The Annual Extra-Credit Warning

This one is somewhere between a blog post and a public service announcement for faculty.

Yes, I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s final exam season, and some things bear repeating.

This is when some panicked students have been known to start asking about extra credit.  It usually comes in the form of “is there anything I can do to improve my grade?”

There’s an understandable human impulse to take pity on a penitent soul.  In some contexts, that can be admirable.

But if you aren’t careful, a favor done for a sympathetic student can look to another student like discriminatory treatment.  “Why did he get a chance I didn’t get?”

If you don’t have a good answer for that -- one you could defend under oath -- it can get ugly.

So, some free advice from someone who has seen this movie enough times to know:

If you must offer extra credit, do it in writing, to the entire class.  Otherwise, don’t do it at all.

“But wait!,” I hear you thinking.  “You’re an administrator! Don’t you want high pass rates?”

Yes, but.  I want high success rates.  I don’t want failing performances dressed up as successes.  There’s a difference. The difference shows when students move on to the next semester, or the next school, or the next job.  

Over the years, I’ve presided over plenty of grade appeals.  When the professor sticks to their own rules, and enforces them evenhandedly, there’s never an issue upholding the grade.  The issues come when Mike gets a break that Michelle doesn’t, or when the professor veers wildly off the syllabus and starts improvising.  Those cases have been blessedly few in my career, but they’ve happened, and they’re not pretty. Worse, they’re entirely preventable.

If the extra credit assignment wasn’t built into the syllabus from the outset, don’t do it.  It will not end well.

Mercy is admirable, but so is fairness.

(climbs off soapbox)

A Plea to My Colleagues

Speaking as someone who has had multiple highly-charged conversations in the last week or so, a plea to academics everywhere:

It’s the end of the semester.  

Even more than usual, be kind to everybody.  

Some folks are paddling harder below the surface than you would guess.

The Continuing Adventures of Free College

For those of us who follow the evolution of free community college as an idea, it has been quite a week.

Last week, New Jersey finally got around to extending “Free Community College” to all of its community colleges, instead of just the initial 13.  It was certainly welcome, even though awarding it retroactively creates a non-trivial task for the FInancial Aid office.

New Jersey’s version of free community college is somewhat attenuated.  Most basically, it sets a hard household income cap of $45,000, which, in this part of the country, leaves out a lot of people who are really struggling.  But it’s a start.

Meanwhile, Washington State is likely about to pass a much more progressive version.  Its version has a higher cap for “Free,” and a higher cap still -- up to the median income -- for extra help.  More encouragingly, it also sets aside new pots of _operating_ funding to “recession-proof” the state’s colleges and universities, and to add capacity in expensive and high-demand areas like computer science and health care.

Operating funds are the most important part of the budget, and the hardest to come by.  They’re what pay for salaries, utilities, and all manner of recurring short-term costs. (Capital funds, by contrast, pay for buildings, renovations, and the like.)  Any increase to enrollment that doesn’t come with operating funds shifts a larger proportion of the budget to tuition. Adequate operating funds prevent layoffs. Inadequate operating funds cause them.  Kudos to Washington State for recognizing that.

Sandy Baum and Sarah Turner argued in the Washington Post that free college, in just about every version that currently exists, is regressive.  Reading that piece, I was reminded of the distinction between policy analysts and political scientists. Baum and Turner aren’t wrong in some of the short-term impacts they cite, but they miss the big picture completely.  

Means-tested programs have higher overhead and less political support over time than universal programs do.  That makes them more vulnerable to shifting political winds. Public libraries, for instance, don’t means-test their patrons; Mark Zuckerberg himself could borrow books for free if he wanted to.  That saves them the cost of staffing an office to do the means-testing, and it saves patrons the hassle of proving they need help. It also prevents the inevitable disappointment when people who are just over the income threshold for help discover that they’re on their own.  I suspect that’s part of why we rarely hear full-scale political assaults on public libraries.

Or compare the political fate of Social Security to that of “welfare.”  Keeping it simple -- hit a certain age and you get paid -- keeps it popular.  Yes, Social Security is more graduated than public libraries, and it has certain gaps often founded on racial and gender exclusions, but it’s still built on universality.  That’s what makes it work, politically.

Baum and Turner’s critique holds political support constant, and instead looks at efficiency.  The argument is that with a universal benefit, some people who don’t “need” help will get help.  

Which is true at the micro level.  Mark Zuckerberg can afford to buy his own books.  But it’s false at the macro level. You can’t hold political support constant.  Programs for the poor become poor programs. Political support is not constant, but it is predictable.  Offering a benefit to the middle- and upper-middle-classes helps maintain their political support for that benefit.  (The ultra-wealthy generally ignore such benefits entirely.) It also gets around the deadweight costs and hassles -- inefficiencies entirely ignored in Baum and Turner’s analysis -- of income verification.

Given my druthers, what would a free community college program ideally look like?

• No income cap.  Make community college as available as the public library.  Make living cost stipends available, and rely on progressive taxation* to tax them back from folks who are already wealthy.  This will have the benefit of greatly reducing financial aid bureaucracy, and of putting the FAFSA out of our misery.
• No post-graduation residency requirement.  Let people go where the opportunity is, or where the future spouse is, or just where they want to be.  Tying the peasants to the land is not how a free society should work.
• Significant _operating_ fund support for the institutions directly.  If price controls lead to continued watering-down of the quality of education, we will have missed the point.
• Open to students regardless of age.  Let the new high-school grad take advantage, and let the returning forty-year-old single parent take advantage.  

Lest this sound like dorm-room philosophizing or a misplaced Scandinavian pining for the fjords, it’s a decent description of CUNY prior to the mid-1970’s.  It’s how CUNY worked under such raving socialists as William McKinley, Warren Harding, and Dwight Eisenhower. It’s American, and it’s entirely doable. We just have to choose to do it.

When stark raving communist Andrew Carnegie endowed all those public libraries, he was hoping to raise the educational level of the country.  The basic idea still applies.

Kudos to New Jersey for its tentative first steps, and to Washington State for its much more ambitious version.  Let’s not let superficially “rigorous” analyses that leave politics out of the equation distract us. Fairness is a conscious choice.  Let’s make it.

*or, if the MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) folks are correct, the Feds could support free community college without increasing taxation at all.  I don’t know if they’re right, but it’s a tough idea to refute. For a great intro, follow Stephanie Kelton online.

Friday Fragments

Free tuition (for low-income students) has finally come to Brookdale!

New Jersey introduced free tuition for students from families with household income below $45,000 for the Spring semester, but it included only 13 of the 19 community colleges in the state.  Those of us among the six excluded colleges were a little miffed. People in every county pays state taxes, but only people in certain counties get the state benefit? It didn’t seem right.

This week, Governor Murphy announced that there’s enough money left in this year’s allocation to bring the remaining six colleges into the fold.  Free tuition has come to Brookdale!

New Jersey is an expensive state: the average household income here hovers around $75,000.  (In Monmouth County it’s even higher.) An income cap of $45k leaves a lot of deserving and struggling people out in the cold.  And as Sara Goldrick-Rab would correctly note, it only covers tuition, which is far from the only cost facing students. A lot of parents who don’t read the fine print, but who consider themselves struggling, may be irked to discover that they’re too “rich” for the benefit, but still too broke to cover the cost of attendance.

Still, it’s a foot in the door.  If we can convince the state to fund it to a more representative income cap, it could make a real difference.  It’s nowhere near where it could be, but it’s a welcome start.

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This story does a nice job of illustrating why free tuition, in itself, may not be enough.  It’s about a student at the University of Florida who had a baby in her freshman year. She’s about to graduate, thanks in large part to the help she got with childcare, food, and housing.

We’re not there, but I hope that someday, we are.  There’s just too much talent being left on the table.

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One of the genuine pleasures of The Boy being almost-18 is that now when we talk about politics, he has a stake.  He knows that he’ll be able to vote in 2020, so he feels like his opinion actually matters for the first time.

It’s fun, too, because while there’s a family resemblance in our worldviews, his is definitely his own.  He’s not afraid to challenge me, or to make distinctions between us. I’m encouraging him; my view of parenting has always been that the point is to raise them to the point that they are their own, fully capable adults.  He’s rushing towards that.

The Girl has long been a political sort, but TB has largely shied away from it until the last six months or so.  (The one exception was the March for our Lives in D.C. For obvious reasons, he has a strong personal stand on school shootings.)  But now that he sees the relevance, he’s finding his way. And I get to veer between “Dad mode” and “Professor mode,” alternately encouraging him to develop his own thoughts and dropping in some history or the occasional “have you thought about.”  

It’s a role I’ve been training for since basically forever.

World, there’s an increasingly formidable almost-adult on the verge of storming the future.  You’re going to love him. We already do.

Just This Week

This week has had a theme to it that I never want to see again.

On Wednesday, we devoted a chunk of the Cabinet meeting to discussing various measures to ensure or improve the physical security of everyone on campus.  By necessity, that involved discussions of some pretty awful scenarios.

The police chief was called away from the Cabinet meeting upon getting word that our Long Branch location was on lockdown “due to a gun situation.”  When he returned, he reported that someone apparently had a gun “somewhere between our location and the elementary school.”

I have a hard time when the word “gun” is in the same sentence with the words “elementary school.”  

The situation was eventually resolved peacefully.  Thank goodness for that.

On Tuesday I saw this video on Twitter.  It’s of a young girl delivering a well-rehearsed talk on active shooter preparation at an adult workplace.  The adults clearly weren’t expecting someone her age. The man at the 1:30 mark pretty much captured it.

Of course, also on Tuesday, someone at UNC Charlotte shot and killed two people and injured more, for reasons unknown.  On Wednesday we learned that one of the people killed was killed while in the process of trying to stop the killer, following the “run, hide, fight” instruction that has become this generation’s version of “stop, drop, and roll.”  His sacrifice apparently saved others’ lives. The hero, Riley Howell, deserves to be remembered. The killer, whose name I will not use, doesn’t.

My kids, the older of whom turns 18 this month, don’t remember a time without lockdowns and active shooter drills in school.  That’s not an exaggeration. Here’s a post I wrote at the time about The Boy’s first active shooter drill, when he was five.

His first active shooter drill, when he was five.

He’s on his way in a few months to UVA-Charlottesville, which made news a couple of summers ago when Nazis in Dockers stormed the campus, and later, one of them sped a car into a crowd, throwing several people airborne and murdering Heather Heyer.  

I’m okay with sending him there because the Nazis don’t get to win.  We refuse to let them.

At one level, I’m glad that TB and The Girl see lockdown drills as normal enough that they don’t get traumatized by them.  But at a more basic level, I hope that none of this ever becomes normal for them, or anyone else.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  For a long time, it wasn’t. It’s this way because somehow, we’ve made the choice to allow it.  

We have to stop allowing it.  This is madness, and, worse, it’s voluntary.  

The way to pay tribute to Riley Howell is to make his sacrifice the last one.  Let this week be the very last of its kind.

Beyond Distribution Requirements

The community colleges in my state have a common framework for distribution requirements for general education courses.  An Associate of Arts degree has to have 45 (out of 60) credits in gen ed; an Associate of Science has to have 30; an Associate of Applied Science has to have 20.  In each case, the gen ed distribution is pretty prescriptive. For the AA, for instance, nine credits must be in “communication,” including six in English Comp. There’s a bit of variation allowed, but even the variation is tightly prescribed.  

The “distribution requirement” model -- so many courses from column A, so many from column B -- has the advantage of relative clarity.  Different states structure it differently, and there are some wild cards, but the basic idea is to ensure that any graduate with a particular degree category can be assumed to have passed something in a given category.  If the framework aligns with local four-year schools, it can help with transfer of credits. (Ours doesn’t, and even gets in the way, but that’s a separate discussion of issues unique to New Jersey.) It also establishes a certain predictability of shares of enrollment across disciplines, which can make it easier to know how many sections of a given class to run.

But a distribution requirement is essentially a checklist.  It operates on the debatable assumption that the whole is equal to the sum of the parts.  And faculty in departments with required courses quickly make the connection between presence on the list, steady enrollment, and job security.  If you ever want to watch faculty panic, try engaging in a discussion of removing a given category from the checklist. A list that may or may not have been developed based on some sort of educational theory quickly becomes an artifact of interest-group politics.  Given that the total number of credits in a degree program is zero-sum, any new requirement has to come at the expense of an existing one; the department whose ox is being gored can be counted on to storm the barricades. As a result, old frameworks tend to linger long past their rationales.

(That’s not just stereotyping; I’ve lived it.  When I was at CCM, in putting together a proposal for what became the Communications program, I inadvertently discovered that the “health and wellness” course requirement was merely local, and not part of the state framework.  Many evening, adult, and online students took an online health course in which they claimed to exercise. That struck me as silly, so I developed and advocated for a proposal without a health and wellness course. It passed, after a vigorous and ugly debate, and the department chair for health never spoke to me again.)

A distribution requirement, no matter its specifics, will tend towards rigidity and perverse incentives.  I’m wondering if there’s a better way.

When a ‘general education’ becomes a checklist, we effectively substitute breadth for coherence.  We assume that one social science is the same as any other, for instance. I have yet to see a credible educational theory by which it’s reasonable to treat sociology, economics, political science, and psychology as interchangeable.  Anyone who knows anything about those fields can rattle off a long chain of differences, ranging from methods to assumptions to subject matter. But on the ground, we treat them as fungible all the time.

Moving from a distribution requirement to another model would be an adventure; I both concede the point and bracket it.  The more interesting question is whether there’s something better to think about moving to.

Four-year colleges that don’t accept many transfer students can get pretty idiosyncratic in their gen ed requirements, because they control the entire process.  But we transfer students onward (and inward!), so we can’t get terribly quirky. I’m looking for something that could work at a statewide level.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen a statewide (or similarly broad) model that works at the two-year level that doesn’t involve a distribution requirement?  If so, how did it work?

When Half of a Group Has Disappeared

I had a chance to sit in on a class recently that featured student presentations.  They were assigned to groups of four or five, with each group having a different topic.  The group I saw had been reduced to two over the course of the semester, due to other students dropping.

The two students carried on valiantly, but it brought me back to a dilemma I never really resolved when I taught.  What’s the appropriate response to grading group projects when members of the group disappear?

Grading group projects is sticky on a good day.  Some students carry more of the weight than others, and it can be difficult from the outside to determine who did what.  If the group is larger than two, there’s a non-trivial chance that at least one member was free-riding on the work of the others.  The strongest member of the group may feel effectively penalized by the weaker performances of the others. Those are well-known issues, and any experienced professor who favors group projects has seen them.

The trickier question, which is probably more salient at community colleges than elsewhere, is what to do when attrition reduces a group’s ranks towards the end.  

Admittedly, in the age of group chat apps, it’s easier for group members to communicate with each other in off-hours than it used to be.  But conflating the availability of technology with the availability of time is a mistake. When attrition is motivated by a crisis in someone’s personal life, which is often the case, they may or may not be comfortable (or attuned to) telling their peers.  They may just ghost. If that happens, then the remaining members are left to pick up the pieces. Depending on how late in the game that happens -- or how late the other team members realize it -- the remaining members may have to do some serious scrambling.

In cohort-based programs, some cohesion tends to develop naturally over the semesters.  By the time you get into the advanced courses, the students have bonded and know they can count on each other.  (I’m thinking here of a program like Nursing.) But in a gen ed class, comprised of students who didn’t know each other before and who may never work together again, you can’t necessarily count on that level of bonding.  That’s particularly true at a commuter campus.

Presentations are particularly difficult, in that the rest of the class sees them.  Assuming that part of the point is to educate the rest of the class, you’d want any presentation to be coherent and passably whole.  If it’s broken into discrete chunks and a middle chunk goes missing, the presentation as a whole might not make much sense.

An experienced professor might advise students early on to make contingency plans in case someone vanishes.  That’s well and good, but students can still be blindsided. It isn’t always easy to tell who might not come back.  

Ideally, of course, we’ll get so good at retention that the problem will fade away on its own.  And we’re making progress. But I’d be lying if I said that everything was solved.

Wise and worldly readers, especially those who teach, how do you handle student attrition down the stretch when grading group projects?

Counting

The return flight was delayed, so I haven’t yet had a chance to review the new Century Foundation report on community college funding in any depth.  But the quick gloss I was able to muster suggests that at a really basic level, we need to think through what we’re counting.

The headline about the study refers to differential funding per FTE across sectors.  Predictably, it’s pretty glaring: community colleges get less funding than other sectors by several multiples.  That’s an issue in itself, and I’m fully on board with those who argue that more funding is a baseline need for sustainable improvement.  The reasons are familiar to longtime readers. But I was struck by the “per FTE” measure. I know they needed a common denominator, but “per FTE” takes a bad situation and compounds it.  

At the Swarthmores of the world, “FTE” and “total enrollment” are probably pretty close.  You could switch the latter for the former and it wouldn’t change the result much. But at most community colleges, “FTE” and “total enrollment” are far apart.  That’s because a majority of community college students are “part-time,” even using the 12-credit threshold that falls short of the official FTE measure of 15.* A college with an FTE of 4,000 might have a student headcount of 10,000.  In that context, choosing between “per FTE” and “per student” makes an enormous difference.

The argument for going “per student” is that there’s no reason to believe that part-time students use only the proportion of student services and campus resources that aligns with their proportion of 15 credits.  Many use far more. In fact, the students who are able to take 15 credits per semester are often the ones with relatively solid family financial support and somewhat fewer demands on their time than others. If we provide only enough advisors for the number of FTE students we have, we won’t reach most of our students.  It takes just as long to advise a part-time student as a full-time one. It takes just as long to prepare a financial aid package for a part-time student as for a full-time one. A part-time student with psychological issues won’t scale those issues back to part-time. Many of our most vulnerable student populations -- the ones that require the most wraparound support -- attend part-time because it’s all they can manage.  But they use support far beyond that.

That’s not a criticism of the students.  I want students to access the support they need.  It’s a criticism of a simplistic measure. FTE is a plausible measure of students in classroom seats, but it’s pretty far from a measure of the services and staffing required.  Raw headcount may be too much, but FTE is far too little.

Similarly, the report calls for some of the proposed increased funding to go to increasing the percentage of full-time faculty.  I’m fully on board with that, too, for a whole host of reasons. But the report refers to a raw headcount of adjunct faculty as against full-timers, which can be misleading.

I’ll illustrate with a hypothetical department.  The Quantum Basketweaving department (motto: “where did the stitch go?”) has four full-timers and six adjuncts, for a headcount ratio of 2:3.  One full-timer is the chair, who gets a course release and teaches four courses in load. The others teach five courses each in load. The adjuncts average two courses each.  That gives the department 19 courses taught by full-timers and 12 by adjuncts. The ratio basically flipped based on whether you counted classes or people. From a student perspective, the odds of getting a full-timer teaching a given section are 19:12, not 2:3.  

As with FTE, the difference between the measures -- sections or people -- matters more at community colleges.  That’s because full-timers here teach more sections in load than full-timers in other places. At places where a full-timer teaches two or three sections instead of five, and course releases are more common, headcount might give a fairly accurate picture of classes.  Here, it simply doesn’t. At my own college, adjuncts far outnumber full-timers, but sections taught by full-timers outnumber sections taught by adjuncts. Definitions matter.

If we want to argue for parity across sectors, we shouldn’t default to measures that inadvertently rely on distortions that work to the disadvantage of community colleges.  The fact that industry “default” settings work against us is, itself, part of the problem.

The most interesting prospect of the report -- which I need to set aside time to pore over -- is the idea of a baseline number for how much money community colleges need to do their job well.  Off the top of my head, that involves judgments about what “the job” is, how good is good enough and how we know, and some regional multipliers to reflect differences in cost of living. A number that might work in South Carolina, where we passed billboards advertising new construction houses “starting in the $200’s,” wouldn’t work here.  

If we count the wrong things, we’ll wind up endorsing unfunded mandates without even knowing why, and then blaming colleges for struggling under their weight.  Here’s hoping this study is more thoughtful than most...

* 15 credits = 60 credits/4 semesters.  12 credits= the federal definition of full-time.  The difference leads to no end of confusion for students.  Every spring brings some angry calls: “But I’ve been full-time for two years!  It’s a two-year school! I passed everything! What do you mean I’m not graduating?”  The answer “well, yeah, you were full-time, but you weren’t full-time full-time” isn’t very satisfying.

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today…

That TW and I got married.  

The day before the wedding featured an afternoon monsoon, but the day itself was beautiful.  TW looked great, beaming in her dress. Before the ceremony, as I waited offstage with my brother, he commented that I was approaching it “like the big game.”  That seemed right.

A lot has changed in twenty years.  My dad did a reading at the ceremony in his deep, smooth, Southern-inflected way; by the time my brother’s wedding came along, ALS had warped his speech to the point that it could be difficult to understand.  He died ten years ago this month. The Boy turns 18 next month, and The Girl will be 15 in July; as hard as it is to imagine now, they weren’t a part of the world then. The world is better with them in it.

I had expected marriage to be a huge life change, but parenthood was the big one.  The day TB came home was the break in history. We learned quickly what parents know: you can read all the books you want, but nothing prepares you for the real thing.  I remember vividly the moment after we brought TB home from the hospital for the first time and put him in the bassinet; TW and I looked at each other and asked wordlessly, “now what?”  It’s a high-stakes exercise in extended improvisation. I’m guessing it always was. At least we share a philosophy of parenting, which is that the goal is to get the kids to the point where they don’t need you.  They’re well on their way.

She’s an amazing mom.  Kids as great as these are partly luck, and partly a lot of work.  We’ve been lucky, and we’ve worked.

Twenty years.  As a thoughtful gesture, I’ve done the aging for both of us.  

TW and I met in 1996, in a bar in New Brunswick.  The bar is gone now. Technologically speaking, it was the paleolithic era; our eventual marriage was one garbled answering machine tape away from not happening.  Something made me call again. I’m glad it did. She was able to look past the powder-blue 1989 Toyota Tercel hatchback and see someone worth seeing again. As smart as she is, though, she still hasn’t figured out that she’s out of my league.  (Nobody tell her!)

Happy anniversary, honey.  

Program note: We’ll be taking a few days for an anniversary trip, so the blog will be back on Monday.

Thoughts on Warren’s Proposed Jubilee

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, as part of her campaign for the Democratic Party nomination for President in 2020, has proposed forgiving existing college loans, as well as making public colleges and universities tuition-free.

A few thoughts.

People sometimes lose track of how ridiculous college costs are, so I fired up my internet machine and pulled some numbers.  I’m based in New Jersey, so I’ll use figures for Rutgers, which is the public flagship university here.

In-state full-time undergraduate tuition, Rutgers, 1990: $2922.

That figure in 2019 money:  $5597

Current cost of in-state full-time undergraduate tuition, Rutgers: $11,886

Factor by which tuition has outstripped inflation: 2.12

That’s only tuition; that’s not counting a “college fee” of over $1300, or anything else.  Tuition alone has more than doubled after accounting for inflation. Let’s try Brookdale:

In-county full-time undergraduate tuition, 1990: $1128

That figure in 2019 money: $2161

Current cost of in-county full-time undergraduate tuition: $145 x 30 = $4350

Factor by which tuition has outstripped inflation: 2.01

Is that a sign of out-of-control spending?  Nope. The operating budget has been declining for years.  It’s a sign of a combination of public disinvestment and the continuing escalation of the cost of health insurance.

Running at twice the rate of inflation for decades is unfair to those who came late to the party.  That’s not usually how we think about it, but it should be.

In that light, offering some mercy to folks who came late to the party seems reasonable.  It’s far from an entire solution, of course; price restraint requires rethinking the underlying business model, most assuredly including a more realistic (and sustained) level of operating funding.  Among other things, that would require rethinking the fatalistic and widespread assumption that concentrating all economic growth among a very few people is normal, natural, and inevitable.

Forgiveness of existing debt would empower plenty of folks in their 20’s and 30’s to start families, buy houses, and generate the kind of consumer demand that lifts the economy as a whole.  I don’t buy the argument that debt forgiveness is some sort of moral hazard, either. Yes, my loans are paid off, so I wouldn’t get a direct benefit. But if all those millennials freed of debt start bidding up house prices, then I get my benefit in the form of property appreciation.  These things are connected. And if the morally questionable behavior at hand is “going to college,” then I’m not exactly panicking.

Starting with a high bid -- total forgiveness -- allows room for compromise to get it passed.  I could imagine forgiving the interest on debt, for instance, while maintaining that folks have to repay the principal.  That would strike me as a reasonable concession to get it through.

The more important piece is the forward-looking part.  If colleges are deprived of tuition revenue, will the Feds or the states be willing to replace that lost revenue to colleges (and increase the total, to accommodate greater demand that suddenly won’t pay for itself)?  If they aren’t, then it’s an extinction-level unfunded mandate. If they are, then I’m happily on board.

For public colleges, that replacement could be straightforward enough.  Senator Warren has already specified that for-profit colleges won’t be eligible.  But America also has a large non-profit private sector in higher ed -- ranging from the Harvards to the St. Somebodys -- some of which charge remarkably high tuition.  I could imagine folks from that area raising some serious objections.

I have no illusions that a plan of this scope will pass anytime soon, and there’s no shortage of devils in the details.  But kudos to Senator Warren for raising the question. Project the current trends forward a couple of decades and the numbers become even more absurd.  Clearly, the trends are unsustainable. Whether through her plan or someone else’s, we need to have that conversation. Otherwise, if you think tuition is bad now...

Looking for the New Keynes

A new correspondent writes:

[John] Maynard Keynes wrote The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and radically revised a lot of our understandings of national political economies. I’m thinking now about the larger system of faculty employment in higher ed, both in the US and abroad. Recent meetings of our faculty union at the vast, urban, multicampus public university where I teach are becoming increasingly tumultuous over demands that we strike unless pay for adjuncts rises to $7,000/course. This isn't an issue for just our university or our state; it’s everywhere. It’s not systemic, it’s endemic, and thus structural. There’s no single driving factor: it has as much to do with the production of terminal degrees in grad programs as it does with economics and legislative policy and the labor market and a half-dozen other factors. It’s public and private.

Has anyone come across a truly thoughtful, insightful study, along the lines of what Keynes did, that provides us with a broad, grand perspective on how exactly the conditions under which contingent faculty now work evolved? I’m speaking specifically about why typical labor market theory, having to do with supply and demand, etc., simply doesn’t apply to this situation. I’m worried about comity within our union as well as the conditions under which my colleagues work and I want desperately to put our supposed intelligence as scholars to work calming things down a bit.

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I have to admit, I’m much more sympathetic to the quest for a Grand Unified Theory of Everything than is probably healthy.  But I find the most insightful theorizing tends to be inductive, starting from empirical observation and working its way up.  Rather than starting with “what’s the nature of the universe?,” it starts with variations on “how the hell did we end up with a system as messed up as this?”  Whether that leads to “calming down” or to concerted action is another question; done well, I think it leads to a greater possibility for coming to terms with the world, and even to changing it in positive ways.  (For those keeping score at home, this is a variation on “standpoint epistemology.” It’s probably part of the reason that I’ve been comfortable with feminist work or critical race theory; they may start from different locations, but their methods and goals are recognizable.)  Put differently, I’d rather read Galbraith, Ehrenreich, and Coates than, say, Husserl or Heidegger.

Accordingly, I don’t think we can theorize the adjunct trend by looking only at the adjunct trend.  It has to be seen in a political/economic context. That means going beyond garden-variety administrator-bashing; if it were merely a matter of this dean or that provost, the trend wouldn’t have happened across the country, in every sector of the industry, for decades.  It also means moving beyond the temptation to reify abstract concepts like “neoliberalism” and to invest them with a life force they simply don’t have. I’ve read plenty of angry attacks on an “adjunct nation” or the “corporate university” that correctly identified objectionable outcomes, but didn’t shed any useful light on causes.  Without causes, it’s just slogans.

I’d start with “The Cost Disease,” by William Baumol.  Longtime readers know that I’m a champion of the concept, in part because it explains sectors other than higher education.  Why did ticket prices for concerts and plays go up, while the price of expensively-produced recordings (albums, movies) went down?  Why do “eds and meds” get steadily more expensive relative to other parts of the economy? Baumol’s Cost Disease offers an invaluable starting point.

More broadly, why does public higher education funding keep following a “one step forward, two steps back” pattern with each economic cycle?  Answering that requires understanding the severe upward trend in where the rewards of growth go, and the resentment generated among the many who wonder why they aren’t getting ahead.  It also requires understanding the relative decline of middle-class salaried jobs with legible career paths. Higher ed used to feed those jobs; as the jobs have grown scarce, higher ed comes under more scrutiny, and therefore more austerity.  I did a double-take recently when I heard a podcast discuss the “new normal” of people having “anchor jobs” and “side hustles.” What are now called “anchor jobs” were once just called “jobs.” That’s a major shift, and combined with tuition increases, it explains a lot.

As always in the U.S., race is an inescapable part of any explanation.  As student bodies become more racially diverse, political support for funding them drops.  That’s true both over time and across sectors. And I remain convinced that part of the long boom of the 50’s and 60’s had to do with other countries being hamstrung either by war damage or by communism.  As they’ve recovered from those and grown more competitive, the middle class worldwide has grown, but the middle class in America has shrunk.

There’s no shortage of potential narrative threads in the story.  I’ve even taken a few preliminary cracks at it, here and here. But I haven’t yet seen anyone tie it all together.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen a Keynes for our times who ties it all together?  If not, what would you add to the ingredients list for whomever eventually tries?

Messing with Texans

As a political scientist, gerrymandering offends me.  It’s the process by which electoral districts are redrawn to guarantee certain outcomes.  In essence, it flips the script of representative democracy; instead of voters choosing their representatives, representatives choose their voters.

That said, it never occurred to me that community colleges would use gerrymandering against each other.  

That’s essentially what’s happening in Texas, as the legislature discusses a bill that would allow Lone Star College to annex a high-revenue town from Lee College’s district.  Lone Star would have the option of annexing three different towns, according to a local report, but expressed interest only in the most lucrative one.

It’s a remarkable move.  

As a partial excuse for my blind spot, I’ll note that I’ve worked in states in which community colleges don’t have “districts.”  In New Jersey, they’re defined by (and partly funded by) counties. Whatever is in your county is in your county. There’s some incidental poaching along county lines when a given town is closer to the other county’s campus, but it’s pretty mild.  In Massachusetts, they don’t have defined service areas at all; each college recruits where it can. For instance, when I was at Holyoke, the city of Springfield was one of its biggest feeders, even though Springfield had its own community college in it.  That wasn’t considered weird.

But for colleges with defined geographic districts to cherry-pick the richest towns from neighboring districts would be a foreign concept.  

Not living or working in Texas, I’m willing to believe that there might be more to the story.  But if there isn’t, and it’s really as brazen and awful as it seems, it should stand as a cautionary tale.  Institutions starved of legitimate resources will resort to desperate measures to feed themselves. Part of what we buy, when we direct operating funds into public colleges, is insulation from the “red in tooth and claw” side of the marketplace.  That allows colleges the option of behaving ethically and still surviving. When we desiccate that funding stream, colleges are sometimes forced to choose between ethics and survival. Cannibalism is a predictable, if horrifying, response to famine.  The behavior of for-profit colleges when enrollments drop isn’t admirable, but it’s understandable. Forcing public colleges to behave like for-profits increases the likelihood of similar abuses.

Gerrymandering isn’t admirable in any case, but for community colleges it’s especially bad.  They exist, in part, to serve people who can’t afford other options. Deliberately excluding lower-income areas from service districts is counter to the mission, even if it’s understandable in immediate budgetary terms.  The conflict between those two shouldn’t exist.

Wise and worldly readers, especially those in Texas, is there more to the story?  Has anyone seen a similar dynamic play out elsewhere? I’m concerned that while the particulars of this story are necessarily local, given the long-term trends we face, this might become as normal as gerrymandering in politics.  And with consequences just as bad.