Online as Backup

An occupational hazard of academic administration is that you hear or read about devastation and tragedy, like Hurricane Florence, and your thoughts turn to learning management systems.  

Hey, someone’s have to.

Like most community colleges, we have an LMS.  (Right now it’s Canvas, though this year we’re also auditioning Blackboard and Desire2Learn.)  It’s the platform on which online classes are taught, but it’s also useful for hybrid or blended classes, and even for onsite classes.  

Faculty who teach online use it, as do some who don’t teach online.  But I’d like to see nearly everybody use it at some level, and events like Florence are why.

Onsite classes run on the assumption that the physical campus will be consistently and reliably accessible and fit for use.  Yes, there’s the occasional snow day -- and every so often a squirrel will take a header into a transformer and plunge the campus into darkness, presumably for reasons of its own -- but the expectation is that any interruptions will be brief and random.  And that’s generally true.

But an event like a hurricane can knock out power and/or roads for a week or more.  And even when the campus is back up and running, many students may not be able to make it there.  Brookdale had its own experience with that with Hurricane Sandy a few years ago. (Students of political rhetoric will remember then-governor Christie’s contribution to the genre as Sandy loomed: “Get the hell off the beach!”)  It could be weeks before some students are able to return.

That’s where an LMS can be useful, even for a traditional class.  It can provide a platform for communication to the whole class at once, and a venue for some sort of academically substantive interaction to happen.  An abrupt, temporary, mid-semester switch to online interaction isn’t anybody’s first choice, but it’s a whole lot better than nothing. Even if the academic component is severely attenuated, it provides a way to get messages out quickly.  Sometimes students just need a sense of what’s going on. Consistent communication carries its content, but it also carries a message that the professor cares. Many students pick up on that. It can also foster communication among students in the same class, which can help as the uneven recovery phase kicks in.  

Isolation can be one of the more devastating effects of a disaster.  Now that most LMS’s (plural?) are usable on phones, it’s possible to mitigate that isolation.  It’s worth trying.

Some people will never willingly teach online; I get that.  But I don’t get the unwillingness to at least have an online backup.  Storms hit when they hit; better to be prepared than not.

And best wishes to the folks in the Carolinas.  Here’s hoping it’s not nearly as bad as it could be.

Live from Michigan

The Boy and I just returned from Ann Arbor, where we went so he could check out the University of Michigan.  It was a discovery trip for him and a nostalgia trip for me.

My parents both went there; it was where they met.  It was the early 60’s. He was a graduate student, she was an undergrad.  She embraced the U more than he did; to this day, she’ll break into a chorus of “Hail to the Victors” at the slightest provocation.  When I was college-hunting, she laid out the ground rules: anywhere I wanted, but if I went to Michigan State, I’d get no help from her, and if I went to Ohio State, I was excommunicated from the family.  Anything else was fine. In Ann Arbor, that line of reasoning makes sense.

Shortly after I went to college -- a small liberal arts school in New England that didn’t trigger any alarm bells -- she moved back to Ann Arbor for a job close to her parents.  I spent several college summers there, sometimes working for environmental groups and once doing an internship in the Mayor’s office, where I discovered that I didn’t want to be a lawyer.  (Ruling out possibilities is one of the seldom-noted, but very real, payoffs of internships.) Although I was of traditional college age, and I was surrounded by U of M students, I was never a student there.  One group used to be based in the Michigan Union, so I spent a lot of time there, and I got to know the local bus system pretty well. Schoolkids Records and the original Borders Books were favorite hangouts. For a few years in the late 80’s, Ann Arbor was a sort of home base, if not really home.

When I share that with TB, of course, I might as well be talking about Periclean Athens.  He has been a fan of U of M sports for years, despite my near-total indifference to NCAA athletics.  As he prepared college lists, Michigan kept popping up. I knew from our Boston visit last year that there’s no substitute for actually seeing a place; Boston U didn’t live up to his expectations, but Northeastern exceeded them.  I didn’t want him to idealize Michigan, only to have another Boston U experience, so we planned a trip. His school closed for Rosh Hashanah, so we went.

Without knowing I was doing it, I spent the first hour or so of the visit pointing to various buildings and saying variations on “that used to be…” until it became clear that that was enough, thank you very much.  Point taken. This trip was about him.

One of my Mom’s friends who still lives there hosted us for dinner on Sunday, along with her kids and grandkids and a cousin who is a current sophomore at the U.  The cousin reminded me a lot of TB’s sister, The Girl, so there was a level of trust already. They spoke glowingly of the U across the generations, including the current one.  (The cousin referred to her membership in a student club called NERDS - “Not Even Real Drama Students” -- who put on plays. It was exactly the right note.) So far, so good.

We did the official information session and tour, of course.  It was a rainy Monday when classes were in session, so I thought it would offer a representative sample.  

TB looked at the facilities, listened for options, and tried on the place for size.  I looked for signs of vitality, and found them almost everywhere. (One exception was a kiosk outside of the Lorch building.  It had bumper stickers on top for political figures -- Perry Bullard and Lana Pollack -- I remember from the 80’s, as well as a few “Reagan-Bush ‘84” ones.)  We both noticed the cars parked along the various streets and in the parking garage. At BU, we saw a lot of Porsches and Mercedes; it was off-putting. In Ann Arbor, as in Pittsburgh, we saw a lot of Hondas and Fords.  Much better.

We had to do a few landmarks, of course.  We hit Zingerman’s deli, because that’s what you do.  And we stopped by the stadium and took his picture in front of it.  It holds over 100,000 people, and is apparently the largest stadium in America.  It’s not my thing, but he was thrilled.

I hadn’t really put it together until we were in the Detroit airport to head back, but we were flying on Tuesday, September 11, in the morning, on Rosh Hashanah.  The airport was weirdly quiet. As we stood in the TSA line, everything stopped, and someone on the loudspeaker announced a moment of silence. Apparently, someone else with microphone access didn’t get the memo, because the moment of silence was filled with “This is the last and final boarding call for flight xxx...REPEAT, this is the last and final boarding call for flight xxx…”  As soon as the boarding call ended, so did the moment of silence. If you’ve never seen an entire airport roll its eyes at once, it’s quite the sight.

He was a little wistful on the way back, declaring that the senior year of high school is all well and good, but he’d really rather be in college.  He can’t wait.

Mission accomplished.

Fresh Eyes

As part of the first week of classes, we had our regular opening reception for adjunct faculty.  It’s a combination of a social gathering, an orientation, and an awards ceremony. I sat at a table with someone who teaches in the Homeland Security program, having recently retired from the field.

He mentioned his shock last semester when he referred to 9/11, and the students didn’t remember it.  He did some quick math, and realized that when it happened, most of them were only a year or two old.  He remembers it so vividly that it doesn’t even seem like the past; they remember it not at all.

It sneaks up on you.  I remember referring to Ronald Reagan in a class, and getting back a wave of blank looks.  Today’s 18 year olds may remember Bill Clinton mostly as Hillary’s husband. Jimmy Carter is about as current for them as Harry Truman was for me.  

From the perspective of the instructor getting older, it’s easy to perceive that as loss.  And in a certain way, it is. But it’s also the gift of fresh sets of eyes.

Young people show up with different baselines, different “givens.”  That lets them see possibilities that I often don’t. My cohort came of age during the late stages of the Cold War, during which time a term like “socialist” was almost a profanity.  Now, 30-year-old women of color are proudly adopting the label and winning elections. I remember when homophobic slurs were about as common as commas; now, someone using one at work would be escorted to HR.  

Tressie McMillan Cottom recently wrote that “generations” -- in the sense of the Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials -- are labels typically only used on and for white people.  That’s true, mostly, but I do see a real generational difference in shared memory. My kids have no recollection of the Cold War, and the very idea of it strikes them as ridiculous.  In the 80’s, there was no escaping it; now, it’s hard even to explain. When I tried to convey the fear of communism, as opposed to the fear of Putin, I found myself sounding like a mirror image version of Sergei Antedeluvianovich Prelapsarianov, from Angels in America: at least the Soviets had a mission statement!  (“What theory do you have? Cheeseburgers?”) Putin is hostile, it seems, just for sport.

Sometimes, historical memory can be a source of solace or inspiration.  For example, having a longer frame of reference helps put the surrealism of the last couple of years of our national politics into perspective.  No, this isn’t normal. No, this isn’t how it always worked. And yet, in some ways, the last couple of years can be read as the logical conclusion of a set of beliefs that have always been there.  As horrific as child detainment is -- and it is -- it has precedent. The politics of “real Americans, “ as opposed to “those people,” have been around for longer than America has. Sometimes it flares up.  It can be tamped down. It has been, before.

I’ve seen a shift of tone among younger people recently that gives me hope.  They’re simply ignoring the old politics of “triangulation” in favor of a bracingly blunt recognition of the effects of decades of economic polarization.  They aren’t trying to get cute with parsing language. They’re calling it like they see it, with fresh eyes undistorted by Cold War-era dogma. They’re telling truth, and they’re doing it in ways that would have been considered shocking when I was growing up.  

As well they should.  As (increasing!) elders, our job isn’t to correct them.  It’s to empower them. It’s to give them some context, and get out of their way.  Sometimes, it’s even to vote for them.

It’s the shift from “I feel your pain” to “Bring it!”  And I say, it’s about time.

--

Program note: I’ll be taking The Boy to Ann Arbor early next week, so he can see it with his own fresh eyes.  The blog will be back on Wednesday.

In Defense of Free Parking

(I’m listening to Mike Myers’ book about Canada right now, which makes me all the more aware that “In Defense of Free Parking” may be the most American headline I’ve ever written.)

My college has free parking, which is not common among public colleges.  It’s facing some long-term budget issues, as I may have mentioned once or twice.  Every so often, someone suggests charging for parking.

Context matters.  This is a non-residential campus -- no dorms -- so everyone has to get here and get back daily.  It’s in a suburban location with plenty of land, and more parking spaces than get used. (At peak times, the only open spaces are farther out than some folks like, but they’re there.)  It’s in an area with limited public transportation. It was built in the 1960’s, on the assumption that everyone would drive. One of the branch campuses isn’t accessible at all by public transportation.  

In other words, a parking charge wouldn’t be in the service of allocating a scarce resource.  It would simply be for the sake of revenue.

But I’m not sure it would be a revenue source.  

Having worked previously at colleges that charged for parking permits, I can attest that if you charge for parking, you’d better have some kind of enforcement.  That means hiring parking enforcement people, and paying salaries and benefits for them. It also means adjudicating parking disputes, which will absolutely happen.  Those adjudications take staff time away from other tasks; depending on volume, you may have to hire more staff to pick up the slack, which means more labor to cover.  Worst of all, you have the ill will generated by parking fines. For students who are already economically fragile, a couple of parking tickets can be a big deal. For others, it’s just insulting.  

I’ve never seen a formal study on this, but I’d bet money that part of the reason that for-profit colleges never charge for parking -- at least, never that I’ve seen -- is that they understand intuitively the effects of that sort of charge on students’ willingness to show up, and to keep coming back.  Say what you will about for-profits, but they’re attuned to what gets people in the door. In this case, they may have a point.

I’ve gone on record supporting Open Educational Resources in place of expensive textbooks, and Free Community College in place of tuition.  Free parking, when practical, strikes me as another version of the same thing. It’s a straightforward way to get economic barriers out of the way of education.

And that’s only on the student side.  Folks in places with hellacious parking battles can describe the effects on employee morale when their tickets pile up.  Charging people for coming to work is counterintuitive at best; I, for one, like it when employees show up. Adding a fee discourages that.

Free parking has another beneficial side effect that I hadn’t appreciated until I saw it in action.  The parking lots aren’t broken out by status; there’s no faculty lot, no administration lot, no student lot.  There are just lots, and you park where you park. Walking through the lot, you get a sort of sociological reality check on a regular basis.  There’s value in that.

Yes, free parking allows drivers to externalize the costs of pollution, and that’s bad.  No argument there. But adding parking fees wouldn’t magically generate a robust mass transit system.  It would just annoy drivers. If I could be assured in a credible way that parking fees would go to the development of some sort of practical, clean, safe, useful mass transit system, I’d happily reconsider my position.  But if the funds mostly go to pay for parking enforcement, let’s not. Life is complicated enough without parking tickets.

Seeing What Isn’t There

Like most colleges, mine has a pretty robust process for developing and vetting new program proposals.  The process starts in existing academic departments, with faculty there proposing something. It moves to the divisional level, then through Academic Council (similar to a curriculum committee), and then to the collegewide governance body for ratification.  The idea is to recognize the unique role of faculty in curriculum, while still subjecting ideas to enough scrutiny to ensure that something won’t get approved just because it’s somebody’s pet idea.

And it works pretty much as described, which is fine when dealing with tweaks to existing curricula, or logical extensions of them.  

It can fall short, though, when new needs crop up beyond what you already have.  If nobody is close enough to it, in terms of training, to take ownership, then nobody owns it and it dies of neglect.  (More accurately, it’s never born in the first place.) A sort of stationary inertia sets in.

Once in a while you get lucky and someone in field A, which you already have, brings a secondary expertise in field B, which you need.  If the stars align, that person can eventually put forward something for field B. That’s lovely, when it works. For example, it worked here with Hospitality Management because our Culinary person happened to have a background in it.  

But sometimes an idea is far enough from anything currently established that it needs a jump start.  That’s where things get sticky.

Grants can sometimes provide jump starts.  In fact, that’s often their stated purpose.  But competitive grants tend to reward already-strong programs, rather than helping to create new ones.  They also often require a commitment to post-grant sustainability, which may not be something a college can promise when trying something entirely new.  There’s a “you first” problem that can trap new ideas. They get funding when they show success, but they can’t get the resources to show success without funding.  A grant can help, but only after you show that it’s already working, and you’ve already benchmarked assessments several years out. Without a track record, you’d have to invent those out of whole cloth.

From a funder’s perspective, that makes sense.  If your concern is bang for the buck, you’re likelier to get it when you scale up things that have already proven themselves.  But from a campus perspective, grants that seem at first to offer hope can wind up being unattainable, precisely because they’re needed.  

In relatively flush times, if memory serves, it can be relatively straightforward to allocate internal funds towards something new.  But when enrollments and/or budgets are falling, it’s harder. And even if you can, the “you first” problem applies to curriculum.

I’ll admit that my view of the “you first” problem has evolved over time.  For a while, I grudgingly accepted it as an annoying fact of academic life.  But the cost of inertia keeps rising. As I write this, one community college in my state is down 20 percent in enrollment from last year, and another has laid off 43 people and is in the process of folding itself into a larger neighbor.  We’re down for the seventh consecutive year, with a cumulative impact well into double digits. The pattern is getting harder to ignore, and the results harder to accept.

The trick is in choosing the intervention.  How do you see what you don’t have, but need?

I’m thinking that the key is looking off campus.  Which industries in your area are growing? What do students keep asking for that you don’t have?  Who is so desperate to hire that they’re hiring unqualified people and training them themselves? That may mean opening up curricular discussions to people who aren’t faculty, at least at the outset, but that’s okay.  Hospitality Management caught a wave, and is thriving, with more employers calling for students than we have students in the program. It’s actually growing. It’s meeting a need.

It may even involve looking farther off campus, at what colleges in other states are doing.  Yes, that can seem threatening, but it’s no more threatening than sustained decline.

Wise and worldly readers, how have your colleges or businesses gone about interrupting declines, or seeing what they don’t already have.

The Last First Day

The Boy starts his senior year of high school this week.  It will be his last first day of school, at least with us.

He’s more than ready to move on.  He has a confidence beyond anything I could have even faked at that age, and -- even better -- the ability to back it up.  To the extent that I worry for him, it’s usually around overconfidence. The hand-wave and dismissive “I’ll be fine” works, except when it doesn’t.  But he’ll have to learn that for himself.

He is very much his own person.  He gets his love for order and neatness from his mother, and he likes to say he gets his “chill” from me, but he’s really his own creation.  (The one thing I’ll take credit for is teaching him that the occasional short sentence, especially as its own paragraph, can help the rhythm of a paper.  He admits adopting that.) He’s athletic in a way that neither of us ever was, and musical in ways that neither of us ever was. The most striking thing, though, is his ease with people.  Little kids love him, and always have; they pick up on the “gentle giant” vibe he gives off. His courtesy is based on actually wanting to be a decent person, and it comes off that way. It’s mannerly, rather than mannered, and it wears well.

He was our first.  Most of our firsts have been with him.

In the early years, he was what gets euphemistically called a “live wire.”  We used to unplug the baby monitor because we could hear him just fine without it.  He used to jump up and down in the exersaucer so quickly that it sounded like a jackhammer in the living room.  He would slam his legs down in the crib so hard that the lights downstairs would shake. The only things that would get him to sit still were books and legos.  

He grew into himself, though, and found ways to control that energy.  

As parents, we had to make it up as we went along with him.  Luckily, we share a guiding principle of parenting, which is that the goal is to get the kid to the point that the kid doesn’t need the parent anymore.  That means providing a safe home base and gradually calibrating exposure to risks, to the extent that you control them.

This will be the first time since he was in the fourth grade that he and The Girl will be in the same school.  They’ve both announced their intentions to avoid each other as much as possible. I get that. It’s not anger or hatred; they actually like each other.  It’s just that they each have their own worlds at school, as well they should. As parents, at least we’ll have a year in which their half-days and snow days always match.  That will be refreshing.

He’s in the thick of the college search.  Next week, when their school is closed for Rosh Hashanah, he and I will fly out to Michigan to see the University up close.  As a kid, I heard my parents (both U of M grads) talk about it. Now my son is talking about it. I’m not quite sure when that happened, but it did.

His next first day will be someplace that is not here, with people who are not us.  

..

This Thursday will be his last first day.  I may be a little late.

The Common First Semester

An idea came up on campus again this week that comes up from time to time.  Couldn’t we save everyone a lot of time and angst by coming up with a common first semester that all, or nearly all, students could take?

At first glance, it seems to make a lot of sense.  We know what the highest-enrolled classes on campus are, and most of them are taken early.  A common first semester, perhaps with a meta-major course built in, would streamline advising and registration and make it far easier to ensure that students take courses that count.

I could see the idea working well at a selective, residential liberal arts college.  It’s a variation on the “freshman seminar” idea, with the goal of starting everyone off on equal footing and ensuring that everyone has a similar foundation on which to build.  We might focus more on skills than on the canon, at least at first, but the general idea is similar.

The catch is that the students aren’t.  

Very few of our students take 15 credits in their first semester.  And of those, most place into at least one developmental (or “foundational”) course.  Some bring transfer credits. Any of those would throw off a tightly programmed sequence; combine a few, and it gets worse.  

Pragmatically, I believe that it’s important for students to get at least one class in the first semester that they recognize as being part of why they went to college.  The traditional remediation model is based on an “eat your vegetables” approach, in which students have to start with the subjects with which they’ve struggled the most in the past before they get to the good stuff.  That has entirely predictable effects on motivation. For that to work, of course, the class that fills the “good stuff” slot will necessarily vary.

All of that said, though, I know that some community colleges have done it.  I’m just unclear on how.

So, my wise and worldly readers, I turn to you.  Have you seen a community college (or public four-year college with a similar student profile) successfully get to a common first semester?  If so, how did they do it? And what did you learn that falls under the category of “if we knew then what we know now?”

Any how-to’s would be greatly appreciated.

Happy Labor Day weekend!

"What Would Help?"

Every so often, I have one of those conversations in which an initial misunderstanding inadvertently lays the groundwork for a good exchange.  That happened this week with Paul Glastris, the editor of Washington Monthly, who called to take issue with my critique of WM’s latest college rankings issue.

WM’s rankings are intended as a sort of rebuttal to the US News rankings.  The US News rankings reward wealth and prestige, so they tend to reinforce existing hierarchies.  As Glastris put it, “the hierarchy within the profession of higher education is not aligned with the public interest.”  So instead of looking at “inputs,” WM tends to focus on student outcomes, with a special focus on lower-income students.

My critique was that the US News rankings gain their power through their broad appeal to a constituency of parents and prospective students; the sheer size of the constituency, and the subsequent effects on enrollments, gives it influence.  For all of its well-known flaws, it carries weight. That’s why so many colleges cheat on it by supplying false information. The WM rankings, by contrast, have almost no discernible constituency. They really aren’t useful from a comparison-shopping perspective, and they’re too inside-baseball for many policymakers.  They might appeal to a thin slice of equality-minded higher ed nerds (hi!), but there aren’t as many of us as one might like, and our political clout is modest at best.

In other words, the critique was based on broad agreement with the goals of the WM piece.  It was largely tactical. A policy argument without a constituency is unlikely to catch on.

To which Glastris asked, reasonably, what an egalitarian analysis with a constituency would look like.  What would help? So, what would help?

It’s a fair question, so I’ll put it to my wise and worldly readers, and then share a few thoughts.

He conceded a couple of suggestions.  A single search bar in which you could enter the name of a school, without first specifying a category, would help.  A category specific to HBCU’s, and another specific to women’s colleges, would make sense. He agreed that it would be nice to be able to rank public universities on cost to students for out-of-state students, but the data aren’t available for that.  (For example: is the University of Michigan still a good deal if you’re paying out-of-state tuition?) And the section on community colleges should include degrees, not just certificates. So that ground is covered.

I’m thinking that starting with exceptions might make sense.  For instance, their list of top national universities starts with Harvard, Stanford, and MIT.  That’s hardly revelatory. But a list of “Top Surprises” or “Most Underrated” could be of interest to parents and prospective students, and could make some political points at the same time.  

Financial aid remains a black box.  I eat, sleep, and breathe higher ed, and the best advice I could give my son was to apply to a bunch of places and see who gives him the best offer.  But there is some comparability. For example, most colleges don’t commit to meeting full need. They could easily be ranked by how much “gapping” they do, with less being better.  And don’t count loans as aid.

Schools with more economically diverse student bodies that have tremendous success getting students into law school or med school would be good to know.  It’s one thing to get students through your own program; that can happen in ways legitimate or illegitimate. But if they continue to do well at the next level, that’s a good sign that something is going very right.  That’s yet another argument for tracking upward transfers from community colleges, of course, but it’s also an argument for finding the affordable schools that make good “feeders” for law, med, or grad schools.

That’s separate from salary data, since students in school don’t usually earn much yet.  But it would be helpful to know. The Boy wants to be a doctor; if there were good information on the most affordable and successful feeder colleges for med school, I’d want to see it.  And I don’t think I’m alone in that.

Given the default assumption that resources correlate with results, the places that get better-than-expected results with fewer resources probably have something to teach us.  

Wise and worldly readers, what would you add?  If you wanted to generate comparative college data that would appeal to enough people to matter, and that wouldn’t just reward the usual suspects, what would help?

In Defense of the $999 Textbook

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018/08/28/universitys-999-online-textbook-creates-confusion-and-outrage

(pause)

(scratch head)

(cough)

(shrug)

I got nothin’.

(walks off stage)

Thoughts on the Washington Monthly College Guide

When I taught writing, I told the students that they needed their intended audience.  Were they writing for children, for educated adults, or for specialists in a field? Factors like those would affect the choices a good writer would make.  

That wasn’t how I was taught, but I think it holds up.  It moves away from the idea that there’s an objectively correct way to write, and towards the idea that writing takes place in (and assumes) a context.  Rather than pure self-expression or channeling of a muse, the point is to communicate to a reader.

I thought about that in looking at Washington Monthly’s latest college guide.  It’s an alternative to the US News rankings. The US News rankings tend to reward wealth, reputation, and exclusivity, as opposed to performance with the students they actually get. (Judging by the number of stories about colleges and graduate programs sending US News false data, the rankings must carry great weight.)  The Washington Monthly rankings look instead at indicators like performance gaps between students on Pell grants and students who aren’t; levels of community involvement; graduation rates; and the upward mobility of graduates. Simply admitting a bunch of rich kids won’t cut it.

As a full-time educator and part-time policy wonk, I get the appeal.  A college whose students consistently outperform what their demographics would have predicted is doing something right.  As a taxpayer and a citizen, I’m more inclined to want to support colleges that do right by a broad swath of students than to support a bunch of semi-talented and overentitled rich kids.  

As a community college person, I was a little annoyed at the complete disregard of transfer, but that’s an asterisk.  That’s an easy fix for a subsequent year, should they so choose.

As a parent, though, I’m not taken with it.  The Boy is starting his senior year of high school next week, so we’re in the thick of the college search.  (He has already announced that living at home, and especially attending a school where his Dad works, is entirely out of the question.  Fair enough.) That means looking at program offerings and location, but also at quality, both real (as far as can be determined) and perceived.  He wants to go someplace “good,” and I want him to have that opportunity.

The US News rankings are aimed at parents and students.  That’s where they get their power. Ambitious students want to know that they’re picking places that will pay off.  The rankings are deeply flawed in all sorts of ways with which most of us are familiar, but they’re accessible. And they address at least some of the questions that parents and students have.  To the extent that rankings drive applications and/or enrollments, they matter to institutions. Their weight comes through their function as a consumer guide.

The Washington Monthly rankings, noble as they are, are nearly useless as a consumer guide.  Part of that is basic formatting. For example, to look for a particular college, you first have to guess which category it’s in.  There’s no “search” box that includes the various categories. Is Montclair State under “regional,” “Master’s,” “liberal arts,” or “best bang for the buck?”  The only way to know is to chug through each category and keep entering until it pops up. That assumes a lot about the reader.

It also assumes that, say, Pell success gaps are as important as external reputation.  And that may be true at a policy level. But as the parent of a non-Pell student, it’s not really relevant.  From a shopper’s perspective, I’m concerned about what the school will do for my kid. Many of the factors WM considers don’t tell me that.  

For example, compare a school that gets above-average results with average students, to one that gets excellent results with excellent students.  The first one gets props for punching above its weight, but a student will get a better education at the second. The first speaks to policy, the second to shopping.  Put differently, the first speaks to wonks, and the second to parents. And there are a lot more parents than there are wonks.

The difference matters because what makes US News so powerful is precisely its attention to parents and applicants.  Its oversimplifications make it accessible, which gives it power. WM offers a much more ethically informed take, but at the cost of usefulness, at least to people outside of policy wonk circles.

“Best Bang for the Buck” comes closer to a parental perspective, but there, too, it makes a common and deeply frustrating category mistake.  For public universities, it assumes in-state tuition. But that’s only true if you’re in-state. Okay, the University of Michigan provides an excellent value to Michigan residents.  That’s great. But is it still an excellent value for people paying out-of-state tuition? The rankings don’t say. Given that most of us are non-residents of more places than we’re residents of, that seems like a major omission.  It seems like it shouldn’t be that hard to offer two rankings for each public institution, reflecting in-state and out-of-state, respectively. That’s the sort of thing a wonk might miss, but a parent will pick up on right away.

I offer these thoughts in hopes of helping WM to improve.  The flaws in the US News rankings are well-known, and having people who actually understand both policy and education weigh in makes sense.  But don’t forget the reader. US News, for all of its flaws, got the reader right. If you don’t do that, the piece doesn’t work, no matter how well-intended it is.

Conditional Acceptance, as Seen from Here

I was struck, in reading the recent Hechinger Report piece on conditional acceptance, at how negatively it was portrayed.  Within the frame of reference they used, it’s understandable, but I can attest that it looks very different from here.

In this context, conditional acceptance refers to selective universities or colleges allowing applicants to enroll, but not right away.  First, they have to spend some time at another institution, often with requirements around courseloads and GPA’s. If the applicant follows the plan and meets the requirements, she’s in.  The piece profiles one student who applied to Cornell on the condition that she spend a year at Ithaca College first; she took the deal.

The practice is portrayed as secretive and somewhat ethically suspect.  It’s a way for selective institutions to allow in some students who won’t “count” in their selectivity statistics.  It can be a consolation prize for the marginally talented uberwealthy, or for filling in demographic holes in an entering class.  In the case of graduate programs with lots of international students -- less common than they used to be, but still -- they can be a way to admit students with talent but with limited proficiency in English.  Spend a year in the ESL program at a community college, the university might say, and if you do well, you’re in.

I can understand why people who are playing the exclusivity game might see conditional acceptance as a form of cheating.  But from a community college perspective, it looks more like a form of guaranteed transfer.

Community colleges catch flak when their credits only transfer piecemeal.  That’s because many people don’t know, or haven’t thought through the implications that, the receiving institution makes the decisions around acceptance or denial.  The CCRC has noted repeatedly that credit loss upon transfer is a major obstacle to on-time graduation. It costs time and money, and students are (rightly) insulted by it.  

But in the case of conditional acceptance, the student has both a path and a guarantee.  Follow the prescribed path and get the grades you need to get, and you’re in. That provides a powerful incentive to perform well, and assures the student that the effort will pay off.  That’s a much more powerful message than a simple rejection.

From an institutional perspective, students like these are on a mission, and students on a mission tend to finish what they start.  There’s a catch when the time in purgatory is less than the full associate degree: the student will count against our graduation rate, despite getting exactly what she came for.  That’s a measurement error, and it has consequences, but it’s fixable in principle. It’s also fairly common now, except that now it tends to happen without guarantees. Guarantees make a difference.

I understand that many students offered conditional acceptance reject it, going instead to places that accept them outright.  That makes sense; they want what they want. It isn’t for everyone. But for the folks for whom it makes sense, I can see a lot of upside.  From here, it doesn’t look bad at all.

The Attention Problem

“Why don’t they see it?”

Melinda Karp’s article about colleges struggling to move from reform proposals to actual implementation struck a chord with me.  I’ve been in the “why don’t they see it?” position enough times to have obsessed about this for a while.

Karp was a longtime member of the CCRC, second-in-command for a while.  Now she’s working with colleges across the country to help implement some of the reforms that she studied and championed.  (Full disclosure: we’re friends.) Her piece describes how easily sand gets in the gears, and some of the steps that colleges need to take to get from here to there.

She comes at the question from the perspective of a researcher; I come at it from the perspective of a practitioner.  We notice many of the same things.

She notes, correctly, that some colleges want something like “Guided Pathways” to come prefabricated, or as a simple checklist: do this, this, and that, and voila!  That rarely works, for a set of reasons. At a basic level, each context is different. That’s a function of factors ranging from different state laws to collective-bargaining status to local cultures.  For example, when I was in Massachusetts, there was a state rule declaring that no full-time faculty could teach a course that started after 4:00 p.m. New Jersey has no such rule. In collective-bargaining settings, there are often old grievance settlements or arbitration findings that become binding in ways that nobody could have foreseen at the time.  Those are facts of life.

But I think there’s a more fundamental issue, too.  I think of it as the attention problem.

As a practitioner who participates in the policy wonk world to some degree, I spend a lot of time thinking about ways to structure the college to make it better.  I engage with research and researchers, attend conferences when I can, correspond with people doing terrific work, and try to bring the best of it to bear locally, as circumstances allow.  I also deal intimately with the local rules of the game and local culture. Having worked at several different community colleges, I even bring something of a comparative perspective to bear.  And I have the wisest, worldliest readers the interwebs have to offer.

Put differently, I stew in this stuff.  

Most people don’t.  They’re focused -- appropriately -- on other things.  Faculty are largely focused on their classes. Staff are focused on their jobs.  Unions are focused on protecting incumbent employees. That’s reasonable -- in my faculty days, I focused much more on my classes and my students than on anything the administration said -- but it leads to the sort of instrumentalist reductionism that Karp laments.  If I have a bunch of other things on my mind, and someone is talking to me about Guided Pathways, I’ll immediately boil it down to “what does this mean to me?” That can quickly lead to the sort of fear-based nitpicking that some cultures are quick to deploy against anything new.

Getting past the “checklist” vision that Karp rejects requires people spending the time, with open minds, to engage with an idea at length.  In the very short term, most don’t see a reason to do that. They’re busy. I’ve had the experience many times of working well with a small group, making great progress, only to bring an idea to a larger group and see it attacked self-righteously by people using arguments that they don’t know were discredited a long time ago.

Odessa College is the exception that proves the rule.  It was able to enact a fundamental transformation of its academic calendar -- moving to shorter semesters -- and to achieve remarkable gains in student success, with the greatest gains accruing to the students who typically perform the worst.  In higher ed policy circles, that’s the gold standard. But the reason it was able to do that is that it had a gun to its head; the state of Texas had plans to close it. That solved the attention problem. Absent a visible, undeniable, existential threat, it can be a lot harder to get folks to look up at the big picture.  Of course, by the time a threat is undeniable, it may be too late.

Thoughtfully adapting complicated ideas to local contexts requires, well, thought.  It requires recognizing the importance of the idea, and being willing to devote time and suspension of disbelief long enough to get into the weeds.  And it requires large numbers of people to do those things, not just a few brave early adopters. That’s a larger ask than one might expect.

The appeal of the prefabricated checklist is that it offers the prospect of skipping the “thoughtful attention” phase.  That may sound sinister or stupid, but the attention problem is often fatal. The temptation to make it irrelevant is real.

Why don’t they see it?  They don’t know why they should.  Get past that, and the rest falls into place.  How hard can that be?...

The Other Use of Standardized Tests

I never acquired a taste for basketball, despite The Boy having spent years playing it.  But he did, so I’ve spent plenty of time at his games, and have taken him to college games.  It’s a running joke with us that whenever we watch elite teams -- either high-level college teams in person, or pro teams on tv -- I groan whenever a player misses a free throw.  It’s even worse when a player at that level misses two in a row.

That’s because free throws don’t change.  Theyre the same distance and angle every single time, and have been since the player’s childhood.  They’re unblocked, by definition. They aren’t rushed. To my mind, elite players should sink free throws as a matter of course.  

They’re a sort of standardized test.  A shot from the field can be different from others, depending on all sorts of variables, but a free throw is a free throw.  It’s a constant. You can compare free throw percentages over time and actually learn something. It doesn’t tell you everything -- if it did, Shaq wouldn’t have had a career -- but it’s something real.

For most of my career, it has been an article of faith among progressive academics that standardized tests are terrible.  They coat existing stratifications with a patina of “merit,” the argument goes. They’re only loosely correlated to academic success.  They’re reductionist. And there are elements of truth to all of those.

But as with free-throw percentages, they can also tell you something.  That’s why I was happy to see this piece from Brookings about the results of the state of Michigan giving free SAT or ACT tests in public schools during the school day.  Even conceding the very real issues with standardized tests, they also brought to light thousands of academically talented students from low-income backgrounds or out-of-the-way places who might otherwise have gone unrecognized.  (Happily, they’re making room for the SAT’s by dropping other standardized tests, so they aren’t crowding out instructional time.)

Standardized tests’ function as an equalizer may be part of why some elite private high schools are dropping AP tests altogether.  If a kid from Nowhere Special Public HS can score the same “5” as a kid from Snooty Prep, then what’s the payoff of Snooty Prep? From SP’s perspective, too much transparency could be dangerous.  It could reveal something they’d rather not reveal. Equalizers aren’t appealing when you’re on top.

Equalizes work because “good” students aren’t only found in “good” schools.  They’re everywhere, hiding in plain sight. As a society, we go to great lengths not to notice.  

Talent-scouting was actually one of the original purposes of the SAT.  James Conant, a president of Harvard, wanted to recruit students of talent even from out-of-the-way places.  Grade scales may be quirky or inconsistent, but a single test with a single scale offers a reality check. It gives the talented kid from East Nowhere a chance to prove what she can do.

Those of us at community colleges, though, have known about hidden talent for a long time.  Open-admissions policies allow students fresh chances to prove themselves. To the extent that the “free SAT” movement plays into the “undermatching” argument -- which suggests that it’s tragic when an academically talented student goes someplace that isn’t selective -- I have no use for it.  But to the extent that it helps us all see that talent is distributed more widely than we currently perceive -- and that there’s much to be gained by improving the resources available to the colleges that lots of talented students from East Nowhere attend -- I’m all for it.

Yes, standardized tests carry all sorts of baggage, some of it deservedly.  But they also make visible some living, breathing rebuttals to the idea that academic talent tracks parental income perfectly.  They can even form the basis for turning the “undermatching” thesis on its head. Michigan’s motivations may have been mixed, or confused, but it may have stumbled into something good.  I’m on board.