The Other Legacy of the For-Profit College Boom

The New Yorker has a pretty good piece on the students stranded by the abrupt closures of for-profit colleges.  It mentions the students who are withholding loan payments for programs taken at the Corinthian Colleges, which both closed and showed evidence of fraud.  And it ends with a heartbreaking profile of a former student who’s trapped in low-wage limbo, waiting for final judgment on loans he won’t be able to repay, and yet rightly wary of going back to school after what happened to him the first time.

As far as it goes, it’s quite good.

But I was disappointed that it didn’t follow through on the photograph that led the article.  The photo showed some fired faculty loading boxes of their stuff into their cars, presumably never to return.  When the college closed, they lost their jobs.  The same is likely true of staff and administration.

Coming on the heels of Burlington College’s closure, I couldn’t help but think about the other legacy of the for-profit college boom: former employees cast adrift.

For a while in the late 90’s, and again in the late 00’s, for-profit colleges accounted for a disproportionate percentage of academic hiring.  (I was part of the first wave.)  That happened for two reasons: for-profits were growing, and non-profits weren’t hiring.  If you were on the market at a particular time and place, you may have had a choice between a sustaining job at a for-profit, and adjuncting at a non-profit.  In that context, the glib equation of “for-profit” with “exploitative” was questionable at best.  

Some of the people I worked with at DeVry should have been snapped up elsewhere, and would have been in a more rational world.  Many eventually were, and when we meet now, we tend to use verbs like “escaped.”  One who retired semi-voluntarily expressed his envy that, in his words, I “found a hole in the fence.”  It was a difficult place to work in the best of times, and the best of times are well behind it.  At least it’s still open.

It had (and has) its issues, which is why we gravitate to prison metaphors.  But it also took in a generation of academics that nobody else would.  It was a port in a storm.  As more of those ports close, the storm only gets stronger.  

It’s easy to write the sins of the organization onto the individual employees, but it’s also a category mistake.  The faculty there -- myself included -- resented and resisted attempted management intrusions into, say, grading decisions.  (Part of my decision to escape was based on not wanting to do that.  I can say with a straight face that I never did.)  We took our teaching seriously, as did the students.  Many of us simultaneously taught at various non-profit colleges and universities in the area, partly for money, partly for a different environment, and partly for validation.  Most of us would have accepted, eagerly, offers from traditional institutions if they had been offered.  

Monday’s piece in IHE about ever-increasing discount rates suggests, among other things, that the for-profits aren’t the outliers that many academics like to think they are.  They’re the canaries in the coal mine.  Many of the little ports in which academics have taken shelter are looking unsustainable.  The folks who’ve worked at Burlington College aren’t in any better shape now than those who worked at Corinthian.  And I don’t think Burlington College will be the last.

For-profits were especially susceptible to boom-bust cycles, since they drew their revenue entirely from enrollment.  But an awful lot of smaller private colleges aren’t really that different, and their discount rates suggests that they’ve hit, if not exceeded, the highest tuitions the market will bear.

I don’t really have a happy ending to this one.  I just hope that hiring committees at the few places that are still hiring won’t hold past resourcefulness against candidates.  They worked honestly, hard, and (often) well.  It’s not their fault that they’re left to pack their things for anonymous headline photos.

   

Graduations

It’s graduation season, which means that college graduations, program graduations, pinning ceremonies, and the like are upon us.  I’ve been through enough of them at this point -- from the varying perspectives of participant, spectator, and platform party -- to have some comparative, if opinionated, perspective.

I’ve already written about graduation speakers, so here I’ll just focus on the ceremony.

First, the regalia.  I’m very pro-regalia.  Yes, it’s sort of silly, but it conveys the message that the day is special.  Also, gowns are quite forgiving; not to brag, but I still fit in the gown I wore in 1997.  I’m a fan of the faculty and administration wearing gowns in the colors of their doctoral institutions, since it makes for a more interesting visual palette than a sea of uniform black (though black can be slimming).  And the moment when the students move their tassels from right to left is lovely.

Name reading.  I’ve seen ceremonies with multiple readers, and ceremonies with single readers.  The best ones, I think, are male/female pairs, which the readers switching off.  Varying voices keeps the audience from getting bored.  My favorites have been when the name readers come from the faculty.  Given the point of the enterprise, it makes sense that faculty should have a speaking role at graduation.  And when you have pairs of faculty doing it, they can plan so when one person’s student comes up, the other can read the name, so the one whose student it is can give a hug or a high-five.  

Selfie sticks.  No.  Just, no.

Strutting up the walkway.  I say, go for it.  By the time we get to the students walking, they’ve already been listening to various speakers for a while, and everyone is a little antsy.  The point of the day is celebration, and some exuberance straining against the boundaries of the ceremony is to the good.  Live a little.  The same goes for enthusiastic cheering sections for individual students.  No air horns -- that’s just gauche -- but some coordinated cheers are morale boosting for the student and comic relief for everyone else.  

Pledge of allegiance/national anthem.  I’ve seen ceremonies in which everyone removed their caps and held them on their hearts, like baseball caps.  I’ve also seen ceremonies in which the caps stay on.  I don’t know the “rule,” but each place seems to have its own variation.  At the Culinary graduation last week, I noticed the chefs kept their chef hats on during the pledge.  I’m not sure what the “rule” is there, either.  I’ll admit that I have to fight the urge to yell “Play Ball!” at the end of the anthem.  I don’t remember ceremonies featuring either the pledge or the anthem before 9/11, so the issue didn’t come up.  

Cap decoration.  For faculty and administration, no.  For students, yes.  My favorites are either the purely celebratory or the clever.  At this point, you’re a college graduate; show some wit.  At Brookdale’s celebration, one student had the chemical structure for caffeine on her cap.  That’s how it’s done.

Outdoors/Indoors.  Outdoors offers potentially infinite seating, and allows for little kids to run around when they’re bored.  That said, outdoors also means you’re at the mercy of the weather.  Heat and humidity don’t go well with multiple layers.  At Holyoke we used a huge wedding tent for a few years after the fire marshall said the gym was too small.  The tent had its virtues, but the acoustics were terrible and we had to keep our fingers crossed that there wouldn’t be lightning, since it wasn’t grounded.  One year a small swarm of bees made its way onto the platform, which added some suspense to the proceedings.  If you’re holding the event on a soccer field or something similar, there’s a very real danger of mud.  That’s a nuisance for high heels, but a disaster for wheelchairs.  Also, port-a-potties are gross.  I’m a fan of indoors, where you have air conditioning, real bathrooms, flat/dry floors, and a decent sound system.  If it’s a nice day, you can always have the post-ceremony reception outside.

Saturday or Sunday ceremonies.  Not a fan.  By the end of the semester, the faculty and staff are fried.  Have the decency to hold the ceremony on a weekday.

Tight controls on tickets.  If you can avoid it, avoid it.  Community college students are sometimes the first in the extended family to graduate from college, and the extended family wants to see it.  This should be encouraged.  (As a frustrated student once put it, “YOU tell Grandma she can’t come!”)  If that means springing for a larger venue, as Holyoke did, or having two separate ceremonies, as Brookdale did, then do it.  Yes, there’s an upfront cost, but the goodwill generated in the community is powerful.  And when little kids cheer their parents as they walk across the stage, well, if you don’t like that, there’s just something wrong with you.  

The shoes!  Watching the variety of footwear as students walk across the stage is always fun.  

That said, I’ve advise students against flip-flops.  Show at least a little effort.  If the ceremony is outdoors and it looks like rain, you might want to go with flats.  (See “mud,” above.)

Finally, length.  As with the advice for graduation speakers, brevity is your friend.  If a ceremony drones on for too long, people start to leave, and the students towards the end get shortchanged.  Besides, the chairs are uncomfortable and the gowns are hot.  Shoot for no more than two hours total.

Wise and worldly readers, what would you add?

Friday Fragments

Thursday was “Scholars’ Day” on campus.  That’s a day for faculty and staff to do presentations for their peers on things they care about.  For me, it’s a rare chance to see faculty in their natural habitat, doing what they do really well.

I was heartened to see that the faculty-led panel on Open Educational Resources (OER) was standing-room-only.  Even better, two of the professors who had used OER in their classes this Spring reported improved course completion rates, one by double digits.  In a survey one professor conducted in two sections at the end of the semester, fewer than half of the students said they “always” buy assigned textbooks, and 16 percent said they never do.  Apparently, when more students actually have the material, more of them do the reading.  And when every student has the material from day one, fewer fall behind.

Much of the discussion centered around ancillary materials -- tests, quizzes, worksheets.  Commercial publishers now are starting to build ancillary materials to supplement OER textbooks.  Get the book for free, but pay, say, $25 for other stuff to round it out.  I had to admit being impressed at the ingenuity of the publishers.

At first, it struck me as cynical exploitation, if not open violation of Creative Commons.  But when other faculty expressed concerns about the workload involved in generating entirely new ancillary materials from scratch, I started to see the appeal.  In a perfect world, all that stuff would be free, and it sounds like Open Stax is starting to develop it.  But a student who gets the book for free and pays $25 for ancillaries is still getting a better deal than one who pays $200 for a bundle with an online code she can’t resell.

Details aside, though, the level of faculty interest was encouraging, and the reports from the early pilot sections ranged from mixed to generally positive.  Student results were encouraging, and student survey feedback was strongly positive.  We may be on to something.

--

I had been tasked with making some opening remarks.  The professor who introduced me just went with “go to it, Dr. Reed.”  Not the most florid intro, but it would make a great title for an autobiography.

--

From the “left-handed compliment” department: this week The Boy was falsely accused of plagiarism by his English teacher because his paper seemed too good.  

He’s that good.  The Boy can flat-out write.  

To be fair, he’s growing up in a house in which it’s not unusual for dinner conversation to turn to the merits of the Oxford comma.  (I’m pretty dogmatically “pro.”  Luckily, my President is, too, so we’ve decreed that the accreditation self-study shall use the Oxford comma.)  We read and write a lot, and we’ve talked to the kids like adults pretty much from the beginning.  

That may account for competence.  The flair is all his.  And I have the same sort of pride that other parents have when a kid has a great fastball or a nasty three-point shot.  

--

Meanwhile, The Girl is obsessed with the “Hamilton” soundtrack.  At breakfast last week, she asked me if Hercules Mulligan was a real person.  That’s a tough one before the first cup of coffee.

--

A correction to the post earlier this week about IPEDS graduation rates: I should have referred more specifically to IPEDS-GR.  It’s the headline number, but IPEDS as a whole contains far more than the headline number.  Thanks to Tod Massa for clearing that up.

Good for the Soul

On a day when you’re just a little crabby for all the silly little petty reasons that people get crabby, there is no faster cure than listening to a mother of four talk triumphantly about her return to college and the example she set for her kids, two of whom are in the audience, beaming.

That’s all.

Barack Obama is a College Graduate

Barack Obama didn’t show up in IPEDS statistics as a college graduate.  That’s because he transferred before graduating.  I’d say he’s done okay for himself.

I love the #CountAllStudents campaign.  It’s an effort to share anecdotes of students who attended both community college and a four-year college, eventually graduating from the latter, but showing up in the official numbers of neither.  Students who fit that profile are far more common than most people realize, and missing them can lead to terrible policy decisions.

Normally I’d object to something entirely anecdotal, on the grounds that it’s, well, entirely anecdotal.  But the statistics have been out there for a while, and people keep ignoring them.  Maybe anecdotes will help the numbers break through.

For example, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, roughly 46 percent of bachelor’s degree grads in America in the last ten years have significant numbers of credits from community colleges; 65 percent of those have at least three semesters.

For context, 46 percent is almost exactly the percentage of undergrads in America who are enrolled at a community college at any given time.

In other words, the percentage of undergrads at cc’s and the percentage of bachelor’s grads with significant cc credits are almost exactly the same.  

That report came out over a year ago.  The political discourse barely noticed.

If community colleges were actually the barriers to success that some folks insinuate, I’d expect to see their representation among bachelor’s degree grads to be much lower than it is.  

The #CountAllStudents campaign gives both names and stories to explain what looks like a contradiction.  If you take “too long” to graduate -- meaning more than 150 percent of “normative” time -- you won’t show up in grad rates.  If you transfer prior to completing the associate’s, you won’t show up in either school’s grad rate.  If you reverse transfer prior to completing the associate’s, you won’t show up in the grad rate.  But in every case, you will show up in that population-level number of total college graduates.

The population-level number gives a much truer picture of the performance of the sector as a whole, though it doesn’t do as much to measure the performance of any given school.  That’s because people move.  Hampshire County, Massachusetts doesn’t have a community college in it, but it has people with associate’s degrees.  They came from somewhere.  Hunterdon County, New Jersey is the same way (though much more expensive).  And even in places that have community colleges, people don’t necessarily live where they went to school.  If the point of tracking these statistics is to isolate a given institution, it may not work well.  But as a snapshot of the sector as a whole, it captures a truth that’s too easily lost when you just look at school-by-school grad rates.

If anecdotes help make the point more effectively, bring ‘em on.  Barack Obama is a college graduate, whether he shows up in any school’s numbers or not.

Tips for Graduation Speakers

I’ve attended my fair share of graduation ceremonies over the years.  In fact, arguably more than my fair share, since DeVry did three ceremonies per year.  I’ve seen some good ones, and some regrettable ones.

Having been to plenty, both on the dais and in the audience, I have a few tips for those poor souls saddled with the no-win task of being the graduation speaker.

1. Be brief.
2. Be upbeat.
3. If you have it in you, be funny.  If you don’t, don’t.
4. Sit down.

Inspirational quotes, aren’t.  Don’t.

Unless you are a Hugely Famous Person -- Barack Obama, say -- nobody is there to hear you.  They’re there to cheer for their loved ones.  Make room for that by not taking up too much.

As far as humor goes, keep it safe.  Families are there, children are there, and people have baggage far beyond your comprehension.  DO NOT make jokes about student loans or jobs.  Seriously.  Don’t do it.  Safe subjects include cute kid stories, cute pet stories, and very mild self-deprecating anecdotes.  You’re going for G-rated here.  This is not the place to figure out if you were meant to be a standup comic.  This is not the place for “edgy.”  A previous college of mine stopped inviting graduation speakers when the last one ended his overly-long speech with a joke that ended with the punchline “you don’t sweat much for a fat lady.”  

Don’t do that.  Just, don’t.  The same applies to ethnic jokes, sex jokes, drug jokes, political jokes, and topical jokes. Don’t do impressions.  If they’re remembered at all, they’re remembered negatively.  Respect the occasion.

If you are a political figure, and you feel the need to say “I would be remiss if I didn’t mention…”, go ahead and be remiss.  

It’s not about you.  It’s about the students and their families.  Let them have their time.  They’ve worked for it -- often, much longer and harder than you would guess -- and they’ve earned a moment.  Let them have their moment, and enjoy watching the elated faces and the hugs when it’s over.  Speeches may get old, but those never do.

In Which I Consider Resorting to a T-Shirt Cannon

Subtlety hasn’t worked.  I may need to resort to more drastic measures.  

Last year I wrote at some length about a report showing that the “death of the humanities” narrative is exactly wrong when applied to community colleges; recent statistics showed that humanities majors are the fastest-growing majors in the two-year sector.

Nobody noticed, except those of us who actually staff classes.

This year I’ll try again, perhaps more directly.  As an update to the report shows:

• The number of associate’s degrees conferred in academic disciplines classified by the Humanities Indicators as being within the humanities rose from 2013 to 2014 (from 338,688 to 347,735; a large majority of the associate’s degrees counted as humanities were in “liberal arts” and “liberal studies”).[2] This continues a trend extending back to 1987. From that year to 2014, the number of degrees increased by an average of 4.3% per year, though growth in the most recent two years has been slower than average.

“This continues a trend extending back to 1987.”  It’s worth looking at the charts.  Even the social sciences -- my own academic home -- are finally gaining some ground, though admittedly from a more modest base.  

Okay, one might say, the charts are pretty good.  But why do they matter?

They matter because they fly in the face of so many assumptions people make about higher ed, both from within and from outside.

First, and at a basic level, they expose the assumptions behind the “death of the humanities” narrative.  To make a “death of the humanities” argument, you have to exclude the entire two-year sector.  Most of the folks who make that argument do exclude the two-year sector, but without acknowledgement and seemingly without thinking; it just doesn’t occur to them to look.  I’ve never seen a principled argument for making that move; it simply doesn’t occur to them that they’re making a move at all.  They are, and they should have to answer for it.

Second, they demonstrate that, as I’ve argued here serially, “transfer is workforce.”  Humanities majors at community colleges generally intend to transfer for four-year degrees and often beyond.  Many of the best-paying jobs require a bachelor’s degree or more.  Given the steadily-increasing cost gap between two-year and four-year schools, the financial argument for transfer is getting stronger, and students are responding rationally.  Politicians who look at “workforce” programs (that is, terminal associate’s or certificates) as “real” and transfer programs as “fuzzy” or “indulgent” miss the point.  There is a cold, hard rationality to doing a transfer degree first, and students know it.  STEM fields are great, but they aren’t the only option.

Third, graduate programs in the humanities need to take note.  Too often, they extrapolate from their own past -- 1970 is usually taken as the Golden Age, though statistically it was more of an outlier -- and assume some variation of the “beautiful loser” pose.  Meanwhile, their students need work, and humanities at community colleges are in their fourth decade of growth.  A few forward-looking types are starting to try to talk sense to graduate programs -- hat-tip here to Paula Krebs for the New England Cross-Sector Partnership, which I’ve taken as a template for the Brookdale-Princeton partnership -- but given how long these trends have been going on, the stage of development of these partnerships is embarrassingly early.  

The coalition of people predisposed to ignore this trend is broad and deep.  But that doesn’t make the trend any less true.  I’m thinking maybe it’s time to resort to more drastic measures -- parades, t-shirt cannons, skywriting.  The humanities are healthy and growing at community colleges.  And that’s a good thing.  Let’s acknowledge it, fund it, and train for it.   

The One-Body Problem

Academics are well-acquainted with the “two-body problem.”  It refers to the difficulties couples have when trying to forge academic careers.  It’s often difficult to find two suitable positions geographically close enough for the couple to live together.  And if they do, and then one of them wants to (or has to) find another opportunity, they have to find two again.  In an industry in which good jobs are dwindling, that’s a tall order, and the tensions play themselves out in people’s personal lives.  Sometimes couples resolve it by living at a distance, sometimes by accepting positions beneath their qualifications, and sometimes by splitting up.  (I offered some amplification of Kelly Baker’s thoughtful comments on the two-body problem here.)

From personal experience, I’ll add that two-body issues aren’t limited to dual-academic couples.  Asking one partner to uproot for the sake of the other’s career -- especially more than once -- is asking a lot.  People make friends, form local ties, and put down roots in communities; uprooting isn’t easy.  If you have kids in school, add another order of magnitude to the degree of difficulty.  In a more robust market, there would be enough options that the issue would be relatively rare, but that’s not where we are.

From a hiring perspective, the two-body problem is insidious.  It plays out in weaker-than-expected candidate pools, regretfully-declined offers, and short stays for new hires.  If you aren’t in a financial and/or political position to offer a “spousal hire” -- I’ve never had the option, though I consider that a sort of blessing -- the two-body issue makes it harder to hire even one.

Having moved from the Springfield, Massachusetts metro area to the New York City metro area, though, I’m now seeing a “one-body problem” more clearly.

In most of the country, when people think of Massachusetts, they think of Boston.  But Springfield is a different flavor entirely.  It’s closer to a Rust Belt factory town than to Boston, and it’s far enough from Boston that a commute isn’t realistic.  

Which meant that in my time there, we had a hard time recruiting people who weren’t already coupled up.  That was particularly true for minority candidates, who faced the prospect of relatively thin dating pools.  (That isn’t just speculation; I heard it directly a couple of times.) The area has its charms, but if you weren’t either already from there or securely coupled, its appeal was limited.  From a recruitment standpoint, the problem of lacking critical mass was self-perpetuating.

I haven’t seen any of that here, though.  In the New York City metro, options are plentiful enough (and dating pools large enough) that single candidates aren’t deterred.  The major issue here is housing cost, which is real -- you have no idea -- but it’s not quite as fraught.  It’s economic in a really straightforward way.  

In my perfect world, of course, we’d have areas with both bustling opportunities and reasonably priced housing.  But America generally seems to be forcing people to choose.  For an institution as squarely aimed at the middle as a community college, that kind of polarization is becoming an existential threat.  

In the meantime, though, I have to admit that it’s refreshing not to see some of the same questions from candidates here that I saw before.  Big metros may be stupidly expensive, but they reduce both the one-body and the two-body problems.

Jane Jacobs’ 100th Birthday

This week marked Jane Jacobs’ 100th birthday.  She wrote one of the maybe half-dozen books I’ve read that I can honestly say changed my life.  

When she died in 2006, I wrote this tribute to her.  In retrospect, I wasn’t aware of how conscious her followers were of her influence, and I wish I had included references to her later work.  Still, as a personal recollection of the impact of a masterpiece, I think it holds up pretty well.  

Happy birthday, Jane Jacobs.

--  

Jane Jacobs died this week. Though she wrote a short shelf of books, she’ll be remembered mostly for her 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

If you’ve never read Death and Life, grab a copy. Seriously.

I first read it in 1994, and can still remember the ‘Eureka!’ moments. It’s one of those books that’s so perfectly crafted on every level, and so intuitively right, that it feels discovered, rather than written. After reading it, you feel like you’ve always known it, but just never put it together.

Jacobs used the quotidian experience of urban motherhood as a framing device (and a source of metaphors) for an incredibly sophisticated, yet simple, argument about cities. In contrast to the great urban planners and theorists of her time (Robert Moses, Lewis Mumford), she argued that the essence of a city is pedestrian, in both senses of the word. Cities live and die according to the pedestrian activity on the streets. When there are ‘eyes on the street,’ the street is safe. Danger comes not from crowds, but from isolation.

The great sin of mid-century urban planning, she argued, was zoning. Cities work best when they’re integrated on the ground. That means high-density, mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly grids, on which people of different incomes and ages and races literally bump into each other. (She took for granted that, in the absence of zoning regulations, mixed uses will develop.) The constant street-level exposure to difference serves as a natural teacher (preventing provincialism), and allows a rare mix of cosmopolitanism and intimacy. Cities in which the streets are empty at night force people into their homes, abandoning the public square to the predatory, the desperate, and the deranged. The segregation-by-use characteristic of classic suburbia was dysfunctional; the gradual creep of jobs into suburbia was predictable. Mixed use is natural, because people have mixed needs.

Her writing fit her theory. The theory seems to emerge inductively, as if discovered in the course of shepherding her kids through life in New York City. Maybe it did.

She cast some long shadows. Richard Sennett’s work owes hers a debt; I’d argue that Richard Florida’s does, too, whether he knows it or not. The ‘New Urbanism’ is a direct outgrowth of her insights. A few years ago, Malcolm Gladwell pointed out that many of the trends in modern office architecture can be traced directly to her influence. Hell, The Wife and I bought the house we did was because the town it’s in has sidewalks, a grid layout, and a walkable downtown. It’s in a town Jane Jacobs would have approved.

I made a major life decision differently for having read her. And she was right.

A tip ‘o’ the cap…

Basic Truths, but Worth Repeating

Doug Lederman’s summary of a new report by Di Xu, Shanna Smith Jaggars, and Jeffrey Fletcher is well worth reading.  The report looks at community college students in Virginia, and tracks their educational and financial outcomes relative to other students several years out.

For those of us who live and breathe this stuff, the report comes as confirmation of things we already knew.  But for people who aren’t quite as obsessive, it could be easy to lose some key distinctions and therefore miss the point.  So, a few basic truths:

First, a student who transfers “vertically” (meaning, from two-year to four-year) without first completing the two-year degree is less likely to succeed at the bachelor’s level than one who graduates first.  The likely cause is credit loss upon transfer.  Students who transfer without a degree are subject to course-by-course cherry picking, but students who get the degree often get the entire package accepted.  Avoiding credit loss is key to timely completion.  Retaking classes costs time and money, and can be profoundly demoralizing.

Second, students who do graduate prior to transfer, and then transfer, complete bachelor’s degrees at higher rates than “native” freshmen.  Admittedly, that’s something of a stacked deck; a more revealing comparison would be the associate grads paired against “native” students who had made it through sophomore year.  But still, it gives the lie to folks who claim that community college students are somehow tainted or incapable.  Four-year colleges would be well-advised to look at transfer students as low-risk ways to fill out upper-level classes.

Third, not every student who completes an associate’s degree actually wants to transfer.  Some degrees are terminal, or directly employable.  And some of the ones who do elect to go on take some time off first.  That’s hardly a sign of institutional failure, though the article implies that it is, and many policy analysts assume that it is.  Many nursing grads, for instance, go to work with the ADN, and take some time before going back for the BSN.  There’s nothing wrong with that -- for parents, it’s often a really good idea -- but a one-dimensional focus on numbers will mistake that for some sort of system flaw.

After those, the picture starts to get more complicated.

In policy circles, transfer is almost always assumed to be “vertical” -- that is, from two-year to four-year.  But on the ground, that’s not how it works.  Lateral transfers are far more common than is widely assumed, though they’re almost entirely unstudied in the literature.  And reverse transfers, which come in two flavors, tend to get ignored.  The trendy new flavor involves the student who transfers vertically prior to graduation, and then sends back some credits to get the associate’s during the junior year.  It’s a sort of insurance policy in case life happens before finishing the bachelor’s.  But the older and more common flavor is the student who started at the four-year, left, and started over at a two-year.  Those, too, are relatively ignored in the literature.

Over the last few years, I’ve been hearing about more students with bachelor’s degrees in hand showing up at cc’s to get associate’s in new fields.  They’re career-changers.  No, they don’t usually go on to get second bachelor’s degrees, but that’s hardly our fault.  They come back to get something employable, get it, and get on with life.  That looks bad for our vertical transfer numbers, but it’s success on the ground.

If there’s an enterprising Ed.D. student out there looking for a dissertation topic, I’d suggest comparable studies of lateral or reverse transfer students.  We don’t just send transfers; we also receive them.  But you wouldn’t know it from the literature.

But that’s for another day.  For now, the layperson’s takeaway should be that students who graduate from community college and then transfer do just fine.  Because they do, and they do so at much lower cost.  We can work on the other details later.

How Can High School Teachers Become College Professors?

A new correspondent writes:

Lately you've been posting a lot on the need for teaching-focused faculty in higher education. I would be curious if you have any insight on teachers in the K-12 world who have successfully made the jump to college teaching. We would come in with many of those basic skills which you note newly minted PhDs often lack, though obviously we would have prepared for a different context. What are the barriers that prevent this from happening more often? Is it just credentials? What challenges might a high school teacher not expect?

High school faculty sometimes cross over.  It can be done.  I’ve seen it done.  One of my best hires many years ago was a former high school math teacher who loved teaching algebra but hated the politics of his school district; he picked up a bunch of developmental math classes and quickly became a student favorite.

That said, it’s definitely the exception.  

Part of the issue is the credentials required.  The standard minimum educational requirement for a full-time community college faculty position is a master’s degree in the subject area; a fair number of high school teachers have that, but many don’t.  The subjects don’t always align cleanly, either.

Part of it is salary scales.  In most unionized settings, salary is determined largely by experience.  But the experience doesn’t transfer.  If you have ten years’ seniority in a high school, you won’t get credit for ten years’ seniority at the college.  In effect, that often means taking a pay cut.  

The major differences -- I’m focusing here on community colleges -- are around student age and organizational culture.

In a college setting, students are assumed to be adults.  Faculty here don’t deal with parents.  We have FERPA to ensure that students have exclusive access to their own records.  (FERPA isn’t absolute, but it covers most routine interactions.)  Nationally, the average age of a community college student is in the late twenties, and it’s not unusual to have students in their forties.  The needs and expectations of those students may be very different from students coming right out of high school.  

Here, we don’t have IEP’s.  Students are expected to self-advocate for any accommodations they need.  Those requests have to be screened and verified by the relevant office on campus, and faculty are not free to disregard them.  But if a student fails to make the request, that’s on the student.  

Relatedly, here, it’s possible to give failing grades.  

Students are assigned to public high schools largely by virtue of where their parents live.  But students choose colleges.  That brings with it the benefits of self-selection, though it can also bring a consumer mentality that many faculty find off-putting.  (A former boss taught me a great response to an entitled student.  When hearing “I pay your salary!” for the umpteenth time,  respond with “Oh, that’s you?  I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.”  Stops the conversation cold.)  

Here, faculty are expected to take meaningful part in shaping curriculum via shared governance.  That can involve some politicking, which can be appealing or appalling, depending on taste.  

My recommendation for a high school teacher who wants to give community college teaching a shot would be to look into either adjuncting or teaching some dual-enrollment classes.   Ideally, spend some time on the college campus to get a feel for the culture.  You’ll probably find it either more freeing or less cohesive than high school.  

I’d love to hear from faculty who’ve made the leap in one direction or the other.  What differences jumped out at you?  

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

Zero-Sum Performance

I hate getting up at dark o’clock to go to the gym.  It’s an act of will, and it doesn’t always happen.  Even when it does, it’s grudging on a good day.  But I do it relatively consistently because I know that it’s good for my health.  And because the more I do it, within the confines I’d realistically observe, the more it helps.  (I’m told there are eventual limits at the extremes, but I’m far enough from those not to worry about them.)  There’s some discernible connection between my efforts and my health, so I power through impertinent alarm clocks.

The theory behind performance funding for community colleges is similar.  Improvement is hard and requires some strength of will, the argument goes, but the results will be worth it.

But there’s a crucial difference that often goes unnoticed.

My own fitness, or lack thereof, is independent of anyone else’s.  If I ramp up my efforts, I get (somewhat) better results, regardless of what anyone else does.  Yes, there are limits -- the forties are not the twenties, no matter how hard you try, and frankly I have other things to do -- but in a general sense, if my neighbor takes up jogging, my ratio of effort to payoff doesn’t change.  Nobody else’s fitness comes at my expense, and nobody else’s lethargy makes my workouts any easier.  I don’t benefit from anyone’s failure, and my success isn’t at anyone’s expense.

That means I don’t face the prospect of futility.  Yes, I may be literally running in place, but I’m still making progress.

The same can’t be said of most performance funding systems.

In most states or systems with performance funding, the overall level of funding -- the pie to be sliced, if you prefer -- is either flat or declining.  Which means that if everyone improves by the same five percent, then everyone gets the same zero percent increase.  You may be making progress, but you’re still essentially running in place.  Worse, if you improve by three percent but the statewide average is five, you actually lose ground.  

Improvements generally cost money.  Having your funding cut for not improving enough can become self-fulfilling, or even a death spiral.  You struggle because you’re underfunded; you get funding cut more because you’re struggling; that makes you struggle even more, which leads to more cuts...

Anyone in the public sector for any length of time has seen this logic play out repeatedly.  And that’s before even mentioning the increasing layers of unfunded mandates that legislatures don’t hesitate to pile on, even as they preach performance and austerity.

Zero-sum performance funding are doubly senseless when colleges’ service areas are defined geographically, whether by county or by “district.”  Cutting funding to a college in Buffalo to fund a reward for one in Brooklyn doesn’t help the student who lives in Buffalo.  If your local college gets hurt by a formula, but it’s the only game in town, well, sorry.  

Redesigning America’s Community Colleges, the excellent book from Tom Bailey, Shanna Smith Jaggars, and Davis Jenkins, makes the often-lost distinction between institutional cost per student and institutional cost per graduate.  It’s possible to reduce the cost per graduate, but doing so nearly always increases the cost per student.  Our funding, including tuition, is mostly per-student.  Getting better results costs more.  

Obviously, it’s possible to waste money; simply spending more is no guarantee of results.  But that’s why it’s important to get performance funding right.  For it to make sense, it has to be both independent of what other places do, and positive-sum.  It has to enable the interventions that work.  If all it does is slow the decline, it won’t get the results we want.

Aging may be inevitable, but poorly-designed funding systems aren’t.  If I want to get more fit, I have to put in more effort; simply reallocating existing effort won’t do it.  Colleges are no different.  The goal of greater success is worthy; we just have to stop pretending that it won’t cost anything.