Friday Fragments

This Marketplace report brought me up short. 

It’s about Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, endorsing gay marriage in New York.  The report notes that CEO’s of major banks aren’t generally known for taking positions on potentially divisive social issues.  

What caught my ear was the pair of lines toward the end.  One interviewee notes that the kind of people who would object to gay marriage aren’t the kind of people who have enough money for him to worry about.  The second line, by the reporter, noted with a smirk that Blankfein doesn’t have to worry about how his views will “play in Peoria.”

I don’t have an issue with the substance of the report, exactly.  It’s true that we don’t usually expect to hear CEO’s take positions like that, and as it happens, I agree with the position he took.  But the smug and un-self-conscious classism in which the report was couched was bracing and, frankly, disturbing.  It plays into the stereotype of limousine liberalism, and it suggests that people who don’t matter -- the folks Lloyd Blankfein doesn’t have to worry about  -- amount to punchlines.

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The Boy and The Wife sometimes watch The Middle, a sitcom about a family in the Midwest.  This week’s episode featured, among other things, a brief discussion of French kissing, along with a definition.

TB recoiled, as if from a bad smell, and asked TW “is that real?”

Sometimes you forget what the world looks like when you’re ten.

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Like many, my college uses Google sites to post documents for internal campus use.  (Examples would include meeting agendas, minutes, motions, etc.)  

Having done that for over a year now, I’m starting to think that posting a document to Google sites is sort of like putting a vegetable in the crisper.  In theory, it makes perfect sense.  But in practice, it’s where things go to be forgotten.

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Of course, Google docs can sometimes be relatively public.  The New Faculty Majority is crowdsourcing a compilation of profiles of adjunct pay and working conditions using a Google doc -- the link is here.  A quick glance showed that a college I know has its rate for a 3 credit course understated by about 40 percent, so I strongly encourage the NFM to do some serious fact-checking.  

With the caveat that some of what’s there is unreliable, though, I like the idea.  If nothing else, it may dissuade potential graduate students from throwing themselves into the sausage grinder.  That would be a genuine public service.

Fixing the Fatalism

Fun trivia fact: this is a Presidential election year.  But you wouldn’t know it from walking around campus.  

Have you seen any meaningful student political activity on your campus so far this year?  I haven’t.  (Admittedly, I don’t work in Iowa.)  

I don’t think it’s because of general contentment.  The recession is still very much in force from the perspective of people trying to get their first real job, and students have felt the effects -- I hope not too strongly, but still -- of increased tuition/fees and certain budget cuts.  Half of the students on campus get some level of Pell grant, so we’re not talking about the anesthetized affluent here.

And it doesn’t seem to be because they’re more caught up in state and/or local politics, either.  

I’ve heard talk at the national level of encouraging more student civic engagement, though most of that has been concentrated in the four-year liberal arts college sector, rather than community colleges.  And even there, the talk I’ve heard has struck me as sort of tangential to what needs to be done.  It’s fine as far as it goes, but there’s a more basic issue to address first.

For lack of a better term, I’ll call it “standing.”  It’s a sense that the larger social and political world is theirs to address.  Many of them simply don’t have it.

The faculty have seen the same thing.  One professor who teaches some wonderfully thoughtful approaches to politics and the economy reports that her students are willing to engage when she discusses problems with them, but turn fatalistic when she turns to possible solutions.  They’ve developed a sort of shrug.  

To me, that’s a much larger issue than the usual statistics about the percentage of students who know, say, how many justices are on the Supreme Court.  Yes, they should know that, but they’ll learn it when they want to know it.  The trick is getting them to want to know it.  When they have a context in which it matters, they’ll get the facts.

I just don’t know how to break through the fatalism.  Filling in the facts without fixing the fatalism (say that five times fast!) doesn’t seem likely to achieve much.  And color me skeptical that encouraging volunteerism -- as worthy as that is on its own terms -- is the same thing.  Volunteerism can achieve wonderful things, but it doesn’t leverage state power.  And if students here don’t leverage state power, others will.

In this light, the trend to try to reduce community colleges to workforce training centers strikes me as potentially undemocratic.  Training is valuable, and there are students for whom it’s a great choice.  But we also need time and space to convey to students a sense of belonging when the big social and political questions come up.  If they’re going to be citizens, they need to feel welcome in the role.

Initial forays into politics are often callow and retrospectively embarrassing.  That’s okay; it’s a stage in the maturation process.  Better to make those rookie mistakes in a relatively safe setting.  

That’s especially true when you consider the student body that community colleges tend to attract.  Bluntly, our population is much more low-income and multiracial than the student body at most four-year colleges, and particularly when compared to the elite colleges that tend to get the spotlight in national initiatives for civic engagement.  If the kids from elite backgrounds acquire a sense of political efficacy, and the kids who need Pell grants don’t, it’s easy to project future political consequences.  If we’re serious about civic engagement, this is where we need to start.  The kids at Swarthmore will be fine; the kids at the Community College of Philadelphia, I’m not entirely sure.

“You’re Assuming We Thought it Through”

A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to discuss a proposed and relatively dramatic policy change with someone fairly high in state government.  I objected to the change with some vigor, and outlined several objections that I thought added up to a compelling case.  She listened politely, and then gave an answer for which I hadn’t prepared.

“You’re assuming we thought it through.”

Well, yes.  At least I would have hoped so.  

She explained, politely, the chain of reasoning behind the proposal.  So as not to betray any confidences, I’ll illustrate by metaphor:

- Broken hearts are painful.

- Pain is bad.

- Love causes broken hearts.

- Therefore, we should ban love!

Each of the three suppositions is largely true, taken on its own terms.  But assuming that they tell you everything you need to know leads to a badly misguided conclusion.

It wasn’t the first time I’ve been brought up short by the mediocrity of the men behind the curtain, but it was particularly striking.

Sometimes realizations like that can be empowering.  I recall my pleasant shock when I sat in on a freshman English class at Snooty Liberal Arts College as a high school student.  I was trying to decide whether I could hack it there.  When I saw the caliber of discussion, I had that shock of realizing that those folks were no smarter than I was.  That realization emboldened me to apply.

The same thing happened while I was dissertating.  At one point, lost among the weeds, I stole away to the library to look at the dissertation of someone who had finished a few years prior, and of whom the faculty still spoke in reverential terms.  I expected to be floored.  Instead, all I saw was a reasonably competent piece.  I needed that.  Discovering that even a “good” dissertation was utterly recognizable as the product of a regular human being demystified it, and helped me get over the fear of failure.

But this was different.  

I had expected to confront differing agendas and priorities, and had prepared accordingly.  It wouldn’t have shocked me to hear that some other priority was outranking my own, or that a good idea fell victim to legislative horse-trading.  Even a straight-up ideological objection wouldn’t have been entirely surprising.  But I wasn’t prepared for “gee, we didn’t really give it much thought.”

(Readers of a certain age will recall the presidential debate in which anti-abortion candidate George H.W. Bush was asked about the criminal penalties he advocated for women who had abortions.  The moderator pointed out that if you hold that abortion is murder, then it follows logically that women who have abortions should be tried as murderers.  Bush responded that he hadn’t given it much thought.  I nearly fell off my chair.)

One of the shockers of adulthood is realizing that most people are pretty much making it up as they go along.  It’s empowering in the sense that they’re no smarter than you are.  It’s dispiriting when you realize that great harm can be done entirely inadvertently, by people who mean well, just because they don’t get it.  And it’s humbling when you realize that somewhere, someone is probably saying the exact same thing about you.

Resilience

I love this story.  

Apparently, a scholar of student success, Shaun Harper, has decided to turn around the usual methods of studying African-American men in college.  Instead of the typical questions - what obstacles do they face, what prevents success, etc. -- he decided to focus on African-American men who have succeeded in college and to try to determine what worked for them.  In other words, he’s focusing on resilience, rather than failure, as the subject needing explanation.

His subject is African-American men, but his method strikes me as transferable to all sorts of questions.  It’s comparative -- already a considerable advance over much of what it out there -- and it assumes that the elements of success are identifiable and transferable.

His findings thus far are a little disappointing: according to the men who succeeded, most of what they needed happened before they ever got to college.  By the time they got there, the die was largely cast.  To the extent that’s true, of course, colleges can only hope to have marginal and indirect effects.  The exceptions to that are finances -- folks on scholarships reported, unsurprisingly, that the money helped -- and same-race peer mentoring, which suggests that there’s something like critical mass.  Beyond that, existing measures didn’t seem to help much, which I have to admit finding a little dispiriting.  Still, it would be a mistake to take the results as definitive.

The findings are subject to the limits of the method; since they rely on self-reporting, they’re subject to the blind spots inherent in self-reporting.  For example, empirical studies have shown that streamlining developmental sequences help improve student completion rates, but I’d be shocked to hear students cite that.  They took the curriculum that was in effect at the time.  That doesn’t mean the effect wasn’t there; it just means it was invisible from their vantage point.  They didn’t have a point of comparison.

(In my student days, I used to see flyers on walls -- yes, kids, that’s how things were done before facebook -- in which bands would try to recruit new members.  Typically the bands would list their “influences,” in hopes of attracting new members who were compatible with their sound.  It always struck me as a presumptuous term.  How the hell do I know who my influences are?  As a writer, I can list other writers whose work I like and admire, but can I really claim them as influences?  Other than the occasional tip o’the cap, I just write the way I write.  At most, I could claim to write like my Mom talks.  Beyond that, I just don’t know myself that well, and I doubt that most people do.)

All of that said, I really like the idea of studying success to see what can be generalized.  In fact, the method strikes me as transferable to other questions.  (The key is finding the folks who didn’t succeed and getting their candid participation.)  The feedback certainly can’t be definitive, but it can be useful. The catch would be in finding the comparison group, and testing for the right blind spots.

With the right grains of salt, though, this is a wonderful lens to use.  Study what you want more of.  It seems so obvious in retrospect...

Learn Now, Pay Later

You know how a song can get stuck in your head, and you can’t get it out?  That’s where I am with the idea floated in California to have students learn now and pay later.

As I understand it, the idea is that students will be advanced the cost of tuition, fees, room, living expenses, and books.  In return, the students will be “taxed” five percent of their post-graduation income for twenty years.  It’s being sold as a win-win for students and universities.  The students will benefit because the tax is based on income, so if you graduate into a recession, you aren’t saddled with high fixed payments.  The university benefits because it essentially declares independence from the legislature, which has a history of fickle support.

I like the spirit of the idea.  It’s innovative, certainly, and it addresses some real issues.  But I don’t buy it, at least in its present form.

First, the obvious: if the students don’t pay now, but the faculty and staff don’t want to wait twenty years to get paid, what bridges the gap?  In the absence of tuition income, how, exactly, does the university meet its payroll and other expenses?  If the answer is “other financial aid,” then I’m not sure how this amounts to declaring independence from the whims of the legislature.  

And that assumes that everyone gets full aid, which simply isn’t true.  Many students only get partial aid -- with the rest coming from the student and/or the student’s family -- and some pay their own way entirely.  In those cases, the temporal gap between the service and the tax has to be filled by something.  I just don’t expect that asking the faculty to wait twenty -- actually twenty-four -- years for their money will fly.

Second, shifting the entire cost to students lets the state off the hook.  That would be fine, at least in theory, if that meant that the university could govern itself as a private institution.  But I have no illusions of that.  As any exhausted administrator can tell you, the past few decades have involved a pincer movement of reduced funding with increased unfunded mandates.  Just because the state is off the hook for funding -- although I honestly don’t see how that would work, but just for the sake of the argument -- doesn’t mean that it’ll stop trying to get something for nothing.

Third, what’s to stop the percentage of the tax from changing?  Tuition increases that hit right now at least generate some painful awareness.  But telling an eighteen year old that she’ll pay more when she’s thirty-five is unlikely to generate meaningful cost discipline.  If anything, the history of consumer credit in America suggests that people spend more when the moment of payment is separated temporally from the purchase decision.  No payments for 90 days!

Fourth, new graduates’ salaries are notoriously subject to the whims of the economic cycle.  Replacing (purported) independence from the whims of the legislature with severe dependence on the whims of the business cycle doesn’t promise much stability.  At least when there’s a significant subvention by the legislature, it’s possible to spend counter-cyclically.  But good luck with long-term financial commitments -- like, say, tenure -- in years when new grads’ underemployment rates are unusually high.  

Fifth, there’s non-compliance.  How would this work with international students?  What about dropouts?  Transfers?  Scholarship recipients?  (Why apply for scholarships if you still have to pay the same tax rate eventually anyway?)  You’d have to build in enough slack to account for unemployment, incarceration, untimely deaths, graduate school, military service, illness, and folks who drop out of the labor force to have kids.  TW is a stay-at-home Mom.  If she were charged five percent of her income, would that mean she wouldn’t be charged at all?  Or am I suddenly on the hook?

And that’s before we get into the shenanigans that people already pull to minimize their taxable income.  The people who make a lot of money -- cough Mitt Romney cough -- are alarmingly good at that.  Charging five percent of “income” means both defining and verifying “income.”  The administrative requirements for this would make the FAFSA look like child’s play.

Finally, there’s the sheer heterogeneity of students.  What about those who live off-campus?  Who attend part-time?  Who drop out?  Who change majors and stick around longer than four years?  

Like so many policy ideas from high achievers, it assumes that everyone is a high achiever.  If everyone started at 18 and graduated at 22, then went straight to well-paying work and stayed there, it could almost start to make a lick of sense.  But here on Earth, it’s a non-starter.  A fascinating, well-intended non-starter, but a non-starter.

Friday Fragments

Thank you to everyone who answered the call for suggestions earlier this week about running college classes in high schools.  The point about class interruptions for announcements, proms, and such was a good one, and can be included in the words of warning we give the professors.  

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The Boy is doing CYO basketball again this year.  At last Sunday’s game, the halftime score was 4 to 2.  

Call it a defensive battle.  Or maybe pretend it’s baseball...

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Folks who think that administration is easy haven’t had to handle personnel issues.  The least appealing part of administration is being confronted with things about people that you never wanted to know.  And that’s all I’ll say about that.

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I’m done with Toshiba.  In the last two years, the count is two catastrophic hard drive failures and a cracked screen.  In the words of Roberto Duran, no mas.  I try not to let anecdotes trump statistics, but at a certain point, it becomes an issue of self-respect.  Toshiba may have a good reputation generally, but I’m done.

Nobody really makes netbooks anymore, so the quest for a good portable blogging device is more complicated.  Ipads are tempting, but I don’t want to lug around a separate keyboard, and I know full well that the kids would get a hold of it and I’d never see it again anyway.  Ultrabooks look fun, as do macbook airs, but I can’t justify the cost.  Regular laptops are far too heavy, and writing longhand is out of the question.  (My handwriting could be described as “distinctive,” as in the sentence, “Nick Nolte certainly cuts a distinctive figure in a mugshot.”)   It is fun to browse, though...

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My publisher is getting antsy.  A recent exchange, as reconstructed from my handwritten notes:

Publisher: Do you think you could helicopter the poodle by Kwanzaa?

DD: Affirmative-a-rooni, pizza!

So, another reason to replace the latest Toshiba.

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I know that “college success” courses are supposed to work wonders, but I’m having trouble getting around having to explain to the student who put it off and did just fine why he would need it to graduate.  If it’s mandatory, then it’s mandatory; failing to take it means you don’t graduate.  But if the only thing standing between you and graduation is a course on how to be a student, I’m not sure what purpose is served.

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Said this to The Boy: “You know what the secret is to writing?  WRITING!”  Now if I would just listen to myself...

Communication Chains

“Why don’t we just automate all of our routine mail?”

It all started so innocently, with such a seemingly logical question...

The folks who work in financial aid offices in community colleges have unbelievably complicated jobs.  I knew that at some level already, but I recently watched as several people attempted to build a flow chart of communications with the goal of automating wherever possible.

Tolstoy wrote that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The same could be said for financial aid applications.

Was our college listed on the online FAFSA?  Did we get income verification?  Is the student considered independent?  Does the student qualify under a state rehab program?  Is the student a veteran?  Is the student covered by trade adjustment assistance?  Does the student intend to pursue a degree?  Full-time or part-time?  Does the student have prior college experience?  A prior degree?  (You’d be surprised.)  

Is the student in-state?  Is the student a citizen?  Do we have transcripts?  Do we have a valid social security number?  Is the phone number correct?  (Again, you’d be surprised.)  How many credits is the student planning to take?  What if that changes?  What if the student drops out after six weeks?  What if after ten weeks?  What if the student stops showing up after eight, but nobody mentions it until ten or eleven?

If male, did the student register with selective service?  Are the vaccinations in order?  Does the student need health coverage?  A bus pass?  A parking sticker?  

What if the loan application is turned down?  What if some paperwork is late?  Does the student need a bookstore voucher?  What if the award is too high?  What if it’s too low?  What if students use more of their work-study allocations than the historical norm, and we run out of hours to offer?  (That happens sometimes.)  What if the student blows off the work-study job and gets fired from it mid-semester?  (That also happens.)  What if the student gets laid off from her part-time job?  What if she gets paid under the table?  

Honestly, I’m only scratching the surface here.  I literally lost track of the number of permutations.  The number of details per student was astonishing, and they cascade quickly in chains of consequences.

Automating that is much more daunting than just drafting a “thank you for your application” letter.  

Local legend has it that the financial aid office hired someone from a very prestigious residential liberal arts college a few years ago.  She quit within a week.  It’s one thing to handle the variations among traditional age students who attend full time and live in dorms.  It’s quite another when you have eighteen year olds with two children, thirty year olds in vocational rehab programs, and forty year olds with scattered collections of credits giving a degree another shot.
The number of variables is simply staggering.

So, a tip o’the cap to the folks in financial aid.  Given the number of moving parts, it’s amazing that mistakes are as rare as they are.  And I promise to be a little more circumspect in asking innocent questions...

College in High Schools

This one is really looking for advice from those among my wise and worldly readers who’ve found reasonably elegant ways to handle a particular situation.

Like many community colleges, mine offers some credit-bearing courses onsite in some local high schools that are just far enough way that it would be difficult for the students to commute.  In some cases, we’re just renting space in the high school and teaching at night.  Those cases are relatively straightforward; we pay a room fee and otherwise do what we would normally do.

But sometimes the school district wants a 100-level class offered to its students, on its premises, during its normal school day.  The logic, which makes sense to me, is that rather than simulating college with an AP or IB class, why not just teach the real thing?  Transcripted credits often do better in transfer than do, say, AP scores, which many colleges accept for placement but not credit.  Even better, when they bring in a real college professor, they bring in college level expectations for the students.  And the choices tend to be greater, since we offer classes in subjects for which AP tests don’t exist (as far as I know).

We’ve run into some logistical issues, though, and this is where I’m hoping some folks have found elegant solutions.

We knew, going in, that the semesters didn’t align cleanly.  (For example, our classes end in mid-May, but theirs run well into June.)  That’s an issue, but hardly a deal-breaker.  High schools also generally prefer to run classes five days a week in bite-size chunks of time; again, not our preferred method -- especially from a staffing perspective -- but not a surprise, either.

Textbooks take some diplomacy.  Students (and parents) in high school are accustomed to getting their books for free.  Colleges are accustomed to referring students to bookstores to buy their own.  When you’re running a college course in a high school, you need to address the book purchasing issue upfront.  Will the district pay, or will the students?  Do they have to go somewhere, will they be provided in class, or can they order online?

What we didn’t anticipate as much as we should have was the issue of placement tests.  Many of our 100-level courses require eligibility for English 101 -- that is to say, the ability to place out of developmental English.  A disturbing number of the high school seniors who are motivated enough to sign up for college courses don’t clear that hurdle.  I say “surprising” in part because of the merits, but in part because of the timing; if the prospective students don’t get their results until shortly before the course begins, and find themselves academically ineligible, then we can find ourselves in the awkward spot of having too few students to run the class.

I’ve floated the idea of just setting aside some seats in some online sections of classes we’re running anyway.  That way, I thought, we’d get around both the ‘travel’ issue and the minimum size issue.  If, say, six students out of twenty-five in a given Intro to Psych class are high school seniors, the class can run just fine.  I’d even argue that they’re getting a more authentic college experience, to the extent that their classmates are primarily 18 and older.

But that doesn’t always meet the needs of the high schools.  For reasons of their own, they need to have students in prescribed places at prescribed times, with someone who is paid to teach/supervise them.  Turning students loose for a while, with the expectation that they’ll eventually find their way to the course’s site, doesn’t meet the institution’s needs.

Finally, there’s the awkward fact that when high schools close, they close.  Colleges typically have admissions staff, registration staff, and the like available for probably fifty weeks a year.  That means that there’s nothing unusual about, say, administering placement tests in July and signing students up for classes in August.  That’s just not the case in many high schools, so even if we can align (or get around the non-alignment of) teaching schedules, all the support services frequently crash into each other.

I’m wondering if any of my wise and worldly readers have seen this kind of arrangement -- a college teaching college classes in a high school -- done smoothly.  What’s the trick?  Is there something we’re missing?

“Value”

President Obama used the term “value” in outlining the criteria he’d use, if he had his druthers, in allocating Federal funding to higher ed.

First, the obligatory disclaimer: he doesn’t get his druthers very often.  He doesn’t quite seem to get that the Republicans have no intention of letting him succeed at pretty much anything.

That said, though, the idea of looking at “value” is suggestive.  

I’d like to look at the “value” of continued wealth polarization.  Let’s also look at the “value” of the highest incarceration rates in the developed world.  While we’re at it, let’s take a long, hard look at the “value” of wars of choice, the carried interest tax deduction, and HMO’s.  Higher education has its issues, but any objective barometer of “value” would suggest that there’s far more surplus value to be squeezed out of any -- let alone all -- of those than you’ll ever get out of educating people.  

That said, though, I suspect some sectors of higher ed should be more worried than others.

I’ve suggested before that there are really four categories of colleges.  Allowing for the obvious oversimplification, they are:

high prestige, high cost -- Harvard, MIT, Swarthmore

high prestige, low cost -- UC Berkeley, Michigan, UVA

low prestige, low cost -- community colleges, state colleges

low prestige, high cost -- innumerable little private colleges scattered hither and yon, for-profits

Even granting that these are very broad strokes -- I like to think that my own cc punches well above its weight in academic quality, and I have the transfer stats to prove it -- the first three categories strike me as passing the basic “value” test.  The fourth, not so much.  

A standard cynical response would argue that “hither and yon” could be rephrased as “in a host of Congressional districts,” and would suggest that localist political concerns would prevent any real harm from befalling the college in so-and-so’s district.  There’s some truth to that, but it neglects the fact that most Federal financial aid is channeled through students, rather than sent directly to institutions.  While that has predictable and sometimes pernicious effects, it does mean that a blanket change to Federal policy can happen without singling out any particular place.  Lowering the cap on federal student loans, for instance, would hit any college or university that charges above the cap; students would have to decide whether the particular college was worth it.

Over time, I expect that the most viable survival strategy for the endangered sector is to start playing a different game.  Instead of offering an undistinguished bachelor’s degree for a premium price, start experimenting with different kinds of credentials.  (I’m intrigued by the “badges” craze, for instance, and I suspect that it’s just the beginning.)  If I were high up at a struggling private college, I’d seriously consider starting some conversations with the Feds about alternative credentialing and financial aid.  Yes, it’s a break from tradition, but if sticking with tradition involves a fast slide into oblivion, the argument for experimentation is easier to make.  Add value where you can, even if it isn’t where you initially had in mind.

With cost becoming an ever-more-serious consideration, the only way I see that fourth sector surviving is by changing its value proposition.  That may not be the intent of the “reforms,” but I’ll take a happy unintended consequence.  If the veiled threat of oblivion spurs innovation in one sector, and that innovation spreads as it catches on, so much the better.  It wouldn’t be the first time that a problematic idea had a happy outcome.

In the meantime, let’s talk about the “value” of those tax cuts for the one percent...

Accidental Productivity

Work doesn’t always look like work.

Over the last week, I’ve had a couple of long, meandering conversations with professors as they’ve returned for the Spring.  One was completely spontaneous, and the other was a focused discussion that quickly and thoroughly overran its purpose.  They were the kinds of discussions that can only happen before the crush of classes gets fully under way -- deadlines aren’t looming yet, students aren’t hunting them yet, and everybody is still relatively well-rested.  It’s a brief window.

In the moment, they both pretty much felt like goofing off.  And I won’t deny that some of the discussion was basically shooting the breeze.  

But they both helped me understand some issues that a more purposeful inquiry wouldn’t have.

I won’t violate any confidences by spelling out the issues, so I’ll give a parallel.  For many, many years, I used to wonder why the Catholic church insists on teaching rules that it knows perfectly well don’t work, like the bans on contraception and homosexuality.  Like the Unitarian liberal that I basically am, I could rattle off the perverse consequences of those prohibitions, and have wondered with frustration why the church continued to stick to its guns even in the face of mountains of evidence.

Then, a few years ago, someone explained to me that failure is the point.  Failure brings guilt, which requires forgiveness and inspires a need for validation.  (“Don’t make the same mistakes I made...”)  The impossibility of actually following the rules was a feature, not a bug.  In that light, my uses of mountains of evidence were either beside the point or actually counterproductive.  

In both of the recent discussions, I came to understand that some issues on campus that struck me as obvious were only obvious if you took them literally.  If you instead took them as “statements” indicative of “identity,” then suddenly my well-reasoned and empirically accurate objections didn’t quite stick.  They weren’t “wrong,” any more than the evidence-based objections to banning birth control were “wrong,” but they answered a different question.  

Getting to that realization, though, had to happen indirectly.  People don’t always have fully developed explanations for why they think the things they do; sometimes you can only get at it indirectly and even accidentally.

That kind of planning for accidents -- making yourself accident-prone -- is hard to reduce to a schedule or a cost-benefit analysis.  Some conversations lead nowhere, and it’s certainly possible to veer off into rants, hobbyhorses, or Grand Unified Theories of Everything.  In practice, it’s often a fine line between “productive wandering” and “goofing off.”  These useful moments came surrounded by moments discussing Tim Tebow, the ethics of the honey badger (“Honey badger don’t care!  He takes what he wants!”), and what it must be like to work in the HR department on the Death Star.  

Yes, I’m a little nerdy.

Moments like these strike me as both necessary and difficult to encourage.  They happen when people have time, but are still physically around.  They require a level of personal comfort, and a willingness to put in a chunk of time without any specific agenda or hope of payoff.  They require enough slack in the system for people to be human.

As budgets tighten and accountability measures proliferate, I hope we’re able to keep enough  slack in the system to allow smart people to have actual conversations without “action items” or “strategic goals” or “measurable outcomes.”  Sometimes, the most productive moments happen in the gaps, by accident, precisely because nobody’s trying.

Friday Follow-ups

A few follow-ups to issues that came up this week:

In response to the “rejection” post earlier this week, one commenter suggested that ageism is rampant in faculty hiring.  S/he offered no particular evidence for the claim, but stated it as a sort of “everybody knows.”

Like many “everybody knows” claims, I haven’t seen it.  Over the past several years, my college has hired faculty in their twenties and faculty in their sixties, with many in between.  The processes for screening applicants are rigorous enough that it’s hard to imagine that kind of bias making itself felt very often.  At my previous college, the same was true.

That’s not to say that my own experience is universal, obviously, but it does make me wonder about the pre-emptive certainty of the claim, and the purpose served by asserting it.  Presumably, if the practice were ubiquitous, I would have seen it by now.  Instead, the charge gets thrown around, but without proof.  It’s hard to prove a negative, of course, but the charge feels a little like working the referee.  

If anything, I’d think the valid concern would go the other way.  With colleges adopting “tiered” benefits packages based on date of hire, newer employees will never get the level of benefits of their elders.  That sure smells like age discrimination to me...

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In reference to yesterday’s post about cost (among other things), a commenter asked how I could assert ever-rising costs for colleges in the face of flat salaries for faculty.

That’s an easy one.  Costs include much more than salaries.

The elephant in the room for any discussion of labor costs is health insurance.  When the cost of employer-provided insurance goes up, then labor costs go up, even if salaries remain flat.  The employee might not feel it, but the employer absolutely does.  From the employer’s perspective, an increase in the cost of benefits is no different than a raise.  

This is why I pull out what little hair I still have whenever I read the New Faculty Majority’s advocacy of the “Vancouver model” for paying adjuncts.  Vancouver is in Canada.  In Canada, health insurance is not attached to employment.  If you don’t account for that, then you miss the point.  Establish single-payer health insurance in America, and we can get a handle on the adjunct compensation issues.  Until then, we use adjunct compensation to get a handle on health insurance.  

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The IHE survey of provosts made for fascinating reading.  The two findings that jumped out at me were the Lake Wobegon effect and the provosts’ views of unions.

The Lake Wobegon effect -- “where every child is above average” -- applied both to academic standards and the effects of funding cuts.  Substantial numbers of provosts reported that grade inflation and declining academic performance are major issues, but only at other places.  And funding cuts will reduce quality on their campuses, even though they haven’t yet.

Many commenters took those responses as evidence of denial.  That may be, but there’s also a sense in which they have to give those answers.  A chief academic officer with a conscience would resign if s/he thought that academic standards had declined on her watch.  But if you don’t deploy the threat of decline in the future, it becomes hard to argue against further cuts.  So you adopt a seemingly contradictory view.

The responses on unions were portrayed as negative, though I read that as a function of the question asked.  If you assume that unions exist primarily to benefit their members, then the answers given necessarily follow.  That doesn’t necessarily imply that unions are objectionable; it just means that their first priority is their membership.  (The same argument holds about the claim that corporations exist primarily to make money.  Of course they do.  The relevant question is whether they accomplish a broader social good anyway.)  I don’t see the contradiction between saying that unions exist primarily to serve their members, and that they’re generally positive anyway.  Are they helpful, or self-interested?  Yes.  Just like corporations.  

On Notice?

President Obama has put higher education “on notice” that if we keep raising tuition, we’ll get our public funding cut.

To which I say, huh?

We’ve had our public funding cut already.  Since 2008, an uninterrupted series of cuts has been the direct cause of severe tuition increases for public higher ed.  If you want to stop the tuition increases, the first thing to do is to require the states to restore and then maintain realistic funding levels.  (When referring to a point in time, the usual term is a “maintenance of effort” requirement.  Otherwise, it can be set as a “grant in aid.”)  When the states have cut back, colleges have turned to the Feds through the indirect means of raising tuition, much of which is funded by Federal financial aid.

That would be the Federal financial aid that is coming under attack, by the way.  This summer the six-month graduation payment deferment is supposed to go away, the interest rate on Federal student loans is supposed to double, and students who place into college through the “ability to benefit” rules won’t be eligible for aid at all.  Why on earth you’d want to start dunning new grads for loan payments in the midst of a recession is beyond me, but there it is.  

So the “on notice” thing strikes me as a bit late.  

If they want to do something intelligent and effective about cost control, on the other hand, I have a few suggestions.  Plagiarize at will, folks.

First, don’t make the classic mistake of looking at tuition increases as percentages.  Loan payments are dollar amounts, so we should look at tuition increases in dollar amounts.  For example, let’s compare Rich Kid U with Eastern Podunk Community College.  RKU charges forty thousand a year, and EPCC charges four thousand a year.  RKU announces that it feels the pain of its graduates struggling with student loan debt, so it holds the tuition increase to three percent this year.  EPCC continues to reel from state cuts, so it raises tuition six percent.  In percentage terms, it looks like EPCC is the problem.

But it isn’t.  That three percent at RKU amounts to $1200.  The six percent at EPCC amounts to $240.  RKU is the problem.  EPCC is part of the solution.

Second, kill the credit hour dead.  I’ve addressed this many times before, so I’ll keep it short here.  If you define your product in units of time, then you will never -- by definition -- increase productivity.  Ever.  Without productivity gains, cost increases in excess of inflation aren’t just predictable; they’re mathematically inevitable.  (Economists call it “Baumol’s cost disease.”)

Third, resist the temptation to replace tuition with tithes.  Out in California, Mark Yudof has generated some sympathetic press by proposing that students pay after the fact, using a set percentage of their post-graduation salaries.  The humanitarian appeal is based on the fact that new grads usually don’t make much money, so using a percentage cuts some slack in the early years.

But the tithe model has serious flaws.  First, and most basically, it decouples the amount of aid received from the amount paid back.  Over time, that’ll start to smell like welfare, and we know what happens to welfare programs.  Second, it assumes -- falsely -- that everyone who gets loans actually graduates.  As annoying as loan payments are a decade down the line, they’re that much worse if you don’t even have a degree to show for them.  Finally, Americans’ credit card habits suggest that “buy now, pay later” leads to overspending now.  In the moment, the tithe model can resemble a blank check.  This does not bode well for cost control.

The way to control costs is to cap aid upfront, and to require colleges that charge above that to make up the difference themselves whenever there’s demonstrated need.  If aid is capped at, say, ten thousand a year for a full-time student, then EPCC can do its six percent increase without much issue, but RKU has to ask itself some hard questions.  

Finally, we need to make a decision as a polity.  Do we want to direct resources to students to use as free agents, accreting credits wherever and however they see fit?  Or do we want high-quality, low-cost institutions?  Because it’s one or the other.

The consumerist, “DIY U” model suggests funneling aid through students, and letting them choose what they want.  As a consequence, institutions lose their own funding.  They make up the difference through a combination of service cuts and cost increases.  

If we want high-quality, low-cost institutions, we have to subsidize them.  This is just a basic fact of life.  

For evidence, look at the for-profits.  They charge considerably more than the publics, and offer a good bit less.  That’s what the absence of a subsidy forces.  The ideologically-driven fantasy that the market will magically make everything better simply doesn’t work for public goods, like having an educated workforce and citizenry.  That’s because they capture too little of the positive externalities they generate.

You want quality colleges at affordable tuition levels?  Me, too.  It’s not that hard.  Break the credit hour, abandon the fantasies of market-driven bounty and/or titheing, and commit to subsidies that actually meet the need.  Yes, there are some basic structural reforms within higher ed that would help -- longtime readers know a few of my favorites -- but first things first.  If you want affordability, you have to spread costs around.  

What you absolutely do NOT do is move to a consumer model.  The last thirty years provide ample evidence of that.  I know this isn’t popular in the culture right now, but institutions matter.  Resorting to the quasi-libertarian fantasy of the almighty empowered consumer will result, inevitably, in systematically underfunded public goods.  There’s a philosophical position that says “and a good thing, too...” -- let’s have that debate.  But let’s have the debate that acknowledges the costs, rather than one presuming some sort of magical harmony of interest.  If you tell public colleges to act like businesses, don’t complain when they act like the colleges that actually are.

Thoughts on Workforce Development

What does workforce development look like?

The question is becoming more important as the term is gaining political steam.  

Politicians like to offer workforce development as an answer to the recession.  The idea is that if the folks without jobs had the skills to get the jobs that are going unfilled, then everybody would win.  Which is true, as far as it goes.

But it’s dangerous to expect too much of the “train the unemployed” strategy.

Too narrow a focus on workforce development usually has the effect of neglecting the ‘transfer’ function of community colleges.  Yes, community colleges can provide short-term training, but they can also provide the first two years of a four-year degree.  For students who are concerned about their debt loads, this can be a very attractive option.  The second word in “community college” is “college,” which is easy to forget when the political discourse reduces community colleges to training centers.

Some of us like to think that the transfer role is, in fact, a form of workforce development.  When a student from a shaky background finds her footing at the community college and eventually transfers for the four-year degree -- and sometimes more than that -- she becomes eligible for jobs she never could have attained without the degree.  That’s a potent, if slow, form of workforce development.  Conceptually, there’s no reason that transfer couldn’t be considered a part of the workforce development role, but in practical terms it’s usually considered separately.  That’s a mistake.

Still, even if everyone agreed on a broad definition, we’d still face some pretty serious issues.

-- The catastrophic increases in incarceration rates since the 1980s have done more than just starve public higher education of resources, though they have certainly done that.  They’ve also generated a tremendous number of low-skilled adults with criminal records.  Many of the jobs that pay a decent wage aren’t open to people with criminal records, even if they’ve completed a training program.  While I certainly support a more discerning approach to criminal justice, it’s hard to know what to offer the folks who’ve already been snagged in the current system.  Training them for jobs they can’t get doesn’t strike me as the answer, though.

-- Picking market winners isn’t easy.  This year’s hot field is next year’s cold one; knowing in advance what will be hot is usually educated guesswork.  I’m fairly sure that neurosurgeons and Ph.D. computer scientists will still do well, but that’s not terribly helpful at this level.  The most predictable lower-level workforce needs are actually the skills we expect students to pick up in their general education courses: effective communication, the ability to see the big picture, enough quantitative skill to know when an answer doesn’t sound right.  Those skills are evergreens, and like evergreens, they take time to grow.  

-- Sheer numbers.  Yes, there are fields in which a few local employers need some people quickly, and the work lends itself to relatively fast training.  But most of the time, the first or second group through exhausts the available openings.  

-- Adult Basic Education.  In many cases, the workforce development that’s actually needed isn’t so much training on this machine or that process, but instruction in English for Speakers of Other Languages or Adult Literacy.  This kind of instruction is usually separate from a college’s developmental track, since it isn’t necessarily geared towards getting the students into a degree program.  Unfortunately, ABE programs are often run on a shoestring, and are even more precarious economically than community colleges are.  If we really want to reach some of the hardest-to-place people, let’s start with the basics.

My free advice to any politicians reading this is simple: don’t let the fantasy of the simple, classic version of workforce development overshadow the big picture.  If you want to improve the prospects of the local workforce, start with adult basic education, add short-term training programs, and beef up the classic academic offerings at community colleges for transfer.  (While you’re at it, you might want to think about all that incarceration...)  If you want the full range of jobs, you need the full range of preparation.  Otherwise, you’ll just keep cycling people through training programs every few years, every time the economic winds shift.

And if you can come up with something practical for folks with criminal records, all the better.