Who's the Customer?

At NACCE I briefly got into a colloquy with a very young, very self-assured investor who asserted confidently that “young people” don’t care a whit about institutions or tradition, and that they will desert public higher ed en masse as soon as a better deal comes along, which is already happening.  I suggested that what he called “young people” in fact reflected an elite, well-resourced slice of young people, and that hollowing out more universalist institutions on their whim would amount to abandoning everybody else.  I still believe that, but I think I’m honing in on why we kept talking past each other.

He was looking at the student as the customer.  From his perspective, it’s perfectly obvious that online options will do to colleges what Amazon did to Borders.  And if you assume unproblematically that “the customer” in higher education resembles the customer in book sales, then that perspective makes sense.  But it isn’t as simple as that.

Who is the community college’s customer?

- Students, obviously.

- Parents/Families.  Particularly for young students and first-generation students, college choice -- whether to go at all, and where -- is often a family decision.  This is generally not true for, say, individual book purchase decisions.

- Employers.  They see students as products, and themselves as customers.  The concept of “workforce development” is built on the assumption that colleges produce workers.

- Four-year colleges.  As with employers, they see our students as products, and they judge our success by the success of our transfers at their schools.  

- The state (and sometimes county).  He who pays the piper calls the tune.  While it’s true that state/county funding as a percentage of college operating budgets is on a long-term and seemingly permanent decline, it’s still significant enough that the state sees community colleges as instruments for achieving broader policy goals.  Nobody judges Amazon by the racial demographics of its customers, but community colleges are judged in part by how well they achieve the goal of eliminating racial gaps.  Community colleges are supposed to produce employable graduates with a broad set of skills, as well as educated citizens capable of taking meaningful part in our politics.  

- The Feds. While we don’t get direct operating appropriations from the federal government -- not that anybody does this week -- the feds are the single largest source of financial aid for students.  Pell grants, subsidized loans, veterans’ benefits, and the rest matter tremendously, though each comes with its own set of strings.  Those strings matter for what we can offer.  (No Pell in summer!  Wait, there is!  No, there isn’t!)  Community colleges also frequently participate in a host of institutional grant programs -- Title III, Title V, NSF, DOL/TAA, NIH, etc. -- that bring criteria, assessments, and imperatives of their own.

- The service area.  Higher education is largely a reputational industry.  That’s much less true for, say, retail.  If I want the new Gladwell book, I can buy it from any one of a bevy of retailers.  I’ll judge the performance on price, speed of delivery (if applicable), and hassle.  If I decide that I don’t much like the book, my disappointment is aimed at the author, not at the bookseller.  

Judging the likely quality of a college education in advance is a much more complicated and problematic task.  In practice, most people rely on reputation.  Maintaining visibility and a positive reputation in the community is crucial.  In the context of a community college, alumni tend to stay relatively local, so alumni relations and community relations overlap significantly.

This list is far from exhaustive.  Add local nonprofits, K-12 districts, sports fans, unions, and whomever else you like.  It’s all true.

My confident young interlocutor seemed to think me obtuse for not recognizing that sweeping away every category of customer other than students would allow for a much more streamlined and efficient operation.  

Yes, it would.  Satisfying multiple masters, each with different and often conflicting agendas, is harder than focusing on just one.  But wishing politics away won’t get the job done.  If we move into the brave new world of technology-enhanced autodidacts, what happens when we notice tremendous social gaps in who benefits?  What happens when some can’t afford it, and are permanently shut out?  What happens when some brave new provider does a lousy job?  

I don’t raise this in the spirit of defeatism or resignation, but in recognition of Hegel’s dictum that freedom is the insight into necessity.  If we’re going to adapt and improve -- which we need to do -- we have to recognize the various needs out there.  We may need to make some choices among them, but that requires acknowledging that those choices exist.  And any new player of significant size will have to deal with many of the exact same issues.

Leadership and Entrepreneurship

I’ve been at the NACCE (National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship) conference in Charlotte, North Carolina for the last couple of days.  It has been a remarkable and remarkably packed set of discussions, but I’ve been particularly struck by what I see as two different ideas of what “leadership” means in the context of making community colleges more entrepreneurial.

To be fair, both “leadership” and “entrepreneurial” are subject to different definitions.  For now, I’ll just define the latter as “taking initiative” and call it good.  That could mean revenue-generating enterprises, or it could mean improving the quality of things that colleges already do.  It could refer to discrete programs in “how to start a business,” or it could be a broader curricular focus on helping students envision moving from the classroom to the application.  As my panel colleague and new friend Tressie McMillan Cottom pointed out separately, we should also recognize that college entrepreneurship programs could serve a valuable role in certain communities of color in which there’s already a good bit of unofficial market activity going on, like people cutting hair or fixing cars under the table.  In those cases, the issue isn’t moving from theory to practice; it’s helping practitioners navigate the worlds of taxes, licenses, regulations, and employment law.  Bringing under-the-table businesses into the open could allow them to grow, and therefore to hire.  We don’t usually use the word “entrepreneurship” for that, but we should.  In taking “theory to practice” as the norm, we’re implicitly taking a certain group of students as the norm, and we should think twice about that. The point struck me as both brilliant and retrospectively obvious, in the way that brilliant points are.

But it became obvious quickly that two very different definitions of leadership are floating around, the first largely oblivious to the second.  

The first, which was delivered quite energetically by several college presidents, was that cultural change for a college had to come from the president.  (Some of them mentioned Boards of Trustees, but most didn’t.)  By this argument, a president sets the tone and the agenda, and everyone else takes their cues accordingly.  By implication, the college follows the tone and agenda set by the president.  If the president ignores, downplays, or rejects an entrepreneurial approach, then it will not catch on.  In this view, the first order of business is to “sell” entrepreneurship to presidents.

The second, which I found myself slipping into in my own panel, assumes that initiative can come from lots of different places, and that the job of the president and the administration more broadly is to set the climate in which that kind of initiative can thrive.  In this view, the task of the administration isn’t necessarily to set the agenda, or at least not in the same amount of detail.  It’s more about moving deliberately towards a climate in which experimentation is valued, failure (in certain cases) is taken as a learning experience, and everyone agrees on a certain indeterminacy as to what an end product will actually look like.  

The second brings obvious challenges of its own.  Budgetary and regulatory constraints are real, and some of the first dreamers to step up to the plate will have trouble with that.  Sometimes, worthy goals will conflict with each other.   Some decisions are dictated by circumstances and/or external forces; from a distance, that can look like administrative fiat.  And it can be a fine line between broad goals or parameters and specific recommendations.

But even allowing for all of those, I see real value in the second view.  Colleges are, by definition, collections of very smart people.  That’s an amazing resource for crowdsourcing.  Instead of treating the faculty and staff as underlings to be directed, I’m guessing a college would get much better results by treating them as creative people who have something to contribute.  That doesn’t mean running the college for the benefit of the employees -- eyes on the ball, people -- but it certainly means not reducing the college’s vision to that of any one person, no matter how wise or well intended.

In discussions of “entrepreneurship,” it’s easy to slide into a sort of Great Man of History story in which the Heroic Leader sees what others don’t and moves heaven and earth to make a better future.  Of course, just breaking eggs doesn’t guarantee an omelette; sometimes you just wind up with a bunch of broken eggs on our faces.  If we want sustainable change -- change that outlasts any one leader -- then it needs to have deeper roots.  Tending to those roots is a crucial task of leadership.  Enabling initiative may not be as immediately exciting as announcing it from the mountaintop, but I see it working a lot better.

Friday Fragments

This graph caused quite the stir on Twitter, and rightly so.  It’s easy to argue about the reasons behind it, but I suggest that anyone considering graduate school as an entry into an academic career should see it and think hard about it.  

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This weekend I’m heading to Charlotte, NC, for the NACCE conference.  I’m particularly psyched to be on a panel with Tressie McMillan Cottom and Anne Kress.  I’ve never been to Charlotte before, so any suggestions of “must sees” would be appreciated!

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Last Saturday, we took the kids to the Jack O’Lantern Spectacular at the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence.  It was impressive, if overcrowded.  Everybody had smartphones, so the crowd moved painfully slowly as everyone tried to take pictures in the dark.  The display is organized by state, so every state got its distinctive tribute pumpkins.  We made a point of seeking out The Wife’s exotic native land, which had the inevitable Springsteen pumpkin.  

Pro-tip: if you use LED’s instead of candles, you can line the inside of the jack o’lantern with colored tissue paper.  They had a few giant green ones that made quite the impression.

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Based on last Sunday’s concert, I can report that Weird Al Yankovic’s appeal still crosses generations.  I took The Boy and The Girl to see him at the Calvin theater in Northampton.  (The Wife had no interest in seeing Weird Al, inexplicably.)  I expected a crowd full of parents with children, which wasn’t quite true.  It was mostly groups of adults, many of them my age or older.  The ones in the row behind us knew every word to every song, and insisted on proving it.  

I enjoyed the evening, mostly, but would not have gone without the kids.  

Weird Al’s commercial peak was in the 80’s, so some of his hits based their appeal on references that predate the kids.  He didn’t make any concessions to that; he did the full Michael Jackson treatment on “Eat It” and “Fat,” complete with costumes and distinctive dance moves.  The kids didn’t quite get the references, but enjoyed it anyway.  The concert was interspersed with video clips of Al’s history, including a jarringly racist clip from “UHF” that made his multiple Michael Jackson parodies a little uncomfortable.  I’ll admit having a slightly melancholy moment when Al did his Nirvana parody in a perfect Kurt Cobain outfit and wig, but that probably says more about me than it does about Al.

The highlight for the kids was the Star Wars trilogy, set to the tune of “American Pie.”  (“My, my, this here Anakin guy/ may be Vader someday later/ now he’s just a small fry…”)  For once, they fully got the lyrical references, and felt included.  TG was a little disappointed that he didn’t do “Another One Rides the Bus,” but you can’t have everything.  

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Speaking of 80’s music and Anne Kress, on her recommendation I saw “Color Me Obsessed,” a documentary about fans of The Replacements.  The ‘Mats are on tour again, sort of, so it seemed like a good time to check out the film.

The film is frustratingly true to its topic, in that it doesn’t include any actual ‘Mats music.  It’s really about the fans, and what they heard in the band.  My favorite moment was the opening, during which a series of fans tried, and failed, to explain what it was about the ‘Mats that made them special.  The pained expressions and halting sentences were priceless.

TW caught the first twenty minutes or so with me before walking out of the room.  The moments that grabbed her were when the film flashed the track listings from the first few Replacements albums.  The song titles alone speak to a certain social location and self-awareness: “God Damn Job,” “Dope Smokin’ Moron,” “White and Lazy,” “Love You ‘Til Friday.”  Westerberg may be a pain, but he’s a self-aware pain, and that counts for something.

The movie also settled a few mysteries of long standing.  The album “Tim” got its name from the lead singer of a band that Paul and Tommy saw pass out drunk, face first, two songs into his set, but his band played on anyway.  It sounded like something Paul and Tommy would do.  And we heard from the woman who inspired “Answering Machine,” which remains one of the most haunting pop/rock songs I’ve ever heard.  (Springsteen’s “State Trooper,” from “Nebraska,” or Tom Waits’ “Murder in the Red Barn” come close.)  As claims to fame go, it’s not bad.

Judging by TW’s reaction, non-fans won’t be won over.  But for longtime fans, it’s a treat.  You know who you are.  

Advising and Registration

This one is a little detail-y for civilians, but higher ed folks will get it.

Every semester, we have an advising period for continuing students.  Students are supposed to see their assigned academic advisors before choosing their classes.  The advisors have the PIN numbers for the students to register online; the idea is that the students have to contact the advisor to get the PIN.  (It gets more complicated than that, but you get the idea.)  The “nudge” is supposed to get the students to bother to show up, on the theory that students who have contact with advisors are likelier to make good decisions -- and therefore to stay on track academically -- than are students who are left to their own devices.

Advisors can be full-time faculty, adjunct faculty on additional contracts, or full-time staff advisors.  (Adjuncts are not required to advise; those who do it get paid extra for it at a rate agreed to with their union.)  Every full-time student is assigned an advisor.

In practice, I’m told almost unanimously, advising sessions are scheduling sessions.  Students will show up with a list of the classes they want and ask the advisor to put them in.  Frequently, most of the session consists of negotiations over available timeslots.  (“I have to be out by 1:00, and I don’t want any gaps.”)  This strikes me as a wasteful use of faculty and staff time.

So this semester, we’re trying something new.  And I’m curious to hear from my wise and worldly readers about whether they’ve seen or done something similar.

Over the past few years, we’ve tried asking advisors to focus more on “big picture” issues than on finding open seats in desirable timeslots, but the gravitational pull of registration has just been too powerful.  So this year, we split the advising period and the registration period.  This semester, for the first time, the advising period ends before registration begins.  The idea is to force, by default, the discussions away from “is there anything at 9:00?” and towards “where do you want to go from here?” and “is this the right program for you?”

Students will still get their PINs from their advisors, but the PINs won’t be effective for a few weeks.  The incentive to show up is still there, but the incentive to spend the advising session playing “find the open seat” is gone.

My guess -- and we’ve only just begun, so there’s no way of knowing yet -- is that after the initial awkwardness of any new system, we’ll see a bifurcation.  Some meetings will be brief and perfunctory, but others will take advantage of the new opportunity to focus on larger issues and actually focus on larger issues.  I’d much rather have faculty use their knowledge of their field -- and of academe generally -- to help students figure out the larger issues of what they want to be when they graduate, and how they want to get there.  A student who knows why she’s doing what she’s doing will be much likelier to stick with it.  And she can find her own open seat.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen or worked with a system like this?  Is there anything we should know to expect?

Follow the Bouncing Schedule

Sometimes I think that everyone who makes policy for a living should have to work for at least a few months in a minimum wage job at some point in their lives.  

Yes, they’d discover just how low the minimum wage actually is relative to the cost of living.  But they would also discover just how unstable the hours often are, and how damaging that instability is to people trying to move up in the world.  I was reminded of that yet again recently upon hearing Tyler Cowen declare on a podcast that worsening inequality is both inevitable and not really a big deal.  It is, and I see it on campus every day.

Among their other indignities, minimum wage jobs often come with hours that fluctuate from week to week.  That wreaks havoc with budgeting, for obvious reasons, but it also wreaks havoc with just about every other part of life.  If you don’t have a car, you rely on the local bus schedule to get around.  If your hours change every week, you may find your commuting time abruptly doubling because suddenly you’re out there when the buses only run once an hour.  (Alternately, if you have an unreliable car, a suddenly urgent repair can throw your budget into chaos at any moment.) If you’re juggling college with work, you have immovable class hours bumping into constantly-moving work hours; an arrangement you cobbled together this week may be completely upended next week, only to be upended again the following week.  That’s a level of daily stress that many of your fellow students aren’t carrying.

And that’s before considering childcare.  Children love routine, and care providers often require it.  Finding safe and affordable childcare is hard enough without the hours changing every week.  Daycare centers often aren’t open at night.  And even the ones that are often require a relatively stable set of hours each week.  

On the home front, constantly-shifting hours do a number of such basics as meal planning and shopping, let alone such “extras” as kids’ sports.  I’m constantly amazed that TB’s fall baseball team assumes that every kid can be at practice by 5:00 on weeknights.  And it’s not unusual in that.  Yes, people can find work-arounds sometimes, but every work-around requires more effort.  The sheer amount of work that goes into compensating for being non-standard amounts to a massive tax, or, if you prefer, insult added to injury.  

In this world, the argument for community colleges to offer online classes becomes pretty compelling.  If work and childcare and transportation arrangements are constantly shifting, it may be difficult or impossible to commit to being in room 125 every Tuesday at 11:00 for four months.  An online class is still a commitment -- and it presumes predictable internet access, which is a real cost -- but at least it takes some of the logistics out of the equation.  If that online class includes open educational resources in place of textbooks, then the cost to the student is reduced significantly, which helps, too.

I’m a fan of community colleges being reasonably responsive to student needs this way.  But at a certain point, the colleges can go only so far.  At some point, the issue is that what students really need is stable home lives with predictable work hours and safe childcare.  Some of that is beyond the reach of policy, obviously -- romantic breakups are a part of life -- but the level of risk that we offload onto the people with the fewest resources to handle it is just beyond reasonable.  

Yes, it’s about money, but it’s not just about money.  It’s about having enough predictability in life that you can devote time and energy to studying, rather than to figuring out where to put your kid next week or how to get to work when the engine is dead and the buses aren’t reliable.  Colleges can take positive steps, but if so many students are constantly exhausted just from navigating the vagaries of precarious lives, the effort will have to go far beyond colleges.  It would be helpful if the folks making educational policy choices had some sense of that.

What the Committee is Really Looking For

Last week, Rebecca Schuman did a wonderful meditation on a job ad from Sewanee that touched off quite a discussion, including here.  This week, Cheryl Ball offered a more global how-to on reading faculty job postings.  The trend of reading job ads as texts strikes me as positive, and someday -- when I’m feeling a little braver -- I may do the same for some administrative postings.  But in the meantime, I was struck by some of the commentary to Ball’s piece in which various readers claimed that it’s possible, by this phrase or that one, to know what a committee is really looking for.

Color me skeptical.  At least if we use a robust interpretation of “looking for.”

Having been lucky enough to be on the hiring side of the desk for a while now -- and I’m always acutely aware that there but for the grace of God go I -- I can attest that it rarely works like that.

The first issue is that faculty job postings are rarely the product of a single author, or even of a single committee.  They’re usually multiply edited pastiches of phrases from various sources, which explains why some of them read they way they do.  Start with the standard institutional self-description.  Add some departmentally-specific language phrased in ways that pass muster with HR. (For example: “minimum” qualifications are mandatory.  “Preferred” qualifications are not.) Throw in the AA/EO phrasing and something about processes and deadlines.  Whether any given search will hinge on affirmative action or similar considerations is usually impossible to predict.  In my experience, it’s neither as dominant as conservative critics often suggest, nor as hollow as some liberal critics suggest.  It’s a factor among others.

Then comes the part that isn’t always obvious from the applicant’s perspective, but it’s real.  Different people on the same committee will sometimes have different ideas of what they want.  They may not even realize it until they’re confronted with actual candidates.  A demo that struck one person as “dynamic” struck another as “domineering.”  One person’s “thoughtful” is another person’s “distant,” and so on.

From a candidate’s perspective, that can be maddening and contradictory.  But it’s the way committees work.  

And it doesn’t stop there.  The candidates who make it past the first round have a second round, in which still more variables come into play.  In the second round, it’s even harder to rely on preconceptions, if only because you have so few candidates among whom to choose.  It comes down to the actual people in front of you, with all of their three-dimensional quirks.  

In other words, beyond a certain point, parsing job ads to try to suss out what the committee is really looking for falls somewhere between kremlinology and astrology.  Most of the time, the committee doesn’t even know, at least with a useful level of specificity.  

For what it’s worth, job candidates can actually use that perspective to their advantage.  

Instead of trying to guess what a given committee really wants, and contorting yourself into a pretzel to resemble it, I’d advise spending that time on gaining some self-awareness.  Who are you as an academic?  As a teacher?  Be that.  Bring your game, whatever that is.  You have a better shot at controlling what you do than what a committee thinks, and you’ll probably do a better job of presenting yourself when you aren’t compensating for something, hiding something, or pretending to be something you’re not.  Even better, you stand a better chance of being successful in the job over time if you present the best honest version of who you actually are then if you get the job under false pretenses.  If the department really wants a flaming extrovert, and you’re a card-carrying introvert, you might be able to fake it through an interview.  But if you succeed, you’ll quickly hate your life.  Life is too short for that.

None of this addresses the pure shortage of positions; I get that.  That’s a much larger issue.  But in the short term, I’d advise candidates to spend less time parsing the tea leaves, and more time figuring out what’s uniquely them.  The search is frustrating enough without trying to read the unreadable.

Getting Good

I’ve been reading the new Malcolm Gladwell book, David and Goliath, in between other commitments.  It’s typical of Gladwell -- highly readable, great anecdotes, somewhat hit-and-miss on a theoretical level.  But chapter three, on “Caroline Sacks,” really hit home.

Sacks is a pseudonym for a student at Brown who grew up loving science.  She went to Brown thinking she’d follow her dream of becoming a scientist, but quickly found herself outgunned intellectually by enough of her peers that she got discouraged.  She switched fields into something that didn’t scare her away.  Gladwell notes that Sacks was more than smart enough to have been the big fish in a smaller pond, but that choosing the big pond of Brown put her at a relative disadvantage.  She got intimidated and retreated, just as very talented students do at “top” colleges around the country.  Gladwell goes on to cite studies showing that students like Sacks would easily have been among the top tier at, say, the University of Maryland, and almost certainly would have gone on to succeed in science.  Choosing the big pond actually hurt her, and deprived the rest of us of a talented scientist.

Gladwell uses the piece to make a somewhat strained point about affirmative action, but I read it differently.  It’s a welcome rebuttal to the annoying literature about “undermatching” that presumes that  less selective colleges are essentially traps.  In fact, they provide the space in which people can get good at the things they love.

I saw both sides of the Sacks dilemma in my time at Williams.  Even then, it was a pretty selective place, and it drew a bunch of very wealthy, smart students from all over, along with a few of the rest of us.  I quickly had the frustrating experience of having my head handed to me in several classes, and of trying to compete with students who were better prepared or just more talented than I was.  I eventually hit my stride and found a niche, but that first year -- and especially that first semester -- wasn’t pretty.

But Williams was also a small place, and it had gaps.  On a whim, I decided to join the campus radio station.  Just to make myself distinctive, I decided to present myself as an expert on jazz.  I had no business doing that, of course, but I knew just enough names to be able to put together an audition tape.  What I didn’t realize at the time was that nobody else there knew anything, either.  Just being able to put together enough of a jazz playlist for an audition tape put me in the top echelon of dj’s there, so I quickly got my slot.  

Since nobody knew anything, I was free to suck at first, and to figure things out as I went.  I took full advantage of that freedom.  I had found a space in which I could be given the time to get good at something.  I never became any kind of expert, but after a couple of years, I became capable of putting on a perfectly passable show.

If the radio station had been anywhere near as competitive as the academic side was, I never would have made it past the tryout.  I was only able to develop because I didn’t have to be good at first.  I could experiment.

The relentless culture of academic meritocracy among the most selective schools may serve well the top one or two percent of students, but it seems mostly designed to inculcate self-doubt in the rest.  It’s remarkably inhibiting.  And that presents a social cost beyond the discomfort of the students who don’t stand out.  It squanders talent.

Being the big fish in the small pond doesn’t necessarily portend lost potential.  The small pond may actually provide the venue in which that potential will have time to come to fruition.  To the extent that’s true, then rejecting the “undermatching” hypothesis isn’t just a matter of justice, although it certainly is that.  It’s also a matter of recognizing that someone may not be the absolute best in the country at something, but may still be more than capable of making a worthwhile contribution.  And that insisting on perfection from day one -- the old “weed ‘em out” approach -- probably wastes more talent than it saves.

I don’t deny that the big pond makes sense for the gargantuan talent.  But for the three-dimensional person who is smart but not world-beating, “undermatching” may actually be just the thing.  It’s time to recognize the value that the non-Harvards of the world offer.  And my thanks to Gladwell for helping me put words to an intuition that I’ve held for longer than I care to admit.

Friday Fragments

This piece by Jeff Selingo offers an upbeat, if largely accurate, profile of students who take long and winding college pathways through multiple institutions.  It implies that we’re on the cusp of a brave new world in which students will “swirl” from here to there, compiling a customized educational experience.

One person’s “swirl” is another person’s “churn.”  It’s hard not to notice that the glorification of “swirl” is coming at the exact same moment that institutions are being judged by graduation rates.  A student who “swirls” through four institutions on the way to a degree counts as a dropout at three of them.  

It’s easy to move rhetorically from “institutions bad” to “individuals good,” without noticing that those individuals need healthy and effective institutions from which to cherry-pick.

Perhaps “churn” isn’t quite the right measure anymore...

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Speaking of healthy and effective institutions, this piece suggests that many small New England liberal arts colleges may not be much longer for this world.  

I was struck, first, by the NIMBY effect shown in the poll of presidents.  Apparently, private college presidents largely believe that other private colleges are facing existential threats, but that their own college will be fine.  The same dynamic applies to members of Congress.  Perhaps I’ll just leave it at that.

More broadly, though, I can’t help but wonder about the fate of expensive but undistinguished colleges in regions with flat or declining populations of young people.  Admittedly, “undistinguished” is in the eye of the beholder to some degree, and a college that may not be considered strong across the board may have a program or two in which it’s recognized as a national leader.  And presidents aren’t known for admitting that their own colleges are undistinguished.

But still.  I understand how the elite institutions justify their cost.  I understand the value proposition of affordable, high-quality public education (hi!).  I understand the recruiting methods of for-profits, and I understand the role of colleges with distinctive niches, whether by religion, program, or gender.  I understand, and think that many others are about to understand, the appeal of affordable and flexible competency-based education, such as at College for America at SNHU.  But I really don’t understand private tuition at a nothing-special school in a program that everybody else also offers.  And I can’t be the only one.

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I’m in Slate!  Check it out.  And thanks, again, to Rebecca Schuman (@pankisseskafka) for the initial discussion.

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The Boy’s schedule, this weekend:

Friday night: baseball practice

Saturday morning: 5k Lego run, followed by a trip to the Lego store

Sunday afternoon: baseball game

Sunday night: Weird Al Yankovic concert

Baseball, running, Legos, and Weird Al.  That’s how we roll.

...and The Rest...

Along with every other Gen X’er, I grew up watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island.  It stuck with me.  In my first gender studies class in college, I understood the madonna/whore dichotomy by thinking of Mary Ann and Ginger.  Last year, I couldn’t watch Mitt Romney without thinking of Thurston Howell III.  (“Dressage” is pure Howell.)  In the second and third seasons of the show, the opening theme song ended with “The Professor and Mary Ann.”  But in the first season, it ended with “and the rest,” showing pictures of The Professor and Mary Ann.  Even as a kid, it struck me that The Professor and Mary Ann got a raw deal in that first season.

I thought about The Professor and Mary Ann while reading the umpteenth report on developmental math and workforce development.  Over the past few years, those two parts of the curriculum have received tremendous attention, and for good reason.  Developmental math has been a stumbling block for many students, and the need to make a living is real.  No argument there.

But developmental math and workforce courses aren’t the entire curriculum.  For example, did you know that most community colleges also teach sociology, and political science, and history?  It’s true!  You could be excused for not knowing it, based on the press, but it’s true.  They’re the “and the rest...” of the curriculum.  And that’s a shame, because they’re much more important than that.

In my faculty days, I taught political science.  I can’t remember the last time I saw a statewide or federal project on the teaching of political science in community colleges.  And the same is true of history, sociology, psychology, anthropology…

I’d like to report that the relative inattention to the social sciences is because everything in them is fine.  But that’s just not true.  And I refuse to believe that they’re unimportant.  So why the inattention?

Part of it, I think, is because they don’t fall cleanly into a widely understood crisis.  Developmental math plays into the completion agenda in obvious -- and legitimate -- ways.  Workforce courses play into the recession in obvious and legitimate ways.  Intro to American Government, or Intro to Sociology, won’t place as cleanly into a widely understood script.  

The scripts exist.  Political disengagement -- or illiteracy -- is a major issue, especially among young people, low-income people, and immigrants.  For that matter, a lack of the “sociological imagination” -- which I’ll reduce to the ability to discern structures behind behaviors -- is endemic among pretty much the entire population.  I see both as fundamental for any educated person, and as crucial for effective and informed democratic participation.  

In my darker moments, I wonder if that’s exactly the issue.  

But I don’t want to dwell there, because it doesn’t lead anywhere good.  So instead I’ll focus on more salable reasons to look closely at the introductory social sciences in community colleges.  

An understanding of basic economics, particularly in the context of personal finance, can help students tremendously as they graduate into a challenging job market.  A basic knowledge of how politics in America work is part of citizenship.  Being able to move intellectually from “Dave is really being a jerk” to “what is Dave responding to that makes him act like a jerk?” is useful both in the short term -- conflict resolution, say -- and in the long term, in seeing and building new possibilities.  

I’m assuming, of course, that the intro courses actually get students there.  They may or may not; I haven’t seen any good national data on them.  Which is sort of the point.  The questions haven’t been considered important enough even to bother asking.

Yes to the Skipper, and yes to Gilligan.  But let’s not forget The Professor and Mary Ann.  If colleges are going to teach them too, let’s devote some attention to seeing that we teach them well.  It’s the second season; let’s include them in the credits.

Not Everyone is a Digital Native

The political news is too depressing for words, so I’ll just note it and focus instead on something a little closer to home.

I’m wondering how different campuses or organizations out there handle helping out students or clients or customers who need really basic computer help.  In a college context, I’m talking about things like emailing papers to instructors as attachments, or downloading files.  Believe it or not, we have some students who need that level of help.

It’s easy to assume, from middle age, that everyone younger just automatically knows this stuff.  Many of them do, of course, and some of them are able to make technology do handstands without seemingly breaking a sweat.  But it’s not universal, and sometimes people don’t know what they don’t know until a point of abrupt need.  By that point, they don’t know who, or even how, to ask.

The usual default mode in colleges is to set up either course requirements or workshops, on the theory that you have to complete task A (figuring out computer basics) before doing task B (emailing a file as an attachment).  That can work, but participation tends to lag simply because people know intuitively that the workshop format is overkill.  If all I need to do is to email a paper, I shouldn’t need to devote a month of Tuesday afternoons to two-hour workshops.  It’s the kind of thing that could be picked up in a few minutes, if only the right resource were available.  Besides, it may not occur to me that I need to know that until it’s suddenly required for a class, and I realize that I have no idea how to do it.

(I’d also argue that the “first you have to do task A” method is oversold generally.  But that’s another post altogether.)

We have a helpdesk, but it’s largely devoted to password resets -- do NOT get me started on passwords  -- or higher-level issues with Moodle.  It’s not built to handle the volume of requests on subjects like “how do I download a new browser?” or “where’s the ‘save’ button in the new version of Word?”  (Full disclosure: when I got 2010, I had to google “how to save a document.”  Not a fan.)  

Off the top of my head, I’d love to have some work-study students who are relatively tech-savvy staff some sort of “ask me anything” version of a help desk somewhere on campus.  They could refer the really hairy or specialized cases to the pros, but they’d be there to help with the more fundamental stuff on an as-needed basis.  

I could envision some possible issues with student privacy, but those don’t strike me as fatal.  If the “ask me anything” staffers were given some simple training and basic supervision, along with an orientation around privacy and intellectual property, those strike me as solvable.

Has anyone actually set up a system like this?  If so, did it work?  Or is there some sort of fatal flaw that wouldn’t necessarily be obvious from the outside?