Which Problem Are We Trying to Solve?

I’m living this one personally.

Within the last week, I’ve been privy to two discussions about high schools, each conducted in complete isolation from the other.

1. “What are the high schools doing?  Why do so many students need remediation?”
2. “What are the high schools doing?  Why are they pressuring so many students to take AP and advanced classes?”

If I were, say, a high school principal, I might find that a little frustrating.  Put next to each other, they suggest that the core issue is only peripherally related to high schools.

They’re both about the disappearing middle.  And the disappearing middle goes far beyond anything high schools are, or aren’t, doing.  The high schools are dealing with the symptoms, but they aren’t the cause.

Something similar is happening in higher education.  Even as community colleges and relatively non-selective four-year schools are increasingly struggling for enrollment, elite and selective institutions grow ever harder to get into.  The Boy is a junior, so I’m privy to a front-row seat to admissions anxiety.  It was bad when I was his age, but it’s much worse now.   Counselors at elite places worry about students burning out from academic overachievement, while the dialogue at community colleges is about getting students through basic algebra.

We use the phrase “getting into college” to describe both ends of the spectrum, but we’re using the same words to talk about two very different things.  

There’s no shortage of contributing factors, but I think the biggest one is the narrowing of perceived avenues to economic success.  And that perception is largely accurate.  Yes, there are “middle skill” jobs that pay decent wages, and I’m glad that community colleges are paying more attention to those than they used to.  But if you look at income distribution over the entire economy of the US, you see good middle-class jobs moving either up or down.  My grandfather dropped out of the 9th grade to work as a tree trimmer, eventually getting a job as a lineman for Detroit Edison.  That unionized job allowed him to raise a family, own a home, and send both of his kids to good public universities.  If he were ever to take the Accuplacer, I’m sure he would have shown as needing remediation, but it didn’t matter.  If he were growing up now, he wouldn’t have the same options.

On the relatively elite side, the Great Chain of Being of institutional prestige is thoroughly national.  It wasn’t always.  For a while, outside of the Ivies, it was largely regional.  As it has gone national -- and international, given the appetite for full-pay international students -- and the elites haven’t added capacity, the competition has become tougher.  But the perceived payoff from a second-tier school, relative to a first-tier school, has dropped.  To many prospective students, rightly or wrongly, the penalty for a ‘safety school’ is much too high.

Public high schools, like community colleges, are built to serve everyone in the area.  That model presumes a relatively robust middle, sociologically speaking. As the middle has been strained, the schools are struggling to compensate.  The elite ones are up against a level of competitiveness that can become toxic; the rest are fighting to keep students on track at all.  

The ‘solution’ to this dilemma isn’t so much conceptual as economic and political.  If we had an economy in which the penalty for ‘safety schools’ wasn’t much more than diminished bragging rights, we could counsel students not to stress so much and actually mean it.  But their angst is based on something.  They don’t remember the economy we used to have.  They see it as it is, and have a sense of where it’s going.  In my darker moments, I wonder if they’re right.

Friday Fragments

On Thursday, Brookdale had a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the KEYS recovery high school.  It’s alternative high school for students in recovery from addiction, located on our campus.  It’s a response to the alarming damage done by the opiate addiction epidemic.

It’s a wonderful program, and I’m proud to be associated with it.  But the ceremony was hard to get through.

I was fine when the local political leaders and philanthropists spoke.  I even managed to make it through the speech by the mother of a student who would soon enroll, as she talked about her heartbreak watching her kid struggle to stay sober.  It was hard to hear, but I got through it without tears.

Then a student spoke.  She had the same first name as my daughter.  They even have the same hair.  She opened with “I’ve been clean for four months.”

I’m not made of stone, people.

Community colleges weren’t built to deal with opiate addiction.  But the community needs the help it needs.  DIverting addicted kids from returning to the environments where they got into trouble means giving them a better chance to get back on track. Hell, it gives them a better chance to stay alive into adulthood.

It wasn’t what I had in mind when I went into this profession.  But I’m glad we’re doing it.

--

Judith Scott-Clayton’s new report on student loan defaults is really impressive.  I need a chance to digest the whole thing, but this part of the summary jumped off the screen for me:

“For-profit borrowers default at twice the rate of public two-year borrowers (52 versus 26 percent after 12 years), but because for-profit students are more likely to borrow, the rate of default among all for-profit entrants is nearly four times that of all two-year entrants (48 percent versus 13 percent).”

The Feds measure cohort default rates by looking only at the students who took out loans.  But that presumes, incorrectly, that the percentage of students who take out loans is relatively even across colleges.  It isn’t.  If only ten percent of your students take out loans, a thirty percent default rate would encompass three percent of your total student body.  Small numbers can cause big swings in percentages.

If cohort default rates referred to percentages of the overall student body instead, we’d get a much more accurate picture.

More expensive places will have lower default rates, because their pool of borrowers will include more affluent people.  Someone whose family makes $75,000 a year probably won’t have to borrow for community college, but would for a private university that charges $50,000 per year.  That student will have a much easier time repaying later than one from a family living on $20,000 per year, all else being equal, because she’ll have a family cushion.  And, of course, all else is never entirely equal.

That’s part of why lower balances tend to correlate to higher default rates.  (The other major reason is that lower balances also correlate to dropouts.  Degree completion matters.  Intriguingly, Scott-Clayon’s data suggests that certificate completion on its own really doesn’t.)  

If you only look at default rates of borrowers, you’d think -- incorrectly -- that less expensive colleges are less affordable.  Kudos to Scott-Clayton for digging deeper.  And I’m nerdy enough to not mind admitting that now I know what I’ll be reading this weekend.

--

“Practice makes progress!” -- Colleague’s three-year-old daughter.

That’s so good, I want to put it on t-shirts.  Practice makes progress.  Yes, it does.

One of These Things is Not Like the Others

If I had my wish, I wouldn’t let anyone talk about community college policy or spending unless they got this quiz right.  

One of these things is not like the others.  Which one?

1. Math
2. Psychology
3. Nursing
4. Philosophy

The correct answer, of course, is c.  Math, Psychology, and Philosophy are profit centers.  We take a major economic loss on Nursing.

Let’s try another one.

One of these things is not like the others.  Which one?

1. Biology
2. Automotive Tech
3. Respiratory Therapy
4. Radiological Technician

The correct answer is a.  Biology is the only profit center in the group. We take losses on the other three.

I bring these up to make a point that’s often missed in discussions of community colleges and workforce development.  Broadly speaking, traditional academic disciplines are profit centers, and vocational programs take economic losses.  

In other words, if you want community colleges to focus less on general education and transfer, and more on vocational fields, you’ll need to pony up a lot more money.

A LOT more.  And not just in the form of one-off grants, either.  Recurring, baseline, operating funding.  

Which makes sense, if you think about it.  A history class -- history is a profit center -- can be taught in a classroom without any specialized equipment.  It can run at 30 students per section.  It doesn’t require clinical placements.  We aren’t competing with private industry for historians.

Nursing, to take an easy case, requires plenty of specialized equipment.  (Brookdale has multiple labs that simulate hospital settings.  It doesn’t have any that, say, recreate Independence Hall, as cool as that would be.) Clinical sections have to be small.  We’re competing with the largest industry in the country for employees.  And as the technology keeps advancing, we have to keep up with it, even though it leads to no “productivity” gains for us.  It’s pure cost.

Much of the political discourse around community colleges juxtaposes “elite ivory tower classes” with “practical job training,” with the none-too-subtle implication that we’d be better off focusing entirely on the latter.  Leaving aside the basic fact that many well-paying jobs require bachelor’s degrees of the sort that transfer-oriented programs feed -- “transfer IS workforce” is my version of Kay McClenney’s “students don’t do optional” -- traditional academic programs are also much cheaper to run.  If we minimize transfer-oriented programs to beef up the vocational ones, we’re going to need dramatic, sustained increases in funding.  

Right now, many colleges handle that through a combination of cross-subsidies and program fees.  That works as long as you have a critical mass of profit centers.  But if you shift too heavily away from them, and don’t have a massive buffer of subsidy to pay for it, you’ll go under.

So, my modest proposal for anyone discussing higher education funding: be honest about it.  If you want community colleges to become more focused on vocational training, are you willing to dedicate the funding to make it happen?  

If not, well, we have some poli sci classes you might want to take first.  They’re profitable.

 

Idea of the Week

It’s still early, but today I heard what will be the Idea of the Week.  As with so many, I overheard it when two students were talking to each other in the hallway.

Student 1: I picked up a lot of hours over vacation.  Feels good not to be broke!

Student 2: Yeah.  We’re just lucky they don’t charge tuition in Bitcoin.

(pause)

Eureka!  “Blockchain Community College.”  It’s only a matter of time...

A Different Kind of Difficult Conversation: A Challenge to the AACC

I read IHE’s account of the recent meeting of the Council of Independent Colleges with a bit of jealousy.  The CIC, which represents private colleges, has started sponsoring discussions of realistic ways to deal with persistent financial issues.

For community and state colleges, it would be much harder to have that conversation.  

Some of the issues are the same: denial, blame-dodging, fear of damage to reputation.  There’s also a bit of what lawyers call the “principal/agent” problem, in which the interests of managers and the interests of the institutions they manage can diverge.  For example, it may be the right thing to do for a given college to close a location, but nobody wants to be the president who closed a location.

But we have constraints that the independent colleges mostly don’t.

Internally, for instance, many public colleges (including my own) are unionized. Collective bargaining agreements, and sometimes state laws, can greatly narrow the strike zone for any prospective downsizing.  When you have to do layoffs by seniority, and your salaries are mostly determined by seniority, the most expensive employees are the most protected.  That makes the math harder.

Externally, public colleges have to answer to governments that provide appropriations.  That may be a county or counties, a state, or a district, but in any event it means answering to people who have other priorities.  Private colleges have Boards that are responsible for only them.  We have Boards, but we also have legislators and local politicians to answer to, and they have their own agendas. (They’re often acutely conscious of how a given decision might look if it were portrayed negatively in the press, for obvious reasons.) On campus, we might be focused on, say, twenty years of flat funding from the state, but the elected leaders aren’t focused on that; they’re focused on the next campaign.

In a political setting, it’s much easier to water down every bottle in the cabinet than to throw out a bottle or two.  That’s because voters often have limited attention, so they’ll only notice if bottles get thrown out.  Closing a location alarms voters in a way that, say, increasing the adjunct percentage yet again doesn’t.

In states with both local and state funding, the issues are compounded by rivalries and, sometimes, party splits.  And America being America, geographic boundaries also often coincide with clustering by race and class, which can make conflict even stickier.

I’d love to see the AACC host some serious conversations about what colleges faced with declining demographics, strong unions, and flat funding can do. What has worked elsewhere?  What are the seemingly low-hanging fruit that actually turn out to be traps?  What looks harder than it actually is?

When we hear about “difficult campus conversations,” they’re usually about race, class, or gender.  Those matter quite a bit -- good luck explaining contemporary American politics without looking at race, for instance -- but at least we’re starting to make headway on them.  We haven’t started to make much headway on questions of institutional resilience.  We should.

AACC, the gauntlet is thrown.  Your move.

Thoughts on “The 21st Century Academic”

“No matter how much faculty members cling to “the good old days,” there is no going back.  We might as well embrace the possibility of creating a new kind of academic.” - Manya Whitaker, “The 21st-Century Academic”

When Ford suffered sales declines in the 70’s, it wasn’t because its workforce forgot how to make cars.  It was because it was allocating resources according to the rules of the previous decade.  The workers wound up paying for the mistake, but for the most part, they weren’t the ones who made the wrong call.

Substitute whichever company you want.  Kodak didn’t go bankrupt because it forgot how to make film.  The workers were as good as they ever were; the problem was that the world changed and the company failed to change along with it.

In the context of companies, most of us have no problem seeing that.  But make a similar point about academia, or politics, and the same argument suddenly comes off as abstract.  

Manya Whitaker makes some terrific points on her piece about the 21st century academic.  She’s right about many of the changes in higher education over the last couple of decades, and I give extra points for self-awareness when she notes that her position makes her one of the lucky few. (Self-awareness is at a premium these days.) She notes the increasingly unapologetic vocationalism among current students, which I would attribute largely to increased income polarization.  She also captures the increasing premium on courses of study outside of the traditional academic ones, and the effects of that shift on morale among faculty in traditional academic fields.  All of that is spot-on.

But the piece ends with a call for a new kind of academic, independent of any sort of academy.  In other words, it misses the company behind the workers.

Most of us - myself absolutely included - are not independently wealthy.  We can’t afford to be free-range academics, teaching the occasional course and mostly just pursuing truth on our own. Just as with our vocation-minded students, most of us have to make a living. In other words, before talking about 21st century academics, we should talk about a 21st century academy.  

We can’t lose sight of the institution.

Whitaker is writing from Colorado College, a four-year liberal arts institution.  I’m writing from a community college, where the issues are somewhat different.  We’ve always had vocational programs; the concept of a “comprehensive” community college refers to one that encompasses both vocational and transfer programs. The entire sector has moved in the direction of free-range faculty -- we call them “adjuncts” -- but the limits of that are becoming clear.  

Whitaker is right that wishing for the good old days won’t bring them back. But I’d rather focus on the institution than the people in it.  How should institutions change?

That would involve looking at funding mechanisms, cost structures, community alliances, policy changes, academic calendars, and various other structural issues. In my slightly more perfect world, faculty would be actively engaged in understanding all of those, the better to transform them. And faculty and administrators could present a united front in pressing for the rules and resources we’d need to make it work. In other words, we’d make the transformation of the institution -- and its business model -- our shared concern.  That means folks coming out of silos a bit, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Faculty do their best work in an institutional context, even at the cost of a few meetings.  Ignore the context, and we’re left arguing over who’s better at building Pintos.  

Friday Fragments

Calling my colleagues in financial aid offices: the AACC is putting together numbers on student withdrawal dates and the financial impact on colleges if a really regressive version of “risk-sharing” passes.  The short version is, community colleges can’t deny anyone admission, and can’t deny them financial aid, but can be punished financially if students on aid don’t complete a semester.  

In other words, it’s both ridiculous and toxic.

If you’re in financial aid, please check the link and get some numbers in.  Thanks.

--

We got hit pretty hard by the “bomb cyclone,” though not as hard as Boston.  It was the first snow day of the year, which brought with it the odd dynamics that snow days bring.

From an administrative perspective, there’s really no winning with snow days.  Fail to call one when the weather is nasty, and you’ve endangered people. Call one when it’s a false alarm, and you lose instructional time unnecessarily.  Call one when some areas are impassable, and people in drivable areas wonder what the hell you’re doing.  

Delayed openings are even trickier.  If the delay is enough to be meaningful, it will cut into the middle of something.  Even if you time it to coincide with the start of a class period -- which I recommend -- there are other classes overlapping that time.  Delayed openings can also be rough on parents when their kids’ schools are closed for the day.  

Still, given how much harder this storm hit than it was supposed to, I was grateful to be able to hunker down.  By late morning the governor declared a state of emergency, so that pretty much settled the question.  

Text messaging has taken some of the sport out of the old “wait for your school’s name in the alphabet on the radio” game, but that’s okay.  I’d rather know early.

--

I pay much less attention to football than I used to, and it was never much, but I have to admit that it did my heart good to see the Buffalo Bills make the playoffs.

Growing up in Western New York, hundreds of miles from New York City, the Bills were the only major team in the region.  Back then, you had a choice: you were a Bills fan, or you weren’t from around here.  

They had their tragicomic series of Super Bowl losses in the early 90’s, but until this year, the millennium has been a disaster for them.  (Bills fans argue, rightly, that the correct way to interpret “they lost four Super Bowls in a row” is “they were in four Super Bowls in a row.”  No other team has ever done that.)  They’ve waited a long time.  Besides, in the year of the bomb cyclone, we should have a cold-and-snow team in there, and the Packers didn’t have it in them.  

Weird trivia: I’ve literally never seen a black placekicker in the NFL.  There isn’t a single one in the league, and I don’t remember even hearing of one.  Placekicking is about as pure a task as there is; either you made the kick or you didn’t.  It’s strange.  If anyone has an intelligent theory on this one, I’d love to hear it.

Reflections on “Weapons of Math Destruction”

Part of the joy of the winter break is that it’s a chance to read something longer than twenty pages.  I spent part of it reading Cathy O’Neil’s “Weapons of Math Destruction,” which is well worth reading if you haven’t already.

O’Neil was a quantitative analyst in the banking world for a while, until she grew disenchanted at the social uses to which her expertise was being put.  She saw sophisticated math being used to make the rich richer at the expense of everyone else.  This book is a form of penance, showing the rest of us cases in which Big Data gets used as a form of power.

(Readers of a certain age will hear echoes of Foucault in there, but don’t worry.  O’Neil’s writing style is far more lucid.)

The book is a series of chapter-length examples, but if you stick with it, you start to pick up the pattern.  O”Neil distinguishes directly-valid data from proxy data, warning us against the latter.  

Baseball offers easy examples of directly-valid data.  A runner reaches base, or does not.  A given swing results in a home run, or it does not.  Somebody wins each game.  That sort of data can lead to valuable insights, because it’s about what it says it’s about.  Sabermetrics, the sort of statistical analysis pioneered by Bill James and immortalized in Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, tends to work because it’s (mostly) based on solid data.  It’s far from perfect, but it can help.  For example, if a team knows that a particular hitter on another team always hits the ball to the right side of the field, it can shift its fielders to the right when he’s up.  

Baseball also offers an example of self-correcting experiments.  If a given team misreads the numbers, or takes a flyer on something wacky and fails badly, the numbers adjust accordingly.  For instance, Moneyball could be read two ways.  A literal reading would tell you that on-base percentage is the key stat for batters.  A fuller reading would tell you that at any given moment, some traits are overvalued in the market and some undervalued, and the first one to find an undervalued one is in a position to win.  OBP was simply an example.  When OBP became the new orthodoxy, it lost much of its competitive usefulness.

Proxy data is where things get squishy.  Proxy data, as she uses the term, refers to data that correlates with the desired trait, but isn’t the trait itself.  She gives the example of insurance companies basing rates on the zip codes where different customers live, on the theory that birds of a feather flock together.  And it’s true that you can find geographic patterns in the data.  But the patterns don’t tell you about any particular person’s risk, and they’re often reflections of other factors -- race and income, notably -- that have the effect of placing extra burdens on the people with the fewest resources.  If living in a low-income neighborhood raises your insurance rates, well, who tends to live in low-income neighborhoods?  

O’Neil points out the irony that relatively strict regulation of the factors that can go into calculating credit scores has had the effect of encouraging the wanton generation of unregulated, rogue scores that are often far more pernicious.  What the market wants, the market finds a way to get.

At times, she falls into the trap of calling for transparency as a solution.  I get the temptation, but it falls short of a solution in a couple of ways (both of which she actually identifies, in passing).  The first is familiar to any customer of a credit card: if you bury something in twenty pages of two-point font legalese, you may have “disclosed” it for compliance purposes, but it’s effectively still hidden for all practical purposes.  That has the effect of neutering much regulation.  The second is familiar to folks who’ve navigated the admissions game to competitive universities.  If you disclose the proxies, people can beef up the proxy scores at the expense of what the proxy is supposed to represent.  This is the kid who joins six clubs and two teams without really getting beneath the surface of any of them.  Alternately, in the context of performance-based funding for colleges, this is the college that tweaks its policies so that any students who place into remedial classes don’t count in their graduation rate.  

Ultimately, there’s no neutral technical fix, because it’s basically a political problem.  If Big Data is about power, and the incentives are there to abuse it, then we can expect the powerful to abuse it for their own gain.  It would be surprising if they didn’t.  And appeals to conscience only work among people who have consciences.  We’ve seen that some very powerful people don’t.  

Higher education certainly isn’t immune to what she calls WMD’s.  Performance-based funding is an easy example: the states that have adopted it haven’t seen meaningful gains.  Instead, they’ve seen a fair amount of system-gaming as institutions do what they have to do to survive.

The ideal solution would be to find the stat that comes closest to reflecting the point of higher education, in much the same way that on-base percentage did in baseball.  But to do that, we’d have to define the point of higher education.  A baseball game has a clear winner, but a higher education system may not.  That’s where politics come roaring back.  O’Neil flags some hazards nicely, but ultimately you don’t solve a political problem with better math.  You solve it with politics.  Get the politics right, and the math will follow.

Local Control, National Economy

What’s the proper role for a locally-funded and locally-controlled community college when the better jobs aren’t local?

I still haven’t seen a serious treatment of that question.  But I’m starting to see people put together the elements of the question, which is something.  

As these two pieces by Emily Badger and Paul Krugman outline, the spatial distribution of wealth in the United States got increasingly flat until about 1980.  Since then, wealth has gravitated to a few major metros, and away from smaller places inland.  (I’m referring here to the lower 48; Hawaii and Alaska are geographically distinct enough to merit their own analyses.)  But most community colleges were established before 1980, and their geographic distribution largely reflects the economy of the postwar period.  

If we see community colleges as local branches of a sort of national educational program, the solution is relatively clear: they should prepare some fraction of students to move to the metros, whether in transfer or in jobs.  

But that’s not what they are.  Yes, there are federal and state training grants, and yes, the lion’s share of student financial aid is federal.  But control -- by which I mean, Boards of Trustees -- is decidedly local.  

In an economy in which opportunity was more evenly distributed geographically, local control made a lot of sense.  Most places had significant opportunity most of the time, so there wasn’t a major tension between educating students and meeting local needs.  Doing the first meant doing the second.

But that’s becoming much less true.  The Chronicle’s piece this week about Kennett, Missouri makes the point directly: the kids who go to college rarely return.  Moving up requires moving out.  “Local boy makes good” requires the boy to stop being local.  

Which doesn’t always sit well with local politicians or philanthropists.  Politicians represent districts, rather than people -- increasingly true in the age of rampant voter suppression -- and there’s little constituency for sending talented young people away from a district.

(New Jersey stands as an accidental rebuttal to that.  It spends a lot on its K-12 system, with excellent results, but then exports well-prepared students to colleges in other states.  Voters know it’s happening, but don’t vote to change it.  But New Jersey is an exception in many ways…)

Our national discourse around community colleges and workforce development is stuck at the “partner with local employers” level.  That’s an excellent idea when the numbers work.  But it presumes enough high-paying local employers who want to hire at the “middle-skill” level.  In small cities and large towns that have lost major industry over the years, that may not always be true.  When that happens, well, then what?

Moving the scope of control upwards would seem an obvious answer, but local elites -- especially those nervous about their status -- tend not to cede power willingly.  If anything, they often dig in.  And our national political dynamic is towards greater distrust between blue metros and smaller red cities, which would tend to suggest political devolution.

But in the context of a national, or even global, economy, political devolution amounts to unilateral disarmament.  (That may be one of the nerdiest sentences I’ve ever written.)  As Boston pulls away economically from, say, Springfield, I don’t imagine the voters of Springfield being terribly happy to cede more power to Boston, even if there’s a rational policy case to make for doing exactly that.  Young people growing up in Springfield might be attracted to the opportunities in Boston, but will be hard-pressed to find ways to access them.

I’m a fan of partnering with local employers, but we need to stop pretending that the questions stop there.  They don’t.  The increasingly urgent question is how to balance a dispersed system founded on local control with an economy that isn’t.  That will take more than partnerships.

Changes, and Not

We went to a party hosted by some family friends for New Year’s.  Most of the adults were our age, give or take, and most of the kids were around our kids’ ages.  At one point, the hosting Dad started to do karaoke.

He had to put on his reading glasses to see the lyrics.

We laughed, mostly out of recognition.  Some changes sneak up on you like that.  

At the exact same time, in the nearby town of Long Branch, a sixteen-year-old boy killed his parents, Linda and Steven Kologi; his sister, Brittany Kologi; and a family friend, Mary Schultz, with a semiautomatic rifle kept in the house.  

Linda, Steven, and Brittany were Brookdale alums.

Stories of mass killings used to be so shocking that they’d dominate the news for days at a time.  Now they’re so frequent that if it isn’t local, they sort of blend into each other.  Reading stories from a few months ago, in which locations are given as shorthand, I have to remind myself which mass killing was which.  

That change snuck up on me, too.  It’s worth remembering that things were not always this way.

The community of Long Branch, and of Brookdale, will hurt from this crime for a long time.  The country will move on quickly to the next one, as if semiautomatic weapons among civilians were an inevitable fact of nature about which nothing could be done.

I’m old enough to remember when mass killings of teenagers only happened through car accidents.  One happened in my senior year of high school: four students were killed while driving to some sort of sports meet.  I knew two of them a little, and the others by association.  We weren’t close, but the shock was still palpable.  The next day in school, the hallways were absolutely quiet.  The teachers showed human sides they didn’t usually show.  Most of us didn’t speak much, because we had no idea what to say.  My history teacher just threw in the towel, announcing that there wasn’t any point to teaching that day.  Maybe in confirmation of his point, I remember that moment far more clearly than anything he ever actually taught.  

The gym coach, who was always confident and often blustery, looked like a shell of himself.  He was ashen.  Someone later told me he was drunk.  I still remember the look on his face as he walked, silently and slowly, out of class, leaving us sitting on the bleachers.

The school acknowledged the loss -- it had to -- but I don’t remember it going much beyond that.  Car accidents can be devastating, but they’re accidents.  The sense of loss isn’t compounded with a sense of betrayal or rage that such things are allowed to happen.  In this case, it will be.  It should be.

My kids don’t remember a time when mass killings were unusual.  The Boy had his first lockdown drill in kindergarten.  They learned how to stay away from windows and hide in corners.  He was five.  He accepted it as normal.  When the Newtown killings happened, The Girl was eight.  The news photos of the kids forming a human chain in the parking lot hit me hard, because she was almost the same age they were.

But it isn’t normal.  This isn’t middle-aged vision softening, an annoying fact of life to which we just have to adapt.  It’s a choice.  It’s a set of choices, ratified over and over again in law and culture.  It’s a set of choices that we could choose to make differently.

I don’t usually do New Year posts, but this deserves one.  My wish for the new year for the people of Long Branch, and of Brookdale, is for peace and healing.  My wish for the new year for the country is memory of what happened, knowledge that it doesn’t have to happen, and resolve to stop it.  

Age can be frustrating, but it brings the gift of historical memory.  I remember when mass killings weren’t normal.  They don’t have to be.  They shouldn’t be.  This year, I resolve to stop pretending that it’s okay or inevitable.  It isn’t and it isn’t, and it never will be.

Free College, Philanthropy, and a Program Note

Every so often I hear a question that makes me wonder why I wasn’t wondering about it already.

We’re getting a new governor shortly.  He ran on “free community college,” though it’s still unclear what that will mean in practice.

In a conversation on campus this week, someone mentioned concern about a possible impact on philanthropy.  If word of free community college spreads, will donors think that issues of access have been solved and redirect their giving elsewhere?

As Sara Goldrick-Rab has pointed out repeatedly, tuition is only one cost.  Taking it off the table -- which I support -- still leaves costs for books, transportation, daily life, and the opportunity cost of paid work not worked to make time for classes.  But potential donors may or may not be aware of that, or appreciate what it means.

So I’ll put out a call to my wise and worldly readers who live in places with well-publicized “free community college” programs.  Have you seen an impact on philanthropy one way or the other?

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Along those lines, it’s worth remembering -- as this piece reminds us -- that free community college is a bipartisan issue.

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Thanks to President Patricia McGuire of Trinity Wesleyan University for a shout-out in her keynote speech at NEASC this month.  Her speech is a welcome call to action to her counterparts in the four-year sector to take community colleges more seriously as educational partners.  

In a speech that references American Nazis, it’s nice to be named as being on the other side...

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I’ll be taking a blogging break for the holidays, returning in the first week of January.  Best wishes to my wise and worldly readers for peace, happiness, and a 2018 much more worthy of you than 2017 was...

Talent Scouting

About a year ago I was at a workshop in which the participants were asked to write down their managerial superpowers.  I wrote “talent scout.”  I stand by it.

Talent scouting in academia is different than in sports or show business.  In sports and show business, you’re seeing people play or act, just as you’re scouting them to do.  You may be looking for clues as to how they’ll perform at a higher level of competition, but the basic tasks are the same.  A high school baseball player does the same tasks as a college or professional one.  And usually, the prospective players or actors go out of their way to get noticed.

Talent scouting here is different.  

In teaching, sometimes it means delivering the tap on the shoulder to let a particular student know that she’s better than she thinks.  Clint Smith’s tweet yesterday reminded me of that.  I’ve had a few students over the years who were much more thoughtful than they gave themselves credit for; once I gave them explicit permission to be smart, they took off.  Teachers have that power, at least sometimes.  

Using that power well means distinguishing between the perfection of a flawless task and the errors of growth.  Flawless execution of set tasks is well and good.  But the ambitious ones who sometimes stretch a little farther than their reach -- the rookies who gets thrown out trying to stretch a single into a double, to extend the baseball metaphor -- are often the ones who benefit from being noticed.  Errors of sloppiness or apathy are fundamentally different from errors of growth; the best teachers know immediately which are which.  The catch is that sometimes the students themselves don’t know the difference, and can undermine themselves by focusing on their mistakes. When you single out the one who’s stretching and offer constructive praise, the results can be amazing.

In administration, talent scouting often means finding latent abilities in people other than the ones they were hired for, and are paid to perform.  That’s very different from the baseball scout who watches the high school pitcher.  It’s closer to figuring out which player would make the best manager.  The skills overlap to some degree, but they’re distinct enough that the best at one role are not necessarily the best at the other.

When I moved from full-time teaching to full-time administration, I used to describe the change as being like switching from sprinting to distance running.  They’re both demanding, but in different ways.  The best sprinter may or may not be the best distance runner, and vice versa.

I’ve known some absolutely amazing classroom performers who leveraged their considerable charisma and flair for the dramatic to deliver lectures for which they could have sold tickets.  When they were on stage, they commanded it.  In the right setting, with the right boundaries, that can be wildly effective.  But that doesn’t really translate to administration, where the tasks are often more about collaboration, diplomacy, and patience than about owning the room.  

In discussing a controversial campus proposal, for example, I’m typically more impressed by a really good question than by a fire-breathing tirade.  The person who can come up with the third, better option to a dilemma catches my eye.  And the one who can see past what’s said to get at what’s meant -- even if the speaker isn’t consciously aware of it -- and build a solution on that, is a star.  

The limited hiring of the last few years has been frustrating, not least because it has it reduced the relevance of talent scouting.  But it never stops mattering.  Sometimes education is about showing someone a talent he didn’t know he had, whether it’s a professor with a project or a third grader with a poem.  

Thank you, Clint Smith, for a timely reminder.