What Seems Obvious at First Glance Is, In Fact, Still Obvious When You Look Closely

A new study found that more prestigious colleges and universities are no better at teaching than less prestigious ones.

To which this Williams College grad who works at a community college says, “Duh.”

Yes, the study had necessary limits.  It was based on single-day observations of hundreds of classes.  We’ve all had good days and bad, though I would expect that those variations would come out in the wash.  It was based on a five-point rubric, on which the elites won on “cognitive complexity of the course work,” and the non-elites won on what amounts to engaging students with the material.  Overall, the differences were a wash; as the study puts it in the title, “prestige is a mirage.”

Yes and no.  In the classroom, mostly yes.

Prestigious places tend to be selective, which is to say, they tend only to let in students who have shown the ability to be very successful in traditional high school settings.  These are the students who take lots of Honors classes, run clubs, volunteer, and get high grades.  Students like that are good at school; if they weren’t, they wouldn’t get in.  That frees up faculty to spend relatively little time worrying about pedagogy; they can just present the material and trust that most of the students will get it.  At Rutgers, for example, many undergraduate classes were so large that there wasn’t much choice but to lecture.  Lectures can be “cognitively complex” at a very high level.

When I taught at DeVry, though, I had to unlearn the teaching methods I had picked up at Rutgers, and pick up a whole new set.  These students generally weren’t good at school, or if they were, they didn’t know it.  They didn’t need to have certainties deconstructed; they needed to feel like there was a point in even trying.  I learned quickly, and the hard way, the difference between “what I say” and “what they hear.”  I had to shift focus.  Instead of showing unexpected nuance and depth to a seemingly simple issue (in the ‘90’s, we called that “problematizing”), I had to bring clarity to what was otherwise a frustrating fog.  That’s a different task, requiring different methods.  Lecture had to be cut into small pieces, interspersed among as many applications as possible.  

After a couple of years of teaching at DeVry, I was a far better teacher than I had ever been at Rutgers.  At a basic level, it mattered more.  The top students there -- and there were some -- got some pretty terrific classes, if I do say so myself, and I wasn’t the best teacher there.  

At research universities, faculty are hired and promoted based on research.  I had professors in grad school tell me openly and without shame to minimize the amount of time I spent on teaching, in order to spend more time writing.  In a culture like that, I’m not shocked to discover that much of the teaching is done by lecture.  

Where the “prestige” piece is more relevant is outside of class.  That’s where the ‘signaling’ piece of a selective degree comes into play.  But inside class, I’m not shocked to hear that the gap is small, when it exists at all.  And given the academic job market of the last twenty years, teaching-intensive places have been able to hire from the same pool that the elites have; by now, you can get “cognitively complex” faculty at every level.  

I’d love to see legislatures take teaching seriously when they allocate funding among the sectors; parity on a per-FTE basis would go a long way.  If this study helps make that case, I’m all for it.  In the meantime, though, some scientifically-backed respect is welcome.  

Meta-Majors, Sampler Platters, and Sneaky Ambition

High-toned liberal arts colleges often like to have interdisciplinary freshman seminars.  Community colleges generally can’t, partly because our definition of “freshmen” is more heterogeneous -- does the freshman year start at enrollment, or when developmental classes are done?  what about for dual enrollment students? -- but mostly because anything interdisciplinary often won’t transfer.  

That’s more a function of neglect and bureaucracy than conspiracy.  Many four-year schools have checklists into which courses must fall to be accepted.  If a course doesn’t fit a category neatly, it either doesn’t make the cut at all, or makes it only as a “free elective.”  Free elective status is where credits go to die.  So we can run Intro to American Government all we want, but, say, The Politics of Protest Movements is a non-starter.

The gap in first-year course ambitions has stuck in my craw for years.  If quirky and interesting first-year courses are available to the elites, they should be available to everybody.  Fair is fair.  

So that’s the starting point with which I came to the idea of meta-majors.  As I understand them, meta-majors and guided pathways are related and complementary attempts to improve student success rates by being much more prescriptive with entering students.  In practice, the idea is to make the transfer checklist the ‘default’ setting for student course selection.  If students are kept on the straight and narrow, the theory goes, they’re less likely to get lost.  If they only take courses that count, they’ll make progress more quickly, and be likelier to finish.  

Meta-majors and guided pathways strike me as very promising ways to improve student success, both at the community college and upon subsequent transfer.  But they’re vulnerable to the critique that they “solve” the tyranny of the checklist by surrendering to it.  They seem to sacrifice adventure for safety.

Unless…

(People who know me know to get a little nervous when I start a sentence with either “unless…” or “what if…”)

Unless the Big Intro course -- the meta-major -- is interdisciplinary and ambitious in its own right.

The most effective meta-major class I’ve seen was the Intro to Health Careers class at Holyoke.  It was a sampler platter of the various occupations within the allied health field, taught on the assumption that many students who had identified nursing as a career goal didn’t know that many other options even exist.  They’d spend some time learning about other roles in the industry, with the goal of finding the one that fits them best.  Some students peeled off into social work, some into nutrition, some into public health, some into medical coding.  The ones who continued with nursing were fewer, but better chosen; after a couple of years, both the diversity of the nursing class and the NCLEX pass rate went up.  When students who actually wanted to be nurses were the ones in the nursing track, they did better.  That’s not surprising; they wanted it more.

Okay, you say, but what does that have to do with the rest of the curriculum?  How would that work in, say, humanities?

And that’s where I sneak my ambitious little friend, interdisciplinarity, back into the plan.

Imagine a Humanities 101 course along the ‘sampler platter’ model, but with a theme.  For example, with “Love” as a theme, the class could offer glimpses into “love in art,” “love in music,” “love in literature,” and the like.  (And before anyone cracks the inevitable joke, no, “Love” will not be a lab class.)  The social sciences could use money, sex, or power.  If you can’t find something interesting among those three topics, well, I just don’t know what to tell you.  Building the sampler platter class around a hook would give it some coherence, would allow faculty to branch out a bit from always doing the same old thing, and would likely give the students a reason to care.  

If the meta-major class is part of a package, it’s likelier to transfer.  And if it helps students identify their interests early on, and thereby to make more strategic course selections as they go, it’s likely to reinforce the ‘guided pathways’ structure.  In other words, we may not have to choose between ambition and safety.  We could have both.

Wise and worldly readers, what do you think?  Could a meta-major structure offer the venue for community college students to get a meaningful version of what students at elite places get?  

Friday Fragments

The Girl won third place for her age group in the costume contest at the Freehold Halloween parade. She went as a “weeping angel,” from Dr. Who.

For non-Whoovians, the weeping angels were the villains in a particularly memorable episode.  They look like stone statues as long as you look at them, but if you look away or even blink, they move quickly.  If they get to you, they send you back in time so far that by the time the present rolls around again, you’ve died.  The episode is better than it needs to be, with a strong female lead and a plot that moves deftly between sweet and creepy.

As we marched through the borough, we kept hearing people yell from the sidewalk “don’t blink!”  TG was gratified that her costume was recognized as often as it was.

Parents of girls know how difficult it can be to find costumes that are compelling and scary without being inappropriately sexual.  The weeping angel did the trick.  TW constructed the wings over several days, using foamboard and the sticks usually used to stir cans of paint.  She ordered the mask online, but painted it dark gray to match the wings.  

We may not have much longer before Halloween parties replace trick-or-treating.  They already have for The Boy.  So don’t mind if I hold on to this for a little while.  They grow up quickly when you look away, or even blink.

--

As regular readers know, I’m a fan of podcasts.  If you listen on any sort of regular basis, check out the latest episode (#38) of “post-bougie.”  It features an interview with Tressie McMillan Cottom that starts with reflections on the 50th anniversary of the Moynihan report but quickly branches out into a much broader discussion of race in America.  The audio isn’t what it could be, but tough it out; the discussion is funny, scathing, relevant, and wise.  

--

On Thursday I had a faculty meeting in the campus auditorium.  I mention it because the auditorium had been a haunted house the week before, and some of the decorations were still up.

I’d never had a faculty meeting in a haunted room before, with headless bodies in the corner and uncanny mannikins in a row in the back.  It sort of puts things into perspective.

--

Finally, a hearty “hear, hear!” to Lee Skallerup Bessette’s piece earlier this week about IHE as a sort of Island of Misfit Toys for writers about higher education.  Part of the reason I started blogging -- back in 2004 -- was frustration at not seeing my daily reality reflected anywhere in either the popular press or the higher ed press.  Scott Jaschik reached out and offered a platform when nobody else did.  

Widely-read platforms open to people from non-elite places are few and fleeting.  The Chronicle has pretty much let its blog section wither, and sites like Grantland shut down on a whim.  IHE has been steadfast in its support of those of us who don’t write from Harvard or a foundation.  Thanks, Scott.

Degree-Seeking, But Not Here

In a meeting Wednesday, a professor raised a great point.  When we ask students to declare whether they're "degree-seeking," why don't we divide them into two groups: "degree seeking here" and "degree seeking elsewhere."  

Before anyone jumps in and says "visiting students!," let me clarify.  The issue here isn't the student who's full-time at Flagship State and takes an intersession class here to transfer it over when she goes back in the Spring.  That student is a visiting student, and we already have a category for that.  That's the easy case.

The harder case is the student who starts at a community college with every intention of transferring after a year to a four-year school.  That student is using the community college as a springboard -- nothing wrong with that -- and saving thousands of dollars while getting the same eventual degree.  But in the meantime, she shows up in our numbers as a dropout, as if the community college did something wrong.  And she doesn't show up in the four-year school's graduation rate at all.

But the financial aid rules, let alone IPEDS data, don't make such fine-grained distinctions.  As far as they're concerned, "degree-seeking" means "degree-seeking here."  And that leads to some serious reality gaps.

For example, when we speak of "transfer," people usually assume that it refers to a community college student moving on to a four-year school cleanly, degree in hand.  And sometimes it means exactly that.  But more often, it means one of the following: going from cc to four-year before completing the first degree; going from one cc to another; going from a four-year to a cc ("reverse transfer"); or sometimes taking classes at two places simultaneously, even while being "matriculated" at only one of them. (That last one is a financial aid nightmare, since students can only receive Federal aid at one school at a time.) Recently, some studies have shown a surprising number of bachelor's grads coming back to cc's with four-year degrees already in hand, retooling for new careers.  They aren't technically "transfers," but they're becoming common enough that we'll need to develop terms and policies for them.  They don't fit cleanly into policies designed with first-time, full-time, 18 year old students in mind.

In states with "performance funding," obviously, getting the numbers meaningfully wrong has direct consequences.  But even in states that don't have performance funding yet, the damage to public image, and the misconceptions held by policymakers, can be significant.  

One response is to simply junk everything that doesn't fit policymakers' assumptions, and then to bask in press adoration as pretty numbers stream in.  I'll call that the Guttman Community College strategy.  It works as far as it goes, but it works mostly because it excludes.  It's a fascinating proof of concept, but not a serious alternative in most places.

A second response is to shrug, let fly some snark about politicians, and brace for impact.  I'll call that the default strategy.  I'm not a fan; fatalism is selfish, and too many people are depending on community colleges to just give up.  

My preferred response is an admittedly awkward combination of trying to improve our own results while simultaneously educating the public and policymakers as to how things actually work.  It isn't as simple or elegant as the first two, but it has the advantage of being both ethical and possible.  Difficult, but possible.

In the meantime, I'll keep nagging the Feds to amend "degree-seeking" to add a second flavor: degree-seeking, but not here.

A Question for Four-Year Colleges

Why do so many four-year colleges balk at taking internship credits in transfer?

A Good Idea Gets Traction

In grad school, I remember people speaking the term “teaching college” with a sneer, and the term “community college” not at all.  This was back in the 90’s, when we were still expecting the “great wave of retirements” to open up so many tenure-track jobs that graduate programs were ramping up admissions to address the looming labor shortage.

So, yeah.

The world was already changing, though we didn’t know it yet.  The gap between what we thought would happen and what actually happened was catastrophic.  

That’s why I was happy to see that the Mellon Foundation is funding a program through CUNY to get graduate students exposed to the realities of teaching in community colleges.  The CUNY partnership isn’t the first to do something along those lines.  Over the past couple of years, Paula Krebs at Bridgewater State (MA) put together the New England Cross-Sector Partnership to get graduate programs talking to teaching-intensive institutions in the name of better preparing their students for the jobs that actually exist. She has put together a series of conferences for grad students at research universities to get tips and feedback from people at teaching-intensive places on both the realities of teaching at regional publics and community colleges, and how best to market themselves to them.  When I was at Holyoke, we even co-presented on the partnership at the League for Innovation, along with Vanessa Ryan, from Brown.  The idea is out there.  When I left New England, I couldn’t participate actively in the partnership anymore, though I understand it has had successful followup conferences at UMass-Amherst.

The CUNY proposal takes advantage of geographic proximity, and sheer scale, to formalize something similar.  In CUNY’s case, grad students will shadow community college faculty for a semester, and then teach their own courses in the community college.  The grad students will get exposure not only to students, but to institutional cultures.

From the perspective of someone who has been hiring community college faculty for over a decade, I can attest that candidates who know the terrain have an advantage over candidates who don’t.  It’s one thing to “love to teach,” and it’s another to love to teach five classes a semester to students whose academic preparation levels range widely.  Some people thrive on the challenge, while others can’t wait to escape to something more prestigious or research-focused.  Neither is wrong, exactly, but the fit can be.  

Where the New England Partnership tried to go, and where I hope the CUNY partnership goes, is in taking back the insights gained through teaching and changing the graduate programs accordingly.  Excellent college teachers aren’t second-rate researchers; they’re first-rate teachers.  But too many graduate programs still treat teaching as either a chore or an afterthought.  If the CUNY graduate school treats this as little more than job placement, then it will miss a real opportunity.

I’ll use my own discipline as an example.  Most community colleges in the US have a course like “Intro to American Government,” but I’ve never heard of a graduate class on “How to Teach Intro to American Government.”  That’s a missed opportunity.  And it’s a shame, because a class like that involves as much un-teaching of bad information as it does the teaching of good information.  Most of us had to figure that out on the fly.  There must be a better way.

So, kudos to Cathy Davidson at CUNY for a characteristically forward-looking idea, to Mellon for funding it, and to Paula Krebs and Vanessa Ryan for building something similar with less money and more space.  The need is there.  The idea makes sense.  And I think Mellon should drop Dean Krebs a line...

A Bumper Crop of Lupins

Anyone remember the Monty Python version of Robin Hood, in which Robin Hood stole lupins from the rich to give to the poor?  The poor were a bit underwhelmed, having no use for lupins.  Robin Hood was solving the wrong problem.

Arthur Brooks’ piece in the New York Times on Friday is a bumper crop of lupins.  

According to Brooks, the major problem facing “academia” now is a lack of “true diversity,” by which he means the presence of political conservatives.  After all, he notes, one study of social psychologists showed that they lean liberal, so the entire academy must!  We must commence with compensatory hiring of conservatives post-haste!

Um, no.

Here are some actual issues I deal with on a daily basis:

Trying to maintain and improve quality on increasingly austere budgets.

Improving student outcomes, especially in foundational courses.

Ensuring that employees feel respected.

Building relationships with community members, employers, and four-year colleges.

Finding solutions within the confines of collective bargaining agreements and tenure.

Fostering a culture of innovation.

Helping OER gain traction on campus.

Personnel stuff.  Enough said.

Here’s one I don’t give a single, solitary hoot about:

How the one person who teaches the social psychology elective votes.

Now, one might respond that community colleges are not what Brooks meant.  If so, then his use of the falsely inclusive “academia” reveals more than he intended it to.  Or, one might respond that my indifference is based on mindless conformity to a norm so thorough as to be invisible.  I’d respond with surprise that “false consciousness” arguments are valid again, and might suggest some more compelling applications.

Or, in a calmer moment, I might point out that hiring to fill ideological quotas fails on any number of levels.  It assumes that ideologies are fixed, internally consistent, and easily counted.  As a political theorist by training, I can assure you that they are anything but.  They evolve.  The ‘center’ moves.  Twenty years ago, the thought of gay marriage was so far to the left that Bill Clinton had to adopt “don’t ask, don’t tell” and DOMA to duck it.  Now, among voters my age and younger, open homophobia is discrediting.  John Kasich mentioned in a Republican presidential debate that he had attended a gay wedding.  That would not have happened in 1992.  

Even more basically, the idea that every political position can be reduced to one of three -- conservative, liberal, or in-between -- is simply inaccurate.  There is no shortage of other ways of stitching views together.  

More basically than that, the freedom to change one’s mind as new facts emerge is central to scholarly inquiry.  Requiring adherence to a single ideological camp means shutting down the possibility of acting on new information.  That would defeat the entire enterprise.  If I’m hired to be the resident conservative, and my research leads me to change my view on this issue or that, I could lose my job; I’d have to choose between following the truth where it leads and keeping a paycheck.  

Brooks is solving the wrong problem the wrong way.  I have literally no idea how almost anybody at work votes, nor do I care.  I have worked in Republican areas -- Morris and Monmouth counties -- as well as a Democratic one, in Massachusetts.  The challenges are the same.  The daily work is the same.  Political party is roughly as relevant as astrological sign.  

I wouldn’t expect Brooks to know that, since as far as I know, he has never actually managed a college.  Yet he gets space in the New York Times to tell the rest of us how it really works.  

No, it doesn’t.  It’s a giant pile of lupins.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some actual work to do...

The New Yorker Gets One Right

Flood the zone.

The best way to get a handle on the issues in for-profit education is to outcompete it.  Flood the zone with well-funded publics, and the for-profits won’t even be able to cheat their way out.

A tip o’the cap to James Suroweicki, at The New Yorker, for encapsulating the issues around for-profit colleges clearly and well in a single page.  The piece is well worth the couple of minutes it takes, not least because Suroweicki neatly dispatches a couple of widely held, but false, assumptions.

First, the for-profit sector as a whole -- and I’m not talking about every single actor -- lives on financial aid, which is about as far from a market as you can get.  While it has clearly outmarketed its public rivals, at least until recently, it rarely outperformed them.  (The exceptions that exist tend to be at the associate’s and graduate levels.  In-between, not so much.)  

The usual response is either to call for greater regulation, or to try to ban them altogether.  But neither really addresses the underlying problem.  For-profits emerged and thrived in the gaps that the publics didn’t serve, or didn’t serve terribly well.  In the early years, they tended to focus on trades or skills that we don’t usually think of as the domain of higher education.  (DeVry started by training people to run and repair film projectors.)  Later, when they moved into more traditional areas, they still offered different forms of delivery.  They largely ignored the agrarian calendar, for example, running full slates of classes year-round to cater to working adults.  

Squashing the sector doesn’t address the gaps that it filled.  And it may well prevent experimentation and innovation that can later find its way into the publics.  Regulation is better, but it’s a tough sell politically, it’s subject to “regulatory capture” (or the regulators forgetting which side they’re on), and its intensity waxes and wanes when political control shifts.  Besides, when hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, folks with deep pockets can fund some very good lawyers to beat back anything imperfect.

The way to get the best outcome all around isn’t to ban them or to try to pass lawyer-proof regulations.  It’s to outcompete them  Flood the zone with well-funded public colleges with the staffing, the facilities, and yes, the marketing, to compete.  Force the for-profits to compete on quality.  Frankly, if they can prove they do a better job with students, I have no theological objection to them.  But the experience of the last ten years suggests that if they can only compete on quality, they’ll shrink to a much less threatening size, and students will be better off.  

For-profits met a need.  The way to beat them is to meet that need better.  Austerity in the public sector cedes the field to people with other agendas.  Beef up the publics, and the need that fed the for-profits in the first place will fade away.  They can’t lawyer their way out of that.

Low-Tech Innovation

My grandmother collected absurd kitchen technology, which made visits fun.  There wasn’t an inside-the-egg-scrambler or fry baby on the market that she didn’t have.  She had a microwave oven back when nobody did;  I remember watching her “nuke” a hot dog, and both of us enjoying its twisty death throes.  As an adult, I realize that I inherited the gadget gene from her.  My platform agnosticism -- I’ve had phones that ran Android, iOS, and even webOS -- is only partially about comparison shopping or avoiding cultism; it’s largely an excuse to try all sorts of new stuff.  PC at work, chromebook on the road?  Why not?  

On Wednesday, though, I had two separate conversations about innovation on campus that I realized later had a common theme: tech and innovation aren’t the same thing.

Innovation is really a function of audience.  If something is new to the audience, it hits them as innovative, even if the performer knows what’s going to happen.  Standup comedians make livings on that.  Some of the moments that blew my mind in my student days came from ideas that were hundreds or thousands of years old, but that were new to me.  (My single favorite exchange in grad school came when a professor asked the class “do you know who first came up with the idea of predestination?” and a student brightly answered “God!”)  When you focus on the whole Plato-to-NATO canon of Western thought, there’s plenty of mind-blowing, even if your technology never moves beyond chalkboards and paperbacks.  When I used Swift’s “Modest Proposal” in a Debate class -- “resolved: we should fight poverty and famine by eating the poor” -- some students responded in a gape-jawed wonder that you wouldn’t normally expect from a satire hundreds of years old.

Others had no sense of humor at all.

But even with content that strikes students as innovative, there’s pedagogical value in the professor trying new things.  The spirit of discovery is contagious, even separately from the content.  Students pick up on the relative engagement or disengagement of the faculty.  The energy of discovery makes the teaching moment more memorable and effective.

Gadgetry offers a relatively easy and straightforward way to try new things.  Even better, it emerges on a regular -- maybe accelerating -- schedule, and tends not to be discipline-specific.  It can be great fun, and at its best it makes possible things that simply could not be done any other way.

But when we restrict the conversation about innovation to technology, whether consciously or not, we lose some possibilities.  And we exclude entirely some folks who just don’t “do” technology, but who can be engaged in other ways.

The trick is in figuring out how to broaden the discussion.

Examples help.  One of my favorite teaching tricks was to give multiple short-essay questions on in-class tests, but to let students bring a single index card with anything they wanted on it.  The catch was that it had to be handwritten.  Students spent hours crafting just the right mix of material on the card to try to put one over on me, only to discover later that they had been snookered into studying.  In sculpting the perfect cheat sheet, they got past needing it at all.  Index cards aren’t a new technology, nor is handwriting, but the method was new to the students, and it worked.

Sharing tips like those across campus -- and please, I grant upfront that others have better ones than that -- might help spread the spirit of discovery beyond the tech-savvy.  I’d shy away from calling it “best practices,” because that implies that they’re settled; to me, the spirit of discovery is the point.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen something like that really catch on in a college or large organization?  Any tips for getting the word out?  Ron Popeil used late night tv, but I don’t have that kind of budget.

Why Good Student Course Evaluations Are So Hard to Find

What are student course evaluations for?

If the answer to that were simple, it would be easier to design them.  But student course evaluations -- and administrator’s observations, for that matter -- serve multiple purposes.

They serve as feedback for the professor.  While much of what students write in evaluations is contaminated by one form or another of a halo effect, it’s occasionally possible to discern something useful.  Sometimes they liked the class as a whole, but really disliked a particular assignment or reading.  Maybe an exercise intended to show one thing was taken to show another.  This kind of feedback is intended to be formative for the next semester or year.

They serve as safety valves for student opinions.  It’s harder for students to complain that nobody cares what they think when they get asked directly, over and over again.  Translating those opinions into observable action on a student’s timeframe is another issue, but they can’t say they weren’t asked.  That matters.

They frequently play into promotion or tenure decisions.  That’s probably untrue at research universities and only theoretically true at high-profile national colleges, but it’s typically true at community colleges with tenure systems.  In this sense, they’re summative.  They offer either confirmation of or counterevidence to professors’ claims of wonderfulness.

On the flip side, they can serve as ammunition for negative personnel decisions.  When a dozen students from the same class write variations on “good professor when she bothers to show up,” that’s a red flag.  Even the numerical part can be instructive.  At a previous college, I received the numerical rankings every year.  After a few years, I noticed that the same few names kept bringing up the rear, usually by a significant margin.  If the same person scores multiple standard deviations below the mean year after year, well, I have some questions.

The tricky part is that what makes for constructive feedback may not make for useful fodder for promotion decisions.  Formative assessments are great and humane, and I’m all for them when people are basically competent and actually trying.  But when those conditions don’t hold, for whatever reason, formative assessments aren’t terribly helpful in making adverse decisions.  If the decision gets challenged -- and it will -- you’ll need strong and unambiguous language condemning the performance.  When one form has to serve both purposes, it’s little wonder that it does neither well.

Even the ‘theater’ function is flawed at best.  The degree to which the opinions have an effect varies from case to case.  For a full professor with tenure, the external impact of the difference between “above average” and “meh” is approximately zero.  In that case, some student cynicism is hard to dismiss.  In the case of someone coming up for tenure, or an adjunct hoping to make the leap to full-time, the same difference could matter.  And the degree to which any given professor takes feedback and uses it constructively varies from person to person, even within ranks.

Clearly, student course evaluations shouldn’t be dispositive on their own.  Students respond to cues both appropriate (clarity, respect) and inappropriate (attractiveness, accents).  I read once that students tend to reward gender-conforming behavior: they prefer men who are authoritative and women who are nurturing.  Women who are authoritative and men who are nurturing get downgraded.  New and unexpected teaching approaches can be polarizing, so faculty who are not in a position to risk it may avoid innovation.  And if years of blogging have taught me anything, it’s that the caliber of anonymous comments can be, uh, let’s go with “uneven.”  Too much faith in any one source is a problem, even assuming that the source is clear and valid.  

I’ve seen and heard proposals to do away with student course evaluations altogether, but I’ve never seen a convincing alternative.  Theoretically, one could do pre- and post-tests to measure “value added,” instead of asking opinions, but how you’d get students to take pre-tests seriously isn’t clear.  I’d also hate to see higher education repeat the mistakes of K-12. You could measure performance in subsequent courses, though in small programs or departments you’d run into an issue of circularity, and in any size department you’d have trouble controlling for inputs.  Colleague and supervisor observations can help round out the picture, but they’re often so limited -- and even pre-announced -- that they come closer to measuring potential than performance.  If I observe a class for a day, I may see a terrific discussion, but I won’t notice that the professor takes a month to return papers.  The students are the only ones in a position to see that.  Shutting off that source means giving up on some pretty important information.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen a particularly good version of student course evaluations?  Is there a reasonably elegant way to serve so many disparate purposes at once?

Siding With the Villain

Clark Kerr famously quipped that university faculties are loose groupings of independent experts, united only by a shared grievance over parking.  As with the best hyperbole, it captured something real.  As anyone in academic administration can attest, there’s a constant, structural tension between the need for faculty autonomy and the need for institutional consistency.  

That tension, I think, is at the root of the story that emerged this week about the conflict over a math textbook at CSU-Fullerton.  The story itself combines several issues.  First, the department assigned a common textbook for every section of a class, regardless of who taught it.  Second, the required text was expensive.  Third, the required text was written by the department chair and vice chair.  Fourth, a professor who broke the rule about a common text assigned a combination that was much cheaper.

So the CSU case combines autonomy/consistency, cost, and conflict of interest.  Unfortunately, it’s easy to conflate the three, and therefore to sacrifice a larger point to a sticky case.  For example, what if the renegade professor had assigned a book that was more expensive?  Or that he had written himself?  I’d hate to base a general policy on the contingencies of a single case.

I’ll focus on the first issue, since it strikes me as the most common and the most important.  Should departments be allowed to determine, and enforce, common texts across every section of a class?

Yes.

I say that not only because the AAUP agrees with it, although it does.  I say that because at the end of the day, credits are granted not by faculty, but by institutions.  Institutions determine the title, the goals, the credits, the day, the time, the location, and the duration of classes.  If a professor decides that she doesn’t like a given timeslot, she is not free to simply change it on her own.  Students plan on it, room conflicts are real, and for security reasons the college needs to know who is teaching where, and when.  

The interest in institutional coherence isn’t limited to logistics.  If a professor is hired to teach, say, digital circuits, and instead spends every class period discussing her family vacations, then she is not doing her job.  “Academic freedom” is not absolute, nor is it entirely individual.  Saying that “the faculty” controls curriculum is different from saying that each individual professor does.  Collapsing the first into the second actually destroys both.

I’ve seen conflicts like this at previous colleges.  A math sequence is built on the assumption that fractions are covered in the first class.  But a professor in the first class thinks that students struggle too much with fractions, so he decides unilaterally not to cover them, leaving it for the next class in the sequence.  The professor teaching the next class doesn’t know that, and proceeds on the assumption that students were taught something that they weren’t actually taught.  Students fall through the cracks, and a collectively-determined curriculum is jeopardized.  The first professor’s disregard of a collectively-determined objective created a problem for the second professor, as well as the students. This is not okay.

In the CSU case, my objection is not that the department chose to assign a common book.  It was within its rights to do so.  My objections are that it chose without apparent regard to cost or to a conflict of interest.  (I say “apparent” because I wasn’t there.)  It chose badly, which is fair game for criticism, but it was within its rights to choose.

Historically, one reason for assigning common texts was actually to reduce textbook costs.  When a common text is assigned, and held for multiple years, then a healthy market in used books can develop.  Students can save significantly with used books, as opposed to new.  When each professor assigns different books, the market for any given book becomes too small.  But when, say, a Psych department picks a common text for the Intro class, the volume is high enough to sustain buybacks and resales.

The IHE piece situates the issue within the larger questions of OER, which is exactly my concern.  For a college to be able to put together an entirely OER degree program, every class in the program has to use OER.  That means every professor teaching those classes.  If someone decides to go rogue and assign something commercial, the students will rightly complain about being misled.  And when financial aid awards are based on estimated costs, a professor who unilaterally decides to impose substantial new costs does significant harm.  Siding with the rogue in a sympathetic case would suggest a rule that would effectively forbid a much greater good.

Theoretically, of course, unanimity would smooth the tension between autonomy and consistency.  But unanimity is both rare and fleeting.  As a standard, it gives undue power to a single dissenter.   If you want a rule to hold up over time, you need to be willing and able to enforce it.  There’s a reason that democracies don’t rely on unanimity, or allow citizens to cherry-pick the laws they’ll choose to follow.  If they did, they’d essentially hollow out the point of majority rule.

I’m no fan of the choices the CSU department made,  I agree that there’s a serious ethical issue around the conflict of interest, and that textbook cost deserves more attention than it gets.  The department seems to have gone out of its way to make itself the villain.  But siding with a sympathetic rogue here would lose the larger cause.  

Because That’s Where the Money Is…

Willie Sutton, the bank robber, would have been lost to history if not for a single quip.  When asked why he robbed banks, he responded “that’s where the money is.”  His misunderstanding of the question got at a larger truth.

I was reminded of Sutton’s line in reading the New York Times piece this weekend advocating the application of “gainful employment” rules to law schools.  The idea is to get a handle on student loan debt where it’s greatest.  Given the low rates of full-time legal employment among recent law school grads, it’s unsurprising that default rates are higher than they used to be.  And given the rate of increase in tuition, those underemployed lawyers are coming out with more debt than they used to. I’ve written before about applying it first to graduate schools before moving down the ranks; law school seems as good a place as any to start.

The beauty of choosing law schools as the place to start is that law schools are unabashedly vocational.  They exist to train lawyers.  To the extent that they fail to train lawyers, or the lawyers they train can’t find work, it’s fair to ask why the schools continue to exist.  

I wouldn’t stop with law schools, either; medical and graduate schools strike me as subject to the same logic.  If people are unable to parlay their years of very expensive training into salaries high enough to repay their loans, I think it’s fair to raise some questions.

The paradox, of course, is that there’s typically an inverse relationship between student debt levels and the likelihood of default: the less they owe, they likelier they are to default.  That’s largely a function of dropouts, though it also reflects the lower levels of family wealth among students who attend community colleges.  The presence or absence of “the bank of Mom and Dad” makes a meaningful difference in the ability to avoid default, and community college students typically have less access to that than do students who attend more expensive places.  Extrapolating from that to a measure of institutional performance amounts to punishing those who serve risky populations.

Of course, in my perfect world, the idea of “performance based funding” wouldn’t only apply to public services.  It would be applied also to, say, regressive tax cuts, or wars of choice.  Fair is fair. But we aren’t there yet.  

If we want to reduce the exploitation of naive strivers, then yes, let’s tackle abuses in graduate education.  They’re real, they’re hardly news, and they’re expensive.  If we want to reduce defaults among folks with smaller balances, let’s transfer some of that money to community colleges to help improve graduation rates, and maybe even to make those first sixty credits free.  The bang for the buck will leave our current system in the dust.  

Or we can pretend that “where the money is” now makes sense.  How’s that working out?

Scenes From a Debate Tournament

Last weekend, The Girl participated in her first debate tournament.  I was there both as a parent and as a judge-in-training.

Full disclosure: when it comes to my kids, I'm wildly biased.  That said, she did great.  She was the only sixth grader in a group of seventh and eighth graders, but you wouldn't have noticed.  She stood her ground with apparent confidence (though she admitted later that she was nervous).  She spoke clearly and well, without reading.  She answered questions with aplomb, and when asked a question including a big word she didn't understand, she coolly offered "I don't know what that means" and then returned to her point.  It was all I could do not to cackle.

After each match -- they participated in four over the course of the day -- the teams congratulated each other in the hallway while waiting for the judges to tally scores.  And it wasn't the "good game...good game..." perfunctory version that usually occurs after baseball games; in a couple of cases, one team mentioned to the other that they felt bad that one side was so much easier to argue than the other.  

And the topics weren't always easy.  They had one I thought was about right -- "abolish the penny" -- but had another about requiring European countries to accept Syrian refugees, which is pretty heady stuff for a sixth grader.  (The others were sort of in-between: one about the state ending the bear hunt, and one about the Federal response to Hurricane Katrina.)  She spent probably an hour a night for a week doing background research, and some prep work with me on anticipating questions.  At one point, she complained that "I didn't know research could make you so exhausted," which I thought was a sign of success.

In between rounds, parents waited in the school cafeteria and passed the time chatting.  At one point someone asked about occupations, and nearly everybody there was an engineer.  I was the oddball.  But graduate degrees were clearly the norm.  

The demographics of the tournament were a little discouraging.  Two private schools were there, and three publics.  The private schools were affluent, as was one of the public schools.  The second public school -- ours -- was somewhat more modest and diverse.  The third was from a low-income area.  The team from that school really struggled, and seemed to be largely uncoached.  It's a little unsettling to see class distinctions so manifest at such an early age, though I'll admit I was glad the low-income kids were at least there.  The benefits for kids from learning to speak in public and make arguments with evidence strike me as obvious, and well worth sharing.

The teams also tilted slightly male, though not overwhelmingly.  I didn't expect that.  The group of kids reminded me of the groups you'd see at Lego League meets, who also tend to be engineers' kids.  

I'm thrilled when The Boy speaks in public, which he has done both in church and with student government.  He has an aw-shucks charm that wins people over, and I know the experience is good for him.  But I'm especially glad to see The Girl step up.  She's eleven, and for her age, she's uncommonly self-possessed.  I worry about the storms of adolescence and their effects on her self-confidence.  Boys don't get a free pass on that -- I remember thirteen, and "free pass" is not the phrase that leaps to mind -- but from what I've seen, girls can really get steamrolled.  TG is a great kid, and I want her to have the confidence at fourteen that she has now.  If she learns to stand her ground now, and gets rewarded for it, I'm hoping it helps.  And when the Mean Girls do what they do, having some sense of Dad in her corner, cheering her on for being smart, can't be a bad thing.  

I can't wait for the next one.

The “O” word

Kellie Woodhouse's story yesterday about Wagner College and its plans to shrink strategically should be required reading for people at teaching-intensive institutions in the Northeast, and for the politicians who decide on budget allocations.

Much of the Northeast and Midwest suffers from a decline in the number of 18 year olds, and the decline is likely to continue for the next decade or more.  The geographic distribution of colleges more closely resembles the population distribution of fifty years ago than it does the distribution now, adding a supply issue to the demand issue.  Add an economic recovery and counter-cyclical enrollments -- recessions boost enrollments and recoveries dampen them, due to the change in opportunity cost -- and it's not a pretty picture. Predictably enough, colleges are competing more vigorously for enrollment than they once did, with high discount rates among the private ones as an easy indicator.

But it isn't just the privates.

Over the last ten years -- twenty, really -- public colleges' revenues have shifted from states (and sometimes counties) to students.  As their revenue sources start to look more like the privates, they start to behave more like the privates.  

Except that the mission is different.  Private colleges can choose to shrink via increased selectivity, which seems to be the route Wagner has chosen.  Selectivity can make life easier for a private college, since it can outsource the riskiest populations to community colleges.  Change the risk profile of your student body, and you will change outcomes.  Improved retention and graduation rates can offset some of the tuition loss over time.  

For community colleges, selectivity isn’t an option; it would violate the mission.  In an environment in which tuition is sixty percent or more of a college's budget, enrollment drops mean immediate budget crunches.  

For-profit colleges are tuition-driven, too, and we’ve seen how some of them respond to declining enrollments: by abandoning academic standards and pressuring faculty to pass everybody.  That, too, would violate the mission of a community college.  I've been proud to note that this sector is largely immune to grade inflation; the really egregious grade inflation occurs at the Ivies, not here.

If we want community colleges to maintain academic standards while serving smaller populations, we're going to have to come to terms with the trend of cost-shifting to students.  States offloaded costs onto students; then, the students went away.  That leaves colleges in a bad spot.

Here I'll make the one argument that I have not seen a single, solitary candidate make, from either party.  It's simply off the charts politically, but it's true.

If you want to maintain quality with shrinking enrollments, you'll need to offset the shrinking enrollments with...

Anyone...?

Increased operating aid.

Notice I didn't say "maintenance of effort."  When the effort is too low, maintenance of effort isn't good enough.  And in states in which counties or districts matter as much as states do, even defining maintenance of effort becomes a problem.

Increased Pell grants are great, and I'm all for them.  But the only way that colleges benefit from them is through tuition.  When colleges price their tuition below the Pell maximum, which nearly all community colleges do -- partisans of the "Bennett hypothesis" ignore this, but it's true -- then Pell increases don't hit the budget.  At all.

Nor did I say "grants" or "corporate partnerships."  Grants have expiration dates.  Corporate partnerships are circumscribed around specific programs.  Both can and do play helpful roles, but they can't carry the ball.

Nor did I say "capital funding."  Facilities matter, and deferred maintenance is real, but this is not primarily a function of too few buildings.

I'm talking about the one category that would do more good, yet gets less press, than any other.  Operations.  The money with which we pay salaries.

Put operating subsidies on a substantial and predictable upward trend, and colleges can enforce academic standards without fearing bankruptcy.  They can continue to take all comers and provide excellent education.  Raise them enough, and we could even make a dent in the trend towards increasing adjunct percentages.  Let them continue to stagnate or fall, and the only institutions that serve everybody will flounder.

Privates can move to selectivity and/or philanthropy without violating their missions.  Community colleges can't; they need operating aid.  That's what will make the difference between downsizing-as-exclusivity and downsizing-as-death-spiral.  

Operations.  It's about operations.   It's time we say the "O" word in public.  Either that, or we let higher education retreat once again to become the exclusive playground of the wealthy.