Mixed Signals

There’s a wonderful moment in the comment stream to this piece by George Boggs.  Boggs argues that colleges often mistake a particular institutional form for the mission, and in so doing, neglect their mission.  He makes an analogy to the train industry which, he claims, failed to realize that it was really in the transportation industry, and therefore left itself vulnerable to competition from cars and trucks.  Stephen Karlson, of Cold Spring Shops, responds that some train companies did realize that and try to adjust, but regulators wouldn’t let them.

Karlson knows more about trains than I ever will, so I’ll assume he’s at least substantially correct on that point.  But the point about innovation being stopped by regulation made me laugh out loud, entirely out of recognition.  Higher ed is facing the exact same thing.  If we want learner-centered institutions, we’ll need learner-centered regulations.

For example, even though students from spotty academic backgrounds benefit from continuous enrollment, and working adults benefit from completing programs as quickly as they can, Pell grants are not available for year-round enrollment.  A student who wants to use the summer as a third semester to get through more quickly can’t get Pell support to do it.  If we take “completion” seriously as a goal, this is preposterous.  If anything, we should actively encourage continuous enrollment.  Forcing seasonal stop-outs on working adults is pointless at best.  But that’s how the law is written.

But Pell is just one part of the picture.  As Boggs correctly notes, we have decades of research showing that late registration puts students at a high risk of failing.  Some community colleges choose to ignore the research and let students in late anyway, fearing loss of enrollment if they don’t.   Others, such as my own, take the high road and don’t let students sign up for the first time after classes have started.  (We do have an add/drop period, but that’s only for students who are already enrolled.)  But when you have a semester-based system and decide to take that high road, you’re left telling a student who shows up in September to wait until January.  (Or, for a student who needs aid and shows up in late January, wait until September.)  That’s not access, and it creates an opening that for-profits are more than willing to exploit.

But if you try to run “late-start” classes, or to break the semester into halves, you quickly run into issues with enrollment reporting.  We have to report student enrollments to the feds for financial aid purposes, so they know who the no-shows are, whose aid to claw back, and whose loan deferments to cancel.  (That’s why we have to report even on students who aren’t currently receiving aid; they may have loans outstanding from previous forays into college.)  There’s a time limit on how long we have to report a student’s last date of attendance.  But what happens with a student who signs up in early September for a class that doesn’t start until late October, and then never shows up?  If the student isn’t taking anything else -- because we’re taking the high road on late registrations -- then by the time we get the report of non-attendance and pass it along, we’ve missed the reporting window.  And what do we do with second-half courses when we “freeze” enrollments at an earlier point in the semester for reporting purposes?

At a conference that the CCRC hosted last year, I had a chance to ask Martha Kantor about some of these issues.  She responded that there’s an option for getting “experimental site authority,” which would allow specific waivers for specific rules in specific settings.

Okay, but that’s yet another layer of labor to comply with rules that shouldn’t exist in the first place.  

In broad terms, colleges are getting two directly conflicting messages.  One message is to focus on outcomes: assessments, completions, placements into “gainful employment.”  We’re told to get out of the ivory tower, to engage with the “real world,” to do what needs to be done to improve bottom-line results.  In some states, such as my own, community college operating funding is now based on performance measures based on those outcomes; here, calling the results “bottom-line” is literally true.

But at the exact same time, we’re getting much more tightly regulated and closely scrutinized on all things monetary.  “Modules” within semesters trigger more scrutiny than before.  Financial aid rules get more detailed, specific, and exacting with each passing year.  We’ve already sacrificed academic initiatives to financial aid regulations, and I expect that we’ll sacrifice more.  

Meanwhile, for-profits can easily outgun us in the regulatory sphere, since they have far greater budgets and they aren’t barred from lobbying.

We’re in the education business, as opposed to the semester business.  Like the railroads before us, some of us have figured that out.  But regulators are sending mixed signals.  As anyone in the train biz can tell you, bad things happen on the tracks when signals are mixed.

Should Gen Eds be Free?

Sherman Dorn caught my eye recently with a proposal that “general education” courses at community colleges should be offered for free.  The idea was to encourage people to see community colleges as viable and attractive feeders, to bring down student loan burdens, and to encourage community colleges to focus on student success in the academic core.

To which I say, no.  Thanks, but no.

And I say that as someone who believes strongly that community colleges would be well-advised to double down on the liberal arts core.  The last chapter of my book mentions that strategy specifically.  So why can’t I sign on with Dorn’s proposal?

Two reasons: unintended consequences, and non-instructional costs.

The second is the easier to explain.  Yes, we pay faculty.  But we also pay for electricity, and counselors, and advisers, and financial aid staff, and the registrar, and maintenance, and even, yes, “administration.”  We pay for library materials, heating and cooling, IT, and accessibility services.  Demagogues like to demonize that as “overhead” or “waste,” but they get curiously quiet when asked to specify just what, exactly, they would cut.  

Some courses cost less to teach than others.  Many of the cheapest to teach are the gen eds, since many of them don’t require specialized labs, or clinical sites, or expensive technology.  By charging the same for courses across the board, we’re able to cross-subsidize the more expensive stuff.  A full section of Intro to Psych, taught by an adjunct, generates revenue that helps offset the considerable cost of Nursing clinicals.  Take away the revenue from Psych, and we’d have to drop Nursing.  

To be fair, Dorn’s proposal refers to “the first new dollars” of state money to pay for the free courses.  The implication is that the state will make up for the loss of tuition and fees from those courses, and that it will provide “new” money instead of just telling colleges to eat it.

Color me skeptical.

As with the proposal last week to make community colleges free, I’d expect to see some serious misgivings at the state level as soon as they figure out that they’re essentially replacing federal money -- in the form of financial aid -- with state money.  It would be lovely to assume a dollar for dollar match and then some, but lots of things would be lovely to assume.  And I maintain my view that becoming more dependent on state finances would prove catastrophic when the next recession hits.  Which it will.

The picture gets more complicated when you shift from a state perspective to a campus one.  Once you start designating certain courses as “gen ed” and others as not, colleges would have approximately zero incentive to improve gen ed, and would instead focus entirely on other things.  After all, those other things bring in operating revenue, which the gen eds don’t.  I’d expect to see a serious move away from A.A. degrees, which are laden with gen ed, and towards short-term certificates and A.A.S. degrees, in which gen eds are much lighter.  States would try to lower their bills by “streamlining” gen ed, essentially by standardizing it.  Colleges would have every incentive to go along with that project, since gen ed would become a money drain.  I see students and faculty emerging with fewer options, larger class sizes, and an inexorable pattern of watering-down.

I once worked at a college with a “diversity” requirement: students had to take at least one “diversity-certified” course to get a degree.  Predictably, a rush ensued to get anything and everything “diversity-certified,” no matter how far the stretch.  I foresee the converse of that here, with departments and colleges rushing to redesignate classes as outside of gen ed, except for the barest core.  If “gen ed” comes to be synonymous with “money pit,” colleges will minimize it.  They’ll have to.  

Dorn’s proposal is well-intended, and I can see the appeal.  But it’s full of perverse incentives for both states and colleges, and I just don’t have enough faith in civic virtue to assume that everyone will look past their own incentives.  “Free” is a magic word, and I’m a supporter of it in certain contexts (like OER and mini-prep classes).  But getting that granular at the level of operating funding, and trusting in the farsighted wisdom of state legislatures during recessions, just seems like an accident waiting to happen.

How Much Do Your Graduates Make?

“How much do your graduates make?”

For the moment, let’s leave aside the motivations behind the question, and just try to address the question itself.  Define “your graduates” and “make,” and we can start to answer the question.

That may sound evasive, but it’s a fundamental truth.  And the fact that such a basic truth is completely elided in popular discussion tells you a lot.

I’ll give you an easy one.  Sarah graduates from her local community college, and transfers to a nearby four-year college.  She subsequently graduates from the four-year college and goes on to medical school.  She spends a few years in residency, then gets a high-paying job as a physician.

At what point do we count her earnings?  And who gets credit for them?

The standard measure is looking at starting salaries right out of college.  But Sarah’s salary right out of community college, and even right out of her four-year school, was zero.  We could include the zero, but it would be deeply misleading.  Or we could exclude Sarah, but that would be misleading, too; if not for the start she got at the community college, she would not have been able to land her physician job.  By excluding Sarah and others like her, we wind up with an artificially low figure for community college grads.  And in this political climate, that’s the kind of figure for which a college is punished.

The basic comprehensive community college produces two kinds of graduates: “transfer” and “workforce.”  (Those of us on the ground know that the distinction isn’t nearly as clean as that, but for the sake of clarity, let’s leave that aside for the moment.)  “Workforce” certificates and degrees are usually understood to be “terminal,” or self-contained.  (The new trend is to make them “stackable,” to prevent stagnation, but we can leave that aside for now, too.)  “Transfer” degrees are built to serve as the first two years of bachelor’s programs.  Stereotypically, transfer degrees have been more popular among high-achieving students of traditional age, and workforce credentials have been more popular among adult students.  Those aren’t absolutes, but they’ll do as shorthand.

In very broad terms -- and I’ll stipulate, again, that these are broad generalizations with lots of exceptions -- the most academically gifted students tend to cluster in the transfer programs.  And in very broad terms -- again, with plenty of exceptions -- the higher-paying jobs in America tend to require bachelor’s degrees or more.  The salary someone with an A.A.S. in electronic engineering technology does not compare to the salary she could get with a B.S. in electrical engineering.  The former is employable, but not at the same level as the latter.  

If my generalizations are even close to correct, then community colleges are subject to a brutal and systematic bias when the question of graduates’ earnings comes up.  The higher-achieving, higher-salary students are excluded from the count, since they show up as bachelor’s degree grads.  (In BLS stats, someone who gets an A.A. on the way to a B.A. counts as a B.A. grad.)  The students who deliberately targeted lower-paying jobs -- often due to time pressure -- do show up, though.  Then we get compared to the four-year colleges -- many of whose graduates started at community colleges -- unfavorably.  This is madness.

The first thing we have to do is to recognize that “community college graduates” and “four-year college graduates” are overlapping groups.  Many of the latter are also the former.  (Many others may not have graduated from the cc, but they did accumulate credits there.  Transfers after the freshman year are quite common.)  If we only count the “highest” point of graduation, though, we miss significant contributions at lower levels.  Policymakers and influential journalists tend to be from the economic class that shows up at Wake Forest at age 18 and graduates at age 22.  But that’s not representative of most of American higher education.

Of course, once we recognize the role of transfer, then the entire distinction between “workforce” and “transfer” starts to break down.  If you transfer as pre-med, and then go on to med school, was your college experience vocational or pure?  I’d say “yes.”  Many occupations now require four-year degrees or higher, so what looks like an “academic” degree at this level is, in fact, the first portion of a workforce credential.  And there’s nothing wrong with that.  I just wish our political discourse would recognize that the general education core is not just about fuzzy-headed academics in ivory towers reciting poetry.  If you want a prosperous middle class -- a fine and worthy goal -- you have to recognize different routes to getting there.  

How much do our graduates earn?  How are you counting?

Predictions and Data

In the comment thread to this piece, several people discuss a great question: how is it possible to simultaneously base decisions on data, and innovate?  After all, anything new, by definition, won’t have data; anything for which the data are solid, by definition, won’t be new.  If the owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk, what do you do in the meantime?

I liked the question a lot because I’ve seen the conflict on the ground repeatedly.  And it speaks to a habit of mind that I had to unlearn when I moved into administration.

I’ll concede upfront that there’s a basic philosophical issue around causality.  David Hume famously pointed out that inductive reasoning can never be entirely certain: just because the sun has risen in the East every single day since time immemorial doesn’t necessarily mean that it will tomorrow.  It’s very likely to -- I’m not worried about it -- but probability isn’t certainty.  

In the case of the sun rising, the data is so strong, and so in line with our intuitions, that for all practical purposes it’s a non-issue.  But with on-campus issues, the problem of inference and causality is real.  Last year we made new student orientation mandatory, and retention improved.  Did the former cause, or at least contribute to, the latter?  And how can we know?

When something new comes along, it’s easy to object that the idea is “unproven.”  Taken to its logical conclusion, that position quickly becomes “never do anything for the first time.”  It’s deadening.  

I won’t pretend to have solved Hume’s objection.  But there are some expedients that we can use for practical purposes that can improve decision making even when the data are nonexistent.

First, when setting up a new project, build assessment measures and mechanisms into it from the start.  What would success look like?  How will you know if it worked?  What are your realistic goals?  (A few years ago I was in a meeting with a now-departed colleague, in which we discussed retention goals.  She suggested a goal of 100 percent.  I suggested gaining a point per year.)   

Second, start small enough that you could afford failure.  Not every brilliant idea succeeds.  If you assume that some percentage of experiments will fail -- I’d suggest that’s inherent in the definition of “experiment” -- that you need enough slack in your system that some failures won’t kill you.  

Third, have a ramp-up process in mind.  This is where many grant-funded projects come to grief, and it’s why administrators everywhere get nervous looks on their faces when the subject of “boutique” programs comes up.  Let’s say that the initial results from the small intervention are positive.  Now what?  Have you designed the project in such a way that you could scale it up to significant size with the budgets you could realistically expect to have?  It’s pretty well-established that if you skim the cream of your best faculty and best students and give them outsize resources, you can beat your own average with that cohort.  But if it’s unsustainable, what have you done?  If it can’t survive scaling, it’s of limited usefulness.  Build to tolerate failure, yes, but also build to tolerate success.

The habit of mind I had to unlearn was looking for the unassailable position.  Grad school teaches, among other things, that if you meet a theory on the road, you try to kill it.  The idea is to develop the skills to spot flawed arguments, so you can build strong ones.  But in administration, if you wait for that kind of clarity, you’ll wait until the issue is moot.  You have to learn to make peace with the reality of partial information.  No, we don’t yet know whether making new student orientation mandatory was a difference-maker.  But we couldn’t hold off on the Fall semester until we knew; the Fall semester started when it started, and we had to make a call.  So we did the best we could, and decided to keep it.  The data will flow in again, and we’ll reconsider.  

Yes, in pure theoretical terms, data-based decisions and innovation are opposed.  But if you’re willing to give up the idea of perfection, they can actually help each other.  You just have to fill in the gaps as best you can.

Step by Step, Inch by Inch

I was never a huge Three Stooges fan, but as a kid I’d catch a few minutes from time to time.  (I’m told that the ability to tolerate the Stooges is only carried on the Y chromosome.  It may or may not be true, but I’ve never seen a shred of counterevidence.)  They had a recurring bit in which one of them -- I want to say Curly, but don’t quote me -- would suddenly start intoning ominously “slowly I turned...step by step...inch by inch.”  It was obviously a riff on something, though I never did find out what.  

I was reminded of that in reading about the changes to the GED coming in January.  We’re turning slowly, step by step, in an ominous direction.

Not only will the new GED be more expensive and more “rigorous,” but it will even move from a test to an “experience.”  (I think the next stage is a “happening.”)  The idea, I’m guessing, is to improve the subsequent success rates of students who pass it by making it harder to pass and thereby skimming the cream.  

The change comes on the heels of a few other changes.  Last year the Feds shortened student Pell grant eligibility from 18 semesters to 12, which can have implications for students with remedial or ESL needs.  It simultaneously banned the “ability to benefit” exemption, by which students who didn’t have a high school diploma or a GED could take a placement test which, assuming they scored at or above a certain level, would demonstrate that they had the “ability to benefit” from higher education.  

Although each change was made independently of the others, the logic as a whole is clear: students who show up without high school diplomas will have a much harder time getting any sort of credit-bearing education.  And if they do, they’d better hurry up about it.

The cost issue isn’t trivial; earlier this week, one of my deans mentioned in passing that she had spent part of the previous day working with a student who hadn’t eaten in two days.  We’ve had students who lived in their cars.  If you’re that close to the line, a sudden doubling of a test cost is a very real thing.

My friend Tressie McMillan Cottom noted on Twitter recently that the for-profits figured this out some time ago, and use the dynamic to their advantage.  Why, she asked, would a strapped student choose a more expensive school over a cheaper one with a better reputation?  Because the more expensive one back-loads the costs onto loans that are so large as to seem imaginary, while community colleges throw fifty and hundred dollar fees at students upfront.  If you’re struggling to eat, a ten thousand dollar loan due in several years is pretty abstract, but a fifty dollar test fee is grocery money.  And doubling that fee may move it from a stretch to a dream.

Slowly we turn, step by step, inch by inch, away from the students who need us most.

It’s a difficult dynamic to change, especially at the campus level.  As colleges, we don’t have the option of doing what some K-12 districts are doing, and just providing food to everybody.  (For the record, I think that what those districts are doing is a fantastic idea.)  K-12 schools are “total institutions,” and they can exercise that kind of control.  Community colleges aren’t, and can’t.  But the need is still there, even if the mechanism to address it isn’t.

Since I can’t solve the holes in Federal law locally, I’ll throw it out there.  If we have to lose Ability to Benefit, can we at least keep the cost of the GED down?  

Smartphones, YouTube, and Academic Freedom

Remember when academic freedom was mostly about faculty and administration?  When the goal was to convince pinheaded administrators to leave faculty alone to pursue truth as they saw fit?

The world has changed.  

In olden times -- I’m thinking basically pre-2008 or so -- it was relatively difficult for a professor to get in trouble in the press for what she said or did in class.  It could happen, but most of the time, it took real effort.  Quotes often came down to one person’s word against another; in the rare cases of tape recordings, there still wasn’t an easy mechanism to disseminate anything.  Most kerfuffles could be kept on campus.  In that setting, if you had a reasonably enlightened administration -- it happens -- you could just teach and not worry about that.

But now, students have phones with video capability, and YouTube and similar sites offer easy distribution.  It’s no great challenge for a student to record a class clandestinely and then put it out there for the world to see.  Once it’s out there, the game has changed.

The Michigan State case from earlier this week was a spectacular example of the dangers of in-class video, but it could happen anywhere.  

Video offers the seductive appearance of objectivity, even though it can wreak havoc with context.  For example, in my political theory classes, I routinely voiced political positions I didn’t personally believe in order to help them become more concrete for the students.  (Think of it as halfway between “devil’s advocate” and “visual aid.”)  Depending on what we read that week, I’ve portrayed conservatives, liberals, anarchists, fascists, socialists, monarchists, and all sorts of hybrids.  I saw that as part and parcel of my job, and I still believe it was.  But it would have been easy for some kid to record, say, five minutes of the fascism rant and post it.  It wouldn’t have been “faked,” exactly, but it would have been materially misleading and, in some settings, devastating.

Folks who went to grad school in the 90’s will remember Foucault’s reading of the panopticon..  The panopticon was a surveillance tower in the center of a circular prison that had one-way windows.  The idea was that a guard in the tower could see into the cells, but the prisoners in the cells didn’t know when the guard was looking at them.  As Foucault told the tale, if you don’t know when you’re being watched, you start watching yourself.

Smartphones represent an unanticipated inversion of the panopticon.  In the classic panopticon, the authority figure watched his charges.  Now, the charges watch the authority figure.  Surveillance happens from below, and viral videos can spread at a speed that the old purveyors of samizdat could only envy.  As Neil Postman put it, big brother is you, watching.

But the effects on campus discourse could be similar.  Professors build rapport with classes, based on familiarity, and the professor can operate within that rapport.  Picking out five random minutes and posting them to the world exposes statements out of context to people who didn’t get the rapport.  Was Professor Reed illustrating a concept, or is he actually a fascist?  From a five minute video, who knows?

Yes, it’s incumbent upon administrations to defend academic freedom against abuses, whether from within or from without.  And yes, we can (and do) have a policy against recording of a class without the instructor’s permission.  But the latter is hard to enforce; a video could already be viral before anyone on campus even knows it exists.  With cameras finding their way into laptops, tablets, phones, watches, and glasses, the idea of ferreting them out in advance is becoming untenable.  

I’m interested in hearing from current faculty about how they’ve handled students recording classes without permission.  Is it part of the collective faculty consciousness yet, or is it still mostly below the radar?  Have you personally made adjustments to your teaching in light of smartphones?  Or is this just destined to be the academic equivalent of the occasional random lightning strike?

Should Community Colleges Be Free?

Since Dylan Matthews wrapped up his series on college costs, his closing suggestion about making community colleges free has been making the rounds on Twitter.  

The argument is straightforward enough.  Community colleges are low-cost feeders to higher levels, as well as respected and popular sites for occupational training.  Making them free would provide an incentive for more people to go, thereby saving money as against more expensive options.  It would strike a blow against student loan burdens, and would greatly simplify the financial aid process.  And to the extent that it made it easier for low-income students to attend, it would be consistent with the “access” mission for which community colleges exist.

But I’m wary.  It looks like a trap, or, at best, a slow-motion disaster.

The most basic issue is where operating funding would come from.  As unpopular as tuition and fees are, broad-based taxes are even worse.  That’s why the last few decades -- and especially the last five years or so -- have seen a dramatic shift in funding from states (and, in some cases, counties) to students.  Giving up that tuition/fee revenue would place community colleges entirely at the mercy of state legislatures and economic cycles.

Secondly, and relatedly, the source of most financial aid is the federal government.  (States have some, and private scholarships help, but the feds are the major players.)  Operating aid to the institution comes mostly from the state, but financial aid to students comes mostly from the feds.  That means that replacing student-pay with state-pay would dramatically increase the cost to the state, all else being equal.  I’ll use my home state as an example, just to keep things simple.  Massachusetts taxpayers pay both state and federal taxes.  If Massachusetts were to base community college funding entirely on state dollars, then Massachusetts taxpayers would carry a double burden: they’d carry the entire cost of their own colleges, while also paying taxes to subsidize the financial aid for colleges in other states.  That’s a tough sell.  (The same basic argument holds in states that share costs with counties or districts.)  

There’s also a basic definitional question.  Are we only talking about the credit-bearing side of community colleges, or also the non-credit side?  Would corporate training be free?  Personal enrichment classes?  Adult basic education?  In many places, the funding for adult basic education badly lags demand, with significant waiting lists as a result.  

History and politics offer reasons for concern.  Certain public colleges started out free.  CUNY was famously free until the fiscal crisis of the 1970’s, for example.  But that’s my point.  Fiscal crises will happen, one way or another.  When they do, colleges that are entirely dependent on state funding will suffer even more badly than they do now.  Political winds shift; even if a particular governor is wise, well-meaning, and far-sighted, there’s no guarantee that the next few will be.  Worse, to the extent that going tuition-free makes community colleges look less like colleges to the public, and more like K-12 schools or social service agencies, it’s easy to foresee the political fallout.

Colleges’ incentives would shift in predictable ways.  California’s example is useful here.  California’s community colleges aren’t “free,” but they’re remarkably inexpensive by national standards, and what little tuition they collect doesn’t go towards operating budgets.  So when enrollment growth threatens to outstrip appropriations, they can’t grow their way out of trouble.  Instead, they shrink.  They run fewer sections of necessary classes, establish waiting lists, and charge students in the form of time, rather than money.  Not coincidentally, for-profit providers have swooped in to fill the void.  If you can’t control income, but you can control expenses, then controlling expenses is exactly what you do.  

If we want to make community colleges permanently affordable, and sustainable, the first thing to do is to get health care costs under control.  I’d also love to see long-term commitments to slow, steady growth in operating funding -- the health care savings could cover that -- and some national support for “best practices” studies in structure and administration.  In my perfect world, we’d even look much more seriously at competency-based credentials, and at serious efficiencies in financial aid and ERP systems.  But we wouldn’t just throw up our hands and declare that it’s all free.  We just don’t have the political culture to make that safe.

Egalitarianism Among the Elites

The Times story about Harvard Business School, and its attempts to engineer gender equality among its students, struck several chords, although perhaps not the ones it intended to.

The world of elite schools is pretty self-contained.  I learned that truth hard when I graduated from a large, public high school and enrolled at Williams College.  The culture shock was severe.

The academic side of Williams presented a real challenge at first; it took me a semester to raise my game.  That was humbling, but not shocking.  The shock was in encountering up close the culture of the incredibly wealthy.  In the first week of freshman year, my section of the dorm I lived in -- the “entry,” in Williams parlance -- did a show of hands.  How many people would never have to work a day in their lives if they didn’t want to?  8 out of 23 answered in the affirmative, and nobody was kidding.  I wasn’t prepared for the casual brutality, the drinking, or the degree to which frat boy behavior was valorized.  (I was particularly surprised because the college had banned frats decades earlier.  But you don’t need frats to have frat boys.)

Among other things, that was where I learned the paradox of conservatism that Corey Robin has recently noted: for all their talk of discipline and virtue, they party hard, and they love to fight.

Those of us who opted out of frat boy culture didn’t have many alternatives.  There was an active evangelical Christian subculture, which either resonated with you or didn’t.  Beyond that, it was catch-as-catch-can.

Harvard Business School is cut from the same cloth, right down to the preponderance of family money.  The overclass sets the tone for the entire culture.

At Williams, the rest of us mostly acquiesced.  In part, we were stunned.  But in part, it was what we had signed up for.  We wanted to play with the big kids, and we assumed that this culture was the price of admission.  If we were to become movers and shakers, we’d have to learn to hold our own when conflicts got real; a certain amount of “toughening up” was part of the unspoken curriculum.  If we expected to compete in the realms of top medical programs, finance capital, law, and academia, we would have to be ready for combat.  I’ve long thought that the outsize focus on intercollegiate sports -- when I was there, about half of the students were on at least one intercollegiate team -- was based on the idea of fostering toughness and competitiveness.

HBS seems to have a similar culture.  Its frat boy culture is based on toughening up students for the world of venture capital, which isn’t exactly known for its warm and fuzzy streak.  You prepare students for the world that actually exists; if that world is hard-charging, brutal, hierarchical, and mostly male, then that’s what you prepare them for.  

Apparently, HBS had a change of heart recently, and its most recent graduating class went through an experiment in top-down culture change.  The goal was to help women students be as successful as their male counterparts.  And it’s crashing headfirst into the dilemmas of egalitarianism among elites.  The leadership of the school quickly discovered that students bring their backgrounds and expectations with them, and that the informal, out-of-class culture is much harder to control than classroom discussions.  Some areas of equality, such as gender, are within the bounds of possible (if awkward) discussion; others, such as class, would strike at the heart of the entire enterprise.  As one student put it, I’m paying a half million dollars to be here; I have certain expectations.  Exactly so.

The composition of elites is in flux at any given time, so the tasks of preparing future elites has to shift, too.  That’s awkward and difficult, since moving too quickly risks preparing students for a world that doesn’t exist, and moving too slowly risks irrelevance.  Harvard has discovered, correctly, that women have become much more important in the business world, and it wants to stay relevant as the change unfolds.  That makes sense, and I imagine that with a few adjustments, it will continue doing what it does unimpeded.  Whether that means simply inculcating women into frat boy culture, or trying to reform it from the ground up, is still up for grabs.  I don’t often say this, but I actually wish Harvard well on this one.

Friday Fragments

The Boy and The Girl returned to school yesterday.  The Girl -- who is starting the fourth grade -- reported that her teacher had every student do a “Facebook page” (on paper) about themselves.  Apparently, it’s fair to assume now that fourth graders know how Facebook pages work.  One of the questions was “favorite things,” and they were supposed to list four.  As TG put it, she listed “kittens, puppies, chocolate, and books.  You know, the essentials.”

That’s my girl.

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Free idea for the League for Innovation: could we put together some sort of League-ish conference entirely online?  Community college travel budgets have really been beaten down over the last few years, so it’s getting harder to send people to conferences, but we need the cross-fertilization of ideas more than ever.  Twitter is great, but sometimes the longer form is necessary.  I’m thinking something “live,” with a schedule and a roster.  

It seems like the technology is getting good enough that some sort of serious online convention might actually not suck.  And it would be far more inclusive than onsite conferences have become.  

I’m not suggesting doing away with the in-person conference at this point, but a supplemental online one -- maybe in the Fall, since both the AACC and the League have the traditional conferences in the Spring -- could broaden the conversation in helpful ways.

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In my book, I argued for a new appreciation of the fruits of specialization among community colleges.  Apparently, I’m not the only one to pick up on the idea.

It makes sense.  As options for students multiply, the likelihood of any given institution winning by default diminishes.  Each institution needs its own answer to the question of why a student should go there, as opposed to somewhere else.  In areas with flat population growth and plenty of colleges, a murky value proposition may not be sustainable.  Better to be very good at some things than mediocre at everything.

Readers of a certain age will remember variety shows on the major television networks.  When there were only three or four channels to watch, a network could win a timeslot by pairing uninteresting music with lame-but-inoffensive comedy and packaging it all in rhinestone-studded jumpsuits.  (Younger readers are invited to look up the Brady Bunch Variety Hour on YouTube to see what I mean.)  If the other networks were showing, say, crime dramas, then the variety hour could win by default.

As viewing options have multiplied, the variety show died an unlamented death.  Now, at any given time, you can find pure examples of whatever genre you have in mind.  I’m thinking we’re heading toward a similar point in higher ed.  Institutions based on the variety show model -- especially expensive ones without name-brand prestige -- are in for a rough haul.  

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This one’s for my fellow grammar nerds.  Number 15 is my favorite, but the Oxford comma cartoon is pretty great, too.  

In grad school, I briefly had a roommate who was a linguist.  He used to argue that grammar rules are merely descriptive, as opposed to prescriptive, and that we should not take them too seriously.  As long as something was “sayable,” as he put it, it was fine.

I try not to get dogmatic on the blog too often, but he was just wrong.  I’m very much on Team Oxford Comma.  The cartoon here is as good an illustration why as I’ve seen.