Middle States, Day One: Of Blind Spots and Respect

I’m in D.C. for the annual conference of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, which is the regional accrediting agency for the mid-Atlantic states.  On first blush, it’s a lot like the NEASC annual conference, except that I don’t know nearly as many people yet.  So, a quick shout-out to my erstwhile peeps in New England.  

The kickoff speaker for the conference was Brit Kirwan, the Chancellor Emeritus of the University System of Maryland, who actually said very little about accreditation.  But that wasn’t even the biggest blind spot.  He addressed The Future of Higher Education, in the form of what he called four “imperatives.”  The four imperatives were:

• serving more low-income students
• building a culture of completion on campuses
• doing more with less
• responding to changing demographics

Perspective is everything.  Kirwan spoke from the perspective of someone who had to pay attention to US News rankings for a long time, and even went out of his way to bash US News for encouraging exclusivity in an era when we should instead encourage inclusivity.  (“What a disservice US News is to our nation” drew hearty applause.)  He spoke from the perspective of someone whose world consists largely of elite institutions that draw on affluent populations for their student body.  

I was struck by his approving mention of Hoxby’s “undermatching” argument, which says that low-income students who properly belong in elite institutions often don’t apply because they’re scared off by sticker prices and/or insular cultures.  In a rare moment in which he actually addressed accreditation, he even suggested making the economic diversity of the student body an accreditation criterion.  Too many rich kids, and you’re in trouble.

And I thought, hmm.  He’s solving the wrong problem.  

It got worse.  As the talk went on, he spoke approvingly of Arizona State’s efforts to use MOOCs for first-year gen ed courses as a cost-cutting measure.  After all, he noted, getting the first year at half price saves a great deal of money for students!

He didn’t mention that they could take the classes at nearby Maricopa Community College for even less money, with real instructors, and transfer the credits.  In fact, in the prepared speech, the words “community college” weren’t spoken.  At all.

The blind spot was especially egregious given the four imperatives he outlined.  Serve more low-income students?  Community colleges do that, and have done that for decades.  Build a culture of completion?  Community colleges have been focusing on that for years.  Do more with less?  Just for fun, let’s compare funding per FTE.  Respond to changing demographics?  What, exactly, do you think we’ve been doing?

When your entire frame of reference is elite institutions, it’s easy to look at the “undermatching” argument as being about saving a few deserving students, rather than seeing it as essentially writing off an entire sector.  A more productive response to “undermatching” would be to make sure that community colleges have the resources -- and, yes, the motivation -- to be worthy of all students.  At that point, some closed-mindedness among elite privates wouldn’t matter much.  But in this climate, the blind spot can do real harm.  Pulling a few into the lifeboat essentially concedes that the rest will drown.  That is not an acceptable outcome.

The very first question from the audience was from someone at a community college, who noted that Kirwan had elided the entire sector in his discussion of costs.  Kirwan accepted the point, and noted that the original draft of the speech mentioned community colleges, but that he had to cut it for length, and they didn’t make the cut.

So, yeah.

That’s how blind spots work.  An obviously well-meaning person, trying to send an inspirational message of inclusion, winds up leaving an entire sector on the cutting room floor, except for one elliptical mention of rescuing the deserving few from having to attend it in the first place.

On to day two.  Here’s hoping for a little more respect on the second attempt...

Cohorts and Critical Mass

This one is best expressed as a word problem.  And no, it doesn’t involve trains heading in opposite directions.

You can’t afford consistently to run classes below fifteen students.  You build a tightly-constructed two-year program on a “cohort” model: in other words, on the assumption that students will move through as a bloc.  How many students do you need at the outset to make the program viable?

1. it’s only money
2. 15
3. 25
4. 30+

The correct answer depends on institutional context.  In an amply-funded institution, or with a really killer grant behind it, “a” could be right.  In a residential college full of high achievers who attend full-time and have an on-time graduation rate over 90, b might be correct.  In a community college, though, even c would be optimistic.  I’d go with d.

Why?

Voluntary, informal cohorts fly apart quickly.  

Let’s say you get lucky and 30 students sign up for the first attempt.  Congratulations!  But eight of them need developmental classes, and another five bring some odd mix of transfer credits.  Now your first-semester classes range from 17 to 30.  

Assume that three students fail or drop out from the primary cohort.  (That’s pretty optimistic.)  Assume that another two drop out from the developmental classes.  At the second semester, you’ve got the “catchup” first semester classes running at six each, with the second-semester classes running at 14 to maybe 27, if you’re lucky.  (With transfer credits, the max is probably closer to 25.)  

Repeat, then repeat again.  By the end, you’ve got class sizes you can’t support, but you’re locked in because students need them to graduate.  Between the classes you planned to run and the catchup classes for the ones who either started or fell behind, you’re swimming in single digits.  And even if you closed the door behind the first cohort, you have an ethical obligation to the first cohort to give it a reasonable shot to finish.

Yes, there are exceptions.  Some employer-based programs hold together much better than that, because there are immediate economic rewards and penalties.  Selective programs also do better, because they’ve screened out the still-developmental and other high-risk groups at the outset.  Programs with captive populations -- high schools or prisons -- prevent attrition by preventing leaving.  But for programs built to take all comers and to last two years or more, this is a broadly accurate picture.

In the absence of either a grant or some other third-party payer (i.e. an employer), it’s easy for a program like this to start circling the drain.  And that’s assuming a relatively healthy sized starting group.  Start with 20 instead of 30, and things get uglier faster.

The folks who want community colleges to respond immediately when the economic winds shift often don’t understand this.  Absent some sort of funding cushion, the nightmare scenario is that you start with 15 to 20.  Turning away that many looks heartless and/or stupid; starting with that many virtually guarantees sustained losses.  

If we want community colleges to be more entrepreneurial and to take more risks like these, they need the funding to do it.  In the private sector, that would be so obvious as to seem tautological: investment requires capital.  But in the public sector, it’s considered suspect.  It shouldn’t be.  Here, too, investment requires capital.  We just don’t call it that.

If we could afford answer A, we could do nearly anything.  Even answer B would allow far more responsiveness to local conditions than we can manage now.  As long as we’re stuck with “maybe C but probably D,” well, some needs will go unmet.  I’d like to change the direction of that train.

The Fruits of Debate Training…

The Girl is 11, and on the Debate team.  I mention this to give context for the letter she wrote us this weekend.

“Tech time,” in our house, refers to phone, kindle, or computer time.  

I haven’t changed any of what she wrote.  Enjoy!

--

Dear Mom and Dad,

Hello!  This letter contains many reasons why I should be allowed to have 2 hours of tech time a day, no more.

This is my first reason: Multiple pediatricians say that kids should be on screens for only 2 hours a day, according to www.commonsensemedia.com.  If experienced pediatricians know this for a fact, why should 2 hours a day be harmful?

My second reason.  When I do not have after school activities (which is every day except for Mondays and Fridays) there is not a lot else to do.  Sure, I can read, but it’s not like I can do that for 5 hours straight, and sometimes there’s nothing to read.  Also, sports require more than 2 people, and again, doing them for 5 hours would be tedious.  Besides, it’s getting cold out, and it is best to stay inside.

My third reason is that after getting home from a 6-and-a-half-hour day of school, all I want to do is relax with Minecraft, Youtube, and then a good book.  I don’t want to be kicked off the phone in the middle of building a house or watching a video!  Then I’d have to read for a much longer time than planned to pass the time, at which point it feels more like another school assignment than a fun activity.

Here is my fourth and final reason.  Longer tech time would not lower my grades!  You guys always make sure that I finish all my homework before going on the phone.  As long as this continues to happen, there is no way that I’d miss an assignment, thus keeping my grades up.

These are the reasons I should be allowed to have 2 hours of tech time a day.  Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Love,

(TG)

--

As a writer, I see a family resemblance.  She leans on underlining like I lean on parentheses, but otherwise, it’s recognizable.  

Two hours a day seemed excessive, but we couldn’t let a good persuasive essay go unrewarded, so we agreed to give her extra time on Fridays.  “Using your words,” as they said in preschool, seems like a civilized way to settle things.  She did, so we felt honor-bound to reciprocate in some positive way.

Not bad for eleven, I think...

Thanks

Thanks to Brookdale for such a warm welcome.  I didn’t realize how much I missed New Jersey until I came back to it.

Thanks to InsideHigherEd for so much support over all these years.  It’s wonderful to have a platform where voices from beyond the Ivies can have their say.

Thanks to the Twitterverse for helping me keep up with sources and stories I otherwise couldn’t.  And the people!  Tressie McMillan Cottom, Paul LeBlanc, everyone at the CCRC...

Thanks to my occasional co-author, Susanna Williams, for making the trek to New Jersey on the rainiest day in recent memory.  Thanks to High School Friend on Wrong Ocean for doing the same, though without the rain.

Thanks to The Girl, for bringing class, wisdom, and humor to every single day.  Watching you grow up is one of my great joys in life.  

Thanks to The Boy, for showing me how adolescence was supposed to be done.  Even with the move, you handle it with a grace and poise far beyond anything I could do at your age.  I’m in awe.

Thanks to The Wife, for holding it all together.  For slowly turning a house that isn’t “us” at all into one that is.  For being an amazing parent.  And for still getting people to ask me incredulously “how did _you_ get _her_?”  I don’t even mind the implied insult...

Thanks to my wise and worldly readers.  You are the point of the blog, and I learn so much from you.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Once More, with Feeling

How many times should a student be allowed to re-take a class she hasn’t passed?  In my context, that usually means either failing or withdrawing; we don’t do many incompletes.

Some colleges have policies on retakes and some don’t, but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a fleshed-out argument for any given position.  I’ll offer a few gestures towards one, and then ask my wise and worldly readers to help me fill it out and reach a considered answer.

First, I think it’s obvious that any given number (assuming there is one) should have some sort of “exceptions” clause.  Weird stuff happens.  When the stuff is both documented and sufficiently extraordinary, I don’t see much point in being overly strict.  (Example: one semester, the professor falls ill six weeks into the class, and the college can’t find a replacement in time.  I don’t see why a student should be punished for that.)  That said, a policy of “infinite retakes” strikes me as hard to defend, given limited resources.  So assuming that infinity is off the table, and there’s some sort of safety valve for extraordinary cases, what would be a reasonable limit?

“One and done” strikes me as unnecessarily cruel.  People make mistakes.  If a withdrawal from a class means you can never take the class again, and that class is a prerequisite for other things and/or a degree requirement, then the student is basically done.  Say that a student has a medical issue or family emergency during Freshman Comp.  Freshman Comp is required in every degree program at the college.  Bar her from retaking the class, and you’ve basically expelled her.  Given that anybody can get sick at any time, that just seems unreasonable.

Two or three attempts both seem reasonable at first glance.  Either allows for a stray awful semester without banning the student from progressing.  But they both put a cap on throwing good money or effort after bad.  If you haven’t passed a class in three attempts, I’m thinking maybe that isn’t the class for you.  Getting blocked from self-registration for a fourth attempt may prompt a visit to an advisor, who might suggest other pathways.  Everybody is good at something, but nobody is good at everything; disappointment can be part of the process of narrowing down the fields that work for you.  If that weren’t true, I would have spent much of the 90’s and 00’s playing major league baseball.  The only thing that stopped me was a catastrophic lack of talent.

I’ve asked the Institutional Research offices at my last couple of colleges to run numbers on success rates for successive attempts at courses.  In both cases, success rates dropped from the first attempt to the second, the second to the third, and so on.  The drop was the largest from the first to the second.  I haven’t seen national figures on that, but I’d guess they’re consistent.  By the time you get to fourth or fifth attempts, it starts to look less like compassion and more like false hope, or tuition theft.  

The change in Pell limits in 2012 added urgency to the issue.  Prior to 2012, students had a lifetime limit of 18 semesters of Pell.  (That had to cover both undergrad and grad degrees.)  In 2012, the limit was shortened to 12 semesters.  If a student spends four or five semesters on a single class, the odds of her finishing a degree before running out of money drop dramatically.  And even if she finishes the associate’s, the odds of having enough money to complete a bachelor’s are vanishingly low.  If a student has a semester or two of ESL and/or developmental classes, and stops out once or twice, that 12 semester limit can come up fast.  I hate to base academic policy on financial aid, but I also find it irresponsible to enable behavior that would defeat the possibility of completing a degree.  

So I turn to my wise and worldly readers to shed light.  Is there another angle on this question that sheds useful light?  Is there a better answer?

Seasonal Retail and Final Exams

The next several weeks are some of the most stressful ones of the year for lower-income students.  

That’s because two demands on their time are increasing simultaneously: seasonally increased hours at many retail and customer service jobs, and the late-semester ramp-up to final projects, papers, and exams.  

Although I didn’t fully process it at the time, I had the remarkable privilege as a student to be able to restrict my paid hours during the semester to six to eight a week of work-study.  (Summers were another story.)  That level of work was enough to keep me honest, but not enough really to interfere with classes.  And on the rare occasions when it did, I could ask for dispensation from a shift and nearly always get it.  At worst, I might have to arrange a trade.  It really wasn’t an issue.

For many community college students, though, this is a cruel time of year.  They need the hours at work to support themselves, and they need study time.  A few jobs allow students to learn while they earn -- I remember the guy at a Christmas tree lot poring over his biology textbook between customers -- but most don’t.  Worse, many of them require variable hours, making it difficult for students to develop the economies of effort that come from routine.  When your transportation or childcare arrangements are precarious at best, routine is your friend; the constant disruptions to routine that low-wage jobs entail can do real damage.

In some ways, the choices that students face are between short-term and long-term goods.  Money right now satisfies a short-term need, but too much time on the job can jeopardize the degree, which is the long-term good.  Every so often I’ll hear people who should know better pontificate about “delayed gratification” and “self-discipline.”  It grinds my gears when I hear it, because for many students, the short-term needs are painfully real.  If you don’t get your car repaired, you can’t get to campus anyway.  If you can’t make rent, you have much bigger issues than a biology exam.  Some students skip meals to save money; I doubt that anyone is at her academic best when hungry.  Reducing the issues to personal failings of self-discipline -- which have always existed, and are not unique to people with low income -- doesn’t account for just how close to the edge some students are.  

Which is to say, I wish students weren’t captive to short-term retail, but sometimes they are.  This is when faculty and staff can make a real difference with nothing more than a stray thoughtful comment, or a show of real human concern.

In my teaching days, I would sometimes structure classes to allow students to work harder at some points so they could ease up a bit at others.  The old “give four assignments and count three” method gave them a freebie to spend as they saw fit.  I would explain it at the beginning of the semester, and note that it gave them options: if they blazed through the first three, they could skip the last one.  Alternately, if life happened at some earlier point in the semester, they had a chance to recover without having to explain or justify themselves to me.  They could maintain their dignity as they got back on track.  It worked pretty well.

At this point, classes are what they are.  But that crucial human connection still matters.  I was repeatedly struck by how many students were struggling economically, but how few of them know that it’s normal.  There’s a lot of shame and secrecy for many.  They’ve imbibed the sort of secular Calvinism that says that material poverty is a sign of moral failing, so they’ll engage in counterproductive struggles to keep up appearances until they just can’t.

Just hearing from a trusted person that they aren’t hopeless or tainted because they’re struggling can help.  

Personal respect isn’t a substitute for a fairer political economy, of course.  But in the meantime, we could do worse than to acknowledge the strain.  Some students are working hours that put them in danger.  Letting them know that someone cares doesn’t fix the problem, but sometimes a little respect at the right moment can make it bearable.  And learning that the issues aren’t just personal may help people connect the dots, and start to work on the politics of it.  That’s my annual holiday wish...

The Shot Not Taken

This one will be short and vague, by necessity.

This week I witnessed a devastatingly effective “shot not taken,” a sort of negative-space insult that worked by implied contrast.  I gasped at its elegance.  It’s a dying art, but it’s not entirely gone yet, and I’ll miss it when it breathes its last.

I’m sure there’s a word for it -- wise and worldly readers, help!! -- but we’ve all seen it.  It’s Mozart saying to Salieri, “only you.”  Or Alan King listing his favorite actors: “Sir Laurence Olivier.  Sir Kenneth Branagh.  And Drew Carey.”  

It’s more impressive in relatively spontaneous contexts.  It can be the silent beat, followed by a conspicuous change of subject, after a stupid comment.  Or the compliment that implies its own shadow, often in the space of a pause: “he’s very...decisive....”  “She certainly has a...presence.”  

It’s not exactly sarcasm; it’s more surgical than that.  Done well, it leaves the attacker looking clean and clever, and leaves the attacked almost nowhere to go.  It’s the verbal equivalent of the perfect knuckleball: off-speed and easy to get wrong, but when done right, almost beautiful in its evasive effectiveness.  

The undisputed master, of course, was P. G. Wodehouse.  Politically, he was somewhere between naive and offensive, but in verbal precision, nobody came close.  “Even at normal times Aunt Dahlia’s map tended a little towards the crushed strawberry.  But never had I seen it take on such a pronounced richness as now. She looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression.”   “He resembled a minor prophet who had been hit behind the ear with a stuffed eel-skin.”  “Unseen, in the background, fate was quietly slipping the lead into the boxing-glove.”

Wodehousian humor demands close attention, which may be why it’s fading.  It requires both precision and subtlety, and it asks of its reader or listener the ability to appreciate each.  It’s easy to miss.

All of which is to say, I tip my cap.  It was so elegant that all I can do is applaud.

Wise and worldly readers, is there a simple term for that?  And do you have a favorite application?

The Prereq Temptation

(“The Prereq Temptation” was a rejected John LeCarre title.  A lot of people don’t know that…)

In my imagined, more perfect world, there would be exactly one reason for a prerequisite to attach to a class: the students would need to know material from the prior class to be successful in the second one.  For example, a student wandering into a calculus class who had never taken algebra or trig could be expected to be lost.  (“Why are you doing math with letters?”)  In sequences of courses that build on each other, the folks who teach the later courses should have some reasonable assurance that they don’t have to go all the way back to square one.  

But in this world, that’s not the only reason prerequisites get put on classes.  For example:

• Frustration with student performance.  I’ve seen professors in all sorts of disciplines argue for English 101 as a prereq, because they’re frustrated by poor student writing.  

• Screening out younger students -- either dual enrollment or first-semester -- without having to say so in so many words.

• A vote of no confidence in local high schools.

• Felt prestige.  At a previous college, I once had a department admit in a program review that the addition of a prereq to its into class made no difference in student success; to its credit, it even included the numbers to prove it.  But it argued for keeping the prereq anyway, as a “statement” about expectations.

• Self-defense in an arms race.  If every other class that fulfills a distribution requirement has an English 101 prereq, and yours doesn’t, then you will get more than your share of the less prepared students, simply by default.  After a while, even some folks who generally object to prereq proliferation will yield just to level the playing field.

• Transfer requirements.  Certain large public institutions -- not naming any names here, but they know who they are -- won’t accept certain courses unless those courses carry specific prereqs.  They take the presence of prereqs as a sign of rigor.  Even if we could show locally that the prereqs achieved nothing except to delay students, we’d still have to keep them.

• Gaming graduation numbers.  If every credit-bearing course requires that a student has cleared the developmental level, and developmental courses don’t add up to 12 credits, then the college can de facto exclude all developmental students from its “first-time, full-time” graduation rate.  It’s unethical, but it happens.

Leaving aside the more sinister and self-serving reasons, people often argue for prereqs out of a sincere, if unproven, belief that they’ll set students up for success.  The argument could be tested empirically, but almost never is.  It should be.

Individual prereqs can make sense, but when they proliferate -- as they tend to do -- they make timely completion of a degree much harder.  A student who has to wait for a prereq class to fit her schedule may add a semester or a year to her time-to-completion, just because she’s following an unproven rule passed through a combination of ego and wishful thinking.  

To my mind, the burden of proof should be on prereqs.  In the relatively rare cases in which the relevance is obvious and well-demonstrated, keep them.  But subject all of the existing ones -- not just new ones -- to actual empirical tests.  If our four-year counterparts would do the same -- hint, hint -- we could drop the prereqs that are only there to appease them.  

The prereq temptation is subtle and pervasive, but it does real harm.  If we could get that long list of reasons down to a single one -- where it actually helps -- students would benefit tremendously.

Guided Pathways for Transfer

Last year I caught a presentation by some folks from the Maricopa County Community College District (Phoenix, AZ) on a transfer partnership they had developed with Arizona State University.  With nearly every transfer student aiming at the same destination college, it was relatively easy to design curricula for the first two years.  (That’s not to demean the effort involved; it’s just to say the target was clear.)  

I was jealous.  That kind of clarity wasn’t possible at Holyoke, and it isn’t possible at Brookdale.  That’s because in both places, students had many more options for destination colleges, and the destination colleges didn’t agree with each other.  When the destination schools disagree on what should go into the first two years, who are we supposed to imitate?

Loss of credits upon transfer is a massive barrier to degree completion, for obvious reasons.  It forces students to spend time and money retaking classes they’ve already taken.  It’s also incredibly demoralizing.  Students feel ripped off, either by the destination college or the sending one, and feeling like a chump doesn’t often inspire greatness.  

When the loss of credits in transfer occurs between public institutions -- say, a community college and a state university -- taxpayers wind up paying twice for the same courses.  It’s a huge issue for students, but not only for students.  Everyone winds up paying for it, except maybe for the destination school.

Yet in the public discussion of transfer -- to the extent that it exists -- most of the blame for “wasted” credits is aimed at community colleges.  

To some degree, any region with a healthy population of private colleges and universities will have to deal with this no matter what.  Private institutions can define curricula pretty much as they see fit, within the confines of state licensing regs and accreditation criteria.  But it seems like the public institutions should be more subject to public authority.  

This week I was in the umpteenth meeting in which discussions of possible changes to curricula led to the inevitable “but will it transfer?,” answered with the inevitable “well, yes and no.”  “Yes and no” is not a satisfying answer.

Put differently, four-year publics need to be required to create “guided pathways” for community college transfer.  That means keeping their own curricula in relative check, and vetoing departmental efforts to go rogue and construct idiosyncratic requirements to avoid “giving away” credits (or, in what amounts to the same thing, relegating them to “free elective” status).  The easiest way, I think, would be to cap at sixty the number of credits that a destination school could require of someone with an associate’s degree.  Let the four-year college departments fight out which sixty credits they can require; I have no dog in that fight.  But allowing the people with the greatest conflict of interest nearly unfettered discretion to double-dip is not okay.  It’s a disservice to the students and the taxpayers.

Have any states actually tried that?  I’d be interested in hearing about unintended consequences and/or workarounds.  Alternately, for folks at public four-years, can you foresee unintended consequences and/or workarounds?

Ground Rules

The Girl is preparing for her debate tournament next Saturday.  She gets the topics ahead of time, but she doesn't find out which side she's supposed to argue until 15 minutes before the match.  That means she has to prepare both sides of the argument, and be ready to argue either way.

One of the topics this week is whether GMO foods do more harm than good.  Last night, as she did her research, she got frustrated and asked me for help.  As she put it, "all of the anti-GMO stuff is really just anti-science.  I can't use that!"

That's my girl.

She's content to argue either side of something that's, well. arguable.  But to her, the legitimacy of science is not arguable; it's a ground rule.  If she can find a science-friendly argument against GMO's, she'll happily use it; depending on which side she gets, she may need it.  But she's not betraying science.

I've been thinking a lot about arguments and ground rules recently.  There's no shortage of topics.

The recent set of conflicts on campuses around racial climates strike me as rooted in different understandings of ground rules.  Some people believe that protests are inherently dangerous, scary, or objectionable, regardless of their content or motivation.  (In my observation, that understanding is usually buttressed by a really selective reading of history.)  The more serious conflicts occur between those who take unfettered speech as a ground rule, and those who take mutual respect as a ground rule.  The former camp is theoretically straightforward, even if frequently inconsistent in application.  (We have closed meetings on a public campus all the time, and nobody says boo about that...)  The latter camp argues that procedural equality often serves to entrench other kinds of inequality, and it asks for a focus on substantive equality before getting hung up on procedure.  That camp tends to be less theoretically straightforward, even as it makes sense on the ground.  As a political theorist, I see lineage to both arguments.  The first group is correct that arguments like Marcuse's "repressive tolerance" can quickly lead to terrible and scary places.  And the second group is correct that a focus on process outside of context can lead to absurd outcomes, as in Anatole France's line that the law, in its majestic equality, forbids both the rich and the poor from sleeping under bridges.  

More basically, the attacks on Paris by religious fundamentalists are rooted in an even deeper conflict over ground rules.  Do you base your sense of rules and ethics on the Enlightenment, or on a desire for a specific kind of caliphate?  As near as I can tell, the two are mutually exclusive.

In higher education, we've seen an increasing intensity to the conflict between two sets of ground rules.  One side assumes that the point of education is to perpetuate the society that exists.  The other side assumes that the point of education is to empower people to remake the world.  In practice, they aren't always in conflict; the former group doesn't mind technical innovation, and the latter tends to value certain ethical precepts with hundreds of years of lineage behind them.  But sometimes the two camps clash.  Custodians of traditions that they believe are under attack by modernity are quick to take umbrage to what they consider irreverence.  Partisans of critical thinking tend to assume that a certain level of irreverence is healthy, and that too much deference is a sign of intellectual laziness.  Each holds the other in mild disdain, and each is quick to take offense when the other shows that disdain.  

The tricky thing about ground rules is that most of the time, people don't have carefully argued reasons for holding them.  They take ground rules as given, and are often genuinely surprised when others don't see their validity.  That abrupt shock can lead to fear, and even to anger.  To me -- and to The Girl -- tested, empirical evidence is self-evidently a valid standard.  That's the point at which our skepticism stops.  To people who hold other beliefs, that may look "dogmatic."  In a sense, it is.  But everybody is dogmatic; they just hold different dogma.  

Dogmas are clashing a lot these days.  My optimism -- which may be naive -- is based on a hunch that at some level, enough of us share enough bedrock dogma that we can find ways to live and work together.  We just have to allow ourselves to be shocked, and then to get over that shock and engage intelligently and respectfully.  We can choose to get some distance on our own assumptions, and to self-consciously bring ethical reflection to the process of improving them.  We can make the choice to change some of our assumptions.  It's a challenge for an eleven year old; it's a challenge for a forty-seven year old.  But it's the right thing to do.  That's where my skepticism stops.

Advising, Decades Later

This weekend we hosted some friends from Massachusetts.  It was a glorious time: the kids picked up right where they left off, the weather cooperated, and the parents got along great.  Other than a nasty sore throat on Sunday, I couldn’t have asked for it to go better.

The friends are college graduates, but not professional academics.  I mention that because at one point the grownups’ conversation turned to memories of college.  (The kids’ conversations were largely about Minecraft.)  All four of us had tales to tell of favorite classes and least-favorite classes, of professors we liked and those we didn’t.  

I was struck, though, by how quickly the others’ tales turned to advising.  In each case, the tale was the same: advisors offered too little, too late, to be helpful.  The student in each case wanted clear direction, but was instead presented with a long menu of options and given little to no help in navigating it.  My own story was a little different: my advisor was a physics professor, whose entire advice consisted of “you should take more physics.”  I thanked him for his input and returned to navigating the catalog myself.

Although each of the four of us came to college from a different angle, and all four graduated, we shared a sense of disappointment in advising.  In our different ways, we each had hoped for some useful information, and none of us got it.  We got through without it, but decades later, we could each recall wanting more.

The common denominator to each story was remarkably consistent with what we’ve been hearing about best practices in advising.  Everyone wanted information that was useful, rather than either comprehensive (the long list) or self-serving (take my course!).  We wanted to know what we needed to take before making choices, and we probably would have benefited from return visits over time.  

I’ve heard those things for years from folks who study student success, but it’s somehow different hearing the same things from friends who wouldn’t know the Lumina foundation if it bit them.  They haven’t been following the student success debates, and I didn’t bring up the subject.  Their commentary was spontaneous, specific, and unanimous.

It’s easy to object to relatively directive advising as handholding, or as reductive.  And it can be.  But some level of clarity is actually empowering.  It levels the playing field with students who have enough cultural capital that they can navigate a bureaucracy on their own.  And it prevents students from taking courses they won’t need, or that don’t make sense for what they’re trying to do.  (One friend mentioned that she unknowingly signed up for the pre-med version of Intro to Biology, even though she was a journalism major.  It made life much more difficult than it needed to be.)  That’s not at all the same thing as lowering standards.  It’s applying standards to the right things.

Knowing the goal, and knowing how to achieve the goal, are two different things.  With limited budgets, most community colleges can’t just hire their way out of the problem.  Getting to a better system will take some redeployment of existing resources, some rethinking of workflows and protocols, and probably some technology.  It’s not the sort of thing that can be done overnight.

But it’s heartening to hear, from disinterested parties, that we’re getting the question right.  Advising matters, and it matters the most to the students who have the least.  I hope that twenty years from now, today’s students will all be graduates, too.  

Ask the Administrator: How to Stay Current with a 15 Credit Load?

A new correspondent writes:

I have been pondering the role of research in higher education and what role it plays in opportunity for students.

In graduate school, we train people in research.  When hiring to teach higher ed, we (generally) expect people to have PhDs or a similar terminal degree in a discipline because then they should ostensibly be somewhat knowledgeable about not only the history of the discipline, but the current trends, and how new knowledge in that field is constructed (I realize that there are fields that are exceptions to this).  And when we take them out of the field of study, that is take them away from research, do we not take them away from this endeavor?  That is to say, are we not doing the students that they train a disservice to not have faculty remain current in research?  Part of my joy is sharing my research (or heck, other people's research as I come across interesting papers) with my students, even my non-majors.  How does this translate to a community college professor teaching 5 classes, multiple preps, not doing research, and (I assume?  Perhaps I am incorrect?) largely unable to keep up with current literature?   What about students who want the chance to actually try the field on (i.e., see what research in a given discipline really is)?  Does it matter that early?

I feel like knowledge keeps progressing, techniques change, and I wonder how CC profs are able to keep up, because I really don't know.  Sure, Socrates and the first law of thermodynamics aren't going to change, but what we have learned in the past few years has.  I suppose the question could equally apply to the increasing reliance on adjuncts at other places as well as lecturers who have no research program; I understand the cost tradeoffs here (and that some people even prefer this path), but my same question applies.  I am curious what your wise and worldly readers have to say about this, as well.

Please understand, my goal here is not to make judgements but simply to ask how research informs teaching and whether it factors in at the community college level (and to educate myself).  I also understand that at research-intensive schools, there are plenty of faculty who do research yet don't give a rat's behind about integrating it in the classroom...or really the classroom at all. For what it's worth, I am largely in the SLAC world, and in the sciences, which both color my views.

It’s a fair question.  For a long time, many community colleges were wary of hiring Ph.D.’s to the faculty for fear of them either leaving quickly for another job -- it was a different time -- or growing embittered as they lost the ability to do the research by which they had intended to define their careers.  The market has changed, at least in the parts of the country in which I’ve worked, so now it’s entirely normal to hire Ph.D.’s to faculty roles, but the question of research currency remains.

Yes, teaching fifteen credits per semester will put a serious dent in most people’s research productivity.  That’s not to say that people don’t write books, but it’s not the norm.  That’s one reason why the strategy of “I’ll use a community college gig as a stepping stone to the research university job I really want” rarely works.  Very few people can write enough while teaching five classes to be competitive with people who barely teach at all.

In my observation, the folks who are able to be happiest here are the ones who stop mourning what the place isn’t, and instead appreciate it for what it is.  Given the lack of a “publish or perish” tenure process, it’s possible to read widely and based entirely on interest.  You can’t keep up with everything, but you can pick a few favorites and keep up with them.  Your interests can shift, which some of us find liberatory.  (Although my training is in political science, I’ve found that left to my own devices, I’m much more likely to read sociologists.)  

On the upside, there’s no better college teaching laboratory than a community college.  This is where the scholarship of teaching and learning finds a natural home.  If you take “how do I best help students understand x?” as an applied research question, you can achieve things here that your counterparts elsewhere can’t.  The best-received presentation I did at APSA was about teaching Intro to American Government to students who were never going to major in it.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Accelerated Learning Program -- a genuine breakthrough in the teaching of entry-level writing -- occurred at the Community College of Baltimore County, as opposed to, say, the University of Maryland.  

One of my prouder achievements at HCC was the development of the “sandbox,” in which faculty were given one-on-one support in experimenting with various kinds of instructional technology.  Brookdale has an entire Innovation Center for the same purpose.  Colleges that recognize faculty as inquisitive and inventive people, and that grasp the potential of a teaching-intensive setting, can be hotspots of pedagogical innovation.  That may not be the kind of research many Ph.D.’s had in mind when they started, but it’s real, it’s valuable, and it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

Admittedly, I’m not entirely objective on this one, so I’ll ask my wise and worldly readers to chime in.  Wise and worldly readers, especially those at teaching-intensive places, how do you keep current in your fields?

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