Parity

What if every sector of higher education received the same per-student funding?

Right now, the more affluent the student body, the more public aid money the sector receives.   Flagship universities receive more per-student funding than do regional campuses, which, in turn, receive more than community colleges.  And if you look at financial aid to students as a form of public funding -- which, in effect, it is, unless it’s a loan -- then private colleges receive more than anybody.  

From a social-justice perspective, that’s counterintuitive.  The tightest cost controls hit the people with the smallest cushion, while those who have the most, get the most. Giving the least help to those who need it the most seems to serve another agenda.

Worse, to the extent that the public/political discourse is dominated by people whose frame of reference is the elite institutions, we get persistent, catastrophic misconceptions driving policy.  

I’m not going as far here as, say, Sara Goldrick-Rab with her suggestion of defunding the private institutions altogether.  I’m just suggesting a level playing field.  If someone is able to do a better job with the same amount of money, let them; the innovation may eventually help us all.  But proving again and again that you can do wonders if your budget were tripled isn’t impressive.

In fact, if we wanted per-student institutional spending to match, then logically, we’d need to have the highest per-student subsidies at the lowest-cost places.  Subsidies would be inversely proportional to tuition.  The lower the tuition, the higher the per-student subsidy. That way, we’d have actual parity of resources on the ground.  But I know that’s unthinkable in our current politics, so I’ll propose subsidy or aid parity as a more modest compromise.  

It may seem farfetched, but really, what is the argument for spending the most on those who have the most?  If we’re serious about educating the citizenry and workforce, why shower money on the Ivies while community colleges are forced to use a majority-adjunct faculty?  If we were starting from scratch, would we design the system this way?

I propose a “laboratories of education” approach.  Give equal funding across all sectors of higher education, and see which ideas are actually the best.  In social science terms, control for a variable.  (I can envision the Buzzfeed piece: “We gave these community college students the same funding as their counterparts at Dartmouth.  You won’t believe what happened next!”)  If nothing else, we’d stand to learn something, and the people who need the most help would benefit the most.

I can certainly imagine worse ideas...  

Two Conflicting Ideas at the Same Time

Wise and worldly readers, in a passing comment this weekend, I realized that I believe two conflicting ideas at the same time.  I’m hoping you can help me figure this one out.

Idea One is that the “high tuition, high aid” model doesn’t work.  Students are scared off by the high sticker price, and simply don’t apply.  

Idea Two is that students are unduly impressed by “scholarships” that are actually discounts off an artificially high sticker price.  That’s why they’ll choose a forty thousand dollar tuition with a twelve thousand dollar “presidential scholarship” over a ten thousand dollar tuition with no scholarship.

At different moments, I have believed -- and professed -- both of these.  But I’m having a hard time believing both at the same time.  If “high tuition, high aid” didn’t work, then students wouldn’t go for high discounting.  But they do.

Of course, it might be possible to believe both ideas if they didn’t really conflict.  If, say, the definition of “students” in each idea were different, then it would be possible for both to be true.  For example, the “students” in Idea One would be low-income and/or first generation students, especially in the context of community colleges.  The “students” in Idea Two could be the sons and daughters of the upper middle class applying to private four-year colleges.  If that’s the difference, then it’s entirely possible for both to be true.  Students who are new to higher education may be intimidated or scared off by high sticker prices, whereas students whose families went to college may not be.  

That explanation seems to work at first blush, though it falls apart somewhat when applied to for-profits.  For-profits focus(ed) largely on first-generation and low-income students, but at considerably higher tuition that most publics, and with little discounting.  Here I’ll draw on Tressie McMillan Cottom’s insight that many for-profits structure(d) their costs with an acute awareness of the psychological difference between the money a student has to come up with now and the money she’ll have to repay later.  They backloaded, creating an initially low barrier to entry.  In other words, while the for-profits may have been much more expensive than most publics, they got good at hiding the fact.  The exception may not be an exception.

If this is all basically true, and the division between Idea One and Idea Two is the social class of the students involved, then we’re looking at continuing economic polarization among sectors.  The sectors that draw upon the (relatively) affluent can compete on amenities, using discounting from a wildly high sticker price to fill the class as they see fit.  Meanwhile, community colleges -- whose budgets are increasingly tuition-driven -- are locked into low costs and a self-perpetuating cycle of austerity.  

This is not good.

I think it’s Stein’s Law that says that anything unsustainable won’t be sustained, and the “discounting” approach is showing signs of unsustainability among some of the private colleges.  At some point, the market will bear only what it will bear; if you’re in a region with a declining number of 18 year olds and relatively flat incomes, and your endowment is finite, you can only paper over the gap for so long.  Eventually, something has to give.  

Or maybe it’s simpler than all this.  Maybe Idea One is right and Idea Two wrong, or vice versa.

Wise and worldly readers, are One and Two mutually exclusive?  Or is there a way of reconciling them other than what I’ve offered here?

Friday Fragments

As regular readers know, I’m no fan of the “undermatching” thesis.  That’s the theory that says that students who were capable of admission to selective institutions, but who choose instead less selective or unselective ones, are harming their own chances for graduation.  In practice, it serves as a way to legitimize a stigma against open-admission colleges.

That’s why I was heartened to see “undermatching” subjected to empirical scrutiny, and failing.  In a study published the American Educational Research Journal, Scott Heil, Lisa Reisel, and Paul Attewell found that “selectivity...does not have an independent effect on graduation.”  

The study only looked at four-year schools, and it did find a mildly positive effect of high tuition on graduation rates.  But it’s a start, and I welcome further debunking of a pernicious theory.

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If you haven’t seen Rebecca Traister’s story on fathers this week, check it out.  It’s one of those pieces that should be so painfully obvious that it wouldn’t need to be written, but it does.  

Men need to own our share of parenting, both privately and publicly.  If we’re going to create a more child-friendly society -- which we desperately need to do -- we’re going to need to remake work so that it doesn’t rule out engaged parenthood.  Parenthood isn’t the only reason to remake work, but it’s a really basic one.  

Note to my fellow guys: “work” and “life” are too important to relegate entirely to women.  If we want work and lives too -- which we absolutely should -- then we need to step up.

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Here’s hoping that the successful theft of over a billion passwords will finally push us towards something else.  Passwords a’re too hard to generate, too easy to forget, and too easy to hack.  Password managers swap dozens of little risks for one big one, and usually leave out at least one platform on which I work.  (I like to think of platform agnosticism as the 21st century nerd version of freethinking.  Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Chrome OS...I use ‘em all.)  There must be a better way.

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Data is not the plural of anecdote, but I’ve seen something this summer that I’ve never seen before, and I’m wondering if others are seeing it, too.

We’ve lost record numbers of English and math adjuncts to full-time jobs elsewhere.  

A couple of those jobs have been the classic tenure-track faculty positions.  But most have been some variation of “alt-ac:” high school teacher, instructional designer, that sort of thing.  Nobody has left in a huff, so I don’t think it’s a sign of discontent.  It just seems like other things are finally starting to open up.

Although it’s a short-term pain from a staffing perspective, it’s a long-term good for everyone involved.  I just hope it isn’t a brief and local fluke.

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At home, earlier this week:

The Boy: President Obama turned 53 today.

The Girl: That’s the same age as Weird Al!

And yes, we’re big supporters of the movement to recruit Weird Al to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show.  You can find the petition here.  Get Weird, America!

Battlefield Decisions

Every August, this happens.  It’s time to start making decisions about which sections are likely to enroll enough students to run, and which need to be cancelled.

If you’ve never been in on a meeting like that, you may picture it something like this:

Dr. Evil (stroking cat): Prof. Doe really loves this class, but he looked at me cross-eyed once.  Screw him!  Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Group: SCREW HIM!  (maniacal laughter ensues, punctuated by flashes of lightning)

The truth is more pedestrian.  

Dean: This is the only daytime section of this class.  

VP: Is it a program requirement?

Dean: Yes, for the Nuclear Basketweaving option.

Academic Advisor: That timeslot usually fills in late August.

VP: Okay.

These decisions are never fun.  You don’t appreciate how many variables are in play until you get down to cases.  Suddenly, every bright-line rule has an extenuating circumstance, mandates conflict with each other, and much hinges on educated guesses about enrollment during the rest of August.  Could the students in the evening section move to online?  Is this part of someone’s full-time load?  Is the course required for the major?  What if it doesn’t run?  Do other courses fulfilling the same requirement still have seats?  Does it have prerequisites that make a ninth-inning rally unlikely?  Does the student population for that class tend to register late?  What’s the pattern over the last few years?

All of which makes perfect sense, as long as it isn’t your class.

We don’t cut off enrollments until right before classes start, so the enrollment figures we have now won’t be the final ones.  That necessarily involves some projection.  Will the twelve students become fifteen, or is the section stuck at twelve?  Since we can’t replay the scenarios later, there’s no way of knowing whether a section we cancelled early would have rallied at the last minute.  We probably get some of them wrong, but there’s no way of knowing the ones that would have rallied.   We only see the inevitable few that we thought would rally, and didn’t.

When I’ve discussed this sort of thing in the past, people have responded that Data Analytics would save us.  I’m a fan of carefully-applied data, but it works much better in the aggregate than in individual cases.  If enrollment is down, say, two percent across the college as a whole, that two percent is not evenly distributed.  And last year’s pattern may not match this year’s.  (The major countertrend is the move to online enrollments.  That magnifies the decline in onsite enrollments.)  Analytics might tell me that there will be a general downward drift in, say, English, but it won’t tell me whether the 2:30 section on Tuesday will rally or not, any more than the latest public opinion poll will tell me what Dave thinks.  

And then there are the qualitative issues.  If a particular, though small, cohort of students has been jerked around for a couple of semesters, there’s an argument for giving the benefit of the doubt this time.  A brand new program will often need a little time to find its constituency.  And there are always the small end-of-sequence classes that students in a given major need for graduation.  We’re getting better at handling those, but they’ll probably never go away completely.

In a more perfect world, we’d have a long gap between the close of enrollment and the start of classes, so we’d be working with fixed numbers.   Alternately, enrollments would be easily and consistently predictable from year to year, preferably with sustained and gradual growth.  Getting really utopian, we’d have enough money, staff, and space that we could base these decisions entirely and only on academic considerations.  Alas, no.

The good news, having been through this at three different colleges now, is that I’ve honestly never seen this process used to “get” anybody.  That may be small solace when it’s your class that’s on the chopping block, but it’s true.  Battlefield decisions aren’t perfect, but we know which side we’re on.

Transfer IS Workforcce

“Is that a transfer program or a workforce program?”  “Yes.”

I often hear references -- both on campus and off campus -- to the two major missions of community colleges: transfer and workforce.  In typical usage, the former refers to the gen ed and liberal arts classes intended for students who move on for bachelor’s degrees and higher, and the latter refers to the courses of study that are supposed to be employable with a two-year degree or less.  In this binary, history is “transfer,” and medical billing is “workforce.”

Since the Great Recession, most of the political discussion around community colleges has centered squarely on the “workforce” side.  The idea is that people need jobs, now, and giving them the skills and credentials to get those jobs is urgent.  The rest is nice to have, but all of the interest (and grant funding) is geared towards short-term, stackable credentials with fast payoff.  Address the first rung of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs now, and the rest can wait.  

I understand the impulse, and I’m happy to support the development of well-designed, stackable programs that meet job-seekers’ needs quickly.  We’ve even developed programs with multiple on- and off-ramps, so people who need to can stop out to make money for a while, and return when they’re able, without losing credits.  It doesn’t fit cleanly into most “performance metrics,” but it’s what many students need.  Someday, I hope the policy folk will catch up and understand that what looks like “churn” can actually be a sign of success.  (If you haven’t seen it, Tressie McMillan Cottom did a great piece last year on exactly that.)

In the meantime, though, I’m concerned that the “transfer” piece is getting short shrift.  

That’s an issue from a purely educational perspective, of course.  But it’s also an issue from a workforce-development perspective.  Simply put, many of the higher-level jobs require bachelor’s degrees or more, and community colleges are the most accessible on-ramp for many students.  In a great many cases, starting at a community college and then transferring makes sense, both economically and educationally. They can get small classes while keeping costs (and debts) down, the better to leave room for other things later.  But in the political discourse, the basic truth that transfer is a form of workforce development gets lost.

I’m guessing that part of the problem is the length of time it takes to see the payoff.  Part of it, too, is a measurement error.  To the extent that we attribute graduates’ salaries to the last institution from which they graduated, transfer feeders won’t get the credit they deserve.  The student who graduates with a bachelor’s in engineering and makes a good salary is attributed to the university; for the community college at which she started, she doesn’t count.  

Taking transfer seriously as a workforce development tool has implications.  For one, it suggests that the classic liberal arts fields shouldn’t be neglected.  Even more “vocational” bachelor’s programs have gen ed requirements; community colleges have offered those forever.  For another, breaking down the conceptual barrier between transfer and workforce will finally allow intelligent discussions of those fields, like social work, in which getting a job requires a higher degree than it used to.  What was conceived as a “workforce” program has become a “transfer” program, albeit with a vocational orientation.  That’s not weird; it’s the direction of many fields.  But it’s hard to make policy around that when we insist on putting programs in one box or the other.

And maybe, ideally, it might make some resources available for the academic core.  That wouldn’t be a bad thing either...

Online Mentoring

Lately I’m enamored of an idea, and I’m wondering if someone has already done it and either shown how to do it, or how not to.

Does anyone have experience with a peer mentoring system for online students?

I’m thinking here of something very different from academic advising or achievement coaching.  Academic advising involves selecting a course of study, and choosing courses to fulfill requirements.  At its best, it involves discussions of long-term career or academic goals, frequently including transfer.  (At a cc, ‘transfer’ is not a dirty word.  We celebrate high-achieving students who transfer after graduating to finish the four-year degree.)  Achievement coaching is about study tips, productive nagging, and targeted encouragement.  Both are pretty well established.

I’m thinking here of some sort of formal system in which more advanced students help newbies navigate the realities of online study: how to negotiate systems, ways around common glitches, that sort of thing.  

I know that student grapevines exist, but they’re often more gossipy than useful.  On campus, though, it’s relatively easy for students to talk to each other, and it’s at least conceptually possible that some of that discussion could involve tips for getting what they want from various college systems.  But online, it’s not clear to me how that would happen.

Usually, online students interact with each other only in the context of a given class.  That’s fine, as far as it goes, but it lacks the equivalent of a cafeteria or hangout space.  

But wait, I hear you thinking, what about the gazillion social networks out there?

Yes, they’re there, but they’re open to all.  In other words, they lack the specificity of a campus.  

Yesterday’s piece about the “invisible curriculum” -- words I coincidentally used in a post on the exact same day -- drove this home.  Students on campus can give each other pointers about where to go for a given issue, who to talk to, and the like.  The reliability of the information may sometimes be suspect, but it can offer a lifeline to a student who just feels lost.  I don’t know that we have an online equivalent of that, yet.

Until recently, it probably didn’t matter much.  Most students in online classes also took onsite classes, and just used the online ones to streamline their schedules, or to make them fit around work and family obligations.  For those students, dropping by a campus office wasn’t necessarily a major burden, since they’re on campus two or three days a week anyway.  But the area of most rapid growth is the purely online student, for whom the safety net of dropping by physical offices may not be available or practical.

I haven’t seen anyone try this yet, but it seems like too obvious an idea to have not happened.  Surely someone has learned some useful lessons around this.  (I don’t want to be like the economists in the old joke that ends “if it were a real $20 bill, someone would have picked it up by now.”)  

Wise and worldly readers, what do you think?  Have you seen this done well?  Alternately, have you seen it done badly in ways that offer useful lessons?

Attendance, Discrimination, and LDA

In case you missed it, Tenured Radical has a thought-provoking piece claiming that class attendance policies discriminate against students with disabilities.

The argument is that many students have “invisible” disabilities that prevent regular attendance, and that blunt-instrument attendance policies put those students at a disadvantage.  (Invisible disabilities would include ADHD, chronic fatigue syndrome, lyme disease, and the like.  They aren’t obvious to external observers in the way that, say, a wheelchair is.)  To a professor who hasn’t been notified of the disability, a student who goes off her meds and stops showing up may be indistinguishable from a student who just can’t be bothered.  

But it’s not as simple as that.

Invisible disabilities are real, and they can be severe.  In some cases, they can also wax and wane in intensity, so a student who seems “fine” for a while can suddenly take a turn for the worse.  Punishing a student for taking time to manage a medical issue isn’t right.

That said, though, colleges at which students are eligible to receive federal financial aid are required to track and report Last Dates of Attendance (LDA).  If a student who is receiving aid for a class walks away during the semester, the college is on the hook to report when that happened.  Depending on when it happened, the aid may have to be reduced.  The idea behind it is that the feds don’t want to be on the hook for educational expenses for an education that stopped happening.  Depending on how aid is administered and which week the student stops showing up, sometimes colleges have to reach out to departed students to claw back money that was already awarded.  Given how close to the financial edge many students are, you can imagine how pretty that process is.

Even asynchronous online classes are subject to the LDA requirement.  It’s trickier to define in that setting, for the obvious reason that there’s no set class time to miss.  In recognition of that, the feds define the LDA as the last date of some academically substantive interaction.  That means more than simply logging on.  It could mean turning in an assignment, taking an exam, or participating in an online discussion, among other things.  

The feds don’t waive the LDA requirement for students with disabilities.  That means that colleges can’t, either.  

Ideally, students with invisible disabilities will self-identify to the on-campus office charged with serving them, and will get the documentation to give their professors explaining what they need.  A professor who has a general attendance policy would be on solid ground granting exceptions for a student with a documented disability that requires more flexibility.  (We’d still need to track the LDA, but other than that, we could be flexible.)  When everyone does their part, that approach works pretty well.  But students don’t always self-identify or self-advocate.  Sometimes they don’t want to admit that they need help; sometimes they fear stigma; sometimes the paperwork requirement is too daunting; sometimes they’re feeling fine for a while and want to see if they can do it “on their own.”  

(Similarly, in a perfect world, students who decide to walk away from courses would submit “withdrawal” forms on the way out.  Many do, but enough don’t that we need to track LDA independently.)

So even with a formal withdrawal process, and an active Office for Services to Students with Disabilities, and a well-developed protocol for notifying faculty of needed accommodations, colleges still need some independent tracking of attendance.  The formal mechanisms are great, but reality isn’t as tidy as the formal mechanisms.  

Attendance policies also do some educational good.  They make group work, lab work, and clinicals possible.  (I literally cannot imagine an attendance-optional protocol for Nursing clinicals.  The entire program would collapse.) They serve as a valuable “nudge” to get dithering students to show up.  And they help to inculcate a habit of timely attendance that employers on advisory boards constantly mention as a crucial “soft skill” often lacking in new employees.  Learning to drag yourself in on time when you’d rather not may not show up on Bloom’s taxonomy, but it matters in the work world.  If we tossed that out for fear of invisible disabilities, we’d lose much of the invisible curriculum on which employers are counting.  That may not be obvious at an elite SLAC, but at a community college, it’s a very big deal.

Even the definition of “mandatory attendance” can get murky.  If you don’t have a formal attendance policy, but lab work can only be done in the lab during certain hours, and you can’t pass the class without lab work, then you have a de facto attendance policy.  In my teaching days, I used quizzes as a de facto attendance policy, because they offered a double benefit: they encouraged students to do the reading and to show up.  Classes always ran much more smoothly when they did both.

On a formal level, we can address invisible disabilities by documenting and accommodating them.  But on the ground, I know that often falls short.  Is there a better way to accommodate the very real needs of people wrestling with invisible issues without losing the real benefits of mandatory attendance?

Friday Fragments

This one is specifically for the registrars out there.  How do you handle attendance reporting to the feds when you combine accelerated courses with semester-long ones?

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Yesterday’s University of Venus piece about the decisions academic women have made about whether and when to have kids is well worth checking out, but it also brought me up short.  

We’ve hit the point as an industry at which having children is a career decision.  There’s something fundamentally wrong with that.

Obviously, having kids restructures how you spend your time.  But it also puts a lot more restrictions on your realistic options.  Cheap but interesting housing is suddenly out of the question if it’s in a bad school district and you can’t afford private options.  Suddenly, moving every couple of years is far less appealing.  (That matters at the early stage, at which people are trying to climb the faculty ranks.  It matters again in administration, where the market is national.)  Given the geographic dispersion of opportunities -- spread out, in an era in which they otherwise tend to concentrate -- having kids forces some very difficult decisions.

It shouldn’t.  Parenthood should never be required, but it shouldn’t be effectively forbidden, either.  Many adults will want to become parents at some point, and a good thing, too.  (Those of us in regions with declining numbers of 18 year olds can speak to the impact on higher ed after birthrates drop.)  If we’ve constructed an industry in which parenthood is disqualifying, then we need to reconstruct our industry.  Something has gone very wrong.

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If you haven’t seen it, this story about the Hoboken, New Jersey school district abandoning a “one laptop for every student” policy is well worth reading.  In a gallows humor kind of way, it does a nice job of catching the gaps between intentions and facts on the ground when it comes to technology, classrooms, and adolescents.  Laptops broke frequently; kids played Crazy Taxis in class; townspeople dropped by to use the free school wi-fi, since the kids publicized the password.  

The same tech tool can look very different in different hands.  The Boy frequently gets my tech hand-me-downs, and he uses them very differently than I ever did. (The first thing he did with his new phone, for example, was to get a spiky, neon-green case for it.  The second was to install Kik.)  Imposing tech without considering the reality of the user and the user’s environment can get weird, quickly.

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Apparently, UT-Austin is charging students for on-campus wifi.  They have multiple tiers of service, and students can choose based on what their professors have assigned.

As an administrator, I actually get it.  Wifi access costs money, and demand increases dramatically every year as students bring more devices to campus and watch streaming video on all of them.  Demand is increasing much more quickly than institutional revenue is.  Tying revenue to demand offers a double win: it promises to increase revenue and dampen demand, thereby making a balanced budget sustainable..

But from an educational perspective, it’s a nightmare.  

We know that the best educational outcomes tend to come from courses that blend online and onsite activity.  Suddenly putting up a toll bridge on the online part -- one that will hit some students far harder than others -- is likely to have unwelcome impacts.  And I can’t imagine a more counterproductive policy when it comes to encouraging the use of Open Educational Resources, which are supposed to save money.  (“Yes, it’s free, but it’ll hog your data.”)  

As with data caps on cell networks, it also fails to distinguish between peak periods and slow ones.  In that sense, it falls flat as a way to manage traffic.  

I understand the need to cover costs, but honestly, this is what technology fees are for. Trying to calibrate at this level is just asking for trouble.

Shared Among Whom?

Among whom should “shared governance” be shared?  And how, exactly?

This week, IHE featured two articles on the subject, both of which rely on an assumption I find troubling.

The first is a profile of the argument in a new book, The Rise and Decline of Faculty Governance, by Larry Gerber.  Assuming that the article got Gerber right, his argument is fairly standard-issue administrator-bashing.  Once upon a time, there was a Golden Age, in which white male tenured faculty roamed free, grazing happily upon the groves of academe.  But then (cue ominous music) Administrators appeared on the scene, bringing with them an inexplicable lust for power matched only by their apparent fecundity.  They left in their wake trails of adjunct sections and outcomes assessment protocols.  Now, nearly all is lost, but we emeritus few can compete to see who can compose the most self-indulgent eulogy.  (Benjamin Ginsburg is quoted, with characteristic humility, calling Gerber “the official historian of the end of the academic world.”)  If not for those evil Administrators, IT, financial aid, payroll, regulatory compliance, disability services, admissions, and marketing would just take care of themselves.  Or something.

The second is a much more nuanced and intelligent take offered by Brian Rosenberg, the president of Macalester College. Rosenberg takes as given that the concept of “shared” governance is importantly different from “faculty” governance, and instead focuses on how to make the sharing effective.  He suggests that the first step is to move away from the illusion that it’s possible to have substantive discussions in mass meetings, since they fall prey too easily to uninformed theatrics.  Instead, he suggests moving from a “direct democracy” model to a “representative democracy” model.  Have the faculty elect some representatives to be present at smaller group meetings where decisions are actually made.  Make sure those representatives, and any other faculty who wish to be, are brought up to speed on how the institution works, so their input can be more practical and effective.

Rosenberg’s approach accepts the basic reality that colleges are complex institutions full of moving parts.  But it still assumes that governance is mostly an on-campus issue, and that the “sharing” involved is sharing among people who work on campus.  That’s much less true than it was, especially in the public sector, but theories of shared governance haven’t caught up to the changes.  As I noted a few months ago in my response to Susan Resneck Pierce’s Governance Reconsidered:

The premise is that a college is a self-contained institution -- what, in the sixties, they used to call a “total” institution -- and that all conflict is contained within it.  Nobody comes out and says that, of course, because it’s facially absurd.  But they assume it, and act as if it were true.  That’s becoming increasingly untenable.  Faculty owe allegiances to academic disciplines.  Administrators and Boards are increasingly subject to levels of rulemaking from state and federal authorities -- as well as financial pressures -- that greatly restrict their freedom to decide...It’s easy (and proper) to call out, say, the legislature of South Carolina for scolding a college for teaching a book about lesbianism.  But that’s an easy case.  The more common case of legislative troublemaking isn’t even around rulemaking.  It’s around uncertainty.  Hiring decisions, for example, rely on the availability of money to pay the new hire.  When we don’t know if that money will be available until very late in the fiscal year, we hold off on hiring.  That has direct programmatic impact, especially when small programs lose full-time people and we don’t have the money to replace until it’s too late for the following year.

Many of the decisions made on campus are in the context of decisions made elsewhere, or facts from the outside.  Combine a legislative “performance funding” formula with a demographic slide, and you have the beginnings of a context in which to understand how decisions are made.  Then add federal mandates, case law, collective bargaining agreements, financial aid regulations, and whatever else.  Adding some representatives to committees -- a good idea, as far as it goes -- won’t change those external drivers.  

A more robust theory of shared governance would have to place colleges within the larger political economy.  That would involve acknowledging that colleges’ issues are not self-contained.  Legislatures often regard public colleges as tools of public policy, and treat them accordingly.  (“We need $10,000 bachelor’s degrees!”  “We need more STEM grads!”)  Those directives are not generally subject to local veto.  In Connecticut, the state actually went so far as to prescribe the amount of remediation a college could offer.  That bypassed typical administrative decisions, and went straight to what a curriculum committee would normally do.  I don’t see those trends abating.

I don’t see much point in hand-wringing about a lost Golden Age, and not only because most Golden Age narratives rely on selective memory.  The idea that higher education should be eulogized implies that it’s dead, and frankly, I take offense at that.  Higher education is taking place every single day.  It’s the old theory of how it works that’s dead.  We need a new theory, in which the “sharing” of governance is broader, messier, and higher-stakes.  Because it is.

Location and Local Identity

Jeff Selingo has a thought-provoking piece about location and its effect on campuses.  It doesn’t focus on community colleges, but in some ways, they face the same issue even more starkly.

In a sense, Selingo’s piece recapitulates the battle between Tom Friedman and Richard Florida over the importance of place.  In broad strokes, Friedman argues that the internet revolution has made place irrelevant, since business can be done from anywhere with a connection.  As he puts it, the world is flat.  Florida argues that the world is actually spiky and getting spikier; paradoxically, the seeming liberation from place actually frees the talented to move to elite talent magnet cities where they can access real-life networks of peers and prospective employers.  New York City gets richer, even as Syracuse struggles.

In the data, Florida is right; a few major cities are prospering, but many of the smaller cities that prospered in the mid-twentieth century are really hurting.  If Friedman were right, Syracuse would probably prosper due to its (dramatically) lower housing costs.  It doesn’t.

Selingo’s piece looks at the effects of spatial polarization on residential campuses, and makes note of Cornell’s decision to locate its new science campus in New York City, rather than Ithaca.  He notes that the rapid geographical spread of campuses in the postwar era may be reversing now, with consolidation in major metros happening alongside real enrollment pressures in out-of-the-way places.

Selingo focuses on four-year residential institutions. From a community college perspective, the picture is somewhat complicated.

Most community colleges aren’t residential, and many have moved aggressively towards online instruction.  From that, you’d think that geography wouldn’t matter so much.  But they draw students almost entirely from within commuting distance -- even with their online programs -- and in some states, much of their funding is local, whether through appropriations or dedicated property taxes.  In other states, they have tightly-defined “service areas,” whether by county line or by “districts,” in the manner of K-12.  It’s all well and good to declare yourself liberated from “place” by technology, but when your funding is place-bound, so are you.

Selingo predicts a wave of consolidations and closures among rural colleges, and continued growth among the urban ones.  (For present purposes, let’s understand “urban” to mean “trendy urban,” such as Boston or Seattle, as opposed to, say, Detroit.)  But the picture is less clear for community colleges, since geographic convenience is actually part of their mission.  

As place-bound institutions in places that isn’t growing, non-metro community colleges are in a difficult spot.  They’re more necessary than they’ve ever been, even while they’re facing challenges of both funding and mission.  The funding challenge is straightforward enough.  Over the past decade, the source of most operating funding has changed from states and localities to students.  When you rely more on student payment and you have enrollment declines, the picture isn’t pretty.  

The “mission” challenge is more subtle, but in some ways, more vexing.  When local industry isn’t hiring much, whether because of long-term structural changes, short-term cycles, or both, the “workforce development” role becomes more complicated.  In the long term, it’s clear that abandoning education is not the path to prosperity.  But in the short term, a graduate with debt and either no job, or the same job she had before she started, isn’t better off economically.  (On the other hand, the transfer mission has never looked stronger.)  It’s difficult to feed a local economy that isn’t hungry.  

Hiring by the college itself can be difficult in out-of-the-way or unfashionable places.  Many academics travel in pairs, and can’t or won’t relocate unless both partners can find something.  In higher-turnover roles, moving to an area without many other similar potential employers is high risk.  That’s probably why it’s easier to recruit talent to a new tech startup in New York City than in Syracuse, even with the higher housing costs in New York City; if your tech startup goes bust in NYC, you have a good chance of catching on somewhere else without having to move.  If your startup goes bust in Syracuse, you’ll probably have to move.  Particularly for people with school-age children, this is not a trivial distinction.  Over time, difficulty in recruiting from the outside can lead to a certain provincialism.

Community colleges in America are geographically egalitarian, in an era that’s becoming geographically polarized.  But they’re even more place-bound than most four-year campuses, given their intensely local identities.  For the ones in hot locations, that works out reasonably well.  For the rest, the tensions are getting stronger.

Ask the Administrator: Teacher or Instructor?

A new (and fortunate) correspondent writes

I am writing to ask your advice on teaching at a school and teaching undergrads. I have job offers from schools and an offer to work as an instructor at a university. I need to make a choice [soon].

I want to work as an instructor but I also feel I should work as a school teacher to catch them young and make a positive influence on students from diverse backgrounds.

As far as salary goes, it is not very different. But school teachers have a good retirement plan. The instructor position is not tenure track but i am inclined towards teaching undergraduate Chemistry in a place where there are chances that I will have like minded colleagues. I am married and have 2 pre-school children. So I would want to spend not more than 50 hours a week at work.

I would sincerely appreciate your advice on the pros and cons of working at a school Vs as an instructor.

First, congratulations on having multiple good options.  Many people don’t.

Context matters, so it's hard to say with any certainty what you should do.  You know the intricacies of your context far better than I could.

That said, "instructor" positions off the tenure track (at colleges that have a tenure track) tend to be unstable, and often isolating.  Most of the time, you wouldn't know until the last minute whether you could return the following year.  (That's somewhat less true in unionized contexts, depending on the specific contract.)  What looks like a good choice now could vanish next year, or the year after that.  In the high school setting, you will probably have pretty good security from the start, and significantly more in a few years.

Since you mention retirement plans, I'm guessing that you're interested in some level of stability of employment.  Based on that, I'd recommend the high school route.  That route would also give you a better chance to "catch them while they're young."  

You'd be much more integrated into the life of the school at the high school level, in most cases.  Instructors at the college level tend to be treated largely as independent contractors, rather than as colleagues.  In most settings -- again, context matters, but I'm speaking to the typical case -- you'd basically be on your own.  At the high school level, you'd be a presumably permanent member of a standing faculty, so you'd have colleagues.  

High schools have issues of their own, of course.  Leadership quality can vary widely, and facilities are often less advanced than you'd find at a typical college.  You'd also have to work with more mandates, whether from the district or the state.  And, of course, dealing with 15- and 16-year olds is different from dealing with adults.  Whether that excites you or makes you roll your eyes is a question only you can answer.

Good luck!

Wise and worldly readers, what would you suggest?  

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

Two Bodies, Revisited

If you haven’t seen Kelly Baker’s articles on the “two body problem” and academic hiring, check them out.  They’re thoughtful, honest, necessary, and depressing.  What I’m writing here is intended to supplement her pieces, rather than to rebut them.  

Baker tells stories of married women, including herself, who found themselves judged by hiring committees based on their marital status and presumed ability to focus on the job.  Some of them wondered whether they should have removed their wedding rings before going to the interviews.  Baker quotes one woman mentioning that she has never not been asked about her spouse’s situation in an interview.  

Married men, on the other hand, get a free pass.  If anything, the presence of a wedding ring may actually count somewhat in their favor, to the extent that it suggests conformity with social norms and/or a willingness to suck it up to keep the job needed to support a family.  

I don’t dispute Baker’s observations, but at the same time, I’ve been on dozens of hiring committees over the past six years and I haven’t seen or heard of women being questioned that way, even once.  We’re pretty vigilant about not doing that.  We even require every member of every search committee to go through training that specifically covers the kinds of questions not to ask.  So I’m left to wonder at the perceptual gap.  (Judging by our hiring record, women candidates have done quite well here.  The gap isn’t just perceptual.)  A few thoughts:

- Maybe HCC is uniquely progressive.  As flattering as that theory is, I tend to doubt it.  We have good people, but we don’t have a monopoly on good people.

- Maybe I’m just not privy to it.  In our structure, I’m in on the final round, as opposed to the first round.  Not being present for the first round, I can’t say with certainty what does or does not get said there.  Even so, though, we have some conscientious people who would send up a signal flare if something as inappropriate as that were to happen.  I can’t prove a negative, but based on the signal flares I’ve received on other issues, I’m confident that someone would say something, at least in most cases.

- Maybe it’s because we have a majority-female faculty, as many community colleges do.  In that context, default assumptions about gender and family roles are quite different.  (That’s true of this area generally.  Northampton is about ten minutes north of campus, and a popular place for faculty to live.  Its municipal parking garage has a sign at the entrance: “Northampton.  Where the coffee is strong, and so are the women.”  It’s hard to imagine that in many other parts of the country.)  Once you hit a certain critical mass, the culture shifts.

Nationally, women are far better represented among full-time faculty at community colleges than at four-year colleges and universities.  After a while, that may become self-perpetuating; women who are unfairly rejected by, or driven away from, bastions of old-school sexism may find a more welcoming clime here.  

Exceptions aside, I wonder if part of the issue is the fact that in higher ed, as opposed to many other industries, the people responsible for making hiring recommendations are often relatively untrained in how to do that.  (Technically, hiring is usually delegated to the Board of Trustees or a similar body, but the recommendations they approve come from within the college.)  If a college doesn’t put its search committees through some sort of HR training, and the members of those committees only get to hire once every several years or so, then while they may be experts in their subject matter, they aren’t experts in hiring.  They don’t do it often enough to get good at it.  

From a department’s perspective, a hire who leaves quickly is essentially a failed hire.  (That’s especially true in a context in which getting a replacement position isn’t automatic.) People from with a department who haven’t been trained in the protocols around hiring, and who may not be terribly gender-conscious generally, may be coming from a place of “let’s not blow this opportunity” rather than anything else.  They’re looking for signs that the candidate wouldn’t stay.  A spouse in a faraway location might be that clue.  Committees are terrible at mind-reading, though, so they can easily misread the significance of personal information.  

In other words, for my fellow admins out there, one major lesson of Baker’s piece may be that if search committees aren’t getting trained, they’d better be.  And if you don’t have a climate in which people are comfortable sending distress signals, you need to establish one.  The alternative -- beyond lawsuits -- is losing terrific people for all the wrong reasons.  I’ve lost great people for fair and valid reasons, and that’s painful enough.  Losing them this way would just add insult to injury.

In some ways, of course, these represent a kind of nibbling around the edges.  The combination of sexism and a lack of funding for enough full-time faculty jobs create the conditions in which moments of stupidity actually matter.  But there may still be something to be learned from contrasting hiring practices at colleges with majority-female faculty to hiring practices elsewhere.  

In the meantime, check out Baker’s articles for yourself.  The kind of thoughtful truth-telling she does won’t guarantee anything, but it will make positive change more likely.  I’ll take that.