I’ve been a fan of Kevin Carey’s for some time. He gets a lot right, and even when he’s off, he’s interesting.
This week, he’s true to form.
In response to President Obama’s hinted-at plans to open up financial aid for higher education providers other than traditional colleges, Carey developed a wish list that’s well worth reading. He’s almost certainly right that direct government price controls on colleges wouldn’t work, or at least, wouldn’t work in a constructive way. (Employer-based health insurance was born as an outgrowth of wartime price controls. How’s that system working out?) Real innovation typically comes either from new entrants into a field, or from panicked incumbents threatened by new entrants. Without new entrants, you don’t get major change. Opening up the financial aid system to new providers with new methods doesn’t guarantee a good outcome, but it certainly improves the chances.
Carey starts from that correct observation, and moves quickly to “and here’s how to do it.” And that’s where he gets...interesting.
On the one hand, he calls for accreditation to move from institutions as wholes, or even degree programs as wholes, to the course level. As he put it, “what if you want to specialize and provide nothing other than the world’s greatest Linear Algebra class?”
I’ll flip the question around. What if you wanted to be able to offer a whole host of courses in a bunch of different majors? You’d have to go through the accreditation process for every. single. course. The administrative overhead -- assessment, documentation, verification, and the like -- would skyrocket. It’s even worse if you want to offer something outside the traditional disciplines. Linear Algebra is pretty well established. But what if you want to offer, say, a philosophy course on the St. Louis Hegelians? (Worst baseball team ever. “There is nothing in the essence of the knuckleball that will not become evident in the series of its appearances...”) Where would you even find the standards to follow? What if you wanted to offer a course on the latest cutting-edge findings in a field -- the stuff that hasn’t been standardized yet? I get a headache just thinking about it.
Worse, students would be left on their own to cobble together coherent and recognized programs of study from the scraps provided. Many years ago, the economist Ronald Coase noted that the great utility of the “firm” in economic terms is that it reduces transaction costs. It routinizes, which is its great strength. Shatter firms, and every transaction has to start from scratch. In a market with a severe information asymmetry, such as higher education, the idea of loosing untrained 18 year olds (or busy and distracted 38 year olds) into the virtual wilds to piece together what they can is a recipe for disaster, even assuming that each individual piece is good.
Colleges as “firms” provide more than just courses. They provide structure. They provide guidance (usually called “advising” or “counseling”). They provide legibility. They provide social support, quiet places to study, and the reassurance of knowing that others have done what you’re trying to do. They allow for the serendipity moments of discovering that the course of study you thought you wanted wasn’t really for you, and that you’re actually much more fascinated by something else.
Offload all of those costs onto students, and you’re creating an inefficiency of monstrous proportions. Worse, the students who would lose the most are the ones with the fewest resources at the beginning. The wealthy, well-prepared, well-connected kid may be able to fend for himself relatively well in the virtual wilds; the poorly prepared and unconnected will likely either fall prey or fall out.
The one virtue of the course-by-course approach is that it could conceivably open the field to a host of scrappy new providers. But then Carey falls into an uncharacteristic bit of wealth worship:
Organizational capacity. If Harvard and MIT form a non-profit to do this, their capacity, academic and financial resources should carry weight. If Carl Wieman wants to get in the Physics 101 business, his status as a Nobel prize winner and researcher on best practices in teaching introductory physics should work in his favor. If Pixar wants to teach computer animation, Wall-E should count in their favor. (Cars 2, less so.)
Um, this is not helpful. The problem with the current system is not that Harvard, MIT,and Pixar are somehow shut out. They do just fine. The problem is that scrappy new providers -- and, to be honest, scrappy existing providers -- would be crushed by the wealthy and powerful. Only the wealthy and powerful could afford to run separate accreditations for every single course, and only the wealthy and powerful would have the name recognition to grab the uninitiated from all over the country. And as that happens, the argument for public support for access for everyone will get harder to sustain politically. As both a citizen and an educator, I have to call that a disaster.
Where I draw hope from Obama’s message -- keeping in mind that it’s a long way from footnotes from a speech to enacted legislation -- is in recognizing that innovation requires new blood. It does. Creating space for new providers to try new things -- and thereby put some useful pressure on existing providers to get more experimental -- strikes me as a genuine good. Let’s just not forget the strengths of what we have in the excitement of the possible.
One of the reasons I like President Obama is that he’s clearly a Dad. I don’t just mean that he has children; I mean that he’s obviously an involved parent. (If you haven’t seen the video of the two-year-old at the Medal of Honor ceremony, check it out. Obama responded as a seasoned parent would.)
That isn’t always easy. I smiled in rueful recognition at this piece from the Washington Post about the prices that involved Dads pay at work. In brief, fathers who take time to be with their kids are penalized at work even more than mothers are. It’s a kind of gender-deviance penalty. And it’s real. When TB was born, it was on a Monday; my boss told me that he expected me in the office by Friday. He never did that with new Moms. In this line of work, a reduced travel schedule and a reluctance to move on a regular basis bring real costs. Dads who are willing to slough off parenting duties don’t pay those costs; Dads who aren’t, do.
I smiled ruefully again at this piece from the Harvard Business Review. The Nordic countries are known for their world-leading family friendliness. They provide paid parental leave for over a year, and they require that the Dads take at least some of it. As a result, it has become normal for new fathers to take some time with their kids. The benefits of that are everywhere: the mothers get a break, the fathers develop parental competence, the kids get the benefit of attachment to two competent parents, and the workplace gets a generation of both men and women who understand what it is to be both an employee and a parent. As a result, the workplace is structured around an assumption that being a caretaker of some sort is a normal part of life.
We tend not to work that way here. Part-time pay isn’t scaled to full-time in most circumstances, so earning a decent salary (and health insurance) generally involves at least one full-time job. Parental leave is usually brief and unpaid, to the extent it exists at all. I couldn’t help but notice in the HBR piece that the male Scandinavian managers who did so well in Scandinavia struggled when they had to manage American men, who read their egalitarian ways as weak. A brutal system rewards brutal behavior; blind spots reproduce themselves. In a culture that gets some basic issues wrong, thoughtfulness can be a liability.
So I respect the American Dads who do the extra work and walk the walk. They -- and on a good day, I like to think “we” -- are swimming upstream in this culture, but it’s worth doing.
Last night was the town Daddy-Daughter dance, so I took The Girl. We both dressed up -- I even bought her a wrist corsage, the first time I’ve bought one of those since the Reagan administration -- and we went to a local country club for the annual event.
The place was chockablock with Dads and their daughters, mostly ages five to about twelve. (TG is eight.) The first couple of times we went, TG stuck close to me and mostly danced with me. Last year, she split her time about evenly between her friends and me. This year, I was a distinct second place; still welcome, but clearly not the point. (I’m told that in a few years, I won’t even be welcome.) I didn’t mind.
Watching TG with her friends, I couldn’t help but be proud. She was exuberant but not obnoxious, dancing in her patented ways and inventing some new ones. She led one of her friends in a version of the tango, which I didn’t know she knew. Her cluster of friends started a conga line during “Call Me Maybe,” which made up its incongruity in pure charm. And yes, I got out there with her a few times. I even managed to keep my composure during “I Loved Her First,” a song designed specifically to reduce Dads to quivering masses of jello.
But my proudest moments with her were afterwards. She’s comfortable talking to me. It’s the kind of comfort that comes from putting in the time. She floats theories, asks questions, cracks wise, and listens like it matters. We actually enjoy each other’s company.
The clock is ticking on this stage; adolescence with its angst lurks around the corner. At that point, a little more distance may well be functional. But for now, I’ll take a certain countercultural pride in knowing that The Girl -- and The Boy -- are getting real parenting from both Mom and Dad. And I’ll keep pushing, in my way, for a world that recognizes that caregiving is a normal part of life. Let’s get some thoughtful parents building workplaces that allow for thoughtful parents. It can be done, and it’s worth doing. It’s time to stop reproducing blind spots, and start noticing the shards of sheer genius that fall out of eight year old girls’ mouths at the end of the day.
I need some help from my wise and worldly readers on this one. A longtime reader writes:
I used to be staff in a marketing-type capacity at a communitycollege, and after a break in private industry, find myself back in asimilar spot at a different college -- this time a four-year school.About half of our incoming students are transfer students.
I have seen several marketing-type reports related to what incomingfreshmen are looking for in our materials. ("Top tasks", in the lingoof some of the experts.) This has been helpful in prioritizing work aswell as working out what words to use where.
But no one seems to have anything similar for transfer students! Doyou know of any data, reporting, etc, on the information-seekinghabits of transfer students when looking at four-year colleges? Iwould make a guess that some things are the same, but if there aredifferences, then we should be taking them into account.
My first thought is, I don’t know. I haven’t seen any research on that, though admittedly, I haven’t looked. Anyone who can cite anything specific is invited to share in the comments.
From conversations with students who’ve transferred and come back to share their experiences, I can think of a few things they should look for:
- Credit acceptance policies. Nothing grinds a student’s gears more than being told she has to re-take a class she has already passed -- and paid for -- elsewhere. Articulation agreements and transfer blocs are supposed to prevent that, and they help, but the devil is in the details. Frequently a college will proclaim loudly that it takes all credits, but then relegate a bunch of them to “free elective” status. “Free elective” status is where credits go to die. Since very few four-year programs have many “free electives” in them, students wind up having to take (and pay for) far more than they should. In the cases I’ve seen, the culprit is usually the department in which the student’s intended major is housed. It doesn’t want to “give away” too many credits. As “conflicts of interest” go, this is pretty basic.
- Transfer scholarships. This should be self-explanatory.
- Support for transfer students. Is there some sort of recognition of the stress of transfer, or are students just thrown in the deep end and told to figure it out? Is there some sort of community?
Of course, what students should know, and what they actually look for, may not always be the same. Your question was more about the latter, so I’ll throw it open. Wise and worldly readers, has anyone seen any actual research on what prospective transfer students look for when they look at four year colleges?
Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
The last time I wrote about Sandy Shugart, I gave him a bit of a hard time. Based on his essay last week, I regret that. It’s a wonderful piece, well worth reading.
It’s about the “completion agenda,” and the useful and destructive ways that it can be interpreted. Shugart, the president of Valencia Community College in Florida, points out correctly that reifying “completion” as a goal in itself sort of misses the point; the point is to produce students who are capable of learning at a high level. If we produce highly capable students, the rest will take care of itself, assuming we don’t go out of our way to mess things up.
I’m a bit less sanguine about the whole “take care of itself” piece, probably because I’m very aware of certain basic structural issues.. But what really sold me on the piece was Shugart’s recommendation that we stop looking at individual institutions, in judging performance, and start looking at higher education as an ecosystem. After all, that’s how most students experience it.
To take the easiest case, community colleges have significant numbers of students who are degree seeking, but for whom the degree sought is a bachelor’s. So they do a semester or a year at the community college to save money and gather momentum, and then transfer. As far as our graduation numbers go, those students count as dropouts, even though they got exactly what they came for. (To add insult to injury, they don’t count in the graduation percentages at their destination schools, either.)
At this point, the ‘typical’ bachelor’s degree student has accumulated credits at more than one college. Some level of transfer is the norm. And since students generally don’t have to complete an associate’s before transferring, many don’t. (Online degree completion programs are likely to accelerate this trend.) To hold that against the community college strikes me as a counting error, rather than any real indicator of performance.
(I disagree with Shugart that the answer is to require an associate’s degree before transfer. That seems needlessly paternalistic. I’d rather see measures that consider the reality of how students actually behave, and then let students follow the paths they choose. If they want to do a year at a cc and then move on for a bachelor’s, I have no principled argument why they shouldn’t be allowed to do exactly that. If the student achieved her own objective, give the community college the credit it’s due.)
Shugart argues further that we should only judge college completion rates when the students in question arrive college-ready. I can’t agree -- it feels too much like an abdication of mission -- but it’s certainly true that it’s more difficult to get a student who arrives with eighth-grade reading skills through a college level program.
A few years ago I saw Gail Mellow, the president of LaGuardia Community College in New York City, argue that if a community college takes someone with an elementary school reading level and gets her to, say, ninth grade reading, that the progress should be seen as a meaningful success. There’s real truth in that. I think that what Shugart was getting at in his reference to “value added.” Did the student leave stronger than she arrived? If so, that should count for something.
But crediting that requires thinking about higher education in a different way. Historically, we’ve viewed higher education as a credentialing device, with bachelor’s and associate’s degrees comprising the focus for undergraduate education. Credentials matter, obviously, but the idea that everyone should fit into one of two categories is getting harder to sustain. People’s needs are much more varied than that. Serving those varied needs well requires moving beyond simple, reductionist measures.
That’s one reason I’m happy to see the discussions around PARCC start to get momentum. Though far from perfect, PARCC at least recognizes that it’s silly and self-defeating to separate a college completion agenda from a serious look at the K-12 system. Many of the states that berate community colleges for teaching all those developmental classes only require two years of math in high school. If we’re serious about improving student success in higher education, we need to see it as part of the same universe as primary and secondary education. From a student’s perspective, it absolutely is.
My guess is that in the coming years, we’ll move from a “many paths to one goal” model to a “many paths to many goals” model. The transition will be halting and messy, with some false starts along the way, but the net change should be positive. Students’ needs are more diverse than one or two degree categories can, or should, cover. If we want to meet those diverse needs, then we’ll need a much more varied and robust set of measures based on ways that actual students actually behave.
This week I had one of those “duh” moments when I realized that I had been missing something basic.
The dean of the Health division -- which includes nursing -- and I took a field trip to a local health care provider to talk about working together to give nursing students some exposure to what goes on there. These wouldn’t be full-fledged clinical placements -- we already have those -- but a sort of structured introduction to a part of the health care system that isn’t always top-of-mind for nursing students. The meeting went well, and I think there’s potential for something good to happen.
In the course of the meeting, though, the dean and the director of the facility got to talking about the difference between the ways that they were taught when they went to school, and the way the health field actually works. When they went through, they had “lectures” which taught “theory,” and “clinicals” that taught “practices.” Students who were relatively good at one weren’t always good at the other, and the connections between the two weren’t always obvious.
Now, largely due to technology, theory and practice are all mixed up, and students are better for it.
We have increasingly and incredibly complex simulators in class, to create the clinical situations the professor wants, on cue. To make time for those simulations in class, lectures have been largely displaced to out-of-class time, online. By the time the students are loosed upon actual people, they’ve already had to bring theory to bear on situations repeatedly. Even better, a student can make and learn from a harrowing medical mistake on a simulator without harming an actual person. (Last year, apparently, some students made a dosage mistake with a simulator, and nearly “killed” the “patient.” After that, those students got religion in a significant way.)
In this model, MOOCs and their variants aren’t threats to our business model or our usefulness; they make us better. They let us focus on where we can add the most value, and they pick up the part of instruction that was least custom.
To the extent that we use online resources this way, I see our business model doing just fine. MOOCs and similar expedients can pick up some of the most rote, least interesting elements of what we do, leaving us free to tend to the integrative, interactive, more applied stuff that often gets neglected. Used well -- that is, integrated thoughtfully into a curriculum -- they can actually help students learn more effectively than they did in the older style.
Nursing lends itself to this kind of blending particularly well, but I could see other disciplines doing something similar. Let the online tool take the students through “Congress is divided into the House and the Senate,” and use class time to have students work on a constitution for a society on a desert island. (I always enjoyed that one.) Let the online tool illustrate the layout of the audience in the Globe theatre, and use class time to show how Shakespeare wrote for each section.
The choice to be made is to re-imagine class time as a scarce resource. Given new and alternative ways to “deliver” information, can class time be used to help students actually wrestle with the information and make it their own?
That should have been obvious -- a “duh” moment -- but it’s largely missing from the public discussion. Can we use the new online tools to offload the least interesting parts of the classroom experience, precisely so we can upgrade the classroom experience?
Apparently, New England is in line for a “repent your sins” snowstorm on Friday.
I know this because I heard it from at least a dozen different people on campus. Then again from the kids.
The kids, of course, are giddy. To them, a huge snowstorm represents a day off from school, and a chance to go sledding, build snowmen, and throw snowballs at each other. It’s all good.
(The only downside is that a Friday storm could postpone the Daddy/Daughter dance. TG is not happy about that.)
I expect kids to be giddy. I remember savoring snow days as a kid, and kids don’t have to deal with many of the hassles of storms. For them, it’s all upside.
But it’s been fun watching adults react almost exactly the same way. It’s like a group flashback to childhood.
Administratively, an entire snow day is much less of a headache than a delayed opening or an early closing. When you split the day, there is literally no single moment during the day that doesn’t create some sort of dilemma. You have a delayed opening that eliminates half of a class period. Is the class still required? A lab section is shortened, but the experiment itself takes a set amount of time. Somebody’s shift is bisected. Some people can’t come in because their kids’ schools are closed. Somebody can’t make it but forgets to call in, and her students storm your office, upset that they braved the elements for no reason.
But a full day is much cleaner. Yes, it causes syllabus issues, and there’s always some making up to do. But at least you don’t have a flurry of no-win judgment calls. At this point, when a monster storm approaches, I root for it to arrive early enough to take out a full day.
The kids have a set of rituals that they use to bring about snow days. I won’t reveal them all here; suffice it to say they know what they’re doing.
Snow days during Intersession are a problem, only because there isn’t much time to make them up. And I live in fear of snow days during December finals. But a snow day in early February isn’t so bad. There’s time to make up what needs to be made up.
And it’s fun watching an office full of adults revert to some dimly remembered childhood habits.
For-profit colleges are having a rough go of it these days. Just this week, Everest College (a branch of Corinthian Colleges) was forced to shut down operations in Milwaukee after only two years, during which it burned through two presidents. In my own state, Attorney General Coakley has announced a broader investigation into various for-profit providers in the wake of the abrupt closure of American Career Institutes.
Unfortunately, much of the debate on for-profits has been ideologically driven. Republicans in Congress treat for-profit higher ed as a necessary bulwark against the tenured radicals they assume have taken over the public sector. And traditional academics largely assume that for-profit higher ed is a form of naked exploitation, preying on the poor and the naive. The “gainful employment” regulations that Congress passed, and that are in some sort of judicial limbo, have hit community colleges hard too, even though community colleges are the lowest cost providers of higher education for most people.
I’ve worked in both for-profit and public higher education, so I’ve seen both from the inside. This may be why I find the current debate so unhelpful. I’ll propose something different.
Allow for-profit higher ed to grow, and even prosper, but regulate the product. Restrict the realm of competition to actual quality. If a differently-organized college can get equivalent or better results for its students, acting ethically, then bring it on; that’s healthy competition. But if it’s offering a watered-down product, shut it down.
In other words, use student learning outcomes to measure the effectiveness of instruction. Compete on quality.
If we went in this direction, I’d expect to see for-profit higher education bifurcate. At the “low” end of the spectrum, it could continue to offer the programs that the publics don’t. (I’m thinking here of the classic bartending or truck-driving schools, but specifics will vary by location.) But I could also imagine a new focus on the high end. If they have to charge more than the publics and the MOOCs -- which they would, since they’re taxed and unsubsidized -- then they’d have to offer some kind of value beyond what the publics and MOOCs do. A for-profit that chose to specialize in one or two programs could conceivably do a very good job with them. I could even imagine special cases in which a given community college might cede a particular program to a for-profit provider that does a particularly good job with it.
Even better, this approach would provide a framework for simultaneously dealing with MOOCs and whatever the next big tech breakthrough will be. Rather than either circling the wagons against the future -- a losing strategy if ever there were one -- or uncritically embracing The Next Big Thing, I’d rather see us compare its actual results to what we’ve been doing. I’m confident that we’re doing a good job, by and large, and that a fair test would show that. But confidence and knowledge are not the same thing.
Instead, most of the dialogue has focused on student loans, placement rates, and advertising. Those are symptoms. The underlying issue is quality. Most of us would accept the proposition that a premium product could legitimately command a premium price. Since there’s often a serious information asymmetry in the market -- many prospective students have no reliable way of judging quality -- it’s possible for a provider to substitute sizzle for steak and do well for itself for a while. But the information asymmetry strikes me as largely curable. And if it is, and prospective students get the benefit of various institutions competing on quality, I see everyone being better off.
Our politics is poisoned, because we pretend that “the market” and “regulation” are somehow opposed. Good regulation enables a functioning market. Let’s try it.
This one is for the parents out there.
What’s your philosophy on “technology time” for your kids?
We have a few techie toys around the house that the kids enjoy using: a kindle fire, a nook running android, and an ipod touch. (For those keeping score at home, all of those were bought used, and all work quite well. I’m not sure why this option isn’t more popular.) There’s also the family laptop on which TW and I do work, and the kids play Minecraft.
(For the uninitiated, Minecraft is a game in which kids build virtual buildings. The Boy loves doing multilevel stadiums or castles. I don’t even know if there’s a competitive component to it; he just loves building stuff. Judging by its popularity at Lego League, Minecraft is the Space Invaders for this generation.)
Naturally, the kids love playing with tech more than they love, say, doing homework, practicing their instruments, or hanging their coats in the closet. At their age, I would have been the same way.
I’m a little bit torn.
Part of me agrees with treating tech as analogous to television: acceptable in small doses, but in large doses not leading anywhere good. They aren’t programming or hacking; they’re just playing games. As such, I’m fine with a little as play or stress relief, but I’d hate to see more worthy endeavors sacrificed to it. So this approach suggests rationing tech time and treating it as a sort of reward for getting the necessary stuff done. (TW is firmly in this camp.) Call it the “spinach before dessert” approach.
But part of me sees comfort with tech as a key skill/habit in the coming years, and I don’t want to weigh my kids down with my own misgivings. From what I’ve seen of the techies I’ve known, most of them spent what looked like unhealthy amounts of time at some point in childhood messing around with whatever tech they could get their hands on. For many of them, games were the initial appeal, but soon they started going beyond what was presented. A sort of excess became the foundation for later exploration and invention.
As the kids get older, we’ll have less control over this sort of thing, which is why I want us to get it right while our opinions still matter.
Wise and worldly readers, have you found ways to encourage your kids to engage with the creative side of tech without too much time-suck from other things? I want them to be comfortable with tech, but I don’t want to see them lose touch with everything else. And I worry about presenting either homework or tech as spinach.
This is a “think out loud” piece, rather than an actual proposal.
What if financial aid went directly from the federal (or state) government to the student, rather than running through individual campuses? The students could use the aid to attend any accredited institution.
It’s not an entirely new model. When I graduated high school in western New York back in the 1980’s, New York State awarded “Regents scholarships” to students who met certain academic criteria. (I don’t remember what they were.) At the time, the scholarships were a hefty $250 a year -- inflation-proof since the 1950’s, according to local legend -- so they didn’t mean much. (Even then, private college tuition was well into the five figures.) But they were applicable to any accredited college or university in the state. The idea, we were told, was to keep bright minds around. Which might have worked, had the dollar figures adjusted to reality.
Private scholarship funds sometimes work that way, too. A local Rotary club might award some scholarships to promising local high school graduates, which they can take with them wherever they go. Even national merit scholarships used to work that way, and I assume they still do. A student who received a national merit award could take it with her anywhere in the country.
The models I’m aware of tend to be merit-based, rather than need-based, but it’s not entirely clear to me that they have to be that way.
As I understand it, one reason to run financial aid through individual campuses is to be able to adjust for differing total costs of attendance. A student who chooses a private four-year residential college will probably need more aid than a student who lives at home and attends a community college.
If most aid came in the form of grants, that might be an argument for keeping the current system. But even a “full” Pell grant comes nowhere near covering the full cost of a year at a typical private college, or even state university. At the more expensive places, “aid” is typically a combination of discounts, grants, and (increasingly) loans. There’s nothing stopping colleges from discounting on their own, if they choose; students would then knit together packages of grants and/or loans and shop around.
One might object that this would put too much power in the hands of the student. But if we have a public good to be served by underwriting higher education more than individual students would -- and I strongly agree that we do -- then we should underwrite it directly. It’s far more transparent and less labor intensive to simply increase appropriations to public colleges and universities than to run everything through a complicated set of hurdles.
Even better, shifting the resources from the colleges to the students would free up colleges to experiment with competency-based learning, different definitions of seat time, and other innovations that are either explicitly or effectively barred under the current system. As long as the caliber of outcomes was the same or better -- that’s where accreditation comes in -- then I don’t see why we shouldn’t be able to try to find new and potentially more appealing ways to get there.
The politics of the shift are a little tricky. Right now direct operating support for public colleges and universities tends to come from the states, while the bulk of financial aid comes from the feds. (I’m ignoring research grants for present purposes.) There’s a pretty good argument to be made that the shift, over the last ten years, from state support to student support has amounted to a shift from state to federal aid. What if we ratified that shift and addressed it directly?
I’m sure there’s a host of issues I haven’t considered, both positive and negative. Wise and worldly readers, what do you think? Would the efficiency gains of a single system be worth it?
- The Boy continues to careen into tweenhood. On Wednesday morning I dropped him off early at school for jazz band. As we approached the front entrance, a girl started to cross, and I stopped to let her pass. He got oddly quiet. Later that night, he told me that she’s his crush, and that he was silently praying that she didn’t see him in the car.
Reader, I embarrassed him.
And so it begins.
- Walter Russell Mead can be maddening sometimes, but I read this piece a week ago and haven’t been able to shake it. It’s basically Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses turned upside-down. If the history of elite support for public higher education was based on a semi-fatalistic sense that the masses were rising economically -- and therefore politically -- anyway, so it would be prudent to civilize them, then what happens when the masses seem to be sinking economically and politically?
- My kingdom for a printer that consistently works. They seem weirdly prone to random malfunctions to a much greater degree than just about any other electronics. And they seem immune to progress.
- My current obsession is the Accelerated Learning Program at the Community College of Baltimore County. (Check it out here.) It’s a variation on just-in-time developmental English. Wise and worldly readers -- have any of you taught this way? I’d love to get a first-person perspective on it.
- “What Writers Can Learn from Comedians.” I love love love this post. And not only because it name-checks Bob Newhart.
- Super Bowl Sunday looms, with its usual conflicts. I don’t watch football as much as I once did, partly due to life changes and partly due to increased awareness of what it does to players. Also, the Bills haven’t been watchable since the Clinton administration..
The Super Bowl is usually fun to watch, since it combines spectacle, sport, and great commercials. (Last year we all loved the Darth Vader kid who started the car with The Force.) But the whole “bro” culture that it celebrates is not how we live our lives. I want TB and TG to know that that culture exists, and to be conversant enough in/with it that they can navigate the world around them as it is. But there’s a difference between acknowledging a presence and endorsing it.
- Signs of hope...
- She got more than the usual amount of crap for it, but Lee Skallerup Bessette’s column from Wednesday, about hoping that her brilliant young daughter avoids academia, struck a chord.
Read it generously. This is the thoughtful reflection of an aware parent. It’s vulnerable, but that’s what parents are.
A couple years ago, The Onion ran a story headlined “Unemployment High Because People Keep Blowing Their Job Interviews.”
I was reminded of that in reading about the governor of North Carolina, Patrick McCrory, and his fusillades against the liberal arts in general and gender studies in particular. He’s the latest in a string of governors to declare that the recession lingers because students keep studying the wrong things, like he did. (McCrory was a double major in education and political science.) If only public colleges and universities would stop teaching the liberal arts and just focus on STEM, he implied, all would be well.
Um, no.
The layers of mistake are many and heavy, so I’ll just pick a few of the more flagrant ones.
The job market for college graduates was pretty good from about 1997 to 2000; it fell apart in 2001. Whoever invented the liberal arts in 2001 must have felt like a real jerk. Then the market got pretty good again from about 2005 to early 2008 before falling off a cliff in late 2008. Were 2008’s graduates markedly dumber or worse-trained than 2007’s? Did philosophy suddenly outpace business as the most popular undergraduate major?
Questions like that are symptoms of “critical thinking.” While some people may consider critical thinking suspect and even subversive, the business case for it is pretty strong. It helps avoid stupid mistakes, and it helps prevent wasteful uses of resources. It isn’t everything, of course -- creativity matters greatly, and awareness of the past is no small thing -- but without it, it’s awfully easy to fall prey to fools and fads.
Like governor McCrory, I was a poli sci major. But that wasn’t all I took. I also took chemistry, and math, and music, and history, and literature, and sociology, and religion, and economics. In the course of doing that, I learned plenty of facts that I’ll never use on the job -- did you know that there were five eclipses in 1678? -- but also some skills that I never stop using.
Unlike governor McCrory, I have attended any number of employer advisory board meetings for various academic programs at several different colleges. And the employer feedback is always the same, regardless of program: employers can train, but they’re counting on us to teach. That means the basics: communication skills, work ethic, problem solving, and a basic sense of how the world works. These can come from various places, but their traditional home -- and if Academically Adrift is correct, their most successful home -- is the liberal arts. That’s why even our technical majors have “general education” requirements. We want to ensure that future engineers, nurses, and chemists are capable of discerning meaning from complicated prose, of juggling multiple points of view, and of making themselves understood in writing.
The gender studies example is particularly bad. To my mind, the hallmark of an educated mind is learning how to re-see something you thought you understood, using an entirely new perspective. Gender studies is particularly good at that. It’s the same skill set that the best technologists have.
Speaking of, anyone who follows technology knows how quickly today’s cutting-edge skill becomes tomorrow’s afterthought. I saw that firsthand at DeVry in 2001, when all those telecom majors abruptly became unemployable as Y2K came and went and the dot-com boom crashed. If you don’t have the adaptability that comes from a deeper understanding, you can go from hot ticket to unemployable in short order.
But honestly, I don’t think even he believes what he’s saying. Duke and Chapel Hill didn’t achieve national prominence on basketball alone, and I have to assume he knows that. Recessions don’t happen because candidates blow interviews or because colleges teach history. Let’s stop pretending that The Onion is the truth.
The New America Foundation released a wonderful and thought-provoking paper proposing a serious overhaul of Federal financial aid. It’s a lot to digest, and I’ve only had the chance to give it a brief run-through. That said, a few thoughts:
First, there’s plenty to like. Turning Pell grants into entitlements -- that is, with predictable annual funding -- makes a world of sense, as does restoring summer Pell. (The previous round of summer Pell was too brief for colleges to adjust as much as would have been helpful.) Income-based repayments have a lot to be said for them, and direct lending is clearly and vastly preferable to running public loans through banks.
I was heartened, too, to see an open call for restoring the eligibility for students who enroll under “ability to benefit.” Until last year, students who lacked a high school diploma or GED could take an exam and establish that they had the “ability to benefit” from higher education. That came in handy for people from a host of different life circumstances. With the GED becoming more expensive -- and possibly more rigorous -- losing that safety valve shuts a lot of people out.
Expanding “experimental site authority,” as the paper suggests, also strikes me as a must-do. There are entirely too many perverse incentives in the current system, but folks on the ground are mostly powerless to do anything about them. Letting more colleges try more innovations strikes me as a low-cost way of road-testing different approaches, and thereby generating data to show which approaches are worth broader adoption.
That said, though, I have several reservations that I’d love to see the NAF consider.
First, the proposal suggests capping time-to-degree at 125 percent of the “normative” time. (Right now it’s 150 percent.) A student would have 2 ½ years to get a 2 year degree, or 5 years to get a 4 year degree.
That’s tricky on a number of levels. Most basically, it recommits financial aid to time-based measures of learning. If we need to get past the credit hour -- Amy Laitinen, one of the authors of the paper, has written brilliantly on that elsewhere -- then we need to allow financial aid to flow to programs that aren’t based on time. To the extent that we write normative measures of time into law, we make it that much harder for colleges to experiment with credit for prior learning, competency-based credit, and the like. Given that one of the goals of the paper is cost containment, I would think that escaping the iron grip of Baumol’s cost disease would be a high priority.
Second, the proposal misconstrues developmental education, and inadvertently reinforces its worst features. The paper excludes developmental students from the 125 percent limit, which sounds fine if you assume that students are either entirely developmental or entirely not, and that they take their developmental coursework all at once. But that’s not usually the case. Students who take developmental math, for example, also frequently take other college-level courses at the same time. Making progress towards a degree matters to students, and so does the ability to take courses that hold their interest.
At a more fundamental level, many colleges are experimenting with building developmental coursework into college-level courses in real time. (The Carnegie Foundation has supported a variation on this through its “mathway” and “statway” projects.) As I understand it, the mathway model involves placing most students directly into college-level courses from the outset, but then providing just-in-time extra review as they go along. (The class has extra hours to accommodate the extra help.) The goal is to get students what they need, when they see that they need it, and in a format that allows them to perceive -- correctly -- that they’re actually progressing towards the degree. A financial aid rule that relies on a bright line distinction between developmental and college level coursework would just get in the way. I’d hate to see a promising academic innovation sacrificed to a financial aid rule, even if the rule were well-intended.
The 125 percent rule also makes little sense when applied to credit-bearing certificates, which are increasingly popular in community colleges. “Stackable” certificates are all the rage now. They work by building employable off-ramps into degree programs. For example, on the way to a nursing degree, a student might be able to pick up a CNA certification. That way, if the student has to stop out or drop out, s/he isn’t leaving empty-handed and debt-burdened. She’s walking away with a credential that can help her get a job quickly. Then when she returns, she’s already on her way to her nursing degree.
Stackable certificates can offer the relatively quick turnaround that appeals to adults who got laid off and need a job fast. But unlike non-credit certificates or whatever it is that unaccredited for-profits offer, they also allow the student to make simultaneous and real progress towards a degree.
The catch is that many students who want stackable certificates have developmental needs, and those can’t be addressed if the window is too small. The 150 percent rule is challenging enough; 125 percent would be that much worse.
I also wonder about the political realism of the paper. It outlines a host of proposals, but insists that they’re all connected, and that they don’t make sense if separated. Color me nervous. There’s a perfectly valid mathematical and ethical argument for capping student loans and eliminating tuition tax deductions to pay for increases in Pell grants. But there’s also a strong political argument for making sure the middle class gets its own. Once the middle class decides that a program is really just for the poor, that program tends to wither on the vine. If the price of Pell is some tax expenditures for the middle class, that may be a price worth paying.
Finally, I wonder if the premise of the paper is a shade too easy. Simply put, it assumes that colleges can and will get their budgets under control if financial aid adjusts.
Two thoughts. First, in the community college world, the idea that budgets have been anything other than tight for the last decade is just otherworldly. For most of my administrative career, I’ve been managing austerity in one form or another. Tuition/fee increases lately have been much more about flat or declining state support than about profligate spending. If you don’t believe me, look at what adjuncts get paid. It isn’t profligate by any stretch.
Second, at this point, many of the drivers of cost increases are either external or structural. Assuming that we just need a little “discipline” is about as helpful as assuming that America could conquer its obesity problem if we all just had more will power. It’s just not that simple. Yes, the cost curve needs to be bent, but doing that will require a lot more room to move. Getting more restrictive, when we should be getting more creative, isn’t the answer.
Anyway, those are some first thoughts. Wise and worldly readers, I really recommend giving the paper a good once-over; if you have a chance, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. And if anyone from the NAF reads this, I’d love to hear from them, too.
Okay, I admit, this is crowdsourcing as a blatant attempt to save time. Researching this formally would be quite an undertaking, but I’m hoping that some of my wise and worldly readers have seen something like this.
We’ve been experimenting with variations on “learning communities” and “linked courses.” Different campuses define those terms differently, and not every nuance is relevant here. For present purposes, I’m looking at two or three courses in which the students are the same but the professors and subjects change. (Here, we call those “linked courses.”) Everybody in Professor Freud’s Psych 101 is also in Professor Van Helsing’s Intro to Phlebotomy, say. The idea is that the students are likelier to bond with each other, form support groups, and the like, if they see the same faces from class to class.
We’re running multiple variations on the format; right now the finding I’m comfortable sharing is that the model works best when it doesn’t take up every course in a student’s schedule. A little variety goes a long way. But when you offer, say, a bloc of three courses that students have to take in unison, the logistical conflicts multiply. So many of our students work 30 or 40 hours a week for pay, often with variable hours, that the rigidity of a linked course model may defeat some of its possible gains.
In trying to figure out how to balance the “group bonding” benefit of a cohort model with the obvious need for flexibility, someone suggested including an online course in the mix.
I was intrigued. On the one hand, it would obviously introduce some flexibility into the scheduling. On the other, I’m not sure whether the group bonding would carry over from the classroom to the screen.
Has anyone out there seen or tried that? Does it work?
Are more expensive colleges better?
Working at a community college, I’d have to say “not necessarily.” They could be, and sometimes they are, but it depends on how they use that money. That’s why this piece -- about a study of liberal arts colleges showing little relation between cost and value -- didn’t especially surprise me.
In the community college sector, we focus intently on teaching the first two years of the undergraduate curriculum, along with some pre-undergraduate (“developmental”) material. We also do a fair amount of non-credit workforce development and personal enrichment instruction. But we don’t do junior and senior level courses, graduate education, high-profile sports, or cutting-edge scientific research outside of the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Community colleges tend to spend the least of any sector, and to charge even less than that. (Public subsidies make up the difference.) That means there isn’t much to spend on non-essentials. Budgets tend to be modest, and focused pretty clearly on instruction. Even student services tend to be focused on helping students succeed academically, such as tutoring or providing accessibility technology. We don’t have a climbing wall, let alone a football team. (Though to be fair, that may be a Northeastern thing; I’ve heard of community colleges in other states with football teams.)
Colleges that do those other things are playing a different game, in some ways. In that sense, direct comparisons can be difficult.
Does having a football team help first-year students learn?
Directly, no. But indirectly, it’s possible: if a successful football team leads to alumni giving, and the alumni giving becomes far more than is spent on football, then it’s possible that the payoff from alumni giving will have salutary effects on students in the first year, whether through scholarships, general operating support, or various gifts for various programs. If the football program is high-profile enough -- I’m thinking here of the University of Michigan -- it can draw strong students who want the football Saturday experience; their presence enriches the experience of other students who could care less about football.
And that’s where I see the more expensive schools playing a different game. Community colleges (and most tuition-driven colleges) have to focus pretty intently on the core function. Grants are helpful in developing experiments and taking the longer view, but even there, the experiments and view in question are pretty close to the core function. For example, would shortening a developmental sequence improve student completion rates?
But the higher-cost places are doing what pool players call bank shots. Instead of focusing more resources on the core function, many of them make a choice to pour their greater money into ancillary functions, in hope of harvesting even greater incidental payoffs over time. Those payoffs could come from technology transfer, or alumni giving, or political favor, or nearly anything else. If we have the best rowing team, the the alums of our rowing team will give more! If we become a national power in basketball, then we’ll attract the upper-middle-class kids who love sports!
Bank shots are great when they work. But they don’t always work, and even they do, the payoff is often delayed. I endured the godawful Rutgers football teams of the 90’s when I was in grad school there, and it was hard to watch all that money be spent on a series of terrible teams while graduate students lived three to an apartment in New Brunswick. I can safely say that the money the typical community college spends on a tutoring center does far more for first-year student learning than the money that Rutgers spent trying to pretend it was Ann Arbor.
The paper elicited plenty of critiques in the comments on IHE, including some pretty good ones. Yes, it was based on self-reporting, which is notoriously sketchy. Yes, different colleges categorize spending differently. But I’m thinking that if you go cross-sectoral -- which, to be fair, the original paper didn’t -- you’d find that some of the gap comes from having different goals. If your goal is to help the student right in front of you right now, you’ll get a much better bang for your buck at many community colleges than you would at some much more expensive places. The more expensive places have something else in mind.
I don’t know if I’m just the fluky exception or if this is indicative of a larger truth, but I don’t Google job candidates.
I hadn’t really thought about it until the MLA conference. In the course of discussion there, someone who’s on the market talked about what hiring committees find when they Google her. I mentioned that I don’t Google candidates. Everyone acted like I had admitted still believing in the Tooth Fairy. But my practice makes sense, and I suspect I’m not the only one.
Hiring managers, and people on search committees, have to go through some pretty specific training from HR about the kinds of questions we are and aren’t allowed to ask. Certain topics are entirely off limits unless the candidate volunteers them; even then, you shouldn’t pursue.
The idea behind those rules is twofold. One, certain kinds of personal knowledge can form the basis of biased judgments, and we don’t want those to prevail. That can happen inadvertently among people of conscious goodwill, so it’s better just to prevent the opportunity from arising. Second, once you know something, it’s impossible to un-know it. If I didn’t know that Jen was a Yankee fan, then my decision not to hire her had nothing to do with my low opinion of Yankee fans. But if I knew, it’s hard to disprove the influence.
In an interview, you can craft your questions to avoid troublesome areas. When checking references, you can do pretty much the same thing, adjusting for the third person. Yes, some people slip through the interview and then disappoint when they get the job, but I’ve had pretty great results over the years with the people I’ve hired. Not perfect, but the batting average is far better than, say, Jeter’s. With experience and forethought, it’s possible to learn much of what you actually need to know through the applications and interviews.
But on Google, anything goes, and it goes with varying degrees of accuracy. And I say that as an avowed fan of Google.
Some people have relatively common names. (If you Google my name, you land first on a triathlete. It’s not a striking resemblance.) Even if you find the right person, you may or may not be able to trust the source on which you landed. Or, worse, you may find out something you can’t un-know. And then you have a real problem.
I just have a hard time squaring the relatively astringent rules for interview questions with the anything-goes information available online. My personal solution is to separate the two. There may be a better way, but I haven’t found it.
Yet for all this, job candidates seem to take it as given that they get Googled. And maybe they do.
Wise and worldly readers, have you found or seen a way to square the increasingly strict rules about interview questions with the ubiquity of information on the web?
My Dad used to teach courses on advertising, which was how he justified his weird attention to commercials. He used to pick up on odd turns of phrase from locally produced ads -- anyone who lived in Rochester circa 1980 will remember those awful/great Hill T.V. ads, with Dick and Linda Hill -- or anything by Ronco. Three easy payments! But wait, there’s more! Now how much would you pay? If you act now...
He may have been ahead of his time.
The kind of payment gimmicks that used to be restricted to the appliance or pocket fisherman biz are finding their way into higher education.
Last week, Union College (KY) announced that it would allow students to take their last semester for free if they got good grades and engaged in campus life. The idea was to offer a tangible reward for sticking around and doing well.
This week, Cleveland State, Florida International, Lamar and Utah State Universities and the Universities of Arkansas, Cincinnati, Texas at Arlington and West Florida agreed to offer a first course free in the MOOC format, as a way of enticing students to stick around after the freebie is done.
(If memory serves, a certain blogger suggested a deposit refundable upon graduation in these very pages back in 2010. Just sayin’.)
Higher ed pricing is usually somewhere between obscure and opaque. There’s a “sticker price,” sort of, that covers the basics. (It’s usually called tuition.) There are fees for various purposes -- lab courses, technology, high-cost programs, student life, or even, in the case of Worcester State, walking (!). For residential colleges, add room and board. Then start subtracting. “High tuition/high aid” colleges live and die by the “discount rate,” or the amount that they’re willing to discount (“presidential scholarship”) the sticker price for various students. Financial aid in various forms, scholarships of all shapes and sizes, and both need- and merit- based programs affect how much a student actually has to pony up.
The advantage of the complexity of higher ed pricing is that it supports the kind of institution-based redistribution that allows students from economically modest backgrounds to get far more than they could ever pay for. There’s real virtue in that. It also tends to tamp down competition on price, directing competition instead towards perceived quality and various amenities. While there’s plenty of noise in the ways people perceive quality, there’s a valid argument to the effect that maintaining some sort of meaningful standards for higher education is a real public good.
But when complexity starts to become opacity, especially in the face of faster-than-inflation increases over time, some potential students probably get discouraged. And that’s where the radical simplicity of the “free semester as a senior” model can cut through the noise.
Admittedly, it’s a little jarring to hear “the first one is free” coming from people who sell intellectual growth rather than, say, crystal meth. But there’s no principled reason that the “loss leader” model couldn’t work for colleges too.
My fear is that we’re inadvertently replaying the old airline model from the 1970’s. When fares were regulated, airlines competed on amenities. When price competition became viable, a sort of race to the bottom ensued; now airlines compete almost entirely on price (and hidden fees), and they pass the savings on to you by making flying as unpleasant as humanly possible. Any pretense of luxury is long gone; now you’re lucky to get a bag of peanuts, and legroom for anyone over about five foot ten is a distant dream.
That’s not entirely bad, except for the legroom. Flights are usually pretty brief, in the grand scheme of things, and some brief unpleasantness may be a fair trade for a lower price. If you get from point A to point B safely and affordably, the flight has done what it set out to do; you can accept the take-off-your-shoes ritual as a cost of doing business.
But college isn’t like that, and shouldn’t be. Real education takes time and investment. I don’t think our current methods are the only possible methods, heaven knows, but I’d hate to see us race to the bottom.
If we want to avoid falling into the same category as the inside-the-egg-scrambler, we need as a sector to give some conscious and deliberate thought to how to blend quality and economic sustainability. That will probably require some pretty significant changes. We can’t rely on the old Pan Am model forever. The world is changing whether we give it permission or not. Colleges starting to adopt the marketing tactics of cheesy television commercials may be understandable and even sort of refreshing, but it probably doesn’t lead anywhere we want to go.
If we don’t do our homework in a serious way, that’s where we’re heading. Now how much would you pay?
