We have family friends whose older son started college this Fall. Apparently, when he got his Fall grades last month, he had his head handed to him. Having reeled from the shock for a while, now he’s studying much more aggressively than he ever has before.
The same thing happened to me in my first semester of college. Having learned certain expectations in high school, the first semester at Snooty Liberal Arts College came as a rude shock. Part of it was poor course selection, but part of it was simply not appreciating the level of effort that I had to muster.
In my case -- and, I’m fairly confident, in the case of our family friend -- that first semester functioned as a wake-up call. I raised my game after that, and the results followed.
But for many students, a rough first semester doesn’t result in redoubled effort. It results in a fatalistic shrug, and either an immediate departure or a de facto one.
I’m not entirely sure what makes the difference.
The literature on resilience suggests that expectations have much to do with it, and that makes intuitive sense. I remember being sort of offended that other guys in my dorm -- most of whom were no smarter than I was, as far as I could see -- did just fine, and I didn’t. It struck me as ridiculous. If Lumpy could do well, I could. I mean, jeez. These guys weren’t mysterious beings with inscrutable superhuman powers. They were relatively well-spoken jocks who liked to pour vodka on the linoleum and light it on fire. (True.) If they could succeed, I thought, I’ll be damned if I can’t.
By that reasoning, a student who is the first in his family to go to college, who commutes from home and doesn’t hang around with strong students, and who has picked up some shaky academic habits in high school might well react differently to a rough first semester. He might be more vulnerable to the impression that people who know how to do this are fundamentally different from him. He might take that first negative report card as confirmation of his self-doubts, rather than as some sort of insult requiring an answer.
To the extent that’s true, then there’s probably a direct academic consequence to the increased segregation by income that characterizes both our towns and our colleges. If the first-in-his-family student had family friends with college degrees, and was exposed to other successful students outside the classroom, he might be quicker to decide that success is attainable. After all, if his none-too-impressive classmates could do it...
But never having that exposure means never having that reality check.
One of the unadvertised benefits of attending SLAC was seeing the sons and daughters of the elite up close. Other than a sort of blithe weightlessness, they really weren’t that different from the rest of us. Nothing demystifies like a shared bathroom.
To the extent that neighborhoods were once more mixed economically than they are now, it was once possible to get at least some cross-class exposure in the course of daily life. That’s mostly not true anymore, which leads to a sort of narrowing of one’s sense of the world. If the elite only ever see other elites, they can lose touch with reality pretty fast. And if the working poor only ever see other working poor, a certain fatalism can come to seem like clearsightedness.
Colleges can be wonderful places for that kind of cross-class interaction, though it’s obviously harder when students live at home and commute.
Our family friend has parents who went to college, and who are cracking the whip on him now. (“Improve your grades or start paying rent.”) I hope that’s enough to get him back on track. But for the kids who don’t have that at home, I wonder.
Monday, February 20, 2012
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Ability to Benefit
I’m told that community colleges will lose the option to admit students on an “ability to benefit” basis as of July 1.
Right now, students who don’t have either a high school diploma or a GED are allowed to take a general skills test for admission. If they score high enough, they are deemed to have the “ability to benefit” from college level work, and are eligible for admission and financial aid. For reasons of its own, the Federal government is not only removing the eligibility for financial aid, but even making entire institutions ineligible for financial aid if they admit any ABT students, even those who are paying their own way.
That may seem reasonable enough at first glance. The argument, to the extent that there is one, is that students who lack either a diploma or a GED should be directed to get one of those first. Once they have it -- usually a GED -- then they’re fine. (The rule does not apply to high school students in dual enrollment programs. Obviously, if the rule did apply, dual enrollment would cease to exist.)
But I wonder if they’ve really thought this through.
The collision of this rule with the effects of No Child Left Behind isn’t pretty. In my state, as in many others -- I’m not sure if it applies to all -- high school students have to pass a standardized statewide exam in order to get a high school diploma. If they finish their senior year with passing grades but don’t pass the exam, they don’t get a diploma. Instead, they get a lesser certificate that does not pass muster under the new Federal guidelines.
Sociologists of education will not be shocked to learn that the students who fall into that category are disproportionately low-income, non-white, and male.
Now the students who complete high school but don’t graduate -- a category that exists only because of the effects of NCLB -- will have to get GED’s before enrolling in community college.
And this is a good idea...why?
I’ll agree without hesitation that it would be great if everyone who completed high school passed rigorous exams with flying colors. It would also be great if ice cream cured cancer. Some things just aren’t going to happen.
In the real world, the effect will be to put up yet another obstacle in front of the students who most need social mobility. You went to a crappy high school? Tough break, kid. Now you have to go through yet another program before taking yet another exam before getting into college, where, in all likelihood, you’ll have to start with developmental courses.
Yuck, yuck, yuck.
I foresee a few possible outcomes.
One is a severe and permanent drop in the enrollment levels of the most disadvantaged students. The implications for their future employment levels, salaries, and life options are clear.
Another is a proliferation of quick-fix GED workarounds. If you think the for-profits are predatory now, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
It gets worse when you consider the idea of making community colleges the default workforce training centers for their communities, as President Obama suggested in his State of the Union address. If you have to go to the community college for your post-secondary training, but you can’t get in without a GED and you don’t already have one, then the hurdle to economic mobility just got that much worse.
Honestly, I don’t know what problem they’re trying to solve with this.
A more productive approach would be to fund studies on ATB students, and to find the programs in which they succeed at the highest rates. What do those programs do right? If the problem is a perceived lack of completion, then let’s address that. But addressing it by putting up even more hurdles doesn’t make sense at all.
Right now, students who don’t have either a high school diploma or a GED are allowed to take a general skills test for admission. If they score high enough, they are deemed to have the “ability to benefit” from college level work, and are eligible for admission and financial aid. For reasons of its own, the Federal government is not only removing the eligibility for financial aid, but even making entire institutions ineligible for financial aid if they admit any ABT students, even those who are paying their own way.
That may seem reasonable enough at first glance. The argument, to the extent that there is one, is that students who lack either a diploma or a GED should be directed to get one of those first. Once they have it -- usually a GED -- then they’re fine. (The rule does not apply to high school students in dual enrollment programs. Obviously, if the rule did apply, dual enrollment would cease to exist.)
But I wonder if they’ve really thought this through.
The collision of this rule with the effects of No Child Left Behind isn’t pretty. In my state, as in many others -- I’m not sure if it applies to all -- high school students have to pass a standardized statewide exam in order to get a high school diploma. If they finish their senior year with passing grades but don’t pass the exam, they don’t get a diploma. Instead, they get a lesser certificate that does not pass muster under the new Federal guidelines.
Sociologists of education will not be shocked to learn that the students who fall into that category are disproportionately low-income, non-white, and male.
Now the students who complete high school but don’t graduate -- a category that exists only because of the effects of NCLB -- will have to get GED’s before enrolling in community college.
And this is a good idea...why?
I’ll agree without hesitation that it would be great if everyone who completed high school passed rigorous exams with flying colors. It would also be great if ice cream cured cancer. Some things just aren’t going to happen.
In the real world, the effect will be to put up yet another obstacle in front of the students who most need social mobility. You went to a crappy high school? Tough break, kid. Now you have to go through yet another program before taking yet another exam before getting into college, where, in all likelihood, you’ll have to start with developmental courses.
Yuck, yuck, yuck.
I foresee a few possible outcomes.
One is a severe and permanent drop in the enrollment levels of the most disadvantaged students. The implications for their future employment levels, salaries, and life options are clear.
Another is a proliferation of quick-fix GED workarounds. If you think the for-profits are predatory now, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
It gets worse when you consider the idea of making community colleges the default workforce training centers for their communities, as President Obama suggested in his State of the Union address. If you have to go to the community college for your post-secondary training, but you can’t get in without a GED and you don’t already have one, then the hurdle to economic mobility just got that much worse.
Honestly, I don’t know what problem they’re trying to solve with this.
A more productive approach would be to fund studies on ATB students, and to find the programs in which they succeed at the highest rates. What do those programs do right? If the problem is a perceived lack of completion, then let’s address that. But addressing it by putting up even more hurdles doesn’t make sense at all.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Ask the Administrator: How Soon Can I Leave?
A new correspondent writes:
First, condolences on learning the hard way about long commutes. A few years ago my commute shortened dramatically, and I have to admit that my quality of life improved significantly. It’s an easy variable to overlook, but we overlook it at our peril.
Having said that, I’ll answer the question with an “it depends.” It depends on how many quick departures you have in your history.
Most prospective employers will forgive one oddly short stopover. If asked, you can simply say that life events made the job untenable -- which is substantially true -- and you had to make a change sooner than you would have liked. If the rest of your history has you doing five years here and six years there, a single aberration isn’t fatal.
But if you have a history of a new job every year, that’s a serious red flag. If you have a long history of playing job hopscotch, then I have to assume that that’s what you do.
The administrative job market is fundamentally different from the faculty job market. There’s much more lateral movement, and much more turnover. (The two are directly related.) That means that some level of movement isn’t necessarily alarming, particularly in the early stages of a career. If a tenure-track professor leaves a college after six or seven years, the default assumption is that s/he was denied tenure; if an administrator leaves after six or seven years, that’s generally considered a good run.
So if this would be the first ‘quickie’ on your record, I’d start looking for new positions as soon as possible. One quickie isn’t the worst thing in the world. If your record is nothing but quickies, though, I’d start asking some hard questions.
Good luck!
Wise and worldly readers -- especially those in administration -- what do you think?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Six months ago, I accepted an assistant deanship at an institution that requires a long daily commute. I've since come to regret my decision, finding that the 60+ hours away from home is damaging my family life, which, in turn, makes me ineffective in both work and family roles. In your experience, what is a reasonable amount of time for a junior administrator to spend in a position before moving on? Do I need to tough it out for a year before beginning my search, or can I start applying for positions now?
First, condolences on learning the hard way about long commutes. A few years ago my commute shortened dramatically, and I have to admit that my quality of life improved significantly. It’s an easy variable to overlook, but we overlook it at our peril.
Having said that, I’ll answer the question with an “it depends.” It depends on how many quick departures you have in your history.
Most prospective employers will forgive one oddly short stopover. If asked, you can simply say that life events made the job untenable -- which is substantially true -- and you had to make a change sooner than you would have liked. If the rest of your history has you doing five years here and six years there, a single aberration isn’t fatal.
But if you have a history of a new job every year, that’s a serious red flag. If you have a long history of playing job hopscotch, then I have to assume that that’s what you do.
The administrative job market is fundamentally different from the faculty job market. There’s much more lateral movement, and much more turnover. (The two are directly related.) That means that some level of movement isn’t necessarily alarming, particularly in the early stages of a career. If a tenure-track professor leaves a college after six or seven years, the default assumption is that s/he was denied tenure; if an administrator leaves after six or seven years, that’s generally considered a good run.
So if this would be the first ‘quickie’ on your record, I’d start looking for new positions as soon as possible. One quickie isn’t the worst thing in the world. If your record is nothing but quickies, though, I’d start asking some hard questions.
Good luck!
Wise and worldly readers -- especially those in administration -- what do you think?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Ask the Administrator: Friending Students on Facebook
A longtime reader writes:
This is probably one of those cases in which someone went overboard, and administrators who didn’t quite get the concept overreacted.
I’m just old enough to remember a time before Facebook. Back then, people used to interact in all kinds of ways, some of them in ways that would give administrators pause. But there wasn’t a written record most of the time, so with exceptions, there usually wasn’t much proof. With Facebook and other social networking technologies, there’s a written record. (Rep. Anthony Weiner discovered that the same principle holds on Twitter.)
Worse, social network etiquette is still evolving. People present different selves in different contexts -- necessarily, and sometimes to their credit -- but those styles of presentation can get all jumbled up on Facebook. Since people can easily spend far more time interacting on a social network than they probably would have in real life, all that jumbling can lead to confusing and dangerous places.
We administrative types have a healthy fear of confusing and dangerous places, since we deal regularly with lawyers. I could see where a risk-averse administrator might just decide that anything insufficiently buttoned-up (as opposed to, say, LinkedIn) should be avoided altogether.
It’s a mistake, though.
You’re right that there’s an issue with regulating speech outside the workplace. There’s also a basic issue with confusing a medium with a message. Yes, some people have done stupid stuff online. But they have also done stupid stuff offline. Email can be used abusively, as can telephones, as can hallway discussions, as can in-class lectures. At a certain point, savvy administrators have to learn to let go of the idea of control -- absurd when dealing with creative people -- and instead focus on setting a climate of expectations and, when things go wrong, controlling the damage.
A more constructive approach would instead focus on helping faculty and staff understand the implications of various kinds of interactions. The rule of thumb with email, for example, is to keep in mind that any message you send could be used in court. The same is true on social networks. Even when the messages aren’t lurid or illegal, they can be socially awkward. If you’re trying to maintain a certain authority within the classroom, pictures of you doing awkward and silly things might be counterproductive. (And yes, the impact of that can vary by age, race, sex, and all the usual variables.) Once you’ve seen your professor on youtube shirtless, wearing Groucho glasses, and singing the theme to Rawhide, you can’t unsee it.
Not that I would know anything about that.
As to the issue of “at-will” employment, that’s a much larger question.
My advice would be to try to find well-respected faculty at your institution who use social networking in recognizably productive ways, and ask them to educate your dean. As long as s/he is acting from fear, you won’t get far.
Good luck!
Wise and worldly readers, has anyone found an effective and responsible way to educate administrators and/or other faculty about social networking?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
I've been told by one of my employers that I am not allowed to accept friend requests from students on Facebook or any other social media site save Linkedin. In my field (probably in most fields) networking is really important and therefore this is a serious bummer.
I tend to have multiple classes with the same students, so Facebook or no Facebook they're going to get to know me. Pretending I'm a personality-free teacher bot isn't going to work. Not sure yet if I'm supposed to unfriend current friends, but if so that's super rude (and potentially time consuming).
I think there's some freedom of speech issues here, but I work at the pleasure of the college so I guess they can tell me to say/do whatever they want outside of school and I can like it or lump it.
This is probably one of those cases in which someone went overboard, and administrators who didn’t quite get the concept overreacted.
I’m just old enough to remember a time before Facebook. Back then, people used to interact in all kinds of ways, some of them in ways that would give administrators pause. But there wasn’t a written record most of the time, so with exceptions, there usually wasn’t much proof. With Facebook and other social networking technologies, there’s a written record. (Rep. Anthony Weiner discovered that the same principle holds on Twitter.)
Worse, social network etiquette is still evolving. People present different selves in different contexts -- necessarily, and sometimes to their credit -- but those styles of presentation can get all jumbled up on Facebook. Since people can easily spend far more time interacting on a social network than they probably would have in real life, all that jumbling can lead to confusing and dangerous places.
We administrative types have a healthy fear of confusing and dangerous places, since we deal regularly with lawyers. I could see where a risk-averse administrator might just decide that anything insufficiently buttoned-up (as opposed to, say, LinkedIn) should be avoided altogether.
It’s a mistake, though.
You’re right that there’s an issue with regulating speech outside the workplace. There’s also a basic issue with confusing a medium with a message. Yes, some people have done stupid stuff online. But they have also done stupid stuff offline. Email can be used abusively, as can telephones, as can hallway discussions, as can in-class lectures. At a certain point, savvy administrators have to learn to let go of the idea of control -- absurd when dealing with creative people -- and instead focus on setting a climate of expectations and, when things go wrong, controlling the damage.
A more constructive approach would instead focus on helping faculty and staff understand the implications of various kinds of interactions. The rule of thumb with email, for example, is to keep in mind that any message you send could be used in court. The same is true on social networks. Even when the messages aren’t lurid or illegal, they can be socially awkward. If you’re trying to maintain a certain authority within the classroom, pictures of you doing awkward and silly things might be counterproductive. (And yes, the impact of that can vary by age, race, sex, and all the usual variables.) Once you’ve seen your professor on youtube shirtless, wearing Groucho glasses, and singing the theme to Rawhide, you can’t unsee it.
Not that I would know anything about that.
As to the issue of “at-will” employment, that’s a much larger question.
My advice would be to try to find well-respected faculty at your institution who use social networking in recognizably productive ways, and ask them to educate your dean. As long as s/he is acting from fear, you won’t get far.
Good luck!
Wise and worldly readers, has anyone found an effective and responsible way to educate administrators and/or other faculty about social networking?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
Monday, February 13, 2012
An Open Letter to the U.S. Census Bureau
Dear Census People,
The folks at BlogHer picked this up, and I just saw it today.
In a study of childcare arrangements done by the census, childcare provided by mothers is counted as parenting, but childcare provided by fathers is counted as babysitting.
And the report isn’t subtle about it. In the words of the report, on the first page:
In households where both parents are present, the mother is counted as the designated parent.
That’s bad enough, but it gets worse just one sentence later:
If the mother is not available for an interview, the father can give proxy responses for her.
Proxy responses. You know, if you can’t find the real parent.
The survey only asked about child care provided by the father for the time the designated parent was working.
Wow. By that logic, since TW stays home, I don’t do any parenting at all!
This comes as news to me. I would have thought that the hours I spent lying on my back, with my arm outstretched upward, holding little TB’s hand through the crib slats until he stopped crying and went to sleep, counted as parenting. Apparently not. Or maybe the week that I spent shuttling between home and the NICU, where I held my newborn daughter gently, so as not to disturb the IV stitched into her head. No?
Sorry, my bad.
All those books read aloud, diapers changed, baths given, meals made, sleep lost, dishes done, soccer games, t-ball games, baseball games, soccer games, basketball games, parent-teacher conferences, emotional crises, family trips, skipped evening events, training wheels, heart-to-heart talks, tickle fights, board games, unwatchable kids’ movies, sledding, skiing, hiking, holding...nothing?
No. Apparently, that pesky Y chromosome invalidates it all.
This is madness.
You don’t encourage men to step up as parents by dismissing our efforts as babysitting.
Census people, I have endured idiotic charges of “patriarchalism” from critics who assume from my pseudonym that I’m some kind of Archie Bunker character. And I’ve endured charges of aloofness from coworkers who don’t understand why I go straight home every night after work.
I will say this one time.
I am a parent. A devoted, sleep-deprived, frustrated, proud, consumed, active, worried, imperfect, unapologetic, parent. As are millions of other men just like me. I am not a babysitter, a stand-in, a substitute, or a proxy. I am a father, and a damned good one.
My seven-year-old knows that. That man taking her to the Daddy-Daughter dance this week isn’t a babysitter. He’s the man who has been there from the beginning, walking the walk, talking with her before she had words to respond, and who’s still here.
We’re done with this.
Sincerely,
Dean Dad
The folks at BlogHer picked this up, and I just saw it today.
In a study of childcare arrangements done by the census, childcare provided by mothers is counted as parenting, but childcare provided by fathers is counted as babysitting.
And the report isn’t subtle about it. In the words of the report, on the first page:
In households where both parents are present, the mother is counted as the designated parent.
That’s bad enough, but it gets worse just one sentence later:
If the mother is not available for an interview, the father can give proxy responses for her.
Proxy responses. You know, if you can’t find the real parent.
The survey only asked about child care provided by the father for the time the designated parent was working.
Wow. By that logic, since TW stays home, I don’t do any parenting at all!
This comes as news to me. I would have thought that the hours I spent lying on my back, with my arm outstretched upward, holding little TB’s hand through the crib slats until he stopped crying and went to sleep, counted as parenting. Apparently not. Or maybe the week that I spent shuttling between home and the NICU, where I held my newborn daughter gently, so as not to disturb the IV stitched into her head. No?
Sorry, my bad.
All those books read aloud, diapers changed, baths given, meals made, sleep lost, dishes done, soccer games, t-ball games, baseball games, soccer games, basketball games, parent-teacher conferences, emotional crises, family trips, skipped evening events, training wheels, heart-to-heart talks, tickle fights, board games, unwatchable kids’ movies, sledding, skiing, hiking, holding...nothing?
No. Apparently, that pesky Y chromosome invalidates it all.
This is madness.
You don’t encourage men to step up as parents by dismissing our efforts as babysitting.
Census people, I have endured idiotic charges of “patriarchalism” from critics who assume from my pseudonym that I’m some kind of Archie Bunker character. And I’ve endured charges of aloofness from coworkers who don’t understand why I go straight home every night after work.
I will say this one time.
I am a parent. A devoted, sleep-deprived, frustrated, proud, consumed, active, worried, imperfect, unapologetic, parent. As are millions of other men just like me. I am not a babysitter, a stand-in, a substitute, or a proxy. I am a father, and a damned good one.
My seven-year-old knows that. That man taking her to the Daddy-Daughter dance this week isn’t a babysitter. He’s the man who has been there from the beginning, walking the walk, talking with her before she had words to respond, and who’s still here.
We’re done with this.
Sincerely,
Dean Dad
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Raising Arizona
Given the level of stupidity regularly emanating from Arizona, I’m almost reluctant even to raise the topic. But stupidity has a way of metastasizing if left unchecked.
The Arizona legislature is considering a pair of measures affecting higher education: the first requiring the use of G-rated language in class, and the second establishing political conservatives as a protected class.
As to the former, I’ll just note that hey, at least they’re speaking English! Checkmate.
The latter, though, requires more of a response.
First, the obligatory snark. I’m glad to see that Arizona is so conscious of civil rights! It’s heartening to see the state that allows police to randomly stop brown people and ask for their papers suddenly develop a concern for the equal protection of the laws. For conservative white people with graduate degrees, anyway.
Okay, that’s done. On to the substantive objection.
If political conservatives are given “protected class” status, then they’ll be able to use the “disparate impact” standard to claim discrimination. In other words, they won’t have to show actual discrimination; they’ll simply be able to point to a predominance of liberals in a given venue and use that as presumptive evidence that discrimination has occurred. Clearly, the intent of the law is to bully colleges and universities into hiring conservatives and/or getting rid of liberals.
Revealingly, the opposite is not true. Liberals will not be able to make that claim where conservatives predominate. (The bill is written only to apply to certain corners of higher education. It would not apply to, say, the state police.) By itself, that’s reason enough for a court to throw out the law. If the first amendment means anything at all, it means that one’s legal standing does not depend on one’s political views. For conservatives to have rights that liberals don’t have would be such an obvious violation of state neutrality regarding political speech that any judge who didn’t throw it out would be immediately discredited in the legal profession.
But back to protected class status. “Protected class” status can be used as a legal battering ram against an institution. Typically, therefore, it has only been available where a person’s membership in it can be verified. Race, sex, and even age are mostly verifiable. Sexual orientation is trickier, but there’s typically enough to go on. But in the age of the secret ballot, how does one prove (or disprove) one’s political leanings, especially if one’s publication record is either thin or concerned with other matters? This is why affirmative action for political inclinations is not comparable to affirmative action for, say, race.
And if “imbalance” is the issue, what, exactly, would constitute “balance”? Should faculties be evenly split? Should proportions reflect the latest election results? (If so, then any sort of long-term employment commitment is literally impossible.) And what, exactly, is the legal definition of “conservative” or “liberal”? What’s to keep people from lying on a questionnaire to keep their jobs? Would people have to testify before the House Un-Republican Activities Committee about their doctrinal purity?
If it’s a matter of party registration, this will accomplish nothing. It’s perfectly easy and legal to register as a Republican and vote Democratic. For that matter, it’s perfectly easy and legal to register as an Independent and vote for whomever you damn well please. (Does “damn well” pass the G-rated test? And how would I know? But I digress.)
If it’s a matter of political perspective, who gets to define them? My own political beliefs, for example, tend to be pretty liberal, but not on every issue. How do you count people whose beliefs don’t fall into an easily defined camp? How do you count, say, libertarians? And what about people whose views evolve over time, based on their discoveries within their fields? The one group guaranteed to lose, in this environment, is people who actually think for themselves.
I’d hate to be hired to help fill a de facto quota for a given political position, only to find my own views evolving away from what my employment requires. In that setting, “academic freedom” is entirely dead, and there’s simply no point in inquiry, since answers are assumed to be pre-defined and pre-approved. And what happens when the political winds shift?
Arizona has had its share of bad ideas over the years, some of which it has passed into law. I hope this bill doesn’t get that far. Preventing any serious intellectual inquiry for fear that it might run afoul of the political majority is a stake in the heart of higher education.
Of course, political majorities aren’t permanent. And payback is a bitch. (Well, I guess there goes the G rating.) I’d suggest that the legislature keeps that in mind...
The Arizona legislature is considering a pair of measures affecting higher education: the first requiring the use of G-rated language in class, and the second establishing political conservatives as a protected class.
As to the former, I’ll just note that hey, at least they’re speaking English! Checkmate.
The latter, though, requires more of a response.
First, the obligatory snark. I’m glad to see that Arizona is so conscious of civil rights! It’s heartening to see the state that allows police to randomly stop brown people and ask for their papers suddenly develop a concern for the equal protection of the laws. For conservative white people with graduate degrees, anyway.
Okay, that’s done. On to the substantive objection.
If political conservatives are given “protected class” status, then they’ll be able to use the “disparate impact” standard to claim discrimination. In other words, they won’t have to show actual discrimination; they’ll simply be able to point to a predominance of liberals in a given venue and use that as presumptive evidence that discrimination has occurred. Clearly, the intent of the law is to bully colleges and universities into hiring conservatives and/or getting rid of liberals.
Revealingly, the opposite is not true. Liberals will not be able to make that claim where conservatives predominate. (The bill is written only to apply to certain corners of higher education. It would not apply to, say, the state police.) By itself, that’s reason enough for a court to throw out the law. If the first amendment means anything at all, it means that one’s legal standing does not depend on one’s political views. For conservatives to have rights that liberals don’t have would be such an obvious violation of state neutrality regarding political speech that any judge who didn’t throw it out would be immediately discredited in the legal profession.
But back to protected class status. “Protected class” status can be used as a legal battering ram against an institution. Typically, therefore, it has only been available where a person’s membership in it can be verified. Race, sex, and even age are mostly verifiable. Sexual orientation is trickier, but there’s typically enough to go on. But in the age of the secret ballot, how does one prove (or disprove) one’s political leanings, especially if one’s publication record is either thin or concerned with other matters? This is why affirmative action for political inclinations is not comparable to affirmative action for, say, race.
And if “imbalance” is the issue, what, exactly, would constitute “balance”? Should faculties be evenly split? Should proportions reflect the latest election results? (If so, then any sort of long-term employment commitment is literally impossible.) And what, exactly, is the legal definition of “conservative” or “liberal”? What’s to keep people from lying on a questionnaire to keep their jobs? Would people have to testify before the House Un-Republican Activities Committee about their doctrinal purity?
If it’s a matter of party registration, this will accomplish nothing. It’s perfectly easy and legal to register as a Republican and vote Democratic. For that matter, it’s perfectly easy and legal to register as an Independent and vote for whomever you damn well please. (Does “damn well” pass the G-rated test? And how would I know? But I digress.)
If it’s a matter of political perspective, who gets to define them? My own political beliefs, for example, tend to be pretty liberal, but not on every issue. How do you count people whose beliefs don’t fall into an easily defined camp? How do you count, say, libertarians? And what about people whose views evolve over time, based on their discoveries within their fields? The one group guaranteed to lose, in this environment, is people who actually think for themselves.
I’d hate to be hired to help fill a de facto quota for a given political position, only to find my own views evolving away from what my employment requires. In that setting, “academic freedom” is entirely dead, and there’s simply no point in inquiry, since answers are assumed to be pre-defined and pre-approved. And what happens when the political winds shift?
Arizona has had its share of bad ideas over the years, some of which it has passed into law. I hope this bill doesn’t get that far. Preventing any serious intellectual inquiry for fear that it might run afoul of the political majority is a stake in the heart of higher education.
Of course, political majorities aren’t permanent. And payback is a bitch. (Well, I guess there goes the G rating.) I’d suggest that the legislature keeps that in mind...
Thursday, February 09, 2012
Friday Fragments
This Marketplace report brought me up short.
It’s about Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, endorsing gay marriage in New York. The report notes that CEO’s of major banks aren’t generally known for taking positions on potentially divisive social issues.
What caught my ear was the pair of lines toward the end. One interviewee notes that the kind of people who would object to gay marriage aren’t the kind of people who have enough money for him to worry about. The second line, by the reporter, noted with a smirk that Blankfein doesn’t have to worry about how his views will “play in Peoria.”
I don’t have an issue with the substance of the report, exactly. It’s true that we don’t usually expect to hear CEO’s take positions like that, and as it happens, I agree with the position he took. But the smug and un-self-conscious classism in which the report was couched was bracing and, frankly, disturbing. It plays into the stereotype of limousine liberalism, and it suggests that people who don’t matter -- the folks Lloyd Blankfein doesn’t have to worry about -- amount to punchlines.
-----------
The Boy and The Wife sometimes watch The Middle, a sitcom about a family in the Midwest. This week’s episode featured, among other things, a brief discussion of French kissing, along with a definition.
TB recoiled, as if from a bad smell, and asked TW “is that real?”
Sometimes you forget what the world looks like when you’re ten.
-----------
Like many, my college uses Google sites to post documents for internal campus use. (Examples would include meeting agendas, minutes, motions, etc.)
Having done that for over a year now, I’m starting to think that posting a document to Google sites is sort of like putting a vegetable in the crisper. In theory, it makes perfect sense. But in practice, it’s where things go to be forgotten.
------------
Of course, Google docs can sometimes be relatively public. The New Faculty Majority is crowdsourcing a compilation of profiles of adjunct pay and working conditions using a Google doc -- the link is here. A quick glance showed that a college I know has its rate for a 3 credit course understated by about 40 percent, so I strongly encourage the NFM to do some serious fact-checking.
With the caveat that some of what’s there is unreliable, though, I like the idea. If nothing else, it may dissuade potential graduate students from throwing themselves into the sausage grinder. That would be a genuine public service.
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
Fixing the Fatalism
Fun trivia fact: this is a Presidential election year. But you wouldn’t know it from walking around campus.
Have you seen any meaningful student political activity on your campus so far this year? I haven’t. (Admittedly, I don’t work in Iowa.)
I don’t think it’s because of general contentment. The recession is still very much in force from the perspective of people trying to get their first real job, and students have felt the effects -- I hope not too strongly, but still -- of increased tuition/fees and certain budget cuts. Half of the students on campus get some level of Pell grant, so we’re not talking about the anesthetized affluent here.
And it doesn’t seem to be because they’re more caught up in state and/or local politics, either.
I’ve heard talk at the national level of encouraging more student civic engagement, though most of that has been concentrated in the four-year liberal arts college sector, rather than community colleges. And even there, the talk I’ve heard has struck me as sort of tangential to what needs to be done. It’s fine as far as it goes, but there’s a more basic issue to address first.
For lack of a better term, I’ll call it “standing.” It’s a sense that the larger social and political world is theirs to address. Many of them simply don’t have it.
The faculty have seen the same thing. One professor who teaches some wonderfully thoughtful approaches to politics and the economy reports that her students are willing to engage when she discusses problems with them, but turn fatalistic when she turns to possible solutions. They’ve developed a sort of shrug.
To me, that’s a much larger issue than the usual statistics about the percentage of students who know, say, how many justices are on the Supreme Court. Yes, they should know that, but they’ll learn it when they want to know it. The trick is getting them to want to know it. When they have a context in which it matters, they’ll get the facts.
I just don’t know how to break through the fatalism. Filling in the facts without fixing the fatalism (say that five times fast!) doesn’t seem likely to achieve much. And color me skeptical that encouraging volunteerism -- as worthy as that is on its own terms -- is the same thing. Volunteerism can achieve wonderful things, but it doesn’t leverage state power. And if students here don’t leverage state power, others will.
In this light, the trend to try to reduce community colleges to workforce training centers strikes me as potentially undemocratic. Training is valuable, and there are students for whom it’s a great choice. But we also need time and space to convey to students a sense of belonging when the big social and political questions come up. If they’re going to be citizens, they need to feel welcome in the role.
Initial forays into politics are often callow and retrospectively embarrassing. That’s okay; it’s a stage in the maturation process. Better to make those rookie mistakes in a relatively safe setting.
That’s especially true when you consider the student body that community colleges tend to attract. Bluntly, our population is much more low-income and multiracial than the student body at most four-year colleges, and particularly when compared to the elite colleges that tend to get the spotlight in national initiatives for civic engagement. If the kids from elite backgrounds acquire a sense of political efficacy, and the kids who need Pell grants don’t, it’s easy to project future political consequences. If we’re serious about civic engagement, this is where we need to start. The kids at Swarthmore will be fine; the kids at the Community College of Philadelphia, I’m not entirely sure.
Have you seen any meaningful student political activity on your campus so far this year? I haven’t. (Admittedly, I don’t work in Iowa.)
I don’t think it’s because of general contentment. The recession is still very much in force from the perspective of people trying to get their first real job, and students have felt the effects -- I hope not too strongly, but still -- of increased tuition/fees and certain budget cuts. Half of the students on campus get some level of Pell grant, so we’re not talking about the anesthetized affluent here.
And it doesn’t seem to be because they’re more caught up in state and/or local politics, either.
I’ve heard talk at the national level of encouraging more student civic engagement, though most of that has been concentrated in the four-year liberal arts college sector, rather than community colleges. And even there, the talk I’ve heard has struck me as sort of tangential to what needs to be done. It’s fine as far as it goes, but there’s a more basic issue to address first.
For lack of a better term, I’ll call it “standing.” It’s a sense that the larger social and political world is theirs to address. Many of them simply don’t have it.
The faculty have seen the same thing. One professor who teaches some wonderfully thoughtful approaches to politics and the economy reports that her students are willing to engage when she discusses problems with them, but turn fatalistic when she turns to possible solutions. They’ve developed a sort of shrug.
To me, that’s a much larger issue than the usual statistics about the percentage of students who know, say, how many justices are on the Supreme Court. Yes, they should know that, but they’ll learn it when they want to know it. The trick is getting them to want to know it. When they have a context in which it matters, they’ll get the facts.
I just don’t know how to break through the fatalism. Filling in the facts without fixing the fatalism (say that five times fast!) doesn’t seem likely to achieve much. And color me skeptical that encouraging volunteerism -- as worthy as that is on its own terms -- is the same thing. Volunteerism can achieve wonderful things, but it doesn’t leverage state power. And if students here don’t leverage state power, others will.
In this light, the trend to try to reduce community colleges to workforce training centers strikes me as potentially undemocratic. Training is valuable, and there are students for whom it’s a great choice. But we also need time and space to convey to students a sense of belonging when the big social and political questions come up. If they’re going to be citizens, they need to feel welcome in the role.
Initial forays into politics are often callow and retrospectively embarrassing. That’s okay; it’s a stage in the maturation process. Better to make those rookie mistakes in a relatively safe setting.
That’s especially true when you consider the student body that community colleges tend to attract. Bluntly, our population is much more low-income and multiracial than the student body at most four-year colleges, and particularly when compared to the elite colleges that tend to get the spotlight in national initiatives for civic engagement. If the kids from elite backgrounds acquire a sense of political efficacy, and the kids who need Pell grants don’t, it’s easy to project future political consequences. If we’re serious about civic engagement, this is where we need to start. The kids at Swarthmore will be fine; the kids at the Community College of Philadelphia, I’m not entirely sure.
Tuesday, February 07, 2012
“You’re Assuming We Thought it Through”
A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to discuss a proposed and relatively dramatic policy change with someone fairly high in state government. I objected to the change with some vigor, and outlined several objections that I thought added up to a compelling case. She listened politely, and then gave an answer for which I hadn’t prepared.
“You’re assuming we thought it through.”
Well, yes. At least I would have hoped so.
She explained, politely, the chain of reasoning behind the proposal. So as not to betray any confidences, I’ll illustrate by metaphor:
- Broken hearts are painful.
- Pain is bad.
- Love causes broken hearts.
- Therefore, we should ban love!
Each of the three suppositions is largely true, taken on its own terms. But assuming that they tell you everything you need to know leads to a badly misguided conclusion.
It wasn’t the first time I’ve been brought up short by the mediocrity of the men behind the curtain, but it was particularly striking.
Sometimes realizations like that can be empowering. I recall my pleasant shock when I sat in on a freshman English class at Snooty Liberal Arts College as a high school student. I was trying to decide whether I could hack it there. When I saw the caliber of discussion, I had that shock of realizing that those folks were no smarter than I was. That realization emboldened me to apply.
The same thing happened while I was dissertating. At one point, lost among the weeds, I stole away to the library to look at the dissertation of someone who had finished a few years prior, and of whom the faculty still spoke in reverential terms. I expected to be floored. Instead, all I saw was a reasonably competent piece. I needed that. Discovering that even a “good” dissertation was utterly recognizable as the product of a regular human being demystified it, and helped me get over the fear of failure.
But this was different.
I had expected to confront differing agendas and priorities, and had prepared accordingly. It wouldn’t have shocked me to hear that some other priority was outranking my own, or that a good idea fell victim to legislative horse-trading. Even a straight-up ideological objection wouldn’t have been entirely surprising. But I wasn’t prepared for “gee, we didn’t really give it much thought.”
(Readers of a certain age will recall the presidential debate in which anti-abortion candidate George H.W. Bush was asked about the criminal penalties he advocated for women who had abortions. The moderator pointed out that if you hold that abortion is murder, then it follows logically that women who have abortions should be tried as murderers. Bush responded that he hadn’t given it much thought. I nearly fell off my chair.)
One of the shockers of adulthood is realizing that most people are pretty much making it up as they go along. It’s empowering in the sense that they’re no smarter than you are. It’s dispiriting when you realize that great harm can be done entirely inadvertently, by people who mean well, just because they don’t get it. And it’s humbling when you realize that somewhere, someone is probably saying the exact same thing about you.
“You’re assuming we thought it through.”
Well, yes. At least I would have hoped so.
She explained, politely, the chain of reasoning behind the proposal. So as not to betray any confidences, I’ll illustrate by metaphor:
- Broken hearts are painful.
- Pain is bad.
- Love causes broken hearts.
- Therefore, we should ban love!
Each of the three suppositions is largely true, taken on its own terms. But assuming that they tell you everything you need to know leads to a badly misguided conclusion.
It wasn’t the first time I’ve been brought up short by the mediocrity of the men behind the curtain, but it was particularly striking.
Sometimes realizations like that can be empowering. I recall my pleasant shock when I sat in on a freshman English class at Snooty Liberal Arts College as a high school student. I was trying to decide whether I could hack it there. When I saw the caliber of discussion, I had that shock of realizing that those folks were no smarter than I was. That realization emboldened me to apply.
The same thing happened while I was dissertating. At one point, lost among the weeds, I stole away to the library to look at the dissertation of someone who had finished a few years prior, and of whom the faculty still spoke in reverential terms. I expected to be floored. Instead, all I saw was a reasonably competent piece. I needed that. Discovering that even a “good” dissertation was utterly recognizable as the product of a regular human being demystified it, and helped me get over the fear of failure.
But this was different.
I had expected to confront differing agendas and priorities, and had prepared accordingly. It wouldn’t have shocked me to hear that some other priority was outranking my own, or that a good idea fell victim to legislative horse-trading. Even a straight-up ideological objection wouldn’t have been entirely surprising. But I wasn’t prepared for “gee, we didn’t really give it much thought.”
(Readers of a certain age will recall the presidential debate in which anti-abortion candidate George H.W. Bush was asked about the criminal penalties he advocated for women who had abortions. The moderator pointed out that if you hold that abortion is murder, then it follows logically that women who have abortions should be tried as murderers. Bush responded that he hadn’t given it much thought. I nearly fell off my chair.)
One of the shockers of adulthood is realizing that most people are pretty much making it up as they go along. It’s empowering in the sense that they’re no smarter than you are. It’s dispiriting when you realize that great harm can be done entirely inadvertently, by people who mean well, just because they don’t get it. And it’s humbling when you realize that somewhere, someone is probably saying the exact same thing about you.
Monday, February 06, 2012
Resilience
I love this story.
Apparently, a scholar of student success, Shaun Harper, has decided to turn around the usual methods of studying African-American men in college. Instead of the typical questions - what obstacles do they face, what prevents success, etc. -- he decided to focus on African-American men who have succeeded in college and to try to determine what worked for them. In other words, he’s focusing on resilience, rather than failure, as the subject needing explanation.
His subject is African-American men, but his method strikes me as transferable to all sorts of questions. It’s comparative -- already a considerable advance over much of what it out there -- and it assumes that the elements of success are identifiable and transferable.
His findings thus far are a little disappointing: according to the men who succeeded, most of what they needed happened before they ever got to college. By the time they got there, the die was largely cast. To the extent that’s true, of course, colleges can only hope to have marginal and indirect effects. The exceptions to that are finances -- folks on scholarships reported, unsurprisingly, that the money helped -- and same-race peer mentoring, which suggests that there’s something like critical mass. Beyond that, existing measures didn’t seem to help much, which I have to admit finding a little dispiriting. Still, it would be a mistake to take the results as definitive.
The findings are subject to the limits of the method; since they rely on self-reporting, they’re subject to the blind spots inherent in self-reporting. For example, empirical studies have shown that streamlining developmental sequences help improve student completion rates, but I’d be shocked to hear students cite that. They took the curriculum that was in effect at the time. That doesn’t mean the effect wasn’t there; it just means it was invisible from their vantage point. They didn’t have a point of comparison.
(In my student days, I used to see flyers on walls -- yes, kids, that’s how things were done before facebook -- in which bands would try to recruit new members. Typically the bands would list their “influences,” in hopes of attracting new members who were compatible with their sound. It always struck me as a presumptuous term. How the hell do I know who my influences are? As a writer, I can list other writers whose work I like and admire, but can I really claim them as influences? Other than the occasional tip o’the cap, I just write the way I write. At most, I could claim to write like my Mom talks. Beyond that, I just don’t know myself that well, and I doubt that most people do.)
All of that said, I really like the idea of studying success to see what can be generalized. In fact, the method strikes me as transferable to other questions. (The key is finding the folks who didn’t succeed and getting their candid participation.) The feedback certainly can’t be definitive, but it can be useful. The catch would be in finding the comparison group, and testing for the right blind spots.
With the right grains of salt, though, this is a wonderful lens to use. Study what you want more of. It seems so obvious in retrospect...
Apparently, a scholar of student success, Shaun Harper, has decided to turn around the usual methods of studying African-American men in college. Instead of the typical questions - what obstacles do they face, what prevents success, etc. -- he decided to focus on African-American men who have succeeded in college and to try to determine what worked for them. In other words, he’s focusing on resilience, rather than failure, as the subject needing explanation.
His subject is African-American men, but his method strikes me as transferable to all sorts of questions. It’s comparative -- already a considerable advance over much of what it out there -- and it assumes that the elements of success are identifiable and transferable.
His findings thus far are a little disappointing: according to the men who succeeded, most of what they needed happened before they ever got to college. By the time they got there, the die was largely cast. To the extent that’s true, of course, colleges can only hope to have marginal and indirect effects. The exceptions to that are finances -- folks on scholarships reported, unsurprisingly, that the money helped -- and same-race peer mentoring, which suggests that there’s something like critical mass. Beyond that, existing measures didn’t seem to help much, which I have to admit finding a little dispiriting. Still, it would be a mistake to take the results as definitive.
The findings are subject to the limits of the method; since they rely on self-reporting, they’re subject to the blind spots inherent in self-reporting. For example, empirical studies have shown that streamlining developmental sequences help improve student completion rates, but I’d be shocked to hear students cite that. They took the curriculum that was in effect at the time. That doesn’t mean the effect wasn’t there; it just means it was invisible from their vantage point. They didn’t have a point of comparison.
(In my student days, I used to see flyers on walls -- yes, kids, that’s how things were done before facebook -- in which bands would try to recruit new members. Typically the bands would list their “influences,” in hopes of attracting new members who were compatible with their sound. It always struck me as a presumptuous term. How the hell do I know who my influences are? As a writer, I can list other writers whose work I like and admire, but can I really claim them as influences? Other than the occasional tip o’the cap, I just write the way I write. At most, I could claim to write like my Mom talks. Beyond that, I just don’t know myself that well, and I doubt that most people do.)
All of that said, I really like the idea of studying success to see what can be generalized. In fact, the method strikes me as transferable to other questions. (The key is finding the folks who didn’t succeed and getting their candid participation.) The feedback certainly can’t be definitive, but it can be useful. The catch would be in finding the comparison group, and testing for the right blind spots.
With the right grains of salt, though, this is a wonderful lens to use. Study what you want more of. It seems so obvious in retrospect...
Sunday, February 05, 2012
Learn Now, Pay Later
You know how a song can get stuck in your head, and you can’t get it out? That’s where I am with the idea floated in California to have students learn now and pay later.
As I understand it, the idea is that students will be advanced the cost of tuition, fees, room, living expenses, and books. In return, the students will be “taxed” five percent of their post-graduation income for twenty years. It’s being sold as a win-win for students and universities. The students will benefit because the tax is based on income, so if you graduate into a recession, you aren’t saddled with high fixed payments. The university benefits because it essentially declares independence from the legislature, which has a history of fickle support.
I like the spirit of the idea. It’s innovative, certainly, and it addresses some real issues. But I don’t buy it, at least in its present form.
First, the obvious: if the students don’t pay now, but the faculty and staff don’t want to wait twenty years to get paid, what bridges the gap? In the absence of tuition income, how, exactly, does the university meet its payroll and other expenses? If the answer is “other financial aid,” then I’m not sure how this amounts to declaring independence from the whims of the legislature.
And that assumes that everyone gets full aid, which simply isn’t true. Many students only get partial aid -- with the rest coming from the student and/or the student’s family -- and some pay their own way entirely. In those cases, the temporal gap between the service and the tax has to be filled by something. I just don’t expect that asking the faculty to wait twenty -- actually twenty-four -- years for their money will fly.
Second, shifting the entire cost to students lets the state off the hook. That would be fine, at least in theory, if that meant that the university could govern itself as a private institution. But I have no illusions of that. As any exhausted administrator can tell you, the past few decades have involved a pincer movement of reduced funding with increased unfunded mandates. Just because the state is off the hook for funding -- although I honestly don’t see how that would work, but just for the sake of the argument -- doesn’t mean that it’ll stop trying to get something for nothing.
Third, what’s to stop the percentage of the tax from changing? Tuition increases that hit right now at least generate some painful awareness. But telling an eighteen year old that she’ll pay more when she’s thirty-five is unlikely to generate meaningful cost discipline. If anything, the history of consumer credit in America suggests that people spend more when the moment of payment is separated temporally from the purchase decision. No payments for 90 days!
Fourth, new graduates’ salaries are notoriously subject to the whims of the economic cycle. Replacing (purported) independence from the whims of the legislature with severe dependence on the whims of the business cycle doesn’t promise much stability. At least when there’s a significant subvention by the legislature, it’s possible to spend counter-cyclically. But good luck with long-term financial commitments -- like, say, tenure -- in years when new grads’ underemployment rates are unusually high.
Fifth, there’s non-compliance. How would this work with international students? What about dropouts? Transfers? Scholarship recipients? (Why apply for scholarships if you still have to pay the same tax rate eventually anyway?) You’d have to build in enough slack to account for unemployment, incarceration, untimely deaths, graduate school, military service, illness, and folks who drop out of the labor force to have kids. TW is a stay-at-home Mom. If she were charged five percent of her income, would that mean she wouldn’t be charged at all? Or am I suddenly on the hook?
And that’s before we get into the shenanigans that people already pull to minimize their taxable income. The people who make a lot of money -- cough Mitt Romney cough -- are alarmingly good at that. Charging five percent of “income” means both defining and verifying “income.” The administrative requirements for this would make the FAFSA look like child’s play.
Finally, there’s the sheer heterogeneity of students. What about those who live off-campus? Who attend part-time? Who drop out? Who change majors and stick around longer than four years?
Like so many policy ideas from high achievers, it assumes that everyone is a high achiever. If everyone started at 18 and graduated at 22, then went straight to well-paying work and stayed there, it could almost start to make a lick of sense. But here on Earth, it’s a non-starter. A fascinating, well-intended non-starter, but a non-starter.
As I understand it, the idea is that students will be advanced the cost of tuition, fees, room, living expenses, and books. In return, the students will be “taxed” five percent of their post-graduation income for twenty years. It’s being sold as a win-win for students and universities. The students will benefit because the tax is based on income, so if you graduate into a recession, you aren’t saddled with high fixed payments. The university benefits because it essentially declares independence from the legislature, which has a history of fickle support.
I like the spirit of the idea. It’s innovative, certainly, and it addresses some real issues. But I don’t buy it, at least in its present form.
First, the obvious: if the students don’t pay now, but the faculty and staff don’t want to wait twenty years to get paid, what bridges the gap? In the absence of tuition income, how, exactly, does the university meet its payroll and other expenses? If the answer is “other financial aid,” then I’m not sure how this amounts to declaring independence from the whims of the legislature.
And that assumes that everyone gets full aid, which simply isn’t true. Many students only get partial aid -- with the rest coming from the student and/or the student’s family -- and some pay their own way entirely. In those cases, the temporal gap between the service and the tax has to be filled by something. I just don’t expect that asking the faculty to wait twenty -- actually twenty-four -- years for their money will fly.
Second, shifting the entire cost to students lets the state off the hook. That would be fine, at least in theory, if that meant that the university could govern itself as a private institution. But I have no illusions of that. As any exhausted administrator can tell you, the past few decades have involved a pincer movement of reduced funding with increased unfunded mandates. Just because the state is off the hook for funding -- although I honestly don’t see how that would work, but just for the sake of the argument -- doesn’t mean that it’ll stop trying to get something for nothing.
Third, what’s to stop the percentage of the tax from changing? Tuition increases that hit right now at least generate some painful awareness. But telling an eighteen year old that she’ll pay more when she’s thirty-five is unlikely to generate meaningful cost discipline. If anything, the history of consumer credit in America suggests that people spend more when the moment of payment is separated temporally from the purchase decision. No payments for 90 days!
Fourth, new graduates’ salaries are notoriously subject to the whims of the economic cycle. Replacing (purported) independence from the whims of the legislature with severe dependence on the whims of the business cycle doesn’t promise much stability. At least when there’s a significant subvention by the legislature, it’s possible to spend counter-cyclically. But good luck with long-term financial commitments -- like, say, tenure -- in years when new grads’ underemployment rates are unusually high.
Fifth, there’s non-compliance. How would this work with international students? What about dropouts? Transfers? Scholarship recipients? (Why apply for scholarships if you still have to pay the same tax rate eventually anyway?) You’d have to build in enough slack to account for unemployment, incarceration, untimely deaths, graduate school, military service, illness, and folks who drop out of the labor force to have kids. TW is a stay-at-home Mom. If she were charged five percent of her income, would that mean she wouldn’t be charged at all? Or am I suddenly on the hook?
And that’s before we get into the shenanigans that people already pull to minimize their taxable income. The people who make a lot of money -- cough Mitt Romney cough -- are alarmingly good at that. Charging five percent of “income” means both defining and verifying “income.” The administrative requirements for this would make the FAFSA look like child’s play.
Finally, there’s the sheer heterogeneity of students. What about those who live off-campus? Who attend part-time? Who drop out? Who change majors and stick around longer than four years?
Like so many policy ideas from high achievers, it assumes that everyone is a high achiever. If everyone started at 18 and graduated at 22, then went straight to well-paying work and stayed there, it could almost start to make a lick of sense. But here on Earth, it’s a non-starter. A fascinating, well-intended non-starter, but a non-starter.
Thursday, February 02, 2012
Friday Fragments
Thank you to everyone who answered the call for suggestions earlier this week about running college classes in high schools. The point about class interruptions for announcements, proms, and such was a good one, and can be included in the words of warning we give the professors.
-------
The Boy is doing CYO basketball again this year. At last Sunday’s game, the halftime score was 4 to 2.
Call it a defensive battle. Or maybe pretend it’s baseball...
-------
Folks who think that administration is easy haven’t had to handle personnel issues. The least appealing part of administration is being confronted with things about people that you never wanted to know. And that’s all I’ll say about that.
-------
I’m done with Toshiba. In the last two years, the count is two catastrophic hard drive failures and a cracked screen. In the words of Roberto Duran, no mas. I try not to let anecdotes trump statistics, but at a certain point, it becomes an issue of self-respect. Toshiba may have a good reputation generally, but I’m done.
Nobody really makes netbooks anymore, so the quest for a good portable blogging device is more complicated. Ipads are tempting, but I don’t want to lug around a separate keyboard, and I know full well that the kids would get a hold of it and I’d never see it again anyway. Ultrabooks look fun, as do macbook airs, but I can’t justify the cost. Regular laptops are far too heavy, and writing longhand is out of the question. (My handwriting could be described as “distinctive,” as in the sentence, “Nick Nolte certainly cuts a distinctive figure in a mugshot.”) It is fun to browse, though...
-------
My publisher is getting antsy. A recent exchange, as reconstructed from my handwritten notes:
Publisher: Do you think you could helicopter the poodle by Kwanzaa?
DD: Affirmative-a-rooni, pizza!
So, another reason to replace the latest Toshiba.
------
I know that “college success” courses are supposed to work wonders, but I’m having trouble getting around having to explain to the student who put it off and did just fine why he would need it to graduate. If it’s mandatory, then it’s mandatory; failing to take it means you don’t graduate. But if the only thing standing between you and graduation is a course on how to be a student, I’m not sure what purpose is served.
--------
Said this to The Boy: “You know what the secret is to writing? WRITING!” Now if I would just listen to myself...
-------
The Boy is doing CYO basketball again this year. At last Sunday’s game, the halftime score was 4 to 2.
Call it a defensive battle. Or maybe pretend it’s baseball...
-------
Folks who think that administration is easy haven’t had to handle personnel issues. The least appealing part of administration is being confronted with things about people that you never wanted to know. And that’s all I’ll say about that.
-------
I’m done with Toshiba. In the last two years, the count is two catastrophic hard drive failures and a cracked screen. In the words of Roberto Duran, no mas. I try not to let anecdotes trump statistics, but at a certain point, it becomes an issue of self-respect. Toshiba may have a good reputation generally, but I’m done.
Nobody really makes netbooks anymore, so the quest for a good portable blogging device is more complicated. Ipads are tempting, but I don’t want to lug around a separate keyboard, and I know full well that the kids would get a hold of it and I’d never see it again anyway. Ultrabooks look fun, as do macbook airs, but I can’t justify the cost. Regular laptops are far too heavy, and writing longhand is out of the question. (My handwriting could be described as “distinctive,” as in the sentence, “Nick Nolte certainly cuts a distinctive figure in a mugshot.”) It is fun to browse, though...
-------
My publisher is getting antsy. A recent exchange, as reconstructed from my handwritten notes:
Publisher: Do you think you could helicopter the poodle by Kwanzaa?
DD: Affirmative-a-rooni, pizza!
So, another reason to replace the latest Toshiba.
------
I know that “college success” courses are supposed to work wonders, but I’m having trouble getting around having to explain to the student who put it off and did just fine why he would need it to graduate. If it’s mandatory, then it’s mandatory; failing to take it means you don’t graduate. But if the only thing standing between you and graduation is a course on how to be a student, I’m not sure what purpose is served.
--------
Said this to The Boy: “You know what the secret is to writing? WRITING!” Now if I would just listen to myself...
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
Communication Chains
“Why don’t we just automate all of our routine mail?”
It all started so innocently, with such a seemingly logical question...
The folks who work in financial aid offices in community colleges have unbelievably complicated jobs. I knew that at some level already, but I recently watched as several people attempted to build a flow chart of communications with the goal of automating wherever possible.
Tolstoy wrote that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The same could be said for financial aid applications.
Was our college listed on the online FAFSA? Did we get income verification? Is the student considered independent? Does the student qualify under a state rehab program? Is the student a veteran? Is the student covered by trade adjustment assistance? Does the student intend to pursue a degree? Full-time or part-time? Does the student have prior college experience? A prior degree? (You’d be surprised.)
Is the student in-state? Is the student a citizen? Do we have transcripts? Do we have a valid social security number? Is the phone number correct? (Again, you’d be surprised.) How many credits is the student planning to take? What if that changes? What if the student drops out after six weeks? What if after ten weeks? What if the student stops showing up after eight, but nobody mentions it until ten or eleven?
If male, did the student register with selective service? Are the vaccinations in order? Does the student need health coverage? A bus pass? A parking sticker?
What if the loan application is turned down? What if some paperwork is late? Does the student need a bookstore voucher? What if the award is too high? What if it’s too low? What if students use more of their work-study allocations than the historical norm, and we run out of hours to offer? (That happens sometimes.) What if the student blows off the work-study job and gets fired from it mid-semester? (That also happens.) What if the student gets laid off from her part-time job? What if she gets paid under the table?
Honestly, I’m only scratching the surface here. I literally lost track of the number of permutations. The number of details per student was astonishing, and they cascade quickly in chains of consequences.
Automating that is much more daunting than just drafting a “thank you for your application” letter.
Local legend has it that the financial aid office hired someone from a very prestigious residential liberal arts college a few years ago. She quit within a week. It’s one thing to handle the variations among traditional age students who attend full time and live in dorms. It’s quite another when you have eighteen year olds with two children, thirty year olds in vocational rehab programs, and forty year olds with scattered collections of credits giving a degree another shot.
The number of variables is simply staggering.
So, a tip o’the cap to the folks in financial aid. Given the number of moving parts, it’s amazing that mistakes are as rare as they are. And I promise to be a little more circumspect in asking innocent questions...
It all started so innocently, with such a seemingly logical question...
The folks who work in financial aid offices in community colleges have unbelievably complicated jobs. I knew that at some level already, but I recently watched as several people attempted to build a flow chart of communications with the goal of automating wherever possible.
Tolstoy wrote that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The same could be said for financial aid applications.
Was our college listed on the online FAFSA? Did we get income verification? Is the student considered independent? Does the student qualify under a state rehab program? Is the student a veteran? Is the student covered by trade adjustment assistance? Does the student intend to pursue a degree? Full-time or part-time? Does the student have prior college experience? A prior degree? (You’d be surprised.)
Is the student in-state? Is the student a citizen? Do we have transcripts? Do we have a valid social security number? Is the phone number correct? (Again, you’d be surprised.) How many credits is the student planning to take? What if that changes? What if the student drops out after six weeks? What if after ten weeks? What if the student stops showing up after eight, but nobody mentions it until ten or eleven?
If male, did the student register with selective service? Are the vaccinations in order? Does the student need health coverage? A bus pass? A parking sticker?
What if the loan application is turned down? What if some paperwork is late? Does the student need a bookstore voucher? What if the award is too high? What if it’s too low? What if students use more of their work-study allocations than the historical norm, and we run out of hours to offer? (That happens sometimes.) What if the student blows off the work-study job and gets fired from it mid-semester? (That also happens.) What if the student gets laid off from her part-time job? What if she gets paid under the table?
Honestly, I’m only scratching the surface here. I literally lost track of the number of permutations. The number of details per student was astonishing, and they cascade quickly in chains of consequences.
Automating that is much more daunting than just drafting a “thank you for your application” letter.
Local legend has it that the financial aid office hired someone from a very prestigious residential liberal arts college a few years ago. She quit within a week. It’s one thing to handle the variations among traditional age students who attend full time and live in dorms. It’s quite another when you have eighteen year olds with two children, thirty year olds in vocational rehab programs, and forty year olds with scattered collections of credits giving a degree another shot.
The number of variables is simply staggering.
So, a tip o’the cap to the folks in financial aid. Given the number of moving parts, it’s amazing that mistakes are as rare as they are. And I promise to be a little more circumspect in asking innocent questions...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)