re doing well with the specific technical skills, but that many students arrive with serious gaps in communication, presentation, and general employee conduct.  

I’m not pining for the old “finishing school” model.  This isn’t about formal state dinners or pretending to be Thurston Howell the Third.  It’s about helping students understand that being on time matters, that deadlines matter, and that there are acceptable and unacceptable ways of communicating frustration in the workplace.  (Honestly, I know some professionals who could use some brushing up on that last one.)  None of those is entirely neutral, but that really doesn’t matter; the relevant comparison is to ignorance,  not to some imagined utopia.  If students want to be successful in professional workplaces, they need to know the rules of the game.  If they aren’t brought up learning those rules at home, then they need to be taught.  And what better activity for a college than teaching?

Besides, rules change.  Ways that men in the workplace were once licensed to behave towards women are no longer okay.  Dress codes are constantly evolving.  Electronic communication brings its own set of etiquette issues.  (Hint: beware the “reply all” button.)  The odd blend of surface egalitarianism and deep hierarchy that defines many workplaces can be a minefield if you don’t know how to read it.  Learning not only what the current rules are, but why they are, and how they change, can help a student adapt when the next big shakeup comes.  

Ignoring gaps in cultural capital is not egalitarian.  Fixing them is.  A-B Tech will have to give serious thought to how it defines and measures ‘soft skills’ if it’s going to offer formal certifications, but that’s okay.  It’s a task worth doing.  The students are worth it.

When Laws Crash Into Each Other

Legislators are masters of compartmentalizing.  This law addresses this, and that law addresses that.  And much of the time, it’s possible to construct a reasonable argument for a particular decision, taken in complete isolation.

But the world doesn’t work like that.  Sometimes “this” and “that” crash into each other, and create an untenable situation on the ground.  That’s happening right now.

Two major legal trends are on a collision course, and nobody in a position to stop them seems to be talking about it.  

The first trend is a long-overdue opening up of public higher education to undocumented students who were brought to this country as children.  Depending on the age at which they came, these kids may have gone through years of American K-12 education. In other cases, their experience of the K-12 system may have been inconsistent, for various reasons.

The idea behind the opening is a recognition of the reality that someone who came here with her parents at age seven really didn’t have much say in the matter.  And making someone a lifetime pariah -- uneducable and unemployable -- is both grossly unfair and unlikely to result in good outcomes.  There’s much more to address there, of course, but the recent trend makes sense as a first step.

The second trend is a clampdown on financial aid.  For example, this summer the lifetime limit for Federal financial aid for any given student was reduced from 18 semesters (or the pro-rated part-time equivalent) to 12.  That covers all credit-bearing study.

Students with significant ESL and/or developmental needs -- such as many of the newly eligible undocumented students -- often require several semesters of work beyond the usual four for an associate’s, or eight for a bachelor’s.  They need to get up to speed in some key academic areas, and that takes time.

The idea behind the clampdown was twofold.  At one level, it’s a cost-saver that allows the Obama administration to maintain the maximum Pell award.  At another level, it’s a response to perceived abuses of financial aid in the for-profit sector.

In isolation, both the “open to immigrants” trend and the “clamp down on financial aid” trend have some rationality behind them.  (I’m much happier with the first than the second, but that’s another issue.)  But they clash pretty directly on the ground.

The message being sent to colleges is to open up more to undocumented students, but not to spend too much time teaching them English or addressing other academic gaps.

*headdesk*

Opening up and clamping down at the same time is bound to create some weird issues.  I’d expect that anyone who put the two next to each other would see that pretty fast.  But the discussions around each issue were completely independent of the other.  

As a country, we have some difficult choices to make.  But we aren’t going to make them well until we acknowledge that they exist.  These laws -- each defensible on its own terms -- are crashing into each other, and they’re doing it on campus.  I know I’m asking a lot, but it would be lovely if we could use reality-based conversations to make these decisions.  Reality doesn’t come in neat little compartments.

In Praise of Niches

This blog doesn’t address car repair, the Twilight series, Hungarian food, or speculation about the next Secretary of State.  Its set of topics is relatively defined, as regular readers know.

That’s not because I adjudge those other topics unworthy or uninteresting; if any of them strike your fancy, there’s no shortage of other places to read about them.  It’s just that there’s a limit to the number of things I can address thoughtfully, and I don’t see much point in covering topics just to cover them.  I’ve found a niche, and that’s where I work.  People who are interested in this niche sometimes find their way here; people who aren’t, don’t.

I thought about that in reading about the University of Phoenix’s  (Phoenix’?) lobbying to prevent community colleges in Arizona from expanding to offer four-year degrees.  The angle the article took was that it was exposing a “plot to corner the cheap education market.”  The U of Phoenix was cast as the evil, money-grubbing mastermind behind a lobbying campaign to prevent the heroic and virtuous community colleges from doing more to serve their students.

Well, maybe.  The motive is certainly there, as are the means and the opportunity.  I doubt that Arizona’s legislators needed to be pushed to champion the private sector -- they seem pretty far right on their own -- but that’s a matter of judgment.  

My issue with the article isn’t so much the idea that the University of Phoenix hired lobbyists to pursue its self-interest in the legislature.  I assume that’s true, and find it unremarkable.  It’s with the idea that community colleges offering four-year degrees is an unalloyed good.  That’s not obvious to me at all.

Admittedly, my view may be influenced by my location.  Western Massachusetts has no shortage of four-year colleges and universities, both public and private.  From the main HCC campus, it’s a half-hour drive or less to UMass-Amherst, Amherst College, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, Hampshire College, Elms College, Springfield College, Western New England University, American International College, and Westfield State University.  (On the two-year level, you also reach Springfield Technical Community College.) Go a little farther East and you hit Worcester and Boston, both of which have a few colleges of their own.  From here, the idea that the first order of business should be to offer bachelor’s degrees just doesn’t make sense.  If anything, from here the first order of business should be -- and is -- transfer.

But my misgivings go beyond a particularly fertile location.  They’re rooted in the idea of a niche.

Community colleges already have broad missions.  They provide non-credit courses in workforce development, personal enrichment, and adult basic education.  They provide developmental courses for people who want college degrees but whose academic preparation has gaps.  They provide terminal degrees in workplace-ready fields, and they provide associate’s degrees that are built for transfer.  

That’s a pretty big niche now.  It’s why over forty percent of the undergraduates in America are at community colleges.  By any reasonable measure, it’s a full plate.  With increased public pressure to improve graduation rates -- and shoestring budgets with which to do it -- improving the quality of delivery across such a wide range, with open admissions, will require sustained focus.  It will require the willingness and ability to reap the fruits of what specialization we still have.

Adding bachelor’s degrees to the portfolio, particularly in the absence of bachelor’s tuition and funding levels, would make improvement that much harder.  Suddenly the faculty would have to pick up the entire 300- and 400- level curriculum, on top of the heavy pre- and intro- level teaching they already do.  We’d suddenly have to scale up facilities for upper-level science courses, which don’t come cheap.  We’d have to increase tuition dramatically, with predictable political consequences.  And our entire marketing and public profile would have to change.  Instead of being a feeder for so many four-year colleges, all of a sudden we’d be a direct competitor.  Resources currently directed to such useful but unsexy purposes as tutoring would have to be redirected to sales.  

A college that has to be everything to everyone seems unlikely to do it all well, just as a blog that tries to address every topic under the sun seems destined to get much of it wrong.  I’d rather do a two-year mission well than multiple missions badly.  Let the four-year colleges handle the upper division; they do it well, and our students thrive when they get there.  Our successes aren’t because of magic or money or superior ability; they’re due to focus.  Take that away, and we’d be lost.  

The University of Phoenix probably wasn’t thinking this way when it worked to stop community colleges from offering bachelor’s degrees.  Its motives were probably a good bit more self-interested.  But it may have been right, even if for the wrong reasons.  Let the four-year colleges do what they do well; community colleges already have a niche, and an important one.