Details, Details...

The entire higher-ed-policy Twitterverse was abuzz Saturday morning with news of the release of Education Department data on the performance of colleges across America.  

After an opening sentence like that, many folks probably stopped reading.  So it goes.

The Obama administration had talked for years about doing some sort of college rankings or ratings, only to back off as it became increasingly clear that both the politics of it and the details of it were daunting.  So instead, it simply released the data.  Now you can do your own ratings.

As always with statistics, be aware of the story you’re trying to tell.  Use the numbers as reality checks, and as cues for unearthing counterintuitive findings, but don’t treat them as gospel.

If you use the site the way that most non-specialists will -- looking up school-by-school -- you’ll be confronted with three numbers for each school: average annual cost, graduation rate, and salary ten years after graduation.  Each is given a line to represent the national average.  

Be careful.

I did a quick read of the policy paper that came with the data, and made some notes.  These are first thoughts; I’m open to correction on any of them.

To its credit, the official document largely concedes that the second criterion, IPEDS graduation rates, makes no sense.  It notes specifically that the IPEDS definition of a graduation rate gives short shrift to community colleges (p. 21).  But it features the flawed number in its headline data anyway.  

It makes a gesture towards acknowledging an issue with the third criterion, noting that while the bar charts show a single average, there are actually very different averages for two year colleges as opposed to four year colleges (p. 24).  Lumping the two together makes most community colleges look artificially bad, and most four-year colleges look artificially good.  (You may start to notice a pattern here…)  It also implicitly assumes that the third and fourth years of college add no value.  If that’s true, we have a much bigger problem.

But the flaw in the second criterion also feeds into the third.  Many of the most financially successful alums of community colleges never actually graduated from them; they did a year, and then transferred.  Those students show up as dropouts at the two-year level, and they’re invisible at the four-year level.  Their salaries don’t get counted.  Given that the “graduation or transfer” number for most cc’s is about double the “graduation” number, this is not a small point.  The paper concedes difficulty in tracking transfer students (p. 34), but never addresses the possibility that it’s creating a substantive distortion by simply ignoring them.

The flaw in the graduation data is most striking when the paper notes that “[f]or two-year schools, completion rates appear largely unrelated to repayment rates, calling into question what types of quality information might be reflected in completion rates.” (pp. 55-6).  Well, yes.  Yes, it does.  So why lead with such misleading data?

(In reference to four-year schools, I was struck by the finding that “only about 5 percent of the variation in earnings across students who attend four-year schools is explained by the institution those students attend.”  p. 49.  If that’s largely correct, then the entire premise of “performance funding” is flawed.)

These may sound nitpicky or defensive, but they add up to something serious.  Yes, trained academic researchers can do much better analyses now than before, and that’s great; I hope some of them come up with tools or discoveries that move the discussion forward.  But putting such badly flawed data in such innocent-looking, user-friendly bar charts implies a solidity to them that they don’t warrant.  I’d hate to see potential students make decisions based on information with such serious flaws.  

My proposal?  For now, dump the user-friendly part.  Let the wonks have at it.  Let’s not pretend to certainty we don’t have.  And in the future, please do big releases on weekdays...

Cub Reporters

The kids had their first day of school in their new town this week.  I needn’t have worried; they’re resilient and likable, and immediately clicked with new classmates.  The Girl, entering sixth grade, was excited to have Drama Club, Model UN, and STEM Club as options.  (As a veteran of Model UN, I’ll admit to some parental pride on that one.  To this day, I can’t hear “point of information?” without flashing back.)  The Boy has already joined the marching band, and is planning to join cross-country for the fall and basketball for the winter.

I had to smile at the difference between the first-day reports, though.  The Girl, eleven, gave a twenty-minute play-by-play, with details, names, and impressions.  The Boy, fourteen, just smiled and said that someone farted in Biology.  He considered that a full report.

Further bulletins as events warrant...

Shoring Up Weaknesses

Would you advise a student with an obvious weakness to take a course in that area, with the idea of shoring up the weak flank?

In a perfect world, there’s a good argument for doing exactly that.  If we think of education as formative -- which it’s supposed to be -- then using education to shore up weaknesses makes sense.  Steer the shy student into the acting class, the dreamer into the business class, and the accountant into the literature class.  They may never major in those areas, or even take them again, but they may well benefit from the experience.  

But as Chad Orzel pointed out in a thoughtful piece this week, the freedom to do that is increasingly a prerogative of wealth.

If you’re an otherwise-strong student with good social, economic, and academic capital, and you’re in a selective and prestigious institution, and you’re well on your way to a lucrative and fairly well defined position, and you have an “elective” slot in a given semester, then yes, you can probably afford to take a flyer on something that will stretch you.  If you pull a “C” in the acting class, well, who cares?  You’re on your way, and it adds some character to your story.  (At Williams, the institutional expression of that was “Winter Study,” or intersession classes, which were graded pass/fail.)  

But what if you’re paying by the course, you’re working your way through, you don’t have a safety net, and your school doesn’t have the prestige that comes from excluding most people?   What if graduation isn’t a given?  What if you don’t already have a strong track record?

For many students, especially at this level, risking failure in an “irrelevant” class is risking too much.  If you’re juggling complicated life circumstances, a combination of failures and withdrawals can easily jeopardize your “satisfactory academic progress,” which is a requirement for financial aid.  In this setting, better to show strengths than to document weaknesses.  Weaknesses are assumed; there’s no need to confirm them.

The “guided pathways” model is based on a pragmatic, if somewhat reluctant, recognition of the higher cost of failure.  The idea is to reduce systemic risk by reducing the chances of bad choices.  I see it as spreading out choice over several semesters: you start with the Big Choice of a general field, and then narrow down as you go.  It’s still possible to fail along the way, but it’s less likely that a student will get lost among conflicting programs.  

I’d like to see an economy robust enough that anyone who graduates college can get a good job, regardless of major; in that economy, we could restore some of those choices.  But for students lacking a glass floor, right now advice like “give it the old college try” is somewhere between tone-deaf and malicious.  I wish that weren’t true, but it is.  And I think we show students more respect by confronting the reality of the situation than by treating everyone as if they have a trust fund.  The first weakness to shore up is economic.

Vocational Programs Cost More

Vocational programs cost more.

If I could hammer home a single sentence to the "too many students go to college" crowd, that would be it.

Expanding vocational programs is a great idea, in many ways, but it's not a way to reduce educational costs.  

I say that as someone who actually has to manage budgets for both transfer and vocational programs.  "Comprehensive" community colleges include both.

Vocational programs bring with them much higher capital costs, whether in terms of square footage or equipment.  (The auto tech program, for example, requires a dozen hydraulic lifts.  That's about a dozen more than the English department requires.)  They tend to be more expensive on "consumables," too, whether that's food for the Culinary program or parts for auto tech.  

Many vocational programs come with their own accreditations, too, whether it's ACF, TAC of ABET, or any of the multiple accreditors in allied health.  Each of those brings with it its own monitoring and reporting requirements, as well as significant expectations on faculty-student ratios and the presence of lab assistants.  

Gen eds, by contrast, are far cheaper to run.  Outside of the lab sciences, they generally don't have high requirements for capital, equipment, or consumables.  They don't have separate accreditations.  The faculty/student ratios can be higher without jeopardizing, say, patient safety.  (Nursing clinicals run at twenty would be unconscionable; Psych 101 sections at twenty are considered small.)  

I bring this up because Tuesday's piece on Vox by a young professor quitting higher education fell into the same "just shunt them into vocational ed" category that so many have.  He gives no indication of having the slightest clue as to how vocational programs are actually run, but that didn't stop him.

I'm a fan of vocational education done well.  But "done well" means "with money."  If we want to see more students ditch the liberal arts for vocational fields, we'll have to fund comprehensive community colleges at substantially higher levels to pay for it.  As anyone in Culinary can tell you, there's no free lunch.

Ask the Administrator: Smuggling in Improvements

Ask the Administrator: Smuggling in Improvements

A new correspondent writes (abridged and slightly disguised):

I have a PhD in English and have been teaching all levels of undergraduate English as an adjunct or on one-year contracts for (more than ten) years. You know how tight the job market has been. My evaluations have been favorable, but the FT, TT positions just have not been there. I've taught successfully at many different institutions and levels. All that experience has served me well, as I have learned how very different campuses approach similar instructional issues. I have just accepted a one-year contract teaching developmental reading at a small college. I am the only FT developmental reading instructor. The developmental chair is at another campus in another town, and I have yet to met her, although we are two weeks into the term. I was hired shortly before the term began, after a phone interview that only addressed my availability. 

I love the location (and the pay), and my students and colleagues are wonderful, but the textbooks, syllabus, and pedagogy are about 20 years out of date. The two required books are $120 drill and kill workbooks ($120 each!), and the subject matter is, well, not relevant to the student population. The students tell me they can't get interested in the texts, because they are so boring. I don't blame them; I was alternately appalled and bored by the essays in the books, too. The books are really designed for 6th graders, but even 6th graders would find the essay content trivial, and the 75 pages of drill and kill per chapter are mind-numbing. The reading level of the texts might be suitable, but the subject matter and the over-reliance on drill and kill are serious impediments for the students.
I am supposed to follow an overburdened syllabus, but I have received no information about the pedagogical reasons for any of the requirements, and I have serious questions. (lists several) The department chair, I am told, developed the syllabus and chose the texts perhaps 20 years ago, and aside from new editions of the same texts, nothing has changed in those 20 years. I was told everything would be on Moodle when I arrived; nothing was on Moodle, and I had to call the chair twice to even get a copy of the syllabus I am supposed to follow.  

This methodology conflicts with everything l have learned about teaching developmental reading and writing. I am only here on a one-year contract, although I would be happy if it turned into more. Should I teach using pedagogy and content that I know from experience and training will be ineffective, or should I sneak in as much of my own content as I dare? I thought I might volunteer to search for more affordable texts and to develop a new syllabus, but I have no idea how that might be received, and I would have to ask permission of the chair who developed this course in the first place.  

Help?

There’s a lot going on here.

Given how lightly the department is staffed, and how casually the hire was made, I’m guessing that the existing curriculum guide is more a function of neglect than of conscious decision.  Your estimation that it’s about twenty years out of date strikes me as plausible; it may be that long since anyone has paid attention.  If that’s true, then perversely enough, you actually have more freedom to innovate than you might think.

First, a caveat.  Check the name of the author of the workbook against the staff list of the college.  If it’s written by someone on campus, you may be stuck with it for a while.  That shouldn’t be true, but sometimes it is.

If the author isn’t on campus, though, then I’d go with the “neglect” hypothesis.  

If the college is relatively indifferent to what’s actually taught, it’s probably attuned instead to some version of results.  Ideally, that would involve tracking student success in subsequent courses; in less ideal cases, it may boil down to hoping for few or no student complaints.  Although going only by complaints is generally a bad thing, it actually creates some space in the interstices for you to do better than the official plan.  If you’re able to generate good outcomes among the students -- however defined at the local institution -- you’re likely to be in good stead.

I did something like that at DeVry.  The curriculum guides for the classes in my field were pretty awful, so I made an executive decision and exploited my relative obscurity to teach them the way I thought they should be taught.  It worked for me; the students were generally happy, the administration was happy with the lack of complaints, and I could sleep at night knowing that I was doing a good thing, albeit below the radar.  (Eventually, I got to rewrite the guides themselves.) That was before everything was online, so I had a bit more room to move, but it sounds like your college isn’t quite up to speed with technology.

Before chucking it wholesale, though, I’d recommend combing through the existing materials to see what you could salvage in good conscience, and then using that on the day of your official observation.  

If you’re able to parlay your short-term position into a longer-term one -- and good luck! -- then you could try tackling the issue more directly.  But in the meantime, I wouldn’t advise committing educational malpractice on students for the sake of your career.  The ethics of that just don’t sit right.

Good luck!

Wise and worldly readers, what do you think?  Is there a better way?  

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

Friday Fragments

When should an aspiring academic have kids?

My preferred answer: when s/he wants to.

There is never a perfect time, and there never will be.  But as an industry, we still pretend that there is.

Rebecca Schuman offered an on-point perspective, suggesting that if academia and family life can’t co-exist, then so much the worse for academia.  For some people, that’s the answer.  She has made a choice with which she’s happy, and much of her description of the constraints rings true.  The tenure clock and the biological clock can seem to compete.

For what it’s worth, I’ll suggest that the issues may look different in community colleges than at research universities.  Here, if you teach well, you’re fine.  At the community colleges I’ve seen that have tenure systems -- all of mine have -- getting tenure has been the default setting.  You don’t have to be superhuman.  It’s possible to have both a family and a career.

Work/life balance issues aren’t unique to women, to parents, or to academia.  They’re everywhere.  But you’d think that academia would be more attuned to these issues than it is.

--

For once, I’m glad to see community colleges ignored.  If you haven’t seen the list of the ugliest college campuses in America, check it out.  

I can vouch that RIT and Hampshire are both, well, architecturally unfortunate.

The period of the greatest building boom in American higher ed was also the high-water mark of brutalism, which may be one of the ugliest styles of architecture ever devised.  It’s ugly and off-putting, and also surprisingly high-maintenance.  (I will never understand the appeal of flat roofs in snowy climates.)  Timing is everything.  Well, timing and taste.  And drainage.

--

Orgtheory has a worthwhile piece on the largely unacknowledged shift of higher ed funding from states (in the form of operating aid) to the Feds (in the form of student financial aid).  As colleges shifted funding burdens to students, they effectively also shifted it to the Feds.  Since the first rule of politics is “follow the money,” we shouldn’t be surprised to see an increased federal influence in higher ed circles.

For many community colleges, the picture is of an increasingly U-shaped curve.  There’s an increased federal presence through financial aid, and a relatively strong local presence.  But state presence has suffered greatly.  That creates some awkward moments on the ground, when rules designed at 50,000 feet have to be applied in local circumstances where they make little sense.  When the intermediary of state-level support has dropped, those moments matter more.

--

The kids start school on Tuesday.  It’ll be their first day in their new district.

I know they’ll do great, because they’re great kids.  (I may be a little biased on that point.)  And the schools are impressive, from what I’ve seen.  The Girl is excited that there’s a debate club open to sixth graders.  The debaters won’t know what hit them.  The Boy has already spent time with the marching band, and is eyeing the cross-country team.  

Still, as a parent, it’s hard not to be a little anxious.  They didn’t ask to move here, they left friends behind, and they’re walking into schools where they have no history.  

Adaptability is a life skill.  But I’ll still have my fingers crossed on Tuesday.

Seeing the Matrix

I can see the matrix, and I don’t like what I see.

I’ve seen a few different ways of managing online classes, but they all (with one clear exception) lead to “matrix management,” or cross-cutting responsibilities that often create diseconomies of scale.  In other words, the org chart starts to look like a drawer full of unmatched socks, and the resulting conflicts wind up consuming far more organizational resources than they should.

As a dedicated non-fan of the matrix, I’m hoping there’s a better way.

I’ve seen the model of housing responsibility for online classes in a separate division, usually with its own dean or director.  The advantages of that model are that there’s a go-to person, it’s easier to ensure that the course offerings are consistent and coherent, and it’s obvious where to locate professional development responsibilities.  

But that model brings real issues when the person in charge of the classes isn’t responsible for the faculty who teach them.  The deans with responsibility for staffing -- who are often campus-based -- often regard online sections as parasitic on their own.  From a quality control standpoint, it’s hard to say who’s in charge.  Finally, some departments rebel on general principle when they don’t “control” their own online sections.   

I’ve also seen the model of treating online classes just like on-campus classes.  In that model, departments and deans who staff say, Tuesday morning sections also staff online sections.  

The advantages of that model are real.  Most basically, it ensures that people fluent in the subject matter are close to the staffing.  It also ensures that faculty have a single dean to report to, rather than multiple deans who may have conflicting opinions.  And it tends to reduce departmental anxiety, and therefore opposition.

But it also tends to prevent the development of a coherent online program.  Online classes often become afterthoughts, or get offered unevenly across the curriculum as some departments move quickly and others drag their feet.  Deans or departments who don’t see value in online learning can kill it through casual neglect.  

The most radical solution is simply to ignore online altogether.  But in terms of student demand and serving the needs of the community, that ship has sailed.  Like it or don’t, but online education is a fact, and an increasingly large one.

The most radical positive solution is what Southern New Hampshire University did.  It simply spun off the online unit and made it entirely separate.  The online unit has its own managers, its own faculty, its own schedule, and even its own support services.  

The “secession” approach has the considerable virtue of clarity.  Folks on either side of the division know which side they’re on, and prioritize it.  Instead of trying to get nervous departments to try something new, they simply created new departments.  No matrix there!

As much as I envy SNHU’s panache, though, I envy its resources more.  It charges far more than we do, and has much more control over its own money than we do.  Accordingly, it can take calculated risks without jeopardizing the entire enterprise.  When “acceptable losses” are quite high, you can afford to take audacious risks.  None of that is to diminish SNHU’s achievement; I’m a fan, and have been for some time.  It’s just to say that some of its methods aren’t portable to most of the community college world.

Assuming that the resources to establish an entirely separate and parallel college won’t be forthcoming, then, the other solutions lead to some pretty basic organizational dilemmas.  If the same faculty teach onsite and online, what’s the best way to structure that?

Wise and worldly readers -- especially those in administration at places at which online runs smoothly -- have you seen a better way?  Is there an elegant alternative to the matrix?

A Fresh Blast of Hope

I've had more first days of school than most human beings ever will.  It's an occupational hazard.  

But there's something intoxicating about first days, even after all these years.

On the first day, nobody is behind yet.  Nobody is swamped with grading.  People are happy to see each other again.  Faculty are excited to meet new students, and students are excited for new classes.  

Every single year -- every semester, really, but it's strongest in the Fall -- there's a fresh blast of hope.

That never gets old.

I think it was Dorothy Parker who commented that she prefers the moment before writing to the moment after, because in the moment before, it could be brilliant; in the moment after, it's merely what it is.  New semesters have an element of that, too.  Some bad stuff will happen, conflicts and disappointments will develop, and the like.  But at the outset, anything can happen, and some of it will be great.

It may be the umpteenth time, but here goes...

Navigation as a New Gen Ed

What skills do students need, regardless of major or career?  What skills do we just expect all educated adults to have?

In the world of undergraduate education, we answer those questions by defining certain skills as “general education.”  Gen Eds, as they’re called, cross majors.  The idea is that whether a student is studying business, engineering, history, or art, there are certain basic skills we’d expect her to have.  

Each college has its own list, though they tend to have a lot of overlap.  Most include some variation on “communication skills,” which tend to result in requirements for English Composition and, sometimes, public speaking.  Most have some sort of “quantitative literacy” requirement, which typically covers math or closely related fields.  After that, they get more site-specific: some have a “diversity” requirement, some require some sort of service learning, some have a “civic knowledge” requirement, and so forth.  The Gen Ed competencies that a college adopts are supposed to drive its course requirements -- though it’s often the other way around on the ground -- and they’re supposed to reflect the common challenges and expectations facing educated adults.

I bring this up because I’ve been thinking about the seeming disconnect between an economy in which paths to prosperity are ever more complicated and opaque, and the move afoot on campuses to make pathways simpler and clearer.  They actually make sense together.  They assume that the ability to navigate complexity is the new Gen Ed.

As with any Gen Ed competency, we can’t just trust that students will pick it up along the way.  That’s where the move to guided pathways comes in.  We have to design for it.  That means not assuming that students come in with it, but building pathways so that they can’t help but encounter it as they go.  

In many ways, I suspect that the current generation is far better at navigating complexity than any other, including my own.  That’s because they’ve handled more complicated social lives, and many of them have handled far more complicated schedules than we did.  But time management is only one element of navigating complexity.  

Over the past (coughing over the number) years, I’ve been to more than my share of employer advisory boards.  Across fields and institutions, a common denominator has been a complaint that many new employees don’t know how to read, and adjust to, workplace culture.  They keep waiting for explicit directions.  Some of that may be age and/or life experience -- “kids today” is hardly a new complaint -- but some of it may be the unintended consequence of years of educating students around standardized tests.  We in higher ed can’t change K-12, at least directly, but we can counteract some of the damage.  We just have to make a point of choosing to.

Wise and worldly readers, have you found ways of helping students develop the ability to make sense from chaos?  And are there ways to measure that sort of thing?

Is Indentured Servitude Really a New Idea?

As a writer, I’m grateful for having readers, and I try to show my gratitude by being generally thoughtful and measured in my posts.  I’m only human, but the effort is there.

That said, every once in a while an idea comes along that’s so staggeringly bad - morally, financially, factually - that respectful treatment wouldn’t do it justice.  This is one of those times.  

Carlo Salerno argues in Forbes that we can get college costs under control through Income Share Agreements.  They’re sort of like liens on future earnings.  The idea is that a prospective student will offer shares in her future income in exchange for an upfront investment that she will use to cover the cost of college.  As Salerno frames the idea, payback would be at a fixed percentage of income for a set amount of time.  The higher the income, the greater the payback, which presumably means the more that investors would be willing to front.  If you want to major in a low-paying field, well, as Salerno puts it,

“Anyone should be able to finance a degree in liberal arts or social services or the like, but nobody should be surprised that backers will expect a higher share of their future income in return.”

Salerno notes that “critics incorrectly equate ISA’s with the 19th century idea of indentured servitude.”  Other than “incorrectly,” we agree on this point.  Salerno suggests that a better parallel is startup funding, in which investors put money in upfront in exchange for a share in future profits.

Of course, if a startup fails, you can declare it bankrupt and start another one.  The same does not apply to people.  That’s why the “indentured servitude” critique keeps sticking.

For a relatively short article, Salerno manages to include an impressive amount of wrong.  For example, he claims that “not a single institution in the past 30 plus years that (sic) has been able to establish and permanently maintain an inexpensive degree program…”  Apparently, Salerno has never heard of community colleges.  There are over 1,100 of them in the United States, so they shouldn’t be that hard to spot.  Granted, one could use the term “permanently” to weasel out of it, by saying that most community colleges were established in the 1960’s, but that’s a bit too cute.  

He also seems to believe that colleges are funded entirely by tuition.  In the public sector, that’s substantially false.  (I’ll partially concede Arizona.)  Over the last five or so years, the single largest driver of cost increases at public colleges has been state disinvestment.  Salerno suggests “funding colleges” by ISA’s, which implies embracing total disinvestment.  If we do that, the first consequence will be to accelerate tuition increases.  Salerno’s solution to rising costs is first to raise prices.  I can’t even…

Of course, Salerno elides entirely issues of equity and inclusion.  For example, nationally, white students graduate at higher rates than African-American or Latino students.  Should the market respond accordingly?  High-income students graduate at higher rates than low-income students.  Should the market respond accordingly?  Assuming that investors act to maximize returns, we should expect to see the student body get much smaller, richer, and whiter than it is now.  The market has spoken!  

At a really basic level, Salerno errs in treating eleemosynary institutions as if they were consumer retail.  They are not.  They are self-conscious efforts to achieve a broad social good.  By social good, I mean something that goes beyond the payoff to the student.  Community colleges are called that because they exist to serve the community.  That means helping high school dropouts with adult literacy classes.  (I don’t imagine investors lining up for that one.)  It means teaching ESL to people whose first languages aren’t English.  (The “indentured servitude” parallel would get really disturbing there, assuming any investors at all.)  It means offering second chances to students any rational investor would have long since abandoned.  

Those aren’t design flaws.  They’re features.  

Besides, efforts to time the market are famously futile.  A student who entered college in 2006 and graduated in 2010 saw the world change in the interim.  Yes, some bets are higher-percentage than others, but anyone who thinks equating fields with jobs is easy is invited to explain the job market for new lawyers.  

Finally, none of Salerno’s mechanisms address underlying costs.  If you’re serious about reducing the tuition spiral, you don’t redirect institutional aid to students.  When you do that, the only way for colleges to make up the loss is to charge more.  If you’re serious, you increase operating aid on a predictable long-term basis; you move away from the credit hour; you restructure financial aid to allow people to use the summer as a real semester, thereby completing more quickly; and you do everything possible to increase the number of middle-class jobs open to new graduates.  You don’t cherry-pick the wealthiest and squeeze the rest even harder.  

ISA’s, as Salerno presents them, are a terrible idea.  They’re plutocracy in the guise of efficiency, founded on a deep foundation of either ignorance or profound indifference to the community.  No.  Just, no.

Tomorrow I’ll try to be my usual, more measured self.

Friday Fragments

The Chronicle ran a couple of stories this week about homeless undergraduates, but in both cases, they focused on colleges with dorms.  

The great untold story is of homeless students at colleges without dorms.  

James Baldwin once noted that poverty is expensive.  That becomes clear when you realize how many forms of economic support effectively require some sort of stable address.  I say “effectively” because many of them offer theoretical workarounds, but the workarounds are often so difficult and obscure that even the people who administer the programs often don’t know about them, or go out of their way to avoid them.

From what I’ve seen in this sector, “homeless” is sometimes a misleading term.  “Shakily housed” comes closer.  Some students couch-surf, going from acquaintance to acquaintance, wearing out welcomes at unpredictable rates.  Others stay in abusive or otherwise awful relationships, just to have a place to live.  Some sleep in their cars.  A heartbreaking number of them have kids.  

I have to tip my cap to Sara Goldrick-Rab on this one.  Her “free community college” proposal goes beyond covering the cost of tuition and fees, and actually includes a modest stipend for living expenses.  It would allow students to move from couch-surfing, or abuse, or living in cars, to modest-but-acceptable conditions in which they could actually study.

Virginia Woolf famously claimed that writing requires a room of one’s own, along with a modest stipend.  She was right.  If we want to encourage student success, we need to stop requiring some of them to be superhuman.  You’re much likelier to stick with a program if you aren’t always looking over your shoulder.  It’s exhausting.

I salute the residential colleges that are making life easier for shakily housed students.  But far greater numbers of the shakily housed can be found at community colleges.  

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Yesterday I told the story of an internship I did in the summer before my senior year of college, but today I realized that I left out a key point.

Although the internship was unpaid, I was funded through what amounted to a summer fellowship underwritten by a generous donor to my college.  That summer stipend made it possible for me to accept an unpaid position.  Without that stipend, I couldn’t have done it.

Summer fellowship stipends for internships aren’t a new idea -- I had mine back in the 80’s -- but they’re more timely now than they were then.  Tuition has gone up much faster than summer job income, and unpaid internships have become more widely expected as a price of entry to many fields.  Many capable students are precluded from internships simply because they can’t afford to work for free.

Note to development officers everywhere: for donors looking to make major differences, but who want to try something different, try this.  For me, it was life-changing.

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This week marked the one-year anniversary of The Dog going missing.  She was lost for seventeen days in the wilds of Southwick, MA, and Granby, CT, dodging cars and fisher cats.  We found her through the help of some wonderful volunteers, the incredible reach of social media, and the great smell of bacon.

The Dog had no idea about the anniversary, but we did.  She got some extra chicken skin this week.

When Success Wears a Disguise

Longtime readers may be disappointed in me for this, but at one time, I thought I wanted to be a lawyer.  Then, the summer before my senior year of college, I spent a summer internship in city government.  I was surrounded by lawyers, and I had a moment of clarity: I didn’t like them at all, and their work seemed dreary.  That internship steered me away from what I thought was my career choice, and saved me a great deal of time and money.

Instead, I went to grad school.  Insert joke here.

At one level, the internship could be read as a colossal failure; it steered me away from the path that it was supposed to reinforce.  But in a personal sense, it was a raging success.  It gave me valuable information at a key moment.  The fact that the information was “negative” was beside the point.  Making a choice involves rejecting other options; when I rejected law, I gained a much clearer sense of what to do next.

That kind of success is hard to capture institutionally, so we mostly don’t.  But we should.  We’d get a much more accurate picture of the value of what we do, and in the process, we’d get a fuller picture of how students actually use college.

When we talk about “student success,” for example, it’s often boiled down to graduation rates.  By now, most of us can recite the reasons that the IPEDS rate is a silly and inaccurate measure for community colleges, and they’re all true.  For example, many students who intend to transfer for a bachelor’s degree don’t intend to complete an associate’s along the way.  Their plan is to do a year at the community college and then transfer.  When the financial aid form asks whether they’re “degree-seeking,” they’re telling the truth when they answer “yes.”  They just aren’t seeking it where they’re first enrolling.  But the forms don’t capture that nuance, so what the student perceives as successfully working a plan shows up in the numbers as institutional failure.

But in some cases, even a more straightforward case of walking away is really a kind of success.  

That’s true, for instance, in many “stackable” allied health programs.  A student who gets a CNA certification and then stops out for a semester or two before returning may be doing something that makes perfect sense for her life, even if it doesn’t do wonders for our “degrees produced.”  And a student who has the shock of recognition that a given program is just the wrong fit for him may have needed to learn that before he could learn the next thing.  

That’s why I’m a fan of statistics like “percentage of bachelor’s degree grads with significant community college credits.”  A number like that pays attention to the long-term result, rather than to short-term twists in the path.  Given the complexities of students’ lives, especially in this sector, insisting on counting only the most linear and traditional paths as successful simply gets it wrong.  

Within colleges, students who change majors are sometimes held against the programs that “lost” them.  I consider that a severe mistake.  I think everyone can do something, but they’re aren’t all the same thing.  (As a baseball player, I’m a hell of a writer.)  Sometimes they don’t know what their niche is until they’ve tried a few.  In my more humanistic moments, I like to think that that’s what education is.  

None of this is to reject the need to get unnecessary barriers out of the way, to provide clear “default” pathways, or to hold colleges accountable for performance.  It’s just to say that success comes in many forms, and if we’re serious about it, we should recognize all of them.  Every day that I’m not a lawyer is evidence of that.

After Crossing Over...

The "Administrators Are People Too" piece in IHE was quite good on its own terms, but I was struck at how quickly the comments inadvertently confirmed its thesis.  There's a level of self-righteous vituperation out there that goes far beyond anything that could be explained by the doings of any one provost or dean.  It comes from something much deeper.  And for newbies who cross over from faculty, the depth and persistence of that vituperation can be disorienting.

Having crossed that divide myself, and having worked with others who have, a few thoughts to offer newbies. 

First, understand that "the administration" is a synecdoche for all external forces, or for anything that compels a professor to do something she'd rather not do.  The state cuts funding and enrollment drops, so the college loses revenue; that's largely invisible to many faculty.  But you put a cap on travel, and you're the bad guy.  That may have been the best move available to you, but many folks won't see the options you had to choose from; they'll only see the one you chose.  "But I made the least-bad choice!" may be true, but many won't care.  Social psychologists call that the "fundamental attribution error:" we attribute actions to personal characteristics, rather than to the options available at the time.

"The administration" also functions as a stand-in for authority generally.  A professor at a previous college once admitted to me that much of his distrust of administration came from growing up in a dysfunctional family.  I was impressed by his self-awareness, but utterly powerless to fix his childhood.  

Many people don't perceive an administration as a set of moving parts, or of consisting of different people over time.  They speak of it as The Borg, and will hold any dean responsible for the perceived sins of all, both present and past.   As Faulkner put it, the past isn't dead; it isn't even past.  In a mature institution, there's plenty of past, and it will change with each new teller of the tale.

And then there's pay.  It's no secret that faculty salaries in many institutions were never great, and have struggled more since the Great Recession.  When you're feeling deprived, the nearest people who are making more than you make convenient targets, whether they have anything to do with it or not.  

All of which is to say two things.  First, don't take it personally.  That kind of anger transcends anything you have done, will do, or even could do.  It comes with the gig.  It's a hard pill to swallow, especially when you have to make decisions that some people won't like.  It's easy for disgruntled people to plug a regrettable-but-necessary action into a pre-existing narrative, and take it as confirmation of every sinister motive ever imputed to your office.  Just take heart knowing that your colleagues know that.  If you've never angered anybody, you've never had to make a hard decision.

Second, don't let it stop you from doing what needs to be done.  If you're in the role for the right reasons, your positive influence will show, over time.  I've personally had the experience, repeatedly, of slogging through tremendous (and nasty) resistance to make a change, only to have the opponents admit grudgingly, years later, that I was right  Opposition in the moment doesn't necessarily portend opposition forever.  Except when it does.

It's easy to underestimate the emotional impact of these attitudes when you first cross over, especially if you stay at the same college.  I saw some former colleagues change their demeanor markedly.  Some became much more deferential, which was creepy; others immediately became more hostile, which was disheartening.  Most didn't change, though, and it's worth remembering that the loudest voices aren't usually the most representative.  The angriest student doesn't really represent the class, and the angriest professor doesn't really represent the faculty.  Most will pay you relatively little mind most of the time, which is as it should be; they should be focused on their own work.  You won't hear much from them, so it's easy to attribute more power to the crankiest than they actually have.  

None of this is to discount or deny that some distrust has a real basis.  Some people in positions of authority abuse those positions.  The trick is to try to stop the cycle.  The best administrators I've seen have shown themselves able to rise above the drama, to choose not to take the bait.  Taking the high road and leading by example can be exhausting, but it wears well and rewards the right things.  Most will notice, eventually.  Some never will.  Let that be their problem.