Small Pond, Big Splash

I love this story.  A Massachusetts philanthropist, Maureen Wilkins, donated $5 million to Cape Cod Community College.  A donation of that size might not be newsworthy at an Ivy, but for a community college of Cape Cod’s size, it’s epochal.  It’s likely to have a much larger impact at Cape Cod than it could ever have at, say, Harvard.

Community colleges generally have been late to the game on private philanthropy.  Part of that is because community colleges generally are relatively young; about half of them around the country were established in the 1960’s, so many didn’t have significant numbers of alumni hitting the peak earning years until the 1990’s.  Most also don’t have high-profile athletics of the sort that Big Ten schools have, so they don’t draw the kind of attention and loyalty that certain kinds of sports franchises do. (Brookdale football has been undefeated since 1967, in the most literal meaning of “undefeated.”)  

As a sector, they tend to be administratively lean.  Having worked at three of them, I’ve never seen an Associate Dean at one.  That is a mixed blessing. It’s good in the sense that resources tend to go directly to supporting students.  It’s bad in the sense that the leaner the administration gets, the harder it is to do new, non-routine things.  Community college administrators are typically so focused on keeping the ship afloat that they don’t always have the time to devote to matters that are important-but-not-urgent, like the relationship building on which fundraising depends.  Fundraising requires upfront spending on administrative capacity, which can be a hard sell when you’re cutting budgets.

Of course, being open to all students necessarily involves giving up on the cachet of exclusivity.  The article does a nice job of pointing out the difference in economic profile between the students at Johns Hopkins, where Michael Bloomberg recently made an enormous donation, and at Cape Cod CC.  (For example, it cites the median family income of a CCCC student as $65,000, as opposed to the median of $177,300 at JHU.) The student body at most community colleges looks a lot more like America than the student body at most exclusive universities, except for the gender ratio.  Given that community colleges skew female, the wage gap women face is another strike against fundraising.

The article notes that community colleges educate nearly half of the college students in America, but receive about 1.5% of the total philanthropic money for higher education.  It’s true that research universities incur costs that we don’t, but even allowing for that, 1.5% seems a bit low.

The relative absence of large-scale fundraising here has also allowed some myths to flourish on campus.  For example, I’ve heard some people assert, with cloudless certainty, that we could plug gaps in operating budgets if only we did more fundraising.  It doesn’t really work like that. You don’t want to use one-time gifts for recurring costs, for obvious reasons, and you don’t want to speak the language of “need” to donors.  To many donors, that sounds like throwing good money after bad. It’s better to speak the language of success, and to invite them to be a part of something positive that will have impact for decades to come.  As a sector, we’ve become so fluent in the language of cuts and needs that making the pivot is a challenge.

Still, kudos to Ms. Wilkins for making a much greater difference at CCCC than she ever could have made at wealthier places, and for putting philanthropy back on our radar.  In a relatively small pond, a big splash makes a great difference. Here’s hoping that we start taking the opportunities in the fundraising world more seriously than we have.  The students will benefit.

Get Me Rewrite!

This week the South Jersey Times published an unsigned editorial that, if taken seriously, could do real harm.  It piles misunderstandings, simplistic readings of data, and stereotypes on top of each other in the name of, well, it’s not entirely clear.  If I were the editor, I would have sent it back for a rewrite.

It’s ostensibly a hard-headed, realistic, data-driven look at the “bang for the buck” that students get at various colleges throughout New Jersey.  It draws on data from the College Scorecard published by the US Department of Education. After noting that Stevens Tech and Princeton University are outliers, it turns its attention to everyone else:

“Below the top two, scorecard readers may be confounded by many schools with annual tuition in the $15,000-$20,000 range, and median salaries in the $40,000-$50,000 range. It’s like trying to determine which package of paper towels is the better buy at Walmart, the 12-pack with 104 sheets per roll, or the 16-pack with 92 sheets.”

Okay, so that’s not promising.  Where does it go from there?

“Community college graduation rates are absolutely dismal...If two-year schools are ever to be the nucleus of tuition-free or debt-free subsidy programs, they must get those washout percentages down.  This is largely wasted tuition money, whether it comes from the students or the taxpayers.”

Leave aside for a moment the idea that students aren’t taxpayers.  (They are.) And leave aside for the moment that other states managed to create tuition-free community colleges without first improving graduation rates.  In fact, if Tennessee is any indication, going tuition-free actually improved success rates, rather than the other way around. But forget that for a moment.

As the recent report from the Jack Kent Cooke foundation reminds us, most community colleges who transfer on to four-year colleges and graduate with bachelor’s degrees didn’t graduate their community colleges first.  They transferred prior to graduation. The student who did a year at Brookdale before moving on to Rutgers and graduating shows up in our numbers as a “washout.” But the student didn’t fail. If anything, she got a great deal and a great start.  And as the JKC report documents, students who start at community colleges and transfer “up” actually outperform students who start at four-year colleges. But you wouldn’t know that from either the scorecard or the editorial.

Those students skew the salary figures, too.  If Jenna left Brookdale for Rutgers after a year, graduated in three more, and got a job paying $60,000 per year, she shows up in Rutgers’ salary figures and our dropout figures.  We don’t get any credit for her subsequent earnings. (To be fair, Rutgers doesn’t get credit in its graduation rate, either, since transfer students don’t count.) The money she saved -- both as a student and a taxpayer -- doesn’t count, but her decision to transfer does, negatively. That’s just silly.

Okay, a sympathetic reader might sigh, it gets community colleges wrong.  But what about the bigger picture?

“Speaking of lowered expectations, the College Scorecard should end any notion that a student can exit Princeton or the New Jersey Institute of Technology, undergrad degree in hand, expecting to make north of $100,000 in just a few years. Use that calculation for how soon you can pay back crushing student debt, and disappointment will be in store.”

Sigh.  “Crushing student debt” isn’t crushing for most graduates.  The default rate on student loans is highest among those whose debt is lowest, and lowest among those whose debt is highest.  That’s because what looks like a debt problem is actually a dropout problem. If you have your “undergrad degree in hand,” it’s unlikely that you’ll have an issue.  The real issue isn’t with Princeton grads or Brookdale grads; it’s with dropouts. Actual dropouts, not the students who transferred early, got degrees, and got good jobs that don’t count in our numbers.

Conflating high debt loads with risk of default, as the piece does, is the kind of intuitive leap that is easy to make if you don’t actually know the field.  It’s also flat wrong. If we want to get student loans under control, the first thing we should do is adequately fund community and state colleges so they can provide the staff and support to get students through.  The ASAP program at CUNY stands as proof of that. Here in New Jersey, the Equal Opportunity Fund program stands as proof of that. Tennessee’s free community college program -- enacted by a Republican governor in a red state -- stands as proof of that.  There’s plenty of evidence, for those who bother to look.

The danger in publishing such an uninformed piece is that someone who doesn’t know any better might mistake its confident shortcuts for actual information, and draw destructive conclusions.  For that matter, the same could be said of the scorecard itself.

As poorly reasoned as the piece is, I have to agree with the decision to publish it unsigned.  I can’t imagine someone wanting to own it. My piece is signed, I work in the field, and my phone works.  A well-placed call before the next editorial could save the rewrite desk a lot of time.

Limbo

The Boy is in the “limbo” stage of the college search, and it’s wearing on him.  

He has sent out all of the applications he plans to send.  Deadlines have passed at many places, so even if he wanted to add more -- which he does not -- the options would be few.  

Two places have accepted him and made reasonable-ish offers, as these things go.  (In other words, they’re absurd, but they’re within the absurd parameters we were told to expect.)  One accepted him and made such a paltry offer that it might as well not have. Three have accepted him but haven’t reported back anything on the financials yet.  One deferred a decision until March or April, and one hasn’t responded yet at all.

That’s a lot of ambiguity, and it promises to last for another couple of months.  At my age, a couple of months of ambiguity doesn’t seem quite so terrible, especially given that he has two viable offers from no-apology places already in hand.  But at seventeen, time passes slowly, and this is a major life change. He’s feeling it.

I’ve been coaching him to reject the idea of a “dream school,” and to think of the process as more like buying a car.  You have some parameters, but within those, any number of choices would do just fine. And much of what his college experience will be is necessarily unknowable at this point.  Where would he have the roommate that becomes a lifelong friend, and where would he have the roommate he’ll never speak to? That will have a major impact on his time there, but there’s literally no way to know it.  That can be overwhelming, but it’s also sort of liberatory; not being able to know that means not being responsible for it. He’ll make great friends wherever he goes, but there’s no way to compare them. So, don’t.

He sort of concedes the point, but he was still upset that one of his favorite schools cheaped out on him so spectacularly.  Honestly, I was, too.

He’s much more conscious of the financial end of it than I was at his age.  Part of that is just by necessity, given how much costs have increased since then.  But part of it is a choice on my part. I don’t want him to coast through blithely, only to have a rude wake-up call later.  His long-term goal involves going to med school, which isn’t cheap, so there’s an argument for trying not to load up too heavily on loans in undergrad.  I’m trying to help him strike that delicate balance of ‘informed’ with ‘confident.’ Still, that much reality can be a lot to take at seventeen.

Reading the “aid” offers is an exercise in interpretation.  All three received so far have included loans in the “aid” calculation.  That would be fine, except that loans have to be paid back. He initially went to the bottom line of the “aid” offered, which is a rookie mistake, and one that I think the schools are counting on.  Aid itself comes in at least three forms: real, sorta, and not. “Real” aid is grants or scholarships. “Sorta” aid is work-study jobs and subsidized loans. They’re hardly free money, but putting off the accrual of interest until after graduation is something, and a guaranteed job on campus is not to be sneezed at.  “Not” aid refers to unsubsidized loans. Certain schools lump all three together. I’ve told him that the number that matters most is the total cost of attendance minus grants or scholarships. Certain schools -- not naming any names -- like to keep those separate, to make the discount look impressive. The net cost is what matters.

This is all the exact opposite of transparency.  

I give TB a lot of credit.  He’s a smart kid who works hard, takes tough classes, gets great grades, plans ahead, runs track and cross-country, volunteers as an EMT, and -- as far as I know -- acts like a gentleman.  He’s doing everything he’s supposed to do. And I know that when this stage passes, he’ll be fine; he’ll go where he’ll go, and he’ll find his way. But even knowing all of that, the limbo stage is no fun at all.

“I Wasn’t Trained for This.”

You’re teaching a class.  It has twentyish students, ranging in ability, interest, age, and background.  One student seems a little offbeat, but nothing out of bounds. One day, about a month into the course, that student starts rocking back and forth aggressively in his chair, and ignoring requests to stop. He doesn’t seem to be malicious; for that matter, he doesn’t seem to be entirely in control of what he’s doing.  The other students notice and are visibly uncomfortable. What do you do?

Most college faculty never took “education” courses.  They studied deeply in their own disciplines, and sometimes had some training in online teaching and/or very basic classroom management techniques, although even that can’t always be assumed.  (The sum total of my pedagogical training before t.a.’ing my first class consisted of the professor saying “you’ll be fine.”) Teaching is often picked up through trial and error, usually first by imitation.  

That can be fine, with many students.  But some students present behaviors that are far enough outside what’s expected that a layperson may be utterly flummoxed.  Behaviors like that -- which I am basing on an actual incident -- aren’t criminal, exactly; calling in the police seems more like escalation than solution.  But they’re disconcerting, and they can be disruptive.

I was never trained for that, and I don’t think most college faculty were.  But these situations happen, often abruptly.

In the moment, most professors improvise as best they can.  (When all else fails, I’m a fan of the “let’s take a break!” move, having the other students clear out for a bit while addressing the one student directly.  It’s not always appropriate, but it’s a good technique to keep in the back pocket.) My question here is about how best, from an institutional perspective, to equip faculty to handle situations like these in the moment.

The question is particularly urgent for adjunct faculty, who may or may not have informal connections with people on campus to ask for help.  

Student mental health is often treated as a private issue, and in many ways, it is.  But when it spills over into the classroom, it becomes more than that.

Ideally, we’d have a small army of mental health professionals at the ready, able to respond to a distress call at a moment’s notice.  But that’s not where we are. The austerity agenda rules that out.

I’m hoping that some of my wise and worldly readers have seen, or heard of, colleges that do a particularly good job of training faculty to deal with situations like those in the moment.  We have protocols for filing reports after the fact, but I’m looking particularly at the moment itself. I don’t have a great answer for the scenario above, but I’d like to, and I’d like my colleagues to.  Has anyone seen a really good institutional approach to equipping faculty for moments like those?

Hampshire: On the Bus or Off the Bus?

In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe attributes a line to Ken Kesey that has stuck with me for the thirty-plus years since I read the book.  The book is about the Merry Pranksters crossing the country in a bus. At one point, addressing someone who isn’t sure about the whole enterprise, Wolfe has Kesey say “you’re either on the bus or off the bus.”  

It’s one of my favorite lines ever.  In the context of the Merry Pranksters, it was literally correct: you couldn’t be “sort of” on the bus.  One foot on and one foot off wouldn’t last very long at highway speeds. At some point, you have to commit one way or the other and own it.  But the line struck me as true in many other contexts as well. Sometimes a clear decision either way is demonstrably better than trying to split the difference.  As a wise person once told me, sometimes you can’t know which is the right decision; instead, you have to make the decision right. Get on the bus or off it, then make it work.  

I was reminded of that in reading the IHE article about Hampshire College’s perplexing decision not to admit a full freshman class this Fall, but to allow Early Decision applicants and deferred applicants from last year to start this Fall.  It’s telling those students that it will commit to teaching them in the Fall of 2019, but beyond that, it’s hard to say.

Hampshire has one foot on and one foot off.  Nothing good will happen from that.

Hampshire has publicly declared that it’s looking for a partner in order to survive.  Given its limited endowment, high cost, and relatively low enrollment, it’s having a hard time seeing a sustainable way forward on its own.  Recently it announced that it wouldn’t take new students for the coming Fall semester. I applauded that decision in public, noting that by refusing to take on new students, it was protecting them.  That has to be a wrenching decision to make. Often colleges will wait until all options are exhausted before admitting defeat, leaving both students and employees in the lurch. Hampshire appeared to be taking the high road, protecting any new students from harm and giving its own employees an actual shot at a soft landing.  

But then it blinked.  Instead of a full-throated reversal -- damn the endowment, we’re admitting a full class and setting the controls for the center of the sun, in hopes that something will turn around -- it’s splitting the difference.  We’ll take a class, but a small one, and only sorta, but we’re still here, for now, kinda, until we’re not.

Get on the bus or get off the bus.  Take a full class, or don’t take anybody.  But this half-measure just doesn’t make sense.

To the extent that Hampshire’s budget is strained, taking a much smaller class while still offering a robust experience to those students will just make the budget worse.  To the extent that it hollows out the experience for those students while keeping them, it’s mistreating students and cheapening its own name and legacy. Hampshire may be quirky, but it’s respected among serious academics.  Hollowing that out would destroy its reason to exist.

As a parent, I wouldn’t send my kid there at this point.  A college that can’t commit to continuing to exist for more than a semester is not an appealing prospect.  But I could imagine some true believers still showing up.

The folks at Hampshire are smart, and they have to be pretty focused at this point, so I imagine they know all of this.  Which makes the move that much harder to decipher.

Herewith, my best guesses.  These are only guesses, based on no inside knowledge.  

Either they’re playing chicken with donors, or they’re playing games with lawyers.

If it’s the former, maybe they’re hoping that something similar to what happened with Sweet Briar will happen with them.  Announce something shocking, galvanize the alums, but keep the systems up and running just in case the alums and/or donors come through with enough money to keep the place going.  When all else fails, sometimes a financial deus ex machina can be summoned to bail things out.

The latter might be a function of contracts and legal obligations.  Maybe they made the announcement in good faith, only to be served notice that they’d be sued to high heaven if they didn’t backtrack somehow.  They still don’t have the money to restore the status quo ante, so they backed into a halfhearted half-measure to keep the lawyers at bay long enough for them to engineer a soft landing, and/or not scare away a potential merger partner.  Partners don’t like walking into lawsuits.

Neither is pretty.  In both cases, prospective students are pawns being used to satisfy other agendas.  There may be another reason, but those are the first that leap to mind.

As an experienced college administrator, I know that sometimes the options at hand are between “unpleasant” and “even worse.”  It happens. But this just doesn’t smell right. I’m hoping that there’s some other, third option that makes all of this okay, but I’m at a loss to discern it.

Wise and worldly readers, is there a better reason for Hampshire to hedge its bets this way?  Or should it just make a choice, get on the bus or off it, and get on with it?

“Inclusive Access” and the Comcast Problem

(For purposes of this piece, I’m using Comcast as a placeholder for any local monopoly.)

As longtime readers know, I’m a supporter of Open Educational Resources (OER), and I’m a seasoned veteran of handset-to-handset combat with customer service people at Comcast.  That combination is probably why a lawsuit around “inclusive access” textbook arrangements in South Carolina caught my eye.

“Inclusive access” comes in a few flavors, but in essence, it’s a large-scale text rental program.  It’s often described as “Netflix for books,” and there’s some truth in that. For a set fee per semester or year, students are given limited-time access to electronic books from one or a set of publishers.  Right now, the big three -- Pearson, McGraw Hill, and Cengage -- offer publisher-specific programs in which colleges that sign on have to agree to use materials offered by that program. In return, the publishers offer a total price for students that’s significantly cheaper than it would be if they bought everything a la carte.

The appeal is cost reduction across the curriculum in one fell swoop.  For a student who takes, say, thirty credits a year, the total book cost under the current system can easily top $1,000.  If inclusive access comes in below, say, $200, that’s a dramatic savings.

In South Carolina, a local used bookstore is suing Trident Technical College on the basis that its inclusive access program is anti-competitive.  By hiding the cost in student fees and making the fees mandatory, it is essentially crowding out any possible competitors. Students can’t shop around; the decisions have already been made for them.

There’s an obvious self-interest in the bookstore’s suit.  Having said that, it may be right for the wrong reasons.

My wariness around “inclusive access” is based on several reasons, one of which sort of overlaps with the offended bookstore.

First, and most basically, I have a problem with a college telling its faculty that it can only use resources from one publisher, or from one family of publishers.  Yes, the big three publishers are quite big, and they can cover a lot of ground. But faculty don’t work for publishers. They should be allowed to choose the materials they think will be best for students.  I square that stand with my support for OER by offering carrots, rather than sticks, for the adoption of OER. And OER comes from a large pool of providers, sometimes including local faculty themselves. As long as it’s free to students, I honestly don’t care where it originally comes from.  And even I will concede that OER remains more relevant in some areas than in others. For high-enrollment introductory Gen Ed classes, it makes a world of sense, and the options are many. For more specialized upper-level classes, maybe not. I see the ideal rollout of OER as incremental, probably starting with lower-level courses and working their way up.  Brookdale has done that, and based on some back-of-the-envelope numbers I ran last week, has saved students over $1 million per year in textbook costs based only on the courses that have already adopted OER, or that have committed to doing so by Fall. And that’s with several large pieces of low-hanging fruit not yet picked. Meanwhile, specialized areas have been left alone.

Second, inclusive access doesn’t do much for part-time students.  Within the model, it doesn’t really make sense to subdivide, so students taking only a class or two can wind up paying the same per semester as full-time students.  Given that part-time students are often part-time due to economic constraints, hitting them with a higher per-credit cost just seems mean. (Admittedly, this may be a matter of how a given program works.  If it works by a per-credit fee, rather than a per-semester or per-year fee, this objection may be moot.)

But my largest concern has to do with Comcast.  When we lived in Massachusetts, Comcast was the only choice for cable tv and home broadband.  It had no competition. As a result, it raised prices dramatically every year, with customer service that ranged from “negligent” to “openly hostile.”  Given monopoly status, it went hog-wild. Its methods looked a like what I’m seeing with inclusive access -- offer a low introductory rate to get people to sign on, then start jacking up prices.  After a few years, the Comcast rates became absurd.

I got direct personal confirmation of that when we moved back to New Jersey, and into a neighborhood that had two competing broadband and cable providers.  Just having a second option meant that the service got dramatically better, and the cost dropped by nearly $100 per month. If one provider got too greedy, it would lose customers to the other, and it knew that.  Competition provided a deterrent to price gouging.

If a college commits all (or most) of its curriculum to a single provider, what’s to stop that provider from pulling a Comcast?  Offer a low introductory rate, then capitalize on the reluctance to change by jacking up rates over time. At least with incremental adoption of OER, we have the opportunity to shift a few classes at a time if/as it becomes necessary; with an across-the-board provider, especially one supported by student fees, the college is at the mercy of the for-profit company.  Yes, contracts are time-limited, but realistically, telling a faculty that it has to change its books for every single class at the college next year is a nightmare. I’ve seen people get worked up over a possible change to an LMS, which is much less dramatic than an imposed change to textbooks. Inertia and campus politics would push hard against any change. That would give the publisher Comcast-like power to have its way with the students.

In the case of cable providers, we’ve seen an emergence of “cord-cutting” over the last few years.  Piecemeal options for other ways to get what they want have led many people to walk away from abusive monopolies.  That’s as it should be. That works in part because of technological evolution, but in part because people mostly know what they want.  In the case of college textbooks, students are told what to get. The used bookstore industry worked as a lower-cost option for a while, but it has struggled in the age of digital codes and electronic resources.  As the folks who tell students what they need, we have an ethical obligation to keep cost in mind. Establishing a monopoly is not the way to do that.

Whether this particular bookstore’s claim has merit, I don’t know.  But at a larger level, it has a point. Monopolies abuse; that’s what they do.  This is not the time to set up more of them, even if the introductory teaser rate looks pretty good.

Why is High School Four Years?

Over the last few days, some colleagues and I have been meeting with curriculum directors and principals of local high schools to discuss ways to ensure that fewer high school grads place into developmental courses.  The conversations have been wide-ranging, ambitious, and occasionally a little awkward, but certainly productive.

That said, my colleague Brian McKeon asked a question that I had never thought of, and couldn’t answer intelligently.

As a community college, we offer “two-year” degrees.  Many students take three years to get that degree, though, and that’s not considered weird.  Between complicated lives, changes of major, financial issues, academic challenges, and all the variables we all know, it can take longer than two years to get a “two-year” degree.

So, Brian asked, why does high school always take four years?  Why couldn’t some students finish in three, some in four, and some in five?  Doesn’t squishing both ends of the bell curve onto a single point necessarily do violence to the folks far from the middle?

I had to admit, I had never thought of it that way.

Dual enrollment and early college high school programs can work as de facto acceleration.  Students are still in high school for four years, but some high achievers also make headway on college while they’re there.  And summer school can fit extra time into those four years, for some of the students who need it.

But those are workarounds.  The normative model for high school is still, clearly, four years.  

I’d guess that part of it comes from the “childcare” function of K-12 education.  Schools aren’t just places for education; they’re places where kids go at defined times where parents don’t have to watch them.  Ideally, those places are safe, nurturing, stimulating, and challenging, but in a pinch, they’re places to be. They give kids time to grow up, and give parents and everyone else a relatively clear set of expectations.  If one kid takes five years to graduate and another three, it would be harder for families to know what to expect and what to do.

But that strikes me as a variation on “that’s how we do it because that’s how we do it.”  It’s true, as far as it goes, but it takes a lot for granted.

Different kids mature at different rates, but it’s hard to codify that.  We have set ages for driving, voting, drinking, and the like not because anything magical happens on a given birthday, but because we’ve decided as a society that we have to draw a line somewhere, and those places seem broadly right.  (I have no intention of litigating the drinking age here…) Some kids are frustrated at having to wait for what seems like an artificially long time, and sometimes they have a point. But in the absence of a bright-line rule, we’d be at the mercy of idiosyncratic judgments, some of which would probably be stupid and destructive.  

I’ve been appalled to see that some states have cut school days from the week in order to pay for ideologically driven tax cuts.  Having some sense of “normal,” even if it’s arbitrary in certain ways, allows for cogent criticism when someone is given less-than-normal.  I’d be concerned that too fluid a structure for high school wouldn’t lead to a more carefully calibrated set of adjustments, but would instead give license to across-the-board cuts driven by people with other agendas.  Given American history, it isn’t difficult to imagine whose fourth year would be the first one cut.

High school is supposed to be universal and mandatory.  College should be universally accessible, but it isn’t (and shouldn’t be) mandatory.  It isn’t designed to function as childcare in the same way. Fluidity in time-to-degree in college wouldn’t cause the sorts of social convulsions that it easily could in high school.  Admittedly, that’s not a purely academic reason, but these aren’t purely academic questions.

Wise and worldly readers, does Brian’s question have a better answer?  If time-to-degree in college can vary widely, why do we insist that high school is always four years?

Campus-Based Podcasts

What’s your favorite campus-based podcast?  Better yet, does your campus produce a really good one?

I’m wondering if podcasting could be a new form of outreach for college radio.

Audio entertainment, as opposed to video, has a distinct niche.  It’s perfect for the car, or for working out, or for having in the background while making dinner.  Radio people have known that for a long time; the radio version of “prime time” is “drive time,” or rush hour.  Watching a movie while driving would be illegal and dangerous, but listening to music or an audio program isn’t a problem.  Audio goes great with keeping your eyes on the road.

It’s no secret that terrestrial radio has lost some of its audience to other forms of audio.  Streaming services like Spotify allow for much more listener control than a radio station does.  Digitized audiobooks are far more convenient than the old books-on-tape. And podcasts have emerged as a genre of their own, updating the old radio play or talk show with asynchronous playback, convenience, and amazing range.  They’re also usually free, which used to be radio’s unique strength. As smartphone storage has gotten cheaper, it’s easy to store hundreds of podcasts even on a fairly low-end phone, ready to play on a moment’s notice.

Many colleges still have radio stations, but I haven’t seen or heard of many going into podcast production, especially with students.  I’m wondering if we’re missing an opportunity.

Some podcasts are just repackaged radio, which is fine as far as it goes.  But the podcast genre lends itself to different possibilities. Because it’s specifically audio, it can be much cheaper to produce than student movies.  And because it’s hosted somewhere, I’m guessing it’s relatively easy to count the number of downloads and find out what has caught on and what hasn’t.

I’ve heard of colleges with “iphone video film festivals,” in which students submit videos they’ve made with their smartphones (presumably Android phones are eligible too) for screening before a real audience.  But I’ve never heard of a college doing a student podcast contest.

Is someone out there doing something like that?  If so, are there any transferable lessons learned that the rest of us might benefit from hearing?  Instead of seeing podcasts as a threat to college radio, I’m wondering if they could give it new life.

Knuckleballs

(Not to worry -- this is only barely about baseball.)

The pragmatist in me gets a kick out of knuckleball pitchers.  Knuckleball pitchers, and the pitches themselves, don’t look quite right.  The textbook for baseball says that pitchers win with speed and precise location.  Knuckleballs are usually slow, and they’re kind of wobbly; most of the time, even the pitcher doesn’t know where the pitch is going.  A knuckleball pitcher can look more like a Dad playing catch than an actual pitcher. Many pitching coaches won’t look twice at a knuckleball pitcher, and knucklers look terrible on some of the basic statistics that coaches keep.

But the good ones still get batters out and win games.  Even though they don’t look the part, and violate several of the basic assumptions of the game, they work.  The trick is in allowing knucklers to do what they do, and not to try to turn successful knuckleball pitchers into middling fastball pitchers.  You have to let them do what they do, and be willing to accept the occasional ugly game. Over time, they hold up well. If you can overlook dogma and focus on results, knucklers can be hidden gems.

The Girl has figured out that she’s the equivalent of a knuckleballer in a league that only values speed.  

She participated in debate throughout junior high, becoming really good at it as she went.  She joined high school debate with high hopes.

But the culture changed, and she had a choice to make.  

The junior high league was always about improvement, and about encouraging kids to get up there and do what they could.  She thrived. The high school league is cutthroat, with kids from affluent private schools getting private coaching and pulling moves that might be technically legal, but that leave a bitter aftertaste.  There’s nothing encouraging or nurturing about it; judges aren’t even allowed to give tips for improvement at the end of a match.

She’s still very good at it, but the culture of the league is unabashedly cutthroat.  It values only one kind of pitcher. She doesn’t want to be that, so she’s walking away.

As her Dad, it’s hard to watch her walk away from something for which she has an obvious talent.  But I can’t blame her. She has to choose between being the knuckleball pitcher she actually is, and trying to fake being the power pitcher the league likes.  

She’s wildly smart, but she’s not cutthroat.  Her favorite part of debate tournaments was the bus ride home, making up cheesy freestyle rhymes and laughing with her friends.  She’s willing to compete when it’s called for, but she has a sense of fair play that isn’t universally shared. I’ve seen her raise an eyebrow and acknowledge a clever move when her opponent made one; that has never bothered her.  She likes to win, but on her own terms.

I don’t want her to lose that.  She knows the kind of pitcher she is, and she knows she’s good at it.  She knows that the current league doesn’t really value that. So she’s leaving.

I asked her what she would rather do with her time.  Warming my heart, she responded “what I really want to do is write.”

She is her father’s daughter.  

Keep on throwing that weird, wobbly stuff, TG.  I’d rather see you develop into the complicated person you’ll be than torture yourself trying to imitate kids who take a sense of fairness as a sign of weakness.  Make those weird, wobbly throws, even if nobody else notices for a while that you’re making batters miss. The world doesn’t need another fast-talking sophist. It needs thoughtful originals who come at ideas in their own way.  We’ll find something else to put on those college applications.

OER as an Institutional Survival Strategy

With The Boy in the midst of his college search -- so far 6 acceptances, 1 deferral, and 1 yet to report -- I’m becoming fluent in the difference between “tuition and fees” and “total cost of attendance.”  The latter figure, which includes everything except opportunity cost, is the one that matters. It’s what we actually have to figure out how to cover. In nearly every case, of course, the published COA is otherworldly and insane; I’m looking at COA after whatever grants are applied.  But still, what matters from here is not how the bill is broken out, but what the bottom line is.

I don’t think my family is unique in that.  

That’s where wide adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) can be an institutional survival strategy.  

Let’s say -- bear with me on this -- that your college is facing increasing costs of provision, but its public support is persistently flat.  That creates an ever-widening structural gap. And let’s further say that you have an institutional mission of access, so you don’t just want to pass along the entire widening gap to students.  Obviously, you look to alternative revenue sources, such as public-private partnerships and increased philanthropy, but both of those take time to cultivate and may take a while before they start to bear fruit at sufficient scale to make up the difference.  And you’ve already cut so much over years of sustained austerity that you can’t make it all up that way. What do you do in the meantime?

Shift focus from “tuition and fees” to “total cost of attendance,” and foster the adoption of OER at scale.  Money not spent on textbooks can offset tuition increases from a student perspective, while still allowing needed operating revenue to flow to the institution.

In the right context, done well, OER represents the rare win-win.  A student facing a tuition increase of, say, a hundred dollars a semester probably breaks even with a single course moving to OER, and comes out ahead if two or more courses do.  Tuition may go up, but total cost of attendance -- the meaningful number -- remains flat or even drops. Even better, OER allows every single student to have the book from the first day of class, which can help with course completion and retention, and therefore enrollment.  (One of the most powerful predictors of retention is GPA. Students with GPA’s below 2.0 drop out at much higher rates than students above 2.0. Not having the book affects academic performance; presumably, having the book may affect it in a positive way.) You can maintain a sustainable funding level for the college, keep costs down for students, and improve retention rates at the same time.

In essence, it redirects revenue from publishers to colleges and students.  Yes, that takes a bite out of some commercial publishers, but that’s their problem.  They should have thought of that before charging $300 for an Intro to Physics textbook, or before bundling non-transferable software codes with textbooks to short-circuit the used book market.

OER is neither instant nor free.  Faculty need time and support to research, compile, and sometimes even create material that works for them.  But especially in a community college context, where most of the courses are at the 100-level, I don’t see why we can’t try it.  Intro to Algebra is neither proprietary nor idiosyncratic. Intro to Psychology is taught to millions of students every single year; surely, there are common denominators to it.  Publishers like to try to scare faculty with lines like “OER is free like a puppy,” but that’s overstated; after the initial selection process, it’s not that bad. (In fields like math, where the real issue is homeworks and problem sets, some publishers have opened up platforms online that assume the presence of an OER textbook.  It’s impure, but I’d rather a student pay $25 for that than $100 for a book and code.)

I ran some back-of-the-envelope numbers for Brookdale over the last few days, to see how much money OER has saved or will save students in the coming year.  Based only on courses that have already committed to adopting it, we’re looking at over a million dollars per year in textbook cost savings. For self-paying students, that’s money they keep; for students on Pell, that represents larger refunds with which they can cover transportation and food.  And that’s only a start; we have more courses that would easily lend themselves, some of which are already experimenting on a section basis. For example, we have a chemistry class with a $125 textbook and a $50 lab manual that it switching to OER this Fall. A student there will save far more from the move to OER than she will spend in increased tuition, and she’ll have the luxury of not having to worry about buying the book.  

Obviously, I’d much prefer for institutions to be sufficiently well-funded that we didn’t have to make these tradeoffs, and students could enjoy the entire benefit of OER.  I hold out hope for a political sea-change that will allow such a world to happen. But until then, I’d rather move to OER in some more classes than go with layoffs, or pass even higher increases in cost of attendance on to students.  Because those are the actual choices at hand.

Notes on Languages

The recent MLA findings on foreign language programs didn’t shock me.  

It found that language offerings at American colleges have dropped dramatically over the last several years.  I can attest that from an administrative perspective, languages offer unique challenges.

When you have a critical mass of enrollments, you can offer just about anything.  We have healthy enrollments in Spanish, for instance, and have for a long time. We have full-time faculty in Spanish, and they don’t struggle to make load.  That isn’t true for other languages.

Attrition rates from the first semester to the second, and then beyond, are relatively high in languages.  That means that if we have, say, fifteen students in a single section of 101, we may be stuck with running a 102 smaller than we would usually allow it to run.  That makes it difficult to take a flyer on a new language offering, or to maintain languages when the 101 level sections run small.

Languages are subject to fads.  French isn’t nearly as popular as it used to be; neither is German.  Japanese does okay, but it isn’t the hot ticket it was a few years ago.  American Sign Language remains relatively strong. But really, when it comes to enrollments, there’s Spanish, and then there’s everything else.  And while it’s commonplace to put languages together in a single “Languages” department, they aren’t interchangeable. If student interest shifts from, say, French to ASL, I can’t just tell the professor to adjust.  (“Yes, we hired you for German, but how’s your Mandarin?”) That means that outside of Spanish, we have to rely on adjuncts.

Setting matters, though.  My kids’ high school has four full-time Latin teachers.  Brookdale doesn’t have one. For whatever reason -- I suspect the halo effect generated by one charismatic hire -- Latin is hot at the local public high school.  It’s a mystery. Although I advised both of my kids to take Spanish, on the grounds of usefulness, they both chose Latin. Kids today...

There’s an argument for looking at ESL as a foreign language.  For the students taking it, it is. But bureaucratically, it’s kind of a mix of foreign language, remediation, and its own unique thing.  I suspect it’s harder to teach than other languages, since the incoming students aren’t all starting from the same language. Locally, for instance, we’ll have students whose first language is Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, or any number of others.  In Spanish 101, by contrast, nearly every student is starting with English. When everyone is starting from the same language, the instructor knows what to compare things to. But when some are starting from, say, Russian, which doesn’t have articles as we know them, and others are starting from Spanish, explaining English articles requires multiple approaches.

The folks who study ESL also report that what they call “generation 1.5” brings unique challenges.  That’s the inelegant term for students who came to America as children and have spent at least a few years here.  They often have pretty good colloquial spoken English, but weak writing (and sometimes reading) skills in both languages.  That’s very different from the student who arrives as an adult with a solid education in her native language. The former may need much more help on structure, but less on vocabulary, with the reverse being true for the latter.  Somehow, the same instructor has to help both at the same time. That’s a task.

Like the other languages, ESL is subject to political winds.  Given tighter immigration, I wouldn’t be surprised to see ESL enrollments start to slip over the next few years.  Still, the primary issue there is demand, rather than supply, so I don’t see it going away anytime soon.

I’d love to see the MLA work more closely with TESOL and do for ESL what the completion agenda has done for remedial math and English.  (That may be the most jargon-y sentence I’ve written this month…) We’re not there yet. In the meantime, there’s Spanish, and then there’s everything else.

Green Mountain College

I never made a conscious decision to make this blog an obituary column for colleges, but as a colleague and a member of the profession, I think each one deserves to be noticed.

Add Green Mountain College, in Vermont, to the list of casualties this academic year.

As with Hampshire last week, I tip my cap to the leadership there for having the moral sense to avoid enticing new students to climb on board a sinking ship.  In a reputational business, there’s a rational fear of bad news becoming self-fulfilling, leading to a death spiral. That tends to mean that you don’t see conspicuous danger signs until the very end, at which point the end can seem abrupt.  

F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.  By that standard, higher ed administration is full of first-rate minds these days. When colleges start to spiral downward financially, the leadership has to convey both real urgency internally and convincing optimism externally.  It leads to a sort of Calvinist anxiety; successful colleges act a certain way, so that is how we will act, even if we know at some level that it’s acting. In the case of public colleges, that’s even more complicated, because the external audiences include legislators who control appropriations.  When faced with cuts or long-term flat funding, the most common rhetorical response is the future conditional: “if this continues, quality will be in jeopardy.” The future conditional is true, as far as it goes, but it tends to elide the damage that has already been done. That’s because noting the accumulated damage could lead legislators and donors to conclude that there’s no point in throwing good money after bad.  But it also tends to let them off the hook for years of neglect. Every year, the baseline moves down again, necessarily without acknowledgement. It’s in nobody’s short-term interest to point that out.

When the future conditional is abruptly replaced by the present and past tenses, the effect can be jarring.  

According to a Boston Globe account, GMC reached an agreement with Prescott College in Arizona to “hire some Green Mountain faculty, maintain student records, and allow students to complete their degrees there.”  I don’t know what “some” means in that context, but I hope that employment casualties are relatively minimal. Moving from Vermont to Arizona is not a small endeavor or life change, so I imagine that not everybody could or would, but it’s better than nothing.  And I’m glad to see that student records will be preserved somewhere. A graduate applying for a job somewhere with an employer who verifies degrees shouldn’t be punished because the alma mater’s registrar’s office is gone. Neither should a student abandoned midway who’s trying to get transfer credits recognized.

As with Wheelock, Newbury, Mount Ida, and Hampshire, Green Mountain noted the unforgiving demographics of New England.  The part of the country that gave birth to American higher education as we know it isn’t producing or attracting enough students to maintain what it has built.  But it’s partially a tale of different sectors. New England’s elite institutions -- the Harvards of the world -- are, and will be, mostly fine. (The asterisk here is for Hampshire, which counted itself among the five colleges.)  Its public institutions have struggled pretty much forever, largely because states there saw the elite private colleges picking up the slack. As Governor Dukakis supposedly claimed, it was okay to underfund UMass because Harvard and MIT were already there.  Non-elite private colleges, though, are really up against it.

To really understand why, think like a parent.  Backbreaking tuition for an MIT may make sense; it’s one of the best in the world at what it does, and it opens doors few others can open.  Much more modest tuition for a local public college may make sense. But backbreaking tuition for a college that few people more than an hour away have heard of is a tough sell.  Some of them have survived on spectacularly high discount rates, but there are natural limits to that. As long as they’re afflicted by Baumol’s Cost Disease, and they don’t have national reputations or obvious programmatic hooks, they’ll get squeezed.  And even a programmatic hook is no guarantee. Green Mountain had a clear hook with environmental studies, but it wasn’t enough.

New England may be hitting this point first, but other regions are likely to follow.  The future conditional is starting to give way to the present. I hope the rest of us heed the warnings, so we don’t wind up relegated to the past.