The Other Side of Free

Robert Kelchen did a nice job of outlining the limits to “free” community college proposals, working from the perspective of the student.  Kelchen pointed out that student costs go well beyond tuition, especially at community colleges, but that most of the existing proposals don’t really address that.  

I’ll address the other side of free.  What do “free community college” proposals look like from the perspective of the provider?  How would they work for colleges?

Details matter, but in general, they’re dangerous.

Most of them are “last dollar” proposals, meaning that they’d fill in the gap between existing financial aid and the actual cost.  And many of them have relatively stringent academic eligibility requirements, in the name of preventing subsidized slacking.  

In the best case, they’d be scholarships that will fill in whatever costs are remaining after, say, Pell grants are used.  (I’m still a little dubious about counting loans as “aid.”)  If that happens, then the only real cost to the provider is monitoring whatever criteria the scholarship requires.

I don’t want to understate that.  Financial aid is already complicated by students who “swirl” among institutions, who stop out mid-semester, and who walk away without bothering to do official withdrawals.  Add, say, a 3.0 GPA requirement, and it’s another thing to monitor.  All that monitoring requires staff -- the dreaded “administrative bloat” -- which costs money.  Does the GPA include second attempts at a course?  Remedial courses?  The details multiply quickly.

But experience tells me that, over time, it would evolve into an underfunded or unfunded mandate to the colleges.  If that’s where it goes, I’d rather not.

Community colleges, as a breed, are underfunded already.  Requiring them to serve more people for free will only make things worse.  

I’m also unconvinced on the politics of it.  If “free” community college is restricted to a relatively small group of students, it will quickly generate resentment.  If it’s widely available, then I’d expect serious pushback from four-year colleges and all manner of other providers.  

Happily, I have an alternative that’s easier both politically and administratively.

Instead of setting aside a few students for freebies while everyone else pays ever-increasing tuition, how about...a commitment by states to return their funding levels to those of, say, the late 1990’s?  In return, colleges could not increase their tuition or fees for a set amount of time.  Let’s say, fifty percent state support in return for a five-year tuition freeze.  (Obviously, the numbers would have to vary by state.  I’m not sure how it would work in states that support community colleges through millages, for example.)  

A tuition freeze is easier to sell than a repeal, simply because it’s applied evenly to everybody.  And it’s MUCH easier to administer.  It would maintain the value of Pell grants, and make a headline that nearly everybody could understand immediately.  Letting prospective students know that this year’s bill will also be next year’s allows for both planning and hope.  

The danger, of course, is that legislatures would take the tuition freeze without ponying up the operating money to make it possible.  But that’s not a given.  Here in Massachusetts, the legislature has committed to increasing its proportionate support of UMass in the name of reducing tuition/fee increases.  I see no reason at all that such a deal has to be confined to the research university sector.  It would work just as well here.

Promises of making things free don’t make the costs of provision go away.  Employees still have to be paid.  I’ve seen too many unfunded mandates come down the pike to have much faith that promises of “Free” won’t amount to more.  But promises of stability, tied to serious funding schemes, could accomplish almost as much good with much less blowback.  And the students would see, and receive, a benefit they could understand and use.

4:00 Dinners

The Gates Foundation has issued a report suggesting that colleges could save millions by collapsing “extra” sections, and increasing enrollments in the sections that remain.

What, exactly, do they think we’ve been doing?

On the ground, I can attest that managing section enrollments is a conscious task every single semester.  The deans and I meet multiple times before each semester to gauge which sections are struggling, and to make difficult decisions about what runs and what doesn’t.  We’ve done that for years, and we’re not unique.

Over years of managing section enrollments, through a spike in 2009 and the regression to the mean afterwards, the key variables have become clear.  “Not having thought of that” is not one of them.

One is student interest.  Applying Gates’ metric to restaurants will make the point.  Many restaurants have patrons waiting at 7:00, but plenty of open tables at 4:00.  If only they could convince people to eat dinner earlier, look at the efficiency gains!

Well, yes, but most people don’t want to (or can’t) eat dinner at 4:00.  Even offering Early Bird specials will accomplish only so much.  People want to eat when they want to eat.  You can try to nudge that on the margins, but at some level, you’re probably stuck with overcapacity in midafternoon and a shortage of tables in the early evening.  It’s the nature of the beast.

Colleges are the same way.  Classrooms are packed during the Fall and Spring semesters from about 9:00 to about 2:30.  There’s a midafternoon lull, followed by a pickup in the evening.  (Student job schedules are major drivers of that)  Meanwhile, weekends and summers remain comparatively sparse, despite repeated attempts to ramp them up.  

The exception proves the rule.  The one case in which “twilight” (that is, 4:00) classes were generally successful was at the peak of the 2009-10 spike.  At that point, everything else was full, and students were desperate enough to take classes when they could get them.  When enrollments started to recede, the 4:00 classes were the first to dry up.  They were almost nobody’s first choice.  As long as students have options, they will tend to cluster around the most common work hours.  

(If we want to make a national push to use summers in more academically productive ways, the first place to start is with year-round Pell.  It came and went in a flash several years ago.  Until it’s a fixture of the scene, we can’t expect people to make plans that rely on it.)

Second is room availability.  We have only so many biology labs.  Overbooking them to see who doesn’t show up would be a recipe for disaster.  

Third is faculty availability.  Faculty and classes are not infinitely fungible.  Asking the professor of Spanish to pick up a section of American Sign Language is not a good use of resources, even if both belong to the Languages department.  Relatedly, when you have a sequence of courses, sometimes the highest level will run small.  Combining it with an unrelated class would make no pedagogical sense; dropping it from the curriculum would leave high-achieving students hanging.  Our “Differential Equations” class runs smaller than a typical College Algebra section.  I’d love to see more students make it that far, but at this point, we either run it small or we don’t run it.  

At the upper end of the curriculum, cancelling small classes would prevent students from graduating.  Given that we’re increasingly accountable for graduation rates, that’s a non-starter.

Fourth is faculty loads.  If you have someone you’re paying anyway, and you close a ‘small’ section with nothing else for them to do, are you really being fiscally responsible?  Again, faculty are not infinitely fungible.  If you fail to account for that, you’ll find efficiencies that don’t actually exist.

Finally, and I can’t stress this enough, enrollment is a moving target.  Patterns change unevenly, so in any given year you’ll get a fresh new crop of anomalies.  When enrollment continues until just before classes start, as is typical at community colleges, you’re left making predictions based on partial information.  And you have to make those predictions early enough for alternate plans to be realistic.  That’s never a perfect science -- every year, someone complains that his course would have filled if we had just given it more time, which is unprovable either way -- but it’s inherent in being “responsive.”  If we locked down enrollments months in advance, we would have time to squeeze out some efficiencies.  With numbers changing until the last minute, it’s harder.  You’ll never capture that if you only look at “snapshots.”

Over the past several years, we’ve repeatedly reduced the number of sections scheduled upfront in order to catch up with shifting enrollments, and to prevent too many mismatches of supply and demand.  I’d say we’ve done a damn good job of it.  Nothing in the IHE report about the proposed Gates metric offers any suggestions about how to do it better. Unless it comes with some sort of practical “how-to,” I’m not impressed.  4:00 dinners are not a new idea.  But diners have preferences of their own.

Friday Fragments

Several of us have long wondered how it is that for-profit colleges report higher graduation rates than most community colleges.  As Ben Miller points out, the answer is...bad counting!

The key is that for-profits offer far more short-term certificates, and far fewer actual degrees, in their mix.  But as far as grad rates are concerned, a completion is a completion.  So yes, students in six-month certificate programs graduate at higher rates than students in two-year degree programs, for the simple reason that life has less time to interfere.  If you correct for the mix of certificates and degrees, the for-profit advantage melts away.  And community colleges cost students much less.

Kudos to Ben Miller for figuring this out.

--

A new study shows that “non-first-time” students complete degree programs at significantly lower rates than first-time students.

That’s not surprising, given that colleges were designed for (and to a remarkable extent, still judged by standards appropriate to) recent high school grads.  

I’d be intrigued to see the data broken down by demographics and by onsite-online enrollment.  My guess is that gender is a key variable, and that onsite enrollments are likelier to complete.  

I remain convinced that the next great frontier in higher education, in demographic terms, is adult men.  That’s the group we’ve had the hardest time reaching; adult women return in much larger numbers than adult men.  Looking at age without controlling for gender could lead to some skewed conclusions.  Still, I’m glad to see some serious attention to the question.

--

The writing gene is showing itself again.  The Boy joined the school newspaper a few years ago, and quickly became its editor.  Now his Lego League team has drafted him to be its copywriter.

Carrying on the tradition, this week, The Girl joined the newspaper.  For a fifth grader, she shows pretty good command of the semicolon.

Some parents beam with pride at kids who can make three-point shots.  Others get excited about musical prowess or the ability to build stuff.  

I get excited when they tackle deadline writing.  

Nerdy parents of the world, unite!

The Case of the Missing Carrots

Sometimes, ideas come from unlikely corners.  Today I saw pieces in the National Review (!) and the Detroit News that bounced off each other in productive ways.  Hey, it happens.

Andrew Kelly argues in the National Review that we’ll never get college costs under control as long as colleges aren’t meaningfully accountable for the unpayable debt of their graduates.  He uses the “skin in the game” metaphor to argue that if colleges bore some cost of failure, they’d have the incentive they currently lack to do a better job.

Kelly notes, rightly, that the current higher ed system resembles popular conservative prescriptions for K-12: Pell grants are essentially vouchers, and students can take aid anywhere they want, including religiously affiliated institutions.  It’s possible to read regional accreditation as the “voluntary guidelines” that conservatives often extol in other contexts.  The failure of the current higher ed system to contain costs, one might think, should therefore call into question many conservative articles of faith, though he doesn’t follow through on the insight.  One might also point out that what looks like runaway spending is actually sustained cost-shifting; several studies have shown that community college spending nationally has been flat or declining for over a decade.  Rising tuition is a function of state disinvestment.   

But never mind that.  Kelly rightly notes that institutional self-interest is not confined to the for-profit sector, although many analyses seem content to condemn the for-profits and call it a day.  And he’s certainly right on the “binary variable” relationship of accreditation to financial aid eligibility.  Put simply, if the only weapon you have is nuclear, you’re effectively unarmed.  The cost of actually using the weapon is so high that everyone knows you won’t.  

Okay, I thought.  Standard “skin in the game” argument, if with greater elegance and candor.  

Then I saw this piece in the Detroit News -- historically, a conservative paper -- and I found the missing link.  Apparently, the Michigan Senate just passed an extension and expansion of the Michigan New Jobs Training Program.  The program provides funding for community colleges to offer training in employable skills for people who are looking for work.  (The article doesn’t mention whether it also applies to incumbent workers who are looking to upgrade.  I hope it does.)  The genius of the program, though, is its funding source.  As the article puts it,

Under the program, the community college training is paid for by capturing the state income tax associated with the new employees’ wages and redirecting it to the college, instead of to the state. These jobs are required to pay at least 175 percent of the state minimum wage.

In other words, the idea of “skin in the game” (honestly, isn’t there a better phrase for this?) cuts two ways.  If colleges do a poor job of preparing their students for the economy, Kelly argues, they should pay a price.  Michigan’s bill addresses the other side: if colleges do a notably good job of preparing their students, they should be rewarded.  And the reward should be as structured, and as guaranteed, as Kelly suggests penalties would be.

The educator in me sees a lot of merit in this idea.  

Colleges don’t capture a set percentage of the value they create.  They get what they’re given.  If you want to talk seriously about incentives, that’s the disconnect you have to fix.  Kelly’s version -- and most of the versions currently being discussed nationally -- only look at incentives in one direction.  Fixing the disconnect on the negative side, while leaving it unaddressed on the positive side, will inevitably lead to greater disinvestment and underprovision.  If you want to increase success and decrease failure, you can’t only punish failure; you also have to reward success.  Michigan’s bill does exactly that.

Admittedly, Michigan’s bill is limited in scope.  It applies only to certain training programs for which it’s relatively easy to determine the economic value-add for a given student.  It doesn’t apply to all degrees, or to transfer-focused programs, or to any of the bevy of other flavors of education that colleges offer.  It doesn’t speak to the non-economic goals of education, the quality of student experience, or even to students who get jobs out of state.  (Kelly rightly notes that only the Feds can track that kind of data across state lines.  That’s a big deal in geographically small states.  HCC is only about a half-hour north of Hartford, Connecticut.  Crossing the state line for work is relatively common.)  It focuses on the lowest-hanging fruit, in terms of measurable outcomes.  And it does nothing to address the simple fact that recessions are independent variables.

Still, even with those caveats, it gets an essential piece right.  If colleges will be expected to provide quality education and training at low cost to students, they need steady, reliable, and significant income to do it.  Short-term grants are great, but if you’re serious, you need to talk about long-term operating income.  If successful education leads to broad economic gains, then taxing back some of that gain to keep the training going is simply responsible stewardship.  Failing to recapture some of it amounts to eating the economy’s seed corn.

Michigan’s solution is much more elegant than, say, Oregon’s proposed Pay It Forward plan.  Oregon’s plan builds in decades of delay between when classes are taught and when students pay for them.  (How, exactly, colleges would cover the multi-decade gap is not entirely clear.)  In Michigan’s case, the delay is much shorter, so colleges would live to see the payoff from improved performance.  The market signals, if you want to call them that, would be fast enough to mean something.  Basing performance funding on performance from two decades ago is not going to work.

So, well done, Michigan.  Here’s hoping that other states, and maybe even the Feds, will learn something.  Carrots and sticks don’t work if you leave out the carrots.

Fast Failure or Slow Success?

Last year we started a self-paced version of developmental math, in hopes of allowing students who can move faster than the standard developmental class to progress as quickly as their talent and drive will take them.  The self-paced option is proving fairly popular, though it’s far too early to render any judgment on its relative success at this point.

In a conversation with one of the professors teaching it, though, I realized that the self-paced model may inadvertently bring up a truth that runs counter to its original intention.

The major goal of moving to a self-paced model is to allow some students to get out of the developmental sequence, and into classes that count towards graduation, more quickly.  And it seems to work that way for the top echelon of students in the class.  Others are moving along at pretty much the rate they otherwise would have, which is to be expected.

The real surprise hasn’t been the ones who’ve floored the accelerator.  It’s the ones who ordinarily would have given up and walked away, who are slowly plugging along.  Instead of “failing fast,” as silicon valley would have it, they’re succeeding slowly.

Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing depends on your perspective.

From the perspective of a three-year graduation rate, it’s a bad thing.  A student who takes “too long” to graduate shows up in our grad rate calculation as a dropout, even if she graduates the very next term.  If you’re trying to speed up completion, a bunch of students moving more slowly than a semester sequence would have looks awful.

But if you assume that most of those students would otherwise have flunked out or dropped out, and are now instead plugging along towards completion, then it looks like a roaring success.  

It’s far too early to know if that will actually happen, of course.  But there’s reason for optimism.  In a self-paced class -- as opposed to a traditional one -- a student has to master each module on its own terms.  In a “standard” Basic Arithmetic class, a student could do well enough on integers and decimals to carry a weak performance in fractions.  Then that student’s weakness in fractions comes back to haunt her farther on in the sequence.  Since a self-paced course requires passing every subset of the course, she has to actually pass fractions to pass the class.  If all goes well, then, the usual pain points later in the sequence shouldn’t be as painful.

This perspective suggests some limits to the widely-held view that “time is the enemy.”  It’s clearly true that all else being equal, students who attend full-time graduate at higher rates than students who attend part-time.  It’s also true, unsurprisingly, that students who don’t need remediation graduate at higher rates than those who do.  The empirical support for clearing away unnecessary obstacles from students’ pathways is clear.

But if the choice is between fast failure and slow success, suddenly the issue changes.  Filling in the gaps from spotty and/or long-ago high school preparation isn’t necessarily the work of a few weeks.  Some students can blast through after a brief brush-up, and they absolutely should have that option.  But some need more time than that.  In a regular semester, they run out of time and walk away with nothing but a failing grade.  In this format, they can come back next time and pick up where they left off.  While the administrator in me sees how that can be problematic, the educator in me can’t help but like the idea of institutional patience with students who get off to a slow start.

Fail fast or succeed slowly?  I’m thinking “yes.”

Cushions

This weekend, two thoughtful stories about community college students got unusual play.  Both were about sympathetic students whose studies were in constant tension with the need to make money (and, in one case, with the needs of a young child).  In both cases, you couldn’t help but root for the student, and in both cases, relatively small amounts of money made a terrible difference.

The stories are pretty representative of many community college students.  Many of them are living on the economic margins, and their studies are easily derailed by shifting work hours, abrupt and expensive car repairs, or other vagaries of life.  

As a policy issue, it gets complicated quickly.  But it’s also potentially instructive for those of us on the other side of college (and grad school).

Looking back on my own student days, there were a few times when economics could easily have derailed me.  But I had two things that some students don’t have now: access to credit, and when things got really bad, parents who could help.

I remember one expensive car repair in grad school for which I had neither choice nor means.  The area I lived in pretty much required a car, so just going without wasn’t really an option.  (Some people tried; they lasted a few weeks.)  Old cars that are cheap to buy are often expensive to maintain, which I learned the hard way.  When the transmission went, there was no earthly way I could cover both that and rent on my grad student money.  After a lot of agonizing, I finally called for parental help.  I hated doing it, but at the time, I didn’t see any other way.

What if I didn’t have that option?

That’s where race and class become mutually reinforcing.  I had middle-class parents who could, when the storm got really bad, throw me a life preserver.  (They were divorced, which made asking just that much more fun, but that’s another issue.)  I was responsible for my own day-to-day stuff, but at some level, I knew I was working with a net.  That, combined with the we’re-all-broke-so-let’s-take-it-easy-on-each-other culture of grad students, made it possible to tread water economically for a while.  Knowing that I wouldn’t have to chuck it all and start bagging groceries allowed for a level of focus that wouldn’t have been possible if everything were riding on me.  Not having kids yet helped, too.

Decades later, it’s easy to forget moments like that.  It’s easy to look past the lack of static from landlords, the occasional financial rescue, and the benefit of the doubt from neighbors. Those just sort of fade into the background, the better to highlight stories of bizarre advisor behavior and the various indignities of grad school.  But those small favors made completion possible. Whatever “merit” came later, from doing well the work that the degree required, was made possible first by some cultural tailwinds.

I don’t bring this up out of guilt; I don’t think I did anything wrong.  It’s about working to extend those tailwinds to everyone.  

That’s hard in practice, because the issues are so complex and the money so scarce.  But the impulse, I think, is right.  As long as we put students in positions where only those with cushions can make it, then only those with cushions will.  The rest, well,...

I’ll be much more comfortable with talk of “merit” when cushions don’t matter.  Until then, there’s work to do.

What I Learned Talking to Grad Students

On Friday, I had the chance to participate in a conference organized by Paula Krebs, from Bridgewater State, on preparing doctoral students for positions at teaching-intensive institutions. (It was the kickoff of what we hope will be an ongoing cross-sectional partnership.)  I was one of several community college representatives there, along with several folks from state universities.  The audience was primarily graduate students at relatively elite institutions, along with a few errant graduate deans and directors.

It was eye-opening.  I honestly wonder what graduate advisors are telling their students.

The format of the conference was refreshing; for once, the community college and state university people were at the podium, and the MIT and Ivy League folk were in the audience.  That almost never happens.  We had some concurrent sessions, in which people presented various perspectives on hiring, but the highlight for me was the one-on-one review of application materials.

The grad students I met were accomplished, earnest, smart, and well-prepared for research university jobs.  But they were also lost, when it came to the realities of applying for full-time faculty roles at community colleges.  It became clear quickly that they really had no idea.  I was a little uncertain, going in, about whether I could actually add any value; when I saw the common mistakes, though, I relaxed.  There’s plenty of work to be done.  

I don’t blame the grad students for that.  They know what they’ve been taught, and what they’ve absorbed by osmosis.  To the extent that their programs have official and unofficial blind spots, the grad students reflect that.  (I don’t exempt myself; coming out of my doctoral program in the 90’s, I had no idea about community colleges.  But that was the 90’s.  I would have expected more progress by now.) The short-term point of the conference was to fill in some of those gaps; the longer-term point is to send some wake-up calls to graduate programs.

Some of the tips that seemed to come as news were pretty basic.  For example, if you’re wrapping up your doctorate in a research-intensive program and applying to a community college, you will raise a red flag with a search committee about whether this is the job you really want.  We don’t want to be settled for.  If the letter is all about your dissertation and subsequent research plans, you probably won’t get the interview.  Similarly, if the cv puts several pages of research before deigning to mention teaching, you’ve tipped your hand.  These should be obvious, but apparently are not.  And for the love of all that is holy and good, don’t do your letter in 8 point font.  Some of us have old eyes, and will struggle to read anything that small.  Using 12 point is not that difficult.  

In terms of experience, getting some online teaching under your belt is helpful.  Whatever your philosophical position on online teaching, it’s a rapidly growing area, and we need people who can roll with it.  Similarly, people who understand the concept of “universal design” and the ways to make their courses accessible to people with disabilities (beyond just honoring the request from the relevant office for extra time on exams) have a leg up on people who don’t.  I would think that would be obvious by now, but apparently it isn’t.  

I tried to convey some sense of the realities of teaching in a community college setting.  On the downside, the teaching loads are relatively high, the students’ academic preparation is uneven, and in some states, the salaries aren’t spectacular.  On the upside, there’s no “publish or perish” moment; it’s possible to have both a job and a life.  (I was heartened to see that male candidates reacted as strongly to that as female ones.  Progress shows in the small things.)  And the knowledge that you’re empowering the students who need it the most can do wonders for one’s conscience.  

I’ll admit upfront that even with helpful hints, the job market stinks.  Yes, some searches fail, and to the extent that we can make a dent in that, it’ll help.  But the larger causes of the poor job market are entirely beyond what applicants do or don’t do.  That said, I still find it shocking that graduate faculty -- whose job it is to prepare students for academic jobs -- are so out of touch with what students need at the institutions that actually do most of the hiring.  The fact that the conference even had to happen is surprising.  I hope that some folks will take the helpful hints back to their grad programs and trigger some discussions about just what, exactly, the programs are doing.  

In the meantime, stay tuned for some postings...

Online Student Life

Most campus-based colleges have some form of a “student activities” or “student life” office.  That office runs a slate of programs for students, ranging from co-curricular to extracurricular to just-for-fun.  (Rule of thumb: the office that runs “Spring Fling” is Student Life.)  The idea is to help students blow off steam, connect with each other, connect with the college, and engage more with the world.  It’s an ambitious agenda, often run on a shoestring, and I salute the people who do it well.

Astute readers will notice the phrase “campus-based” in the above paragraph.  

Has anyone seen a college do a good job of providing some sort of student life for online students?

A Question for the Statisticians

In a recent exchange with one of my favorite higher education peeps, I realized that I’ve been stubbing my toe on the same issue for years now.  I’m hoping that some very smart readers have found an elegant way around it, the better to spare my theoretical feet.

Let’s say that you’re trying, for whatever reason, to measure the average earnings of graduates from a particular college or set of colleges.  And let’s pretend that actually getting the data is relatively easy, just for the sake of argument.  (“In theory, there’s data.”)  

What do you do with the students who transfer to the next level of education, instead of getting a job?  

For community colleges, the issue is students who move on to four-year colleges.  If you measure earnings a year after graduation, they’ll look markedly low, but that’s artificial.  If you count those students as they are, you’ll get a misleadingly low average.  If you exclude them from your count, you’ll essentially exclude the highest-achieving echelon of graduates.  We have grads who have gone on to medical school and done quite well for themselves, but they don’t show up in our numbers because the gap between graduating community college and making big money as a physician is too long.  

Four-year colleges face a related issue.  How do you count the students who went on to law school, med school, or, heaven help us, grad school?  In the first year out, or even the second, they’re making peanuts.  But they’re on a track that historically has done quite well, other than certain flavors of grad school.  The future cardiologist will do fine, eventually, but by then it’ll be too late for your numbers.

Again, factoring them out means discarding the cream of the crop, which hardly seems fair.  But leaving them in builds a systemic distortion.

Many of these issues go away if you assume a long enough timeframe.  Look at earnings twenty years out, and get a much clearer picture.  But if the point is to hold colleges’ feet to the fire, using data from twenty years ago isn’t likely to work.  The lag is too long.

I could understand the “just don’t count them” solution for, say, grads who drop out of the workforce to have children.  They’re playing a different game.  It isn’t necessarily as clean as that, of course; dropping out may be more appealing if your job is low-paying and dead-end.  But for the sake of simplicity, I could understand assuming choice.  

Graduates who join the military may also bring some low numbers initially, which I would argue are also misleading.  

For the sake of simplicity, let’s leave out students who “swirl” among several different institutions.  If a student transfers three times before graduating, which college should get credit for the earnings?  

It’s tempting to just throw up one’s hands and declare the entire enterprise a fool’s errand, but politically, that’s a non-starter.  If there will be “accountability,” how should we count?

Code-Switching and Professional Development

Travel funding is even harder to come by these days than it used to be.  In the community college world, that’s saying something.

I mention it in light of this piece in the Chronicle about the Aspen Institute’s recommendations for search committees looking for community college presidents.  In a nutshell, the Aspen Institute recommends that search committees de-emphasize their usual focus on fundraising and networks, and instead focus on people who’ve shown the ability to improve student success, to take risks, and to get people to experiment.  

I agree strongly with the Aspen Institute, for reasons that won’t surprise anyone who knows me.  But in thinking about what it takes to cultivate both student success and the spirit of experimentation, I’m thinking we might need to look at a different kind of professional development.  Specifically, future leaders might want to think about conscious cross-fertilization in choosing which conferences to attend.

I’ve walked some of that walk, having attended the Council for Undergraduate Research national conference, as well as NEACRAO, NACCE, and the first CASE conference on community college development.  From personal experience, I can attest that the initial sense of the surreal fades after an hour or so, and before long you find yourself considering issues from perspectives that otherwise might never have occurred to you.  For future leaders of change, this is not a bad thing.

Because I have some pretty nerdish tendencies, one of my ‘bucket list’ goals involves attending the American Educational Research Association annual conference.  I’m a big fan of Institutional Research done well, and I can’t help but think that if top management at community colleges were more fluent in data, it might be a good thing.  (Putting the people who make decisions in touch with the people who have information seems like it has some potential.)  But in 2015, the AERA conference and the AACC (American Association of Community Colleges) conference overlap almost completely, in cities pretty far apart.  Grr.  Looks like AERA will have to wait at least another year.

Along similar lines, I’ve noticed that Educause doesn’t seem to draw much overlap from the non-technical side of colleges, either.  It should; making resource allocation decisions without being conversant in technical trends is high-risk, at best.  There, too, I see a pretty compelling argument for senior administrators to travel outside their fields to see what’s going on.

The first time I traveled outside my comfort zone was as faculty.  My dean sent me to the AAC&U conference to hear how other colleges were handling the issues around ‘general education.’  That was where I discovered that DeVry’s habit of using “general education” and “liberal arts” interchangeably was actually idiosyncratic; when I first heard liberal arts faculty complain about having to teach “gen ed” courses, I had no idea how to make sense of it.  After discovering what they meant -- and how most of higher education uses those terms -- suddenly much more of what I had to do around accreditation made sense.  I just needed immersion in someone else’s frame of reference.

Reading around -- by which I mean, reading outside your own industry -- can help, to some degree.  (Blogs and Twitter are great for that.)  But the immersive and disorienting experience of being surrounded by people whose assumptions and frames of reference are different is qualitatively distinct from just reading outside your field.  

The ability to shift frames of reference, and to hold them up against each other, is a key leadership skill.  Public education leaders need to be fluent not only in faculty-speak, but in media-speak, lawyer-speak, politics-speak, business-speak, and donor-speak, among others. It’s a kind of code-switching.  (The best leaders go beyond code-switching and reach all the way to translation, which is a radically inclusive act.)  It requires practice.  And the best language practice is immersion.  

That’s a hard sell in an era in which every travel request triggers strict scrutiny.  But as expensive as travel can be, it’s cheaper than the failures rooted in provincialism.

Wise and worldly readers, have you ever been to a conference outside your normal circles that made a real difference for you?

A Different Way to Count

Last week’s report on the many failures of IPEDS data to reflect reality struck a chord.  Community colleges generally aren’t huge fans of IPEDS, since IPEDS focuses entirely on first-time, full-time, degree-seeking students.  That’s a smallish minority of community college students, and with the growth of dual and concurrent enrollment programs -- in which high school students take college courses while in high school, thereby losing their ‘first time’ status -- it will get smaller still.  

The recent report adds several categories in which IPEDS struggles mightily to get it right: online courses, accelerated semesters, “continuing education,” and the like.  The common denominator to each variation is that it’s a departure from the traditional semester-based, full-time, eighteen-year-old student that the system assumes.  The farther you get from that model, the more the system struggles.  

Unsurprisingly, the system does best by the most affluent institutions, with the most traditional and affluent students.  It does poorly by community colleges and colleges with multiple formats and non-traditional students.  When “accountability” or “performance” systems are based on data like that, the results aren’t hard to predict.

It’s easy enough to nitpick this flaw or that one, but ultimately, those are rearguard actions.  In an era in which we get judged by headline numbers, parrying with asterisks is not a winning strategy.  

Instead, we need to design new measures that assume the community college setting as normal.  

That might involve paying less attention to “semesters,” and more to progress.  It shouldn’t matter whether a student makes progress in a regular semester, an accelerated semester, or even an intersession.  With competency-based programs starting to catch on, the entire ‘semester’ edifice is making less sense anyway.  

We shouldn’t conflate stopping out with dropping out, as the current system does.  Students who need to work full-time while going to school often have to take time off along the way, both to make money and to get some rest.  Instead of understanding that as institutional failure, which the IPEDS system does, we should judge institutions on how easy it is for the student to resume progress upon re-enrollment.  The trend towards “stackable” credentials is based on an overdue recognition that students move in and out of college for economic reasons, and it’s better to give them something useful before they go.  But in the current data, those stopouts count as attrition, and are held against us.

In the community college world, many adult students arrive with a grab-bag of credits they’ve accumulated over the years, and with various skills acquired through years of work.  How well does a college address those?  How well does it work with time-limited funding for students, such as unemployment or trade adjustment assistance?  If a student only has a year of funding for education, the job of the institution should be to provide something useful within that year.  Judging it as a failure for not generating a two-year or four-year degree misses the point.

Taking the community college student as “normal” is radical in the best sense of the word: it gets to the root of the issue.  As long as the “norm” is assumed to be eighteen, full-time, living on campus, and supported by Mom and Dad, then community colleges will look defective.  They have their challenges, like any institution, but openness to different kinds of students is a feature, not a bug.  If the data collection system can’t recognize that, then we need a new data collection system.  Let the old one die under an avalanche of asterisks.

Friday Fragments

Writing is good for you, says science.  “Even blogging or journaling is enough to see results.”

I’d rather blog than jog, myself.  Easier on the knees.

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Higher ed wonks have been abuzz this week over adjustments to the ways the Feds calculate Cohort Default Rates for colleges.  CDR’s refer to the percentage of student loans issued for students at a particular college that have gone into default in the first three years after they were issued.  If a CDR for a particular school is too high, the school could lose its eligibility for Title IV financial aid.

The feds changed the way that they calculate the CDR, with the apparent effect of sparing some schools the ax.  That’s fine, as far as it goes, but it dodges the larger issue.

Let’s review.  A community college cannot turn anybody away who has a high school diploma or its equivalent.  It cannot deny loans to any student the feds deem eligible.  Students who only attend for a single semester, or even less, are counted in cohorts.  We are in a devastatingly slow recovery from the worst recession in 80 years.  And the best answer we can come up with is to crack down on colleges?

If you want to reduce default rates, reduce the percentage of college budgets paid for by students.  And maybe do something about a top-heavy economy that simply refuses to provide entry-level jobs that pay very much.  But punishing colleges because students they can’t turn away can’t find jobs is just bizarre.

That should be obvious, but it cuts against the grain of much current political discourse.  The conceit that colleges can be ‘rewarded’ or ‘punished’ with student financial aid is based on false premises.  It assumes that colleges have control over the most important variables.  They don’t.  Did a spike in defaults in 2009 reflect a sudden and unprecedented indifference to teaching, or a catastrophic global economic collapse?  

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Speaking of reality, this piece by the president of Western Governors University really requires a response.

“Students are no longer place-bound.”  That would come as a surprise to most students at most community colleges.  Geography still matters.  Yes, online instruction offers an alternative, and there are times when that makes a lot of sense.  But actual students have situated lives, with family and work obligations that tie them to particular places.  Not all students, sure, but enough that simply waving them away in a rhetorical flourish is irresponsible.

We’ve found that the most vulnerable students are often the most place-bound, and the most responsive to in-person, high-touch services.  That makes them expensive to serve, even though the colleges that serve them get far less per-student funding than the colleges that serve the scions of the upper middle class.

I say that as a fan of what WGU has been able to do.  To me, the challenge worth facing is how to adapt some very real advances to the needs of actual students in actual places.  The epic failure of Udacity’s model at San Jose State University is instructive; Udacity’s first response was to blame the students for being too “needy.”

The challenge is to meet the needs, not to wave them off.

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A few days ago:

The Boy: Dad, what made you decide to get a smartphone?

Me: Email, mostly.  Not having access to email when I’m out and about started to become an issue.

(pause)

TB (incredulous): Email?  Really?

Me: Yeah.  Now I mostly use that, Twitter, navigation, and texting.  What do you use the most?

TB: Minecraft, Instagram, Snapchat, Vine, the camera, and texting.  I never use email!

I am officially old.

Why Faculty Searches Take So Long

Rebecca Schuman did a characteristically smart and funny piece this week on the sheer agony that higher education faculty candidates go through in the job search.  (She focused in particular on candidates in the humanities, where the issues seem to be the most pronounced.)  That said, though, it struck me that some of the reasons that faculty searches take so long that are obvious from an administrative perspective may not be obvious from the outside.  So in the spirit of an attempted good-faith answer to a serious question -- and hoping not to be guilty of “mansplaining” -- here goes.  Why do faculty searches take so long?

I’ll clarify here that I’m working from the perspective of a teaching-focused, public institution.  Searches at research-intensive places may be very different; I simply don’t know.  Any wise and worldly readers who can shed light on that are welcome.

The easiest contrast is to hiring in just about any other industry.  In most businesses, either the “hiring manager” for a given area, or the human resources department, does the hiring.  That tends to happen quickly, because it’s relatively simple and the relevant players are few.  

But in higher education, we have “shared governance.”  In the context of hiring faculty, that means that faculty and staff are entitled to significant input.  We typically accomplish that through a “search committee,” which in itself would be a foreign concept in most industries.  A search committee has to be chosen, has to meet to schedule itself, and has to agree on the wording of the job posting.  That posting has to be reviewed in HR, among others, to ensure that it’s in compliance with the many, many, many regulatory and contractual rules to which we are subject.  For example, designating a given qualification as “required,” rather than “preferred,” puts real limits on the discretion of the committee.  And we have to avoid strenuously any language that smacks of favoring one demographic type over any other.  (For example, a reference to “fresh perspectives” could be read as coded age discrimination.)  

As public employers, we have to post each position for at least a set minimum amount of time, and we don’t start screening until the deadline has passed.  

Anyone who has assembled committees around teaching schedules knows that getting groups together repeatedly is a task in itself.  (On my own campus, we count search committee membership as meeting the “college service” requirement.  In other words, they’re excused from other committee work, to open up time to do it.)  The committees need to be large enough to be representative, without being so large as to be unwieldy.  And they can’t be entirely of one demographic type.  Given the gender breakdown here, it sometimes takes conscious effort to avoid all-female committees.  

The search committee goes through the applications and decides, in consultation with the campus affirmative action officer, who to invite for first-round interviews.  Each interview has to be scheduled, which involves finding open slots not only for every committee member, but also for each candidate.  Our first round interviews involve teaching demonstrations, and we routinely invite people from outside the geographic area, so the time commitment is significant.  It’s not unusual for the first round of interviews alone to take two weeks.

After that, the committee decides on a few finalists to send forward for second round interviews, which again have to be scheduled.  The second round includes the dean, the academic vp, the affirmative action officer, and the chair of the first round.  We include the first-round chair in the second round, so there’s someone at the table who saw the first round interviews and teaching demonstrations.  Finally, the reference checking, salary calculations, and initial offers get made.  If the first-choice candidate is balky, which sometimes happens, it might be another week before the second-choice candidate gets a call.

It would be possible -- hell, it would be easy -- to construct a much faster process than this.  We could simply designate one person whose job it is to hire.  Maybe that’s the dean of each area, or the CAO, or someone in HR, or the department chair.  We could do away with requirements to post, and just hire on the spot.  We could even establish a take-a-number system among incumbent adjuncts, and hire entirely on autopilot.  Any one of those would be significantly faster, and in other industries, would not be considered weird.

But culturally, we aren’t willing to do that.  Defaulting to a single hiring manager across disciplines would make it difficult to insure content expertise, since nobody is an expert in every discipline.  Defaulting to department chairs would make inbreeding entirely too likely.  Defaulting to any one person, no matter who that person is, would ensure that the one person’s blind spots would be coded into the DNA of the organization.  Search committees and multiple rounds are exhausting, but they also offer the prospect of cancelling out any one person’s hobbyhorse.  

For many positions, especially in the evergreen academic disciplines, qualified applicants far outnumber available full-time positions.  That tends to dampen the urgency to streamline the process.  If we have to balance concerns about field coverage, fluency with new technology, sensitivity to student needs (such as students with disabilities), demographic diversity, affirmative action, contractual guidelines, and shared governance -- all while assuring both content expertise and solid teaching skills -- we can, but it won’t be quick.  Or we could privilege speed, but only at the expense of some of those other considerations.  As long as the market price of moving slowly is low, and the legal/cultural costs of speed are high, searches will take a while.  

None of which mitigates the real frustration that candidates feel as the months go by.  Been there.  The shortage of positions is bad enough without adding insult to injury.  And committee members have an ethical obligation to do what they can to respect candidates’ dignity, such as getting down to business as quickly as possible after the application deadline passes.  (We don’t do conference interviews, which are an issue in their own right.)  But even if everyone in the process performs her role well, it will still be slow.  To get around that, we’d have to abandon some pretty core assumptions about how academia works, and start acting like just about every other industry.