Reminders

I called this one nine years ago.

This week the University of Phoenix announced that it’s considering “going private,” which means taking itself off the stock market.  It would still exist, and still be for-profit, but would no longer be publicly traded.

The idea would be to shield it from shareholders expecting a quick return to profitability.

Or, as I put it in 2007,

If I were appointed czar of the University of Phoenix, my first move would be to upgrade the faculty (hire a significant cohort of full-timers) to handle students with limited skills/motivation/time. Until they improve their graduation rate, they're going to be in serious trouble. Yes, that would entail a short-term cost. But it's the right way to go. Obviously, that strategy would crash headlong into the stock market imperative of quarterly returns, but I'm increasingly convinced that private equity is the way for for-profit higher ed to go. Yes, all that public capital sloshing around can be great fun for a time, but it creates pressures that I don't think any institution has yet figured out how to handle. They need patient capital, which means private capital.

(mic drop)

It’s hard to patiently restore quality when the markets impatiently demand profits.  

Patient capital is almost always private capital, but private capital isn’t always patient capital.  For UofP to restore its reputation, it will need autonomy not only from stockholders, but from the holding company that buys it.  It was slapped on the wrist by HLC in 2013 for insufficient autonomy from its ownership; depending on who buys it, that danger could reassert itself.

In higher ed, the traditional model for buffering a college from the whims of funders, whether public or private, is the Board of Trustees.  The Board is charged with taking the long view, and giving the administration the operational autonomy it needs to make the college succeed in its educational mission.  In other words, the Board is supposed to enable and enact the separation of ownership from control that was characteristic of the mid-twentieth century corporate model.

That model came in for plenty of criticism at the time, although in retrospect, it didn’t get its due.  In a twist of history, the alternative didn’t turn out to be democratic control by workers; it turned out to be subjection to a market red in tooth and claw.  The managers -- administrators, if you prefer -- who had relative autonomy at midcentury gave rise to a distribution of wealth and income more egalitarian than any that had come before, or has come since.  The subsequent moves to “unlock shareholder value” have led to multiple decades of increased income polarization.  That’s not a coincidence.

The for-profit sector dispensed with buffers from the outset.  It doesn’t derive income from philanthropy.  It charges more than its cost of production.  When times are good, that means it can expand very quickly, as it did in the 1990’s.  In the public sector, growth can be experienced as a cost, so you get slow growth and waiting lists; in the for-profit sector, growth more than pays for itself, so it can happen quickly.  But the same applies on the way down.  The lack of restraints on growth plays as a lack of buffers on the way down.  Stockholders don’t like to catch falling knives, so if the current management of Phoenix hopes to hold on, it will have to get rid of the stockholders.

What Hegel called the “cunning of history” is real.  Phoenix grew quickly by dispensing with many of the restraints of traditional higher ed.  Now, in freefall, it may remind us all of why we needed those restraints in the first place.  For that, I thank Phoenix.  The rest of us could use that reminder before we make the same mistakes.

The Long Game

People who know me know that one of my favorite phrases is “playing the long game.”  It means favoring sustainable, gradual, long-term changes over Big Splash interventions that often leave destruction in their wake.  That’s probably why this story made so much sense to me.

It’s a contrast between two major urban school districts in New Jersey: Newark and Union.  Newark got a huge burst of publicity, a major infusion of funds, the attention of some very high-profile people, and a master plan so complex that its author referred to it as “sixteen-dimensional chess.”  Union used existing staff to focus on reading.

Years later, Newark has very little to show for its changes, while Union is showing real and compounding gains.

The “Big Splash” model holds visceral appeal to some people.  It looks “decisive,” and it gets attention.  The “long game” model isn’t nearly as easy to encapsulate in a headline; in the very short term, it can look like not doing very much at all.  If you equate “leadership” with getting headlines and making big splashes, the long game can look sort of distant or passive.

But that’s a fundamental misreading.  The long game works.  It gets results.  It’s sustainable, even in the absence of “angel” funders.  And it allows for fallibility, public input, and institutional learning along the way.

(SNHU, characteristically, does both, and does them separately.  I’m a fan of that approach, but I don’t have the resources to try it here.  Very few places do.)

The long game works by looking at the resources and strengths that already exist, rather than assuming that the whole thing needs to be blown up.  It settles on one or a very few goals, sets timeframes measured in years, and gradually aligns resources around those goals.  It sticks to those goals and accepts mixed or incremental gains in the early going.  

It makes certain demands that make it harder than it sounds.  It requires both humility and perseverance in its administrative leadership.  It requires faculty and staff who are willing to admit that things aren’t perfect.  And it requires Board and public/political patience.  That last one can be the most difficult of all.

If the senior leadership turns over every couple of years, and each new team has to bring in a new Big Splash to justify its existence, you can expect a certain earned cynicism to set in among the staff.  You start to hear terms like “this too shall pass” or “flavor of the month.”  Certain desperate leaders will even cook the books to try to make it look like the Big Splash is actually working; that’s the sort of thing that works until it doesn’t.  And once it doesn’t, the cynicism gets even worse.

Making the long game work requires leadership that sticks around, keeps its eye on the big picture, admits when something didn’t work and makes a change, and doesn’t require the spotlight.  That combination is rarer than it should be, for all sorts of obvious political reasons.  

In the context of community colleges, I’d be skeptical -- if not openly cynical about -- any claims of improving completion rates by double digits in a year or two.  That’s not how this works.  In the absence of something fluky and extraordinary -- regression to the mean after a natural disaster, say -- improvement is likely to be uneven at first, and then gradual.  But it feeds on itself.  

Kudos to the Union schools for doing it the right way.  I hope that funders take note, and start thinking about investing in the long game.  The only thing better than a smart long-term strategy is a smart long-term strategy with money.  Bring it on.

Hearing Yourself

Musicians sometimes say that the hardest part of playing is listening.  To be really good, particularly in a group context, you have to be able both to play well and to listen well.  You have to hear how you sound, how the others sound, and how things fit together.  Some terrific players never make it to the top level because they’re so busy with their own sound that they don’t listen.

I’ve seen the same thing as a debate judge.  In team debates, in which each team has two or three members and the sides take turns responding to each other, everyone after the first speaker has a double burden: make the points she wanted to make, and also respond to what the other team did.  The latter seems to be much harder than the former.  Adults struggle with the same thing: I was struck at what happened in the last Democratic presidential debate after Bernie Sanders apologized to Hillary Clinton for a staffer snooping at an email list.  Clinton was clearly caught off-guard by someone taking the usually untrodden high road, but she managed to improvise her way to a reasonably graceful acceptance of the apology.  Martin O’Malley then erupted with a high-energy, clearly prepared attack on the “bickering” we had allegedly just seen.

But we didn’t.  One apologized, the other accepted.  That’s not bickering.  He was so eager to score his point that he didn’t bother listening to what they actually said.  Clinton may have been off-balance, but at least she recognized what had happened.  

Really good listening is at the heart of critical thinking.  And it’s rarer than it should be.  

Pop music lyrics often reflect an inability to hear while singing.  My personal favorite is still Van Halen’s “only time will tell if we stand the test of time,” which goes beyond garden-variety stupidity to earn extra credit for packing two cliches into a single phrase.  Honorable mention to Paul McCartney for the rare double-preposition: “in this world in which we live in…”  (John Moe’s “Pop Song Correspondences” are master classes in the art of listening closely to lyrics.)

Recently I’ve seen a couple of quotes that really made me wonder whether the speakers could even hear themselves as they spoke.  The first, which is from an English professor at a community college, fairly jumped off the screen when I read it.  It’s by Joe LeBlanc, an English professor at Northern Essex Community College, in Massachusetts.  He was quoted in his capacity as president of the statewide faculty union, which is currently on “work-to-rule” over a contract dispute.  I take no position on the dispute, since I’m in another state now, but Prof. LeBlanc’s statement made my jaw drop.  According to the Worcester Telegram, he responded to the state’s proposal as follows:

“[w]e’re not about to jump through hoops to improve our course completion rates.”

Wow.  Just, wow.  

Public sympathy for faculty comes mostly from a sense that they’re helping students.  For the president of a statewide faculty union to dismiss student success out of hand is astonishing.  I honestly wondered if he could hear himself when he spoke.  If I had read that in a caricature, I would have thought it overdone.

In case that seems too cartoonish a reading, LeBlanc added:

“We plan to increasingly tighten the screws with work-to-rule.”

So student success can be dismissed blithely, but “tightening the screws” on colleges merits sustained focus.  That’s an alarming pair of statements to make in public.

The second, blessedly removed from higher ed, came from governor Paul LePage, of Maine.  In discussing the very real heroin crisis, LePage said:

“These are guys with the names D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty...these types of guys...they come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, they go back home...Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave…”

It’s the sort of thing you might expect to hear from Uncle Larry at Thanksgiving, but not from a governor in his second term.  As a cultural studies text, it’s impressive; you can spend hours peeling the layers.  But as a statement from a chief executive of a state, well, it doesn’t inspire confidence.  

So, as a former teacher of writing, I plead my case.  Listen to yourself when you speak.  It matters.

Note to New Jersey

What happens to places that export most of their talented young people?

Serious stagnation, if not worse.

This is where community colleges can serve a purpose better than anyone else.  Their graduates tend to stay in the local area.

Recent IPEDS data -- I know, I know, but still -- shows that New Jersey has one of the highest rates of high school graduates going to college out of state.  That has been true for a long time.  

I suspect it’s largely a function of the economic geography of the state.  It combines one of the highest per-capita incomes in the country with the highest population density in the country; that tends to put a squeeze on affordable housing.  Compared to most states, it has an unusual number of people who work outside the state, drawn mostly to the New York or Philadelphia metros.  It’s a hard place to start a family, given the cost of housing and the relative disconnect between local income levels and local salaries.  (High NYC salaries drive up prices in areas where local salaries don’t scale.)  

Every state exports some young people, and that’s fine.  If a kid from Maryland gets into Harvard or Stanford and wants to go, I don’t see a political crisis in allowing it.  But when a state or a region exports too many, and particularly of its highest achievers, it sets itself up for trouble.  

The whole “creative class” line of argument made famous by Richard Florida caught on because it explained something we’ve all seen: places that import lots of ambitious young people prosper.  That can become self-reinforcing over time.  My back-of-the-envelope test for whether an area is on the right track is whether it attracts significant numbers of young people who move there before they’ve found work.  Moving to accept an offer is one thing; moving without an offer shows real interest in being in a given area.  

The IPEDS data suggest that more young people want out of New Jersey than want in.  

From a policy perspective, I could imagine a few possible responses.

One would be indifference.  It’s easy and cheap in the short run, but over time, it doesn’t lead anywhere good.

Another would be some sort of coercion.  But that tends to backfire; the most ambitious students are the ones likeliest to escape.  And that’s leaving aside a whole set of moral issues.

I’d favor making the place more appealing as a destination.  Given that talented young people have choices, the best way to attract or keep them is to make the place a more attractive choice.  Make it likelier that the next wave of entrepreneurs will set up shop here.

The fastest, easiest, lowest-cost way to do that would be to make the community and state colleges stronger.  Give the high-achieving high school grad a reason to stick around, and give the high-achieving high school grad from a neighboring state a reason to come over.  

The advantage to this strategy is that the infrastructure is already in place.  It wouldn’t require solving much more intractable issues.  And it wouldn’t even rely initially on getting the word out in other states.  Just doing a better job of keeping the young people who are already here would make a difference.  We already know that community college grads are likely to stay in the local area, so you’d get a labor-force payoff quickly.  Strengthen the four-year sector as well, and the payoff could be even greater.  The scale of investment wouldn’t have to be all that high, though it would have to be sustained over time.  That includes during recessions.

When I worked in New Jersey in the previous decade, it exported scads of young people.  Upon returning, I notice it’s still doing the same.  How’s that working out?

It’s time to try something different.  The data tell the tale.  

Administrative Writing

Why is so much administrative writing so bad?

For the same reason that many syllabi are so horribly written.

In a word, contexts.  When writing, you can never be sure of the context in which what you wrote will be read.

You'll be read by many with goodwill, which is lovely.  You'll also be read by some with axes to grind.  You'll be read by amateur lawyers, trying to twist every ambiguous phrase or quirk of syntax into a new entitlement.  (A professor once responded to an email by accusing me of using "menacing ellipsis."  I decided that "menacing ellipsis" would be a great name for a band.) You may be read by actual lawyers in the context of some sort of legal action; if so, you can't anticipate the agenda, other than to say it won't be positive.  

In the context of personal writing -- writing to a friend, say -- it's easy to assume a shared context.  Even there, it's possible to get into trouble -- we're all warned about conveying tone in emails -- but it's usually broadly possible.  If all else fails, you can just pick up the phone and say "what was that?"  In the context of disciplinary writing, it's often safe to assume that the only readers will be people in that discipline, so you can rely on certain interpretive conventions.  

But when you're under scrutiny from people who are looking to score political points against you, you can't assume that your words will be read in good faith.  If anything, it's usually prudent to assume the opposite.

That's probably why, after all these years, I still have this writerly space largely to myself.  My colleagues don't blog, or if they do, they don't blog about higher ed policy.  Hell, I used a pseudonym for years until I felt like I had found a voice with which I was comfortable.  Putting ideas out there can draw fire.  I think of that as a form of leadership, though I've also heard it called risky.  Probably both.

In this sense, administration is closer to politics than to teaching.  Politicians' relationship to language is notoriously sketchy, going at least back to the Sophists.  The Sophists actually make an instructive case.  The term "sophist" forms the root of "sophistry," which we use to mean lying.  But it also forms the root of "sophisticated."  An acute awareness of the consequences of the misuse of language will lead, in the early stages, to forced or overly-safe constructions.  It takes a while to get comfortable enough with the externally-invisible conventions to be reliably able to hit the narrow overlap in the Venn diagram between "professional" and "human."  It's especially difficult when exhausted.  Some insist on being human, and eventually get nailed for something impolitic; most take refuge in cliche.  Moving from sophistry to sophistication takes time and practice, and the safe spaces in which to develop the skill to do that barely exist.

To be fair, there are more mundane reasons for painful administrative prose, as well.  Sometimes it comes from acronym overload.  Sometimes it comes from the overuse of internal shorthand, a temptation to which many academic researchers are also prone.  Sometimes it comes from extremely scrupulous adherence to various legal terms of art.  Sometimes it comes from time pressures.  And yes, some people are just lousy writers.  

But in thinking about what would improve the caliber of administrative writing overall, we might want to be careful what we wish for.  (See "take refuge in cliche," above.)  

It would be easy to adopt a more freewheeling and natural communication style if we just got all the skeptics to back off.  

But what, exactly, would that entail?

Richard Sennett noted forty years ago that the great irony of "transparency" is that it forces a much more powerful self-censorship.  That's not necessarily a bad thing; our first impulses aren't always in our best interest.  The old "hydraulic" model of catharsis -- blowing off steam, say -- assumes that once you've "gotten something out of your system," it's gone.  But that's not how the world works.  If I respond to the umpteenth silly request with "oh, bite me," I haven't resolved anything; in fact, I've created a whole new level of problem.  "Oh, bite me" might more accurately reflect my "authentic" state of mind in the moment, but it won't lead anywhere good.  And I certainly prefer a world in which most people don’t respond that way to me.  Catharsis is likelier to generate tension than to resolve it.

Put differently, some forms of self-censorship are what make organized life possible.  Self-censorship sometimes comes from considering the needs of others.  The act of thinking before speaking -- or writing -- may be tiring and frustrating, and in the hands of the less-skilled, may result in stilted prose.  But it pushes us in directions we need to be pushed.  If other people matter, then their opinions matter.  If they’re free to express those opinions, then folks in the public eye may be expected to craft their words carefully to avoid unhelpful conflict.  To flip Hannah Arendt on her head, banality isn’t necessarily evil; it may be a symptom of freedom.

Acronyms, on the other hand… (See “menacing ellipsis,” above.)

Best Intersession Class You Ever Took

What’s the best intersession class you ever took?

I’ll narrow it down.  By “intersession” I mean a very short-term class, typically offered for two or three weeks in January.  

January terms are relatively common in higher ed, since they fill a gap in the calendar, but they get sort of ignored in most discussions of both curriculum and student success.  We talk about semesters and the “summer melt,” and sometimes summer boot camps, but I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve heard someone mention January terms or intersessions in the context of higher ed policy discussions, other than around financial aid.  

At their best, intersession classes offer a kind of focus that most classes just can’t.  Because they stuff so much class time into such a brief window, they fairly demand almost exclusive attention from students.  I’ve had faculty tell me that intersession classes are their favorite ones to teach, because for two or three weeks, the students don’t do anything else.  They have to jump in with both feet.  

Perhaps as a function of self-selection, and perhaps because the short calendar doesn’t give much time for life to get in the way, pass rates for intersession classes have usually been much higher than for semester-based classes.  (At HCC, they were 15 to 20 points higher, year after year.)  It worked incredibly well for many 100-level gen ed classes.  It also worked well as a catch-up period for students who took developmental math in the fall, and just needed another week or two to pass it.  It worked incredibly well in classes like Nutrition, or Baking, where having really long days in the teaching kitchen allowed for more complicated and ambitious projects than could usually be done.

At least theoretically, I bet it would work well for language immersion.  Spend all day, every day, for several weeks speaking a language, and you’d have to pick up something.  

That said, I’d be wary of trying to stuff, say, English Composition into that format.  Even with long class times and plenty of in-class writing, the feedback (and grading) would just be too time-consuming.  I’m not saying it couldn’t be done, but I’ve never seen it done, and I have a hard time imagining it.  If someone has done it well, I’d love to know how.

In my student days, the January term was given over to interdisciplinary stuff.  (Given the need for credits to transfer, we’re more limited in the ability to do that here.)  My favorite was the one I took my sophomore year.  It was 1988, and the topic was Gay and Lesbian Politics in America.  For 1988, that was pretty daring.  The course was team-taught, nobody knew what to expect, and I remember being floored both by the content and by Wendy Brown’s ability to turn phrase after phrase.  Her smart-stuff-per-minute ratio was the highest I’ve seen, before or since, and she managed to be clear and understandable while she did it.  It was the verbal equivalent of landing consecutive triple axles while juggling.  There were times it was all I could do not to applaud.

All of which is by way of asking you, my wise and worldly readers: what’s the best intersession class you ever took?  For bonus points, what made it great?

Looking Up

I had to smile at the New York Times’ story yesterday breaking the news that senior citizens who attend college classes do it because they want to.  At this point, learning for the sake of it has become newsworthy.  The idea that people free from economic necessity can pursue higher learning isn’t exactly new -- Aristotle was no stranger to it, and Machiavelli waxed eloquent on the subject -- but it’s worth revisiting in a time of economic panic.  At this point, it’s almost radical to suggest that higher education is more than job placement.  

It is.

And yet, I understand.  The economy remains unforgiving for people trying to get started, and paths to the middle and upper middle classes are less legible than they once were.  Even once you’re there, holding on takes sustained and serious effort.  That’s especially true if you’re also trying to keep your kids on the right path.

That’s why the occasional break is so important.  It offers a chance to look up from the quotidian whitewater of events and get some perspective.

Christmas break is many things, but one of them is a chance to read stuff just because I want to.  It’s good for the soul. For a little over a week, I got to sit down from time to time with books or articles that held my interest just because.  And I remembered why I care as much about education as I do.

Without quite intending to, I read Kathryn Edin’s “$2 a Day” and Hanna Rosin’s “The Silicon Valley Suicides” back to back.  Edin’s book is a bracing account of the realities of living on the bottom of the American economic ladder in the wake of welfare reform; by her reckoning, several million Americans live on $2 a day or less, which is the measure some NGO’s use to calculate poverty internationally.  Rosin’s article profiles high-achieving teenagers in one of the most affluent areas in the country, in one of the most desired high schools in the country.  You’d think that reading them next to each other would constitute what, in my radio days, we used to call a collision mix.  But it didn’t.

They’re both about constrained possibilities, or the inability to see other ways of being.  

Edin’s subjects are so strapped that their world shrinks to what’s right in front of them.  Given the extreme and increasing economic segregation of housing in America, very poor people tend to be clustered with each other.  Growing up in a setting like that, desperation can come to seem both endemic and inevitable.  If everyone you know is struggling just as badly, or almost as badly, as you are, it becomes that much harder to see a way out.  Edin’s subjects are full of stories of couch-surfing -- often staying with people who were sexually or otherwise abusive, just to have a place to stay -- and of no-win ethical dilemmas.  Some sell food stamps (now in the form of EBT cards) because they need cash to pay utility bills or rent.  TANF is almost entirely absent; strikingly, nobody in her book received it, or knew anyone who did.  It has become so difficult to obtain that for all intents and purposes, it’s gone.  She writes of a teenage girl who consciously chooses a sexual relationship with a teacher because he promises her food.  By the girl’s reckoning, if the teacher feeds her, then there will be enough food left in the house for her siblings.  It’s the only way she can see to get everyone fed.

Rosin’s piece is about another world, but the habits of mind are the same.  Palo Alto High School has been plagued by multiple rounds of student suicides, largely among high-achieving students.  Rosin paints a vivid picture of students who are so deeply inculcated with upper-middle-class notions of meritocracy that they can’t even conceptualize rebellion.  They’re so focused on not losing the ground their parents gained that any failure, no matter how small or normal, seems catastrophic.  Most find their way through, but a disproportionate number see no better option than stepping in front of a Caltrans train.  

The economics matter, of course.  But so does a sense of larger possibility.  Neither Edin’s nor Rosin’s subjects can see an alternative to the world in which they feel stuck.  

That kind of vision can come from all sorts of places.  Kristin Hersh’s memoir of her late friend Vic Chesnutt,  “Don’t Suck, Don’t Die” is a jagged collection of broken visions.  It’s messy and spiky and unforgiving, crushingly sad, sometimes funny, and humane.  At about 180 short pages, it took me a half-dozen sittings to get through.  There’s nothing light about the book, but it’s worth the considerable effort.  

Hersh and Chesnutt were close friends for many years, and much of the book consists of tales of touring with their respective spouses.  But that’s like saying that Moby Dick is about trying to catch a whale.  It’s not wrong, exactly, but it misses the point.  

In Hersh’s telling, Chesnutt comes off as kind of a jerk.  She knows that -- he did, too -- but, as she put it, “love just is.”  The book gives the contours of a travelling foursome gradually shrinking, and of a friendship struggling.  One marriage dissolves and then sort of doesn’t; the other does, more slowly.  Money is sort of present, and then very much not.  

Hersh is far smarter than she lets on, with the eye of a naturalist.  She plays dumb at several points, but her writing betrays her.  Although she occasionally inveighs against musicians’ effort to “control” music by consciously writing it, she has gone to great pains to be kind to everyone in her writing.  Her husband, who leaves her at the end of the book, is portrayed sympathetically, as are Vic and his long-suffering wife, Tina.  Kristin and Billy’s children are entirely absent from the book, which struck me as a kindness to them.  The prose isn’t always linear, but it’s always tightly controlled, with her characteristic ear for phrasing.  She seems determined to find kindness and grace where she can, and to share it.

Which is why, as difficult as it is, the book won me over.  Hersh is awash in visions; some unbidden, some chosen, some even a little forced.  She sees her friends for who they are, and for who they want to be, and she loves them for trying.  She notices the grace notes in fleeting moments, and shares them as she can.  She’s artist enough to convey many of them -- for my money, “a man made of butterfat/careening around on a Sno Cat” is one of the best word-pictures in music -- but humble enough to try to lean towards the humane.  

I couldn’t speak for a while after finishing Hersh’s book.  But then I couldn’t shake some of the images.  The wings she imagines spreading from the back of Chesnutt’s wheelchair, the flavored non-dairy creamer packets they’d eat in hotel lobbies; they were all about seeing more than what was directly in front of her.  They were about looking up.

I’m glad to have had the chance to look up, too.  Now it’s back to work, trying to create opportunities for students to look up.  Share those grace notes, and remind them that there is more to life than job placement or predators.  There’s humanity, if you’re able to take a deep breath and look.

Mystery Solved?

Quick, which is the better deal:

1. Watch videos online and pay $649 for three credits.
2. Take a class with a human being and pay $252 for three credits.

If you said “a,” congratulations -- you’re part of the one percent!

Last Spring, I asked in this venue exactly what problem ASU and EdX thought they were solving.  Now we have the first attempt at an answer.  According to over 99 percent of the students who signed up for a MOOC through the ASU/EdX partnership, they weren’t.  

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course.  To the extent that folks watched MOOCs in the same way that they watch, say, TED talks, I don’t see the harm in it.  But to the extent that the partnership was supposed to be about opening pathways to bachelor’s degrees, it doesn’t come close to comparing to the already-established route of starting at a community college -- in this case, I used the tuition rate of Maricopa Community College, the largest feeder to ASU -- and transferring.

The program didn’t even follow the usual “script” for “disruptive innovations.”  It came in at a higher cost than a respected, existing alternative.  That’s not how disruption is supposed to work.  I have to wonder at the implied invisibility of the single largest sector of American higher education, but that’s another discussion.  

ASU was essentially trying to charge premium prices for Prior Learning Assessment and hope nobody would notice.  A savvy student could simply watch the MOOC and then take a CLEP exam for credit for less than a hundred bucks.  I admire the audacity of the effort, though I admire more the clarity with which most people saw it.

I guess it’s possible to construct a scenario in which the partnership is a good deal.  Maybe it works well for the Starbucks employees who get a special deal with ASU.  I suspect Starbucks could get a better deal working with community colleges, but hey, it’s their money.  Outside of something relatively idiosyncratic, though, I’d be hard pressed to explain why a student wouldn’t be better off taking classes at a community college with an actual professor.

Wise and worldly readers, am I missing something here?  Is there a subtle wisdom to the arrangement that goes deeper than brazen overcharging?  

Program note: ‘tis the season, so the blog will go on its annual holiday hiatus until January 4.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an “ugly sweater” competition to win...

An Idea Offered Freely to Candidates

On Saturday night, with The Boy out visiting friends, The Girl announced that she wanted to use her control of the tv to watch...the Democratic debate.  

So we did.

What that says about us as parents, I’ll leave to the reader.

There’s no shortage of material to write about in the debates, and others have done just that.  I’ll just focus here on some of what seemed missing in the brief discussion of higher education.

You wouldn’t know it from the debate, but public higher education in America is mostly run by the states and/or local governments.  (It varies by state: in New Jersey, for instance, counties have a strong say; in Massachusetts, none at all.  I’m not sure how public higher ed is run in D.C.)  That’s especially true at the level of community and state colleges.  Here, Federal funding tends to take the form of financial aid -- which is to say, accessible to the college only by charging students tuition and fees -- or certain grant programs to institutions, like Perkins or Title III.  Operating funds come from students -- again with the indirect help of the Feds -- and states, and sometimes localities.  (There’s also some income from facility rentals, bookstore revenues, and the like, but all of that totals in the single digits.)  

But the candidates’ plans didn’t seem to acknowledge that.  They mostly spoke of financial aid and the prices that students pay.  I did hear a passing reference to state disinvestment, but I never heard a proposal to address it.  And I don’t recall it coming up in a substantive way in any of the Republican debates, either.

If we want to get a serious handle on higher ed affordability and quality, we need to address its political economy and structure.  It’s simply not under direct federal control in the same way that, say, Medicare is.  It’s more variable across the country.

The easiest way to address such variable structures across the country is to go through the single common denominator, which is students.  Pell grants work the same way in Utah that they do in Connecticut.  And that’s largely how the Feds have addressed college access up until now.  The GI Bill, Pell grants, Federally-backed loans -- all are ways of attaching money to students.  For colleges to get that money, they have to charge the students.  

That strategy worked pretty well for a while.  But over time, states (and sometimes localities) realized that they could cut their contributions to colleges’ operating budgets without much consequence, since colleges could shift those costs to students (and indirectly to the Feds).  On the ground, it wasn’t quite that simple; over the decades, colleges have largely split the difference between cost shifting and ever-tightening austerity.  The combination of steady tuition increases and a gradual but inexorable trend towards adjunct faculty was mostly able to offset reduced support until the Great Recession hit.

The enrollment surge of 2009 briefly hid the effects of disinvestment, but as the surge has receded, the funding shortfalls have become impossible to ignore.  

Now we’re hearing calls for “free community college,” which, depending on implementation, would attack the revenue stream on which we have come to rely the most.  Yes, grants could still be available for student living expenses, but that doesn’t help colleges make payroll.  And although I would love to imagine that states and localities were itching to step up with major multiples of their current contributions, I just don’t see it.  

Here’s where the candidates have an opening.  And I’m happy to share it with anyone from either party.  

If you want to get costs under control, you have to be willing to change two things.  The first is the reliance on the credit hour, which drives costs inexorably upward through the mathematical trap of Baumol’s cost disease.  The second is the free ride that states and localities have had in reducing support.  The first holds the potential to finally get cost inflation under control, and the second holds the potential to reverse the trend of cost-shifting to students.

The Feds have nibbled around the edges of each, the former with experimental site authority and the latter with a marginally-effective “maintenance of effort” requirement in 2009-10.  But they haven’t taken either on directly.  This is where someone who was willing to step up could make a real difference.

So, here’s the idea: matching funds for operating budgets.  For every dollar a state or locality pours into a college, the feds put in one to match.  So a state puts, say, five million towards a college, but its economy gets ten million worth of activity.  (The exact multiplier is obviously adjustable; I’m just using one-to-one for the sake of simplicity.)  Given that colleges are, among other things, local employers, the appeal could be significant.  And the one-for-one would work both ways; cuts to college budgets would mean leaving money on the table.  

We already know that an educated workforce is a hugely positive investment over the long term.  But the short time horizon of elections can wreak havoc with that.  Matching funds can make the long term benefits concrete and legible in the short term.  And with robust operating budgets, colleges can both hold the line on prices and restore some of the externally-invisible cuts that do subtle, but real, damage.  

In the spirit of bipartisanship, I offer this idea freely to any candidate who wants to run with it.  Getting college costs under control isn’t just a matter of tinkering with financial aid.  It requires reversing some key underlying realities.

I’ll warn any politicians who are reading: my daughter is onto you.  If you haven’t done something by the time she reaches voting age, she’ll notice.  You’ve been warned...

Fishing In Our Pond

I’m going to ask my wise and worldly readers who work at non-elite four-year colleges to weigh in on this one.  It involves an alternate -- supplementary, really -- reading of the decline in enrollments at community colleges nationally.

According to IHE’s reading of new data from the National Student Clearinghouse, post-secondary enrollments in America dropped from 2014 to 2015.  At first glance, that would seem consistent with the article’s thesis, which is that it’s due largely to an improving economy.

A slightly closer look bolsters that reading; almost all of the drop was concentrated in for-profits and community colleges.  The four-year sector basically held steady.  Most of the decline was among students age 24 and up, who are presumably more attuned to changing opportunity cost of returning to school; when the opportunity cost goes up (because the job market improves), they’re less likely to enroll.

But the two-year sector doesn’t have a monopoly on adult students, by any means.  And students over 24 aren’t the only ones who respond to economic cues.  Given that the four-year sector remained steady even as the economy improved, there must be something else going on.

Here’s where I’m hoping my counterparts elsewhere can shed light.

I’ve heard anecdotal, but persistent, rumors that some non-elite four-year schools are lowering their admissions standards to maintain their enrollments.  From a community college perspective, they’re fishing in our pond.  That might explain why enrollments in our sector are dropping faster than demographics suggest they should, while enrollments in the four-years aren’t dropping at all.

That reading might also explain the rapid rise of discount rates at many four-years.  To the extent that they’re drawing more heavily on students who need more aid -- students who otherwise would have gone to lower-cost community colleges -- they’re having to pay out more to cover students’ costs.  (Or to cover most of students’ costs -- “gapping” seems to be rising along with discount rates, which suggests that needs are growing even faster than spending.)  Discount rates of 60 percent or more are becoming relatively common; that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.  

I can’t imagine discount rates at that level being sustainable for very long.  At that point, tuition increases are almost entirely theoretical.

In a more perfect world, tuition would comprise a relatively small portion of community college revenues, so some students going elsewhere wouldn’t be so bad.  But in the states that haven’t signed on to “free community college” yet -- cough, cough -- years of cost-shifting to students has resulted in our business plan looking much more like the private colleges.  When you shift your revenue source to students, and the students go away, things can get ugly.

If that’s actually what’s happening -- four-year colleges lowering standards and raising discount rates to try to stay afloat, resulting in community colleges suffering -- there’s a relatively easy way to fix it.  Reverse the cost-shifting to students.  Then the two sectors could compete on quality, and students would win either way.  Otherwise, we’re stuck fighting over shrinking ponds, inflicting devastating blows on each other and saddling students with a choice between larger loans and larger classes.  

Wise and worldly readers at four-year colleges, does this describe the reality you’re seeing?  Or is there a better explanation?

Why Don’t They Show Up?

How heavily attended should the college Senate be?

I’ve been mulling this over lately.  Brookdale has a more robust routine turnout at Senate than I’ve seen elsewhere, but some folks think it should be even more so.  I suspect that my wise and worldly readers have seen great variation in college Senates elsewhere, so I’m hoping to get some sense of what has worked (or not) in other places.

At some level, of course, high turnout is a good thing.  It increases the chances that people will know what’s going on, and what the major campus issues are.  If the high turnout is evenly distributed among constituencies -- not a given, but if -- it can increase the chances of multiple perspectives being brought to bear on various questions.  Ideally, high turnout both indicates and feeds high interest, which in turn leads to the most collective brainpower focused on shared issues.  Even better, reasoned dialogue across ranks and roles leads to a better shared appreciation of our commonalities.

And sometimes that happens.

In practice, though, most people don’t attend to be edified.  (Some do, but they’re rarely a majority.)  Beyond a core group, most people don’t attend unless they’re upset about something.  By that point, it’s often difficult to have reasonable discussions, because battle lines are already drawn.  If the agenda for the next meeting started with “Resolved: Monetary Pay for All Employees Shall be Replaced by Compensation in Kit-Kats,” attendance at Senate would skyrocket, but I don’t think the overall effect on the college would be a new golden age of deliberative democracy.  People who don’t usually show up, would, just to prevent something terrible from happening. Then, after the crisis had been averted, attendance would quickly regress to the mean.

In my poli sci days, we used to study voter turnout and the theories explaining it.  One theory -- I remember George Will championing it, among others -- held that non-voting is a sign of contentment.  This is the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” school of thought.  It sounds plausible until you look at the demographics of who votes and who doesn’t.  For this school to be correct, we’d have to assume that the very wealthy are horribly oppressed, and the very poor are content.  That fails the “I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck” test.  

Another school looks at mediating institutions, like labor unions or political parties.  Robert Putnam got famous by broadening the idea to include all manner of “social capital.”  The idea here is that people vote when they’re prodded by people they care about and identify with.  That could mean a union, a church group, or even a bowling league.  (Hence, “Bowling Alone.”)  

The strength of Putnam’s position is that it fits the late twentieth century quite well.  But it doesn’t do a great job of explaining why voter turnout is higher in national elections than local ones, given that local ties are supposed to matter more.  And it doesn’t explain the spike in voter turnout in 2008, when Obama rode a wave of new voters to victory, even as unions and bowling leagues continued to decline.

I was more convinced by the folks who looked at non-voting as a desired outcome of elite policies.  Piven and Cloward argued in “Why Americans Don’t Vote” that voter registration rules were deliberately designed to discourage participation.  (They wrote it in the 80’s, well before the voter-suppression wave of the last ten years.)  Nina Eliasoph argued in her brilliant “Avoiding Politics” that certain social norms within the culture make it difficult for people to “own” the role of citizen, and that those norms were deliberately reinforced at all sorts of levels.  Her argument flipped Putnam’s on its head; in her view, social ties often precluded politics.  

Still, the most persuasive perspective I’ve seen argues that people are likelier to vote against something than for something.  This is why David Duke’s run for governor of Louisiana in the early 90’s occasioned record-breaking voter turnout among African-American voters; faced with the prospect of putting the Grand Dragon of the Klan in charge of the state police, folks who had never bothered to vote before suddenly did.  Looking back at most of my own votes for various candidates, more of them were motivated by stopping A than supporting B.  

Given that the campus is unionized, and nobody has to register to vote in the Senate, I don’t think some of the national explanations really apply locally.  But the last one probably does.  Outside of a smallish group of unusually public-spirited types -- in which I include myself -- most participation is sporadic, and occasioned only to prevent catastrophe.  Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, it seems to be a persistent thing.

Wise and worldly readers, are there better explanations?  And are there consistently successful ways to make shared governance both more widely shared and a more positive influence on campus?