This Is What We Call a “Red Flag”

[R]ather than being asked to change their ways, full-time faculty members are simply phased out over time.

This sentence passed virtually unnoticed about a third of the way through an IHE story about a survey it had done of college and university financial officers.  To me, it jumped off the screen.

The finance officers addressed a number of strategies for preserving their institutions in light of financial and enrollment pressures.  They range from the unobjectionable -- energy efficiency, economies of scale in certain back-office functions -- to the conspicuous, like mergers and campus closures.  They named a number of constituencies from which they solicit input, including trustees, senior administrators, and the community.

But they’re starting to give up on faculty.  Having heard nothing useful but plenty of condemnation from that quarter, they’re isolating it and essentially consigning it to hospice.  

That’s instrumentally rational and substantively shocking.  

As a short-term move, I can see the reasoning.  Full-time faculty are expensive and specialized.  Their input on financial decisions is often reflective of only getting one part of the picture, and can be vitriolic.  After a while, it becomes easier just to appease the incumbents and let attrition do the dirty work.  After all, it’s nearly impossible to dislodge a tenured professor, but easy not to replace one who leaves.  Over time, the incumbents will gradually become less relevant.

Over time, of course, there’s a real concern about academic quality.  But for most finance officers, that registers as relatively abstract.  In the battle between this year’s deficit, which is very real, and yet another round of “the sky is falling!” from the usual suspects, I can see the temptation to focus on the problem that’s actually solvable.  

From an academic perspective, the solution seems obvious.  If we care about maintaining the full-time faculty role in any significant numbers, full-time faculty need to get involved in discussions of the business model.  That’s different from protesting to bring back a golden age, or just screaming at trustees.  It means engaging seriously with the long-term drivers of cost and revenue, and applying those critical thinking skills to find solutions.  It means being willing to entertain the possibility of doing things differently.

That’s not just wishful thinking; it has been done.  The Accelerated Learning Program at the Community College of Baltimore County -- acknowledged nationally as a breakthrough in improving success rates for students who placed into remediation -- reconceives the instructor’s role in a way that improves student completion rates.  It was developed by faculty in the English department.  The Z-degree -- an all-OER degree with zero textbook cost -- at Tidewater Community College was a faculty initiative.  Odessa College went to short semesters to survive, and discovered that student success rates improved for every subgroup of students, and at minimal cost.  The faculty took a leading role.

There’s plenty of low-hanging fruit for interested faculty to examine.  They’re in a unique position to look at the merits of different forms of scheduling, different methods of advising, and new sorts of “nudges” to help students stay on task.  (My son’s high school gives every teacher access to a group texting app with which they remind students of upcoming exams or paper due dates.  I’ve actually heard TB exclaim, upon reading a text, “Oh, @#$#, I have to study!”)  They’re on the front lines with students, seeing and hearing when systems break down.  Many have experience in different types of institutions, with different business models.  And as a group, they’re awfully smart.  I hate to leave all that intelligence untapped.

Some may take being ignored as a short-term win; it means they can do what they’ve always done, relatively undisturbed.  But it’s a truism in business that you know you’re in trouble when people stop asking what you think.  Once you’ve been consigned to irrelevance, it’s a long way back.  Even worse, some seem to relish the irrelevance, calculating that they can run out the clock before everything collapses.  

The fact that many college finance officers admit moving from “engagement” to “containment” is a gigantic red flag for faculty.  I hope they don’t miss it.  

Tying the Peasants to the Land

Fifty years ago, when community colleges were springing up at the rate of one a week across the country, people were mobile and capital wasn’t.  Extending education to previously underserved areas made sense because the money in those areas was likely to stay there and to grow; companies needed workers.  

Twenty-five years ago, both people and capital were mobile.  We started to see the rural/metro split we know now, but it was still common for people to pull up roots and go where the work was.  Community colleges stopped springing up, but they were able to maintain and even grow enrollment by serving, in part, as ways to attract capital to a region.  A company wouldn’t be likely to relocate to an area where it couldn’t find qualified workers.  A community college could help it grow (or upskill) some of its own.

Now, capital is more mobile than ever, but we’re building barriers to keep people in place.  Both New York and Rhode Island have passed “free college” programs that come with post-graduation in-state residency requirements.  Rhode Island is all of two counties; that’s pretty restrictive.  At this point, states are starting to look not only at institutions as tools to accomplish policy goals, but at citizenry the same way.  Why educate them, the argument goes, if they’ll just up and leave?

Ugh.

We’ve seen plenty of discussion of border walls and travel restrictions at the national level in the last year or so.  But now we’re starting to see a less conspicuous version of it at the state level.  The state-level version doesn’t have quite the racial charge to it that the national one does, but it’s hard not to see the two as being of a piece.  They’re about tying the peasants to the land.

The dangers of both policies are clear.  At a really basic level, they invite -- sometimes almost compel -- reciprocation.  If New York keeps its “human capital” but New Jersey doesn’t, at some point, someone in NJ will notice the imbalance and try to right it.  That may trigger Pennsylvania.  Then Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia.  Then…

Ask any economist about the efficiency losses of protectionism.  If we train smart people in New York but their talents could best be used in California, then we wind up settling for second- or third-best uses of their talents.  And that’s assuming we find those uses at all.  Remember the Great Recession?  Imagine graduating the University of Michigan in 2009, only to be told that leaving the state would require ponying up all that past tuition, but the in-state economy simply isn’t hiring.  

Conservative economist Tyler Cowen has argued, I think correctly, that people going where the opportunity is often leads to better outcomes all around.  Shackling them to a depressed region isn’t likely to lead to positive outcomes.

Residency requirements, if they spread, would also greatly shift the balance of power when companies play states off against each other in bidding wars for relocations.  As hard as it is to move for a job -- something I know personally -- it’s that much harder to see the job move away and know that you don’t have the option to follow it.  That already happens between countries, but moves between states are much more common.  Allow capital to move but tie workers to places, and I’d expect to see ever more public funding get diverted -- whether directly, as through subsidies, or indirectly, as through tax credits or abatements -- to owners, even as wages go down.  Income polarization in the US is combustible enough already without adding lighter fluid to it.

Then there’s the simple fact of what life is like in the twenties.  Those are often family-formation years, as well as the years when people are likeliest to pull up stakes and go to where the grass is greener.  Can you imagine having to pay the state the equivalent of either bail or a dowry (depending on taste) to get to be with your beloved?  That won’t lead to anything good.  

And at a really basic level, the idea confuses means with ends.  People aren’t supposed to be tools to realize goals of the state.  The state is supposed to be a tool to realize the goals of people.  Social contract theory isn’t new, but it’s based on an insight that still holds: the state is here to serve us, not the other way around.  This kind of economic coercion, essentially kneecapping the educated young for the short-term gain of the state, is a category mistake.

I know that Richard Florida, among others, is pushing “devolution” as the path to equality, but this isn’t a path to equality.  It’s a path to separatism, fatalism, and retaliation.  

We’re at the early stages yet, which is good and bad.  It’s bad, in the sense that the pattern is still invisible to many.  But it’s good, in the sense that we can stop the snowball before it gets very far down the hill.

We have to stop it.  The point of public education is to benefit everybody.  Sometimes that means sending folks off to places where their unique talents will make a better fit.  That’s fine; that’s what makes the economy work.  But even if the economics turn out to be a wash, there’s a deeper ethical point here.  Education is about, among other things, freedom.  If some of the peasants want to flee the land, let them.  If states want to keep more of their own, and attract others from outside, let them make themselves more appealing destinations.  Attract the ones who want to be there, rather than trapping the ones who don’t.  

Tennessee and Oregon have shown that “free community college” doesn’t have to work this way.  Instead, it can empower people to make their own choices.  Here’s hoping we follow those models, and convince New York and Rhode Island to change before the unintended consequences start to metastasize.  Combine a residency requirement with a nasty recession, and it won’t be pretty.  Let the students go.

Friday Fragments

The idea of setting some sort of “emeritus” status for distinguished retirees has been bouncing around campus for a while, and it seems to have momentum.

At universities, my impression is that emeritus status is often a function of published research, and/or fundraising.  Neither of those really applies here.  We have folks who have published research, and we’ve fundraised, but neither is at the core of the enterprise.  

Ideally, it shouldn’t only apply to faculty.  I could imagine someone who had served the college for decades in another key role being entirely deserving, but expanding it beyond faculty ranks necessarily raises the question of criteria.

In the context of a teaching-intensive institution, what do you think would make sense as criteria for emeritus status?  What would it mean here?

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Well done, Canada.

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I know it’s SCIENCE, but “Path of Totality” sounds a lot like a 70’s jazz fusion band.

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We’re dogsitting a 90 pound golden retriever, Ralphie, for a few weeks for some family friends.  That means that Sally has temporarily lost “only dog” status.

They’ve been pretty good about it, except for Sally trying to mount Ralphie a few times  (He growls and she backs down.)  They walk together well, looking like a canine version of the Odd Couple.  Sally is Felix, tidy and fussy; Ralphie is Oscar, shambling, shedding, and drooling.  

The real shock for me was the difference in personalities.  Sally has been our dog for over seven years now; prior to this week, I had met Ralphie maybe twice.  But when I got back from Nashville, Ralphie made a much bigger fuss over me than Sally did.  He has that golden retriever “happy to meet you!” demeanor that Sally just doesn’t.  She’s friendly to her peeps, but ‘peeps’ status is earned over time.  

Ralphie has been here for less than a week, but it’s already getting difficult to remember what it was like before.  

Dogs are sneaky like that.

The Public Option

If you haven’t yet seen Jeff Selingo’s thoughts on affirmative action in selective college admissions, the column is worth reading.  Broadly, he argues that while diversifying the student body at some elite schools is a positive step in itself, the real issue is the designation of elite schools in the first place.  To which I say, let’s take that a little farther.

The conflict over admissions to selective places is based on two assumptions.  The first is that the demand for seats there exceeds the supply, which seems pretty clear.  The second is that seats there are worth far more than seats at less exclusive places.  It’s only worth joining a club that might not accept you as a member.

That second assumption strikes me as clearly unnecessary.  We could choose, if we wanted, to invalidate it.  If we did, the first assumption would likely die a natural death.  

In Canada and the Scandinavian countries, broadly speaking, there isn’t the same rigid hierarchy of prestige in higher ed.  Some universities are better known than others, but nearly all public higher education is respected.  If you go to the University of Ottawa rather than the University of Toronto, your life isn’t over.  People can make decisions based on location, or aesthetic preference, or programmatic specialization.  And for-profit higher education simply never gained the foothold there that it has here.

That’s what a strong public option will do.  It will relieve pressure on the elites by offering reasonable, accessible options of recognized quality.  And it will crowd out the for-profits by denying them a reason to exist.  

Put differently, the best way to attack for-profits isn’t to attack for-profits.  It’s to strengthen community and state colleges.  Make the public options high-quality and let that quality be known.  Dissipate the need for for-profits, and the ones that can’t prove themselves will fade away.

When I was at DeVry, we weren’t afraid of Princeton, or even of Rutgers.  We were afraid of Middlesex County College.  The county college offered more options, lower prices, and a locally respected name.  DeVry competed on marketing and specialization; over time, that proved not to be enough.  

The beauty of a strong public option is that it doesn’t rule out private ones.  It just forces the private ones to do a better job, which benefits everyone.  Those that couldn’t add value wouldn’t survive.  Survival would be predicated on adding value -- doing a better job in a given area, like Juilliard with music -- or adding values, such as a distinct religious identity.  

Defunding the publics is a false economy.  It creates a scarcity at the top, which leads to all manner of zero-sum hypercompetition, and it creates room on the bottom for people with other agendas.  Compare the cost of forgiving loans for Corinthian students to the cost of improving the local community college; the latter is less expensive, and does far more social good.

In the community college world, and at non-selective colleges generally, affirmative action in admissions is a non-issue; we take everybody.  And that’s not at the expense of diversity, either; nationally, community colleges are the most racially and economically diverse sector of higher education.  

Straightforward arguments for more funding seem to have landed on deaf ears, so maybe we can try these.  Strong public institutions offer a way out of the admissions arms race, and offer an effective and legally bulletproof way to solve the quandary of for-profits.  Even better, they already exist.  All we have to do is respect them, both verbally and fiscally.  It’s time to rebuild the middle.

The Vision Thing

Yesterday I mentioned the moment in the talk to the state directors of community colleges at which I got stuck.  Essentially, I’m seeing an increasing tension between place-bound funding systems and geographically mobile students.  Some states are responding by kneecapping student mobility with post-graduation residency requirements, which I’ve opposed and still do.  My preferred solution involves moving the funding up the food chain, whether to states or to the feds.  (In my own state of New Jersey, a significant number of graduates move to New York City or Philadelphia, both of which are out of state, so we’re particularly sensitive to this point.)  

But the discussion itself was much more wide-ranging.  

I saw my task not as orating on truth and beauty -- nobody needs that at nine in the morning --- nor as getting into the weeds.  Instead, I decided to focus on issues that often get lost in the daily rush of events, but that have significant impact over time.  Judging by the feedback in the room, some of these topics are ripe for exploration.

ESL - While we have some great scholarship on the effects of remediation and better ways to help underprepared students, we have very little useful information on ESL programs.  ESL isn’t remediation, really -- remediation assumes that the student was previously exposed to the material, which often isn’t true in ESL -- but it often gets treated as if it were.  And the fit between academic ESL programs and existing financial aid rules is awkward at best.  

As a sector, though, we haven’t made intelligent examination of ESL practices a priority.  If we’re going to make significant headway with underrepresented groups, we should.

Men over 25 - Regular readers know I’ve been asking about this one for a while.  At most community colleges -- and I’ll admit that technical colleges may be the exception that proves the rule -- the gender ratio among traditional-age students is pretty even.  But among students older than their early twenties, women far outnumber men.  I suspect that’s a function of a combination of different incarceration rates and opportunity costs on the student side, and program mix on the college side.  (Allied health programs continue to skew female.)  Still, from a standpoint of improving local quality of life, if we could bring more underemployed men into college and then into decent-paying jobs, we could make a significant, positive difference in many communities.  Judging by the responses in the room, this was a new idea.  I’d love to see more focused efforts here.

Expand Free Lunch Program to CC’s -- Sara Goldrick-Rab has been arguing for a while that student hunger is a serious issue; just this week, a report using national data confirmed that she’s right.  (They quibble over percentages, but agree that the number of students affected by hunger is in the millions.)  We may not be able to build on the existing free lunch program as is, but we can take the concept as a template.  What would it look like if we took student hunger seriously?  How can we move away from hit-and-miss charity drives and towards sustainable measures to allow students a chance to focus on their studies?

Senior Citizen Outreach - The oldest baby boomers, born in 1946, turn 71 this year.  With the baby boom generation moving into senior citizen territory, that demographic is expanding fast.  As a group, seniors have a few salient traits for our purposes.  They tend to be locally connected, they’re relatively affluent as a group, and they have high voting rates.  They make powerful political allies, if asked.

As a sector, though, our outreach to seniors has largely been on the margins.  We haven’t made a point of consciously courting seniors in the community.  That could mean programming, but it could also mean recruiting them as mentors for struggling younger students.  In some courses, local seniors can make wonderful guest speakers or resource people.  To the extent that union contracts allow, they can be extraordinary volunteers in certain roles.  We just haven’t made a point of trying.

As the rest of the baby boom generation moves into the retirement years, the consequences of our failure to engage could get worse.  Or, we could engage, and draw on a massive and powerful resource.  It’s up to us.

None of these is revolutionary, but each could make a difference, if taken seriously.  It’s hard to tend to longer-term issues like these when a campus is busy putting out short-term budgetary fires.  Loss of vision is a real cost of austerity.  Here’s hoping that we can build on some of these while we still have the option.

So What You’re Saying Is…

On Monday I had the chance to address the annual gathering of state directors of community college systems, in Nashville.  It’s a knowledgeable and self-assured group, unafraid to challenge speakers.  That’s good and bad.  The discussion was lively, which was fun, but I had the embarrassing experience of realizing live, in front of an audience, that I hadn’t fully thought through one of my points.  This will be an attempt to think it through a little more, even if not fully.

(Just one aside about Nashville, which was lovely: a country band I saw on Sunday ended its set with “Comfortably Numb,” by Pink Floyd.  It sort of worked, but it would never have occurred to me that I’d hear that song by a country band.)

The point was about the geographic distribution of wealth in the US.  Roughly half of the community colleges in the country were built in the 1960’s, and the vast majority was within a few years of the 1960’s in either direction.  That was the height of the geographic dispersion of wealth across the country.  At that time, you could find solid middle classes in most of the country.  Productivity, in economic terms, was relatively even across the states.  There were exceptions, such as Appalachia and the rural deep South, but they were exceptions.  Community colleges fit that economy well, and found an enthusiastic reception because they fit emerging local needs.

Fifty years later, the economy has changed.  Now, wealth is much more concentrated, both socially and geographically.  A few major metros have taken off spectacularly, and a few smaller ones have really energized.  But much of the country is stagnating or declining.  You can see the difference easily in housing costs.  If you compare the ratio of costs between, say, Buffalo and New York City fifty years ago to the ratio now, you see New York City really pulling away.  It’s not a perfect indicator, but it’s a pretty good one.  And the same holds if you compare rural areas to urban ones in various states.  

But the geographic distribution of community colleges, and the funding mechanisms for them, remains pretty much what it was fifty years ago.  That means that in some areas of the country, they’re preparing students to leave.  That doesn’t fit cleanly with local funding, local political support, or local philanthropy.

Someone objected that, in fact, community colleges supply the workforce that will attract new businesses.  Yes and no.  They supply the workforce that _may_ attract new businesses.  Nearly any area is better off with a well-prepared workforce than without one.  (My favorite argument for public higher education in both Massachusetts and New Jersey: we don’t have oil, or sunny/warm climates, or cheap land.  If we’re going to compete, it’s going to be on quality of workers.)  But in areas of the country that have shrinking populations and years of economic decline behind them, the argument that supply of workers creates demand for them may be hard to sustain.  Heck, the academic job market itself refutes the idea that supply creates demand.

Someone else challenged me with some variation on “so you’re saying that we have too many community colleges, especially in rural areas?”  (I didn’t write it verbatim.)  That wasn’t the intent, but I was caught flatfooted by the interpretation.  No, that wasn’t what I was saying.  So what was I saying?

I see it more as an argument for rethinking both funding and delivery.  To the extent that students are likelier to pack up and leave after graduation than they used to be, I see an argument for shifting the funding source up the food chain.  (After the talk, someone from EMSI told me that now, about 70% of community college grads remain in the local area.  That’s high in absolute terms, but twenty years ago it was 85%.  In other words, in the last generation, the percentage that leaves has doubled, and is still climbing.)  In other words, during the generation that has seen significant reduction in state-level support, graduates are likelier to conduct job searches statewide.  The increasing mismatch between funding sources and reality on the ground may explain part of why it’s harder to get support than it once was.

Historically, community colleges have distinguished themselves from “state” colleges.  Typically, the former offered associate degrees and the latter offered bachelor’s.  (Florida and Ohio, among others, call some community colleges “state” colleges, but the general pattern holds.)  But the distinction may be getting harder to justify.  It may be time to speak of a higher ed ecosystem, with the different parts feeding each other.  That may also help justify arguments for cross-sector funding parity, which would be a welcome change.

I can’t pretend that I have a fully thought-out answer, but the line of inquiry strikes me as important.  What are the implications for a distributed system when wealth has concentrated in a few specific places?

Anyway, my thanks to the state system directors for the chance to speak to them, and for correctly identifying a gap in my argument.  Wise and worldly readers, I need your help.  What are other implications of wealth concentration for what community colleges should do?

Accessibility (the other kind)

A Twitter exchange Sunday between Sara Goldrick-Rab and Ken Lindblom touched on a favorite topic, but one that I don’t think we take seriously enough.  SGR asked for a definition of “college readiness” in accessible language; Lindblom responded that graduate schools don’t teach accessible writing.  

They don’t.  It’s a real problem.

The postmodernist trend of the 90’s had its strengths, but one of its greatest flaws was a semi-intentional premium on incomprehensibility.  When you’re supposed to show your sophistication with terms like “always already” and “overdetermined,” simple statements come across as naive.  Traditionalists used to make great sport of quoting particularly opaque sentences out of context, poking fun at highfalutin word salad.  Admittedly, the search for sentences like that was often like looking for hay in a haystack.  

Postmodernism aside, though, academic writing isn’t typically geared towards the educated public.  We know the reasons for that, and some of the reasons make sense.  Making a narrow point seven levels into an argument requires using shorthand for the first five or six levels, or you’d never get it done.  (A few months ago a mathematician was asked to leave a plane because someone in the seat next to him found his notes jarring.  They were a complicated math problem.)  The public isn’t really into footnotes.  Specialists use shorthand that non-specialists find daunting, and it makes sense that they do.  On campus, I don’t stop to define “accreditation” every time I say it.  It wouldn’t help.  

But our failure, as a sector, to engage the public has created a vacuum.  When we leave the public sphere to others, with their own agendas, they take advantage.  Now the stories making the rounds about academia are about “dropout factories,” student loans, and political correctness.  Those stories are based on varying degrees of truth, but our stories are missing.  Why aren’t we hearing about those “lightbulb over my head” moments that changed lives?  Why aren’t we hearing about universities as places for experiments?  For that matter, why aren’t we hearing that one generation’s wild radical student cause is the next generation’s common sense?  Alternately, why aren’t we hearing about the impact of sustained educational austerity on the next generation?  Why don’t we get our stories out there?

We don’t train for that.  We don’t hire for that.  Maybe we should.

In one way, community colleges have an advantage.  We hire for teaching ability, as opposed to research.  In research, obscurantism can sometimes pass for profundity.  But in teaching -- and especially in teaching students who may be the first generation in college -- clarity matters.  Clear and effective communication matters more here because teaching matters more here.  But the teaching loads, and the relative lack of help, can make it difficult to keep up a prolific writing schedule.  I can attest personally that a prolific writing schedule isn’t easy.

Michael Lewis, Ta-Nahesi Coates, and Sara Goldrick-Rab have shown us that there’s a market for substantive, academically informed non-fiction if it’s written well.  It can be done.  Until now, academe has treated it as a distraction or worse.  It shouldn’t.  If we don’t win the public, others will.  As I’ve told my own kids through their respective baseball and softball careers, strikeouts are part of the game, but if you must strike out, I’d rather see you go down swinging.  Let’s start.

Friday Fragments

A few days ago, a reader wrote to ask about how professors police cheating during in-class exams, now that smartphones are pretty much ubiquitous.  

Wise and worldly readers who teach, how have you adapted in-class exams for the age of the smartphone?

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Actual in-car conversation, having just picked up The Girl and some of her friends from a party:

Friend 1: She’s such a Veronica!

TG: She’s more of a Heather, I think.

(antennae up)

(drop off the other girls)

Me: What was that?

TG: Oh, they’re talking about this musical called “Heathers.”  I think it’s based on a movie.  Have you heard of it?

(mind reels)

Me: It’s only THE BEST MOVIE EVER MADE!!!

TG: That’s what (friend)’s Dad says, too!

It’s good to see the classics get their due.  Generation X’s mark on the culture may have been fleeting, but I’ll happily own this one.  Neither Winona Ryder nor Christian Slater was ever quite that good again.

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“When you have an area that just isn’t working like Upper New York State…” - Donald Trump

Ahem.

In an interview this week, Donald Trump advised residents of “upper” New York to move to Wisconsin.

A few thoughts.

First, nobody there calls it “upper” New York State.  It’s Western New York, or, in some cases, Upstate.  As a lifetime resident of New York City, I would have expected him to know that.  But that’s a minor point.

The President of the United States is writing off regions of the US with millions of people in them?

Um, not okay.

In Western New York, where I grew up, there’s a chronic sense of being in the shadow of New York City.  NYC dominates state politics, and it dominates the state’s national image.  When I got to college and people asked me where I was from, I learned quickly that if I just answered “New York” they’d assume I meant The City.  When I mentioned Rochester, a classmate asked me which subway line it was on.  Rochester is farther from NYC than Washington, DC is.

The rule is that you’re only allowed to criticize it if you’re from there.  If you haven’t personally washed down a white hot with a Genny Cream, or you have no idea what a Garbage Plate is, I don’t want to hear it.

Those of us who grew up there and moved away -- some of whom even work at IHE -- have complicated feelings about the place.  But we earned those.  And they’re based on knowing what we’re talking about.

It’s a new era, I know that, but I’m still put off by national political figures trashing states they didn’t win.  That’s not what a _national_ figure is supposed to do.  I don’t recall the presidents Bush trashing Massachusetts, or Obama trashing Alabama.  The Clintons liked Upstate so much that they moved there (sort of).  

Early next week I’ll be in Nashville for a conference.  I intend to go the entire time without indulging in any regional stereotyping.  Anytime Mr. Trump would care to learn from my example, I’d welcome it.  Besides, he doesn’t seem like someone who would turn down a Garbage Plate.

Promises, Promises

Apparently Oregon and New York, each having announced a variation on free public college, are both falling short of full funding for their programs.  

When “Promise” programs don’t keep their promises, I would expect some blowback.  As Robert Kelchen pointed out, this will give scholars of disappointment effects (!) an excellent natural experiment. (“When I grow up, I want to study disappointment!”)  But I can’t claim surprise.

In both cases, to my knowledge, the programs don’t have dedicated funding streams.  Instead, they’re discretionary spending, subject to political horse-trading and the usual legislative shenanigans.  The programs are new enough that we can’t blame growth.  Worse, the underfunding is happening at a point in the business cycle when states are as flush as they can reasonably expect to be without major policy changes.  States can’t run deficits, so when the next recession hits -- and it will -- revenues will drop at the exact moment that demand for college increases.  If they’re falling short now, they’ll fall catastrophically short then.

In my perfect world, nobody would be allowed to serve in a legislature without being able to demonstrate a first-level knowledge of Keynesian economics.  I can envision a few possible policy responses.  (I can also envision a few choice words from disappointed students…)

One is the usual policy-wonk retreat to “means testing,” or what laypeople call “slow murder.”  The argument will be based on a sort of economic triage: if there isn’t enough for everybody, then help the neediest first.  But in the political climate of my adult lifetime, that’s a recipe for decline.  Programs for the poor become poor programs.  If you want an expensive program to survive, its benefits need to be broad-based, and preferably universal.  Otherwise you start to get into bureaucratic nightmares of income verification, apocryphal or exaggerated stories of abuse, and the like.  The unsung heroes in our financial aid offices know how that works.

I could also imagine benefits being narrowly targeted at desired majors, as Arkansas is doing.  The argument there would be that the state needs more STEM majors, or computer majors, or nursing majors, or whatever, so let’s build incentives for that.  It’s better than nothing, but it assumes that entering students know what they want, and/or are utterly indifferent to what they study.  Neither is true.  It also runs the risk of saturating certain job markets over time.

Alternately, states could move to “first come, first served.”  There’s a simplicity to that, but in practice it will tend to be regressive.  It also defeats the predictability that made the initial promise of free college a potential game-changer.  If a full-tuition scholarship is guaranteed, that’s an incentive.  If you follow the rules but your application only came in 30 days early instead of 35 so you get nothing, that’s not much of an incentive.  If anything, it’s a kick in the teeth. Once some sympathetic stories of students who were denied for heart-tugging reasons start making the rounds, things will get ugly.

Tennessee has taken the utterly brilliant step of actually designating a specific funding stream.  It uses lottery revenues.  One can argue about the moral hazard of that, but it does provide a line of revenue (relatively) protected from political mood swings.  As a result, Tennessee isn’t having the shortfalls that Oregon and New York are, and enrollments in community colleges received a healthy boost.  At the state level, this strikes me as the best realistic outcome.  Kudos to Governor Haslam - a Republican, for those keeping score at home - for getting this one right.

Eventually, a free college policy would make the most sense at the Federal level.  Unlike the states, the Feds can run deficits, so sudden enrollment spikes in recessions wouldn’t threaten everything else.  Give it a dedicated funding stream as a baseline, and use borrowing to cover gaps just as Keynes recommended 80 years ago.  States that aren’t being contrary for purely ideological reasons will figure out quickly that having a healthy higher education sector will mean getting their share from the Feds; as incentives go, that’s pretty good.  As for the states that will be contrary just for the sake of it, well, all the more for everyone else.

Of course, that’s not where we are, politically.  In the short run, it looks like the Tennessee model makes the most sense, and I commend it to other states..  But when the next recession hits, and it will, the rules against state-level deficit spending will come back to bite us.  Because eventually, the political winds will shift again.  Promise.

When Nobody Steps Up

My friend Christine Nowik posted a great question on Twitter this week.  Linking to a piece about department chairs who have stayed too long, she noted that in many departments there’s nobody willing to step up if the current chair steps down.  In some cases, chairs stick around less out of eagerness for the position than out of a lack of alternatives.  What to do when that happens?

I’ve seen this happen several times over the years.  It’s particularly common in small departments, where the personalities involved are few and long-entrenched.  Let’s say you have a department of three full-timers.  One has been the chair for a very long time, with middling performance in the role.  One of the others is nearing retirement and couldn’t be dragged by wild horses to do the job, and the other is a dedicated clock-puncher.  Budgets make a new hire a non-option for the near future.

In that situation, the de-facto-chair-for-life may be the least bad option.  You won’t get greatness, but the basic tasks will get done.  With either of the other two options the basic tasks probably won’t get done, at least not reliably.

Sometimes, the best option in a case like that is either a merger with another department, or a threatened merger with another department.  I’ve seen people who swore up and down never to step up change their minds when threatened with what they saw as a forced takeover.  The threatened loss of autonomy can be enough to overcome a distaste for administrative tasks.

Depending on context, it can also make sense to reconfigure the role.  Larger departments have had success with splitting the role between two people.  The key there is in a clear delineation of duties.  Having “co-chairs” as pure equals simply doesn’t work; you introduce a whole new level of ambiguity, and people learn to play the two off against each other.  But if one co-chair deals with, say, the full-time faculty and department meetings, and the other is the go-to person for the adjuncts, that can work.  

In some cases, unwillingness to step up can be a symptom of a larger organizational dysfunction.  In my own career, I’ve declined to apply for positions when the people to whom I’d have to report didn’t meet my sense of acceptability.  It can be a barometer.

But it’s frequently more a combination of the general academic distrust of “going over to the dark side” combined with individual personal priorities.  Personally, I don’t mind when people step up to chair roles with an eye towards eventually moving into deanships.  Those folks have something to prove, and therefore an incentive to do a really good job.  That’s a good thing, even if there’s a cultural taboo against admitting it.  

I’ve heard of colleges moving away from department chairs altogether, on the theory that faculty are hired to teach, and the skill set for management overlaps only slightly with the skill set for teaching.  I get the logic, and there can be specific local circumstances in which it makes sense.  But as a long-term strategy, I’d be concerned about losing the talent development pipeline.  Chair positions are often a toe in the water of administration; they operate as de facto audition periods on both sides.  I’ve seen chairs who thought the position looked great decide quickly that accepting it was a tragic mistake; I’ve seen others discover previously untapped talent for management.  The in-between status of chairs allows for a relatively low-risk exploratory period; if it doesn’t work out, returning to the faculty isn’t that hard.  That’s much less true for full-time administrative roles.

I’m pretty confident that Nowik and I aren’t the only people ever to have seen this.  Wise and worldly readers, have you seen a reasonably elegant solution to the problem of nobody wanting to step up?

Budgets and Bernie Mac

On The Bernie Mac Show, the late, lamented Bernie Mac had a recurring bit in which he’d show frustration or disbelief by just staring silently at the camera and tapping his fingers.  It slayed me every time.  His body language conveyed silently that he was somewhere between “can you believe this?” and “what the...?”  

Reading IHE”s piece yesterday about an analysis of budgetary “pass-throughs” of state budget cuts in the form of tuition increases had me in full Bernie Mac mode.  

The article is a summary of the results of a study of the effects on tuition at public colleges and universities when public funding was cut.  The article doesn’t mention community colleges, and the original study is paywalled, but my impression is that the study focused on four-year colleges and universities.

For me, this was the key paragraph:

State and local divestment accounted for 16.1 percent of tuition and fee increases paid by the average student since 1987. Disinvestment accounted for a greater share of tuition and fee increases more recently, though. It is responsible for 29.8 percent of the tuition and fee revenue increase since 2000 and 41.2 percent since 2008.

That lends itself to interpretation, of course.  One, offered by Jason Delisle, was:

Policy makers will still wonder why, if appropriations cuts really drive tuition higher, the pass-through rate isn’t 100 percent, said Delisle of AEI.

(stare at screen, tapping fingers)

Okay, I know that policy folk look at practitioners roughly the way that biologists look at butterflies, but I have to respond.  As someone who has spent the last decade dealing with flat or declining public funding at public colleges in two states, I can offer confidently that anyone who assumes that budgets have not been cut simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Take a look at the change in adjunct percentages since 1987, just for starters.  Why do you think colleges have moved so heavily in the direction of part-time faculty?  On my own campus, I’ve been authorized to replace fewer than half of the full-time faculty who’ve left over the last two years.  Why do you suppose that is?

It’s because adjuncts cost less.  That’s where much of the lost funding shows up.  To the extent that we offset “money not received” with “money not spent,” we reduce the amount we have to raise tuition and fees.

Of course, it’s not just adjuncts.  Look at offices run with fewer staff, tutoring centers with fewer tutors, or thirty-year-roofs in their fortieth years.  Deferred maintenance is another version of “money not spent,” until it abruptly has to be.  (For the DC pundit class to grasp this, just look at the Metro.)  Look at travel budgets, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post.  Look at the health insurance packages that employees get to pick from, and compare them to the plans from, say, ten years ago.  Look at “hiring freezes,” raises foregone, and position consolidations.

Then look at non-optional costs that have increased over the years, whether in compliance, IT, or mandatory student services.  As worthy as they are, they put pressure on everything else.

As I’ve been pointing out for years, colleges have handled flat or reduced support by splitting the difference between spending cuts and price increases.  

The contribution of this study, to my mind, is that it shows that the era of less painful cuts is over.  The steady increase in the “pass-through” rate shows that it’s getting harder to maintain a level of service without finding other revenue.  Anecdotally, that’s spot-on.  Shrinking a department from ten full-time faculty to nine is painful; shrinking it from three to two is much worse.  And as much as policy folk don’t want to hear it, the supply of good adjuncts is finite.  There comes a point at which the low-hanging fruit has been picked.  Barring some sort of sea change, I’d expect the pass-through rate to continue its rapid climb.  

Part of the reason I’ve written this column/blog for as long as I have is that I’m still struck by the absence of knowledgeable practitioner voices in the discourse around higher ed.  After all these years, it’s still true.  I understand the career politics behind that, but at some point, we who actually live this stuff need to speak up.  Bernie Mac’s frustration was funny, but ours isn’t.  We need to step up and speak the truth.  If we don’t, these ideological abstractions win by default, and we all suffer.