Two Worlds

I’ve worked over the years to build a persona as a relatively controlled writer, one who has opinions, yes, but who doesn’t veer off into self-indulgent, profanity-laced tirades.

And then Aunt Becky from Full House pays a half million dollars to get her kids into USC, despite one of them having posted videos saying she doesn’t intend to go to class much.

(tapping fingers on table)

Which happens during the same week that I’m combing the instructional budget to cut a million dollars to help offset some of the latest shortfall.

(foot tapping under table)

Then I read that one trick some rich parents used was fake disability claims, to get control of the SAT testing venue so they could get away with hiring people to take the tests for them.

(ears reddening)

This, the week after a new governor elected on a “free community college” platform proposed a budget with exactly zero dollars of increased operating aid for community colleges.

(tapping gets faster)

Ahem.

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It’s hard to read about colleges so swamped with applicants that they have to turn most of them away when I work at a college that’s doing somersaults and backflips to avoid layoffs due to declining enrollment and public disinvestment.

Persons so inclined will see the rush to exclusive places as a “flight to quality,” but that’s not it.  If that were it, then our graduates would struggle at those places when they transfer. In fact, they outperform “native” students.  And I really don’t think that Ms. Loughlin’s daughter was weighing academic quality. She certainly didn’t seem too focused on it.

It all feels like morbid and unwelcome confirmation my oft-repeated line “community colleges struggle because they’re trying to create a middle class for a country that no longer wants one.”  The wildly wealthy live in their own world; what Christopher Lasch called “the secession of the successful” has so dessicated our sense of community that colleges for whom community is their middle name are left aside.

The tax deduction on Ms. Loughlin’s bribe would be enough to hire two tenure-track professors here.  That’s just the deduction.

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The interwebs have been filled with thoughtful pieces noting that the real scandal about elite college admissions is how much tilting in favor of the wealthy and powerful is actually legal: everything from access to “good” school districts to certain sports to SAT coaching to the free time to do a slate of extracurriculars comes with wealth, but registers as “merit.”  That’s all true, but it’s only part of the picture.

Colleges and universities exist in a political economy.  When that political economy favors the middle, institutions in the middle will thrive.  When it pulls towards the extremes, it’s the places in the middle that feel the strain.

Yes, by all means, let’s throw the wrongdoers in prison.  They have it coming. But as long as the economic rewards skew ever more highly to a small elite, it’s not surprising that people will do whatever they think they have to do to get, or stay, among that elite.  If we want a more livable society, in which it’s possible to have a good life in many different ways, we need to make the policy changes to make that political economy happen. Reduce college choice to personal preference, and most of the madness will stop.  College admissions madness is a symptom, not a cause.

In the meantime, there are plenty of good seats still available at “access institutions” all around the country, at least for now.  No photoshopped athletics necessary.

A Seeming Contradiction

I don’t often resort to Socratic dialogues, for reasons, but this topic lends itself.  I’ll be me, and my interlocutor will be Imaginary Interlocutor. For brevity, I’ve skipped all of the “it is certainly so, Socrates…” responses.

Me: It’s a shame we didn’t raise tuition more.

II: Wait a minute.  Don’t you support free community college?

Me: Yup.

II: But you want to raise tuition?

Me: Yup.

II: That seems like a contradiction.  

Me: Not really.  Most “free community college” programs are actually scholarship programs.  By raising tuition, we would increase the amount of aid we get in the form of scholarships.  So students who benefit from the free community college program wouldn’t pay the increase, or any tuition at all.  And I want to ensure that we have the funding to provide a quality education to all of our students.

II: Huh?  If community college is free, wouldn’t everyone get it?

Me: No, that’s not how it works.  “Free community college” programs are actually scholarships for selected groups of students.  The scholarships cover tuition, and sometimes fees. So if we raise tuition, we get more from the scholarships.  

II: Wait, so it’s not free?

Me: It’s free to certain students, but we still have to pay our bills.  It’s cost-shifting. The appeal of “free community college” is that it shifts some of the cost from people who really can’t afford it to people who really can.  In return, we get a more productive workforce, a more peaceful society, and a more informed electorate. It’s a good deal.

II: You mean like welfare?  Or socialism?

Me: I mean like public schools.  Or libraries. Or the military, for that matter.  Those are public goods that draw public support. The same applies here.

II: But I worked my way through college!  Why can’t kids today?

Me: They aren’t kids.  Besides, tuition has gone up so much faster than entry-level wages.  Most students now work more than students used to, but they make less, relative to tuition.  “Kids today” aren’t lazy; if anything, they work harder than we did. We just made it harder on them.  I support making it easier on them. After all, they’re the ones who’ll be paying for our Social Security.  Or not.

II:  But taxes are bad.  Why can’t we let the private sector handle it?

Me: Because those schools keep folding, and we keep eating those loans in the form of...wait for it...taxes.  I’d rather pay upfront for a good product than keep paying later for a bad one.

II: Okay, but caveat emptor.  Shouldn’t the market choose?

Me: No, because the benefits aren’t just personal.  Formal education after high school leads to all sorts of better social outcomes, which save money on the back end.  Asking kids right out of high school to pony up tens of thousands of dollars a year that they don’t have, without aid, won’t work.  We’d wind up with a less productive and more desperate society.

II: Are you saying that people who don’t go to college aren’t productive?

Me: No.  I’m saying that more people will be more productive if they’re more educated.  My grandfather dropped out of the ninth grade, but he was able to support a family on his wage as a unionized electrical lineman for Detroit Edison.  Jobs like those aren’t as easy to find as they used to be, and even those jobs now require training beyond high school. Policies that made sense seventy years ago don’t work now.

II: But we still have electrical linemen!

Me: Yes, but now they require post-secondary training, like the JCP&L program at Brookdale.

II: Nice plug.

Me; Thanks.

II: This still doesn’t seem right.  Wouldn’t you rather eliminate tuition altogether?

Me: Absolutely!  As long as we have an adequate revenue stream to replace it.  The current programs don’t eliminate tuition; they pay it. Right now, tuition and fees are about 57 percent of our budget.  Eliminate that revenue without a replacement, and the place would collapse. What good does access to a closed college do?

II: Well, none...

Me: Exactly. Replace that tuition with public funding, drawn from progressive taxation, and we have a deal.  Until then, we need to raise tuition to partially make up for the flat funding and increasing costs we actually have.

II:  Hmm. Smells like socialism to me.

Me: Or like America before the 1970’s.  Harry Truman supported free community college.  When public colleges were free in the decades after World War Two, we had the greatest economic boom in the history of humanity.  If you want to call Harry Truman or Nelson Rockefeller socialists, that’s on you. I just want a policy that works.

II: Make public colleges great again?

Me: Hey!  Common ground!  Lemme buy you a free beer...

Asking the Right Questions

A thought experiment:

One full-time professor teaches five sections of twenty-five students each.

Two adjunct professors teach one class each, also with twenty-five students per section.

In this scenario, the “student:faculty ratio” is 175/3, or about 58 to 1.  But the average class size is 25. If you try to infer average class size from the student/faculty ratio, you will get it wildly wrong.

I bring up the thought experiment because it helps explain what makes me uneasy about the numbers in the new American Academy of Arts and Sciences survey of humanities instruction in community colleges.  A line like “Philosophy appeared to have the highest student-faculty ratio among the humanities disciplines examined here, with approximately 50 students for each faculty member…” could mean many different things, or nearly nothing.  What it almost certainly does _not_ mean is that the average size of a philosophy class is 50. But of course, the first two comments on the IHE story about the survey immediately leaped to the conclusion that the faculty/student ratio is the same as the average class size.

The report doesn’t appear to make an argument; it seems intended to create a baseline against which future surveys can draw longitudinal data.  That’s valuable in itself, and you have to start somewhere. But false precision is a real danger.

The adjunct/full time divide is an obvious place to start.  Just defining the terms can be a challenge. If a full-timer teaches a section as overload, does that count as full-time (because taught by a full-timer) or adjunct (because taught outside of load)?  If a dean teaches a class, is that full-time (because she’s full-time) or adjunct (because it’s outside of her regular job)? In places where full-time faculty and staff do significant overload teaching, the way you answer those questions makes a material difference in the numbers you reach.  In a national survey, you’re probably getting numbers counted differently in different places. That’s a lot of statistical noise for a seemingly straightforward question.

Before making any inferences about the strength of the humanities at community colleges, it’s also helpful to distinguish gen ed requirements from electives.  English composition, for instance, falls under “humanities,” and it’s required in nearly every degree program at the college. But inferring high intrinsic student interest from high enrollments -- when those enrollments are required for every major from Auto Tech to Women’s Studies -- risks a basic category error.  Some students are happy to take it, and many more develop an appreciation for it once they’re there, but a non-trivial number take it because it’s required.

I saw the difference when I moved from Massachusetts, where the state doesn’t require a speech course as part of general education, to New Jersey, where it does.  Requirements drive enrollments. If you don’t believe me, sit in sometime on a faculty discussion of a proposal to change gen ed requirements. Faculty in affected departments see the connection immediately.

If it were somehow possible to isolate distribution requirements from electives, we’d get a truer picture.

That said, it’s also true that the humanities are much stronger at many community colleges than the popular discussion acknowledges.  To listen to politicians and commentators, you’d think that we do nothing but STEM and workforce preparation. But that’s simply not true.  We have students who come here to be artists, or who discover a love for art once they get here. We prepare students for transfer, which means giving them a broad base of courses at the start.  And we have faculty in the humanities doing innovative work within the admittedly significant confines of heavy teaching loads. This is college, after all.

So, kudos to the AAAS for starting to establish a baseline, and for calling attention to a much-neglected, but crucial, part of what we do.  I’d just advise being careful about which questions to ask, so we don’t inadvertently play into negative and false stereotypes.

Thoughts on Argosy

Argosy University, a well-known formerly for-profit university known for graduate programs in psychology and related disciplines, is either dead or dying, depending on the information source.  This comes two years after a deeply weird buyout and conversion to nominally nonprofit status by the Dream Center, a move that I found mystifying at the time.

Tressie McMillan Cottom pointed out on Twitter that most of its students are graduate students, often pursuing doctorates.  Accreditation issues aside -- and that’s saying a lot -- that makes subsequent transfer much harder than it would be for most undergraduates.  Graduate programs don’t typically take courses in transfer at all. And if they do, they insist on their own comprehensive exams and dissertations.  In practice, that means that many students will lose recognition for everything they’ve done in their programs; at most, they might be able to get loan forgiveness.  

At least at the undergraduate level, there’s a common practice of transfer, and of credit by examination.  At the graduate level, each program is bespoke.

It’s terrible for the students, obviously, and I’d bet that many of the faculty and staff tried to do legitimate work.  That was certainly true in my time at DeVry. But the model, even with a subsequent surface-level retrofit as not-for-profit, had a decided center of gravity.  

I never understood the alleged conversion.  The chain had so much baggage that simply declaring one day that it was nonprofit didn’t seem likely to matter.  In fact, it didn’t.

Secretary DeVos seems to believe that the solution to the dilemmas around higher education in America is deregulation.  But Argosy shows what happens when regulators let the good times roll. I’ll suggest a three-part strategy that’s much more likely to work.

First, adequately fund public higher education.  If you don’t do this, the rest won’t matter. Flooding the zone with good, affordable public options will squeeze out space for shady operators.  Scammers succeed by first identifying a need. Take away the need, and you’ll choke off the scammers’ air supply. Make the need worse by continuing to bleed the publics dry, and you open up space for new scammers.  

Yes, that costs some money upfront.  But bailouts aren’t free, and neither are sweeping loan forgiveness programs.  At least this way, you’ll be doing some good in the world. If students seeking opportunity find flexible, high-quality, available, understandable, affordable opportunities on the public side, they’ll take them.

Second, regulate.  I’ve written before that for-profit education, if it’s going to exist as a positive force, requires “patient capital.”  To me, that means getting it off the stock markets. Require it to be privately held, and severely curtail the options to sell.  If you can build a value-adding operation from the ground up and sustain it by building a series of better mousetraps, go for it.  But “pump and dump” or “cut and run” or any of the other scorched-earth ways of making money have no place in education.

Third, start treating higher education as a system, rather than as a confederation.  That’s a much taller order, but again, it offers the possibility of real improvement.  That means taking a systemwide look at funding, at programmatic gaps, and at transfer pathways.  

If we did all of those things, there wouldn’t be so many unmet needs for scammers to exploit.  People could still make money, but only if they managed to compete on quality. And instead of these hellaciously expensive ballouts and write-offs, we could actually budget.  

Or we can wait a few months for the next massive system failure.  

In the meantime, my condolences to the affected students, faculty, and staff.  Even if the overall organization was shady, many of the people on the front lines weren’t.  Here’s hoping that as a sector, we don’t add insult to injury by stigmatizing them.

Friday Fragments

When my administrative career started, the conversations around class sections and scheduling had to do with how full they could run -- who would go over a cap, which caps were harder than others, and the like.  It was all about trying to squeeze in as many people as possible.

Now, those conversations are all about how small a section can run without closing.  I haven’t had the “where will we put all these students?” conversation in years.

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My condolences to the folks at Southern Vermont College, which has announced its closure.  It joins Newbury College, Mount Ida College, Hampshire College, Green Mountain College, and the College of New Rochelle.

Every college closing brings with it not just stranded students, but unemployed faculty, staff, and administrators.  In most cases, they’re unemployed through no fault of their own. In these cases, they’re thrown into the market in a part of the country where even the relatively healthier places aren’t hiring much.  And the towns in which the defunct colleges are located take a nasty economic hit.

I suspect that more are coming, and I say that more as a parent than as a higher ed insider.  Small private colleges without national reputations only offer a good value proposition if they discount dramatically.  But if they do that, they starve themselves of revenue. I understand premium prices for, say, Princeton, but most places aren’t Princeton.  Discount rates over half suggest that many small colleges have hit their effective price ceilings. Add declining numbers of 18 year olds in the region, and the math is tough.

(To be fair, Hampshire has a national reputation.)

I’d love to see some enterprising sociologist study what happens to former employees of colleges that fold.  Where do they go?

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A conversation in a meeting this week reminded me of a story The Girl told me last year.  She was walking in the hallway at school during a class-change period when someone tapped her on the shoulder from behind.  Thinking it was her friend, she turned around quickly and barked “I”M RUNNING ON NOTHING BUT SUGAR AND DESPAIR, AND I’M ALL OUT OF SUGAR!”  

It wasn’t her friend.

World, you have been warned...

The Other Side of Free Tuition

As longtime readers know, I’m a fan of the idea of community colleges being tuition-free.  It strikes me as the best hope we have of bringing excluded people into the advanced economy, of building an informed citizenry, and of generating the kind of workforce that can sustain long-term prosperity.  Opening up higher education to anybody who wants to try it is exactly the sort of thing that a prosperous society that believes in the dignity of everybody should do.

From where I sit, though, there’s a minor issue that people keep forgetting.

If a state wants truly free community colleges, there’s a key step it has to take.  It has to support significantly increased _operating aid__ to those colleges year in and year out.  

Notice I didn’t say “scholarships,” or “performance-based incentives,” or “capital grants,” or “seed money,” or any of the other indirect or restricted sources of money.  The key is _operating aid_.

Operating budgets, as distinct from capital budgets, cover labor costs, utilities, and short-term expenses.  In other words, they pay for people. They are what pay for faculty, registrars, financial aid staff, advisors, librarians, and electric bills.  When operating budgets fall short, we see the kinds of austerity that folks in higher ed know all too well -- replacing full-time faculty with adjuncts, replacing full-time staff with hourlies, having two people do the work of three.  Over time, each new cut becomes the baseline for the next one; political leaders wedded ideologically to the idea that all public spending is bad keep forgetting every cut before the next one. With each round, students pay (often through borrowing) more for less.  Then we wonder why young people are turning to the political left with a vigor unseen since before the Cold War.

Holding operating aid flat, or cutting it, while promoting “free community college” is austerity on steroids.  It makes the fundamental mathematical mistake of conflating price (of consumption) with cost (of production). At a really basic level, it kneecaps colleges’ ability to make payroll.

I wouldn’t be quite so strident on the point if the people who refuse to increase operating aid didn’t also condemn colleges for raising tuition.  But they do. When asked just exactly how we’re supposed to pay the bills, they tend to dismiss the question breezily, usually with some passing mention of “new revenue streams.”  I’m a big fan of new revenue streams when people can actually identify what they are. But when used as a smoke bomb to escape a hard question, not so much.

Sometimes they refer instead to a “new business model,” with emphasis on the word “business.”  The implication is that adopting the attitudes and practices of private industry would make everything okay.  But that’s not our mission. For-profit companies aren’t about universal service or universal access. They serve the people it’s profitable to serve.  If a given area isn’t profitable, it’s cut off. Just ask the folks in Lordstown, Ohio, where the GM plant just closed. Despite a president who claimed such things would stop, they didn’t; the business case to close it was too compelling.  Business shed unprofitable product lines and employees as a matter of course. That’s not the point of a community college. Its job is to serve everybody, including those whom a business-minded manager might calculate are more expensive than they’re worth.  Given our mission, that’s a feature, not a bug.

Frustratingly, the current wave of austerity is entirely voluntary.  The economy is strong right now, we keep hearing; that’s part of why our enrollments are down.  If the economy is strong, what’s with all the cuts? If the economy is awash in jobs and money and we’re still taking cuts, what happens when the next recession hits?

Enough.  Our employees insist on being paid not in conditional money, or hypothetical money, or the vague promise of future money.  They want actual dollars in the bank. We can only do that if we have actual dollars in the bank. If we’d rather source those dollars from the revenues drawn from progressive taxation, instead of tuition, I’m fully on board.  But to pretend that we can just cut and cut and cut without ever doing damage isn’t a political position; it’s a delusion. We can eliminate price, but we can’t eliminate cost. Austerity is expensive, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Consumer Tip

A couple of days ago I had a conversation with someone who knows higher education well.  She asked about things that parents of prospective community college students should know.  When I mentioned in passing that “of course, students who want to transfer should be sure to check in with the transfer counselor as early as possible,” she stopped me and asked what that was.  

If she didn’t know, i’m guessing most people don’t.  So in the spirit of “news you can use,” a quick word about transfer counselors.

In parts of the country with relatively high concentrations of four-year colleges, a given community college might send students on to several different places.  For example, at Holyoke we regularly sent students to UMass-Amherst, Westfield State, Elms, Springfield College, Mount Holyoke, and Western New England University, among others.  Each of those schools had different areas of strength, different expectations for transfer students, different requirements, and different financial models. At Morris, we sent students to Ramapo, William Paterson, College of St. Elizabeth, Rutgers, Drew, and Cornell, among others; the same principle held.

Multiply all of those destination schools (and many more) by the panoply of degree options available, add articulation agreements and (shifting) statewide transfer policies, and it would be easy for the average student to get lost.  If I’m starting at my local community college with the intention of transferring on for a bachelor’s degree in, say, business, how do I know what to take to ensure full transfer of credit?

That’s where the transfer counselor comes in.

These are the folks whose job it is to stay on top of those details, and to communicate them to students in useful ways.  They know whether a given school has a foreign language requirement, for instance, or which math class fits which business program.  They also know who to talk to at various schools to appeal negative transfer decisions, what the requirements are for transfer scholarships at various places (and that such things exist!), and what the most common choke points are for students trying to move on.  

For example, most of our destination schools here have a ‘diversity’ course requirement.  In most cases, a course on, say, African-American history would fulfill both a diversity requirement and a history requirement.  But Rutgers specifically disallows counting the same course in two categories at the same time, so if you use that class for diversity, you have to use another class for history, and vice versa.  A Brookdale student who’s targeting Rutgers is better off knowing that early, so she can use an elective slot in her program to take the extra class with us, at our lower tuition rate.

Statewide transfer agreements help, but they have limits.  Typically they cover the gen ed classes, but not the classes in the major.  (And even the gen ed coverage is imperfect.) And with each four-year college having material differences from all of the others, we can’t possibly do a perfect mirror of the first two years of all of them.  A few years ago I heard the president of the Maricopa system talk about the success they’ve had mirroring the first two years of curricula at ASU. I was impressed, but part of the reason Maricopa could do that was that over 90 percent of the students who transfer on from there go to ASU.  When you have a single target, it’s easier to aim. We’re in a target-rich environment.

A good transfer counselor can turn that target-rich environment from an intimidating dilemma into a wealth of opportunity, if you know she exists.  So this week’s consumer tip: find the transfer counselor early. You’ll save money, time, and frustration.

Ask the Administrator: Advice for Sector-Jumpers

A new correspondent writes:

I loved your book on community college administration. I'm now transitioning to a 4-year university which is a completely different formal and informal structure. One advantage of my transition is I'm going from community college to a relatively small technical university. Both systems focus on instruction and applied learning which is to say the university I'm going to is not a R1 institution. Do you have suggestions that will supplement your book and looks at navigating administrations and culture within a 4-year environment?

Maybe your reading community does as well?

--

I appreciate the plug, but let’s focus on the second half of the question.  What resources are out there to help community college administrators who (want to?) make the leap to four-year schools?

I haven’t looked for those, so I can’t speak to it specifically.  There’s a pronounced difference in tone at conferences that include both sectors as opposed to those specific to community colleges, but outside of the elite institutions, I suspect that many of the challenges are similar.  Demographics, for one: tuition-driven institutions located in parts of the country where college-going populations are flat or declining have some obvious financial issues. Student persistence and completion concerns cross sectors.  Based on local observation, I can attest that community colleges don’t have a monopoly on dual enrollment anymore.

Slightly over a quarter of community colleges nationally have dorms, so what used to be a pretty clear distinction is now much less clear.  (At many regional four-year campuses, a significant number of students commute, too.) Both sectors, at least on the public side, have endured significant disinvestment since the Great Recession.  And human behavior is human behavior.

Off the top of my head, I’d guess that philanthropy plays a more conspicuous role at many four-year colleges, and that deans (and up) would be expected to play active roles in cultivating donor support.  That’s still mostly nascent in the two-year sector, though it’s starting to change. Most four-year colleges also have geographically larger service areas than most community colleges, though again, your mileage may vary.  For instance, Brookdale is focused (appropriately) on Monmouth County, but Ramapo and Montclair State Universities serve the entire state. Depending on the specific role you occupy, that sort of distinction may matter.

So I’ll ask my wise and worldly readers, some of whom have likely made the leap.  What advice would you have for a community college administrator who’s making the move to a four-year school?

Anxieties

Decision anxiety is a real thing.  Sometimes that still surprises me.

The Boy has received financial offers from six of the eight colleges to which he has applied.  (The other two haven’t yet reported whether he’s in.) He has developed a spreadsheet in which he breaks down each one: sticker price, scholarship/grant, work-study, subsidized loan, and what I call the “real total,” which is the sticker price minus any scholarship or grant.  The offers range from okay to comically bad, with little discernible connection to prestige as generally perceived.

The two most recent offers were from among his second tier, and they came in with weak offers.  His response? “That’s good - now it’s down to six.”

I hadn’t thought of it that way, but when he said it, it rang true.  Ruling out two options reduces the number of possible futures he’s juggling, and gives him a sense of agency.  What looks on the outside like a loss of options -- which, in one sense, it is -- feels to him like gaining clarity on what comes next.

Two schools have yet to report, so it’ll be a little while before the full picture comes into focus.  

The eagerness to reduce ambiguity, even at the cost of losing real options, is the same basic idea behind guided pathways.  I’ve read some behavioral economics pieces applying the same principle to grocery shopping; shoppers who will happily choose from among four brands of toothpaste will walk away in frustration if there are twenty.  Too many options makes the act of choosing seem overwhelming. Simplicity brings clarity, and therefore a sense of agency. But somehow, in the moment, it was still surprising.

From the parent’s perspective, the whole process looks different.  I’m much more sanguine about his options than he is, because I know that all of his choices are good, and that much of what will define his college years -- friends, relationships, quirky interests -- are, and have to be, unknowable from here.  He can’t know yet who he’ll meet, who’ll break his heart, or what chance overheard comment will change his life. He’s prepared to thrive, and I’m sure he will. He isn’t as sure about that as I am, but that’s okay. I wasn’t sure at seventeen, either.  It comes with the territory.

His anxiety is about choosing.  Mine is about something else.

Six months from now, he’ll be ensconced in his new college, and our house will have a six-foot-seven, TB-shaped hole in it.  He’s getting anxious because he can’t yet picture the near future. I’m getting anxious because I can.

I’ve been talking with him daily since before he could answer.  Later this year, when I forget and call his name, he won’t be there to answer.  

(pause)

That’s okay.  It’s supposed to happen.  I just didn’t realize it would happen so fast.

Gail Mellow

Gail Mellow, the longtime president of LaGuardia Community College in New York City, announced this week on Twitter that she’ll be stepping down in August.

In the fourteen (!) years I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve never stopped to pay tribute to a retiring president.  But she deserves the writerly equivalent of a standing ovation.

LaGuardia is a tough gig.  CUNY itself is not for the faint of heart -- it’s subject to the politics of New York City, and its student body is among the most diverse in the country by just about any measure.  

Not only does she seem unflappable, as far as I can tell, but she actually brought about remarkable improvements for students within a system that can make positive change an uphill battle.  (For a harrowing account of just how difficult it can be, check out Alexandra Logue’s Pathways to Reform.) She and Kay McClenney are among the only people whose presentations I seek out specifically whenever I’m at a conference.  In McClenney’s case, it’s because she knows so much, and runs panels better than anybody. In Mellow’s case, it’s because she’s always up to something. She did pathways before it was cool, and wrote a book about it. The first time I heard about “tagging” (as in hashtagging) it was at a panel about something she had done with faculty at LaGuardia.  

She’s even an excellent talent scout.  Michael Baston, my erstwhile Aspen colleague and current president at SUNY Rockland, was her provost for a while.  Allia Matta, one of my favorite people from Holyoke, decamped for LaGuardia and I couldn’t blame her. When the ESL department at Holyoke needed external consultants for a review, it reached out to LaGuardia; when the consultants arrived, they mentioned that whenever they need resources, they just ask.  In response to a slightly cynical reaction, they clarified that LaGuardia isn’t wealthy; it’s just that the president there has her priorities right. That’s rare in itself; for it to be recognized is even rarer.

She has also embraced a role as a public champion of community college students.  I considered it a real honor to be in the same documentary with her -- Fail State -- and it made perfect sense that its New York premiere was at LaGuardia.  Of course it was.

I don’t know what her next move will be, but her last one was extraordinary.  Thank you, Gail Mellow, for showing the rest of us what can be done. You proved worthy of your students.

Build Your Own Course

What if students could build their own courses out of modules?

Middlesex Community College (MA, not to be confused with the ones in CT or NJ) has broken its student success course into one-credit shards, from which students pick three.  They’re then bundled into a single course on the transcript.

My counterpart at MCC, Phil Sisson, presented this at the League along with the Dean of Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary Studies, and Online and Weekend Programs, Matthew Olson.  (I think I got the title mostly right. In my defense, it’s really long…) I was immediately jealous, because it would be much, much harder to do something like that here. But it’s a great idea.

As I understand it, the core of the idea is that every student has to take the relatively generic one-credit “intro to college” class, which covers much of what you’d expect.  But for the remaining two credits, they can choose from among a large and growing list. The most enticing, from my perspective, was the one-weekend interdisciplinary mini-conferences.  Over a Friday and Saturday, the college brings multiple speakers -- including from off campus -- and provides students a deep, sharp dive into a particular experience. Afterwards, the students write reflection pieces on it, which serve both for grading and as artifacts for outcomes assessment.  

The single-weekend topics could be geographic regions, social movements, historical epochs, or nearly anything.  The mini-courses have to hit certain gen ed student learning outcomes, but other than that, they’re open to faculty passions.  

Which is the other appeal.  In the move to reduce degrees to 60 credits and provide guided pathways, it has become harder for faculty to develop and teach courses in areas of personal interest.  That can be demoralizing for faculty over time, and it deprives students of the experience of following someone into a more specialized or idiosyncratic area of interest.  But with the student success course as the umbrella, they can pursue intense and personal areas of scholarly interest with students.

Even better, the ‘conference’ format lends itself to collaboration.  A given class might be organized by a sociologist, but could have guests come in from English, political science, history, and economics to give different angles on the topic.  As a student learning experience, that could be remarkable, even if brief.

Sisson noted that “the registrar hates it,” which makes sense; I could imagine a format like that could make administering financial aid tricky, too.  ERP systems have been known to choke on such things. In a state like New Jersey where student success courses aren’t yet recognized in the gen ed transfer framework, something like this would be even harder.  But as an aspiration, it struck me as exciting. Interdisciplinary classes shouldn’t be the exclusive province of four-year schools; community college students (and faculty) can benefit from them, too. Student success classes, often pilloried as banal, could actually be the banners under which all sorts of exciting stuff gets taught.  Put that in the gen ed framework, and it will even transfer.

Thank you, Middlesex, for doing the hard work to fit the square peg of idiosyncratic classes into the round hole of transfer.  It’ll be a while before we can do that here, but it’s a worthy goal.

Somewhere Between Urgent and Cranky...

Monday’s League conference was one of the most encouraging conference days I’ve had in quite a while.  For today, I’ll just focus on Uri Treisman’s keynote.

Treisman was a pioneer in developmental math acceleration, and he has been fighting battles around student success in open-access colleges for decades now.  Which is to say, he has seen a lot, he has nothing left to prove, and no need to impress anybody. He took that as freeing, and offered a brief stream-of-consciousness talk that was bracing in its honesty.  This was a man with no more hoots to give, but who decided to use his powers for good anyway.

The gist of the talk, as near as I could piece it together, was that “innovation” consists of both ideas and implementation, and that we’re far better at the former than the latter.  Too often, we treat “innovation as ornamentation,” creating tiny little projects too small to matter. “Pilots don’t scale,” he declared, noting that advisors often steer students away from pilot sections of anything, because they don’t understand (and therefore don’t trust) the pilot.  In a moment that made me laugh out loud, he added that “when scaling a system, you have to ask, can Banner handle it?”

Instead, he argued that when scaling up, you don’t just replicate.  You have to look at the lessons you can learn from it, then change systems.  That can mean curricular pathways, but it can also mean such quotidian-but-crucial matters as financial aid and registration systems.  Anyone who has tried to get an ERP system to recognize learning communities will groan in recognition.

Systemic change goes beyond internal college matters.  He advocated reaching out to high schools and cooperating to improve students’ readiness, rather than just exhorting them.  That may eventually require changing some governance systems. (At a panel later in the afternoon, I had to sigh when the presenters noted that they have a single public school district covering the entire county.  Monmouth County alone has over 60. The challenges increase exponentially.) Changes at that level promise to be particularly challenging, since they involve competition for power; he left that part unstated.

Moving to equity, he noted that at some community colleges, as many as 60 percent of the students who receive Nursing degrees -- one of the highest-paid occupations for which we prepare students directly -- already have bachelor’s degrees.  That tends to reduce the impact of such programs on the inequality of wealth and opportunity. I don’t know if that’s true locally; it never occurred to me to check. I’ll check.

Worse, he relayed that when completion rates increased dramatically in Tennessee, some engineering schools started pushing back, saying that with so many students doing well at cc’s, they didn’t know how to sort applicants.  All those failures served a “sorting” purpose; when the failure level got too low, the next level of schools had to introduce new filters. It struck me as a small version of the larger truth that education alone can’t solve a labor market problem.  We’ve shied away from acknowledging that, for fear of getting “political” and therefore divisive, but it’s true. The Great Recession didn’t happen because we suddenly got bad at teaching. At a certain point, equity requires much larger choices than any that colleges can make, even if we get really good at them.  That doesn’t let us off the hook, but it does suggest a larger context for a discussion that we’ve been careful not to have.

Treisman’s manner was somewhere between urgent and cranky, with a palpable feeling of impatience.  That struck me as about right. Systemic change is the work of years. Now that we know some things that work -- as he put it, “I was as surprised as anyone” that speeding up developmental sequences actually worked -- there’s no excuse not to do them, and to make the larger changes we know we need to make.  For a cold and windy Monday morning in February, it was twenty-five minutes well spent.