Secret Teaching

What happens when you combine administrators and faculty from research universities, master’s level universities, and community colleges to discuss how best to prepare grad students for jobs at teaching institutions?

Apparently, a whole lot of “I hadn’t thought of that”s.

On Monday I attended a meeting convened by Paula Krebs, at Bridgewater State, to discuss exactly that.  It featured attendees from Brown, Northeastern, and Boston Universities; UMass Amherst; UMass Boston; Bridgewater State, Framingham State, and Salem State; Wheaton College; Worcester Polytechnic Institute; and Cape Cod, Greenfield, Holyoke, and Massasoit Community Colleges.  

Much of the discussion was about practical steps, and it’s still fragile enough that I don’t want to put it out there yet without everyone’s OK.  But one sidebar quickly became a group discussion, and honestly, I would not have thought of it.

We were discussing ways to connect formally community colleges and nearby research universities, with the goal of giving prospective faculty a glimpse into the reality of another institutional type.  The devil is in the details, of course; who pays, how to avoid contractual issues, supervision, etc.  But then someone raised a point that brought me up short.

Apparently, many doctoral students already adjunct at community colleges, but they keep it on the down low; they don’t want anyone at their home university to know.  

I feel so _cheap_.  So _used_.

From the grad students’ perspective, it seems, there are two major obstacles.  One is that they don’t want their graduate funding cut; they’d rather have both the graduate stipend and the adjunct paycheck.  The other is that they don’t want their advisors to think that they want anything other than an R1 gig, for fear of not being taken seriously.

I see no good at all coming from the secrecy.

Ideally, some sort of formal, aboveboard relationship could allow what is now a strictly transactional relationship -- I’m fighting the metaphor, people, work with me -- to become part of a larger plan for professional development.  Grad students could bring back lessons from the front to their graduate programs and share them with their faculty and colleagues.  Over time, the teacher training at the graduate programs could become more realistic, and therefore more useful.  

The second reason -- about judgmental dissertation advisors -- strikes me as both true and beyond anything I would know how to fix.  I clearly remember respected professors in grad school telling me in all earnestness to spend as little effort as possible on teaching, the better to focus on publishing.  Grads who had gone on to teaching colleges were openly disparaged as not “serious,” even as the market for other positions went off the rails.  I’ll happily leave that issue to my colleagues at research universities.

But the first reason strikes me as potentially fixable.  If public teaching colleges were to enter into deliberate, intentional relationships with research institutions to prepare their grad students for jobs that actually exist, I could imagine real benefit on both sides.  

But first, we’d have to bring the relationship out into the open.

That wasn’t the meeting I was anticipating.  It was better.  The next step is to see what, concretely, we can do.  But at least now I see an issue I didn’t see before, and have some sense of the reasons for it.  In my nerdy way, that gives me hope.

Wise and worldly academic readers, did you ever hide your side teaching gig from your advisor?

Ask the Administrator: What About Master’s Programs?

A new correspondent writes:

First, I'm frustrated by why "grad school" always, always seems to bedefined as leading to terminal degrees (an MFA, for example, but moregenerally speaking, a Ph.D./D.A.). 

Second, the assumption generally seems to be that one wants a Ph.D. inorder to get a tenure-track position at a university. Although I'msure they're out there, I have yet to actually encounter much of adiscussion of, "I want a Ph.D. because I want to become really expertin my field." There also seems to be little, if any, discussion aboutalternatives to post-doctoral non-academic (or non-teaching)positions. My own experience has given me some insight other folksmight not have - I've an aunt and an uncle who both have Ph.D.s in thesciences, and do research; although both are affiliated withuniversities, and my aunt also teaches, her teaching duties aresecondary, and her Ph.D. was not acquired because she wanted to teach.Ffurthermore, my mother has a Ph.D. in the humanities, and while Iknow she would have preferred teaching at the college/universitylevel, she spent her entire teaching career at the secondary level.(Again, I'm sure they're out there, but I've never encountered anotherteacher who got an advanced degree in the humanities and stayed at thesecondary level.) 

I would love to see more of a discussion about master's degreeprograms and the reasons why folks get those degrees. I'm in gradschool at the moment, but "grad school" = "getting a Master's degree,"although I also teach at a community college and don't aspire toeither get a Ph.D. so I can get in higher education, nor do I want tomove to larger school for that reason. (To be fair, in my undergradyears, begun when I was in my late 20s, 10 years ago, I went through ateacher education program because I wanted to teach middle school. Igraduated 15 minutes before the economy caved in on itself like a flanin a cupboard, as Eddie Izzard would say, and have found it easier toget a job teaching at the college level - in two different states -without a graduate degree than at in secondary education with all thequalifications.) 

I'm tired of the limited discussion about the reasons one goes to gradschool, how grad school is actually defined, and the lack of examinedalternatives. Surely I wasn't the only undergrad with whom this wasnot discussed.

I’ll start by conceding the point that much of the discussion online about whether people should go to grad school in the humanities tacitly assumes that grad school means doctoral programs.  But there’s no reason it has to.  Master’s programs are well-established, and serve purposes of their own.

(For present purposes, I’ll address the freestanding Master’s programs, as opposed to the “Master’s as consolation prize for not finishing the doctorate” Master’s degrees.  In those contexts, a Master’s has a different meaning.)

In a followup email, the correspondent noted that she’s currently adjuncting, and she would like to be able to teach full-time in a community college.  A Master’s will give eligibility for that, though the usual warnings about the ratio of candidates to openings still apply.

For me, it boils down to purpose.  What’s the intended payoff of going for a Master’s in a liberal arts field?

If it’s simply moving up in the hierarchy in a place where you already work, and where occupational grades are clearly defined, then the idea makes sense.  Jobs like that are fading fast, but some still exist.  

If the idea is simply living the life of the mind, I’d recommend finding the lowest-cost program you can.  A year or two of grad school can easily weigh you down with tens of thousands of dollars of debt if you aren’t careful.  Intellectual stimulation can be had in other, less expensive ways.

A few months ago, Tressie McMillan Cottom did a piece on the “should I go to grad school?” literature that gave me pause.  She pointed out that for many people of color, getting a graduate degree pays off in the job market entirely independently of academia.  Getting some letters after your name makes a difference, particularly if you would otherwise be under a cloud.  And even adjuncting may be a better gig than, say, flipping burgers.  

I’m embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t thought of it that way.  If you’re in a social location in which getting your hand stamped will open doors that should have been open in the first place, then the payoff may well be worthwhile even if you never use the experience directly.  I hate to think of tuition as a racism tax, but if that’s what it is for you, and those letters after your name make your life markedly easier, then I’m in no position to argue.  That may be what the FDA would call an “off-label use,” but if that’s what it takes to build a decent life, then I drop my objections.  Everyone should have access to a decent life.  I’d rather live in a world in which that issue was moot, but there it is.

For folks to whom that doesn’t apply, though, I remain largely skeptical.  Graduate school is expensive, both directly and in the form of opportunity cost, and the payoff is often poor.  In non-technical fields, the demand for grads typically isn’t there.  If you get funded and your other options aren’t great, then it may make sense.  But if you have to go into significant debt, I still lean strongly against it in most cases.  

But that’s me.  Wise and worldly readers, what do you think?  Should most students be discouraged from pursuing Master’s degrees in liberal arts fields?  Are there other uses for Master’s degrees in, say, English, that make them better ideas than I’ve assumed?

Have a question?  Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.

Friday Fragments

It’s the end of the semester, and you can see it in the exhausted, pinched expressions on campus.  The trick to this time of year is not to sneak up on anybody.  Or to make any sudden movements.  Or to attempt irony in any way, shape, or form.

It happens every May.  June is just around the corner...

--

The Boy’s baseball team has really struggled so far this Spring.  This week they had an especially long and ugly game, during which he rode the bench for the first couple of innings.  (They have more than nine kids on the team, so they have to rotate.)  It was one of those games in which the catcher’s throw to second -- attempting to catch a base-stealer -- rolled into the outfield, and the outfielder’s subsequent throw to third wound up in the bleachers.   Everything went wrong: at one point, the umpire even called a strike on a pitch that crossed the plate on the first bounce.  I’m not kidding.

On the ride home, TB had a bit of a hangdog expression.  I asked him what was wrong.  He responded, and I am not making this up,

“It’s hard to sit there and watch other people suck.”

Who says baseball doesn’t teach life lessons?  I want to copyright that and put it on bumper stickers.

--

On the other hand, this is also reception season, when we celebrate the things that went right on campus.  

This semester we had our first implementation of self-paced developmental math.  Making that happen required cooperation among faculty, deans, financial aid, the registrar’s office, IT, and facilities, among other folks.  And we did it.

Early feedback is encouraging.  We’ll have actual numbers after the semester is over, but in the meantime, I’m thrilled at the level of cooperation that happened to make the model work.  The reception for the math working group was modest, but probably the most fulfilling I’ll have all Spring.  Making cultural headway while making academic headway is the best kind of win.

How Long Are Bad Grades Good For?

How long are bad grades good for?

I’ve never actually seen a serious, empirical study of this, but I’m hoping it’s out there and some among my wise and worldly readers can point me in the right direction.

Like many colleges, mine has a “fresh start” policy for students who are coming back after many years and want to erase a checkered academic past.  The idea is that someone who, say, partied his way through a terrible semester ten years ago, and then spent a decade getting kicked around by the job market before deciding to return, is probably meaningfully different now.  Continuing to hold that early foray against him doesn’t really make sense at this point.  

That matters for a few reasons.  Academic probation is one; if you average a youthful 0.2 with a mature 3.0, you’re still below 2.0 and therefore automatically on probation.  But if you had just shown up out of the blue and achieved that same 3.0, you’d be fine.  What a decade-old semester reflects about current ability or performance is obscure at best.

Admission to selective programs is another.  For our Nursing program, for example, students have to apply after getting through a bunch of gen ed and prerequisite classes (like Biology).  They compete for scarce seats -- a scarcity driven largely by the availability of clinical sites and instructors -- partly on the basis of GPA.  A student who is forever weighed down by a bad experience dating from the 1990’s will never make it in.  Considering that adult students with a sense of purpose often do quite well in Nursing, excluding them like that wouldn’t make sense.

And then there’s geography.  GPA’s don’t transfer; only credits do.  Therefore, a student who had a rough semester at East Side CC and returns twenty years later carries the old GPA, but that student’s twin brother who had the same rough semester at ESCC twenty years ago enrolls now at West Side CC and starts fresh.  What educational or social purpose is served by punishing a failure to move, I’d be hard pressed to say.

Financial aid is a much stickier issue.  I’ll defer to specialists on this, but my impression is that the Feds don’t have any sort of “fresh start” provision.  Even if we grant what amounts to an academic do-over, the Feds won’t.  That matters for things like “satisfactory academic progress” and lifetime Pell limits.   

I’m not thrilled about the Feds, but we control only what we control.

Conceptually, I’m comfortable with the idea of allowing a forty-year-old returning student to write off a bad semester that dates back to age eighteen.  But in the world of applied policy, the easy example of a twenty-two year gap will lead quickly to applications from people with a two year gap, asking for the same thing.  Beyond personal intuition, I don’t know what the temporal threshold should be.

Has anyone out there seen (or done) research on the amount of time after which earlier college performance is no longer meaningfully predictive?  Is there an empirical answer to how long bad grades are good for?

Competing with For-Profits

The news of SNHU’s College for America getting approval to offer bachelor’s degrees got me thinking.

What would happen if community colleges were to take as an explicit goal competing with for-profits?

We already do, in many ways, but it’s mostly incidental.  We happen to go after some of the same populations, and offer some of the same programs.  But it hasn’t been a distinct purpose.

I could see a strong public policy justification for doing it.  As a group, for-profits saddle students with far more debt than public colleges (and particularly community colleges) do. While quality within each sector varies, many for-profits are not regionally accredited, so their credits mostly don’t transfer.  (A few large ones, such as Phoenix and DeVry, are regionally accredited.)  To the extent that many for-profits leave students worse off than they found them, I can see a public good being served by making a more aggressive effort to provide a visible public alternative.

Of course, there’s also an easily imagined ideological objection.  Why should the government sponsor competition with private enterprise?  I’d find that objection much more compelling if the private enterprise in question weren’t almost entirely dependent on government-sponsored financial aid.

More to the point, though, what would a frontal competitive assault on for-profits look like?

Before we do anything else, we’d have to look seriously at what makes for-profits successful.  (In politics, they call it “opposition research.”)  They’re quite good at certain things; if they weren’t, they’d go out of business.  For example:

- They understand the salience of short-term barriers to applying.  As Tressie McMillan Cottom has pointed out, to a student who’s really up against it economically, a twenty thousand dollar student loan due years in the future might as well be monopoly money, but a fifty dollar application fee is a real barrier.  Admissions counselors in for-profits will go out of their way to track down transcripts, for example, to give expedited decisions on transfer credits, which tend to be generous.  (They understand the concept of a “loss leader.”)  

- They provide concierge-level service in areas like financial aid and admissions.  When I was at DeVry, the local on-campus enrollment peaked at about 4,000.  (This was around 1999-2000.)  It had an admissions staff of probably fifteen to twenty.  When I went to CCM, it had double the enrollment, with less than half the admissions staff.  To a prospective student who’s on the fence, the difference between being actively courted and being left alone may be enough to tip a balance.

- They advertise specific programs.  For reasons I’ve never entirely understood, public colleges tend not to do that.  They tend to focus on the overall brand, leaving it to the prospective student to find out whether a given college teaches, say, HVAC.  Most for-profits offer a much narrower range of majors than most community colleges do, by design.  That narrow range offers a clear and easily explained identity.  A college with a hundred majors, that doesn’t specifically advertise any of them, comes across as more of a black box.  

That doesn’t matter for students who already know what’s there, whether through family connections, friends, or just a general sense of higher ed.  But for students who don’t have those connections or contexts, it makes a difference.  

- They barely do remediation, if they do it at all.  They understand its impact on student retention and success.  Remember, from a business perspective, a retained student is a repeat customer.  And it’s much cheaper to retain a customer than to attract a new one.

It’s possible for non-profits to learn from these.  SNHU’s College for America, for example, is doing a spectacular job of offering a non-profit alternative by actually working with large employers to become the in-house education option.  It has a narrow range of majors, a low upfront cost, a built-in support system, and regional accreditation.  Now, it’s even offering bachelor’s degrees.  (It also has a competency-based model, helping it get around Baumol’s cost disease.)  I’m consistently impressed by what CfA is doing, and I hope that community colleges can learn from it.  It’s possible to build an effective, ethical competitor that meets the same needs as for-profits, but for a higher purpose.  In our own way, we could do something similar.

Culturally, we don’t have a history of taking on specific competitors.  But the world is changing.  I’m thinking it may be time that we address the competition head-on.  

Seeing the Dog

“For colleges and universities to chart a successful future going forward, I believe that faculty members and administrators alike must move beyond constituency politics.” -- Susan Resneck Pierce

Well, yes.  But there’s a knowledge problem, and consequently, an incentive problem.  

Pierce wrote a terrific piece in IHE about the difficulties that thoughtful presidents face with faculty skeptics who simply refuse to believe that any challenges their campuses face have anything to do with external forces.  In their all-too-common view, nothing’s wrong that can’t be solved by blaming administrators.  (Pierce is careful to point out that these views are typically held by smallish percentages, but that those smallish percentages are far louder than their colleagues, who are either cowed or disgusted into silence.)  The pitfalls of the monocausal explanation are several.  It gets the facts wrong, which means that meeting any immediate demand doesn’t actually solve the underlying problem.  It keeps (or drives) good people out of administration, leaving that role to others.  And it discourages constructive participation by poisoning the climate; after a while, cooler heads simply opt out.  

Social psychologists call the drive to find and punish villains the “fundamental attribution error.”  It’s the fallacy of ascribing motive without understanding context.  Why did the driver in front of me brake suddenly?  Obviously, he’s a thoughtless jerk!  It couldn’t be that a dog just ran out in front of him -- after all, I, from my vantage point behind him, didn’t see a dog!  

If we want to move the discussion forward, we have to make the dog visible.

A college, by definition, is a collection of very smart people.  In the right climate, it’s a potentially fertile ground for crowdsourcing solutions.  But if the faculty and staff don’t see the dog, they’ll reach the wrong conclusions and instead take positions based on what’s right in front of them.  

That could mean retreating to personal or departmental self-interest, or it could mean simply shooting the messenger.  Either way, an opportunity is lost.

The first step is to make the dog visible.  Share with the faculty and staff the information on external issues.  What’s happening regionally?  What’s happening with the local demographics?  What’s the state interested in supporting, and to what degree?  What’s driving the current budget squeeze?  What’s driving the longer-term budget squeeze?  What seems to be working?

We did that locally in January, with a college-wide “data day.”  We put all manner of information on posters and put them up all around the room on a day when the faculty came back.  The goal, which I think was actually achieved, was to get a common fact base out there.  It was only a beginning, and one could certainly argue about what other things should have been included, but it was an attempt to at least indicate the size, nature, and sheer presence of the dog.  At that point, it became possible to start a more fruitful discussion about how to respond to it.

If you skip that step and just go to “what do you think we should do?,” you’ll tend to get answers based in personal or departmental circumstances.  Worse, if you skip even that step and just go to “here’s what we’re doing, make it work,” you’ll engender all sorts of resentment, foot-dragging, and sabotage.  Absent context, it’s easy to impute all sorts of motives, and some will.  

Of course, even a really well-executed bit of dog portraiture will bring some skepticism.  But truth is persistent.  Even if it initially meets with a wall of denial -- which sometimes happens -- it has a way of outlasting alternatives.  

In much of the Northeast, for instance, local demographics are not favorable for higher education for the next decade or more.  That’s not because any one administrator anywhere did anything.  It’s not under the control of any one college.  But it’s real, and failure to deal with it may prove fatal.  In my perfect world, someday we’ll have a collegewide discussion of Baumol’s Cost Disease.  But we’re not there yet.  We’re still at the ‘fact’ stage.  Theorizing -- in the ancient sense of “seeing” -- is the next step.

Until faculty and staff see the dog, it’s all too easy to assume that administrators are just driving recklessly.  (To be fair, some probably are.)  Shared governance or crowdsourcing works best with a shared context.  Without that, constituent politics and worse are probably inevitable.

A Different Approach to Class-Based Affirmative Action

I get a little twitchy when I read about class-based affirmative action in university admissions, though probably not for the reasons you might expect.  

The underlying premise of the debate around affirmative action in university admissions seems to be that seats on the lifeboat are limited; therefore, allocation of those seats is a matter of high import.  Some argue that those seats should be allocated according to pure academic merit, whatever that means.  Some argue for a merit-based system with some recognition of different opportunities for ‘merit.’  Some argue for demographic representation.  Some argue for merit until they notice their own group being disadvantaged.  But every single one of those positions accepts as given the idea that seats on the lifeboat are finite.

What if they weren’t?  What if, with apologies to Roy Scheider, we had a bigger boat?

I’m thinking we should start with the obvious.  Let’s equalize per-student funding among sectors of public higher education.  Give the same per-student support to community colleges as given to four-year teaching colleges (and/or Master’s level universities) and flagship research universities.  This isn’t as radical a proposal as, say, Sara Goldrick-Rab’s idea to defund private universities and make the first two years of public college free; this could be accommodated within existing structures.  (Her proposal and mine aren’t mutually exclusive; I’m just offering an easier place to start.)

Until we do that, we’re creating an artificial shortage.  If we starve out the institutions that serve the vast majority of students, and instead pour money into universities that turn away most of their applicants, then the shortage over which we fight is inevitable.  

But wait, I imagine one saying, what about the costs of research?

Research should be paid for with research funding.  I’m talking about institutional funding.

Giving community college students parity in institutional support would allow us to address some issues of long standing.  We could finally support reasonable full-time faculty ratios, for example.  We could ramp up our Institutional Research capabilities, a notable weakness of the sector as a whole.  (HCC is a lucky exception.)  We would have the resources with which to conduct long-term local or regional experiments.  We could ramp up both our IT capabilities and our human staffing, the better to capture the best gains from technology while preserving the human touch that we consistently find makes the most difference.

Even better, we’d be able to provide opportunities that capable students with difficult lives could actually take.  

The whole “undermatching” literature, of which class-based affirmative action is conceptually a piece, assumes that the only reason an academically capable student would turn down a distant, exclusive institution for a local and inclusive one is ignorance.  I reject that out of hand.  Students have three-dimensional lives.  They have family obligations.  They work for pay.  They even -- horrors! -- have regional preferences just because they do.  (When elites have those, we call it “taste.”)  

If the seats to which local students have access are just as good as the seats that are currently so contested, then many of the battles we’re currently fighting would quickly become moot.  And that would be okay.  

Or, we can continue to fund sectors in inverse proportion to their percentages of students of color.  Though I have to admit having a hard time imagining a principled defense of that.

I’m thinking, let’s start with parity.  Let the accessible colleges have the funding to make themselves worthier of the students who need them.  If that’s not enough, then we can have that discussion.  But until then, we’ll be stuck arguing in circles.

Moving Parts

Earlier this week, Kate Bowles, an Australian academic, sent me the link to this speech by Australian Minister for Education Christopher Pyne.  The speech is about “setting universities free” in Australia to diversify their missions; he specifically cites the American model of teaching-focused undergraduate colleges as an example of a direction he’d like to see Australia move.  On the same day, I happened across this piece by Nicholas Lemann on the idea of the university, with a particular focus on the California master plan developed by Clark Kerr in the 1960’s.  Reading the two pieces next to each other generated a certain cognitive dissonance.

As an American, reading the Pyne piece was a bit jarring.  He refers repeatedly to the “autonomy” of universities as key to their successful functioning.  I gather from context that “autonomy” is a form of “pay your own way,” or a high-minded way of justifying the defunding of the sector.  Frankly, though, from an American context, it sounds like a better deal than the combination of forced austerity with ever-increasing “accountability” that we know so well.  If you don’t want to pay the piper anymore, at least stop trying to call the tune.  But I wouldn’t be surprised to see “autonomy” lead in a little while to scrutiny of some boondoggle or another, to be followed by the austerity/accountability dyad we know so well.  

Australia has a strong research university model regulated at the national level, but it doesn’t yet have sectors comparable to the four-year teaching colleges or two-year community colleges we have in the U.S.  He’s calling for increasing the diversity of institutional types, and apparently giving each type more autonomy, in the name of meeting the increasing need for higher education while supporting the international competitiveness of a few elite universities.  

I’ll admit being leery of the rhetoric of “setting institutions free,” since that’s usually used as a euphemism for budget cuts.  But I was struck by how the American system looked from the outside.

Clark Kerr’s master plan for California, drawn up in the early 1960’s when he was the chancellor of the University of California, relied exactly on a division of institutional types.  In Kerr’s plan, the elite research universities -- especially UC-Berkeley and UCLA -- would do the lion’s share of academic research.  They would pit themselves against universities from around the world.  The second tier would be bachelor’s granting colleges (the Cal State system).  Finally, community colleges located all over the state would serve both as vocational training centers and as entry points for the financially disadvantaged.  In theory, a student could start at a community college, transfer to a Cal State for a bachelor’s, and then, if so inclined, go on for graduate work at Berkeley.

As Lemann notes, though, the master plan started to spin out of control within just a few years.  The less-elite universities wanted status and funding, too, so they started trying to “raise their academic profile.”  That could involve adding graduate programs, say, or raiding the star faculty from other campuses.  The coin of the academic realm for faculty at the mid-tier schools was still research; star teachers are rarely recognized, let alone hired, beyond their home campus.  While the “system” as a whole required a certain balance, the interests of many constituent parts of the system were to move up the ranks.  Meanwhile, community colleges were increasingly blamed for taking in the students who didn’t go elsewhere.  In the years after Prop 13, the students whose public school experience had been desiccated showed up in community college, needing far more help than the system was built to provide.

In looking at the proposed plan for Australia, I couldn’t help but see some parallels.  When you “set institutions free,” their choices may or may not make sense from a systemic level.  They will choose to do what makes sense for them individually.  In the American case, that has led to a difficult combination of cost increases and economic polarization, with some weird imbalances between the parts of the system.  That’s why, for example, we continue to produce ever more liberal arts doctorates, even with steadily declining demand for them.  Each segment of the system is acting according to its own imperatives; the fact that the imperatives conflict is not any one institution’s problem.

The American system has much to be said for it, but some of its most persistent flaws stem from the difference between a coherent system and a vast collection of moving parts, each with its own imperatives and will.  Moving up the value chain is individually rational for any given campus, but when everyone tries it, you get tuition inflation.  Growing enrollments is a good move for any individual campus, but when everyone tries it at the same time and the population is flat, you’ll have issues.  

In other words, if Australia wants to learn from the American system, I’d recommend focusing less on “American” and more on “system.”  Otherwise, it will open itself up to the same kinds of tuition spirals, producer casualization, and demand imbalances we know so well.  

(Thanks to Kate Bowles for correcting mistakes about the Australian system in an earlier draft.)

Kay McClenney

Kay McClenney is retiring today.  For some of us, this is quietly devastating.

Kay is known in the community college world for many reasons.  She has been an active leader in the University of Texas community college leadership program, along with her husband, Byron.  She has been the director of CCSSE, the country's largest and most influential survey of community college student engagement, for over a decade.  She coined a phrase -- "students don't do optional" -- that has become foundational wisdom for academic leaders everywhere, even if most of us secretly wish it wasn't true.

In my world, though, she stood out early as the single best director of conference panels I have ever seen.  She's the master of the form.  I take notes watching her work.

Anyone who has seen panels of presidents knows well the dangers of the format.  Conference panelists generally are known for running over time limits; presidents in particular can sometimes get a bit windy.  And relevance can be a real problem when people have every incentive to make themselves look as good as possible, even in the context of addressing difficult issues.

At every single panel I ever saw her run -- probably a half-dozen over the last several years -- Kay managed the impressive feat of simultaneously keeping the discussion moving, keeping people on point, calling out evasions, elevating the discourse, and managing the crowd.  Even more impressive, she did it all gracefully.  I have never seen anyone do it as well as her, even once; she pulls it off every single time.  

A few years ago, I mustered the courage after one of her panels to introduce myself.  I was still writing as "Dean Dad" at that point, and initially she had no idea who I was.  I was just some fanboy trying to catch her attention while she wrestled with her bag.  Even then, though, she was generous with her time, gracious with the unknown stranger, and personally kind.  When I mentioned that I was "Dean Dad," she laughed, and we started a periodic correspondence that did me far more good than it did her.  When my publisher asked who I wanted to write the foreward to my book, hers was the only name I submitted.  True to form, she was gracious, on-point, and bracingly smart.  

I don't have a habit of writing retirement tributes.  But some people leave the field so much better than they found it that failing to mark the moment just wouldn't be right.  Thank you, Kay, for your work, but thank you, too, for setting such a wonderful example of how to do engaged scholarship the right way.  Conferences won't be the same without you.

Escape from New York

Yesterday’s post on indentured servitude drew some scolding from people who thought the metaphor was overdrawn.  Then, I read this.

James Skoufis, a Democratic Assemblyman in New York State, is proposing making CUNY and SUNY tuition-free for students who fulfill two conditions:

1. They have to perform 125-250 hours of community service per year.  This seems fine.

2. They must agree to stay in New York for five years after graduation.

The “indentured servitude” thing is starting to look more accurate.  Students who can’t afford private college won’t be allowed to move out of New York State for five years.  (If they do, then the tuition waivers they received will suddenly turn into loans.)

Wow.  Just, wow.

I assume that Assemblyman Skoufis means well, but this is a spectacularly bad idea, particularly for traditional-aged students.

I’ll start with the basics.  The early and middle twenties are some of the most mobile years, especially for college graduates.  Those are the years when they try to break into new career fields, find spouses or life partners, and make their way in the world.  Most of the people with whom I went to college were in different states (or countries) at 27 than at graduation, myself included.  We went where the opportunity was.  That’s what ambitious young people do.  And as a society, we desperately need them to do that.  That’s where breakthroughs come from.

I understand the impulse, from a legislative perspective, to want to capture the gains from education locally.  After all, you helped underwrite them.  But state-level protectionism isn’t going to lead anywhere good economically.  If New York tries this, I could imagine other states following suit.  Before long, peasants would be tied to the land all across the country.  How this will help aggregate talent, I have absolutely no idea.

You know what else ambitious young people do, when they aren’t chasing medical school slots or dream jobs?  They couple up.  I can only imagine the ugly conversations.  “Honey, I’d love to come live with you, but I’d need a dowry to pay off my loans.”  I’d like to think that we’ve moved beyond the “dowry” years.  The social interest served by coercing sub-optimal coupling, I can’t even imagine.  And we’d be sending an interesting message to young people: marry interracially if you want, marry your own gender if you want, but whatever you do, don’t marry anyone from Jersey!  That’s over the line!

(For the record, TW hails from the Garden State.  I will defend New Jersey’s honor.)

New York is a biggish state, but it’s finite.  If you’re from, say, Syracuse, you may well face a choice between a rough local job market and moving away.  New York City is an amazing place, but it’s not for everyone.  And outside of the NYC area, many of the smaller economies aren’t necessarily thriving.  Forcing someone to remain in a languishing region when they could have landed a productive position in Boston or D.C. or San Francisco doesn’t serve any useful purpose.  

It can be difficult for a locality or a state to invest in education only to watch talent leave.  But tying talent down is not the answer.  Pushing other states and localities to invest, too, is.  

Higher education should not reinforce provincialism.  I fully agree with reducing the debt burden on college students and new graduates.  But cutting down their futures to what fits within the state lines is not the way to do it.  If a new graduate with a great idea for a startup wants to escape from New York and find fortune in Palo Alto, let her.  And if a nerdy kid from Rochester somehow meets and falls in love with a Jersey Girl, back off.  Surely, somewhere, you can find a real problem to solve.  Maybe you could start with SUNY’s appropriation...

The First Time as Tragedy...

I’m just old enough to have seen ideas I had thought long dead come back to life.  They’re typically about as attractive as the undead can be expected to be.  During the 90’s and early 00’s, an idea originally floated by Barry Goldwater and considered wacky -- turning Social Security over to the stock market -- had a brief and scary second life.  (Perhaps predictably, it was felled by a long bear market.)  Now, we’re starting to see variations on indentured servitude come back.

In the earlier version of indentured servitude, people in other countries would agree to work for specific employers for shockingly low pay for a set number of years upon arrival in the new world, in exchange for passage to the new world.  The idea was that they would pay off their travel through underpaid labor for an extended period.  In the 1980’s and 1990’s, I was taught that this was a form of barbarism that had been consigned to the past.

It’s returning, but this time with application to college tuition rather than seafare.  

In some cases, the patron is a state.  For example, Oregon is considering a bill whereby students could enroll without any upfront tuition, but would have to pledge three percent of their earnings for the first twenty years after graduation.  

It’s a peculiar conceit on a number of levels.  First, and most obviously, it would require the state to front the lost revenue to the college or university for many years before any sort of payback would kick in.  I haven’t noticed a trend of states suddenly wanting to double or triple their appropriations.

Second, by taking federal student aid off the table, it would effectively displace federal dollars with state dollars.  That means that states would have to increase their appropriations by even more, just to keep the colleges even.  And the taxpayers of, say, Oregon, would pay federal taxes to support student aid in other states that students in Oregon wouldn’t get.  That would be on top of the support they’d have to increase for Oregon itself.  Conceptually, it’s possible, but politically, I’d consider it astonishing.

Third, it’s not obvious to me how Oregon would enforce collection across state lines.

Fourth, “the first twenty years” doesn’t necessarily mean the first twenty years.  Students who immediately go to grad school, say, wouldn’t generate much payback.  Given the realities of “adverse selection,” I’d expect to see students who are targeting graduate school to enroll in this plan, and students majoring in, say, computer science avoiding it like the plague.

That’s because -- fifth -- some students would wind up paying back far more than they ever would have owed.  The students to whom that would apply would probably figure that out early on, and avoid the plan.  That would leave the plan with the most “expensive” students, setting in motion a death spiral.

Sixth, though -- and I’m a little surprised that few commentaries mention this one -- it would cap college and university revenues at the level of entry-level wage growth.  Given that any labor-intensive enterprise will inevitably see costs increase faster than the economy as a whole, this is a recipe for long-term austerity.  (And that’s before factoring in any sort of tax revolt by high earners.)  If we want higher education to remain more than MOOCs, we’ll need to come to terms with the fact of it being labor-intensive.  We haven’t done a good job of that so far -- the trend towards adjunctification being the most spectacular example -- but simply denying it altogether will only lead to collapse.  Transformation isn’t cheap.

Predictably enough, states aren’t the only patrons interested in this model.  Some private investors are putting up tuition money in exchange for cuts of future earnings of students who are likely to make big money.

The private model is at least immune to the objection of displacing federal money with state money.  But it replaces the “adverse selection” death spiral with a pure focus on high potential earners.  If you’re a future hedge fund trader, you’re appealing; if you’re a future social worker, they want no part of you.  From an ROI perspective, I get that, but in terms of the public good, it’s catastrophic.  

Indentured servitude collapsed for some good reasons.  I’d like to see it crawl back under the historical rock from which it crawled, to be replaced instead by funding mechanisms that reflect both the reality of labor-intensive industries and the necessity of paying attention to the social good.  Let’s not replace a flawed system with a dead one.