The Government

The Girl and I were playing catch yesterday in the front yard when the conversation took an unexpected turn.  And I swear, I am not making any of this up.

TG: Dad, when you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Me: I don’t remember.  A bunch of things, really.

TG: Did you want to be a vice president at a community college?

Me: (laughs) No, that didn’t cross my mind.

TG: So how did that happen?  I mean, nobody becomes a veterinarian without meaning to!

Me: That’s true. You have to go to school to be a veterinarian.

TG: Didn’t you get a Ph.D.?  

Me: Yeah, I did.

TG: What was that for?

Me: I wanted to be a professor.

TG: Of what?

Me: Political science.

TG: What’s that?

Me: The study of politics.

TG: Politics?

Me: Studying how the government works, and how we make decisions about it.

TG: Isn’t the government bad?

Me: (laughs) Well, sometimes, but not always.

TG: Why would you want to study that?

Me: (smiling) It’’s important.  And I thought it would be helpful to understand it.

TG: If the government is so bad, why don’t we just get rid of it?

Me; Well, it’s not always bad.

TG: But people on tv are always complaining about the government!

Me: That’s true.

TG: They say it’s always doing terrible, horrible things.  They must be terrible, horrible people!

Me: Well, Barack Obama is part of the government.

TG: (eyes wide) He IS?

Me: Yup.  He’s the President, and the President is part of the government.

TG: But he doesn’t do terrible, horrible things!

Me: No, mostly not.

TG: So why do people always complain that he’s doing terrible, horrible things?

Me; Well, do you remember a few years ago when Barack Obama ran against Mitt Romney to get to be the President?

TG: Mm-hmm…

Me: We have elections like that every few years so the government will know what most people want it to do.  Barack Obama and Mitt Romney had different ways of doing things, and people got to choose which one they liked better.  But the ones whose side lost complain a lot.  In this case, the Democrats won, so the Republicans complain a lot.

TG: Oh.  So everyone in the government is a Democrat, and everyone on tv is a Republican?

Me: Not technically.  It only seems that way.

TG: How does the government work?

Me; Well, it’s complicated.

TG: I thought the government was about ten people in a room somewhere.

Me: No, it’s a lot of people.  And it’s split into different levels.

TG: Like what?

Me: Well, there’s the government of the entire country.  That’s called the federal government.  That has the president and Congress.

TG: Do they do terrible, horrible things?

Me: Well, sometimes, but not mostly.  And then there’s the state government.  Every state has its own. Deval Patrick is the governor of the state, which is like being the President of Massachusetts.  

TG: He doesn’t do terrible, horrible things!

Me; No, he doesn’t.  And then our town has its own government.  Mayor Cohen runs that.

TG: He doesn’t do terrible, horrible things either!

Me: No.  They’re mostly trying to do the right thing.

TG: But everyone gets mad at them!

Me: That’s true.

TG: That’s why I want to be a veterinarian.

AACC, Day Three: Choose Your Own Message

The final day of the AACC conference was incongruous in the way that big conferences usually are.  It had a high-profile speaker -- in this case, Colin Powell -- and it had panels relegated to Scheduling Siberia, or 7:30 in the morning on the final day.  It followed Vice President Biden’s announcement of the Registered Apprenticeship College Consortium, which is intended to spread the apprenticeship model to health care and IT, with a panel on the RACC that barely mentioned health care and ignored IT altogether.  So it was inclusive, but with some relegated to the margins; it was a followup, but forgetfully.  You could choose your own message.

I’ll start with the good stuff.  At the sendoff brunch -- once they finally set up enough tables and chairs to accommodate everybody -- they gave a series of awards to distinguished alumni of community colleges.  I always enjoy those moments, since they’re reminders of why we do what we do.  Dr. Toshiko Abe was the most memorable; she’s a Japanese politician who got her nursing degrees in the United States, starting at a community college in Alabama.  it’s hard to imagine why an aspiring nurse in Japan would decide that what she really wants to do is attend community college in Alabama.  (Her answer: “God sent me to Alabama.”)  But she did, and it worked out well for her -- she got her Ph.D., and is now a member of the Japanese parliament.  

The keynoter, Gen. Colin Powell, is a polished conference speaker who knows how to deliver a laugh line.  He flattered the audience, testified to the importance of higher education, cracked several self-deprecating jokes, attacked the opponents of Obamacare, waxed nostalgic about growing up in the Bronx, and told a few stories about Reagan that allowed you to see the Gipper as either a Zen master or a real-life Chance the Gardener.  It was a thoroughly professional performance.

Powell ended with the assertion that “optimism is a force multiplier,” claiming that exuding optimism is one of the core elements of leadership.  I couldn’t help but contrast that to Jim Collins’ speech on Saturday, in which Collins quoted James Stockdale saying that the optimists were the first ones to break in prison camp.  Choose your own message.

Even the scheduling sent mixed messages.  

My intrepid colleagues from HCC were bumped by Biden to Tuesday at 7:30, but they went ahead gamely and did an upbeat and funny presentation to a diminished audience. The time-shift effectively deprived everyone else of a discussion that many would have found valuable.  (I’m sure the same could be said of everyone else who got bumped to that slot, as well.)  They were included, but in a timeslot that defeated the purpose.  Maybe if they could have replaced the comedian...

The subsequent panel on the RACC was much better attended, and I have to give it credit for surprising me.  After Biden’s talk, in which he plugged the RACC by name, I assumed that the room would be bursting with people curious to hear about how you apply apprenticeships to the IT industry.

Not so much.  The room was full, but small, and the panelists spoke almost entirely about construction trades.  (I’ve heard the word “pipefitter” more in the last three days than in the last three years.)  It was as if everyone had tacitly agreed to ignore what Biden had actually said.  Not that that’s always a bad idea, of course.  I heard some grumbling about his crack about “sleeping with a community college professor every night.  The same one.”  But people don’t usually forget proposals as clear as the IT one.  

Still, the session had value.  The highlight there came during the q-and-a, when someone asked about the percentage of students in the various apprenticeship programs who were women.  In every case, the answer was less than five percent.  I filed that nugget, since men over 25 have consistently proven the most difficult demographic to attract.  (Locally, over 70 percent of our students over age 25 are female.)  If there’s a way to structure a program that draws adult men, it’s worth some thought.  That wasn’t the angle they intended, but you get to choose your own message.

Back to campus, where theories that sound so easy and great in presentations confront messy reality, and students choose their own messages every single day.  I choose to believe that we’ll do right by them.

AACC Day Two: Bidens and By-The-Ways

After the bitter shot of espresso that was the first day of AACC, I decided to split the second day between the official conference and the unofficial one.  

Academic conferences run parallel programs.  The official program is what gets printed in the, well, program: panels, plenaries, and the like.  The unofficial one is the people you bump into during the day.  When the official program gets a little same-y, stuffy, or bitter, the unofficial one can redeem it.  So a bit of each.

The official highlight, which I made sure to attend, was Vice President Biden’s speech.  Jill Biden introduced him, speaking as both the “second lady” (not sure about that title…) and a community college professor.  Joe introduced himself as Jill’s husband, which fit the room nicely.  He praised community colleges as the best route into the middle class in a time when the “aperture” into the middle class is shrinking.  

The centerpiece of his talk was a new federal program to encourage, coordinate, and possibly help fund apprenticeship programs between employers and community colleges.  (Unions were conspicuous by their absence in his speech.)  Biden noted, correctly, that certain skilled trades have long used apprenticeships to train incoming workers, and that new trainees in those fields can make pretty good salaries when they graduate.  Even better, they get paid while they’re learning, so the opportunity cost is greatly reduced, compared to traditional higher education.

He proposed taking the apprenticeship model beyond construction and related fields (pipefitting, plumbing, etc.), and into fields like allied health and IT.  He didn’t go into much detail as to how that might work, and it wasn’t immediately obvious to me.  Allied health fields are already pretty well-defined with ranks and roles, and it’s already possible to move up the ranks through well-designed stackable programs.  (Holyoke’s Foundations of Health program is built on that insight, and it’s conspicuously successful.)  They don’t use the word “apprenticeship,” but the basic idea is already sort of there.

But I honestly don’t see how the apprenticeship model would work in IT.  Apprenticeships work well when the craft takes time to learn, the roles are well-defined, and the field is structurally stable.  Pipefitting is like that; moving water from here to there is still essentially the same process it was a generation ago.  Apprenticeships also generally happen in unionized industries.  Construction tends to be heavily unionized, so it lends itself well.

IT doesn’t fit either bill.  The content of the field changes rapidly, and its structure is in constant flux.  It’s relatively indifferent to credentials -- in part because the field is in such flux -- and it’s not exactly a hotbed of unionization.  IT has adopted the internship model much more than the apprenticeship model, both because interns are cheaper and because the industry doesn’t rely on clearly defined roles.  The field is rife with startups, which are notoriously averse to the kind of rankings that apprenticeships presume.

Still, any time the executive branch of the federal government wants to give community colleges a high-five, I’m all for it.  And even when he’s a little subdued, as he was here, Biden is always fun to watch.  As well-spoken as he can be, his internal editor isn’t always up to the task, which makes him seem more authentic and makes watching him sort of suspenseful.

On the way to see Biden, though, we had to stand in a preposterously long line for a security screening similar to what the TSA does.  (My colleague Alana Wiens tweeted the line of the day: “It’s like loading the ark in here.  People are coming in two by two.”)  The woman ahead of me in line struck up a conversation with me to pass the time.  She turned out to be Laura Meeks, the president of Eastern Gateway Community College.  But more to the point, I’m convinced that she’s my Mom’s long-lost sister.  We spent a solid hour discussing Swedish family Christmas traditions, among other things.  When you find someone who has endured the lutefisk, you have to share.

On the other extreme, I attended a fascinating panel on campus crisis communications.  The president and the public relations person from Carl Sandburg Community College in Illinois discussed how they handled public disclosures when their campus flooded last Spring.  The short version: get it all out there quickly, and offer the press structured opportunities (press conferences) to get what it needs at manageable intervals, so you don’t spend all day answering individual queries.  The presentation was vivid, practical, thoughtful, important, and attended by maybe a dozen people.  Makes ya wonder.

On the unofficial side, though, all was lovely.  I reconnected with friend and rising star Jessica Chambers, who is now the chief student affairs officer at Hagerstown Community College in Maryland, and got to introduce her to established superstar Kay McClenney.  Gretchen McKay flagged me down to tell me about a historical game project she’s using to get and keep students interested, and to figure out how to make it useful in a community college context.  Jee Hang Lee and Bryce McKibben, from ACCT, introduced themselves and had the first of what I hope will be more discussions.  And I finally made the trek to the New America Foundation offices, where I was able to meet in person Kevin Carey, Rachel Fishman, and Amy Laitinen, among others.  (Possible essay question: The New America Foundation is neither new, nor a foundation.  Discuss.)  Webinars and online interactions are all great, but some things require actually seeing people in three dimensions.

On to day three.  My HCC colleagues’ panel, “Changing the Game,”  was bumped by Biden to 7:30 a.m. Tuesday, so I’ll be there for moral support.  Learn how to make grants work together!  Improve student outcomes in allied health fields!  Watch me try to look awake at 7:30 in the morning!  

I promise not to bring lutefisk.

AACC, Day One

Every so often, it’s fun to play “roving reporter.”  I’m at the American Association of Community Colleges conference in Washington, D.C.  All I need is a trenchcoat, a fedora, and a pencil.  

So far, the conference is more scold-y than I’ve seen in the past.  It seems to reflect a sort of anxiety of generational change, with the folks on their way out getting in some parting shots while they can.  That phase may be inevitable, but it isn’t much fun to watch.

The opening session on Saturday was supposed to feature Jim Collins, which it eventually did.  Collins is the author of Good to Great and several other books and monographs along similar lines.  But first, one solid hour of lifetime achievement awards -- including one to a man who retired in 1998 -- and words from our sponsors, which included the University of Phoenix and American Public University.  Yes, one solid hour.  

And that’s all I’ll say about that.

Collins made his usual arguments about what makes for great leadership, as opposed to merely good leadership.  Since it was a speech to a convention hall, there was no q-and-a period.  Had there been, and had we not lost a solid hour to acceptance speeches, I would have liked to ask how you apply the “get the right people on the bus” approach to a setting in which people have tenure.  Perhaps fittingly, time did not allow.

The Sunday kickoff was the official unveiling...drum roll, please...of the AACC 21st Century Commission Report.  

Admittedly, the title doesn’t stir the blood.  But it was a Kay McClenney panel, so the discussion was both well-directed and useful.  McClenney herself fired off the best line of the day: “when I hear people say that some students just aren’t college material, I assume they’re talking about someone else’s children.”  Yes, yes, yes.  (She also referred to some presentations as “sit and git” sessions, which I intend to steal shamelessly.)  The focus, not surprisingly, was on improving completion rates, and the ways that various colleges are working on that.  Some are “streamlining” (reducing) options, to be more directive so students don’t get lost.  Some have adopted “auto-graduation,” which seems to involve chasing down students who have enough credits to graduate but who never bothered, or something close to that.  Some have moved away from placement-by-Accuplacer to placement-by-GPA; they found that the strongest predictor of success in college-level math is whether the student took a math class in the senior year of high school.  

In other words, students who take more math seem to learn more math than students who take less math.  

So there’s that.

I was struck, too, by a repeated comment that “we [presidents] need to be ready to lose our jobs over this mission.”  The implication was left unspoken, but not unnoticed.

That vague sense of scolding intensified in a later panel with the leaders of the League for Innovation.  The ostensible topic was unexpected challenges facing community college presidents, but it took an unexpectedly dark turn.  Terry O’Banion, the eminence grise of the League, gave what amounted to a jeremiad on why community colleges will fail to achieve the graduation numbers President Obama set out for 2020.  He blasted one intervention after the next: high-impact practices are insufficient, staff development doesn’t work, campuses have “initiative fatigue,” and “we forgot to include the faculty in the completion agenda.”  John Roueche echoed O’Banion’s sentiments, noting that community colleges train everyone’s employees except their own, and pointing out that this is the only industry in which employees are free to turn down ongoing professional development.

I’ve seen O’Banion and Roueche speak many times before, so I have some sense of their usual style.  The pessimism was a new and jarring note.  “Bitter” might be too strong a word, but it was certainly bracing.  It was much more “Adorno” than anything I’d heard since my critical theory days.  The subtext, as near as I could tell, was that the next generation of leaders (nine percent of current cc presidents are interims, according to Gerardo de los Santos) will have to figure it out for themselves, since the efforts of the retiring generation have come to grief.  

Happily, the unofficial conference has been much sunnier than the official one.  As with most conferences, meeting up with old friends, and making new ones, is a highlight.  I reconnected with Scott Jaschik, which is always great, and finally got the chance to meet Anne Kress in person.  She’s the president of Monroe Community College, in Rochester, and a fellow tweeter.  Having met her, I’ll say she’s good people and surprisingly funny.  I also finally met my book’s publisher, David Brightman, from Wiley, who is funny and warm in the way that you would hope people who work in publishing would be.  And Heather Van Sickle and Karen-Michele Mirko from NACCE are always a treat.  (I also ducked out to visit my brother and his family, which is good for the soul.)

Monday’s program features Joe Biden, so I’m hoping for something a bit more “adorbs” than “Adorno.”  Now I just have to find my fedora...

Friday Fragments

I’ll be at the AACC conference in Washington, D.C., over the next several days.  I’m hoping to touch base with several people over that time, but I’m also psyched for the presentation by my HCC colleagues Michele Snizek, Alana Wiens, and Rebecca Lewis. (It’s called “Changing the Game: Improving Achievement in a Model Career Program through High-Impact Grant Collaboration.”) They’ll be talking about the ways we’ve aligned different grants to reinforce each other, particularly in the context of allied health fields.  

They’ve been bumped by Joe Biden, which is frustrating.  So they’ll be presenting on Tuesday morning at 7:30.  I’m hoping for a good turnout -- they’re a great group, and the work they’ve done is both impressive and largely transferable.  BIden’s okay too, but will he help you figure out how to stitch grants together?  No, he will not.  If you’re at the AACC, check them out.

--

Chad Orzel wrote an interesting piece in response to Caitlin Flanagan’s widely-read article about fraternities.  Orzel’s is necessarily somewhat circumspect, since he attended a college without frats as such, though he correctly notes that the rugby team at Williams was pretty fratty.  The guys who would have been frat boys elsewhere were called “hammerheads” there.

Orzel’s time at Williams and my time there overlapped slightly, so I can offer a different perspective on the same context.  

Yes, there’s a persistent appetite among some students for what Orzel calls “drunken idiocy,” and they’ll find ways to slake that appetite.  Williams had banned frats in the 1960’s -- that was part of why I went there -- but that didn’t prevent the social scene from revolving around teams and kegs.  If you weren’t either on a team or part of one of the church groups, the social scene was largely catch-as-catch-can.  Frats may have been absent, but drunken idiocy was not.  Drunken idiocy isn’t all that different in a dorm than in a frat house, except that when it’s in a frat house, those who prefer not to be surrounded by it can escape to the dorm.  When it’s in the dorm, there’s no escape.

My recollection was that the problem wasn’t so much sports and beer, but the almost complete absence of nearly anything else.  (Williamstown is in the middle of nowhere, and most students didn’t have cars.) Drunken idiocy ruled by default.  If that was your thing, you probably didn’t see a problem.  If it wasn’t your thing -- it mostly wasn’t mine -- the problem was all-pervasive.  

In choosing a college without frats, I was hoping to avoid frat boy culture.  It didn’t work, which suggests that some of the criticism aimed at frats is mistaking the symptom for the cause.  

All of that said, though, it was the 1980’s.  The web didn’t exist yet, and phone calls off campus were expensive.  I hope for everyone’s sake that life on the ground has changed.

--

I know I shouldn’t pick on Sandy Shugart.  He’s a well-regarded president of a community college that has emerged as a national leader in improving student success.  And he recently published a mostly-thoughtful piece on the ways that student behavior often flummoxes systems.

But this has been bugging me ever since I read it.  He wrote:

“[Students] swirl in and among, stop out, start back, change majors, change departments, change colleges. And because this was exceptional 50 years ago, when we were in college, we continue to think it is the exception.”  (emphasis added)

“50 years ago, when we were in college…”  Sigh.

It’s a smallish thing, but I’ve bumped into that blind spot enough times that I’ve decided to stop pretending not to notice.  Not every educational leader is a baby boomer.  It’s time to acknowledge that.  

--

Speaking of Gen X, this weekend marks twenty years since Kurt Cobain shot himself.

That one stung.

Courtney Love may be a train wreck, but the footage of her reading his suicide note, with commentary, to a crowd of mourners gathered outside their house was one of the most harrowing moments I’d ever seen on television.  It was mercilessly raw, and human, and true.  

Nirvana’s music wasn’t terribly forgiving, either.  Everyone knows “Teen Spirit,” rightly, but check out “Aneurysm,” or “Pennyroyal Tea,” or “All Apologies.”  And if you’re really focused, give a close listen to “In the Pines,” from Unplugged.  When he got that direct, you realized that the distortion in their songs wasn’t overpowering; it was cushioning.  Undistorted, the music landed harder.

From a distance, it may be hard to see why it mattered so much at the time.  But it did.

--

The Girl: Daddy, if the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?

I didn’t have an answer for that, but I loved the question.

Pilots

Wise and worldly readers, how much time -- and how many attempts -- do you allow a “pilot” course or project before deciding whether to keep it?

As finances get tighter and political pressures stronger, I’m seeing less patience for waiting for the results from pilots to come in.  The meaning of the word is changing.

In my original understanding, a “pilot” was an experiment.  It was designed to see if, say, a course had staying power.  Did students respond to it?  Did it achieve what it was supposed to?  It might take a couple of attempts to really get a good read, especially if the goals are ambiguous or in tension with each other.  A new math class might require a few semesters of follow-up to see how students fared later in the sequence, for example.

But I’m seeing “pilots” now used as something closer to “dress rehearsals.”  In this version, the idea is to debug before scaling up, but the goal of scaling up is pretty much a given.  In other words, the meaning has shifted from idea-testing to implementation-testing.  We’ve already decided that the show must go on; we’re just making sure we get the blocking and lighting right.

There’s value in both versions of pilots, of course.  But mistaking one for the other can lead to unhelpful conflicts.

In some cases, the shift in meaning is entirely unconscious.  It happens largely as a result of scheduling.  Let’s say we run a new math class in the Fall of 2014.  Faculty schedules for the Fall of 2015 are done by mid-Spring of 2015.  At that point, we have exactly zero data on how students in the pilot class did in the following course, but we have to make a decision anyway.  

Alternately, a pilot held in suspension for an extended period -- if your bylaws allow -- accrues a sort of tenure.  People start to count on it.

So I’m trying to find the right balance.  Has anyone out there cracked the code?

Consolation Prizes

Stephen Joel Trachtenberg suggested yesterday that students who drop out of a four year program after two or more years should be awarded Associate’s degrees as a sort of consolation prize, like a year’s supply of turtle wax.

The argument is that a student who has put in two or more solid years of college has done some real work, but that she leaves with nothing to show for it.  An Associate’s degree signifies something concrete, and carries more heft than a high school diploma alone.  Since it’s better to leave with something than with nothing, Trachtenberg suggests, why not award the Associate’s as a consolation prize?

Sigh.

A few thoughts:

First, and most obviously, an Associate’s degree is a degree.  That means that it’s more than just a collection of random credits.  It has some sort of coherent pattern to it.  Curriculum committees at community colleges spend painfully long meetings hammering out distribution requirements, major requirements, credit hour allocations, and the rest precisely because the degrees are supposed to carry some sort of specific meaning.  

Yes, some degrees are much more forgiving than others.  On most campuses, the liberal arts or transfer degree will have much more room for choice than, say, an engineering or nursing degree.  But even the “looser” ones are more than just additive.

Second -- and this argument is usually used against community colleges, so it’s odd to turn it around -- there’s a difference between finishing what you start, even if it’s less ambitious, and walking away. Yes, that difference is often economic or external, but the students who are able to negotiate difficult circumstances and finish anyway really accomplish something.  

That said, it’s easy enough now in many cases for students to do “reverse transfers” into community colleges, and then to take a stray couple of courses to fill in gaps.  Most of the national discussion on transfer assumes that it only moves in one direction, but it doesn’t.  Reverse transfer is more common than one might imagine.  

I also wonder about the status issue that Trachtenberg raises but immediately drops:

Research universities that grant not only bachelor of arts or science degrees but also masters and doctorates are on the top of the chart. Community colleges that offer only associate of arts degrees not so much. Faculty are paid differently, research expectations are not the same, test scores of entering students are often widely variant at the two extremes.

Okay...so if four-year colleges start awarding two-year degrees, does that imply a convergence on teaching loads, salaries, and the rest?  Or are the four-years just slumming?

The piece that Trachtenberg gets right is that student behavior on the ground is much more varied and dynamic than policymakers typically assume.  I don’t see that changing anytime soon, so it makes sense to rethink systems built as one-way streets.  Rather than having every college do every thing, which strikes me as a recipe for mediocrity, it would probably make more sense to have ecosystems of colleges in which each institution specializes in its own thing.  Students would be served best by knowing what can be found where, and by making it easy to switch gears, reverse direction, stop out to make money, and generally attend to life.  

But that approach implies respect across the board.  Community colleges have long respected the unique value that four-year colleges offer.  It would be nice to see that respect reciprocated.