Access from Above

The twentieth century gave “re-education camps” a bad name.

(I can’t imagine anyone quoting that out of context…)

But short-term college programs for people who already have bachelor’s degrees (or higher) are looking like the new hot ticket for community colleges and for-profit providers.  Whether you call them “boot camps” or “retraining” or something else, they’re targeting a market that neither sector has historically targeted.

Just this week, Anya Kamenetz did a story on four-month coding bootcamps for NPR, and the president of Sinclair Community College in Ohio, Steven Johnson, tweeted that fully five percent of Sinclair’s credit students have a bachelor’s or higher.  At the AACC this Spring, Kent Phillippe noted that “community college is the new graduate school,” with more bachelor’s grads returning to community college and fewer going on to graduate or law schools.

Taken together, I wonder if we’re starting to see the next great enrollment opportunity.

Community colleges have been tasked with being “open access,” and they resolutely are.  That often involves giving chances to attend college to students who otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance, for any number of reasons.  It also extends to students who’ve taken courses over the years, but never actually finished a degree.  In the 1970’s and 1980’s, many community colleges served influxes of Moms who wanted to return to the workforce, but had to get a degree first.  

They’ve also always served students who could, and did, attend four-year colleges first.  “Reverse transfer,” as it’s known, is much more common than most of the public (and most policymakers) appreciates.  According to the most recent stats from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, over half of the students who transfer from public four-year colleges transfer to community colleges. “Reverse transfer” takes many forms, ranging from the student who partied his way through a first semester away from home to the student who wanted to change direction late in the game.  

Now, we’re getting post-bachelor’s students.  I wouldn’t call them “transfers,” exactly, but they’re similar.  Post-bachelor’s students are usually either foreign students brushing up on ESL before graduate school -- a cohort of its own -- or career changers.  Unsurprisingly, given the ferociousness of the Great Recession, career changers are more common than they used to be.  

Post-bachelor’s students don’t count in our graduation numbers, since they aren’t “first time.”  And our various systems aren’t really built for them.  They don’t need “orientation” in the same sense that first-timers do.  The focus on remediation is irrelevant for them.  They often aren’t eligible for financial aid, which is based on the linear-progression model of degrees.

And that’s where the for-profit providers come in.

As regular readers know, I’ve suggested for years that the logical space for for-profits to try to compete in isn’t the “low” end, where they’re up against untaxed and subsidized community colleges, but the high end.  Some of them are starting to figure that out.  Even some of the MOOC providers have moved away from degrees and towards corporate training, where they can assume that most of the students will already have bachelor’s degrees or higher.

The “access from above” group is still small enough, relative to other groups, that it mostly flies below the radar.  But keep an eye on it.  If community college is the new grad school, let’s do it right.

Coalitions That Don’t Coalesce

No, this isn’t about Greece.  

In response to yesterday’s post, which was tangentially related to a Center for Teaching Excellence, an occasional correspondent wrote to wonder why CTE’s and similar centers with different names often choose to ignore Education faculty on their own campuses.  After all, he noted, their goals are often substantially similar; you would think that people with similar goals and complementary training could work together.

Well, sometimes.

I don’t see this as being specific to CTE’s and Education departments.  That’s one manifestation, but the larger issue is the frequent disconnect between faculty and staff.  For example, take academic advising.  (Please!)  At many colleges, academic advising is a shared responsibility between faculty and staff.  But it’s common for friction to develop between the two groups, despite sharing a common task and, presumably, a common goal.  

Some of that, I think, stems from very different work environments and schedules.  Some of it reflects different mixes of tasks in their respective workloads.  And some of it reflects the usual mix of politics, turf, and history.  The good news is that much of that is potentially amenable to change.

The most basic issue is scheduling.  Yes, there’s a divide between nine-month faculty and twelve-month staff, but it goes beyond that.  For faculty, there’s a pretty predictable rhythm to the semester, with crunch times during which they’re stretched thin.  For staff, the crunch times don’t always align with the faculty’s.  That can create situations on both sides where one thinks of the other “why can’t they just…?,” which leads to resentment and distrust.  

Workloads differ, too.  For full-time advisors, advising is the primary task, and they do a lot of it.  In many cases, they have to be de facto generalists, advising across a wide range of disciplines.  Depending on the structure of the college, and the way that curricular changes are communicated, they may or may not be up to speed on the latest iterations of curricula, simply because there are so many of them.  To faculty who primarily stick to advising in one major, or maybe a few closely related ones, that ‘generalist’ knowledge may look superficial.

For faculty, advising often falls behind teaching in the list of priorities.  I don’t mean that as a criticism; teaching is what they’ve been hired to do.  And I’ve never heard a professor disown the concept of academic advising; if anything, they almost always want it done better.  But in the end-of-semester grading crunch, if something has to give, it’s often the second thing to go.  (The first is committee meetings.)  

I’ve seen colleges try to address the faculty/staff advising divide in a few ways.  One is to pretend it doesn’t exist, which works about as well as that strategy usually does.  A more sophisticated version involves what I call “the handoff.”  In that system, staff advisors handle incoming students registering for their first semester, with the goal of handing them off to faculty in the department in which they’d like to major by the second semester.

The handoff can work, but students tend to resist it.  The students who most need advising -- often first-generation students with spotty academic backgrounds and some issues around both preparation and confidence -- often rise or fall based on having a go-to person at the college.  When they bond with the staff advisor upfront, they don’t want to break that connection and move on to some stranger.  They want to stay with the person with whom they’re comfortable.  

The most effective approach I’ve seen to overcoming the divide is to embed the full-time advising staff in the academic department.  At HCC, we did that in Foundations of Health; a dedicated full-time advisor had an office in the department, attended the department meetings, and was a consistent presence among the faculty.  Students had to go to the department to find her, so they got familiar with the setting and the faces there.  And she was up to speed on all manners curricular.  The faculty knew that -- and her -- and respected her accordingly; the students picked up on that respect, and sought her out.  After a year of that structure, we ran the numbers and found that her advisees had significantly higher retention rates than other advisees.  She’s great, but I think the structure makes it work.

If the administration of a given college pits different work areas against each other, whether deliberately or through negligence, then I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lack of collaboration.  Sometimes what looks like petty personal status anxiety is actually symptomatic of a correct reading of a flawed situation.  Yes, some people are just turfy, but sometimes turfy behavior is rewarded.  If you want to change the behavior, change the rewards.

One admin’s response, anyway.  Wise and worldly readers, what reasons have you seen for rational coalitions that didn’t coalesce?

Knowing Why They Know

Maybe political theorists just have a certain way of thinking.  That might explain it.

Betsy Barre, the Assistant Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Rice (and a fellow political theorist by training), fired off a set of tweets this weekend that made a lot of sense to me.  She was addressing the disconnect between relatively small gender effects in quantitative student evaluations and the relatively large gender effects in qualitative feedback.  In other words, while the “scores” of male and female professors aren’t very different, the comments they get are.  As Barre put it (quoting tweets):

• my completely unscientific guess, given what I have learned from the literature, is that students are relatively good at…
• identifying teaching that helps them learn.  They’re not so great at understanding “why” that teacher helped them learn…
• so in the qualitative comments, they’re reaching for things to explain their intuition.  And when doing this…
• they likely think in gendered ways (in both directions).  This would explain why numbers seem less gendered, at least.

Unscientifically, but with many years of experience of faculty evaluation (and of teaching), I think Barre is onto something.  

Last week, in the post about tolerance for ambiguity, I mentioned watching students in a writing class grasp for words to explain a hunch.  Once they found a cliche, they grabbed it and held on tight; even if it didn’t really work, it offered a sense of familiarity.  It came closer to feeling like an answer than anything else they had at the ready, so they used it.  My job as a teacher was to help them get past that response, and to develop the skill of articulating their own answers.  

But teaching evaluations are supposed to be uncoached, by definition.  (I once received one in which a well-meaning student offered that the class “helped me write more clearer.”  Great…)  In the comments section, students can easily fall back on long-ingrained habits.  

The good news, to the extent that there is good news, is that the unconsciously loaded language doesn’t always go very deep.  When asked to express the same ideas in a different form, such as numerically, the differences shrink notably.  

From a faculty perspective, of course, the larger worry may be less what students write and more how it’s read.  Here, too, Barre got it right: a single, isolated comment about almost anything should probably be disregarded, but if the same issue comes up over and over again, from both good students and bad, there may be something to it.  If I saw one or two students complain about too much reading, I’d write it off to “college is supposed to be hard.”  If a dozen students complained about the professor chronically showing up a half-hour late for class, I’d follow up.

I know it’s an article of faith among many faculty that student evaluations are meaningless at best, but I’ve been struck over the years that they’re usually in the ballpark.  They’re imperfect, of course, and I’d oppose any move to take them as gospel.  But if you observe enough professors, and read enough evaluations, you’ll notice they tend to get it broadly right.  If the sample size is decently large, the wisdom of crowds seems to kick in.  Yes, hot-button social issues can produce some jaw-dropping comments, but they’re less common than you might expect.  

Barre’s juxtaposition of quantitative and qualitative feedback suggests that some of what comes across as biased or inappropriate judgment is, in fact, an artifact of weak writing skills.  From the perspective of over a decade of administrative experience, I think she’s right.  

None of that is meant to discredit or discount claims for social justice.  It’s just to say that when we read student comments, we have to remember that we’re reading student writers.  Student writers tend to fall into certain traps.  They know what they want to convey, but they don’t always know why they know, or how to explain it in language that people with graduate degrees would consider appropriate.  When they shift to another register -- numbers -- they become more surefooted.

Thank you, Professor Barre, for connecting the dots.  And sorry for the cliche.

(Situational) Tolerance for Ambiguity

Jeff Selingo has a good piece about the importance of “tolerance for ambiguity” as an employment skill.  He situates it in the context of his early days in journalism, when an editor basically dropped him off in a small town and told him to find, and write, a story by five o’clock.  Selingo notes that much of the work world involves the ability to figure out what needs to be done before anyone tells you, and that instilling that skill is part of the task of higher education.

I like the piece, and there’s a lot to it.  But in thinking about my own tolerance for ambiguity, I wouldn’t call it high or low.  It varies, and I think the major independent variable is my own feeling of competence in the situation.  When I feel like I can handle whatever the situation is likely to throw at me, ambiguity isn’t a problem.  When I’m utterly lost, ambiguity can feel threatening.  The key issue isn’t so much ambiguity or the lack thereof, but its possible outcome and my own sense of vulnerability.

If that’s broadly correct, then part of what we need to do for students is to instill some confidence that they can find solutions.

When I move to a new place -- something very much on my mind of late -- I make a point of getting lost several times.  I’ll drive around without a clear mission, or sometimes just take roads to see where they go.  It’s when I don’t necessarily know where I’m going that I discover surprising shortcuts, or places along the way that I wouldn’t have expected.  But I can do that because I have a basic faith that one way or another, I’ll find my way back to civilization. Now, of course, GPS can be useful as a safety net, but it still lacks the pedagogical power of engaged improvisation.

I don’t have that same confidence with, say, engine repair.  It would be nice if I did, but I don’t.  In that area, my sense of my own competence is shaky enough that the prospect of just taking parts out and seeing what happens isn’t appealing.  

In my teaching days, I remember noticing that when controversial topics came up -- when you teach political theory, there’s no way around that -- students would often flail verbally, more or less free associating, until they found a cliche that seemed to apply.  Once they had that, they held onto it tenaciously, using it as a weapon against any alternatives.  

It took me a while to figure out why they did that.  The cliche felt familiar and solid.  It offered clarity in the face of a charged and confusing discussion.  “I don’t know much, but I know this.”  I wound up spending most of the semester trying to help them get past that first impulse and to let themselves get a little bit lost in unfamiliar territory.  Until they were willing to wander -- which involved building a level of trust -- they wouldn’t really learn.

New graduates, when they get their first “adult” jobs, may fall into that same trap.  That’s part of the value of internship or co-op experiences.  If they can get some exposure to the culture of a professional workplace when the stakes are relatively low, then they’re less likely to make really mortifying rookie mistakes when the stakes are higher.  And to the extent that we can provide assignments and experiences in and among classes that give students the experience of getting a little lost and finding their way back, we may be able to build some of that tolerance for ambiguity in the kind of settings Selingo discusses.

Wise and worldly readers, have you found relatively effective ways to help students gain confidence that they can wander, without falling off a cliff?

A Trend I Never Thought I’d See

Between getting older and having a teenage son, I’m gaining a new perspective on trends.  The Boy complained yesterday about a meme that “has been around forever -- it’s two months old, at least!”  I’ve had library books longer than that.  

I’ve shown him some of my pictures from the 80’s, to hilarity all around.  (“Nice hair, Dad!”)  He seemed surprised when I didn’t rise to a spirited defense of 80’s pop; try as I might, I just can’t work up a lather defending the honor of Wang Chung.  Whether everybody in fact wang chungs tonight is none of my concern.

That said, I’m seeing a trend of late that I never thought I’d see.  Tuition is being frozen in some states, and, in others, actually reduced.

In my experience, “tuition” and “cut” don’t occur in the same sentence.  “Budget” and “cut” do, or “appropriation” and “cut.”  But “tuition” and “cut” is new.

Even more surprising, the trend seems to have bipartisan support.  Oregon and Tennessee have done variations on “free,” and now Washington and Minnesota are doing tuition cuts.  Even Ohio is doing a two-year tuition freeze.

In the words of the single best band of the 80’s, color me impressed.  

As someone who has spent years trying to work within community college budgets, I’m naturally concerned about the sustainability of the trend.  To the extent that it relies on solid commitments by states and realistic projections of underlying cost increases, I’m all for it.  To the extent that it’s a sort of political mood swing, I’m concerned about colleges’ ability to weather the next recession; experience suggests that tuition controls will last longer than appropriation increases will.  And to the extent that it forces community colleges to be even more austere than they already are, I’m alarmed.  

Still, the direction is encouraging, at least in the short term.  

In younger days -- see the earlier reference to hair -- I used to think that sticker price didn’t matter much, as long as the aid was there.  And there’s a sense in which that’s true.  But both politicians and much of the public never really understood the high-tuition, high-aid model.  (To be fair, they weren’t always wrong.)  If behavioral economics has taught us anything, it’s that certain kinds of gimmicks actually work.  Headlines like “Tuition Cut!” can break through the noise and resonate with people in ways that, say, increases to Pell grants don’t.  And I say that as a HUGE fan of increases to Pell grants.  I see the simple clarity of a tuition freeze or cut as the higher ed equivalent of “No payments for 90 days!”  It may not be optimally efficient, but if it works, it works.  And we need whatever public support we can get.

In my perfect world, community and public colleges will use the relative respite from cuts to implement changes to their operations to make them more effective and sustainable, so when the next storm comes -- and it will -- we’ll be better prepared.  

I’d also like to see certain states -- not naming any names here -- take lessons from Ohio, Tennessee, Oregon, Washington, and Minnesota.  A little peer pressure isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  If we can switch the ‘default’ setting from tuition increases to tuition cuts, and do it without taking it out of the hides of the staff, well, that would be the most positive trend in quite a while.

The Boy’s memory of trends may be shallow, but mine is deep enough to withhold judgment on whether this is the dawn of a new normal, or the policy version of a one-hit wonder.  But I will say it’s one of the most hopeful developments I’ve seen in years.  Kudos to the states taking the lead.  With luck, this trend might just outlast the long-lost mullet.

Big Fat Hairy Facts

Yesterday’s post, co-written with Susanna Williams, got some unexpected and very welcome backup from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.  The post was a response to a piece by Harry Holzer, of AIR, arguing that community colleges are preventing students from succeeding.  Among the highlights of the new report:

87 percent of students who transfer from a community college to a four-year college in the US do so before earning a credential at the community college.  They show up in the community college’s numbers as dropouts, even as they go on to graduate with bachelor’s degrees.

51.3 percent of students who transfer out of public four-year colleges transfer TO community colleges.  It’s actually more common than a “lateral” transfer.

18.5 percent of students who transfer from community colleges cross state lines, evading state-level data collection.  24 percent of students who transfer from four-year colleges do the same.

I swear that Susanna and I had no idea it was coming when we wrote yesterday’s post.  But it provides wonderful empirical confirmation.

In policy circles, you sometimes hear discussion of Big Fat Hairy Ideas.  They’re the enormous goals, or underlying theories, around which everything else gets organized.  Alternately, they’re the unconscious and unexamined assumptions that most people take as given.

But sometimes, some Big Fat Hairy Facts come along and show that the reigning Big Fat Hairy Ideas are simply wrong.  They’re empirically false.  The “difficult truths” that some claim we need to face up to, aren’t truths at all.

The test of intellectual honesty is in whether one is willing to revisit the “givens” in light of new facts.

We mentioned yesterday that judging community colleges entirely in light of graduation rates was a category error, since many students attend community colleges intending to do a year and then transfer.  As it happens, “many” is the overwhelming majority of students who transfer.  We were more right than we knew.

Getting the meaning of the graduation rate wrong leads to other errors.  For example, the “undermatching” thesis, which is popular in policy circles, takes the original measurement error and layers the ecological fallacy on top of it.  It assumes that a student attending a college with a twenty percent graduation rate has only a twenty percent chance of graduating.  Therefore, partisans of the undermatching thesis conclude, colleges with low graduation rates should be avoided.

As flawed arguments go, it’s a whopper, but it’s widely held.  It plays to certain popular prejudices -- race, class, academic prestige -- and it gets seeming confirmation from a statistic that looks simple and transparent.  And it leads to a conclusion that tends to flatter people in high places.  Some folks who should know better -- people I otherwise respect -- embrace the “undermatching” thesis.

They shouldn’t.  It’s thoroughly bunk, and now we have proof.

Partisans of the undermatching thesis could never explain just how it’s possible that 46 percent of bachelor’s degree holders in America attended community college, which almost perfectly matches the percentage of undergraduates in America who attend community college.  If community colleges are fatal to degree ambitions, why do so many people with bachelor’s degrees have cc experience?  How is that mathematically possible?

Now we know.  It’s because 87 percent of the cc students who transfer to four-year schools don’t bother completing the two-year degree first.  They do a year or so, and then move on.  Even if they finish the total package in four years, they show up as dropouts, and policy wonks wring their hands about difficult truths.  A performance funding mechanism that ignores the 87 percent in the name of “accountability” is ironic at best.

And that’s before addressing the ecological fallacy.  In the piece we examined yesterday, Harry Holzer managed simultaneously to base his argument on undermatching while -- at the same time -- acknowledging that cc graduation rates are very different for high-achieving high school grads, as opposed to low-achieving ones.  It’s an impressive feat of cognitive dissonance.  

As anyone on a community college campus knows, different profiles of students succeed -- whether defined as passing, transferring, or graduating -- at different rates.  Any competent sociologist could predict the fault lines.  The overall rate for an institution reflects the mathematically average student, but actual students are different.  Success rates are higher for women than men, for whites and Asians than African-Americans or Latinos, for full-time students than part-time, and so on.  The undermatching thesis holds that subaltern status somehow rubs off.  I can’t even.

No.  The discussion to have about public higher education, especially but not only community colleges, should not be around how to discredit them.  It should be around how to help them do right by their students.  For all of public higher education’s flaws -- regular readers have seen me mention a few -- the fact that it serves the public that actually exists isn’t one of them.  That’s a feature, not a bug.  

If we want accountability, let’s start with accountability for accuracy.  The “undermatching” thesis holds no water.  Let it go.  And let’s focus policy discussions instead on ways to help the students who actually exist, succeed.  They’re worth it.  That’s a big fat hairy fact.

Choking on AIR

(This post was co-written with Susanna Williams)

“Overly high attendance rates at community colleges are part of a larger problem…” - Harry Holzer, AIR Institute Fellow

In an Intro to Philosophy class so many years ago, a professor told the story of the turtles.  A student asked what held the world up, and the teacher responded that the world sat on the back of a turtle.  The student asked what the turtle stood on, and the teacher said it was on another turtle.  Anticipating the question, the teacher said that it’s turtles all the way down.

Our response to this piece from AIR is “no,” all the way down.  It’s so severely wrong that it needs a full-throated rebuttal.  

The argument is a tangled mess, but as near as we can discern, it relies on several elements:

• Graduation rates at community colleges are abysmal, therefore we should encourage high-achieving students to pursue degrees at four-year institutions where they have a better chance of finding success.

• Students fail to attend colleges worthy of their academic potential mostly because they are “so unfamiliar with the postsecondary world” that they don’t know any better than to just attend the school they’re most familiar with, either through proximity or affordability.

• If only students had better information, they would make the right choice, i.e. the school with the best graduation rate.

Even on its own terms, though, the argument is confused.  Holzer notes that “high achieving” high school grads do far better than “low achieving” ones, then somehow concludes that community colleges should be left to low achievers.  

To get there, he relies on the idea of “undermatching.”  The theory behind “undermatching” is that talented students will rise or fall to the level of the college they attend, so if they attend lower-level colleges than they’re capable of, they’ll leave talent on the table.

It’s a difficult argument on a good day.  A study by Scott Heil, Liza Reisel, and Paul Attewell published in AERA in 2014 found “no evidence that students who do not attend highly selective colleges suffer reduced chances of graduation as a result, all else being equal.”  A 2015 report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center showed that “46 percent of all students who completed a four-year degree had been enrolled at a two-year institution at some point in the past 10 years.”  If community colleges are truly deathtraps to ambition, then it’s hard to explain why the proportion of BA grads with community college experience almost exactly matches the percentage of American undergrads attending community colleges.  The math simply does not work.

Part of the issue is the easy-but-false equation of graduation with success.  As those of us in the trenches know, many students who attend community colleges don’t intend to graduate from them.  Instead, they intend to do a year and then transfer to a four-year college. (The language of “degree-seeking students” doesn’t capture that nuance.  These students are seeking degrees, just not there.)   A student who does that and subsequently graduates with a BA shows up in the cc’s numbers as a dropout, even though the student got what she came for.  That student will show up in the 46 percent figure from the NSCRC, but will show up on the negative side of a community college’s graduation rate.  Counting that as failure is measurement error.

Holzer compounds the mistake with a gratuitous swipe at humanities majors at community colleges, noting that their “market premiums” are negligible.  

No, no, no.  Wrong all the way down.

English majors at community colleges are intended for transfer.  That’s their purpose.  They should be measured on the academic success of their graduates at subsequent four-year schools.  Filtering out the high achievers -- which is what you do statistically when you exclude the earnings of students who transfer and subsequently earn higher degrees and salaries -- is measurement error of another order entirely.   How would Harvard’s alumni earnings look if we filtered out everyone who went on to law school, med school or business school?  

The assumption that community colleges prevent success is not based on evidence -- the evidence decisively shows otherwise -- but on a larger assumption about a Great Chain of Being.  If you assume that exclusivity defines quality, then it follows by definition that any college with open admissions must be terrible.  Never join a club that would accept you as a member.  If Yale is the model, then Gateway Community College can only be explained as a deviation.  

But a single Great Chain of Being assumes that every student has the same goals.  They don’t.  It also assumes that every student who wants to go to Yale, can.  They can’t.  And it assumes that failing to attend Yale is a sign of a lack of academic seriousness.  That’s false, though if we continue to fund colleges by that assumption, it could become self-fulfilling.

The logic of the “undermatching” thesis leads inexorably -- and, some of us suspect, deliberately -- to a sort of Darwinist culling of the colleges that serve the most diverse student bodies.  Performance funding schemes get applied to community colleges, with their low-income and multiracial student populations, yet flagships -- much wealthier and whiter --  escape similar scrutiny.   Given the relative costs, and the weight of evidence, that can’t be explained without reference to some much larger, and more charged, issues of stratification.

American higher education has its issues, heaven knows, but  shunting all high-achieving students to schools with better graduation rates isn’t the solution.  If we’re truly concerned about maximizing student success, why should we assume that success will only ever be possible at one of a few, deliberately exclusive places?  Why not provide the resources to help colleges do a better job where they are and where the students are?  The problem with American higher education isn’t that there’s too much of it.  It’s that we haven’t made a priority of making sure that it’s worthy of every student, including those who don’t look like Whiffenpoofs.The answer isn’t letting more students into the club. It’s eliminating the club altogether.

Green Shoots

The Oregon House and Senate have approved a bill co-sponsored by Rep. Mark Johnson, Republican from Hood River, and Sen. Mark Hass, Democrat from Beaverton, to waive most tuition at Oregon community colleges for many students.  The bill passed both chambers with veto-proof majorities, and everyone expects Governor Kate Brown to sign it into law.

By their own admission, Rep. Johnson and Sen. Hass followed in Tennessee’s footsteps.  

The program is limited to relatively recent high school graduates with high school GPA’s of at least 2.5.   As with Tennessee’s, it’s designed as a “last dollar” program, meaning that students first have to apply for, and use, any other grants or scholarships for which they’re eligible; the state will fill in the gap between whatever grants they receive and the cost of tuition, minus a fifty dollar per course deductible.  (They don’t call it a deductible, but it works like one.)

The idea is to make it easier for new high school graduates to get post-secondary training or education at a low-cost but respected institution.  

In broad outline, I like the idea a lot.  It owes a lot to Sara Goldrick-Rab’s F2CO proposal from a couple of years ago, with a few tweaks to make it fit Oregon’s budget.  The relative simplicity of the policy -- fifty bucks a course -- makes it an easy sell to students and families who are understandably wary of student loans.  Assuming a 60 credit degree and three credits per class, that’s 20 classes at 50 bucks a pop, for a total of $1,000 for the first two years of college.  If you’re taking a “terminal” degree or certificate with direct workforce applicability, then you’re getting a potentially significant lifetime wage bump for a thousand dollars.  If you’re transferring, you’ll almost certainly start your junior year without debt.  

As the ad used to say, if you can find a better deal, take it.  

From a student perspective, the program’s flaws are minor.  Unlike Goldrick-Rab’s original proposal, it doesn’t include support for living expenses, books, and the like, so actual costs are higher than fifty bucks a class.  I’m guessing the fifty bucks per class will be out-of-pocket, which could cause issues for some students, but a college with a forward-looking foundation -- hint, hint -- could easily make that up for students with hardships.  Many students require more than sixty credits to graduate, given remediation, ESL needs, and/or stopouts.  And adult students are out of luck, at least for the time being.  Though I wouldn’t be surprised to see the program expand its reach if it proves successful.

Institutionally, the reports I’ve seen don’t shed much light.  From the inside, I’d be concerned about increased demand with capped or decreased revenue.  If the state has to cover the gap between Federal aid and the price of tuition (minus deductible), then I’d imagine the state would want to control tuition pretty tightly.  Unless the package comes with significant increases in operating aid-- and commitments to sustain those increases over time -- a seeming bargain to students could come at the cost of hollowing out the institutions to which they’re gaining access.  

Rep. Johnson and Sen. Hass point out, correctly, that a few thousand dollars of community college tuition is far cheaper over time than years on food stamps.  If they can sustain a consensus around that perspective -- as the bumper sticker used to put it, “if you think education is expensive, try ignorance” -- the program could actually work.

Over time, I’d expect to see the program evolve in several ways.  If the program works, I’d expect to see older students included.  If competency-based education gains steam in Oregon, the funding mechanism will have to change.  But the real test will come with the next recession.  In recessions, state aid goes down and enrollments go up.  That could put a fatal pincer movement on the funding mechanism.  Obviously, it would be lovely if we never had a recession again, but hope is not a plan.

Still, in a period when public higher education is only starting to recover from the devastating blows of a fiscal meltdown, Tennessee and Oregon represent green shoots.  Good ideas are starting to take root, sometimes in places I wouldn’t have expected.  Hope is not a plan, but it’s something.  Well done, Oregon.

Like a Phoenix from the...oh, wait…

The University of Phoenix continues to shrink.  It’s on the downside of the same dynamic that propelled it upwards so quickly.  And it’s paying for a bad call made about ten years ago, that may take another ten years to undo.

Phoenix grew by serving a niche that traditional higher education usually ignored.  And its business model was based on three major factors: the availability of financial aid, charging more than the marginal cost of production, and feeding investor expectations.  The last two are different enough from what non-profits do that they’re often misunderstood.

For-profits generally eschew many of the “student life” trappings that many people blame for the tuition spiral. (I’ve never seen a for-profit with a football team, a climbing wall, or a lazy river.)  They charge more than community or state colleges, but often less than elite nonprofits.  They keep non-marketing expenses as low as they can, and sell the prospect of growth to their investors.

When enrollments are climbing, all is well.  Because they charge more than the cost of production, growth more than pays for itself.  It isn’t a cost, as it often is in the public sector.  That means that when a hot opportunity comes along -- IT in the 90’s, say -- the for-profits can swoop in much more quickly, and at greater scale, than publics can.  They have private investment capital for infrastructure, and the prospect of steadily increasing profits keeps the capital flowing in.

Phoenix hit the limits of its niche in the early 2000’s.  Historically, it had required students to be at least 21 or 25, and to be employed.  By being relatively selective, it was able to ensure at least some level of quality control.

But by the early 2000’s, the 90’s tech boom had subsided, and the publics were starting to make their presence felt with online and weekend programs.  In other words, UoP’s niche was getting crowded.  Because it only makes sense when it’s growing -- “stability” reads as “stagnation” in the capital markets -- it decided to throw the doors open to keep the growth moving.  That “worked,” for a while, in the narrow sense that it allowed enrollments to keep growing for a few more years and keep investors happy.  But it eviscerated what quality control the institution had.  Over time, higher attrition and unhappy graduates (and employers of graduates) chipped away at the reputation.  Add an administration with a bone to pick, and suddenly the underpinnings of the business model started to fail.

When non-profits decline, they often have sources of income other than tuition.  (Sweet Briar’s alumnae fundraising drive leaps to mind.)  For-profits don’t have that; when enrollments flag, investor interest flags even faster.  Investors behave differently than alums.  Rather than bailing out the sinking ship, they flee.  Instead of blunting the impact of decline, they magnify it.

The real mistake, I think, was when it chose the wrong path for continued growth.  It tried to compete with community colleges, which have significant cost advantages.  (At a basic level, they’re subsidized and untaxed.  It’s hard to compete with that.)  Instead, it could have used the boom times to focus on getting more selective and improving both retention and reputation.  During the boom, they wouldn’t have had to choose between growth and improvement; they could have had both.  Then, when the boom ended, they would have been in a very different market position.

In most other sectors of the economy in which for-profit and public entities compete, the for-profits take the high end and the publics take the low end.  Most for-profit higher ed has focused on the low end, and now, they’re watching community colleges eat their lunch.  They missed a chance to legitimize themselves.

They still have the option, of course, but it’s harder now.  The much-maligned statement that they’re expecting enrollment declines actually gives me hope; it suggests that they’re in touch with reality.  Getting selective will likely cut short-term enrollment even more than otherwise, but over the long term, it’s the best chance for survival.  And frankly, if for-profits were to compete on quality and force everyone else to raise their game, there wouldn’t be much reason to object to them.

Good luck, Phoenix.  It’ll be a rough ride, but it’s possible.

In Which I Discuss Political Economy With a Ten Year Old

The Girl is ten -- almost eleven, she would prefer I say -- and curious.  The book she was reading last night contained a reference to the Great Depression.  I was in the room at the time.  Conversation ensued.  In my defense, this was entirely impromptu.

TG: Dad, what was the Great Depression?

Me: It was a period of about ten years when the economy really didn’t work well.  There weren’t enough jobs, and lots of people were poor.

TG: Why?

Me: It’s complicated.

TG: Tell me!

Me: Okay, well, people sort of ran out of money, so they stopped buying things.  When that happened, businesses couldn’t sell things, so they stopped making things and they fired the people who had made things.  Then those people couldn’t buy things, so it got worse.

TG: How did they run out of money?

Me: Well, they borrowed too much, and couldn’t pay it back.  Then they stopped buying things, and the companies that make things went out of business.  Then the people who worked at those companies lost their jobs, so they stopped buying things, and so on.

TG: It’s like a spiral.

Me: Exactly.

TG: How did we get out of it?

Me: World War Two, mostly.  And the New Deal.

TG: World War Two?  How did that help?

Me: The government borrowed a lot of money, and used it to pay soldiers, and to pay people who worked in factories making planes and guns.  Once people had money, they spent it, which created demand for stuff.  Then companies had to hire more people to make stuff, and the spiral moved upwards.

TG: So a war did something good?

Me: Unintentionally, yes.

TG: What was the other thing?

Me: The New Deal?

TG: That!

Me: A lot of programs.  It was when Social Security started.  That’s where the government gives money to retired people or old people.  The idea is that they’ll spend it on stuff.  That will create demand for stuff, so companies that make stuff will have to hire people.  

TG: But didn’t they always do that?

Me: No.

TG: So what did retired people do?

Me: Lived with their kids, mostly.

TG: That’s stupid.  Where do they get the money for Social Security?

Me: Taxes, mostly.  And some they borrow.

TG: Why?  Why can’t they just print money?

Me: It doesn’t work like that.

TG: Why not?  They have machines that print money.  I saw them at the mint!  Remember?

Me: Well, yeah, but if they print too much, it becomes worthless.

TG: What?

Me: Some countries tried that, and it didn’t work.  You needed a wheelbarrow full of money to get a cup of coffee.

TG: But the government is money!  Why do they have to tax people for it?  They can just make more!

Me: Imagine if everyone had all the money they wanted.  Would anyone go to work?

TG: Oh yeah.  I guess nobody would make anything.

Me: Exactly.  With lots of money but nothing to buy, money is worthless.  They can’t just print it whenever they want more.

TG: Oh.  I wonder what’s in Area 51...