Cicadas Have Nothing on These Guys

The Replacements are touring again, after twenty-two years!

That sentence probably doesn’t mean much to most people, but to some of us, it’s a big deal.  The mighty ‘Mats were one of the most talented, and certainly the most conflicted, of the indie bands that ruled college radio in the late 1980’s.  At a certain time and place, they captured something that nobody else did.  Below, an excerpt from a reflection on them I wrote back in 2006:

As a veteran of college radio in the late 1980’s, I absorbed the Replacements’ music pretty much by osmosis. They and R.E.M. were simply inescapable. R.E.M. eventually crossed over to mainstream success, but the ‘Mats (‘Mats, fanspeak for Placemats, fanspeak for Replacements) flamed out in 1991. The lead singer and songwriter, Paul Westerberg, has carried on an uneven solo career since.

My affection for Westerberg/Mats music is based partly on the music, and partly on the persona. Westerberg (fun fact: in the movie Heathers, the high school is named after him) is a distinct type: he’s a talented screwup who succeeds despite himself and fails despite his talent. (One writer described the Replacements as “the little band that could, and didn’t.” That’s about right.) The Mats’ sound, when they were sober enough to play, conveyed both an ambition for greatness and an indifference to practice. Their aesthetic dictated that an album with such undeniable classics as “Satisfied” and “Answering Machine” also had to have “Gary’s Got a Boner,” which sounds pretty much like you’d think it would.

I discovered the Replacements in my twenties, and still think of them as capturing something about that age. They veered uncertainly from eloquent longing (“Skyway,” “Left of the Dial,” “Answering Machine”), to narcissistic drama (“The Ledge,” “Talent Show”), moping (“Someone Take the Wheel,” “Here Comes a Regular”), and stupid restless energy (“I Don’t Know,” “Alex Chilton”). Unburdened by musical competence but with a telling weakness for catchy hooks, they hid vulnerable self-awareness under bluster and jokes. Contradictory as hell, but accurately so, and full of good lines (“you’ve got a voice like the last day of Catholic school,” “how do you say good night to an answering machine?”). They made the best anti-video ever (“Bastards of Young”), and their concerts were famously feast-or-famine, sometimes both. (At a show I caught in ‘91, they delivered a show-stopping version of “Alex Chilton,” and followed it with about thirty seconds of a cover of “All Right Now,” before stopping because Paul forgot the words. It was an exemplary ‘Mats moment.)

Replacements fans couldn’t help but notice how much Nirvana owed the ‘Mats, or just how closely the early Goo Goo Dolls resembled them. The first thirty seconds of “Left of the Dial” sound like the best song Kurt Cobain never wrote. The Arctic Monkeys have a ‘Mats-ish sound, albeit with cockney accents.

As Westerberg moved into his thirties and forties, the songs didn’t get worse, but the albums did. Self-awareness is his gift, and that actually ripens with age. His best solo stuff (“Things,” “It’s a Wonderful Lie,” “AAA”) reflects a man confronting his own failings, finding solace in catchy melodies. (He even did a surprisingly affecting, surprisingly rocking tribute to Sylvia Plath, “Crackle and Drag.”) The problem, though, is that the contradictions that had given his early work its urgency were largely gone. Most of the tracks on his 90’s and later work sound forced, which he has admitted they mostly were. He has too much self-awareness, and too little craft, to fake it convincingly. When he’s faking, you know it. “Actor in the Street” or “We May Be the Ones” can be physically painful to listen to, since they fail on every level: melodically, vocally, lyrically, everything. They’re the aural bile of a man who hates his job.

But even the failures are accurate. I don’t have the same drive for drama or restlessness in my thirties that I did in my early twenties. At 22, the prospect of dying face-down seemed vaguely romantic; now it just seems pitiful. There’s a time in life when you can sing, with goofy conviction, that “all I want to do is have beer for breakfast.” If you’re lucky, that time passes.

It’s also hard to maintain the striving-amateur pose at a certain point. After a while, you either develop competence and go with it (R.E.M. and the Goo Goo Dolls did that), or you find something else to do. Westerberg’s efforts at capturing the romantic, shambolic slacker become less convincing, over time. By the time he did Stereo/Mono, he had to resort to doing his own incompetent drumming and letting the tape run out on his single best performance, mid-song (characteristically, a cover of “Postcards from Paradise,” by Flesh for Lulu), to maintain the amateur vibe. It’s a nice trick, but that’s all it is.

I can’t imagine that the current version will have the energy of the old band.  At this point, it’ll be Paul on guitar and vocals, Tommy on bass, and whomever on everything else.  Paul hasn’t written anything compelling in years, and the go-for-broke youthful energy that used to power the band tends to fade by the fifties.  It’ll be an oldies act, as painful as that is to admit.  The last time I saw them, I was half the age I am now.  That’s painful to admit, too.

But still.  The Replacements!  Left of the Dial!  Unsatisfied!  Alex Chilton!  If Paul can stay sober enough to remember the words, the shows should be great.  Here’s hoping they find their way to New England...

What To Do In Denver When You’re Developmental

The Denver public school district is adopting a new plan to ensure that its graduates don’t place into developmental coursework when they get to college.  The plan is to teach the developmental coursework in high school.

(blink)

A few thoughts:

As a very short-term measure, this has its merits.  The initial cohort is taking the coursework in the summer before they start college.  For students who are behind, making academically productive use of summer makes sense.  If they can get on track by the Fall, they can progress to the degree without undue delay.  And to the extent that the developmental courses are paid for by the school district, rather than the students, the students can save their financial aid for college-level work.  This is clearly to the good.

But as a long-term measure, it only makes sense as a small component of a much larger plan.

According to the article in the Denver Post, placement into developmental courses is determined by scores on the SAT, ACT, or Accuplacer.  It goes on to mention a student who graduated high school with a 3.1 GPA, but who placed into developmental classes at the University of Colorado - Pueblo.

Where to begin?

First, the predictive validity of any single standardized test, taken once, is markedly low.  The CCRC has produced studies strongly encouraging “multi-factor” placement, so that we don’t sentence students to months or even years of coursework that they don’t really need.  High school GPA has been shown to improve the accuracy of placements significantly when taken in combination with test scores.  Screening out the “false negatives” is an easy, low-cost way to reduce barriers.

Second, to the extent that the tests are valid, I’d be concerned that students with better-than-B averages are placing developmental.  That strongly suggests a serious issue at the high school level in curriculum, instruction, or both.  Maybe they’re grading too easily, maybe they’re doing drill-and-kill instruction that doesn’t stick, or maybe they’re simply teaching topics other than the topics the college tests.  (It could also be a combination of the above.)  If Colorado doesn’t require four years of math in high school, I’d absolutely start with that.  To let students stop taking math after sophomore year, and then complain about having to teach developmental classes, is just a massive system failure.  

Third, re-teaching things that didn’t work the first time, in the same place, and in much the same way, isn’t likely to get dramatically different results.  If you want to improve students’ college preparation -- a worthy goal -- you have to be willing to get a little more radical.  This is the group with which to try project-based learning, self-paced modules, or whatever else might grab them.  The one thing you don’t do is exactly what you’ve done before.

Still, it’s encouraging to see that they’re at least starting to address the question.  It’s the right question, even if I’m not sold on the answer.  Good luck, Denver.  I hope this is just the first step of several.

Summer Jobs

Summer Jobs

I’ve been on the road most of the day, so in the spirit of the season, a slightly edited reflection from a few years ago...

This time of year, when I keep waiting for that summer lull that keeps not coming, I find it helpful to reflect on one of the very best parts of having a real job: not having to find a summer job.

Finding summer jobs in high school and college was bad enough, but at least it felt age-appropriate. Since summer teaching gigs were few and far between in my graduate program (I got my first one after my fifth year in the program), I was still looking for summer jobs at 25. That’s just wrong.

The summer job panic usually started in April. By early May, I’d usually be in a combination of depression and panic.

There isn’t much good to be said about most summer jobs. They pay badly, you’re almost always the peon, and (almost by definition) they involve doing work you really don’t want to do. They can help forestall any undue sense of entitlement, since daily degrading combined with low pay will do a number on any excess self-esteem with which you might be burdened.

Crappy non-academic summer jobs I’ve held:

- Dishwasher

- Parking lot attendant

- Door-to-door canvasser (An awful job, but you do develop a pretty good sense of real estate.)

- Piston ring tester (We used Scotch tape. I’m not making that up. This is why I’ve never bought an American car.)

- Receptionist

- SAT Prep instructor (twice)

- Supermarket stock boy (I got fired from that for stacking canned beets too slowly. The shame!)

- Customer Service Rep (I drank more that summer than in the rest of my life, combined.)

- Mover

- AIDS Walk recruiter (lots of compliments on the little blue baseball cap we had to wear)

- Intern (where I learned I didn’t want to be a lawyer)

And the ultimate depression-inducing, college-motivating, holy-crap-if-I-had-to-do-that-for-a-living-I’d-kill-myself job...

- The Ice Factory

The ice factory bears explanation. You know those 8 pound bags of ice in convenience stores? The ones you buy for parties? Someone makes those. My job, for 8 hours a day at $3.50 an hour (minimum wage at the time was $3.35), was to pick up the 8 pound bags of ice off a lazy Susan and stack them on a wooden pallet, for the forklift to take to the saran wrapper, and then to the truck. Naturally, this entailed working in a freezer, so the ice wouldn’t melt. For 8 hours a day.

I learned a lot that summer. Lessons of the ice factory:

- If you work in a freezer 8 hours a day lifting heavy objects, you burn an astonishing amount of calories. Everybody brought huge lunches, and we all lost weight. Calories are actually units of heat. If you want to lose both excess weight and your will to live, I can’t recommend this enough.

- People whose actual, not-just-seasonal jobs are in the ice factory are prone to odd enthusiasms. One guy spent his time developing an intricate theory explaining that Phil Collins was actually a space alien. (“Sussudio? What’s that? Space code! Abacab? Space code!”) Another had what I would call an unhealthy fascination with the guitarist Allen Holdsworth.

- Different brands of bagged ice come out of the same vat. One brand’s bag memorably claimed that its ice melted more slowly than other brands. We checked. It didn’t.

- As of the mid-1980's, feminism had not yet made meaningful inroads into the culture of ice factories.

- Some people can discourse knowledgeably about the relative merits of the food in the various jails throughout their home county. These people make your food. I’m just sayin’.

- Just because a guy is five-foot-four and missing a few fingers, doesn’t mean he can’t slam-dunk an 8 pound bag of ice in the middle of a stack fifteen bags high.

- Disgruntled workers have ways of Sticking It To The Man. Among these ways is peeing in the ice vat. There’s a reason I don’t buy bags of ice. If you do, first, hold the bag up to the light. If the ice isn’t perfectly clear, don’t buy it. Trust me on this one. Seriously.

- $3.50 an hour adds up to...let’s see, carry the seven...I think the mathematical term is “bupkus.”

Compared to those, even the longest days here aren’t bad at all. It’s all about perspective.

Wise and worldly readers, what’s the worst summer job you’ve had?

Subprime Students?

The Twitterverse got itself pretty worked up recently over a quip by a financial analyst who, in the context of evaluating the stock of Corinthian Colleges, implied that “subprime students” were to blame for poor financial performance by the company.

It’s one of those phrases that’s just pithy and absurd enough to catch on.  It’s worth giving some thought.

The analyst, Trace Urdan, argued with David Halperin that the relatively low graduation rates of many for-profit colleges were actually pretty good, when compared to their subsidized competition (community colleges).  Halperin countered, correctly, that it’s misleading to characterize most for-profits as unsubsidized, given their heavy reliance on Federal financial aid.  But the line that jumped out at me was Urdan’s assertion that “[the] school offers quality instruction.  The students make of it what they will.”  If your unit of analysis is the disconnected individual, then it follows that any failures must be the fault of those individuals.  If you have low graduation rates, you must have subprime students.

It’s a convenient belief, because it lets everyone else off the hook.  If people rise or fall entirely on their own merits, then those who fell must lack merit.  If they lack merit, then their failure is nothing to worry about.  After all, if they had merit, they wouldn’t have failed!

I’ve heard the same argument applied to long-term adjuncts who haven’t found full-time jobs.  If the market is a meritocracy, and the market rejects you, then you must lack merit.

Notice how many “ifs” appear in those sentences.

To be fair to Urdan, he’s assuming a variation on the old weed ‘em out model.  For a long time, that was standard operating procedure in much of higher ed.  The assumption behind weed ‘em out is that some students are, well, weeds, who need to be removed so that others may thrive.  

The only way to make sense of that perspective is to assume that colleges, or the market, amount to black boxes.  What happens in the college makes little difference.  Students arrive with merit or not, and they’ll find their own level.  And merit is either inborn or formed so early, and so mysteriously, that questioning it is pointless.  

In other words, it’s epistemologically arrogant.  It assumes that we already know everything we need to know about both education and success; all that’s left is to let the sorting happen.

But we don’t.  Anyone on the ground knows that students will surprise you.  Placement tests do a markedly poor job of predicting student success, and we see students defy demographics all the time.  And those of us who work in colleges know that they aren’t just black boxes.  Some practices lead to greater student success than others.  The folks who assume that merit is somehow innate tend either to ignore that, because it’s inconvenient, or to attack success efforts as somehow distorting the market.  It’s as if we’re debasing the currency.

The currency metaphor, of course, is at the root of the “subprime” metaphor.  Subprime mortgages were loans that went bad because they were made to people who couldn’t pay them off, whether because of job loss, market shifts, or because the loan never should have been made in the first place.  The point of the metaphor is to suggest that as with mortgages, some people just aren’t worth the investment.

So the upshot from the analyst is that the for-profit college is worth the investment, but the students aren’t.

I’ll propose a different measure.  What do the for-profits offer that community colleges (or other non-profits) don’t?  Assuming that they draw from the same general pool of students, what value do they add that justifies their premium cost?  (And for those of us in the cc world, what can and should we learn from them?)  Let’s assume that student ability is the unknown, and that different institutions have established different track records of success in developing it.  Those that don’t pre-screen for likelihood of success -- through selective admissions -- have similar challenges.  Let’s look at the ones that handle that challenge well.

No, the students aren’t subprime.  The analysis is.

The Internship Condundrum

(That sounds like a spy novel, doesn’t it?)

From listening to employers, you’d think that community colleges would be hotbeds of internships.  Since employers frequently want some sort of work experience, and community colleges have been tasked with a focus on workforce development, it would seem to make sense that community colleges would be epicenters for internships.

But it isn’t that simple.

I’m the first to agree that internships can provide real value for students.  I had one during the summer between my junior and senior years of college, when I thought I wanted to be a lawyer, and when I discovered that I didn’t.  At age twenty, that was valuable information to have, and I don’t know how else I would have discovered it.  Done right, internships can provide three-dimensional views of the reality of workplaces, and can help students decide whether a given setting makes sense for them.  And it’s not at all unusual for employers to treat internships as extended auditions, hiring the interns who make the best impressions.  That makes obvious sense, and provides an incentive on both sides for taking the opportunity seriously.

Having said that, though, the issues from an institutional perspective are twofold.

First, most internships are unpaid.  (I was lucky; mine came with a stipend.)  For many community college students, that’s a deal-breaker.  They’re working their way through school, and they can’t afford to forego paid employment to work someplace else for free.  It’s easy to argue that a short-term sacrifice is worth the long-term gain, but that argument is easier to make when your basic needs are met.  When the short-term sacrifice involves the basic needs, it’s a tough sell.  You can’t eat prestige, and your kids certainly can’t.

Unfortunately, that can put many community college students at a competitive disadvantage in the subsequent job search, since they’ll be competing with people who could afford to work for free in a career-relevant field.  

Second, very few four-year colleges take internship credits in transfer.  They generally prefer that internships be done no earlier than the junior year.  I’ve never actually heard a rationale for that.  If I had to guess, I suppose they’d say something about wanting to send out people who are well-prepared.  But I think that gives short shrift to the “discovery” function of internships -- better to find out earlier than later if a field just isn’t for you -- and it actively discourages community colleges from competing with them.  (From their perspective, that may be a feature, rather than a bug.)  In a four-year context, you can at least offer a student academic credit, even if you can’t offer pay.  (Put differently, you can charge them for working.)  For a student starting out at a community college and intending to transfer, being told that the internship credits they worked for and paid for won’t transfer is a powerful disincentive.  

To my mind, this obstacle doesn’t have to exist.  Four-year colleges could agree to accept up to x internship credits in transfer if they wanted to.  That wouldn’t get around the issue of pay, but at least it would put community college internships on a level playing field.  Folks with leverage in this area could make it happen if they chose to.  Hint, hint.

In some programs, the transfer issue isn’t as important.  When a two-year degree is enough to get started in the field, then what the transfer school will accept doesn’t matter much.  But the issue of pay looms large for many students.  

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen a community college find an elegant way around these obstacles?  I think we play a difficult hand well, but if there’s a better way, I’d love to hear it.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Fifty Bucks

Students will pay extra for a sense of fairness.

Until last year, we had a non-credit math review class that we offered students who didn’t like, or believe, their score on the math placement test.  For fifty bucks, we offered them a couple of weeks of guided review and a chance to retake the test.  

From an institutional perspective, this was a screaming deal.  Fifty bucks could get you out of one, and possibly two, semesters of remediation that you didn’t really need.  The savings on tuition alone are substantial; when you add the savings of time, it’s a no-brainer.

And yet, very few students took it.  

They saw it as a scam.

“You give me a &*#^#% score, and then offer to make it go away for fifty bucks?”  To many of them -- more than we realized at the time -- it felt less like a bargain than a shakedown.  They saw it as a scam.  So they skipped the opportunity, and instead enrolled in full semester classes that they didn’t think they needed.  

In straightforward cost/benefit terms, paying for a semester instead of two weeks is absurd.  But from the perspective of maintaining one’s dignity, I can see it.  They couldn’t dodge the exam, but they could dodge what looked to them like a trick.

Last year, we waived the fifty dollar fee to see what would happen.  I thought we might see a modest enrollment increase, though I also wondered if making it free would make it seem worthless.

Enrollment quintupled.  We had to add sections.  And the students stuck with it and got the results we had hoped they would.  Many were able to bypass a semester, and several were able to bypass two.  For a couple of weeks’ investment, that’s pretty good.

In numerical terms, the difference between fifty dollars and free is dwarfed by the savings from skipping a semester-long course, let alone two.  But if you treat self-respect as a relevant variable, the difference is dramatic.

I didn’t expect it to matter that much, in part because I thought the myth that remedial courses are cash cows was more widespread than it actually is.  After all, if the choice is between a cheap scam and an expensive one, a rational mark would choose the cheap one.  But the “cash cow” myth appears more widely held among cynical policy types than among actual students.  

When we talk about fifty bucks, we aren’t just talking about fifty bucks.

The Giving Tree

At the risk of seeming churlish, I was never a Shel Silverstein fan.  The Giving Tree, which is one of his most popular stories, struck me as deeply creepy.  It’s about a tree that gradually martyrs itself for a boy until there’s nothing left of it.  We’re supposed to admire the tree’s generosity of spirit, rather than recoil at the boy’s selfishness.  

As a kid, it struck me as missing the point.  As an adult, I can’t help but see the story as gendered, with the tree as the Mom.  And if that’s the fate of Moms, then we need rewrite.

I thought of the Giving Tree again upon reading Sherman Dorn’s kind review of my book.  Dorn and I agree on some points and disagree on others, but the question of future strategy for community colleges highlights an assumption I hold that I may need to make more explicit.

In the book, I make a pair of arguments that Dorn assumes are mutually exclusive.  First, I argue that community colleges will do well to increase their partnerships with other institutions, whether K-12 schools, four-year colleges, community organizations, or local employers.  Then, I suggest that the “all things to all people” strategy of the “comprehensive” model is unsustainable, and that community colleges shouldn’t be afraid to specialize.  Dorn notes that each new partnership will bring with it expectations of some sort of mission expansion, and asks how I can argue for both expansion and contraction at the same time.  Dorn argues:

Someone will be given the task of workforce education every X miles, and in a post-financial-crisis world where corporations have sloughed off on-the-job training, community colleges are those someones. Community colleges have joined high schools as legatee institutions–Larry Cuban’s term for social institutions that inherit a broad range of purposes. I don’t think it is easy to undo that history.

In this context, Dorn argues, the only realistic way to ensure the sustainability of community colleges is to increase their operating funding from states and/or localities.    

A few thoughts.

First, there’s a difference between community colleges as a single sector, and community colleges as 1,100 different institutions.  My reference to increased partnerships was in the context of the former, and my reference to specialization was in the context of the latter.  In other words, I don’t see a contradiction between saying that, say, Massachusetts’ community colleges as a group should partner with all sorts of employers, but that there’s much to be said for, say, Holyoke Community College and Springfield Technical Community Colleges having different emphases.  In fact, they do.  Holyoke has a Culinary program, for example, which STCC does not, and STCC has a Dental Hygienist program, which HCC does not.  That kind of specialization allows for economies of scale on each campus, and prevents unhelpful duplication.  To the extent that both institutions are publicly funded, efficiencies like these make sense.

But that’s a quibble; I may have been too quick in my presentation of that in the book.  The more basic issue is with the assumption that community colleges should be the Giving Trees of their communities, and that saying “no” to any particular community need would damn the sector to political perdition.

The Giving Tree is many things, but “sustainable” is not one of them.  It dies in the end.  My search for alternate strategies is premised on trying to avoid that fate.

Yes, of course, more (and more reliable) public operating funding would make a world of positive difference.  I don’t think anyone in my role would disagree with that.  With the worst of the recession seemingly behind us, I hope to see -- and would absolutely welcome -- a healthy increase in state support.  Bring it on!

But it’s hard not to notice the trend over the last few decades all across the country of post-recession recoveries never quite restoring what was lost.  After several cycles of two down and one up, I can’t help but see a pattern.  The “say yes to everyone” strategy that community colleges have followed for decades has coincided with a downward trend -- bumpy, yes, but clearly downward -- in public funding for decades.  By continually trying to please everybody else, we make it politically painless to just keep cutting.  Like the Giving Tree, our own generosity becomes our undoing.

In that sense, the example of California may be revealing.  In California, colleges that have absorbed cuts have responded by just turning students away.  Dorn suggests that “ If there is a lesson other states can draw from the disaster that befell California’s higher ed system in the last few years, it is that comprehensive institutions’ turning away students is a really bad idea, politically.”  I’m not sure.  I’ve leveled my share of criticism at the California funding system over the past few years, but that was all based on the complete separation of tuition and fees from operating budgets.  One could make a pretty good argument to the effect that the waiting lists and spectacular flameouts exerted enough political pressure to result in the state finally starting to step up.  Once voters got over the shock of hearing the old “legatee” system actually say “no,” they finally agreed to pony up some revenue.

Making choices is risky.  But the alternative is worse.  The last few decades have shown strongly that the default path is to just keep hollowing out the tree until there’s nothing left.  I’d rather see educational leaders take seriously the task of pruning and use it to preserve the health of the tree than just wait for the next storm.  The doormat strategy is untenable; if it worked, it would have worked by now.  

Specialization, as one element of a larger strategy, may or may not work.  But waiting for the money fairy to come back and make everything okay again just won’t.  I’ll plead guilty to taking an unconventional view, but expecting the status quo to last is truly unrealistic.  The Giving Tree dies in the end.  We can still avoid its fate, but we’ll have to stop imitating it first.

Who’s Our Competition?

It used to be relatively easy to identify a given community college’s competition.  It might be another community college nearby that draws, at least in part, from the same feeder communities.  (That varies by state; some states have tightly defined “service areas,” whether as counties or as “districts.”  In others, such as Massachusetts, colleges just draw from whoever wants to attend.)  If there were a for-profit or two in the area, add that.  In a given program, there might be some rivalry with a nearby four-year school, although that tends to be fairly muted.  And that would be about it.

That’s changing.  

The first serious wave of change was the online for-profits.  When the University of Phoenix hit critical mass, it was suddenly everybody’s competitor.  Others for-profits followed.  Then non-profits started to step up with online options, as much by necessity as by inclination, so a student in a relatively isolated community suddenly had a panoply of options.

Now we’re seeing possible competition from new corners. MOOCs are still in their infancy, but are already making a mark.  If they can solve the “business model” issue, they could become formidable.  (Alternately, they may simply become variations on Open Educational Resource providers for traditional colleges as a way to ensure their survival.)  Western Governors University is experimenting with competency-based credits, and SNHU’s College for America has gone all-in with competencies.  (So far, enrollment is mostly employer-based, but that’s not necessarily intrinsic to the model.)  Credit for Prior Learning is gaining steam, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it take off in the next few years, particularly for working adults.

We’re at the awkward stage now at which the external market is changing faster than our awareness of it.  That’s dangerous.  

On the public side, I’d love to see more self-awareness of the sector as a sector, and some reflection on what we can do uniquely well.  

In the postwar boom years, when most community colleges in America were founded, they mostly followed one of only a few models.  They were ‘transfer’ focused -- the old “junior college” model -- or vo-tech focused, often with a distinctive regional flavor.  Over time, the two models tended to converge, and both of them added remediation on the front end.  The converged version took on its own name -- the “comprehensive” model -- and was based on geographic scarcity.  If a college was the only practical commuting option for students in a given area, then it had to take a crack at being all things to all people; if it didn’t offer something, after all, then that thing didn’t get offered.  After a while, it wasn’t weird to see the same college offer basic arithmetic, air conditioning repair, and philosophy.

That “comprehensive” model makes sense when providers are few and far between.  And it works particularly well when enrollments are expanding and funding is available.

But the world is changing faster than our awareness of it.  The funding crunch is pretty well established at this point, even if the reasons for it remain controversial.  Some who’ve done fairly well under the traditional system are digging in their heels to defend it, even as its claim to being The Only Way is becoming untenable.  (I was especially discouraged to see this story in IHE, about gradual economic recovery in the states, being presented as a return to normal. It isn’t, and the illusion that it is is dangerous.)  Now, the defining condition of knowledge is abundance, rather than scarcity.  Nobody has a regional monopoly anymore.  In a world in which everybody has a choice of many providers, each with a different strength and method, the “all things to all people” model doesn’t make sense anymore.  

In some ways, the adjustment to abundance is easy.  Open Educational Resources can fit nicely in the existing institutional model, and take the edge off student costs without fundamentally challenging what we do.  That may buy us some badly needed time.  But the basic model of prerequisites, gatekeeping, and comprehensiveness is fraying.

When a product moves from scarcity to abundance, producers can be in a tough spot.  I’m just old enough to remember when music was expensive.  Twenty years ago, an hour-long cd cost sixteen dollars in early 1990’s money.  Now, ten bucks gets you a month of music.  Record companies have taken a beating, and musicians who used to support themselves with recordings now either tour more or get day jobs.  

I’m thinking we need to redefine our product.  We have to be able to explain what we offer that you can’t just get from a free online instructional video.  Instead of being “junior” colleges that are, themselves, junior research universities, let’s focus on doing better the core of what we do.  We do success for those who don’t succeed elsewhere.  For-profits will only do that as long as it’s profitable.  MOOCs offer access, but their attrition rates are awful.  Exclusive colleges won’t even let the average student in.  

That’s an argument for not pretending to be “junior” versions of other things, and instead embracing the uniqueness of what we offer.  Being all things to all people only worked when there was no competition.  Now there is, and it’s not going away.  If our awareness is able to catch up to our reality, we can focus clearly on the access mission that we do best.

Weirdly Brilliant

I have to give the state of Florida credit.  There’s something weirdly brilliant in this.

The state of Florida is planning to increase dramatically the percentage of students who are ready for college level courses by...wait for it...calling them ready!

I had not thought of that.

Starting in 2014, any student who entered the ninth grade in Florida after 2003-4, and who has a standard Florida high school diploma, will be automatically exempted from remedial classes.  The exemption also applies to all active-duty members of the military.

As I read the story, students won’t be banned from remedial classes; they just won’t have to take them.  Students who want to, apparently could.  (How that would work with financial aid is left unclear.)  I don’t imagine that many would, but they’d have the option.

I’m glad that Massachusetts isn’t doing this, but I’m also glad somebody is.  Between Connecticut’s “one and done” remediation model and Florida’s massive exemptions, we’re seeing a couple of potentially revealing natural experiments.  If nothing else, these should both provide valuable lessons for other states, whether positive or negative.

In a perfect world, of course, Florida’s law would be redundant.  High school graduates would have the skills they need to be college-ready right out of the gate.  This law would be as unnecessary as the NBA passing a rule that the average height of players on any given team must exceed six feet.  

But this isn’t that world.  

Even in the Florida case, they’ll have adult students who missed the window, high school grads who moved in from other states after the start of ninth grade, out-of-state students, and people with GED’s.  So the exemption isn’t total.  But it’s certainly sweeping.

The research I’ve seen over the last few years strongly suggests that much remedial coursework accomplishes little or nothing in terms of graduation rates; if anything, by increasing time to degree, it makes it likelier that life will get in the way.  (I’ve also been less than impressed with the lack of predictive validity among placement tests.)  To the extent that remediation is either ineffective or counterproductive, there’s certainly a strong argument for retiring it.  

I’m still wary of such blunt-force interventions, though.  Were it up to me, I’d prefer to see a combination of accelerated “boot camp” models, embedded as-needed help, and beefed-up tutoring centers.  (My psychic powers tell me that this rule change won’t come with more money for tutoring.  Call me cynical.)  But ultimately, whether my preference would be more effective, or whether we should just rip off the band-aid and be done with it, can be settled empirically.  After a few years, we should get a pretty good idea of the effects of Florida’s change (and Connecticut’s, for that matter).  

Thanks, Florida, for volunteering to do something audacious, hamhanded, and possibly stupid.  One way or another, the rest of us will learn from your example.