Placing the Actor

You know how you can see an actor on a tv show and recognize him from somewhere, but you can’t remember where, and it drives you a little bit crazy until it comes to you, days or weeks later?  That’s how I am with the story that the loan guarantor ECMC is buying several dozen Corinthian College campuses for less than a half-million each.  There’s more to the story, but I haven’t quite placed the actor yet.  

ECMC is buying 56 campuses and paying very little for each.  It’s saying it will run them as nonprofits, and will show good faith by starting with a 20 percent tuition cut.  It’s promising to bring in a top-flight educational management team, despite never having run even a single campus of a college before.  And it’s saying, probably correctly, that it won’t be a guarantor of any of the loans on its own campuses, because the Feds will.

I can see why the Feds are eager to sell.  They have no desire to run a chain of colleges, and full refunds and payouts to everyone would be terribly expensive.  Selling to ECMC makes the problem go away, or at least spreads it thin over several years.  It strikes me as the same logic that made selling Chrysler to Fiat seem like a good idea.  The Feds may be eager enough to sell to allow a tuition cut that would violate the 90/10 rule, as Trace Urdan pointed out yesterday.

But ECMC’s interest is harder to explain.  It has the means to do the deal, certainly, and it has the opportunity, but I’m stuck on the motive.  Why is it doing this?

At least with Fiat and Chrysler, there was a straightforward profit motive.  Since ECMC is committed to running the campuses as nonprofits -- it’s calling the nonprofit operation Zenith, which reminded me of Tenured Radical -- a straightforward profit motive is off the table.  

The CEO is speaking the language of philanthropy, but I’m having trouble with that.  It’s pretty far out of character for a loan collector, for one thing, and actually taking over and operating 56 campuses when you’ve never even run one seems like a convoluted way to make a contribution. If it wanted to make philanthropic donations, there’s no shortage of foundations and nonprofits already around that would be happy to receive a large check.  I’m not convinced.

Some commenters suggested that it was a principal/agent problem, in which the upper management of ECMC was buying itself high-paying sinecures before its current industry collapsed completely.  It’s possible, I guess, though it seems like an awfully indirect and labor-intensive way to do something that they could have achieved much more simply.  The financial services sector is notoriously clever about finding ways to make money; the idea that they’re buying campus presidencies for themselves just seems...odd.  I’ve been around my share of bankers over the years; I’ve never heard one say “nonprofits...that’s where the money is!”  It seems more cynical than insightful.

Granted, a hundred years ago some titans of industry used to like to establish nonprofit universities named after themselves as a combination of egotism and noblesse oblige.  But that doesn’t seem to be the case here.  They aren’t naming the campuses after themselves, and they don’t seem to have some sort of larger Cause -- whether ideological, religious, or whatever -- in mind.  They’re talking instead about pruning program offerings based on local job markets.  That’s fine, as far as it goes, but it’s pretty standard.  There’s no obvious “hook.”  They don’t seem to be out to prove some sort of theological or pedagogical point, or to build monuments to themselves.  They’re talking about it like a new product rollout, and the product doesn’t seem to be substantially different from what’s already on the market.  After all, if you want to offer slightly cut-rate vocational programs, what’s to distinguish you from the local community college?  And the community college starts with both local reputational advantage and lower tuition.

Someone suggested yesterday that it could be an exercise in property flipping.  I guess that’s possible, though I’d imagine most Corinthian locations are leased, rather than owned.  (I may be wrong on that.)  It could also be an attempt to buy accreditation, as in the “taxi medallion” sales of 2000-10, but those were usually for the sake of profit.  The nonprofit piece muddies the picture.

Yesterday I came up with another angle. What if the idea is to use the campuses as data mines for the sake of other financial products?  

It’s not entirely fanciful. That’s what Google does with Gmail, Google Docs, and the rest of its “free” offerings.  It offers services free to users, in exchange for gathering all sorts of data it can sell to advertisers, whether directly (as data) or indirectly (as ad placements).  If the service is free to use, the user is the product.  Facebook does that, Twitter does that; it’s not unusual in certain industries.  Older media operated somewhat differently, but on the same principle: radio stations sell listeners to advertisers, allowing listeners to listen for free.  Newspapers sell readers to advertisers.  The model is more refined than it once was, but not conceptually new.

In this case, replace “free” with “nonprofit,” or even “loss leader,” and the idea may work.  Given a chain of 56 different campuses in a single system, it would be easy to run each campus as its own test market.  The data-mining possibilities are astonishing, given the amount of confidential information that students disclose on financial aid forms, among other things.  If the campuses are basically break-even enterprises on their own after the first couple of years, then the data becomes a self-renewing profit source.  Every semester brings a fresh new crop of students, each representing fresh new data.  ECMC may not make a profit off campus operations, but it may profit -- directly, indirectly, or both -- from the data it could mine from the campuses.  

I hope that this is tinfoil-hat territory, and that student data is much more protected than that.  But I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that an experienced loan collector had found a loophole in the regulations around student financial data.  They’re pretty good at that sort of thing.

Wise and worldly readers, is there a better explanation?  Is ECMC simply and suddenly consumed with civic spirit and a love of the common good?  Have I given short shrift to the “sinecures” theory?  Can someone please help me place the actor?

The Ecosystem Problem

People may or may not get what they pay for, but systems do.  A new report on the growing number of new Ph.D.’s hurtling into a market that doesn’t need them is a sign of a larger failure to look at higher education as a single system.

Despite a chronic underemployment problem for new Ph.D.’s, American higher education is producing more of them than ever.  The numbers of new doctorates are hitting all-time highs every year, even though there’s a large and increasing backlog of Ph.D.’s who would like, but are unable to find, the jobs for which they were trained.  

The physical sciences have adapted, to some degree, through the increased use of postdocs.  In the humanities and social sciences, for the most part, those remain the exception.  

The catastrophic and growing disconnect between graduate institutions and the larger academic job market is a function of the incentives to which graduate institutions are responding.  Given an ongoing and well-publicized (at least within the industry) employment problem, why do graduate programs keep growing?

The short answer: although the larger system doesn’t need more new grads, each individual research university needs a constant, and preferably growing, supply of graduate students.  The incentives at the institutional level are the opposite of the needs at the system level.  New graduates pay the price for the disconnect.

In a perfect world, of course, there would be vastly increased public support for teaching-intensive institutions, with a resulting increase in the demand for permanent faculty.  That would be all to the good, and would certainly help.  But if it were that easy, it would have happened by now.  Barring a sea change in our politics, what is there to do?

I’d start by taking a serious look at higher education as a larger ecosystem of institutions.  It’s currently run as a sort of Great Chain of Being, in which the institutions on top -- the Harvards and whatnot -- dictate the terms, and everyone else is judged and funded based on their proximity to the Harvard model.  The institutions with the wealthiest students get the most money, especially if you include the tax exemption for endowments.  The institutions with the neediest students get the least, and are judged on measures -- first-time, full-time graduation rates, most notably -- devised with elites in mind.  And the Ph.D. graduates of top-tier institutions are prepared in ways that ignore completely, when they don’t denigrate, the realities of roles at teaching-intensive places.  We speak of research “opportunities” and teaching “loads,” rather than the reverse.

The internal incentives for a graduate university involve keeping the freshman sections staffed with teaching assistants.  That requires a pipeline of graduate students.  And the faculty in graduate programs will fight to the end to preserve their programs, whether their grads get jobs or not.  It’s easy for any given university to acknowledge the problem, but to cast its own programs as exceptions.  Yes, there are too many Ph.D.’s, they might say; all the more reason for our competitors to get out of our way.  It’s the same idea behind the Onion article finding that 99 percent of American drivers support increased use of mass transit by other people.

In my own state, as an example, community colleges are subject to “performance funding,” but the flagship state university is not.  From a system perspective, that’s backwards.  Graduate programs are not held accountable for employment rates of their graduates, but they are held accountable for getting the freshman sections covered.  They respond accordingly.  If instead they were held accountable for the fates of their graduates -- which might entail, among other things, preparing them for the realities of teaching at community colleges -- we could finally get a handle on the labor imbalances.  Add to that some reasonable parity of per-student funding, and the community colleges could actually afford to hire some of them.

As long as each institutional sector can look only at its own needs, we’ll have gaps between them.  If we’re serious about bridging those gaps -- and reducing the human damage from hardworking scholars falling into an economic hole -- it’s time to tie the fates of the various sectors together.  Until then, we’ll keep seeing the same ridiculous graph, year after year.

Not Voting With Their Feet, Exactly...

Many years ago, when I was at DeVry but looking for another place to work, I saw an ad for the community college in the county where The Wife grew up, and where her parents still lived.  I noted the address of the college, and asked her where it was relative to her parents.  “County?” she asked, surprised.  She remembered going there in elementary school to visit the planetarium.

I got the job, and a few months into it, asked my boss about the planetarium.  CCM didn’t have a huge astronomy program, but the planetarium was smack in the middle of the major academic building, taking up prime real estate.  When I asked why it was there, he explained that the planetarium drew huge numbers of elementary school students from throughout the county every year, and that every time one of those kids set foot on campus, the college built up chits with local families.  The more people who set foot physically on campus over time, the stronger the college’s political support.  They don’t vote with their feet, exactly, but their feet influence their vote.  He saw a direct connection between hosting community events -- whether planetarium shows, musicals, art gallery openings, or anything else -- and the long-term health of the college.  It needed allies.

The lesson stuck with me.  Place is an asset.

Public higher education has a divided mind about place these days.  On the one side, with interest rates low and competition among colleges heated, we’ve seen a significant growth in construction projects over the last decade or so.  At the exact same time, though, we’ve also seen a large and growing migration of instruction online.  Online instruction meets all sorts of needs, and has much to be said for it, but rooms full of servers aren’t visually appealing.  In terms of drawing the public to campus, server rooms can’t compete with planetariums.

In some communities, campuses are the rare spaces in which meaningful numbers of people from different parts of town, economic classes, and the like come together on a regular basis.  That function is probably most pronounced among community colleges, since they’re open to everybody and usually have clearly defined geographical identities.  In areas in which classes and races are relatively segregated -- more common than I’d like to admit -- community colleges in particular often draw people from across those boundaries.  That role as public meeting space is easy to ignore in day-to-day operations, where we’re concerned with room usage, class sizes, and all of the usual daily business.  But over time, it matters.

My personal favorite public outreach was senior citizens’ day.  Every spring at CCM we’d have an open house with one-day classes for seniors, along with lunch.  I even did a couple of presentations on American politics, and had a blast; unlike younger students,the seniors had living memory of administrations from decades past, and since they weren’t being graded, they had no problem letting me know when they thought I was off-base.  Attendance at seniors’ day was always several hundred.  As any competent political scientist can tell you, seniors vote at higher rates than younger people do.  To the extent that they harbor good will towards the local community college, that could only help.  I recognized some of the same faces from year to year, and heard them refer to senior day as their event.  That kind of community support is hard to itemize, but you notice if it’s missing.

Large state universities have known this for years, which is why they sponsor high-visibility athletic programs.  At community colleges, the efforts at visibility have tended to be more local, which makes sense.  

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen particularly successful ways to bring more of the community onto campus and make a positive impression?

Filtering, Again

I don’t often repeat posts, but this one seems to warrant repeating.  It’s from this past August.  The fact that it bears repeating is sort of the point.

--

“Sometimes, the police break the law.”  -- Me, to The Girl, this week.

The Girl is ten, and The Boy is thirteen.  TB seems in a sort of hurry to grow up; TG is enjoying being ten.  But they’re both old enough to notice some of the things going on in the world around them.  And they notice when a parent reacts emotionally to a news story.

Robin Williams’ death generated parental reactions, but it was easier to explain.  The kids know about death, and we explained that he was a very funny actor we grew up watching.  It was sad, but it didn’t shake a worldview.  

The police shooting an unarmed young black man in Missouri was a harder case.  How to explain that to a sane, happy, blisteringly intelligent ten year old whose world still mostly makes sense?  

The Boy was born just a few months before 9/11.  I remember TW being glued to the set as she nursed him.  At the time, I was grateful that he was too young to understand what was happening.  To protect my own mental health, I actually tuned out the news entirely for a few weeks.  TB was tuned out by virtue of age.  TG hadn’t been born yet.

My first “political” memory in childhood was Watergate.  I had no idea what it was or why it was always on the tv -- sometimes preempting cartoons! -- but I knew Dad was glued to it, and I was miffed that it bumped Batman.  (As it happens, IFC is running old Batman shows this week.  TG enjoys the campy humor and the theme song.)  One night I asked Mom what it was all about.  She explained that the president’s friends had done something wrong, and he knew about it, but he didn’t tell anyone, and that was wrong, even for the president.  She even mentioned that the president isn’t above the law, which is why he isn’t a king.

That was pretty heady stuff for a five-year-old, but I remember it.  I liked the idea that even the president had to obey the law.  It seemed fair.  Forty years and a Ph.D. in political philosophy later, it still does.

Now I find myself explaining to my kids that even the police have to obey the law, and that sometimes, they don’t.  

I don’t want to terrify them.  Our next-door neighbor is a cop.  Placing risks in perspective can be tough as a kid.  And I want them to have enough room to reach their own conclusions over the years, even if they don’t align with mine; I don’t want to be the Dad who shoves his politics down his kids’ throats.  So I focus on the stuff I consider foundational, like the idea that police are subject to the law.  I told them that if someone random attacks you, you call the police.  If the police attack you, who do you call?  That’s why it’s extra important that the police follow the law.

It’s a tough balance.  At ten and thirteen, they’re still looking for good guys and bad guys, and for all the right reasons.  They want to be on the side of right.  That’s a good instinct.  Nuance can be a tall order for a fifth grader.  

So I see my job as allowing bits of truth to get through as they seem capable of making sense of them, and providing context after the fact when unwelcome things get around the filter.  Plant the seed now that authority figures are only human, and just let it grow.  I didn’t hide that I was upset about what happened to Michael Brown in Missouri.  Start with a basic respect for common decency, and go from there.  

In the meantime, I want them to have enough of a visceral sense of safety that when they get older and that sense isn’t present, they notice.  And enough of a visceral sense of fairness that when it’s violated, they notice that, too.  

I followed Robin Williams’ career for thirty-five years.  I’ll miss him.  I never met Michael Brown, but his loss bothers me more.  As they get older, I hope the kids will come to understand why.

Two-Year Majors

Should community colleges have psychology majors?  English majors?  Poli sci majors?

The trend nationally is against it.  The “guided pathways” movement is all about “streamlining,” which means reducing the number of available options to the bare minimum.  The theory, and there is some empirical support for it, is that students are easily overwhelmed by too many options.  Keep things simple, and there will be fewer places for something to go wrong.  This is the argument for the plain vanilla “gen ed” major, which lumps together most pre-transfer liberal arts students into a single category.  Let them be generalists early; they can specialize after they transfer.

There’s truth to that.  The differences in the first two years of, say, a history major as opposed to a poli sci major are often subtle enough that they could easily both be contained within a single structure that includes a few electives.  I’ll even admit that the bureaucratic overhead of many majors is greater than for just a handful.

But I’m starting to wonder about the value to both the student and the college of making a more specific identification relatively early.

The value to the institution is easy.  Knowing that a given student wants to transfer on for psychology, as opposed to political science, makes it easier to assign an appropriate academic advisor.  I’d rather send a student to a professor in her chosen field for guidance than to one who just happens to inhabit the same large bucket of vaguely-related disciplines.  

The value to the student is more subtle, but more important.  Many community colleges have some version of a generic transfer major.  That major typically has one of the lowest completion rates on campus.  Some of that is due to planned early transfer, such as when a student only ever intended to spend one year at the cc before moving to the four-year school.  Although that technically counts as attrition, I’d argue that it’s measurement error; the student got what she wanted and went on to finish.  But some of the lower graduation rates of generic transfer majors, I suspect, comes from the fact that they’re generic.  They become dumping grounds for undecided students, by default.  But those are the students who most need direction.

Forcing students to pick something -- knowing full well that they have the option of changing it later -- can nudge them towards acknowledging some sort of substantive interest.  I’m thinking here that it may be akin to party identification and voting rates: people who register as Democrats or Republicans tend to vote at higher rates than people who declare themselves independents.  Much of that is probably a reflection of previous underlying interest, but some of it may be self-reinforcing.  It may not be a coincidence that voting rates have declined along with party identification.  Asking the students to declare the academic equivalent of a party may induce a greater sense of academic belonging.  They’ll know who their peers are.

A few well-developed tracks within majors (‘options’ within a single major) can accomplish much of what I’m suggesting.  At Holyoke, for example, the psychology major is an option within the liberal arts major.  That’s probably enough, since it still allows us to know who to send to the psych department for advising, and it allows students to declare a substantive interest.  It even allows us to generate critical mass to run some solid 200-level psych courses, instead of consigning the faculty to teaching nothing but Intro for the rest of their careers.  That matters in its own right.

Wise and worldly readers at community colleges, have you seen or found ways to differentiate usefully among the students in the generic transfer major?

Mind the Gap: A Response to Ben Wildavsky

Is it fair to offer operating subsidies to public colleges that allow pricing tuition below cost for all students, even the most affluent?  Should even the wealthier students get discounts?

Ben Wildavsky says no.  I say yes.  

Wildavsky does a nice job laying out the core of his position.  He argues that raising tuition at state colleges and universities would contribute to economic growth.  The argument runs something like this: the payoff to college is getting so great that nearly everybody who can afford to go, will go.  The upper middle and upper classes will send their kids as a matter of course.  Therefore, any subsidy directed to them - such as through pricing below cost - is basically throwing money at people who don’t need it.  Liberating those funds from those who don’t need the money will allow states to redirect that money to needier students, who often struggle to complete their studies because of financial issues.  Therefore, redirecting subsidies from where they’re redundant to where they would matter more will result in more low-income students graduating and becoming more economically productive citizens.

It’s a well-written piece, but it makes the common mistake of ignoring both institutions and politics.  Yes, it’s easier to construct theoretically elegant models if you leave out institutions and politics.  It’s also easier to construct flying trains if you leave out gravity. If you want your solution actually to fly, you have to take account of those sticky, messy, conflictual spaces that reflect multiple and competing agendas.

For example, nothing in Wildavsky’s analysis acknowledges that the public institutions that currently come the closest to his model -- the flagship research universities -- have the highest average student family income.  The institutions that are the farthest from his model -- community colleges -- have the lowest average student family income.  At my own cc, for example, the median student debt level is zero, because a student on full Pell doesn’t have to pay tuition or fees out of pocket.  That’s how low our tuition and fees are, and that’s not unusual for the sector.  

Wildavsky notes, correctly, that states differ in the levels of subsidy that they offer to public higher education.  That would seem to open up an opportunity to compare and contrast.  For example, California offers far more per-student support than New Hampshire does.  Is New Hampshire’s economy outstripping California’s?  Are low-income students better served in New Hampshire than in California?  These aren’t hard to test.  

Wildavsky doesn’t take a long historical view, though he certainly could.  Over the past several decades, most states have shifted cost from subsidies to students.  Pell grant spending has increased, student loans have ballooned, and students working thirty or more hours a week for pay outside of class has gone from aberrant to normal.  We’ve gone from very low tuition -- CUNY was free until the mid-1970’s -- to considerably higher tuition and higher aid over the course of decades.  Has that resulted in greater economic growth?  Is the economy growing faster in 2014 than it was in, say, 1968?  (Hint: no.)  Has it resulted in greater economic equality, as all of that high aid should have led us to expect?  (Hint: no.)  

Although you wouldn’t know it from Wildavsky’s piece, many institutions -- including public ones -- offer students less aid than their higher tuition would justify.  It’s called “gapping.”  Small gaps can often be filled by extra private borrowing, extra work hours, and/or extra family help.  Big gaps generally either prevent enrollment or prevent completion.  The fact that “gapping” is an increasingly common practice suggests that Wildavsky’s faith that the savings from reduced subsidies to the wealthy would be redirected to the poor is naive.  That’s not how it works.

It’s a commonplace of policy studies that programs for the poor become poor programs.  They become identified in the public eye with their beneficiaries. That’s why philanthropic support -- also absent in Wildavsky’s analysis -- flows much more freely to already-affluent institutions than to, say, community colleges.  Support flows to perceived success, rather than to perceived need.  Over time, that becomes self-fulfilling. To the extent that we push tuition even higher, I’d expect to see the already striking levels of stratification increase even more.  And Wildavsky’s version of lifeboating -- the “undermatching” theory -- implicitly admits that it’s effectively writing off the vast majority of institutions entirely.  

If we’re serious about educating lower-income students at scale in a sustainable way, the high-tuition high-aid model doesn’t work.  If it did, we’d be enjoying unprecedented economic growth and a rapid expansion of the middle class.  Instead, we need to find ways to make the institutions that most students actually attend just as appealing to people with choices as the pricier places are.  

I know that 1968 isn’t coming back.  The challenge facing higher education leaders now is to interrupt the circuit of self-reinforcing decline through intelligent, sustainable innovations that preserve the best of what has come before.  That’s hard to do.  It’s a lot harder than just raising prices and hoping for the best.  It involves, among other things, paying attention to messy realities like politics, institutions, and history.  But it’s worth it.

“Like a Real College”

How do you know a real college when you see one?

People in the industry may have some quick answers, drawing on accreditation, reputation, or the presence or absence of (insert hobbyhorse here).  Until about 1995, that was pretty much good enough.

Since then, though, alternatives have arisen to traditional colleges.  First the for-profits exploded in scale, and now we have all manner of other providers.  Most are online.  Some use a combination of credit for prior learning and competency based credits to help students get through more quickly.  They don’t always look like colleges.  Many don’t have campuses, for example, and many of the traditional sorts of activities around “student life” don’t exist.  At DeVry, for example, there was no homecoming weekend.  It simply didn’t happen.  

Evangelists for disruption are generally unbothered by such changes.  They argue, often correctly, that certain traditional trappings only make sense if you assume a traditional-aged, residential experience.  Most adult or working students don’t have time for that stuff.  They need to get what they came for and get on with life.

Yes, but…

I’m consistently struck at the resonance that some of those traditional trappings have for non-traditional students.  They may need scheduling flexibility and appreciate accelerated times to degree, but they still want to feel like they’ve attended a “real college.”  I’ve heard those words enough times that I can’t write them off as flukes anymore.

I heard them in my teaching days.  Students in my classes would pay the left-handed compliment that my class “felt like a real college class,” leaving the contrast implied.  In the years when the graduation ceremony didn’t involve academic regalia, students complained that it didn’t feel “real,” and often acted accordingly.  After one particularly unfortunate ceremony, it was moved to a local theatre, complete with academic regalia and a processional.  Instead of rebelling at the corniness of it, students loved it.  They brought families, took pictures, and celebrated in exactly the ways that students elsewhere do.

Some folks have figured this out.  Southern New Hampshire University’s actual campus-based operation serves a smallish fraction of its student body, but it also serves as a sort of validation for the students who never show up in Manchester.  Even if their personal experience is entirely online, the existence of a traditional campus offers a stamp of authenticity.  I suspect that’s why the University of Phoenix sponsors (or did, anyway) an NFL stadium, despite not having a football team of its own.  

Innovators who want to get around some of the logistical or conceptual barriers to fuller participation in higher education need to keep in mind that while the new students may appreciate the access, they still want it to be access to a valid and recognizable thing.  That may not entail a homecoming weekend, but it may well entail graduation ceremonies, human contact with faculty and staff, and the chance to connect socially with other students.  They want signifiers that suggest to other people -- employers, yes, but also family and friends -- that they’ve achieved something real and recognizable.  Telling your parents that you’re about to complete a competency-based certification doesn’t pack the same emotional wallop as telling your parents that you’re about to graduate college.  It just doesn’t.  For many -- and especially for first-generation students, and those for whom academic capital has not been easy to come by -- that matters.  

As we attract more fully-online students, we need to start being more thoughtful about deliberately including some trappings of the traditional college experience.  Sticking through an entire program, as opposed to a course here or there, is an achievement, and one worthy of recognition that resonates.  If that means inviting folks to put on caps and gowns for a day, then that’s what it means.

The Middle: A Response to Goldie Blumenstyk

Over the weekend, I read American Higher Education in Crisis, by Goldie Blumenstyk, because that’s how I roll.  It’s an accessible introduction to many of the major issues in higher ed, but it makes a claim in passing that I think needs a closer look.  Blumenstyk writes that

If there is a hollowing out in higher education it is more likely to happen at community colleges, regional state universities, for-profits, and other institutions that provide most of the educational opportunity for low-income and lower-middle class students. (p. 152)  

I don’t entirely buy it.

First, some context.  Blumenstyk notes, correctly, that the increases in costs of attendance for students over the past few decades have badly outpaced the growth of average household income.  Some of that is driven by cost-shifting from subsidies to students, some by Baumol’s cost disease, and, in other sectors, some by competition.  (Community colleges have been largely immune to that, since they tend to be defined geographically.)  When the Great Recession took simultaneous bites out of family income and appropriations to public colleges, the disconnect between what students had to borrow and what they could reasonably expect to pay back became too large to ignore.

As Blumenstyk notes, much of the disconnect is properly attributed to collapsing entry-level wages and opportunities, rather than to skyrocketing tuition.  Popular discourse also frequently fails to distinguish between graduates’ debt and dropouts’ debt, and often takes outliers as being far more representative than they actually are.  Still, the concern is real and valid.  Any college that asks students (and, frequently, their parents) to borrow five figures a year for four or more years is asking a lot, and it’s reasonable for the borrowers to ask about the likelihood of getting jobs that would make repayment realistic.

She also notes -- again, correctly -- that states themselves are pressured financially on multiple fronts, of which higher education is only one.  The same cost disease that afflicts higher education also afflicts K-12, corrections, and health care, for example, and neither K-12 nor corrections offer the kind of alternative revenue streams that higher ed does.  (Health care economics are far more complicated.)  As long as the political climate makes progressive taxation toxic -- again, a separate and complicated topic is its own right -- we can expect higher education to function as a sort of shock absorber in state budgets.

From that combination of factors, Blumenstyk concludes that non-elite public higher education -- here defined as everything outside of flagship research universities -- is in trouble.

It’s a possible outcome, but certainly not a necessary one.  The argument doesn’t consider the structure of the academic ecosystem, the sheer size of enrollments, or the weakness of alternatives.

Elite private institutions are largely above the economic fray, and can pretty much do what they want.  Elite public universities have research funding -- usually federal -- as well as prestige, visibility, and size.  They aren’t immune to cost pressures, certainly, but they’re in better shape than most.  But the two sectors combined aren’t nearly big enough to serve the population that wants education.  Indeed, they couldn’t expand much without giving up the exclusivity that drives their prestige.  

Which means that everyone else needs someplace to go.  Yes, a brave few will venture into the world of what Anya Kamenetz calls “DIY U,” but at this point, the do-it-yourself stuff is more about supplementing than supplanting.  As Peter Thiel himself noted in “Ivory Tower,” the autodidact model may work for a small number of hyper-capable, driven people, but it doesn’t scale.  (And the jury is still out even on Thiel’s cohort.)  Where will the masses go?

One possible answer is “nowhere.”  But I don’t see that selling, politically.  Young people still want good careers and, yes, even good educations.  And they should.  Say what you want about for-profits, but they would never have grown had they not identified a real demand.  The demand is there, and I don’t see it going away.  (Another possible answer is “prison,” and in some areas, that’s far too true.  But my sense is that we’ve passed Peak Incarceration.  And a good thing, too.)

My guess is that the sectors most likely to be hollowed out are the for-profits and the less well known privates.  The for-profits have come under sustained public scrutiny over the last few years, often with good reason.  And the privates have an increasingly difficult value proposition to sell.  As a parent, why would I spend $35,000 a year for a nothing-special degree when the same thing is available at a local public for $15,000?  An Ivy degree, sure.  But most privates aren’t Ivies, or terribly close.  Multiply that by four years per kid and multiple kids, and it adds up.  Unless the privates can answer that question -- which some can, in various ways -- I’d expect them to fall upon hard times.

Which means that the publics can actually turn a dilemma into an opportunity.  If they allow themselves to be commoditized -- to “sell” only interchangeable general education credits -- then I foresee an ugly race to the bottom.  But with more middle and even upper middle class students feeling compelled by economics to look more closely at public options, there’s a real opportunity for publics to start to fill the holes left by struggling privates. Gaining more traction with the middle and upper middle classes can bring with it not only more resources, as important as those are, but more political strength.  

In other words, the publics have a choice to make.  They can look only at their appropriations and start trying to shrink to meet them, or they can look at the larger ecosystem and start preparing to fill a niche that is slowly but surely being vacated.  With for-profits already falling away in large numbers, and many marginal privates carrying discount rates of half or higher, someone will have to do the heavy lifting.  If you can see some heavy lifting coming up, you should try to make yourself stronger.  

Admittedly, that’s a lot to put on a single sentence.  But the future matters.  Community and state colleges may be in a tight spot now, but they’re poised to become far more important if they play their cards right.  Here’s hoping they do...

Gratitude

It’s almost Thanksgiving, so a moment of gratitude seems to be in order.  

We had our parent-teacher conferences last week for The Boy and The Girl.  

The Boy is in eighth grade, so he has a different teacher for each subject.  His school has parents come in with their kids and sit at tables in the cafeteria while teachers move from table to table.  It’s sort of a cross between traditional conferences and speed dating.  

The Girl is in fifth grade, so she spends most of her day with one teacher.  Her conference was in the much more traditional format of three adults sitting awkwardly on low chairs at a low table.

They’re both doing really well, which is gratifying enough in itself.  But I was especially proud to hear that they’re both confident, participatory, gracious, and just generally great to have around.  

Yes, I have Dad goggles.  But it’s also true.  

“Smart” is great.  It’s useful, and it opens up options.  With half of my chromosomes, the odds of either of them making it as professional athletes are approximately zero.  They’ll need to live on their smarts.

But it’s possible to be smart and toxic, or smart and selfish, or smart and mean.  

TB and TG are smart, but they’re also good people.  They walk through the world aware of others, and I’ve seen both of them, at various times, step aside when a group dynamic started to get weird.  Their peers like them, but also respect them.  

I’m grateful that they’re smart, but I’m more grateful that they’re genuinely good people.  Watching them grow into themselves is a privilege.

Happy Thanksgiving.

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Program note: I’ll be taking a Thanksgiving break, returning next week.   Safe travels!

More of This, Please

Although much of the debate about higher education policy happens at the Federal level, the decisions that matter the most on the ground are usually made by the states.  That’s why I was so pleased to see this piece by Jessica Bowen, of the New America Foundation.

It’s a compare-and-contrast essay, of all things, looking at the plans offered by the Center for American Progress and the AASCU on guiding Federal policy to encourage greater investment in public higher education by states.  It breaks down the two proposals in simple and direct ways, noting the appeal and the shortcomings of each.  

In other words, it makes complicated policy proposals on a key issue legible.  This is no small thing.  In fact, it could be a first step towards much more productive proposals.

Federalism isn’t the sexiest topic, but it underlies many of the hot-button issues in American politics.  In the case of higher education, there’s an odd separation of responsibility: most student financial aid (and most research funding) are controlled at the Federal level, but most operating appropriations come from the states (and, in some states, from localities).  That has a subtle but important effect.

State disinvestment is partly compensated by increased Federal investment, through the indirect mechanism of financial aid. (In the research university sector, federal research funding may well play a similar role; I defer to my R1 colleagues on that.)  As public colleges and university budgets shift from state support to student tuition, they effectively shift from state and local aid to federal aid.  After decades of that, it’s unsurprising to see the feds want to have more influence.  After all, they’re paying.

But the influence can have unintended effects, since the states (and localities, where relevant) are independent actors with interests of their own.  A federal desire to support more robust public higher education can easily be defeated by states’ preferences.  That’s especially true when higher education has an alternative revenue stream -- students -- and many of the other sectors on which states spend money, don’t.  Local aid, K-12 education, and corrections don’t generate revenue in the same way that colleges do.  At the state and local levels, it can be tempting to use federal support for higher ed -- even in its indirect form -- as license to shift state money to other things.  

To my mind, the really crucial question for federal education policy is how to work with the states and localities.  Ignoring them results in defeated intentions.

It isn’t as simple as bribery.  Bribery worked reasonably well in the case of raising the drinking age.  Back then, the feds threatened to withhold interstate highway funding unless states raised the drinking age to 21.  Louisiana held out the longest, if I recall, but most states fell into line fairly quickly.  Bribery fell flat in the case of Obamacare, though, in which several states turned down free money from the feds to expand health insurance, just to make an ideological point.  In terms of complexity, competing goals, and cost spirals, higher education is much closer to health care than to highway construction.

“Maintenance of Effort” requirements -- basically, requiring states to keep up a certain level of funding in a given category as a condition of getting more money -- can work, but again, the Obamacare case suggests that some states will leave free money on the table to make a point.  

As policy dilemmas go, this one is high-stakes, expensive, and difficult.  It isn’t as easy as calling for “more.”  In this context, Bowen’s piece strikes me as exemplary of the kind of work we need to see much more often.   Making a complicated issue simple enough to enable thoughtful discussion doesn’t guarantee a good result, but it enables progress towards one.  More of this, please.  

A “Worst Practices” Model

At a meeting last week, a colleague mentioned that he had learned some lessons about how to do a particular project through making a series of mistakes, and that if we had more time, he’d be happy to describe some of them.  And that’s when it hit me.  For all of the talk of “best practices,” wouldn’t some open discussions of “worst practices” be more useful?

The beauty of “worst practices” is that they’re concrete.  “Here’s something I did that blew up in my face.  In retrospect, here’s why.”  In many cases, the moves people made in the course of worst practices actually made some sense at the time.  The logic can be familiar.  That’s the value of it.  If you can recognize the directions that tend to lead off the rails, you can avoid them.

To be fair, I’m really talking about something closer to “worst plausible practices.”  Some practice are just so awful that there’s not much to be gained by dwelling on them -- showing up to work drunk, say. We all know, or should know, that’s bad.  I’m thinking instead of the things that seem like good ideas at the time, but later reveal themselves as disastrous.  

Institutionally, almost every incentive aligns against candid discussions of lessons learned from failure.  Drawing lessons from failure involves first acknowledging and owning it.  In many organizational cultures, that can be a career-limiting move.  If you work in a place with a strong culture of finger-pointing and blame-shifting, owning up to mistakes -- even small ones -- amounts to a kind of unilateral disarmament.  And even if you’re lucky enough to work in a setting in which people take a relatively enlightened view, you can’t assume the same will hold true externally.  I’ve been to my share of AACC and League for Innovation conferences over the last several years, and I can report that the ratio of presentations on “here’s something we did well” to “here’s something we messed up” is approximately 100:0.  

And that’s too bad, because the latter can teach lessons, too.

I’m told that something similar holds in the literature around academic science, oddly enough.  Although we’re all taught that the scientific method is all about replication and testing, papers based on replicating results are relatively scarce, and the few who do them are widely considered suspect.  They’re looked upon the same way that police look at Internal Affairs departments. But they serve a crucial function in the scientific ecosystem; to the extent that up-and-coming scientists are steered away from it, we lose a valuable method of quality control.

As more states and systems move to various forms of “performance funding,” the paradox of increased need and decreased room to learn from mistakes grows.  Performance funding schemes work on an annual basis, which means that there’s little margin for error; you can’t absorb the costs of the early stages of a learning curve, because the punishment you’d take in the next year’s allocation would prevent you from realizing gains in the later part of the curve.  (That’s part of the appeal of multi-year grants: by design, you are given the time to do the unglamorous groundwork first.)  Of course, the idea behind performance funding is to create an incentive to do things better, which usually involves doing new things. You just don’t have the room to make mistakes.  In that climate, it’s unsurprising that prepackaged solutions from various think tanks and foundations catch on; they offer the prospect of improvement without having to go through the messy process of learning first.  But those don’t always sit well in environments in which shared governance is prized.

I’m not sure how to create a space for candid and useful discussions of worst plausible practices, other than in off-the-record, informal interactions among peers who trust each other.  In other words, in the interstices.  Interstitial candor is well and good, but it’s nowhere the scale we need.  I’m just not sure how, as an industry, to get there from here.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen sustainable ways to discuss worst plausible practices?  Or is this just one of those facts of life endemic to any industry?

CoCo Goes Pro Bono?

When The Dog is resting on her pillow, and she hears an unusual noise, one ear will pop up.  She’ll stay down, but the one ear will be at attention.  We call it “shark ear.”  When the shark ear is up, we know something weird is happening.

The story that a student loan collection agency is buying roughly half of the Corinthian College campuses, and turning them nonprofit, made my shark ear go up.  

There’s something weird about it.

ECMC -- not to be confused with EDMC, a major player in for-profit higher education -- is buying 56 campuses for $24 million, which works out to less than $450,000 per campus.  It’s keeping the widely-discredited Everest and WyoTech names, but bringing in all new management.  ECMC’s entire higher education experience has been in student loan collection; it has never run a college or any other educational institution.  When asked why ECMC is doing it, the CEO replied that “we want to help.”  Happily, ECMC has been “assembling a short list of qualified individuals” “under the radar” to step in and actually run the campuses.

To which I say, hmm.  

Loan collection agencies aren’t generally known for philanthropy.  Colleges typically cost more than single suburban houses.  Corporate management turnarounds often involve rebranding.  And I would think that an agency that had never run a college before wouldn’t start with 56 of them.  One, maybe.  56, no.

As far as I know -- and I’m open to correction on this -- ECMC has not allied itself with any particular pedagogical movement or philosophy.  This isn’t Founders College, the short-lived attempt to base a college on the writings of Ayn Rand.   If it doesn’t have a profit motive, or a religious motive, or a philosophical motive, or a pedagogical motive, what is it trying to achieve?

It  “wants to help,” but at what?  The value proposition for students is obscure, at best, since ECMC hasn’t said anything about a new academic specialty, or offering something that nearby public colleges and universities don’t already offer at lower prices.  

As regular readers know, I’m not necessarily hostile to for-profit education as a concept.  I think this piece from the Boston Globe gets a lot right; just because many for-profits have been bottom feeders doesn’t mean that all of them must be, by definition.  I remain convinced that there’s room for thoughtful entrepreneurs to add value, particularly through programmatic specialization.  

But ECMC is doing it backwards.  It’s keeping names that have been tarnished as predatory, and offering to do...what, exactly?  Instead of building a new enterprise from scratch, or radically repurposing an existing one, it’s offering to continue to run mediocre programs at slightly less inflated prices.  That doesn’t pass the sniff test.

The CEO claims that ECMC’s self-interest has nothing to do with it, since the loans that the new CoCo students will receive will be federal, and won’t be subject to collection through ECMC.  Maybe.  But if that’s true, then the motive is even more obscure.

I’m having a hard time explaining it through the self-interest of managers, either.  Managers in large-scale financial services make far more money than, say, campus deans.  I don’t think they’re hijacking capital to buy themselves sinecures.  

Wise and worldly readers, am I missing something?  Is there some narrative by which this move makes sense?  My shark ear won’t stop twitching on this one.