Drugs, Guns, and Trapper Keepers

Did you know that many K-12 districts actually ban Trapper Keepers?

As a card-carrying Gen X’er, the phrase “Trapper Keeper” immediately strikes a chord.  Trapper Keepers still exist, but in the early 80’s, they were the thing.  Trappers are folders with vertical pockets, so the papers you store in them don’t fall out when you’re carrying them.  Trapper Keepers are binders that hold Trappers.  In their heyday, Trapper Keepers were everywhere, and it’s easy to see why: they combined a practical solution to a real problem with cool (for the time) pictures and the great smell of PVC.

Okay, that last one isn’t ideal.  It was the 80’s.  

I hadn’t thought about them since probably the Reagan administration, but last week The Boy attended a meeting for the marching band at his new school and reported back that he had to get a shoulder strap to hold his sheet music binder while he marched.  I had an immediate vision of sheet music falling out, and suggested a Trapper Keeper.  No sooner had I congratulated myself on long-term memory did The Wife mention that they’re banned by name.  I did a little Googling, and found that they’re banned in a lot of places.

That had never occurred to me.

Yes, schools are stricter about certain things than they used to be, but this one threw me.  First peanut butter, now this.  There had to be a reason.

Alertly, I forgot about it for several days.  Then, on a whim, I asked folks on Twitter why they thought Trapper Keepers merited specific mention on “forbidden” lists, alongside weapons and toxins.  Three theories emerged: status competition, he sound of velcro, and size.

To which I say, phooey.

The status competition part may once have been true, I guess, but in the age of iphones, fitbits, smartwatches, and Macbook Airs (Macsbook Air?  Macbooks Air?), it seems like pretty weak tea.  I’m old enough now to remember all sorts of oddball stories over the years, but I don’t recall a rash of folder-related fatalities.  I remember when we were supposed to be terrified of heavy metal, of sneakers with pumps, and of satanic daycare centers, but I don’t remember pitched battles over office supplies.  Tressie McMillan Cottom characteristically did some actual research and pointed me to this piece on the history of Trapper Keepers from Mental Floss, which has some great nostalgic photography, but doesn’t offer a satisfying explanation of the bans..

The “velcro” theory is about the ripping sound that the cover made when it was opened.  But according to the Mental Floss piece, velcro was replaced long ago by a snap.  I don’t buy it.

The ‘size’ theory makes some sense, but if you see the size of backpacks that kids carry -- replete with school-approved chromebooks -- it falls apart quickly.  Kids have to carry trombones, ipads, and textbooks with the weight of bowling balls; I really don’t think binders are the issue.

So I remain stumped.  Yes, they’re kind of cheesy and dated, but we don’t ban Camaros.  So why the ban on Trapper Keepers?

Meanwhile, a Bubble Quietly Deflates

Did you know that Federal subsidized student loans, measured in dollars lent, have dropped more than forty percent over the last five years?

It suggests a bit of a flaw in the “student loan bubble” discussion, if nothing else.

Robert Kelchen has a good analysis here - check it out.  I’ll shamelessly build on his, since he already did the groundwork.

That decline doesn’t just represent a shift from subsidized to unsubsidized loans, either; the unsubsidized ones dropped by over twenty percent.  And Pell grants dropped by over fourteen percent, so it wasn’t a massive shift from loans to grants.  The only student loans to grow over the last five years have been for graduate school, which actually accounts for a much larger piece of the student loan pie than is generally acknowledged.

My first guess is that it’s a combination of a gradual climb out of the Great Recession and the rapid and severe decline of enrollment at for-profits.

The climb out of the Great Recession could matter in a few ways.  First, it tends to depress enrollments at community colleges, where enrollments are usually countercyclical.  Generally, the weaker the economy, the greater the number of people who enroll at community colleges, and vice versa.  It makes sense if you look at the opportunity cost of enrollment.  If enrolling means working less, that’s one thing.  If there aren’t any jobs to be had, though, and the alternative to enrolling is basically nothing, then enrolling becomes more attractive.  Within higher education, we tend to assume that colleges compete with each other for students, and sometimes that’s true.  But sometimes, especially in the community college sector, we compete with work.

But wait, you say, don’t enrolled students often work thirty or forty hours a week for pay anyway?  Yes, and often to their academic detriment.  But during the worst of the recession, they tended to work fewer hours because there were fewer hours to be had.  At Holyoke, at the low point of the recession, we had the highest percentage of work-study hours actually used in the college’s history.  A couple of years later, the percentage returned to its usual level.  For a while there, work-study was pretty much the only game in town.  It isn’t much, but it’s more than nothing.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see a trend among community colleges now that would show FTE’s dropping faster than headcounts, as more students move from full-time to part-time to accommodate the greater work hours they can get now.  That would decrease their need for student loans, at least in any given year.  (Tip for enterprising grad students looking for research topics: trace the impact of the Affordable Care Act on full-time/part-time enrollment ratios.  Once you didn’t need to be full-time to get health insurance, well…)

The other impact, obviously, is that students whose parents may not have been in a position to help with college a few years ago may be able to get more parental help now.  

For-profit college enrollments have declined drastically over the last five years, sometimes resulting in campus closures, and sometimes as results of campus closures.  For-profits always consumed far more than their proportional share of federal student aid, so as students move either to work or to other sectors of higher education, the draw on the Federal budget is dropping.  

To the extent that the talk of “bubbles’ still may make sense, it’s in graduate schools.  But I’ll leave that to the folks who are closer to it.  (The data in Kelchen’s piece don’t speak to “private” loans, though my anecdotal sense is that they, too, peaked a few years ago.  I’m certainly open to correction on that point if someone has better information.)

Just last week,the Hechinger report purported to blow the lid off of the supposed boondoggle of Pell grants.  Now we know that Pell grant funding is down, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the cost of attendance.  As boondoggles go, I’m not impressed.  

This may all seem technical and wonky, but people base life decisions and political views on assumptions about student loans that simply aren’t true.  Decisions based on bad information can do real damage.  Let’s tell the real story, and stop blowing bubbles.

"In exchange for concessions from management..."

Six months ago or so, Ry Rivard and I (separately) wrote in IHE about the implications of increased control of campus decisions by creditors, and specifically financial institutions.  Yesterday IHE followed with a piece on lenders trying to keep struggling colleges alive long enough to bleed out repayments and avoid the loan forgiveness that happens when a college shuts down.

I really don't think most of us who pay attention to shared governance in higher ed have connected the dots yet.  We should.

The term "shared governance" implies an "us" among whom governance is shared.  Historically, colleges have tended to define the "us" as faculty, staff, and administrators, with trustees hovering outside.  The boundaries have long been contested -- adjuncts, for example, are often excluded either de jure or de facto -- but they've been understood mostly to encompass people who work on campus and who see each other on a regular basis.  

But to the extent that colleges become increasingly beholden to lenders, lenders are starting to demand power.  And their agendas are entirely different.

Colleges have had donors who have wielded (or tried to wield) power in the past; the recent blowup at UBC is simply the latest in a long line of those.  But those tend to be isolated individuals with either ego-driven or ideological hobbyhorses; most of the time, they can be either diverted or rendered largely irrelevant.  And with a few notable exceptions, most colleges that rely heavily on donor revenue have enough donors that no single donor can really dominate the discussion.  When donors' agendas cancel each other out, the college can operate largely according to its own goals.

Creditors are different.  Legally, they're entitled to repayment. ("entitled" is a relative term, but still...)  They tend to be far fewer, meaning that their influence isn't diluted by numbers.  And unlike both donors and employees, they're almost entirely indifferent to the long-term health, or even survival, of the college.  As long as they get paid, they're happy.  If that means firing half of the employees or selling off entire campuses, then so be it.

For-profit colleges probably elicit less notice within the rest of higher ed, because they've never really adopted shared governance in the same sense.  And there's some sense that if you live by private investment capital, you die by private investment capital.  

But it isn't only for-profits.  As Rivard's February piece noted, creditors have started wielding decision-making authority at both private and public non-profits.  Given the building boom of the last ten years, mostly financed by bonds, I wouldn't be surprised to see the power of creditors continue to grow, especially in regions with declining numbers of college students.  Borrow to overbuild, watch enrollments fall, struggle to repay, and before long, you have to start using phrases like "in exchange for concessions from management..."

The trend is a much bigger deal than the current conversation assumes.  It will make faculty-administration conflicts look quaint by comparison.  If we care at all about preserving some level of academic autonomy, we need to connect the dots.  If we don't, some very well-dressed people will be more than happy to connect them for us.

Onsite Support for Hybrid Students

I’m hoping that some of my wise and worldly readers can help on this one.

As is true at many colleges, most of our “online” students are actually hybrid.  In other words, they’re taking both classroom courses and online courses at the same time.  They’re using online classes to make their schedules more compatible with work and family demands.  We have some purely online students, but most of our online students aren’t purely online.  Most come to campus, or to an affiliated location, at least once a week.

Which raises the possibility, at least in theory, of using onsite resources in support of the online classes that these hybrid students are taking.

(I’ll pause for a moment to let all that jargon settle.  Occupational hazard.)

Online classes are becoming increasingly popular, but success rates in them tend to trail their onsite analogues.  (Analogs?)  If students are flocking more to the format in which we succeed less, we have a choice to make: either accept lower success rates as the wave of the future, or get better at online support.  I prefer the latter.  

(To be fair, there’s also the third option of sticking our fingers in our ears, holding our breath until we turn blue, and trying to wait out the whole “internet” thing.  I don’t see that ending well.)

So here’s the opportunity.  We have students coming to campus on a regular basis while they’re also taking online classes.  Conceivably, they could get help unique to their online classes while they’re on campus.  In a perfect world, that support would help students succeed at greater rates in their online courses.

My question to my readers:

• Have you seen colleges do something like this successfully?
• If so, how did they do it?  
• Alternately, have you seen an instructive crash-and-burn?  

Thanks!

Pell Grants and Fire Departments

Taxpayers have funneled millions -- nay, billions -- of dollars into fire departments around the country over the years.

And yet, we still have fires.  Clearly, the firefighting paradigm has failed.

I don’t mean to pour cold water on anything, so to speak, but it’s time to reassess the whole “throw money at burning buildings” approach.  Are we really getting our money’s worth?

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Of course, most people would quickly identify that argument as ridiculous.  Yet when applied to, say, Pell grants, it gets taken seriously.

This piece from the Hechinger report implies -- “argues” is really too strong a word -- that the Pell grant program is a boondoggle, because it funds students who don’t graduate.  (The headline -- “Billions in Pell Dollars Go To Students Who Don’t Graduate” -- pretty much captures it.)  And it insinuates that colleges are hiding the scandalous truth, presumably with nefarious intent, because if people knew the real rates, they’d rise up in outrage.

It’s a frustrating piece, because it has nuggets of truth.  But the storyline to which it’s wedded manages to obscure what could have been a useful analysis.

First, some basics.  Looking at Pell recipient graduation rates at individual colleges -- even if you looked at all of them -- doesn’t tell you the Pell recipient graduation rate nationally.  Why?

Bueller...Bueller…

Because students transfer.  A student who starts at Eastern State and then transfers to Western State shows up as a dropout in Eastern State’s numbers -- scandal! -- and doesn’t show up as a graduate in Western State’s numbers, because the grad rate only covers first-time students. So even though you have a college graduate on your hands, you have one college showing a dropout and the other showing nothing at all. Those of us in the community college world have been making this argument for years.  I would expect a serious analyst of financial aid policy to know that.  It’s a basic counting error that contaminates the statistics.

The article also lumps together three separate causes of increased spending on Pell.  One is a rise in the benefit level, though the rise is far smaller than the average growth in tuition during that time.  Leaving out the latter factor would leave the incautious reader with the impression that students are getting more purchasing power, when in fact they’re getting much less.  The second is the Great Recession and its impact on family income; when need goes up, demand for need-driven aid goes up.  And the third is the dramatic increase in the number of applicants.  That has an effect on program costs, but it does nothing to make life cushier for the folks who get grants.  

In fact, as the article obliquely notes but fails to consider, the purchasing power of Pell grants relative to tuition and living costs has gone down.  That, combined with ever-increasing income polarization, is the real story.  I could suggest an alternate headline that would also fit the facts: “Pell Grants Too Small to Make Up for Polarized Society By Themselves.”

The missed opportunity in the piece was here:

“The more Pell students an institution enrolls, these statistics show, the lower their likelihood of graduating.”

Now, that’s potentially interesting.  Why would that be?

My first thought would be to look at other variables.  Did they control for institutional per-student spending?  (I’m guessing no…)  Right now, the colleges with the most low-income students and students of color get the least public support per student.  In fact, most community colleges charge LESS than the full value of a Pell grant, allowing students to apply the remainder to living expenses.  (For some reason, the policy types who champion the Bennett hypothesis consistently ignore that. It’s a hell of a blind spot.)  So by and large, the colleges with the fewest Pell students are also the colleges with the most money per student.  Shockingly, students do better in better-resourced institutions.

But that’s not the story the article wants to tell.  It’s looking for a boondoggle to expose, not an opportunity to create better outcomes for low-income students.

Alternately, one could take a “culture of poverty” view, and say that students from impoverished backgrounds do better when surrounded by people who aren’t from impoverished backgrounds.  What would that imply?

To me, it implies a need for a really serious attack on residential income segregation, as well as a serious attack on income polarization.  If we want a middle class, we have to deliberately create one.  They don’t occur in nature.

Instead, the story notes that despite increasingly inadequate aid, students in expensive places without money to support themselves sometimes struggle.  And it implies that the aid isn’t inadequate enough.

To which I say, when you have an arson epidemic, you don’t cut the fire department.

Transparency, Candor, and Discretion

Reading the revelations about the working conditions at Amazon alongside stories about officials at UIUC using personal email addresses triggered a spark of recognition.  The common denominator is the relationship among transparency, candor, and discretion.

If the recent New York Times piece about Amazon is at least substantially correct, it sounds like working conditions at Amazon are somewhere between a reality show and Logan’s Run.  The Times piece -- which Jeff Bezos denies is accurate -- suggests that Amazon uses its extreme secrecy to enable extreme arbitrariness in how it treats its own people.  In the absence of any worker protections at all, hard-charging people are chewed up and spit out quickly.  The system will work as long as it’s growing.  When it starts contracting, though, the fall will be fast and hard.  It’s one thing to put up with cruelty when there’s something in it for you; it’s quite another when the best to be hoped for is to squeeze a little more time out.  

Whether that proves true or not, the extreme secrecy about work conditions at Amazon are necessary for it to be as brutal as it apparently is.  

Management in public institutions is a very different beast.  Here, managers are scrutinized by all sorts of external parties all the time.  Emails can be subpoenaed.  People who have no awareness of context are entitled to grab fragments at random and weaponize them.  Managers learn early that certain topics are reserved for phone calls or face-to-face discussions instead, since those can’t be ripped out of context as easily.  Some resort to personal emails; others avoid email altogether.

The argument for transparency is that it prevents abuse, and that can be true.  But more transparency isn’t always better.  Sometimes a difficult issue requires a candid exchange, and thoughtful candor requires discretion.  The deeper we push transparency, the more difficult we make it for candid exchanges to happen.  And in the absence of those -- the discussions in which people try on ideas, discard them, contradict themselves, and fine-tune eventual solutions -- knee-jerk or formulaic ideas win by default.  If we can’t tell the truth, then we have to base decisions on euphemisms or preconceptions.  How that’s better is unclear at best.

Some of the loudest advocates for academic freedom are also the loudest advocates for transparency, and they don’t see the contradiction.  Academic freedom is necessary to protect the free exchange of ideas.  So is discretion.  You need the room to move, to misspeak, and to explore, without having every first draft on public record.  At least, you need that if you care about getting the details right.  

Too little transparency can lead to willful abuse.  But too much can lead to a self-protective vapidity.  In the private sector, the former is the greater danger; in the public sector, we’re falling victim to the latter. (Donald Trump’s early appeal in the polls, I suspect, is a function of his symbolic rejection of self-protective vapidity. He embodies candor without discretion.)  As budgets get tighter and public scrutiny more exacting, we don’t have the margin for error that we once did; getting the details right matters more.  

None of this is to pretend that, say, hosting your own email server is the way to go.  But it does suggest that using electronic discovery as a modern-day version of the thought police will bring diminishing, and then negative, returns.  Rejecting one extreme shouldn’t lead to embracing the other.  As a culture, I hope we figure that out before doing more damage.

The Stigma

I heard a comment this weekend that made me wonder.

Is the stigma of “community college” as strong as it used to be?

When I was in high school, it was an article of faith that community college was a last-ditch option for people who couldn’t get in anywhere else.  At the time, you’d hear phrases like “thirteenth grade” or “high school with ashtrays.”

Ashtrays are gone now, for other reasons, and I still hear “thirteenth grade” from time to time.  But the reactions I get from other parents when I mention where I work aren’t consistent with the old stereotypes.  Instead, I’m hearing a lot of “y’know, I used to ignore those, but they’re making a lot more sense now.”

Some of that may be courtesy, but it’s consistent enough that I’m wondering if there’s some truth to it.  If there isn’t, there should be.

If the stigma were fading, I’d guess it would be as a function of several factors.  The most basic one is cost: when even a public four-year school runs fifteen to twenty thousand a year for in-state tuition, and privates are anywhere from thirty to sixty and up per year, transferable gen ed credits at four or five thousand a year start to look pretty good.  That’s especially true if you have multiple kids.  

But value reflects quality, as well as cost, and I think some word about quality is getting out.  Many community colleges have Honors programs that challenge strong students, and that serve as transfer pipelines into some impressive places.  And as the sector has matured -- about half of the community colleges in America, including Brookdale, were founded in the 1960’s -- most adults know someone who attended the local one.  It’s harder to stereotype when a satisfied alum is in the office next door.

That said, though, I’m not sure how to measure “stigma.”  And I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that shifts in the degree of “stigma” vary by demographics, whether by race, income, region, or whatever combination you prefer.

The prestige hierarchy within higher education rests mostly on a combination of age, wealth, and exclusivity.  Community colleges will lose on “exclusivity” every time, by design, since they’re open to anyone with a high school diploma or equivalent.  And funding is always an issue.  The sector as a whole is getting better at cultivating alumni and other donors -- to which I say, yes, yes, yes -- but it’s starting off behind.  

But to the extent that we look at outcomes, rather than inputs, I could see the sector start to gain some overdue respect.  At a really basic level, the percentage of bachelor’s degree grads with significant community college credits is almost exactly the percentage of American undergrads enrolled at community colleges.  In other words, the widely-held myths of “dropout factories” don’t square with facts on the ground.  And the oft-cited graduation rates are measuring the wrong thing; so many students transfer before graduating, and then go on to graduate, that leaving them out simply gets the story wrong.

Wise and worldly readers, I know I’m biased on this one, so I’ll throw it open.  Do you see the community college stigma fading?  And is there some sort of reasonably objective measure of it to check?

Friday Fragments

Tim Burke has a characteristically thoughtful piece about Phyllis Wise, UIUC, and expectations of administrators generally.  Well worth the read.

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The Girl was trying to set up voicemail on her phone.  She was flummoxed by the prompt asking her to press the pound sign.

TG: What’s a pound sign?

Me; The tic-tac-toe board.

TG: (blank stare)

Me: The hashtag.

TG: (brightly) Oh!

--

The Mother-in-Law is a lovely woman, but very traditional.  She, The Girl, and I had a conversation last week:

MIL: It’s nice that the President gave you some time to move.

Me; Yes, she’s been very supportive.

MIL: She?  So you have a lady president?

(Turning to TG) Me: Yes, women can be college presidents.

TG: Dad, women can be REAL presidents!

My work here is done.   

Accelerator, Brake, Accelerator, Brake

The “policy wonk” level on this post is turned up to 11.  You’ve been warned.

If you haven’t seen Amy Laitinen’s excellent piece on the Education department’s failure to engage with its own sanctioned experiments with competency-based education, check it out.  (Admittedly, that may be the least catchy opening line ever.)  Laitinen points out that when the DOE opened the door a couple of years ago for colleges and universities to offer degrees based on demonstrated competencies, rather than seat time, a fair number of colleges went for it.  But almost none have actually started, because the DOE is taking its sweet time in issuing guidance for how it wants CBE done.

In other words, as an industry, we’re flooring the accelerator and the brake at the same time.

“Guidance” matters in a host of ways.  Many of the financial reporting rules to which colleges are subject are based on seat time and credit hours.  (For example, FTE’s --the typical measure of enrollments -- are based on credit hours.  How you would determine FTE’s in a CBE program isn’t obvious.  “Satisfactory Academic Progress” for financial aid eligibility is based on credits attempted.  Without credits, how do you measure that?  Prior learning assessment isn’t eligible for financial aid; at what point does PLA stop and CBE start? In the context of CBE, what’s a “full time” student?  I could go on…)  These may sound picky, and in a way, they are.  But if a college isn’t in compliance with the relevant regulations, the financial and legal consequences can be severe.  (If you want to watch a CFO’s eyes get really big, sneak up on her and suddenly yell “audit findings!”)  So colleges, quite sensibly, are looking for guidance from the DOE on all of those second-level issues.  And the DOE isn’t stepping up.

Which raises the obvious question: why not?  

I can think of a few possibilities, but I have to stipulate that none of these is based on any inside knowledge.  Anyone with inside knowledge -- Paul LeBlanc, I’m looking at yooouuu…- is invited to shed light.

• They’re overwhelmed.  They approved the concept of CBE without first thinking through all of the implications for other policies, and now they’re playing catchup.  This strikes me as highly likely.  

• They’re focused more on “gainful employment,” for-profit providers, student loan issues, and, until recently, the effort to produce college ratings.  WIth other things on fire, something like CBE could easily get overshadowed.  I consider this possibility entirely compatible with the previous one.

• They’re stuck in a contradiction.  At the very same time that they’re trying to encourage experimentation with moving away from the credit hour in the context of CBE, they’re also clamping down on the credit hour in the context of online teaching.  It’s possible to do either, but doing both at the same time requires a level of theoretical hair-splitting far beyond what they’re usually called upon to do.  My guess is that an initial rush of enthusiasm quickly gave way to dispirited foot-dragging as they realized that the two emphases can’t coexist.  

• Their alien overlords in Area 51, in conjunction with the Illuminati and the Trilateral Commission…(You can fill in the rest.  I’m not a fan of this one, but any explanation of Federal government behavior on the internet has to include at least one reference to it.  Let’s check that box and move on.)

In the best of all reasonably possible worlds, it’s just the first one, and they’re poised to strike.  

In the meantime, though, I’d love to see some thoughtful discussions of questions like the definition of FTE’s or SAP in the context of a competency-based program.  I see great potential in hybrid programs, and in breaking down the barriers between prior learning assessment and CBE, but the Feds need to step up.  Done right, the breakthroughs in these areas for which CBE is the catalyst could benefit all sorts of programs.

In the meantime, we rev the engine at a full stop.  Thanks to Amy Laitinen for connecting the dots.

Email and the Void

I’ve worked at several different colleges now, and at every single one, I’ve heard the same discussion.  It goes like this:

“Why don’t students use their college-provided email?”

“Maybe if we forced them to, like by making important things available only that way…”

“But that could impact enrollment and retention.”

“Can’t they set their emails to forward to whatever address they actually use?”

“Yes, but they don’t.”

“Maybe if we texted them…”

For a while, many students didn’t have internet access outside of class.  At this point, though, mobile devices have achieved enough presence that I suspect most students could access email if they wanted to.  The issue is that they don’t want to.

Back in the paleolithic era, when I was a student at a small residential college, students had physical mailboxes in the student center.  We’d have to go there to get our snail mail, or as we called it, mail.  Official college messages could be dropped in mailboxes without postage, so we’d get whatever college notices we were supposed to, along with our magazines, letters, and care packages.  (Yes, we actually wrote letters, because we didn’t have email and long-distance calls were expensive.  You, in the back, stop snickering.  Also, get off my lawn.)  The system was slow and flawed, but reaching students wasn’t terribly difficult, and nearly everyone checked mailboxes on a regular basis.  Care packages were too valuable to leave behind.  Students might choose to ignore something, but they couldn’t really dodge it.

In the slang of that time, though, many messages now get sucked into the void.  

I’m thinking that the lack of something like care packages may be part of it.  Students don’t really use email to communicate with each other socially; they’ve moved on to all manner of apps for that.  Email is relegated to institutional communications, many of which are negative, dull, and/or irrelevant.  That’s not to say they aren’t important, but they aren’t enticing.  

When letters from the college were mixed in with letters from friends and brownies from Grandma, they tended not to linger in the box too long.  But if friends and Grandma weren’t there, and all you’d ever find would be the student equivalent of memos from HR, I wouldn’t be surprised if the mailboxes grew cobwebs.  

Replicator technology remains in the early stages, so we aren’t yet at the point where we can beam brownies over the interwebs.  We could do coupons, I suppose, but they aren’t exactly the same thing.  

I’d be fine with them forwarding it to whichever address they actually use, but many don’t even do that.  

Has anyone out there found a way to get students to use their college email on a regular basis?  Right now, far too much crucial information is falling into the void.

Of Ceilings, Floors, and Hooks

Anyone remember HillaryCare?  

Back in the 90’s, Hillary Clinton was put in charge of developing a proposal for a national health care system.  She and her group came up with a hideously complicated proposal that went exactly nowhere, and that delayed progress by twenty years.

The merits of her proposal were considerable.  It reflected a nuanced understanding of the health care system and of the various interests represented within it.  But it only made sense if enacted as a whole, as written. It was so pre-engineered that it didn’t allow for the compromises inherent in the political process.  By building in compromises from the start, Clinton left the legislative branch with no way to assert its presence except a Great Refusal.  What was intended as a floor became a ceiling, and the process of compromise proved too much for it to bear.  It never even came to a floor vote.

(I saw the same dynamic of floors and ceilings with my recent foray into househunting.  When the realtor asks you your range, and you say “x to x plus fifty,” she hears “x plus 100 and up.”)

Now she’s coming out with a complicated, nuanced, tightly pre-engineered proposal for public higher education.  And I’ve got that same sinking feeling I had back when Dave Grohl was still with his first band.

As with HillaryCare, the higher ed proposal reflects serious thought by people who have spent time studying reality.  It requires states to increase their support for public colleges, in order to prevent them from simply replacing state money with federal.  For the public four-year sector, that’s a great idea.  (For community colleges, the news is more mixed.  In many states, community colleges derive as much or more support from local counties or districts as from the state.  Addressing the state while letting the county or district off the hook would create issues.)  It has a built-in work requirement for students, to address public concerns about subsidized loafing.  It allows Pell grants to be used for living expenses, and it puts some pressure on colleges to improve their results, as defined by some pretty reductionist metrics.  That’s par for the course.

But it lacks a hook, it’s heavy with details, and it’s a sitting duck in Congress.  

Clinton made the same mistake here that she made in the 90’s.  She pre-compromised, as if getting the nuances right out of the gate would make the proposal compromise-proof.  That’s simply not how the process works.  By now, I would have expected her to know that.  

Details matter, but you can’t lead with them.  You need to lead with a clear and appealing hook, and address the details as you go.  

“Free community college” isn’t a perfect idea, but it’s a clear one.  And because it’s a goal, rather than a method, it allows for horse-trading of methods in service of the goal.  In other words, it’s possible that an idea like that could command attention in the legislative branch, and emerge in a form that would still do some good.  Clinton’s intricate, pre-compromised, I-thought-of-everything-even-if-I-didn’t package would likely fall victim to the same fate that her health care proposal did.  And if it didn’t, its lack of a clear hook would make it easy to water down to meaninglessness.

That’s not an argument against details, exactly; it’s an argument for putting details in the service of a clear purpose, and foregrounding the purpose.  Be strong on the purpose, and flexible on the details.  Insist on every detail, and you won’t get a single one.

Hillary Clinton is a smart, experienced political professional surrounded by smart, experienced political people.  You’d think that twenty years of hindsight would have had some benefit.  Say what you will about Dave Grohl’s first band, but at least it could write a hook.

Public, Private, and In-Between

Greetings from New Jersey!  Now, back to our regularly scheduled blog...

Is a college degree a public good or a private good?  I’m starting to think the terms of the question are wrong.

Most academics would argue that it’s a public good, which is why it’s deserving of public support.  They use the term differently than economists do -- economists like to use non-excludability, as in the textbook example of a lighthouse -- but that’s okay; the economists’ definition has long struck me as myopic. It’s possible for an excludable good to still have positive spillover effects (or “externalities”) of sufficient magnitude as to justify a public interest in its growth. That’s the argument for tax credits for businesses moving into an area, but it applies equally to public higher education.  In both cases, the positive externalities generated by excludable goods can be -- sometimes are, sometimes aren’t, but conceptually can be -- large enough to justify the use of public resources.

It’s an article of faith among academics tired of budget cuts -- which is to say, academics -- that college degrees have come to be seen and defined as private goods. (A particularly thoughtful example can be found here.) The shift in understanding of who benefits from higher education, the argument goes, has justified the last few decades of cost-shifting from states to students.  After all, why should a struggling high school grad’s taxes pay to train the next financier who will lay him off?

As easy as that binary division is, though, I think it’s missing something.  

As an erstwhile political theorist who works in the community college sector, I’m seeing two angles on the same question.  In Western political thought, it was a commonplace to divide society into three sectors, rather than two: the state, civil society, and the home.  “Civil society” correlated broadly to what we would now call “the economy.”  It isn’t as tightly organized as the state, but it isn’t just private, either.  It’s defined by the interactions among private interests, following rules set and enforced by the state.  It’s intersubjective, by definition.  It partakes of both public and private, and can’t really be reduced to either.  It’s neither purely public nor purely private.

As its own realm, civil society has its own character.  Reducing it to the state, as in the old Soviet model, concentrates too much power in one place.  Reducing it to isolated monads, as in Margaret Thatcher’s assertion that “there is no such thing as society,” leads to immiseration and catastrophe.  It is its own thing, and reducing it entirely to one pole or the other is fanaticism.

In the context of my day job, I see accidental recognition of civil society whenever programs are developed in the name of “workforce development.”  This might be below the radar of folks in the four-year sector, but in the community college world, terms like “middle skills jobs,” “educated workforce,” and “skills gap” are common.  Fittingly, many of the programs built to address those issues are “public-private partnerships.” The idea is that yes, credentials in certain areas lead to higher income for the people who have them, but that there is also a broader social interest served by making it easier for more people to get those credentials and make that income.  

That broader social interest is comprised of many things.  An educated workforce is more fertile ground for startups.  A better-paid population is likelier to take better care of its kids.  It’s likelier to vote and volunteer at higher rates.  A city with a better-paid citizenry will be better able to balance its budget.  Businesses outside of the specific partnerships benefit, too, because those workers buy groceries, and clothes, and services.  And a really basic level, the existence of a plausible, identifiable route for upward social mobility actually brings some stability to the system.  People who have nothing to lose have nothing to lose.  Shut out too many for too long, and bad things happen.  If people feel like the game is winnable, they’re more likely to play by the rules.  Community college training programs are far cheaper than mass incarceration, and far more humane.  Second chances “work” when they pay off, yes, but they also “work” just by existing.

The specifics of all of this may be obvious, but I don’t know that as a sector, we’ve really connected the dots.  Community colleges have the concept embedded in their very names, but many of them are changing their names to obscure their roots.  (For the record, I say community colleges should own what they are.)  “Community,” like “civil society,” may be a hard term to nail down, but that doesn’t make it chimerical.  It matters.  It matters quite a bit.  Without it, we’re left debating terms that don’t fit, and devising solutions that don’t work.  

If anything, we may be better off doubling down on “community.”  It’s not entirely public or private, as those terms are typically used, but that’s okay.  It’s where most of us spend much of our adult lives.  Let’s acknowledge it, and discuss seriously why and how it works better when people have access to good, affordable higher education.