The One Thing Never to Say

This one is aimed specifically at community college faculty job candidates, though it applies to staff and administrative positions as well.  Without betraying any confidences, I’ll just say this is based on more than one case in more than one place.

Let’s say that you’re changing careers.  You’ve had a good run in your industry, and you’d like to switch to teaching.  A nearby community college posts an opening for a teaching position in that field, and you apply.  You get the interview.  You get asked why you want to change careers and start teaching.

What don’t you say?

“I’m at a stage in my career where I’d like to slow down and do something less stressful.”

No.  Just, no.  Don’t do it.  

Do you know what that sounds like on the hiring side?

“I’m terribly self-impressed, and I won’t lift a finger, except to complain about other people.”

It’s instant death.  It implies that what we do isn’t actual work.  Anyone who has taught a full load for a semester knows that it’s work.  

The first time I saw someone say something like this, it gave me pause.  I’ve seen it a few times now, so I think it’s time to say something.

Teaching in a vocational field, having come from industry, is a very different kind of work.  But it’s work.  Doing it well requires time, effort, forethought, practice, and follow-through.  It’s not just telling war stories.  And that’s just the teaching part; the faculty job also involves service to the college in a number of ways, many of which take significant time.  Outcomes assessment, curriculum development, observing adjuncts, professional development, governance committees, and (in some places) student advising all take time.  You can’t just kick back and opine.  That’s not how this works.

Faculty work is widely misunderstood in the culture.  That’s annoying, but endemic.  But I’m certainly not going to hire faculty who think that the entire job consists of kicking back, telling stories, and passing judgment.  

If that’s what’s drawing you to the field, step back and give it some more thought.  Teach some classes as an adjunct for a bit, and find out what the full-timers there do.  If you still want to make the leap, knowing the reality of it, go for it.  But if you think you’ll be recollecting your career in tranquility while adoring undergrads listen worshipfully, well, you won’t be doing it here.

Legislatures Teach

Apparently, the state of Florida is looking at following up its ban on mandatory remediation with a funding cut.  The logic is that if colleges aren’t teaching remedial courses anymore, what do they need all that money for?

As an administrator, I have a palm print on my head from reading about it.  This is exactly the sort of response that makes constructive followup impossible.

I’ve heard mixed reports on the fallout of Florida’s ban.  As near as I can tell, it led to improved pass rates and some allegations of grade inflation.  (I don’t know how valid those allegations are.)  It also led to colleges reallocating much of the money that used to go into remedial classes.  Now it goes to student support services for introductory classes.  That’s likely a key part of the success of the changes.  Draw down the resources that made success possible, and you will accomplish two things, both bad: you will increase the fail rate, and you will teach campus cynics that any new change, no matter how well grounded in the literature, should be resisted.

In the private sector, we take for granted that desired behaviors should be rewarded.  But in the public sector, we think nothing of punishing good deeds.  We need to rethink that.

“Performance funding,” for instance, is typically zero-sum or punitive.  In the private sector, that would be considered a sign of incompetence.  

What might it look like if we rewarded success, instead of punishing it?

First, we’d enable it to happen in the first place.  That would mean ensuring that campuses have enough money to meet their obligations, and a little discretionary money to take flyers on some new ideas.  As any business manager knows, growth requires investment.  And serious improvement, by definition, requires trying something different.  

Then, when something does work, support it.  For example, some sort of institutional bonus for the number of graduates beyond an “expected” number -- perhaps with some sort of “profit sharing” for employees -- would put the state’s money where its mouth is.  It would create the kind of reward for success that other parts of the economy take for granted.  Align incentives and rewards with desired behaviors.  That principle has been known to work.

In the time since Redesigning America’s Community Colleges came out, one of its key arguments has gone largely unacknowledged: decreasing the cost per graduate often involves increasing the cost per student.  The social benefit is likely to outweigh, significantly, the upfront cost, but it won’t negate it.  Success isn’t free.

As someone who works with faculty and staff on a daily basis, though, the long-term harm I see from Florida’s proposal is in confirming campus cynics.

Making forward progress on something as daunting, and important, as student success takes real effort.  It requires collaboration, which requires building trust.  Seeing the state so bluntly betray the colleges will simply confirm the cynics, and will make their position much stronger.  That will make further improvements much harder to implement and sustain.  They won’t necessarily sabotage, but they’ll foot-drag, which has the same effect.  The damage could last for years.

Education is a long game.  The payoff accrues over time.  Small savings now, especially ones achieved through impulsive and sweeping gestures, bring tremendous opportunity costs.  That’s especially true when they punish success.  Florida’s community colleges are being notably successful at a difficult enterprise; the state will reap the benefits for years to come.  Colleges teach, but so do legislatures.  If colleges get slapped down for their troubles, I’d expect them to learn some harmful lessons from it.  

Homeownership and Angry Voters

I’ve been thinking a lot about Matthew Desmond’s latest piece in the New York Times.  In many ways, it’s a followup to his outstanding book Evicted.  It traces the regressive effects of housing policy on the distribution of wealth among families, with a particular focus on the mortgage interest tax deduction.

Desmond points out, correctly, that the impact of the deduction is higher as the size of the mortgage gets bigger, up to a million dollars.  Home buyers factor the deduction into buying decisions, which means that it acts effectively as a price support for upper-middle-class homes.  That’s great if you already own one; folks who do can be expected to fight vigorously any reduction in the deduction.  But if you don’t, it amounts to a tax giveaway to people who make a lot more money than you probably do.  It only works because it’s largely invisible.  The folks who get it don’t think of it as government aid, and the folks who don’t get it are often only vaguely aware that it exists.

There’s a lot of truth in that.  In fact, it gets worse.  As William Fischl pointed out over ten years ago in The Homevoter Hypothesis, for most homeowners, their house is the single largest value item in their portfolio.  They’re well advised to do what they can to maintain or increase its value.  While it’s easy, and often accurate, to criticize NIMBY behavior, it comes from somewhere.  If you look at most homeowners as undiversified investors, some of their behavior makes sense.  The Great Recession taught us what happens when home values go “underwater” -- it’s not pretty.  Attacks on the mortgage interest deduction, or even the property tax deduction, can be expected to generate waves of righteous anger among people who made major life decisions under one set of rules, only to see those rules change..  

Property taxes seem to be more despised than other forms of taxes, and it makes sense that they are.  They don’t vary according to ability to pay.  I’ve had years with across-the-board pay freezes, but my property taxes went up anyway.  Given how illiquid real estate is, property tax increases can feel like theft in a way that income tax or sales tax increases often don’t.  Income taxes vary with ability to pay, and they often get deducted from paychecks before they’re even seen.  Sales taxes are more visible, and regressive, than income taxes, but it’s still possible to calibrate one’s own exposure to them.  If I live where I live, and my taxes abruptly go up by a substantial amount in a year when my salary is stuck, I just have to suck it up.  

To the extent that local governments are funded through property taxes, that spells trouble for public higher education.  At least with K-12 districts, as Fischl pointed out, there’s a correlation between the perceived quality of a school district and the home values there; savvy advocates can sell property tax increases that fund K-12 as a sort of property value insurance, to a point.  (If the taxes get too high, of course, they can reduce the value.)  But the same doesn’t hold at the county or state level.  

Hostility to taxes is part of what has been behind the shift of costs from taxpayers generally to students specifically.  Higher ed has the mixed blessing of multiple revenue streams, which makes it easy for certain parties to free ride on others.  

Shifting our funding from property taxes (directly or indirectly) to income taxes would usually imply a shift of venue.  With some exceptions, income taxes are usually collected at the state level, rather than the county or municipal level; property taxes tend to be much more local.  To the extent that community colleges are local creatures -- more so than any other sector of higher education, though varying by state - that makes sense.  Moving the funding stream “upward” would also involve moving control “upward,” which brings issues of its own.  (I’ve worked in both systems.  In Massachusetts, there is no local funding; only the state makes an appropriation.  In New Jersey, the state and the county are supposed to share the appropriation.  Neither is foolproof.)  

The great tragedy of community colleges as public goods is that they don’t come close to capturing the value of what they produce.  They aren’t supposed to; that’s the point of a “public” institution.  But it means that they’re constantly scrambling to prove a small fraction of the value they actually provide, so they can keep providing it.

Wise and worldly readers, do you know of any scholarly studies showing the tax system most likely to lead to sustainable and adequate funding?  I haven’t found one yet, and Desmond’s piece suggests that too cavalier an approach could lead to some very angry voters.

Graduation!

Friday is graduation at Brookdale.  We actually have two ceremonies -- one in the morning and one in the afternoon -- to make room for all the grads.  

I don’t know how many graduations I’ve been to over the years, but it’s a lot.  (DeVry used to do three per year, which bumped up the numbers.)  They still manage to win me over.  And I don’t mean to brag or anything, but I still fit into the gown I used for grad school...

Having been through both indoor and outdoor versions, I’m a fan of indoor ceremonies.  Outdoors can be nice in that you can fit more people, and sometimes you get lucky and catch a beautiful day.  For families with small children, letting the children run loose on the lawn can burn off some squiggly energy.   But humidity, or rain, or mud, or heat, or bees can wreak havoc.  (I’ve experienced all of those.)  The bees were the worst.  I’ve never seen a major bee attack indoors, though I’ll concede the conceptual possibility.  The acoustics are usually better indoors, too, which comes in handy during the speeches and the reading of names.

The highlight, always, is seeing the families beaming when the students appear.  Sometimes students will seek out their favorite professors for hugs and photos.  And there are usually some stories of triumph over adversity that feature so much adversity that it puts my own gripes into humbling perspective.  For some families, this is the first college graduation they’ve ever experienced.  For some students, it’s a milestone they never thought they’d attain.  Those moments deserve respect.  This isn’t the time to be jaded.

Graduation speeches are a tough genre.  I’ve never delivered one, though I wrote one at the pit of the Great Recession (thanks to Chuck Pearson for digging it up) that I think holds up pretty well.  If I were to deliver it now, I’d simplify some of the sentence structures and drop one off-key paragraph, but the basic thesis still seems about right.

The general rule for a graduation speaker is the classic “be brief, be upbeat, be seated.”  Among all of the ceremonies I’ve seen, I’ve never heard anyone lament that the speech was too short.  When in doubt, cut.  If you’re a current or former President of the United States, you will be remembered just for having shown up, regardless of what you say.  Otherwise, you probably won’t be remembered at all.  Honor the occasion by making it about the occasion, not about you.  Brief, upbeat, done.  

If you’re on the platform party, don’t look at your phone.  People will see you.  Some people may take embarrassing videos of you, and post them.  If you’re bored, watch the shoes as the graduates walk by.  I’m always impressed at the sheer variety of footwear.  It’s not weird to see five-inch heels followed closely by Chuck Taylor All-Stars.  Flashing lights are a nice touch.  I’d advise against “heelies,” though, given the possibility of falling.  Also, if you don’t usually wear significant heels, this isn’t the time to experiment.  Between the ramps and the gowns, it could get ugly.  Word to the wise.

So, on to the ceremonies. Congratulations to the graduates, and kudos to the parents, grandparents, spouses, friends, children, and everyone else who provided the support.  As a colleague recently put it, if it takes a village, then the audience is the Village People.  Enjoy the show.

OER and Total Cost of Attendance

We’ve all had colleagues who tended towards conspiracy theories.  At a previous job, I pranked one once by leaving a folder on my desk labeled “My Top Secret Plans for World Domination, Part One.”  It was empty.

This is about as close as I get to real conspiring.  But I’ve come up with a...let’s call it “plan”...that might actually make a difference.

We don’t have free community college yet in New Jersey.  The original funding model was an even three-way split in costs among the state, the county, and the students; at this point, though, students pick up 57% of the cost, and their share is growing.  Nobody wants to raise tuition, for obvious reasons, but it’s also unrealistic to fund ever-more-expensive health insurance when every revenue stream is either flat or declining.  The math doesn’t work.  So there’s a premium, no pun intended, on ways to find revenue that aren’t so painful.

Some of those ways are the usual: philanthropy, public sector grants, space rental for conferences, summer camps.  Improved retention and completion offer the prospect of greater tuition revenue without raising tuition, simply because more people would stick around longer.  In business terms -- I know, but still -- a retained student is a repeat customer, and it’s cheaper to retain a customer than to find a new one.  Making that happen without spending significant money is a challenge.

But I’m thinking that an aggressive move towards OER could actually help generate revenue.  Here’s how.

Although tuition certainly matters to students, what matters more is “total cost of attendance.”  That includes fees, books, transportation, and the opportunity cost of taking classes, among other things.  (Reduced work hours to make time for classes leads to reduced income in the short term, which is a cost.  Over time, if they graduate, they more than make it back, but in the here and now, it’s a cost.)  Opportunity cost is lowest in recessions and highest during expansions, which is why our enrollments are countercyclical.  

We don’t control opportunity cost, and we have relatively little control over transportation.  (We’ve made some headway with bus routes, but the basic point stands.)  Tuition speaks for itself.  Fees come in different flavors, ranging from course-specific ones to a general student fee.  But books…

So here’s the plan.  If we get critical mass of sections using OER, and we can quantify the typical savings to students in some sort of credible way, I’d like to go to the Board with the following argument:

If we raise tuition $5 a credit, a student taking 30 credits pays an extra $150 a year.  But if we’re using OER in enough places that the student is saving $500 a year on books, she’s still coming out ahead.  And the college is getting some much-needed revenue.  The only loser here is the commercial textbook industry, which, frankly, isn’t our problem.  

In essence, it’s a redirection and splitting of revenue.  It directs revenue away from commercial publishers, and towards the college and the students.  Students would have a lower total cost of attendance, and the college would gain more revenue.  Over time, increased retention from having every student able to get the books from day one would add another layer of revenue.  

As conspiracies go, it’s somewhat less enticing than most of the ones involving Elvis or the Trilateral Commission.  But it has the virtue of being both benign and practical.  It could buy us some time until free community college comes along, and/or we get a health insurance policy that makes some sense.  

It’s not world domination, but that’s okay.  If it means students can learn because they have books and the college can teach because it has revenue, I’ll call it good.  Maybe I need a new folder...

A Tribute

I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge the unsung heroes of higher education:

The poli sci profs trying to teach Intro to American Government this week.

On the bright side, they probably have some spectacular new essay questions...

The Girl Takes the Stage

The Northeast regional championships for the Middle School Public Debate Program took place on Saturday.  The Girl competed.  I judged.

Logistically, it was quite an operation.  264 debaters were there, ranging from New England to DC.  Judging by the school names, I’m pretty sure that nearly all of them were from upscale private schools; I’m not sure what they thought of our low-slung public school. The dress code was the junior high interpretation of “formal,” which is to say, eclectic.  At that age, the students can look anywhere from nine to twenty, and they did.  

Watching the students, I couldn’t help but feel a little wistful.  Nerd culture has come a long way since I was that age.  Back then, what Anthony Edwards called “nerd persecution” was a real thing; now, they’re kind of cool, in their way.  As they should be.

The students competed in teams of three.  Every team participated in five debates, with the two top teams competing in a sixth round at the end.  Teams won or lost as teams, but each speaker was awarded individual speaker points based on performance.  It’s possible for a team to get more speaker points and still lose, because sometimes the whole is less than the sum of the parts.  

The team advisor, a social studies teacher, pulled the team aside before everything started to thank them for a great year.  For the record, the room was a little dusty, and dust can have funny effects on adult eyes.  Allergies and whatnot.  They can sneak up on you.

For this tournament, her Jersey grandparents came to watch her in action.  They had never seen her debate before, so they were excited to catch a couple of rounds.  

The Girl had a strong year in debate, even winning the “golden gavel” at one tournament.  But the tournaments, up until now, featured probably 50-75 kids, fairly evenly split between public and private schools.  264 kids, mostly from selective schools in New York City and DC, is a very different matter.  She barely needs any coaching from me at this point, so I mostly just let her do her thing.  In the car on the way there, when she admitted some nerves, I gave the same advice I always do: rather than worrying about winning or losing, which is out of your control anyway, just focus on giving a strong showing.  After that, the chips will fall where they’ll fall.  If you have a great round but lose to someone who did even better, just tip your cap and make a mental note of something they did that you could use to improve.  

She’s really good at that.  Her piano teacher up in Massachusetts absolutely loved her because she used feedback for improvement and actually practiced.  Debate has been the same way.  In her first couple of tournaments last year, she really struggled to fill her time, and was easily thrown off by questions.  But she learns every single time; at this point, she’s poised, composed, and confident.  She has figured out that she has to open with a hook, lay out her points, anticipate objections, and close clearly and on time.  And she has found her voice as a speaker, which has been great fun to watch.  In one round, she shut down a questioner so coolly that several of us in the audience gasped.  It was elegant.  I know adults who can’t do that.

I judged a couple of rounds, neither involving her or her school.  Teams can bring six kids for each judge that they bring, so judges are at a premium.  I haven’t missed a tournament since she started.  Judging is actually fun in itself, because at the end, the judges are supposed to give constructive feedback.  It takes me back to my teaching days.  My goal, always, is to give them something they can use to do better the next time.  Sometimes it’s as simple as “pause.”  

The topics weren’t easy.  They had to argue the planetary status of Pluto, the composition of the Supreme Court, the merits of the Endangered Species Act, tenure for public school teachers, and nuclear policy.  They had a few weeks’ notice, so they could do research, but they didn’t know which side they’d be on until 15 minutes before the round.

TG’s team struggled a bit, losing several early rounds.  Part of it was strong competition and part was somewhat uneven judging, but I could see her getting frustrated.  I gave her the “just control what you control” piece, and caught her fifth and final round.

If you’ve never debated five times in a day -- I haven’t -- imagine doing it at age 12.  I have to hand it to these kids.  They were dragging by the end, but you almost wouldn’t have known it.  

The day ended with a mass convening in the auditorium for the awards, and the final debate between the two top teams of the day.  The final debate was a hoot.  It was between two private school teams on the topic of a constitutional convention.  One speaker brought the house down -- remember, she was 12 or 13 -- by declaring passionately “the first convention featured James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington.  Who would this one feature?  Donald Trump?  Sarah PALIN?”  The winning team looked like they could have been in their early 20’s; their final speaker acted like he was giving a TED talk.  For junior high, I was impressed.

They gave awards to the students in the top ten percent for speaker points.  TG got one!  She was the only one from her school, and I’m pretty sure the only one from a public school.  It quickly found its way to her Instagram account, as well it should.  I got entirely too many pictures with her advisor and her teammates.  Many of the stronger debaters on the team are moving on to high school next year, so the advisor was particularly glad to know that TG will still be around.  Any coach likes knowing that a top scorer is coming back.

At one point, one of the organizers called out to the crowd that “this is what democracy looks like!”  I applauded, not realizing until later just how upscale the group skewed.  In a way, that didn’t invalidate the thesis, which is even more disturbing.  But still, it gave me hope to see kids so young wielding research, words, and logic with such confidence.  And yes, I’m biased, but seeing TG do as well as she did gave me hope, too.  She’s a great kid, and I never get tired of seeing other people recognize what I’ve known all along.  I’ll stop before the allergies kick in...

I Don’t Mean to be Reviewer #2, But…

Academic peer review is supposed to be a form of professional quality control, filtering out the silly or severely flawed research and only letting the good stuff get through.  Sometimes it even achieves that.  But as a system founded on small numbers and anonymity, it can fall prey to some predictable pathologies.  

In the academic twitterverse, there’s a running joke about “reviewer #2.”  This is the reviewer who trashes a perfectly good piece because it isn’t the piece he would have written.  In reading Richard Florida’s new book, The New Urban Crisis, I felt some reviewer #2 coming on.  The book outlines a serious issue well, takes a few bold and thoughtful positions, and, as always with Florida’s stuff, makes its case in an uncommonly readable way.  But I still came away frustrated, because it isn’t the book I wanted it to be.  I admit freely that this says more about me than it does about Florida.

The New Urban Crisis, as Florida sees it, is that superstar cities are becoming victims of their own success.  Cities like Boston, New York, and Seattle have gone from struggling to wildly prosperous in the last thirty years, due in no small part to the economic advantages of talent clustering that the creative economy generates.  In fact, they’ve become so prosperous that they’re pricing out many of the middle and working class people who form the civic backbone of cities -- police officers, teachers, nurses.  Florida draws openly on the work of Jane Jacobs, who famously argued that the life of cities derives from mixed-use, mixed-income, mixed-background neighborhoods at pedestrian scale.  When a city’s success brings such rapid upscaling that mixed-use neighborhoods become canyons of skyscrapers of luxury condos owned by global elites who only stay there a few months per year, the pedestrian life of the city suffers.

Florida notes, correctly, that the 70’s and 80’s image of cities as gritty and suburbs as sylvan is looking dated in the major metros; now, the cities are aspirational and often unaffordable, and suburbs are dealing with levels of poverty and economic struggle that they were built, in many ways, to escape.  The most prosperous cities are often the most segregated, even as they’re the “bluest” politically; this won’t come as news to anyone who knows Boston or New York well.  I was struck by a passage, buried mid-paragraph, addressing the politics of contemporary suburbia:

“Economically distressed suburbs in red states are the ones that swing blue, while economically distressed suburbs in blue states are the ones that swing red…” (165)

Another:

“[T]he metros where the middle class is largest are whiter, have a larger working class, and have higher levels of political conservatism --- all features of economically declining places.  Furthermore, the metros that had bigger middle classes in 2000 are the ones that saw the largest middle-class declines by 2014.”  (99)

Florida does a real service in noting the persistent ironies about demography and politics.  Political theorists (hi!) have been known to write entire books about such things.

Florida lands on an intriguing mix of policy prescriptions for dealing with the new urban crisis.  He mentions NIMBY (not in my back yard) groups disparagingly, preferring to call them urban luddites.  By making housing scarcer than it could be, he suggests, they drive up costs for new people, generating windfall gains for existing owners.  He resurrects Henry George’s (!) idea of taxing land, as opposed to property, with the idea that taxing land instead creates a positive incentive for development.  If a given lot has the same tax bill whether it’s surface level parking or a fifty-story apartment tower, the economic argument for apartment towers gets a lot stronger.

Florida is honest enough to admit, though, that those same economic incentives lean towards building high-cost housing, rather than something that teachers and cops could afford.  That’s where he turns to politics.

Here he draws on the work of the late political theorist Benjamin Barber to argue that we should devolve power to the municipal level whenever possible, on the grounds that local leadership is more in tune with local needs than national leadership could be.  Let Boston be Boston, and make Washington matter less.

Which is where I become reviewer #2.

First, and most basically, letting Boston be Boston also involves letting Lynchburg be Lynchburg.  Given America’s racial legacy, any argument for devolution has a serious burden of proof.  (And even Boston is hardly innocent when it comes to racism…)  The sleight of hand in the argument shows itself whenever Florida refers to “metros” rather than “cities.”  Metros are regions that include other political entities, usually called suburbs.  But they have their own political representation.  Grosse Pointe is part of the Detroit metro, but it is not part of Detroit, and it has no intention of becoming part of Detroit.  Arguments from devolution, like arguments from home rule, often quickly become arguments reinforcing segregation.  Conceptually, they don’t have to, but on the ground, they do.  Invoking “metros” as the unit of analysis simply defines segregation away.  On the ground, it does not work like that, and it will not work like that.

At a different level, the major urban crisis in America isn’t in the Bostons or Seattles.  It’s in the Springfields, the Uticas, and the Scrantons.  Those cities aren’t suffering from affluenza; they’re suffering from declining tax bases, poverty, and an economy that’s shifting away from them.  These cities go almost entirely unmentioned in the book, and his proposed solutions are almost entirely irrelevant to them.  St. Louis’ major struggle isn’t with NIMBYism or international elites owning condos they only use seasonally.  Milwaukee may be segregated, but it’s not prosperous.  These urban crises aren’t “new,” but they’re severe, and they’re largely ignored.  A municipal leader in one of these cities looking for answers in Florida’s book will come away empty-handed.

I could imagine several possible responses.  Will those cities follow in the wake of the major metros?  Will they gradually shrink into provincial outposts?  Are they doomed to become backwaters?  I recently lived for several years in a suburb of Springfield, Mass.  I did not see any signs of hipster millennials selling artisanal pickles in Springfield.  Instead, I saw city leaders grasping desperately for a casino, and I saw my neighbors in the suburb being utterly clear that they were not part of Springfield.  It was only 90 miles away from Boston, but economically, it was on another planet.  What should Springfield do?

An attempt to answer those questions would have to deal with issues of political economy that cannot be understood, let alone addressed, taking the municipality as the unit of analysis.  Those issues are national or global.  London’s standing as a global capital of finance is at risk not because of NIMBYs but because of Brexit, which is what devolution looks like in practice.  Historically, movements for inclusion have favored socializing conflicts, rather than privatizing them, and there’s a reason for that.  I understand the temptation to give up on Washington -- really, I get it -- but we’ve had a confederacy before, and we know what happened.  No, thanks.

My “beat” is community colleges, so I’ll just note here that the shift in the physical distribution of wealth in the US from relatively spread out to relatively concentrated puts community colleges in a tough spot.  Community colleges are spread out, by design, and they’re almost always defined by geography.  Half of them were built in the 1960’s, at the high point of suburbanization.  Community colleges in expensive places deal with the issues Florida notes -- good luck affording a nice Boston apartment on a Bunker Hill CC salary -- and the ones in the Youngstowns of the world deal with the dilemma that sometimes they serve the community by acting as a springboard for talent to escape.  When your funding and political support are local, that’s a problem.  The entire system was built on the assumption of a sort of spatial equality that is fading into history.  It’s hard to prepare a middle class for an economy that no longer wants one.

To some extent, the critique isn’t entirely fair. Florida set out to write about superstar cities, and he did it well.  But they can really only be understood in contrast to all of the other ones, the ones where most of us live.  Abetting what Christopher Lasch called, over twenty years ago, “the secession of the successful” isn’t likely to help anyone but the successful, and they don’t need it.  Yes, it would be nice to create more affordable housing in New York City; I’m on board.  It would be nicer if other places offered more options for a decent life.  That’s the book I’d like to read.

Friday Fragments

William Baumol died yesterday.

Longtime readers know that I consider his signature contribution to economic thought -- Baumol’s Cost Disease -- one of the foundational truths of higher education.  (The same could be said for health care and live entertainment.)  He waited until late in life to commit the idea to book form; his book The Cost Disease should be required reading for anybody who presumes to comment or work on the economics of higher education.  I even reviewed it here.

His idea is generally downplayed or ignored in discussions of higher ed financing.  That’s everyone’s loss.  He never really solved the issue, but he gave us a map to understand it.  That’s a genuine contribution.  Well done, sir.

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Baumol’s insight helps us understand, too, the broad-based assault on the professions.  Why are “disruptors” so intent on undermining the educated professional middle class?  Because until now, people in those jobs were able to demand significant salaries due to scarcity.  If you’re the first to break that scarcity, whether through automation, disaggregation, or some other variation, you can hoover up those gains for yourself.  Which is exactly what’s happening.

When you break the link between labor and production, it becomes much easier to hoard value in a few hands.  We’re only beginning to grasp the implications of that.

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We’re into celebration season on campus.  It’s the time for the end-of-year gatherings, when the various programs acknowledge students who have done outstanding work.

Every year I go through the same three-stage emotional cycle.  First, I look at the number of commitments on the calendar and get preemptively exhausted.  Then, I suck it up and attend anyway.  Once I’m there, it’s great, and the exhaustion is forgotten until the drive home.

Just this week, I had the celebrations for the EOF program and the statewide PTK group.  EOF is a New Jersey program that targets funding and staff support to a set of students who are low-income and/or first generation in college.  At the end of the year, the program gives thanks to its supporters, and some of the students tell their stories.

If you aren’t affected by some of the stories, you’re in the wrong line of work.  

This year featured a single Mom who will be graduating this month along with her daughter.  They made it through together.  Seeing her obvious pride as both a student and a parent, you couldn’t help but smile.  It’s good to be reminded of why we do what we do.

PTK is the two-year honor society; it’s our version of Phi Beta Kappa.  Hearing the stories of the students there always makes me feel like a slacker.  I take some solace in knowing that Brookdale has had the top community college student in the state for each of the last two years.  As a chief academic officer, I like that sort of thing.  This year’s winner, Kelsey Giggenbach, did us proud with a speech about how the point of talent is to use it to help other people.  

Friday night is the faculty and staff award dinner.  The winners are chosen by their peers, which makes them much more meaningful.  Last year’s event was unexpectedly sweet, so I’m looking forward to this year’s.  

Yes, the events take a lot of time, especially in sequence.  But it’s hard to stay grumpy when you see how hard people have worked, and how much they care.  It does the soul good.

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And then there’s the prom.

The Boy is a sophomore, but his girlfriend is a junior, so she invited him to the junior prom.  Prom invitations are much more elaborate now than they used to be.  Now they’re “promposals,” and they’re expected to involve some pomp and creativity.  She stepped up.

I have to tip my cap to the folks at the tux shop who were unexpectedly prepared to alter the sleeves on a tux to fit a boy who’s six foot seven.  They just went in the back and lengthened them.  I honestly don’t know how they did it, but it worked.  He looked great, she looked great, and the colors were coordinated.

As a parent, it’s a little surreal to see your kids hit milestones that you remember vividly.  (To be fair, he got a year’s head start.  He’s far more dashing than I was, or am.)  He’s handling the teen years with a confidence and grace that he certainly didn’t get from me.  I’m especially proud of the way he treats his girlfriend.  Within the confines of his age, he’s quite a gentleman.  As a father, that counts for something.

The teen years are a series of hairpin turns, and they can go off the rails at a moment’s notice.  But for now, I’m just enjoying the heck out of watching an extraordinary young man emerge.

Accreditation is for Proles

This week, two major stories came out detailing arguments by very elite, selective institutions to the effect that they should be exempt from the demands of regional accreditation.  They point to their reputations, graduation rates, and selectivity, and argue that their excellence speaks for itself.  Let the accreditors focus on troubled places, they say -- they call it “risk-adjusted accreditation” -- and leave the elites alone to do their elite thing.

(fingers tapping on the desk)

I try to keep the blog relatively free of profanity, so it’s difficult to convey the depth of my response.  To convey it visually, rather than verbally, I would need some anatomically correct dolls.

(fingers tapping on the desk)

“Accreditation is for proles,” the argument goes.  Rules don’t apply to the cool kids.

(fingers tapping on the desk)

No.  Ethically, morally, politically, common-sensically, economically.  No.

I’ll explain.

The WSJ article -- sorry for the paywall; I evernoted it before it was ransomed -- notes that

Some colleges with spectacular reputations and sky-high graduation rates complain that accreditation is little more than expensive paper-pushing that can lead to picayune demands from reviewers.

“Little more than expensive paper-pushing that can lead to picayune demands.”

Leave aside the implication that peer review is invalid because the elites are presumptively peerless.  That’s annoying, but secondary.  The real issue is that Princeton and Stanford shouldn’t have to pay people to gather data, but that community colleges and others that serve low-income students should.  This, while Princeton and Stanford maintain tax exemptions on endowments in the billions, and we take annual budget cuts.  The value of the tax exemption on Stanford’s endowment is greater than Brookdale’s entire operating budget in a given year, and they’re arguing that we should be subject to an unfunded mandate, but they shouldn’t be.

It’s beyond offensive.  It’s almost cartoonish.  

Mar-a-Lago is subject to health inspectors in the kitchen.  Speed limits apply to limousines.  Even private jets have to submit to air traffic control.  

Accreditation sets out the rules of the road for granting degrees.  If the rules of the road are burdensome -- and sometimes they can be -- then the elites could use their clout to get those rules amended.  They don’t get to exempt themselves from the rules simply by virtue of being prominent, or rich, or well-known.

If we want to adjust for risk, let’s get the units of analysis right.  Right now, the institutions with the least risky students get the most money, and the ones with the riskiest students get the least money.  That amplifies risk.  If we want to adjust risk, let’s do it right.  Fund institutions -- and I’m counting tax exemptions on endowments as funding -- based on the relative financial need of their students.  We could set a standard dollar figure per student, and then fund to fill in the gap between what the students can reasonably pay and that figure.  Do that for a decade or two, and then talk to me about unfunded mandates.  

Stanford can handle the cost.  Harvard can handle the cost.  Community colleges are far more strapped, yet they propose to increase the costs for us.

As an interim step, maybe we charge a premium to the elites to be exempt, and then use the proceeds to pay for the costs of compliance for the rest of us.  We could send our bill for the Institutional Research Office to, say, Princeton.  It’s a stopgap, but it’s better.  They’d be free of scrutiny, and we’d be free of an unfunded mandate.  

But a blanket pass just for being rich?  No.  Just, no.

#PellYes

As easy as it can be to despair of our politics, once in a while, despite itself, Congress gets one right.  It just approved reviving summer Pell.

For a brief window during the first Obama term, students with Pell grants were able to get extra money to take classes in the summer.  The idea was to encourage rapid program completion.  But summer Pell coincided with the recession-driven enrollment boom, so it came at the exact moment that demand for regular Pell hit an all-time high.  It went away quickly, before most colleges really had the chance to adapt.  Now, with enrollments off their peaks, summer Pell is making a very welcome comeback.

Pell grants are the very best kind of financial aid, because they’re grants.  Students don’t have to pay them back.  Even students who are more debt-averse than is really in their best interest don’t have an issue with grants.  And they’re need-based, so their impact is progressive; the poorest students get the most aid.

In the years since summer Pell went away, the completion movement gained steam.  As a sector -- or what my private sector colleagues call a “space,” for some reason -- we have a greater understanding of the importance of continuity for completion than we did before.  Forcing students to go away for four months, just as they’re getting the hang of it, is often counterproductive.  Now, more students will have the option of sticking around.

Institutionally, summer Pell may help with enrollment, retention, and completion, if we respond to it in the right ways.  Educationally, it makes sense, too; I simply refuse to believe that people can’t learn between May and September.  If anything, our summer classes have higher pass rates than our semester classes do.  Part of that may be because the terms are shorter, but the principle stands.  There’s no educational argument for forcing the summer to be an academic wasteland.

I’m especially encouraged because expanding Pell to include summer indicates the conceptual possibility of changing Pell in other ways, too.  For example, right now Dual Enrollment and Early College High School programs aren’t eligible for Pell.  That doesn’t really make sense.  Programs like ECHS have been shown to increase the likelihood of low-income students eventually getting bachelor’s degrees or higher.  They’re relatively cheap, they expand access, and they can provide academic challenge for talented students in districts that may not be able to afford robust gifted-and-talented programs.  But right now, if you don’t have a philanthropist or a school district willing and able to foot the bill, ECHS students have to pay in full.  

I’ve heard of some movement, too, for making Pell available for more non-credit workforce training programs.  To the extent that those programs fit local needs, they can work wonders.  At last year’s graduation ceremony for the welding program, I saw some giddy partners of the graduates; going from minimum wage to family wage brings with it a raft of social benefits.  For a bit of Pell money, it’s a remarkable social return on investment.

So, #PellYes.  And a rare tip of the cap to Congress for doing the right thing.

Online Testing

Is there an elegant way to administer exams in online courses?

I have no evidence that cheating is greater in online courses than in face-to-face, but I probably wouldn’t.  Intuitively, it seems like it certainly could be.  Anyone old enough to remember the New Yorker cartoon about “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” will know why.  And some faculty still refuse to teach online for that very reason.

Like many colleges, we have a fair number of online courses that require a student to show up physically somewhere to take exams.  That usually means the campus testing center, though I’m told we have informal reciprocity with campus testing centers around the country, so a student taking a class from, say, Ohio could use the testing center at her local community college.  The military also has versions of testing centers that we rely on for proctoring for students who are deployed.

Students often object, though, saying that the whole point of taking an online class is to avoid having to come physically to campus.  I understand the objection, and at some level, agree with it. The problem is that elegant alternatives are hard to find.

We have a lockdown browser that faculty can use to ensure that a student can’t have anything else open on the computer while taking the test.  That works really well if the student only has access to one screen.  But in a time of smartphones and tablets, we can’t assume that.  Even if the computer is locked down, the phone may be right there.  

I’ve heard of systems with webcams that can look around the room where the student is taking the test.  The idea is to ferret out any second screens, books, notes, or other contraband.  But taken far enough to inspire confidence, it borders on creepy.  Assuming that many students are taking online courses and exams from home, that brings a level of surveillance that I’m not comfortable embracing.  It also presumes the presence of people on the other end who are looking at what the webcam is catching, which has to be one of the dullest jobs on the planet.

To some degree, replacing traditional exams with other sorts of assignments may hold the promise of both solving the cheating problem and being more pedagogically interesting or sound.  Depending on the subject matter, idiosyncratic assignments can sometimes be the way to go.  But sometimes they aren’t, and even when they are, they’re often much more labor-intensive to develop.  Sometimes, tests serve a purpose.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen a non-creepy (or at least minimally creepy) way to give exams online that makes cheating difficult enough that faculty can have confidence in it?